AnnieAn_Portfolio2024 by An Annie

ARCHITECTURAL PORTFOLIO

ANNIE AN

2020-2024|Select Works

GEOGRAPHIES OF THE URBAN NIGHT

M.ARCH Core I| Fall 2023 | Indivdual

memories of the city

B.A Studio III | Fall 2020 | Indivdual

Timed experience

Photogrammetry| Fall 2020 |Group (4)

Toxic heritage

Thesis Research Seminar| 2021-2022 | Indivdual

HOUSING

M.ARCH Core III| Fall 2024 | Group (2)

Urban farming as sensory therapy

M.ARCH Core II| Spring 2024 | Indivdual

GEOGRAPHIES OF THE URBAN NIGHT

Year: FALL 2023 | Type: Individual | Instructor : KEVIN HAI PHAM

“Thus we arrive at the following definition: A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.”

- Emile Durkheim

Nightlife spaces are a form of escape from the mundane --where people can explore other modes of being. These spaces often encourage and challenge what the respective society considers “normal” during the day. My design juxtaposes the two environments in which the sacred and illicit activities occur – the church and the nightclub. The collective consciousness of society used to be religion as a common belief, as society becomes more secular, this collective consciousness becomes more diluted –but many do find common worship in the even more abstract feeling obtained from being in nightclubs and the phenomenological experience evoked.

The design proposes a network of adapted churches - the refunctionalization of peripheral urban structures as night time escape spots. Through simple intervening methods, the ease of conversion between two seemingly different programs is demonstrated.

3 WEEKS - INVESTIGATION OF URBAN HETEROTOPIA

A juxtaposition of the priest at the altar to the DJ at the disc, holy water to alcohol, effects of stained glass to disco and LED lights, and positionality of audience to a central worship.

St. John’s Lutheran

81 Christopher Street, NYC

Our Lady of Pompeii Church

25 Carmine Street, NYC

St. Luke in the Field Church

487 Hudson St, NYC

Memories of the City

Year: 2020 | Type: Individual | Instructor : Adrian Phiffer

6 weeks - Residential Housing for two INHABITANTS

“One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its people, and like memory it is associated with objects and places. This individuality ultimately is connected to an original artifact … it is an event and a form.”

- Aldo Rossi

Acollective city is one interlinked by memories. The facade of the house is made up from materials gathered from antique shops, demolished waste sites, recycling facilities, items spotted in old photographs from the community and even my own neighborhood’s refuse -- all of which are items that have experienced time and encapsulate their own stories. The items are assembled to form the walls of the house with metal beams framing in these objects as if showcasing artifacts from art galleries or museums. All of the artifacts are conjoined at this intersection, which can be understood as the intersection -- both metaphorically and physically manifested in the objects -- memories of this city.

Historical: an original Eaton Family Coach House

Reuse: Condo-type Townhouse 2000-2500ft/unit (4 units total)

Historical: a Toronto Hydro Storage Facility

Reuse: Contemporary Condo

Historical: a commerical building

Reuse: live-work 2 storey townhouse

380 Macpherson Ave - “Madison Avenue Lofts”

Macpherson Ave - “Lofts” 78 Lowther Avenue - unit 1

Backyard view into dining room

Chandelier in living room of condo unit

Second floor bathroom of unit

1. Maximum area of lot

3. Upcycling of antiques

5. Experimenting with placement of parts like puzzle pieces

6. Voilá!

4.Corrugated metal and metal beams for facade framing

2. Angled Cross-Pitch roof

LEFT: Items collected in antique shops, garage sales, old photographs

Section A-A

Section B-B

Section C-C

timed experience

Year: 2021 | Type: group (4) | Instructor : jay pooley

4 WEEKS - DIGITAL TWINNING photogrammetry

A cabinet of curiosities stored and exhibited a wide variety of objects and artifacts. Through the selection of objects, they told a particular story about the world and its history.

This project looks for alternative ways to represent history than that of its usual methods -- the reading of words or viewing of artifacts in a displaced modern environment. Can digital twin actively represent these scenes to create a more immersive experience of history? By engaging with modern technology of photogrammetry, objects are scanned, collected, and assembled together to create a full 3D experience. Through projection of the environment into physical space and onto digital platforms, the project aims to make the seemingly distant events and objects more vivid. It functions as an interactive digital archive of architectural and urban objects, overlaid with sounds and narrations, to turn past events into a more wholesome experience.

xiaorui an, Jing Yan, Chenxi cai, yunhe zhao

Chenxi cai, yunhe zhao

World building collection process

These scans serve as the background 3D base file for our project. Each street was video recorded and converted into 3D models with Agisoft. photogrammetry scans of yonge-dundas square

Collecting assets with photogrammetry

Collecting elements resembling different historical periods to iterate the progression of Yonge-Dundas Square.

Trial run for assemblage of scans as mesh, assemblage by Cassie Cai

Old Train Station

Victorian Facade

Old Cabin

Physical iMMERSIVE Interaction

Using projection techniques on all four walls within a small enclosed space, the audience is invited into the scenes of the re-creation with body-to-object interaction. The videos use ambiant noise of objects and related soundtracks to engage viewers into the environment.

Digitial Immersive iNTERACTION

By using Mozilla Hubs as a 3D interactive space, a digitial engagment with the content is created. With the addition of voice-over narration iterating the historical events and sound track of ambiant environment noise, vistors can explore the digital space, and approach objects to engage with the historical information.

Video rending with Unreal Engine by Nancy Zhao

Assemblage on Mozilla Hubs by Cassie Cai

Video rending with Unreal Engine by Nancy Zhao

Assemblage on Mozilla Hubs by Cassie Cai

toxic heritage

Year: 2021 | Type: Individual | Instructor simon rabyniuk

8 months - UNDERGRADUATE THESIS

“I am heir of all human effort, I claim all as my identity.”

- Frantz Fanon

By reinviting human activities to fields of toxicity, this project is about redefining the scope of cultural heritage by envisioning active toxic waste storage facilities as an essential heritage of human legacy. By bringing people to the immediacy of the issue, can this vehicle be used to aid our recognition of environmental problems? A site as heritage is a program used to populate a place of underrepresentation. This project hopes to expand cultural imagination on the topic of heritage, waste and the hidden frameworks both preserving and threatening human lives. The project focuses on the byproducts of material production -- steel manufacture from iron ore that has created iron deposits along the beach of the Cantabrian Sea. Inspired by Richard Serra’s action-verb scultpures, the project proposes a network of site-markers emulating action verbs relating to the sites’ history to extraction, manufacture, export, import, and disposal of iron ore in Bilbao, Spain.

Trinitite Desert of New Mexico

July 16th, 1945 Nuclear Bomb Test

Plastiglomerate

Shorelines of Kamilo Beach, Hawaii

Campfire on beach (molten plastic and sand)

U.S Embassy, Norway

September 14 - November 17th, 2021

In 2002, the United States raised a fence to protect the Embassy during the War on Terror. In 2017, Norway declared the building a National Monument, calling for the demolition of the fence. The listing carefully excluded the 9/11 fence as unsightly, preserving only the mid-century building and creating an idealized image of the U.S. presence in Oslo.

Minium Broken Hill, Australia 1800s

Mining Fire

Tommy Thompson Park, Toronto, Canada

1959 - Present

Runit Dome, Marshall Island, USA

Sulaibiya Tire Graveyard, Kuwait

1977 - Present ? - Present Exhibition Exhibition Remediation Reuse

Esturary of Bilbao, Spain Fresh Kill Park, Staten Island, USA

2018 - ongoing

Between 1920 and 1970, the metallurgic industry Altos Hornos de Vizcaya dumped more than 30,000,000 tonnes of industrial waste into the Cantabric Sea. Residues washed up on nearby shores formed a 6-meter-tall ridge of brown rock, constituting a stratified fossil record for the geological epoch of the modern Anthropocene.

2008 - fully developed in 2038

The Fresh Kills Landfill was a landfill covering 2,200 acres on Staten Island in the United States. In 1986, Fresh Kills received 29,000 tons of residential waste per day. Today, it is a public park with the waste moved and hidden elsewhere.

Millions of cubic metres of earth fill, dredged sand and construction debris have been used to create a site that now extends about five kilometres into Lake Ontario. More than 100,000 visitors enjoy Tommy Thompson Park every year.

The island is the site of a radioactive waste repository left by the United States after it conducted a series of nuclear tests on Enewetak Atoll. There are ongoing concerns around deterioration of the waste site and a potential radioactive spill.

Gigantic holes are dug out from the sandy earth and filled with old tyres every yearthere are now over 7 million. The expanse of rubber is so vast that the sizeable fields are now visible from space.

Abhurite Sharm Abhur, Jeddah, Red Sea 14th Century BCE Uluburun Shipwreck

Gorrondatxe Beach in Bilbao Spain exhibits large scale charactersitics of “techno-fossils”. Between 1902 and 1995 -- within almost a century long period, 30 million tonnes of blast furnace waste was tipped offshore. Wave activity transported the waste back to the coast and it re-sedimented as a beachrock deposit about 1.8 km long and 7m tall.

~1.8km long

1. Alto Hornos and other iron and steel manufacturing companies dumps 30 million tons of industrial waste into the Cantabrian sea between the 1930-70s

3. The waves of the water carries the waste obejcts back onto land

2. Waste from factory sewage system is released into the sea

4. Formulates into a 6m wide and 1.8km long strata of sedimented iron slag, with fire bricks and plastic still intact

This drawing maps out the locations of the manufacturing companies along the estuary between the 1880s to 1970s. The left bank of the river consists of factories and working class neighborhoods, the right consisting of commercial, historical and residential areas.

HISTORIC paintings as RESEARCHmethodology

Paintings from the era and photos from each of the present manufacturing companies was used to piece together conditions of the past and present. The industrial age and the production company appears as a subject in many artworks and postcards, validating this time as a vital part of collective memory.

network of sites

“Bilbao Blast Furnace” Dario De Regoyos, 1908

“Night view of the port of Bilbao Blast Furnace”, Jose Echenagusia, 1870

Estuary of Bilbao

“Bilbao Alto Hornos” Postcard

Living tapestry

Year: FALL 2024 | Type: group (w/Benjamin Spears) | Instructor : eric bunge semester long (IN PROGRESS) - affordable housing

“The modern house had its origin in three fictions: the house as a place of rest, as if work could be separated from life; the house as private property within everyone’s reach, as if when considering it a commodity it would not be determined by market-driven dynamics; and the house as a sanctuary for the nuclear family, as if there were no other forms of coexistence, and the private and the public were two independent fractions[...]”

~Fernanda Canales

Our proposal synthesizes a critique of modern atomization in urban housing and the concept of multiscalar community to try and escape the idea of housing as ‘unit’. Within the context of our proposal, we began to work in dialogue with the modernist conception of the tall housing slab, the tower in the park. The tower as a typology lends itself to efficient space division and atomization of community into units. The machine for living is built for units in the language of universalizing modernist homogenization. We propose housing as an additive, multiscalar assembly of community on a given site rather than the division of any number of individuals apart from each other.

The room, is seen as a defined entity – an object suspended in space. It takes the typical housing unit, and disperses its division of spaces, forming the conception of an open unit shared by residents

Repetition of open communal spaces — like the living room, the kitchen, the eating areas – delineate a conceptual idea of zones – gestured with the rotation of the grid. Generating the basis of an ordered relationship and flow of circulation without creating physical barriers between people.

The single unit, on the scale of the building, becomes an open concept that allows fluid occupation. Your bathroom may be detached from your sleeping room, because the entire floor (or even broader) is your unit. You are stepping out of your private dwelling, but the space between is also your home, and not just a threshold to what is your private space. The whole floor is at once your own space, but not only your space.

At the scale of the building, subtractive voids foster the next community scale. These voids are domestic spaces, scaled up- a dining space, a living room, a study space, a gathering space- if every floor can be thought of as one “unit” in a neighborly scale, the entire building is one “unit” in a larger one.

These spaces are perceived by the entire building community and become an ‘event’ in the fabric of our section, as collision points and activity nodes for people who wouldn’t normally see each other that much. They begin to act in a theatrical manner, telegraphing building life and domestic community to the neighborhood. These are “theatrical” spaces to be viewed from within and with out.

PHYSICAL MODEL OF A UNIT (FLOOR)

STREET v IE w

URBAN farming AS SENSORY therapy

“Newark faces significant pollution challenges that severely impact residents’ physical health, contributing to higher rates of respiratory illnesses, developmental disorders, and other chronic health conditions.”

Currently, new sublime territories of toxic landscapes define the environments we reside in, certain communities living in close proximity are powerless over these conditions. As a direct result of poor environmental conditions in Ironbound, Newark, 1 in 20 children is diagnosed with autism. This issue is adressed by creating a network of vertical farms managed by young adults with autism, which also serve as therapeutic spaces with a focus on sensory design. Gardening, a form of horticultural therapy, provides a healthy environment through repetitive activities and offers employment opportunities for autistic youth. Given the longterm nature of superfund cleanups, the number of autistic children requiring diagnosis and support facilities will continue to grow. These vertical farms will not only provide therapy and employment but also produce fresh food for the community, improving access to healthy options. This proposal aims to create a positive impact on the neighborhood by supporting autistic youth and contributing valuable resources to the community.

In the form of a board game, this physical model depicts the power struggle of residents of the Ironbound living next to the Diamond Alkali superfund cleanup site. The goal of the game is to clean up the contaminated tiles, in orange. Two players play in cooperation to win against the board game itself. The duration expressed in the model is not necessarily linear progression but the struggle one experienced in time. When one plays the game and is pushed back and forth between switching of the tiles, it emulates the experience of being pushed back and forth in reality between lines of forces and the never ending struggle for those powerless to change the damaged landscapes that is their home.