House
Fragment House
433 and 1439 E 2nd Avenue
Year: 2024
Course: DES 301
Instructor: Tania Gutierrez Monroy
Location: UBC
Collaborator: Rita Troinikova
Fragment House is a social housing proposal in Vancouver’s Grandview-Woodland area, a neighborhood known for its family-friendly amenities, including healthcare, recreation, and education facilities. However, the prevalence of one-bedroom units has led to a steady decline in households with children. Fragment House aims to reverse this trend by offering two- and threebedroom units designed to attract families with children and multigenerational households.
The design is guided by three principles: Green Integration, Porosity, and Community. The design preserves and enhances the connection to the existing park through integrated green spaces - a porous layout allows the landscape to blend seamlessly into the park, creating a private-to-public gradient and encouraging circulation through the form. Shared spaces, such as a public café, flexible studio for residents, community garden, and a courtyard promote safety and togetherness, ensuring a welcoming environment for families and children.
isometric/community diagram
form finding
Despite the irregular forms, each unit has ample space and shared walkways. The living rooms are oriented towards one another, allowing community inside and out of the units.
Our 1:75 model of the North-East unit explores the materiality, colour, and spatial experience of the two-bedroom unit on the first floor through lasercut, 3d printed, and painted elements.
model photos
design principles
section perspective
Haven.
Year: 2024
Course: DES 202
Instructor: Riley Baechler
Location: UBC
Haven is a performance stage project conceptualized in Vancouver’s Grandview park, a contested site regularly used by an diverse community. Based on the imagery of curled wings and possessing a circular stage without defined audience and spectator, Haven is intended to convey a kind of performance absent from the park--one of reflection and sensory respite.
Winding, twisting and oblique entrances becomes transitional space, where one has time to meander and reflect before entering the main performance space, becoming part of the performance.
The form itself is minimal and designed with passive solar heating and ventilation in mind. Although closed air roofs are not allowed in Vancouver Parks, Haven offers shelter from the sun, the rain, and the world with its overlapping form.
creative process
Haven began as an apparatus designed to measure the angle of the head in respect to the neck.
and forms of the object.
The movements of the apparatus during phone scrolling was diagrammed.
The visual language of the diagram was reinterpreted into a physical object of sticks and skins.
1. apparatus
2. diagram
3. object
Overlay // lateral view
4. haven.
Circulation Paths Egress Points
Charles
William
north and south elevation
NORTH ELEVATION
Two different types of chipboard were used to emphasize the textural differences between grass and path. The forms were 3D printed then treated into a porcelain-like materiality that highlights the purity and tranquility of the project.
LINKED PLAY
Year: 2023
Course: DES 201
Instructor: Autumn Riggan
Location: UBC
As a final studio project, I redesigned a 10 by 14 meter square located on Granville island’s Ron Basford park. Centered around the ecological goal of supporting the water movement of the site through materiality and planting and the social goal of connecting visitors to local history, this colourful playground evokes Granville island’s industrial past while supporting ecology through bioswales, gabions, native plantings. Though the project began as a four person group project, conception of the design to the final renders were completed by me, with input from peers and instructors.
context map
site plan
The steep slope of the site, while limiting, also offered opportunity for risky play, important for development. Soft, non-toxic and native planting as well as grass near elevated areas ensured safety. The slope also provides those seated on the northernmost chains a great view of False Creek South, making the a place for not only play but also conversation, relaxation, and thought across all ages.
north elevation
Chains were chosen as the base form as it allows Island’s industrial past. By emerging from the ground, it is as if Granville Island’s history is r the present, renewed. The versatile form allows a freedom of play for children and adults alike.
model photos
Pit in my Stomach 04
Year: 2024
Course: DES 211
Instructor: Riley Baechler
Location: UBC
I explored digital fabrication in Pit in my Stomach, completed with my partner, Lily Zhang. We were asked to digitally fabricate an abstracted an abstracted human organ of choice and design a set of instructions that could be used to recreate the fabrication. In this group project, I created the 3d Rhino model that we waffled, the main concept, and made the entirety of the instructions, while my partner handled lasercutting and file formatting.
Our end result is a work that strives to depict the visceral experience of anxiety through a matryoshka-inspired design, where smaller stomachs within larger ones depict the overwhelming sensations of shrinking and compression one experiences under pressure—until the stomach feels no different from a crumpled pit. Each stomach layer is made out of increasingly fragile material (beginning with acrylic to chipboard to paper), representing the increasing feeling of fragility as fear and anxiety sets in.
05 Travel Sketches
Year: 2024
Location: China (Beijing, Chengdu), France (Paris), Italy (Rome), Czech Republic (Prague, Brno), Austria (Vienna)
Last summer, I had the amazing opportunity to travel to China and afterwards participate in a study abroad trip in Europe. I took this chance to fill up my sketchbook with architectures so drastically different and to practice sketching with speed, accuracy, and intention.
All drawings were completed within 10-30 minutes of sketching and drawn in-situ with micron pens.
It was fascinating to see the western architectural paradigm manifest in the many ornate religious spaces present in European architecture. I attempted to depict the scale and depth of these spaces, but nothing triumphed being there in person.
Ashley Huang