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The New Old Toy A Community Center

Spring 2020

Individual Work

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Instructor: Maya Alam

Site Location: Callowhill, Philadelphia

As toy industry develops rapidly, the taste and need of kids are changing rapidly as well. The generational updates of toy industry are now suffocating the lower-end of the production. More and more high tech and low-quality toys, less and less repair and lasting of toys. The toy recycling industry is still under-development in the United States, while the gap between supply and demand is becoming larger.

The idea of Eccentricity occurs between spheres and cubes, where one nest into the other, one stretch the other, therefore creates tangency and seams. Through lenses of materials and textures, curve and linear misconceptions, and the idea of eccentricity, the Callowhill neighborhood is awaiting something new.

Still Life Render

ELEVATION, WEST

Similar to toy objects, depth perception is challenged through material changes and transparencies, which leads to intentional misconceptions and new opportunity of play.

Focusing on relationships between curves and lines, between what we understand as straight and proper and curved and crooked, this market utilizes the concept of eccentricity to nest program and form into the neighborhood.

Ramps circulating the market space bring the playground up high. With walking area and resting areas circulating the whole site, acting as outdoor playground for all generations. The playground also extend to the viaduct park, on which seating areas and playground areas circulates around a weather-proof overhang, which is more adequate for the Callowhill residents.

Bringing different levels of interactivity also provides more freedom of vision, enable a secure visual connection between kids and parents.

Novel Natures Within Itself

A Study Of Monumentality And Homunculus Nature

701 Design Studio IV - University of Pennsylvania Fall 2022

In collaboration with: Cherie Wan

Instructor: Simon Kim

Site Location: Los Angeles

There is an architecture that travels Los Angeles. It collects and it curates. The following series of referenced works are formulated solely by this homunculi. Its emergence in the landscape of Los Angeles’ urban fabric began its role as a collector. As it traverses across disparate environments, it collects human waste materials that makes up its own body and functioning system. The body is an incubator for a new world. As it accumulates material, new hybrid environments are created until it longer has the capacity for it. When it reaches this state of death, it deposits new hybrid environments where novel natures are ultimately curated. This cycle repeats itself for as long as civilization persists. Through the lens of it, we are reminded that we must find new, critical ways to reflect on the architecture and monuments we have inherited and to imagine those we have yet to build.

Collector Curator

Materials such as moisture from the air and water; sand and debris from the piers; dirt from the tar pits are all fed back and preserved as resources in the homunculi’s malleable body.

As it collects more information, the host is stained and overloaded with information that is putting itself at risk of survival. As both the body and its appendages gain weight, its motion staggers. The system moves to its own detriment.

The collector fills up its body with sufficient material till it is no longer capable of more. In this instance, it ambivalently releases a microbicide of its collections revealing newly forced relationships between materials. This is also known as the moment of totemic expulsion.

PHYSICAL MODEL IMAGES

Material + Information Accumulation

Monument

Formerly objects placed in space by selected groups of individuals that impose narratives intended to be spread as knowledge. Curated historical identifications given from single perspectives despite paradox to larger communities. Seen by homunculi’s as objects placed in space with no particular meaning or purpose - objects with no narrative.

Dougong Deposit

a. Material waste collected by the homunculi are unknowingly depositing its content into new natures.

b. An alternate way for humans to understand the moment in which totemic expulsions occur.

Interior Renders

Material Deposition + Monument Creation

A system of friction fit elements composed to create a structural network that joins pillars and columns to the frame of the roof. In the eyes of a homunculi, they are simply objects composed of the same material revealed to its sensories in a moment in time when it travels to spaces.

Ambivalent materials collided in a newly shared space that is open to interpretation if chosen to. Multitudes of scale-less objects configured as abstractions of new spaces or habitation for others and humans.

Reinterpretations of waste materials as infrastructural elements. Architecture as composed by synthetic nature.

Weave-in

3d-printed bio-materials using robotics

704 Design Studio IV - University of Pennsylvania Spring 2023

In collaboration with: Yiran Zhao

Instructor: Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen

Site Location: Læsø, Denmark

With extensive practice of printings and studies of decade and maintenance of bio-materials, a long-term intervention of installing pre-fab stations and building up sediment levels was proposed to preserve an unique bogged lake ecosystem.

Selected for Venice Biennale 2023 online exhibtion

Island Design Assembly

A recreational shelter

10 - day design and built experience on Hurricane Island, designed and constructed a recreational shelter with wood panels that allows for easier transportation and installation.

Summer 2019

Group Design and Construction Work

Worked with: McLeod Kredell Architects

Site Location: Islesbro Island, ME

‘Frame’

Installation work with wood frames, prints and sculptures

Instructor:

A discovery of aesthetics and self-identity through the process of prints, sculptures, and re-production of familiar space using wood-frames.

Photopolymer Plates on silk

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