FANG FAN
Architecture Portfolio 2012 - 2016
CONTENTS 01 In the Future
An narrative occurs in the future
02 The forgotten railway
C u l t u r e C e n t e r n e x t t o Ta i p e i R a i l w a y
03 Anonymous Monster
Art Institution next to High-line,NY
04 Excavating Wildness
Museum at Gramercy park,NY
05 A Brief Journey
Ve r y- Fa st A i r p o r t d e s i g n
________________ 06 Other Works
01 | IN THE FUTURE Thesis
INSTRUCTOR Kyle Miller
There are three mistakes people commonly make when thinking about the future. The first is to assume that nothing will change, that everything will remain the same. The second is to assume that everything will change, that nothing will remain the same. The third, and most dangerous mistake is not to think about it at all. Marshall Berman. All That is Solid Melts Into Air Architect are not really known for their story telling or writing skills. However it is the most powerful for architects to address the most challenging issues that a society faces. The power of architectural representation, and the narratives it can unfold, provoke me to explore and expand the boundaries of architecture design. It also stands a statement of my own position within the discipline. The field of architecture representation is not a neutral medium of either historical events or future speculation. Rather, the processes of narrative and structural control are a series of subjective simulation which evoke individual experiential judgment. This narrative illustrates the vulnerabilities of the relationship between past and future, and each may resist the others declarations; it also opens multiple perspectives on the course of the events of the day, by bringing pieces of the world together where truth and fiction happen at once. This narrative embraces reality in this globalized world while introducing new technological innovation and space experiences through a newly assembled world. Using representational images, this narrative focuses less on the production of official meaning, and more on meaning itself, as the story reconstructs our known world in a poetic and propitious way.
01 | IN THE FUTURE
People always ask me where I am from. Technically, I don’t belong to any places. I was born in district 010110 - Taeeonan zone, in an infrastructure called the Circle. My mom told me that when I was born, I was blessed, because on the day, just after she gave birth to me, she looked out the window and saw two gold pigeons flying in a distance. This meant that I would know happiness, and prosper; that I would have a good life. My last memory of the Circle was at the metallic viewing deck, on the day my father returned from the surface cities below. He had come to pick us up. It was a joyful day, this memory was tinted with sadness though, because he told me that he quited his job, we would all have to leave the Circle. I was only eleven at that time, but I remember feeling very uneasy about the surface world down there, the outdoor world that I had never been to.
It was a sunny day when we left the Circle, but the thin air was chilly as always. We took the sky elevator from the drop platform all the way to the ground. The entire ride only took a minute, and the wind felt particularly fast, from what I remembered. As I looked up during our descent, I saw a long, looming shadow swipe across the sky, obscured by wreaths of gray, ragged clouds. This gray under-layer of the world that seemed static and vast and unearthly. We moved to a gigantic house in a small city near a forest. The rooms were huge, and sometimes I could hardly feel my body in all the empty space around me. Father told me that this is normal for Downers because everything in the Circle is so compact and tightly packed together. The second week after we settled down, father took me on a walk around the city to show me the buildings he designed. II was still getting used to not feeling the thrumming vibrations of the big, hidden machinery of the Circle in my body. I stole a glance at it far above us. It was like looking at a colorful corridor. I missed the Circle. I missed meeting all the artists and musicians from Creer zone. I didn’t tell this to my father though.
When we were first settling into life on the surface, I often wondered why my father had quit his job, but he never said anything. Father was a silent man. He especially avoided discussing his early life. He had been a leading Architect of the Guihua Zone back in the Circle, but he never returned there, and he refused to participate in the government’s Sky Tower program. Before he passed, father handed me a sealed envelope, telling me to open it only after the start of the next century. For 20 years I lived with that envelope, faithfully keeping it sealed and safe. It remained the biggest mystery of my life—a mystery that I dared to think might give me some sort of answer someday. It was a beautiful winter morning on the day I finally returned to the Circle, with my father’s envelope in my vest pocket. There was a big centennial celebration going on up there. I entered a Sky Tower near my home, the sky elevator poised to soar to the drop platform. I waited until dusk, watching the perfect sunset through the window as a red kite flies as high as a distant Sky Tower. Below me sprawled the city father built. The room was quiet, and I could once again hear the pulse of the machines.
I finally opened the envelope. It held a picture from father’s early childhood, he was learning to ride a bicycle in a narrow ally. There was fear in his face, yet such fear as he kept caring with him, reminded him of what the surface world feels like. Father grew up in a little town of Northern Asia, his memory was mostly outdoors filled with adventures and excitements. I understood suddenly why he couldn’t stay in the Circle, far from earth. From the Circle, we were forced to be a bystander, watching the process of a crowded and colorful planet—the place where he grew up—being slowly paved under by the endless ground and gray, lonely Sky Towers, taller than ever imagined and higher than their earthly counterparts. All he ever did was gaze downward, reminiscing about the days when buildings and people were cluttered and mixed up. I never saw the old land myself, but he often said it was a place where everything was connected, embracing all kinds of cultures and pleasures. The Circle was to be a traveling machine, but it gradually became home to all the social events, the center of the world. My father shuffled between the cities and the Circle, unable to embrace either in its entirety. In his final years, he chose to live in a Wheatland, where he called it the real-world.
I can’t see the world the way he did. I learned my history and culture from the Circle. My friends and I would go to the Divertmento Zones to climb on walls or down to the Gyanburu to lose some money gambling. The Circle was my home—a world filled with interesting people and exciting goings-on, a machine full of lives, a place built up with myriad glam elements, including golden roofs and ornaments in hundreds of bright colors. The often-held festivals and international evens tend to gather people from all zones to celebrate. There is never any fear of falling, of losing, of being alone. There is only pleasure and comfort. And yet, I also love the surface world below— that empty space where I can enjoy moments alone with myself and meditate. Absolute silence, in which only my own heartbeats is perceptible. Sometimes, I just need to get lost, in a place wondering where I am, a place with no name. I was born in a time where the ground returned mostly to unclaimed fields and nature, the wildness journey can send us to where our soul would rest relieved. People today likes to travel between the Circle and the Surface to create their own version of life. In a Journey, we are in harmoney with ourselves and the elements in nature. In the end, however, the journey completes, and I returned to the restless circle. When we share our story and love, our circle of our lives may become infinite.
THE END.
Thesis Film: https://vimeo.com/192583375
02 | THE FORGOTTEN RAILWAY C u l t u r a l C e n t e r i n Ta i p e i R a i l w a y
INSTRUCTOR
Dwayne Oyler & Jenny Wu Wo r k i n co l l a b o rat i o n w i t h E u j e a n C h e o n g
Lines exist in nearly every structure in every city. Cities are entities driven by various forces and pressures, energies that tend to bend straight lines. This project is interested in investigating the urban forces of Taipei from multiple scales of measurement, developing an approach that negotiates these contesting urban elements, forces, and structures from an architect’s perspective and interest. The existing structure of the Taipei Train Depot currently separates the northern and southern parts of the city. A new cultural center, conceived by a graphical line drawing initiative, proposes the creation of fluid pathway through the site for efficient circulation and urban mediation. The programmatic volumes are situated relative to the abstraction of the pathway contours. Each volume of the cultural center receives transparent pressure from existing Train Depot volume. New and old do not touch each other, but several implications can be drawn from the composition and texture of the building’s form and façade. The volumes consist of a performing center, a theater, and a concert hall, along with an underground commercial promenade. With a new landscape that corresponds to the shape and mass of the new building, volumes are spread throughout the site and allow people to circulate through industrial building remnants. Several proportional qualities of the landscape suggest that the center of the complex embraces the major building with the main performing center, while the other structures support the main program mass. The three distinctive programmatic volumes are constructed with independent individual materialistic approaches: concrete, steel, wood. With each volume designed and formed with different material and structural builds, the highly diverse purposes of the cultural center are expressed in an advanced and tangible way by the singular formal language of the complex.
Line work site drawings The two drawings propose an abstract reading of the site only through the two-dimensional lines. The existing structure of the Taipei Train Depot is currently separating north and south part of the city, this fact is conceived by graphical line drawings. The project proposes the creation of fluid pathway through the site for efficient circulation and urban mediation.
Volume under pressure of lines The study model is in search of a more integral approach to the making of the liner system and volumetric enclosures.
1/8� Physical Sectional Model Th e model was made in piece by 3D print machine, structures and detail elements are assembled by hand.
03 | Anonymous Monster Art Institution next to High-line INSTRUCTOR Kyle Miller
The project is interested in the idea to develop new architectural�design models and form types�, and to investigate new dynamic relationships between various design components and how they formulate a plausible architectural result. The assigned building program is a Institution for Architecture teaching and exhibition. This project is about creating a building form that engages its context through loose figural associations and dramatic volumetric propositions enabled by structurally expressive cantilevered spaces. The project combines characteristics associated with strong figural forms and buildings that are considered tectonically (structurally) expressive. The superimposition of two formal typologies creates interior spaces for the program that expose the strategy of collage via hybridization. Visually, the project is trying to build a form of multiple loose figural association, allowing multiple readings for the individual viewer.
Physical form model 1/8�
04 | Excavating Wildness Museum at Gramercy Park,NY
INSTRUCTOR Jon Lott
In New York City, a private park is undergoing a crisis of boundaries. Gramercy Park. Located in the Gramercy Park Historic District, is one of the two private parks still existent in New York City. A fence was built around the park during the earliest mentions of the structure, as New York grew northwards on Manhattan Island in the 1830’s. The fence was designed to preserve the park as the ultimate form of privateness for the wealthy owners of the first buildings erected around it, town houses for the elite of New York. The privileges of the park remains exclusive today, and only people residing around the park who pay an annual fee have a key. The public is not generally allowed in - although the sidewalks of the streets around the park are a popular jogging, strolling and dog-walking route. Concealed from view, the unknown space of the park has become a white space, a subject of the public’s curiosity. The interiority of the park and the exteriority of the city are no longer continuous, and each took on a life of its own. This project provides an alternative idea to what it means to put a fence around a park. It suggests replacing the fence with an invisible wall; an empty, cavernous space, deep in the earth. The shape of the fence becomes simultaneously a void. The project allows an ongoing production of new relationships between neighbors and strangers, open to spontaneous encounters as the view is longer blocked. As the only urban landscaping within the densely built-up neighborhood, the park then can share its beauty and play a more central role in public life. The project features a viewing deck, designed to welcome crowds and become filled with people engaged in various activities, yet always providing a spot for everyone to get a nice view. The void around park provides a place of emptiness, where people get a chance to mediate, to temporarily isolate themselves from the noisy city; it also become a spontaneous museum of earth itself, where people enjoy the stunning texture of earth. Yet the park is still a private land isolate from the common ground where no one except those who have the key may enter. The private tunnel linking the basement of the neighborhood building to the park becomes the only path for people to enter the park. Behind the void, where everything in Gramercy Park is unreachable, the unknown space becomes even more mysterious. The original intention behind the creation of the park is not forgotten. The project, however, now allows the interior and exterior to remain conjoined in a particular way, organically connected to the local area. Surrounded by void spaces, the park eventually becomes the shared subject of imagination for the people of the city.
Park with fence
Gap proposed
Public spaces
+0’ Ground
- 42’ Pedestrian tunnel - 25’ Private tunnel Private escalator Public escalator - 95’ Pedestrian tunnel
- 150’ Pedestrian tunnel
Physical model 1/8�
05 | A BRIEF JOURNEY “ Ve r y Fa st ” A i r p o r t
INSTRUCTOR
Nanako Umemoto Work in collaboration with Eujean Cheong
For the last few decades, the typical modern airport, located near a large urban center and connected by highways to the local region, has paradoxically found itself in a state of arrested development. The designs of these complex transportation centers are almost universally made in the prevailing style of High-Tech. High-Tech is an architectural style emulating the aviation technology of the 1960’s, which has since gone on to become to become a worldwide cliché. As the standard architectural design of airports wherever one goes, High Tech has become worn down, and it no longer speaks to the specifics of place nor to the specifics of experience. This project suggests another set of possible futures for the architecture of the contemporary airport. Designed as a Low-Cost Carrier Airport, it suggests a new way of life that crosses regional and international boundaries, while also creating its own sense of the local through material effects. It explores a group of compound volumetric models that incorporate multiple layers of surface and poche. The circulation of the airport is considered no longer as horizontal, but vertical: The general organization of the various systems and programs in this transportation center is established with a certain amount of looseness, to promote a unique sensibility while continuing to maintain a maximum level of efficient movement and service.
BRANCHING
MAIN STRUCTURE
CIRCULATION TO GATE / DEPARTURE
CIRCULATION TO EXIT / ARRIVAL
Volume and structure Study using plastic bottle (not to scale)
Ticketing / baggage claim
Exhibition
Entrance/Exit
Security
Departure/Arrival gate Immigration Lounge
Cafe
PERFORATED ALUMINUM SHEETS
GLASS AND INSULATION
Physical model : facade study
STEEL PANEL /JOINTS MERO SPACE-FRAME STRUCTURE
INTERIOR ALUMINUM PANELS
B
A
A
B
06 | OTHER WORKS
REST STOP | Fall 2012 TECHNIQUE [ Hand Craft ] Physical model of a rest stop design along highway I91 in Montana
TRANSPARENCY | Spring 2012 TECHNIQUE [sewing]
A facade study using silk to demonstrate skin and skull
W o r k i n c o l l a b o r a t i o n w i t h Z h e n q i a n h u i To n g & C h e n q i a o z h i Z h o u
AMBIGUOUS FIGURE | Fall 2013 TECHNIQUE [ Wood cutting ] A set of Abstracted Figural design
Wo r k i n co l l a b o rat i o n w i t h X i a o H a n
THE NUTRITION BULB | Spring 2014 VC Studio TECHNIQUE [ Hand Craft , Spay Paint , Hot Glue] The Nutrition bulb is a full scale model that can be installed in the water. This element will be used in the floating gardens in the future to maintain the urban green area . Equipped with next generational nutrition absorb electronics and transmission monitors, the plants are able to use the nutrition that is transformed from the sea mineral.