Daniel Yu Portfolio

DANIEL YU

MEGA MATS house of cards

How would people inhabit oblique surfaces?

The studio is initiated by looking at Claude Parent’s book <The Function of the Oblique> about how to occupy oblique surfaces. Underneath the oblique? On the Oblique? Or above the oblique? What happens to the spaces in between the obliques?

This project investigates four mega mats that are leaning obliquely on one another and appear to delicately support one another like a house of cards to impose a provisional skyline to the existing city. And using the shadow ground projection strategy, I created a figural mega mat object that is jammed in the four leaning mats and hovering over the existing city to achieve an effect of an internally occupiable high line.

I used simple commands including move, rotate, and scale, to orient slabs in the digital space. By doing a glance cut at multiple slabs, it unifies multiple slabs as a whole. And by doing inclination of the cut figure, it could emphasize the unique quality of various compositions of the slabs.

The composition of the slabs appears playful, which is represented by the wiggling effect in the animation. Yet, when it is placed on top of the existing city, the absurdity of its scale creates a sense of defamiliarization of its scale and its source of origin. The playfulness can direct the audience into a world of a diorama. It appears to be existing in a completely different realm of reality than everyday life as the new architectural typologies.

GODZILLA DRAWING

A. HIGH LINE SHELL

With the shadow projected on to the ground, a figureal platform is created by shoveling in between the four mats and hovering over the existing building. The figure contains the quality of the cut figure and the leaning/ supporting formal relationship among the mats. It serves as the new ground that also contains life inside and it also provides communal access to all the mats.

a1 2ft thick opaque black figural trim

a2 Swimming pool

a3 Upper Plaza

a4 Sunk-in plaza to mat interior

a5 Campus overlooking deck

a6 Circulation Staircase

a7 Transparent figural glass trim

B. EXTERIOR SHELL

The idea of the exterior shell comes from the idea of a diorama, where a sun sets in the cavity formed by the right two mats to create an effect of the cut figure fading and under belly glowing.

b1 Opaque exterior

b2 Black cut figure trim

b3,4,5,7 Perferated panels

b6 Operable window

b8 Opaque aluminum panel

C. FOUR MATS

The four leaning mats impose a provisional skyline to the existing city. The cut figure indicates the osculation points emphasizing the precariousness formal characteristic.

c1 Embedded staricase

c2 Platform extrance

c3 Art room

c4 Residential units

c5 Restaurant

c6 Penthouse units

c7 Core

c8 Rensidential units

c9 Yoga room

c10 Platform entrance

c11 Bathroom

D. PUZZLE SITE

c12 embedded staircase

c13 Indoor garden

c14 Administration office

c15 Art gallery

c16 Restaurant

c17 Library

c18 Dinning area

c19 Outdoor patio

c20 Veteran musuem

The puzzle site condition is with a linear gigantic nursing home dissect into half. With the four mats leaning against each other, it maximizes the view and function as a uniformity.

d1 Existing nursing home

d2 Sidewalk

d3 Public plaza

d4 Road

d5 Greenery

ASSEMBLIES

urban micro-unit

“What is an architecture of aggregation that transcends the individual unit and is not subservient to a monotonous mass?”

Housing has long been a pedagogical staple of architectural education. It comes with a rich legacy of precedence anchored by modernism’s quest for a model of social dwelling that corresponded to the egalitarian ideals associated with the industrial revolution, mass production, and the then newfound freedoms available to the working class. The clarity of the problem was directly related to a modernist tenet of design that centered on functionality and beauty in accordance with a system of mechanical reproduction.

For architects at the turn of the 20th century, the migration from the agrarian to the urban spurred on by factory job opportunities and a new sense of independence for the working class consolidated into a crystal clear problem: how do you house all these people and what is the architectural expression for it? This type of housing often comes with the prefix of ow-income or social or public, which also comes with the stigma associated with economic status. Rather than identify the housing type in terms of class or status, the studio will frame it in terms of setting: urban housing.

ONE MORPHOLOGY

four unit types:

This project consists of one morphology of the unit, with the second one being a 180° flip of the first unit type. The unit design is initialized by taking the section of the precedent and rationalize its dimension to satisfy an average of 300 s.f. requirement for each unit. And by subtracting a volume from the first floor and reattach it onto the second floor, the units are able to interlock in various ways to create different unit clusters.

To maximize the potential of one module, we tested different interlocking logics to create multiple clusters. The numerous interlocking logics also creates an effect or an illusion that there are more than one unit types in this project. The project is a heavy stack of four unit aggregations around a void, each of which is sectionally sheared from its vertical neighbor. This unit transformation logic was taken into consideration when constructing the units of our micro-housing project.

ACCUMULATION physical composition

How the architecture of the contemporary art museum, as much an accumulation of spaces, can contain a collection of withdrawn interiors?

‘Cultural confinement’, a term coined by Robert Smithson in ‘72, exposes the issues that arise when the museum imposes its overarching limits on art through its architecture. As a result, Smithson claims, art “ends up supporting a cultural prison that is out of its control. Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is. Museums, like asylums and jails, have wards and cells – in other words, neutral rooms called ‘galleries.’ ”

In this project we hope to argue that the inevitable frictions between art and architecture should not point towards a mode of confinement but rather of provisional containment; one in which the fragility and tenuous equilibrium of the museum as a collection, but also as an organism, embraces unanticipated affinities and logics between objects.

We accumulated a series of objects and produce scenes according to the following three conditions: - A still life - A Landscape of Objects - Transparency of Objects. Utilizing glass as a way of representation, we could discover the relationship between the vessels in terms of their spatial overlaps, the silhouette among each object and the overall compostion.

Collaboration with: Yunbin Wang

Instructor: Maxi Spina

WITHDRAWN INTERIOR

CHOREOGRAPHY fragility in motion

“What can architecture do?”

The project site is situated in Venice Beach, Los Angeles. It is bounded by Pacific Ave, Venice Blvd, and Dell Ave. There is a canal that bisects the site into two parts. And it is only one block away from the beach on the west side, and there is a wealthy neighborhood on the south side. The current planning proposition suggests the housing problem and potential solutions are city-wide, and therefore the location of new affordable housing should likewise be distributed equitably throughout the city.

This affordable housing project focuses on the integration with the local artist community and the city in general. This project minimizes the appearance of each housing unit. Yet, it is infused with vertical gardening on the wireframe, oblique aperture following the geometric form, and multiple observation decks for the ocean on the west side, canal on the site, and city views on various sides.

Due to its significant location in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, the views from all sides, and the canal system on the site have become the most dominant consideration. There was an existing bridge on the site. We abstracted the shape of it into the alphabet “U”. Then, this shape is oriented and deformed according to the view of the ocean, the rest of the city, and not blocking the canal underneath.

Collaboration with: Adam Wang

Instructor: Eric Owen Moss

CHOREOGRAPHY twist and split

“What can architecture do?”

The project site is situated a traditional, rural, manufacturing town, which is located 80 km southwest of Vienna, named Marktl. The company, Prefa Aluminum, intends to build the Prefa Academy above an existing parking lot bounded by a major highway to and from Vienna and Traisen River that flows east of the site.

The Prefa Aluminum project focuses on exhibiting the wide range of aluminum applications for architecture, cultivating skills of future generations, and staying connected with the manufacturing warehouse through offices and conferences facilities.Prefa Aluminum has a huge demo in environmental sensitivity, eco-consiciousness and customer services on house intervention. The Prefa Aluminum project would challenge us on how to justxpose a project bu this innovative company in this rural town.

It investigates the motion of twisting and slicing and its relationship to the ground and the existing city. Rearranging the sliced chunks can address the programmatic requirements for Prefa Academy with unique interior and exterior qualities. Starting from the site, although we decided to do underground parking, we want it to be as interactive as it should be on the ground. So we punched openings for visual and practical connections.

Collaboration with: Adam Wang

Instructor: Eric Owen Moss

Parking Exit to Waterfront

Primary Steel

Frame Steel

Secondary Steel

Floors and Stairs

Conference Class- Exhibition Lobby + Cafe Office Area

DETAILS DETAILS handrail revitalization

What is an architectural detail today?

This course is an investigation into the future of the architectural detail. It considered a range of critical positions on the issue, and tests their outcome through the design and fabrication of an architectural detail.

“A number of contemporary architects, from Ben Van Berkel to Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaus have suggested that the relevance of the architectural detail has faded in favor of more subservient part to whole relationships.

There is no denying that, given the simultaneous technological advancement and material development of our era, the idea of seamless continuities are on the horizon (if not at our fingertips) at least from the standpoint of constructability. But, is that really the best we can do? Or might the future of the architectural detail belong to a more nuanced approach that draws from a wider range of definitions?”

Metal is introduced into the design to intervene the solitary use of wood. Steel and mahogany are joined together with curvilinear interface and peculiar sectional profile

Collaboration with: Lezi Li, Wency Zhang

Instructor: Dwayne Oyler

MALLEABLE ASSEMBLY “wireframe” the drapery

How to use digital augmentation to approach architectural assemblies using Fologram and Hololens?

Malleable Assemblies looks at the design and fabrication of eccentric architectural assemblies through the collapsing of digital and analog approaches. Utilizing advanced mixed reality software, and working in close collaboration with the architects and software developers at Fologram, the seminar will utilize a range of hands-on design approaches and techniques specifically tuned to this type of software.

One of the key advantages of mixed reality software is its ability to allow the user to envision complex forms in 3-dimensional space. This has incredible advantages in ensuring a level of precision difficult to communicate through conventional drawing practices. It does, however, require careful consideration of the type of materials and assembly that allow for malleability during the fabrication phase.

The best examples of those digital fabrication methods are specifically intended to eliminate malleability from the process, ensuring that parts can only be assembled in one way- thereby, rendering any form of mixed reality useless.

Collaboration with: Karim Khayati

Instructor: Dwayne Oyler

Bending Brass through Hololens

Side-by-Side Assembly

DANIEL YU