Architecture Portfolio 2020 - spreads

Academic Work Architecture - An Architect’s Home-Studio 2 - Artist Residence of Extremities 8 - Hidden Room: Narcissistic Deflections 16 Landscape and Urbanism - Climate Park of Brick Monuments 22 Fabrication - Parametric Surface 30 - Deployable Folding Chair 32 Personal Work Films and Video Installations 38 Drawings and Sketches 40

YUNZI SHI ARCHITECTURE PORTFOLIO 2017 2020

An Architect’s Home-Studio Fourth-year Design Studio I Fall 2019 Instructor: Marshall Brown

The site, Pilsen, is a historically industrial workingclass neighborhood that is now enlivened by a Latinx population. The street art and diverse demographics provide a rich context for the architect to respond to.

This project seeks to design an architect’s home and studio in the neighborhood of Pilsen in Chicago.

The proposal imagines an architect’s home studio as a kaleidoscope. Changing daily and seasonally, the immaterial and transient light admitted in the kaleidoscope interacts with the material and unchanging concrete, making the home-studio a source of inspiration and theatricality.

Top: Site Plan, 1”=30’; Bottom: Site Section, 1”=20’; Pencil on Tracing Paper

Conceptual Collages

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Floor Plans and Diagram, Pencil on Tracing Paper, 1/4” = 1’

Sections, Pencil on Tracing Paper 1/4” = 1’

The fenestration on the four facades create dappled light effects when there is direct sunlight. The shape is derived from an eagle’s eye from the local street art - a motif that stands for the desire of communication. When lit up from the inside, the home-studio become performative with the facades in dialogue with the neighborhood.

Detail Models, Plaster and Acrylic, 1/2’ = 1’

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As another strategy of admitting light, double height lightwells are introduced for light to diffuse at the lower level. They are slanted towards the south so that light bounces off from the concrete before falling, creating more gentle effects.

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Structure Model, 1/8” = 1’

Section Model, Foam Core and Chipboard, 1/4” = 1’

Site Model made by students of ARC404 studio students collaboratively.

The south side of the site is blocked off by the adjacent building, so the only places where direct sunlight can penetrate through is on the east and west sides, as well as through the void volume on the second level of the adjacent building. The four perforated facades are oriented accordingly.

Elevations, Photomontage, 1/4” = 1’

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Artist Residence of Extremities Instructor: Michelle Chang I Fall 2020 Collaborator: Sharon Welch This project encompasses the design of an artist residency situated within and between two existing residences. The project begins by inheriting a relationship between two existing houses: a pair of triple-deckers in Cambridge.

An addition to the pair will result in a change to their existing site(s). A response should address how changes in the relationship between the houses might produce new formats for institutional thinking: “a new typology”.

The Site: 31 Myrtle Avenue

Driven by a close reading of the triple-decker typology, as it tries to unpack the dialectics between ornamental and what is not in the triple decker typology. While the fact that oranments are usually dismissed architecturally is questioned, before being reimagined it to generate possibilities for the envelope and the interior. The result is a hybrid of the ordinary and the ornamental extremities as a radically reimagined triple-decker type.

Conceptual “comic strip” of extremities

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We thought of the two primary elements of the triple decker as the extremities--bay windows, decks, gables on the rooftop-- and the shared circulation space - the hallway and the staircases.

On the one hand, we got interested in the bay windows, decks and balconies that triple deckers have. We define these as extremities, which are elements that are added onto the facade and serve both as ornament from the exterior and as extra spaces on the interior.

On the other hand, the circulation bisects the traditional triple decker, forming a long hallway with both private rooms and gathering spaces (such as the kitchen and living room) on either side.

Analytical Diagrams

Isometric Rendering with Site

Through creating cascading corridors that connect the two exsiting triple deckers onsite, the project accommodates different program requirements ranging from institutional to domestic.

The width of the hallway is manipulated so that it acts as both circulation and programmable space. As seen in the plans, the corridor expands to accommodate public programs and contracts for the domestic space of the residency.

Site Plan

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The setbacks between the staggered extremities accommodate skylights and balconies.

Similar geometry for the extremities is used at a different scale on the back facade, creating apertures that admit light into the corridor.

Section 1

Section 2

Section 3

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Front Elevation

Back Elevation

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Main Entrance

Front Courtyard

Backyard

2nd Floor Corridor

The public entrance of our project shifted over to the extremity. It calls for a turn before entering the building, where the visitors will be provided a view of the courtyard ornamented with extremities.

The cascading balconies take the shape of a reversed bay window, where artists from their studios can interact with visitors in the courtyard.

The geometry of the extremities is preserved but less sculptural. The entries on the ground floor are aligned with the ones in the front to allow for circulation across the building into the backyard and open up the ground floor.

The extremities on the back lights up the corridor on the second floor, and opens up views into the backyard. The partition walls between the studio on the left and the corridor can be used for exhibition purposes, as the side openings allow for mingling between the artists and the visitors.

Section Perspective across the Corridors The corridor, traditionally pure circulation space, is reimagined as the place where public and private programs take place.

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Hidden Room: Narcissistic Deflections Instructor: Michelle Chang I Fall 2020

This project involves designing a group of five rooms, one of which seems to be hidden from the other four.

The program requires providing a means of access to the hidden room while controlling the degree to which the room becomes vulnerable to disclosure.

This project investigates hiddenness as the deceptive character of frontality in architecture. Through manipulating the frontal façade, the fenestration, and glass panels, the spectator’s expectation of what lies behind the frontal façade is negated. Meanwhile, the façade becomes a screen where unexpected and disorienting space is projected.

Peter Campus Three Transitions 1973

“There is a sense in which we could say that these two works by Campus simply take the live feedback of camera and monitor, which existed for the video artist while taping in his studio, and recreate it for the ordinary visitor to a gallery. However, mem and dor are not that simple. Because built into their situation are two kinds of invisibility: the viewer’s presence to the wall in which he is himself an absence; and his relative absence from a view of the wall which becomes the condition for his projected presence upon its surface.”

-- Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism.” October, Vol. 1. (Spring, 1976), 62.

As Rosalind Krauss argues, this spectacle runs counter to the narcissism afforded by live-feed video recording in mass media, and it produces two invisibilities for the spectator. Specifically, the spectator needs to determine their own position, choosing between either the objective reality or the mediated representation of it.

Inspired by this project, this hidden rrom project This hidden room project is thus inspired by reflecting on the duality of physical space and their representation in architecture which run parallel to each other.

Peter Campus’s video installations reveal our cultured tendency to inhabit the vantage point of the camera. In the single-channel video installation Three Transitions, Campus filmed himself piercing through a yellow backdrop (or front drop) with two cameras on either side of the backdrop. These two recordings are then overlayed on top of each other, creating a doubled vision that is disorienting and impossible for the spectator, who in reality cannot be physically at both the front and the back.

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Conceptual Diagram

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Section Oblique

Right: East Elevation; Bottom Left: South Elevation; Bottom Right: West Elevation

Ground Floor Plan

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Second Floor Plan

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The double facades in the project with apertures set up the front-back relationship similar to that in the installation of Campus.

The expectation that each set of aperture corresponds to a room behind it is denied spatially in the plan, where the apertures always shy away from the center of the rooms where programs actually take place. This deceives and disorients the “narcissistic” spectator who only perceives the building from the vantage point outside.

The double facade with oblique glass panels creates different optic effects during the day and at night. As daylight causes reflection and refraction during the day, the spatial relationship between front-back and top-bottom is rendered unclear.

The Hidden Room on the ground level without optic deflections

On top of this, another layer of disorientation comes from tilted glass panels, which deflect the views of the spectators from what is immediately behind and redirects them to unexpected locations, thereby connecting spaces separated in reality. All the apparatuses conceal the hidden room, which becomes the only normal space that is all back and no front. Without readily available views framed or curated by the architectural space, the narcissism of the spectator is also subdued, and allows them to interact with the space as a neutral subject.

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The couble facade with oblique glass panel from below

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Climate Park of Brick Monuments Environmental Challenges of Urban Sprawl | Spring 2019 Instructor: Mario Gandelsonas In the Fourth Regional Plan of 2018, the Regional Plan Association (RPA) proposed designating the NJ Meadowlands as a “Climate Park”. Adjacent to Manhattan, the Meadowlands and the 15 municipalities that fall within it is one of the Northeast’s largest remaining contiguous tracts of urban open space and a crucial “sponge” to mitigate rising sea levels. It also supports a wide array of wildlife and biodiversity in tandem with transportation and freight infrastructure vital to the economy.

Current Sea Level Regional Map, 1934

Sea level rise threatens the biodiversity and the daily lives of the local inhabitants. Recent research indicates that the region will be gradually inundated by the end of this century.1

Kopp et al, ”Assessing New Jersey’s Exposure to Sea-Level Rise and Coastal Storms: Report of the New Jersey Climate Adaptation Alliance Science and Technical Advisory Panel”. October 2016.

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New Jersey

Hackensack

Hudson

Manhattan

Sea Level +1 ft (2030)

Sea Level +3 ft (2100)

Little Ferry, one of the 15 municipalitieson the site of this project, lies in the northeast of the meadowlands on the bank of Hackensack River. As elsewhere in the meadowlands, the history and landscape of the town is marked by urbanization in the New York metropolitan area, both positively and negatively.

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Sea Level +6 ft (2100+)

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“Little ferry became a hotbed of activity in the brick industry due to its extensive beds of clay which led to hundreds of people being employed in the brickyards. Bricks on barges floating down the Hackensack River were a common sight.”1 “Many more brick companies would find their place in Little Ferry. In 1895, the combined output of the four large yards reached 100,000,000 bricks annually, making Little Ferry the second largest producer in the United States.”2

Gonzalez, Laura. “Little Ferrys Brick Yards.” STREET TO THE LEFT, 8 July 2016, streettotheleft.weebly.com/blog/little-ferrysbrick-yards.

2 Sue. “Just Another Brick in the Marsh: Finding Little Ferry’s Historic Clay Industry.” Just Another Brick in the Marsh: Finding Little Ferry’s Historic Clay Industry, 9 July 2013, www.hiddennj.com/2013/07/justanother-brick-in-marsh-finding.html.

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Topography

Water and Wetlands

Figure Ground

Road Network

The Clay and Clay Industry in New Jersey (Photos credit to Alamy)

Little Ferry started as an important ferry crossing for towns in Hackensack and Bergen. Its easy access to water supported clay industry as the major source of local income.

Mehrhof Pond, the pond at the center of the town, was formerly the largest clay pit used for brickmaking. The Mehrhof ’s were a major family in the brick business. A brick manufacturing company occupied the property until the 1940’s. It is now filled with fresh water.

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Brick Masonry in NYC buildings (Pictures from the Internet)

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In the proposed park in Little Ferry, a series of brick monuments will be erected. It is intended that as the sea level rises, these monuments serve as sites for contemplation over human activities and the impact on the environment. In a posthuman scenario, these monuments become the memorial of the underwater town.

Monuments are consistently placed apart from each other at the nodes of a grid system derived from the road network.

The base and top curves of the monuments are designed to interact with the water surface, revealing different shapes of the monuments that demands distinct means of access at each stage of inundation.

Cross Sections at Stages of Inundation

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Renderings of Individual Monuments at Different Stages of Inundation

Sections of Individual Monuments at Stages of Inundation

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Parametric Surface Instructor: Iman Fayyad I Fall 2020 Collaborator: Thomas Delahouliere

In this formfinding exercise, complex surfaces are discretized by subdivision to construct curved surface topologies out of planar parts in response to an architectural or programmatic motivation. Here, two enneper fragments with different lobe counts were stitched together and creates a continuous profile curve.

Through assigning material and tectonic details, the geometry accommodates a pavilion embedded in landscape, framing views and lending structural support.

Plans

Gaussian Curvature Analysis

Sections

Renderings with applied materials

Geometry Formulation

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Tectonic Details

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Degrees of Overlapping

Deployable Folding Chair

Legs

Edges

Planes

Third-year Studio II | Spring 2019 Instructors: Jesse Reiser & Stefana Parascho Collaborator: Anna Marsh Referring to the folding chair designed by Lina Bo Bardi that implicitly folds back into a planar board, we were interested in inventing a modular chair both deployable (can be easily flattened) and flexible (supporting multi-use depending on the way it is folded). The flexibility - structural rigidity paradox led us to origami, where our study started. The project involved extensive experiments with materials, seam patterns and fabrication.

(Experiments of Cut Patterns by Anna Marsh)

Folding Chair designed by Lina Bo Bardi

Experiments of Seam Intersections

After experimenting with multiple material combinations including paper, tensile, and fabric, we chose felt hardened by resin applied as material. We then carried out a series of experiments testing the formal and structural potentials of this material.

Seams intersecting at various angles support different structural potentials when folding the fabric with varying degrees of overlapping.

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Grommets are placed at each vertex of the triangles. When folding, the user can use wire to bind adjacent/overlapped vertices.

Diagram of Small Scale Folding Sequences

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The flexibility of the fabric allows it to be folded and used in distinct ways depending on the need of the user. Each model is color coded to help with reconstructing the desired shape. After being used, it can be easily flattened and stored.

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Flattening Sequence

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alluvial

Films and Video Installation

Visual Arts Thesis Show | Spring 2020 Advisors: Kenneth Tam, Jeff Whetstone The film presents the birds, bird watchers and other visitors in DeKorte Park in Lyndhurst, NJ. While the site - tidal marshes at downstream Hackensack was heavily polluted by adjacent landfills, it is now a popular destination of waterside recreation and bird watching. The film brings together the perspective of migratory birds and the documenting lens of the bird watchers to present the many unofficial accounts of the meadowlands being threatened by pollution and sea level rise.

alluvial is a show about the time and space between our memories and the actual past, as well as in between the projector and the screen. In this intermediary time and space, light transforms from an intangible material to an image carrying legible information; it is the same process specific to digital time-based media that conditions our memories, identification with the past and connections with the world. Like water, the camera and the projector generate (non)time and (non)space where memories and time are eroded and deposited, corrupted and preserved.

deadpankomorebi.cargo.site

Through the Meadow Lens

Single-channel video, 5’54” | Summer 2019 Featured in video installation “Liquid Landscapes” in the 12th Architecture Biennale of Sao Paulo Advisors: Mario Gandelsonas, Curt Gambetta https://vimeo.com/422219204

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Drawings and Sketches

Pen sketches, 5*7

Color Pencil on Drawing Paper, 18*24

Pen sketches, 5*7

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Charcoal on newsprint, 18*24

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