YUNZI SHI ARCHITECTURE PORTFOLIO 2019 2021
Film Shed for Tenet Instructor: Sean Canty I Spring 2021 This project includes entails the individual design of a flexible and iconic film shed that contributes to the formation of a flexible and iconic campus (or mini-city) of sheds, which is designed in a group of five. The film Tenet, directed by Christopher Nolan, was specified in identifying the specific sets, sheds, and studio lot needs to accommodate it. Each shed houses one large sound stage (24,000 SF), two small sound stages (8,000 SF each), and cellular supporting programs. Besides the film sheds, the studio lot contains supporting facilities, shops, and open spaces.
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The site is an expansive wedged shaped area of approximately 1.3M SF (30 acres) at the East end of the Seaport District in Boston. On-site features are a north facing shoreline, a public road running through and an enormous functioning dry-dock used for servicing ships. It is a constructed landscape, built over existing water and over time, infilled and refilled and subject to severe change vis-a-vis climate change and the rising tides.
Top: Exterior View of the Main Entrance Bottom: 3D Site Massing (group collaboration)
Top: Geometric Inversion Diagram; Bottom: Film Lot Site Plan (group collaboration) Time inversion is a central concept to the movie Interpreting the symmetry and inversion of linear time as a spatial strategy, we studied geometric inversion, a mathematical construct that basically turns space inside-out about a circle of reference. Each shed shape consists of a regular geometry and its inverted geometry according to a circle as indicated in red and blue respectively. The inversion follows a set of parameters to keep the shapes familial.
OP = 1 / OP’
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Top: Site Plan; Bottom: Roof and Floor Plans
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The shed focuses on the highway chasing scene in Tenet. As a spatial apparatus of manipulating time, the highway speeds one up by elevating one above urban traffice. This inspires the shed to recreate a conceptual highway with catwalks suspended above the sound stages that serve as shortcuts between the dressing rooms and the sound stages while providing spectacular views from the above.
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Section A-A’
Section B-B’
Section C-C’
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West Elevation
East Elevation
North Elevation
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Encircling the sound stages, the catwalk creates a nesting gesture between them and the envelope of the shed. From standing seam to frosted glass panels, facade materials with varying transparency become a double screen with different degrees of public exposure. As the diagram below shows, each sound stage is enclosed by both opaque dry walls and translucent glass panels. When it gets dark, the translucent panels above the main entrance and above the central courtyard turn the sound stages into light boxes, animating the exterior of the shed and interacting with the public.
Top: Light Screen Diagram; Bottom: Exterior View of the Main Entrance
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Top: Interior Perspective of the Catwalk Bottom: The Central Courtyard
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An Architect’s Home-Studio Instructor: Marshall Brown I Fall 2019
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.
Conceptual Collages
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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.
Top: Site Plan, 1”=30’; Bottom: Site Section, 1”=20’; Pencil on Tracing Paper
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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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Floor Plans and Diagram, Pencil on Tracing Paper, 1/4” = 1’
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’
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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Section Model, Foam Core and Chipboard, 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”. 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.
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The Site: 31 Myrtle Avenue
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.
Isometric Rendering with Site
Site Plan
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Analytical Diagrams
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.
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Section 1
Section 2
Section 3
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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.
Front Elevation
Back Elevation
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Main Entrance
Front Courtyard
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.
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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Backyard
2nd Floor Corridor
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.
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Climate Park of Brick Monuments Instructor: Mario Gandelsonas | Spring 2019
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.
New Jersey
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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Hackensack
Hudson
Manhattan
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. 1
Sea Level +1 ft (2030)
Sea Level +3 ft (2100)
Sea Level +6 ft (2100+)
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Topography
Water and Wetlands
Figure Ground
Road Network
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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“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. 1
The Clay and Clay Industry in New Jersey (Photos credit to Alamy)
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.
Cross Sections at Stages of Inundation
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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.
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Renderings of Individual Monuments at Different Stages of Inundation
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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
Geometry Formulation
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Tectonic Details
Renderings with applied materials
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Films and Video Installation 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.
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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alluvial
Visual Arts Thesis Show | Spring 2020 Advisors: Kenneth Tam, Jeff Whetstone 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
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Drawings and Sketches
Color Pencil on Drawing Paper, 18*24
Pen sketches, 5*7
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Pen sketches, 5*7
Charcoal on newsprint, 18*24
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Academic Work Architecture - Film Shed for Tenet 2 - An Architect’s Home-Studio 10 - Artist Residence of Extremities 16 Landscape and Urbanism - Climate Park of Brick Monuments 24 Fabrication - Parametric Surface 32 Personal Work Films and Video Installations 34 Drawings and Sketches 36