HANA MEIHAN DAVIS Undergraduate Portfolio Yale University B.A. Architecture (Design) Multidisciplinary Academic Program in Human Rights
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TABLE OF CONTENTS Resume
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STUDIO WORK: Building Scale Little League Baseball Community Hub
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Danish Eatery
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Mother and Child: Nature Pavilions
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The Raw and the Cooked
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STUDIO WORK: Object Scale
In Quest of the Dominant Void
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Lunch/Box
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Nomad Van
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Light and Shadow: Site and Form Allegory
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WRITING SAMPLES “How Hong Kong’s protesters harnessed the city to make their case to the world.”
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“In Hong Kong, calls for democracy are written on the walls. Literally.”
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“Tai On Building: a relic of Hong Kong’s past merging residences with shops and eateries”
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HANA MEIHAN DAVIS EMPLOYMENT
hana.davis@yale.edu | (808) 679-8498 hanameihandavis.com
Index on Censorship | January – June 2020 Youth Advisory Board As a specially selected group of young people aged 16-25, the youth board advise the work of Index on Censorship, support the ambition to fight for free expression around the world. The Washington Post | June – August 2019 Editorial Intern Worked with the Post’s editorial board under Fred Hiatt, attended tri-weekly pitch meetings, and published opinions pieces as “The Post’s View”. Published Op-Eds for Global Opinions. Yale Daily News | 2016 – 2019 WEEKEND Editor Oversaw nearly two-dozen reporters to publish the weekly 12-page end-of-week issue featuring investigative long-form pieces, personal essays and art/theatre criticism. South China Morning Post, Hong Kong | 2017 – 2019 Intern and Freelance Writer Interned for the City and City Weekend desks in the summer of 2017. I then continued on as a writer for the weekly “Explainer” column until June 2019.
EDUCATION
Yale University | 2016 – Present B.A. Architecture, expected graduation May 2020 Yale Law School Multidisciplinary Academic Program in Human Rights Founding President of the Hong Kong Student’s Association Major GPA: 3.84, Cumulative GPA: 3.81 DIS Copenhagen | June – August 2018 Study Abroad Architecture Foundations Studio Chinese International School, Hong Kong | May 2016 High School International Baccalaureate Diploma Program: 43/45
FELLOWSHIPS
Kirby Simon Summer Fellowship | Summer 2019 Awarded by the Yale Law School to support human rights advocacy by covering the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. This later shaped my senior capstone in the Human Rights Program. Richter Fellowship | Summer 2019 Awarded by Morse College in support of summer research for my Senior Capstone project.
SKILLS
Fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin and English. Adobe Creative Suite | Rhino | Microsoft Office | ArcPublishing | Sketchup Publications www.washingtonpost.com/people/hana-meihan-davis/ www.scmp.com/author/hana-davis yaledailynews.com/blog/author/hanadavis/ 3
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studio work: building scale
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LITTLE LEAGUE BASEBALL COMMUNITY HUB Senior Studio ARCH 450A: ‘In Space’ Turner Brooks / Adam Hophner Fall 2019
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This project responds to the needs of Pop Smith Little League Baseball, a team in the local New Haven area. The proposal includes a ‘clubhouse’ for team meetings, bathrooms, a viewing porch, press boxes, a concession stand, and a library. The new facility will be designed to accommodate not just the needs of teams playing, but the parents, siblings, and friends of those players, creating a festival atmosphere on game day. My project is modeled after a climbing frame: Creating a footprint that expands across the landscape, with the idea that climbable beams and columns can be used in a myriad of ways to promote play and community activity.
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R: Elevation from library/study space L: Elevation drawing, showing how the building dissolves into a climbing frame of beams and columns
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R: Drawing showing an imagined interior clubhouse space — floating steps and a pillow nook. L: Drawing of the library interior, looking out
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R: Plan showing the adjacencies of the discrete buildings L: Jagged section cut.
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DANISH EATERY BY AMAGER COMMON
DIS Copenhagen Architecture Foundations Studio Søren Amsnæs Summer 2018
Eatery from the river
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Adjacent to a footbridge and a man-made river, the semi-circular ‘eatery’ serves as a pavilion entrance to Amager Common, a public park in Copenhagen. By beckoning passersby into the park, the eatery embodies the Danish ideology of “hygge”. In the summer, glass walls and ceilings are covered in greenery; in the long winter months, the monolithic concrete support columns stand as sculptures in and of themselves. I took the Chinese idea of “以小見大”: Small details are what give a sense of place to this spaces. To me, it is the light smoke of a steaming cup of coffee, the sunlight dancing through shadowy leaves, the trickle of water nearby — that bring the human touch into architecture we dwell within.
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R: Site plan L: The eatery at night
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R: Elevation showing courtyard L: Elevation from the outward facing side
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MOTHER & CHILD: NATURE PAVILLIONS Senior Studio ARCH 450A: ‘In Space’ Turner Brooks / Adam Hophner Fall 2019
The aim of this project is to design a series of pavillions that follow a path through Beaver Pond Park, the forest adjacent to the Little League Baseball community center. There is to be one larger pavillion, built as a gathering space for learning, and a series of smaller ones, weaving in a trail system that circumnavigates the pond. The smaller shelters are designed as spaces for the contemplation of nature. The ‘child’ hubs and ‘mother’ hubs reflect one another in their design. In nature, they stand as wooden structures that suggest their varying purposes — bench, roof, climbing frame. Their shape, inspired by that of fallen branches and leaves, captures a sense of uplift: Their footprint on the woodland environment is light, and they convey the sense that at any point, they can easily be lifted off the ground, vanishing away from the woods they call home.
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R: Initial sketch of a structure that lifts off the ground. L: Pavillion from above, showing the branches into nature.
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R: Elevation of final ‘mother’ L: Sketches of the trail-side ‘children’
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THE RAW AND THE COOKED
Methods & Forms in Architecture II ARCH 251b Michael ‘Surry’ Schlabs Spring 2019 The project is to design a facility exploring and celebrating, the social, historical, and cultural contexts of food production, consumption, and education at the scale of the community. Our site for this project – a mid-block parking lot in downtown New Haven – bears a historical relationship to both the lively Crown Street corridor and the city’s storied theater district. The program is approximately 7,500 square feet, addressing the problems of cultivation, preparation, consumption, education, and play (or exercise), in the multi-seasonal environment of southern New England.
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R: Photo detailing roof access L: Photographic plan from above
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R: Rendering of ground-level vegetable garden L: Worm’s eye axonometric
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studio work: object scale
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IN QUEST OF THE DOMINANT VOID
Senior Undergraduate Studio 450A: ‘In Space’ Turner Brooks / Adam Hophner Fall 2019 An exercise in space making in which the space created is more palpably present, more powerfully assertive and potent, than whatever it is that physically defines it. The project is fashioned out of raw wood ‘furring strips’ approximately 1” X 2” X 8 ‘ in dimension. Mine is an unending cubic knot that counterbalances off a platform on the roof of the School of Architecture.
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Study model analyzing the blurring of boundary and threshold using one seemingly continuous length of wood.
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R: Sections imagining the expansion of the dominant void. L: Perspectives of this imagination.
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LUNCH/BOX
Methods & Forms in Architecture II ARCH 251b Michael ‘Surry’ Schlabs Spring 2019
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Beginning with an exploration of the conception, production, presentation, and consumption of a dish of my choosing, I translated the various processes needed to produce Northern Chinese hand-pulled noodles, synthesizing the methods into a lunchbox. The vessel is designed not only to contain and transport the meal, but to display it, and to facilitate its sharing between two people. Inspired by the white containers emblematic of Chinese-American take-out food, my final lunchbox comes with origami assembly guidelines, detachable wooden chopsticks, and subsections to separate various condiments or sauces, allowing for a multitude of function.
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R: Origami rendering of how the take-out box is folded together. L: Images showing how the lunch box comes apart
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Exploration of the conception, production, presentation, and consumption of handpulled noodles.
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NOMAD VAN
Senior Project Design Studio ARCH 494 Steven Harris/Gavin Hogben Spring 2020
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As a segue into our final project of designing a way-station/hub for nomadic communities, we were first tasked to examine the transformation of vans from ‘road mode’ to ‘camp mode’ as a way of exploring a specific vision of nomadic life. We were to design the devices, appliances, and mechanisms that fit out of a van relative to both stealth camping and open camping. The goal of this brief assignment was to build a detailed image of mobile life within a 1950s Citroen H Class Van, to understand the intimate scale of the van’s cabin space, and to explore the way interior life can extend and retract when the van is at rest and when it is engaged to its environment. For this project, I imagined a ‘library on wheels’, where the more functional utilities of life are hidden within a network of books and shelves. Through this, I created a livable space without disrupting the all-encompassing experience of this world of books.
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Back view of the library van, featuring the extended exterior awnings, doors and patio (open mode), and the interior world of books.
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View of van from the other side, showing library books peaking through a side window, and the exapandable back entrance.
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LIGHT AND SHADOW: SITE ALLEGORY
Methods and Forms in Architecture II ARCH 251b Michael ‘Surry’ Schlabs Spring 2019
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Asked to analyse site through the lens of a dichotomy, I chose to look at light and shadow in New Haven’s historic Crown Street Corridor. We were instructed to embrace not only the physical features of site, but also the the role played by human imagination and intervention in the site’s construction as a place and its topological relationship to time and memory. To do this, I constructed an allegory of site analysing the formal characteristics of light and shadow, as well as the influence of structure, commerce and history.
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Birds eye view of a woodblock model exploring form and the creation of shadow.
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Allegory of site: Chapel and College Street. Triptych.
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writing samples
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[Originally published in The Washington Post]
How Hong Kong’s protesters harnessed the city to make their case to the world. June 21, 2019 On Friday, for the fourth time in two weeks, protesters took to Hong Kong’s streets, responding to the government’s failure to withdraw a controversial extradition bill. Since there was no large space for the protesters to gather, Hongkongers had to be strategic. They peacefully surrounded and shut down the branches of power that most threatened their sovereignty: the legislature and the police. In a city with limited room that has been defined by tree decades of protest, the spaces that do exist are politicized in a way that is seldom seen anywhere else. It is impossible to read urban protest in Hong Kong without also noticing the city’s urban design. These demonstrations are no exception. The city itself has become a player in these protests, folding around demonstrators a in way that conveys their very message: that Hong Kong has a unique, immutable identity. The images that have emerged from last Sunday’s march — of a “sea of black” filling a six-lane thoroughfare, sidewalks, overhead pedestrian bridges and alleyways — evoke a sense of togetherness that was born in the tight corridors of space winding around high-rises. They reflect the stubbornness that has made Hong Kong’s protesters so resilient to the obstacles in their way and remind viewers of Hong Kong’s distinctness from both China and the Western world. Hong Kong was not designed to have expansive civic squares or wide boulevards like Washington, Cairo or Beijing. It was certainly not meant to backdrop large occupations. The way Hong Kong grew upward and inward should have impeded political
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sit-ins and rallies of dissent. Yet the precise physical barriers meant to stifle protest have instead given them even more poignancy. Though the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has flagged crackdowns on civic space as an abuse of human rights, the government has tried time and again to limit public space: fencing off Civic Square, renegotiating the number of traffic lanes allocated to marchers and relocating where protests can begin in Victoria Park, sometimes forcing protesters out of the park altogether. Authorities even designed the new government complexes in a way that precluded mass gatherings — despite ostensibly modeling the government headquarters on an “open door.” By surrounding the buildings with a network of roads and a park that could easily be blocked off, the government likely thought it could control any protests that might arise. But the more Hong Kong’s government attacks access to protest space, the more creative its people have become. When the police cracked down on the student-led class boycott in Tamar Park in 2014, the students resettled on the adjacent Tim Mei Avenue. Later, when the government tried to close off the small space that eventually became Civic Square, it accidentally unleashed a storm that turned nearby roadways into a city of tents and umbrellas. Protesters also learned to use the symbolism of Hong Kong’s structures to their advantage, targeting rallies to indicate who, or what, the city is protesting. Marches once concluded at the old Legislative Council building, but recently, China’s Liaison Office has become a popular destination of many demonstrations. Where the city once protested the leaders of Hong Kong,
it is now increasingly protesting mainland China. Ultimately, Hong Kong’s identity — the crux of these ongoing protests — has been indelibly shaped by the factors that molded the city and its urban design. The ongoing power struggle between Hong Kong’s authorities and residents can be read through the city’s urban landscape. That is why the moments that capture Hong Kong’s unified resistance have resonated across the world. The ocean of rainbow tents, the flick-
ering of 100,000 candles, the heads of 2 million people crammed in the narrow space between buildings — these snapshots tell a far deeper story than just politics can convey. As Hong Kong prepares to dig in its heels, it is unclear what will happen. One thing, however, is certain: The city itself — a collage of people and umbrellas and ramshackle pastel buildings — will be on center stage.
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Multimedia visual essay on Hong Kong’s Lennon Walls.
Edited by Kate Woodsome and Mili Mitra. Originally published in The Washington Post. All images from Getty Images/Anglerfish.
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[Originally published in the South China Morning Post]
Tai On Building: a relic of Hong Kong’s past merging residences with shops and eateries The Sai Wan Ho structure is an example of an architectural style that has long given way to glittering skyscrapers and megamall. July 1, 2017
It looks like so much of Hong Kong: crevices of dissonance and colour wedged tightly between soaring skyscrapers and dense tenements lit up by fluorescent signs and packed with hawkers and shoppers who mingle amid the scent of braised beef, curry fish balls and the omnipresent blanket of humidity. A beautiful cacophony.
ed, it was a high-rise waterfront development amid a sea of short dwellings. However, over time, the surrounding buildings grew upwards. Street-side dai pai dong became 7-Elevens and a screen of gleaming residential complexes now lines the harbour, which has moved hundreds of metres away from Tai On Building.
However, unlike its cousins, this 20,000 sq ft shopping arcade sits beneath a 28-storey building containing 1,884 flats.
Stepping through its entrances transports the visitor into a world of nostalgia. Small snack vendors, shoe repair stores, Chinese medicine shops and cha chaan teng line the halls.
Tai On Building in Sai Wan Ho in eastern Hong Kong Island has stood as a landmark of the district since 1968. When first construct-
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An array of traditional Hong Kong-style street snacks is available in the arcade. Cart noo-
dles, egg waffles, dumplings and mango mochi have given Tai On Building its new status as a “foodie paradise”. Regardless of the hour, the dimly lit halls bustle with hungry locals.
Lee said. “This means these buildings were not only self-sufficient communities, but mini-economic entities. Residents theoretically did not ever have to leave the building.”
Peter Lai Chiu-hung, owner of Hung Kee Top Quality Egg Waffles, has operated in Tai On Building for nine years.
However, in 1966, concerns over hygiene and health prompted the government to order changes to the way property could be developed. By the early 1970s, developers stopped constructing composite buildings.
“Tai On Building gave me a chance,” said Lai. “The people living upstairs bring steady business that lets me sustain my stall even when the weather dissuades outsiders from venturing into the building.” Renes Ng Ka-wai opened his restaurant, Siu Shing Chi Mei, in May: “I was attracted to Tai On Building because of the constant flow of people,” Ng said. “The culture within the building is very unique in Hong Kong today. The family nature makes me feel at home.” For many people, Chungking Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui is a prime example of a building that serves as a microcosm of the community it conceals within. However, this “world inside a building” phenomenon is not unique. While there are an estimated 5,000 such “composite buildings” in the city, there are no more than a couple hundred structures that – like Tai On Building – have more than 15 storeys, said Dr Lee Ho-yin, associate professor and head of the division of architectural conservation at the University of Hong Kong. These self-sustaining “mini-communities” began sprouting up as part of a “distinctive vernacular typology” associated with the 1960s, University of Hong Kong adjunct professor Lynne DiStefano said. Composite buildings arose as the government’s method of supporting a swelling population and boosting the economy amid an influx of mainland Chinese immigrants in the wake of the second world war and the 1949 revolution. “The government allowed people to work and live in the same unit at the same time,”
“Self-sustaining communities like Tai On Building and Chungking Mansions are a phenomenon unique to Hong Kong,” Lee added. “They were a temporary solution created to deal with a specific problem at a certain moment of Hong Kong’s history. “In today’s Hong Kong, places like this, where whole communities live within a building and have a genuine culture of connectedness are rare,” restaurant operator Renes Ng said. “They are being replaced with megamalls and new housing developments.” While developers continue to rebuild the city’s skyline, nostalgia for icons of old Hong Kong could stop the demise of relics like Tai On Building. “For a long while, I think outside people neglected the stores downstairs. Serving only the residents of the building was not enough to sustain business,” resident Yeung Ling-ka said. “Then a few years ago, business picked up again. I think the internet helped a lot with raising awareness. A lot of the newcomers are young people and tourists.” The Sai Wan Ho landmark continues to attract attention for its unique architecture and delectable snacks. Perhaps this way, Tai On Building serves as a sign that such structures can be protected. “It is a phenomenon that is worth maintaining,” Lee said. “This architecture is something really local. The 1960s composite buildings against the backdrop of high-rise towers and mega architecture are unique in the world.”
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