Portfolio by Hey Young Lim

HEY-YOUNG LIM academic portfolio

CONTENT Architecture should not be conceived as still walls and empty organs, neither as a sole purpose of sheltered inhabitation or a program host. Architecture is a machine that takes on its content and container determined by the site’s and people’s needs. It [re]cycles, a characteristic like that of the human and nature. Needn’t look far; those cycles and prosaic daily routines overlooked hold most potential to invite architectural integration.

01 Urban Internalization of Waste Ma

i. Prologue ii. Urban Problematique & Visual Nar iii. Intervention Catalogue iv. Case Studies v. Discourse to Design :: wellness retre

18 Thermodynamic Laundry House 23 Riparian Wrap 26 Doug Fertilizer

anagement | Thesis

rrative

eat x waste plant

PROLO G UE circle of life wellness retreat

Welcome to the Circle of Life Wellness Retreat, a therapeutic getaway where you can indulge in a wholesome experience of becoming one with nature— just within the city! Immerse in a 2-day weekend or a 7-day retreat program where you reside in a small, exclusive village built bottom up from surprising resources we all once thought could be used for nothing, and practice a sustainable ritual of a good samaritan lifestyle. Or simply swing by to experience becoming a piece of trash yourself on the Fast Trash rollercoaster ride, glimpsing behind the scenes of the retreat’s workings that, we assure you, will be a special little surprise. Join us on this journey, and we hope to greet you soon while this wholesome experience awaits you.

RISD | B ARCH THESIS | FA18 Professor: Daniel Ibañez

U R B A N I N T E R N A L I Z AT I O N O F WA S T E M A N AG E M E N T

urban problematique + visual narrative

The shortcoming of current approaches in delivering environmental issues is the embedded nuance of fear and threat as some inescapable presentiment of global catastrophe. As accurate and calamitous as it is articulated if not recuperated, the deliverable ought to be a well-balanced mix of alert and restorable optimism. The severity needs to be more confrontational but not overbearingly intimidating. Waste management systems operate almost with an invisible cloak; we are oblivious of what happens to our waste because our perceived timeline of our trash ends at the house or street trash bin. We do not know specifically where are waste travels to, how it is being taken care of, nor do we really concern for it due to the immediate convenience of disposal. This convenience of the silent 6AM garbage truck sweeping our unwanted traces away from the city out to the hinterlands are instigating counteractive repercussions. The system of externalization is not only inflicting ecological degradation of landfilling, but also inflating our negligence of collective responsibility towards proactive concern for such a critical, timely, and planetary issue. The design research attempts to close the loop of these current linear conditions of the waste management that has separated its operations from the daily lifestyle of citizens, but instead allow these systems to be internalized in its material flow within the urban setting by revisiting associated sites of production, distribution, consumption, and disposal treatment in order to first, repurpose our method of management and second, absolve negligence.

INTE RV ENT ION CATA LOG I post-waste series

CATA LO G O F IN T E R VEN T ION S pre-waste & post-waste

It is important to realize that once we begin to track back at our food processes before the trash bin, each stage of food production, distribution, and consumption are all generators of waste. Initial speculations intervene new ways of managing the sites associated to waste in urban life, emphasizing the need to expose these processes to ameliorate not only the non-human voices of systems, but also human-voices of engagement and awareness.

I N TE R V E N TI O N CATA LO G I I pre-waste series

RISD | B ARCH THESIS | Professor: Daniel Ibañez

EXPO SE D AVAC SYS T E M

visual awareness + street integration

The AVAC system, currently installed in Disneyland and Roosevelt Island, is an underground vacuum system for waste collection. All buildings are all connected to one central collection point, in which any waste that is disposed travels through air-pressured underground pipes at 60 miles/hr. This allows sidewalks to be absent of trash-bins, and minimizes the truck collection route to one point. Although AVAC system brings many benefits, it conceals the transportation of waste more than ever before; it is silent, unseen, and detached from any human interaction. To prevent heightened oblivion and disengagement, the exposed AVAC system is designed to operate above-ground, enabling the transportation of resources to be visually interactive and become part of the ordinary view and street circulation. Exposed AVAC replaces these singular node pickup points into destinations of various local waste management facilities where waste-to-energy can be directed back for the community needs.

POST-WASTE INTERVENTION

FA18

What happens when the internalization of waste management fuctions at building-scale? Mixed family residential garbage chutes have increasingly eliminated compartmentalization of organic waste from other types because of its messiness and foul smell. The inconvenience to way-find methods of waste sorting result in mixtures of trash.

RES I DENT IAL WASTE P LANT building internalization

Allowing the sorting to occur by installing on-the-spot organic waste plant, the building further benefits from the plant’s byproduct: methane gas and machinery convection. The anaerobic digestion captures methane in the process of decomposing, in which the gas flows along the south facade, catching heat and transferring warmth into the homes during the winter. The plant located on the bottom level of the building emits heat from machine-working, releasing the heat to rise and warm the upper floors through its thermodynamic benefits.

POST-WASTE INTERVENTION

TOOT A R EN A

controlled production

Cow expulsion of farts and burps are major contributors to the world’s accumulation of methane, and in effect global warming. Better control over the management of cows, especially during peak times of digestion, can prevent the release of methane to the atmosphere. Herding the crowd after their meals and plentiful digestion time, a transparent dome temporarily confines the cows during their release of burps and farts, vacuuming and storing the gas for energy conversion. Strategically locating the cows according to their day’s schedule, just as they routinely graze on grass-fields and after supper, stroll back to the stalls for sleep, the designated location for digestive expulsion should also become an addition to their controlled schedule to ensure an environmental boon during animal farming.

PRE-WASTE INTERVENTION

Within U.S. farms, 20% of produce goes to waste, occasionally to landfills, because the markets reject visually imperfect produce. This has shaped the norms of consumerism, as we strangely prioritize the display of these products before the quality of taste. Ugly is the New Black intervenes the vending of the produce market, operating with blind distribution that assures the consumer that shape is null to its quality by treating all shapes of produce equally. What if produce markets operate similar to vending machines, in which the idea of choosing is only associated with selecting the kind of produce, then in which one of its ‘kind’ is vended through randomization?

U GLY I S T HE N EW B LAC K blind distribution

As consumers begin to realize that shape is secondary to its great taste, the odd-lookers no longer elicit rejection, but rather equity if not popularity for its quirkiness. PRE-WASTE INTERVENTION

OP E N KI TCH E N DIN IN G transparent consumption

The new approach to the open kitchen is designed with total transparency, exposing every move and every material, that exists within the making and eating process, to be monitored. The transparent attitudes of cooking, the reasonable portion choosing, the ways of eating, and disposal of food of both the chef and consumer encourage ultimate sanitation, healthiness, and responsibility. The transparency enforces the clearance of opaque surfaces of the kitchen that may hide messy, prodigal secrets or interfere with the main function of the space, but instead allows the one and only visible sight to be our interaction between the moving hands and the food.

PRE-WASTE INTERVENTION

The highest rate of contaminant waste is found in schools, due to the lack of proper disciplinary disposal, in which the waste is unsalvageable from the severe mixture between organic and un-organic material. Ore Pillars attempt to fix this issue, enforcing students to vigorously engage in the act of disposal as a form of competition amongst teams to produce the least amount of waste accumulating in their waste pillar. Groups of students are assigned to specific cafeteria tables, in which they dispose their leftover food into the vertical ore bins. Out and below in the yard, the accumulation of total waste is visible, and students with the least amount collected are rewarded. Later, the food is aerated and composted within the pillars and released into the soil. The routinely competitive play of disposal becomes habitual, allowing students to be mindful of reasonable portioning of food onto their plates as well as visually learn the danger of how fast food waste could quickly accumulate from meal to meal.

O RE P I LLA R S

controlled consumption

PRE-WASTE INTERVENTION

SY S T E M S & AT T I T U D E S

case study

The common denominator amongst the various works is the interrogation towards our social attitudes and beliefs of hygiene, privacy, and invisibility. The case studies challenge our notions and explore the reversal of the hidden and exposed, as well as the private and public. Ranging from Buñuel’s satirical but provocative approach to our quotidian routines, to Bonvicini’s provocative but tolerable design of the public bathroom, a gradient of responses to this interrogation suggest our seemingly fixated beliefs to be potentially malleable. In analyzing the nuances of our public / private, hidden / exposed realms, the sense of privacy ties beyond the sense of visibility, to our behavioral connections and conceptions. Theses systems are those that have been recently invented and our seemingly fixed conceptions that have evolved with the infrastructural development are notions that are alterable and malleable. Targeting those pressure points of social and technological ties to the invisible system can potentially be a way of approaching the re-internalization of waste management.

In extreme, Buñuel, who totally reciprocates our normative lifestyle— by making the bathroom a collective and public program and eating a solitary and private task— invents a new type of social norm and attitude, and its simple spatial reciprocity between the space to eat and space to have do-da business creates a social change, the bathroom setting transitioning as the main context of central discourse. 13

M AINTAINANCE AS EXC E P TIO N

the kiss | inigo manglano-ovalle

The scenario of inevitable maintainance may first strike as disturbance to our notion of privacy. In a space in which privacy and separation from the outside is sought, the home can be associated with the most private space within our dwellings. However, maintainance starts to become an exception, then negotiation, then compromise with our values of privacy.

E m N a l t t c m m t

Nuances of malleability in maintainance becomes mundane and mandatory for the cleanliness of the building and the home.

T t c p a i

EXP OS U R E : A M B IT IO N VS RE ALI TY

PRIVATELY PUBL IC BATH ROOM

house NA | sou fujimoto

don’t miss a sec’ | monica bonvicini

Entailing from The Kiss contextualizing the motives of exposure in a domestic space, House NA by Fujimoto aims to utilize transparency as a device to deliver a message of contemporary lifestyles of citizens, in which modern inhabitants are more nomadic in our settlements rather than fixed, as well as unified of separation and coherence beyond the home. However, a disagreement between the occupant and the architectural motives of exposure force privacy to be afforded through curtains.

The not-so-private public bathroom positions itself on the borderline of comfort and discomfort. The experience of being able to see but is unseen while enacting what we deem a private action, interrogates our conception of the attitudes and beliefs that entail our notions of private and public, visible and invisible.

The ambitions of the architecture and its attempt to materialize a message of behavioral transparency provoke the opposite response from its occupants in the post-built. The users associate home as a space of privacy, and associate privacy with invisibilty or separation from the exterior.

PRE-BUILT CONDITIONS “cross-over” between the city and private home, whose spaces are reinterpreted to ref lect new contemporar y lifestyles. POST-BUILT CONDITIONS The total transparenc y of the house has brought inconvenience in both privac y and temperature factors.

REVERSAL OF THE HIDDEN AND EXPOSED “poo in public, eat in private” the phantom of liberty by luís buñuel

M O D E R N WA S T E P L A N T S

case study

HYBRIDITY

attract and educate

The second case study acknowledges the recurring themes throughout modern projects that are utilized in attempt to reveal and share its processes.

The projects use hybridization of public programs to attract, populate and naturally allow learning to occur. However, there exists a disparation between the plant and the public program, absent of any co-dependancies or hybrid metabolism.

Current approaches aim to materialize this exposure and connection through design methods of hybridization of public program, visual transparency, and public access.

The waste plants remain in the black box of invisibility as public programs are simply stacked, adjacent, or encompassed.

However, despite the motives to expose and educate, the waste plants still remain as enclosed cores: black boxes that confine its system solely within itself and do not fulfill to deliver awareness and holistic understanding of waste systems and their importance. Although the case studies position against the design research argument, the exploration of the project’s tactics pose as crucial examples that cannot be negated. Deciphering methodologies that are repeatedly attempted but do not fulfill the architecture’s intentions reveal the limitations of materialization and the slips of human attitudes and conceptions in reality.

waste plant x ski slop

V ISUAL TRANSPARENCY exposure through visibility

The projects use visual transparency in attempt to reveal the inner workings of the plant. The UPPSULA and Shenzhen plants allow their exterior facade to be visually permeable. The Amager Bakke, though, chooses a more subtle visual approach by maintaining its facade concealed and indicate through smoke rings, but fails to meet its technological ambitions. Transparency as a method of exposure hold potential to trigger attention, but is an insubstantial tactic on its own to increase a holistic understanding of the system workings.

‘donut smoke’ per on incineration

PUBL IC ACCESS invitation to learn AMAGER BAKKE bjarke ingels

SHENZHEN EAST W TP schmidt h. lassen architects

UPPSULA POWER PLANT bjarke ingels

The projects use public access as a means to invite the learners into the machinery site, a tactic that would be perceived quite radical during the period of functionalism. The projects move away from mono-concentration of function, and aim to integrate publicity and eduction. Revealing the function of waste plants through public access hold more potential to fulfill curiosities of those who are willing to learn. However, being educated on the logistics of a waste plant does not promise understanding and participation of the individual’s connection to the larger system once one leaves the plant and returns to their habitual lifestyle.

elevator that travels v of the hill to the grou

ne ton of waste

visitors from the top und level

waste plant and x circular excercise trail

permeable wood facade

elevated circular walkway to view the plant machinery below

waste plant x greenhouse

transparent solar dome

dome’s interior during the wintertime

T H E U R B A N WA S T E P L A N T : A N A LT E R N AT I V E

discourse to design

The nuanced relations and examples of contemporary case studies display pluralistic definitions of what transparency could mean, and it cannot be boiled down to visibility as a form exposure. Thus, the design research interrogates and re-politicizes through a new urban typology that consists a hybrid of a waste plant and a wellness retreat, a site-less exploration using architecture as a device to re-politicize the invisible urban waste system into one that is visible. The hybrid plant and retreat brands a radical yet necessary new sustainable lifestyle and a guide to becoming a good samaritan, that positions itself as a mediator between the capitalist/consumerist party and the sustainability party.

Acknowledging the limitations of either- solely advancing an urban waste system tailored to unrealistically obedient citizens, or advocating ineffectively to change the minds of people through preach or threat- the wellness retreat capitalizes the contemporary societal trends of consumerism as a modest but effective approach to drawing attention to these issues. The typology can be seen as a machine that metabolizes through people and waste. The building is concentrically layered with the core as the central composting courtyard. The second layer consists of the waste plant components that are disassembled, elongated in connection, and internalized by its third layer of symbiotic programs of the retreat.

C I RC L E O F LI FE wellness retreat

The wellness retreat— a place of production, distribution, consumption, disposal, and repurposing of material— is subtle in educational engagement but more immersive in its process. The programs in the wellness centre support and are supported by the plant. Ex. incinerator as a thermal source for hotel, filter system to catch and store additional gas from cow expulsion, the power engine fueling the kitchen, waste byproducts as its own reproductive building material.

UNFOLDED SECTION: THE ORGANS

The public activity center are all based on trash through a fast and entertaining experience. The rollercoaster takes people behind the scenes of the workings of the waste plant by becoming a piece of trash themselves being treated through an AVAC system, taken through the heat of the incinerator, the water and steam engine, the power generator, and filter system, experiencing at the plant scale.

C 20

Rise and Shine Morning wake-up calls of people shrilling in their rustling trash bag ponchos swoosh by your interior window every minute on the FastTrash rollercoaster ride. You could sleep in through a couple of rides and still have enough time to shower, get ready, and make it to the 9:00 AM collective farming ritual. Make sure you don’t snooze past 30 of them though, because it probably means you’re late. But needn’t worry; you bed will be burning hot in no time once the incinerator starts operating to warm up your room for the night.

Morning Stroll at the Greenhouse A forest of sun-shading inflatable smoke trees hover above while you stroll on your theraputic morning wall downhill to the kitchen, solely contemplating on one simple, happy dilemma: the curation of your breakfast ingredients. To prevent surplus food hoarding, you are limited to choosing five ingredients from the farm that you place inside your straw basket. The produce are on protected display, so look around and vend out what you please to eat!

Open-Kitchen

Every meal is crafted with intent, simplicity, and minim chefs at the open kitchen, and spectate while they creative taining a wholesome meal, leaving behind a mi 25

n Fine Dining

malism. Deliver your basket of organic ingredients to the ely cook it to perfection. Your basket will be returned coninimum trace of food waste during its curation. 26

Return to Nature Return your traces back to nature at the Cirlce of Life compost ring located on the ground floor, where the food scraps you dropped above into the Ore Pilars are collectively turned with the pillar wheel for natural aeration and bacterial digestion. The scraps will decompose overtime and repurpose as a compost terrain ground for the retreat.

To conclude, transparency cannot be a formal definition; the internalization of material circulation, a co-existence of hybrid social space and public space encompassing from the small to big scale, and the materiality of the building reflecting its self-reproductive build-up— constitute the pluralistic definition of transparency. The typology materializes transparency through these methodologies in hopes to erase the taboo of urban waste plants and invent new social relations of conception and attitude towards our production and treatment of waste. 28

2 THE RMO DYN A M IC L A U N DRY H O U S E In a tradition in which hung clothing in the voids between buildings, on the walls of the building facade, and above the roofs of homes has become a niche aesthetic of the culture and architecture, the Laundry House celebrates and preserves the tradition of Spain’s long kept laundry practices. The new communal housing typology promotes a modest reconfiguration of ‘doing your laundry’ by integrating the cylce of laundry routines into the thermodynamic and architectural re-purposing.

UPM ETSAM | PROYECTOS 6 | SP18 Professor: Iñaki Ábalos & Javier García-Germán

LAUNDRY AS CLIMATIC CONDITIONING

The laundry clothes are taken down to the Basement through storage elevators, in which the process of cleaning, ironing, folding, and packing are done. These steps during the laundry process emit energy that performs as natural heating for the rooms above on ground level. Through these laundry services, the communa has the ability to adapt to its highly public location, and utilizing that source as the building’s ongoing year-round metabolism. Depending on the different times of the day and season, laundry routines adapt within the building accordingly: In the summertime, the clothes are dried with the sun and wind at the periphery of the building, allowing the moisture and ventilation to simultaneously flow in through the interior, while acting as a natural sun-shading device. In the wintertime, the exterior walls close in and stay insulated. The humidity and warmth circulates within the building, as the winter winds are blocked from the enclosure as well as the row of drying clothes. In effect, each drying-station alters the method of racking the clothing:

SUMMER DAYTIME

The North Dry Room opens up the walls, and clothing is hung parallel to the north wind for ventilation. The South Dry Room also opens up, but clothing is hung perpendicular to block hot sunlight from overheating the interior space. 35

SUMMER NIGHTTIME

The North and South Dry Rooms both open up the walls, and clothing is hung parallel to the north wind for a cross-ventilating night flush.

CAKE-CUT SECTION DRAWING: SEASONAL CONDITIONS

WINTER DAYTIME

The North Dry Room keeps walls closed, and drys clothes parallel to the facade to block as much infiltration as possible. The South Dry Room also keeps walls closed, but drys clothes perpendicular to the facade to invite sunlight. 37

WINTER NIGHTTIME

The North and South Dry Rooms both keep walls closed, and drys clothes parallel to the facade to block as much infiltration as possible.

CAKE-CUT SECTION DRAWING: SEASONAL CONDITIONS

3 RI PA R I A N W R A P The Blackstone River, as it cuts through the region of Central Falls, RI, is the most polluted river in the United States, and the need for purification is demanding. Riparian Corridor is vegetation that grows along where land meets water, and it has a crucial function of filtering out any unwanted substances from the water (eg. runoff ), before it enters the river. It is apparent that there is a scarcity of existing riparian edge bordering the site. The building, as it wraps around the river’s edge, becomes an addition to the river’s scarce riparian corridor,

performing as a buffer for treating runoff water that enters the site to prevent further pollution. The hyrid of residential housing and water treatment education centre promotes the learning of water treatment and its importance, allowing visitors and inhabitants to visually first-hand experience as one moves together with the flow of water.

Bl ac ks to

ne R iv er RISD | URBAN ECOLOGY | FA17 Professor: Jeff Geisinger

Plants Compatible for Zone 6 C Various canopies and root structures to slow d

Climate with Flood Resistance down, infiltrate, filter pollutants from runoff

C FA AD E

SECTION MODEL | TROMBE WALL HYBRID

45 UT AD

SO C FA E

The water storage tanks replace the south-facing facade of the houses for direct water reuse collected from rainwater. Adopting and re-interpreting methods of trombe wall systems, the tanks perform as a passive solar heating device, in which winter sun heats up the water and transfers the warmth into the house. Substituting the second wall with water, a substance that is far more effective in heat transfer than the usual building materials, the trombe wall performs more vigorously.

SECTION | WATER TREATMENT SYSTEM

SITE

PROVIDENCE PLACE MALL

CITY HALL AMTRAK STATION

4 DO U G FERT I LI ZER Located on the expansive green field adjacent to the Providence Amtrak Station, City Hall, and Providence Place Mall, the herd of Dougs attempt to revitalize the under-utilized and poorly maintained space. The site, with potential to be a spot of attraction as it is surrounded by heavily populated programs as well as occasional dog walkers who shamelessly leave behind their pet’s business, is rescued by Dougs that invite attention and maintainance through offering seating, playground for dogs, and easy doggy-doo facilities.

RISD | ADVANCED STUDIO | FA17 Professor: Nick Safley

GRASS CLIPPINGS, DOGGY

FOR THER

DOO, AND SOMETIMES BUT

THERE NE

NOT ALWAYS, THE HELP OF

VISUAL PO

RAIN AT ITS AVAILABILITY,

BACK FACA

COMPLETE THE RECIPE FOR DOUG’S DIGESTIVE TREATS. BEWARE OF NON-STARCH

SURFACE A

BASED BAGS AS IT WILL

STRONG SU

CAUSE INDIGESTION.

DOUG MANUAL

HIGH INTE

DURING THE PRIME TIME, DOUG EXPLODES AND SHARES ITS TREATS TO THE REST OF THE GRASSMUNITY. DOUG HAS THE ABILITY TO DECOMPOSE DOGGY-DOO INTO HEALTHY GRASS FERTILIZERS, ESSENTIAL FOR FRESHER & GREENER LOOKS.

RE TO BE CONSUMPTION,

EEDS TO BE RELEASE! THE

ORTAL IS LOCATED ON THE

ADE, INDICATING HOW FULL DOUG IS.

ENSITY OF THE INTERIOR’S

AREA AGAINST THE WINDOW

UGGESTS PREPARATION FOR EVACUATION.

SECTION PERSPECTIVE | ORGANS OF THE DOUG

Along the backs of Doug Seaters are re dog-owners and watchers, given the opp their pets roam in the central space, p The pets will be kept busy for quite a identity’ on every

ed yarn cushions to offer platforms for portunity to climb on, relax, and observe re-occupied by poles and looped pipes. while.. trying to sniff and ‘mark their single one of them.

A TYPICAL DAY AT THE DOUG