Kai Huang Selected works
2017 - 2021
Content
1. Archive of Urban History
2
Design IV, Fall 2020
2. Fragmented Dwelling
6
Design III, Spring 2020
3. Longyearbyen Hothouse
12
Design II, Spring 2019
4. The Street and The Island
17
Design IV, Spring 2021
5. Fanatic Urbanism
20
Thesis, Fall 2021
6. Formal Analysis
22
Design III, Fall 2019
7. Other works
25
Archive of Urban History Evolo Skyscraper Competition 2021 Design IV, Fall 2020 Professor: Diana Agrest Despite its engineering achievement, skyscraper could be perceived as an architectural result of the confrontation between private development and public well-being. As in the case of the condo towers on 57th Street, New York, where the private developers have squiggled around the loopholes of the zoning law to acquire additional heights and volumes, these slender towers violate the well-being of the public realm by casting long shadows on the ground and creating tremendous amounts of waste in terms of public resources due to their long-term vacancy. The public responds to this phenomenon through various approaches, ranging from protests and public hearings to parkours and illegal constructions, as we see in the case of “Stand Against the Shadows” in 2015, where New Yorkers marched to protest unregulated super-towers. More importantly, this friction is exactly the driving force of the development of the skyscraper as an architectural typology, as we witnessed in the transformation from the Equitable Building and the Empire State Building to Lever House as well as Seagram Building, and to 432 Park Ave and the Central Park Tower.
Shadow Study
Incentive Zoning
Unbuilding Midtown Manhattan
Formal Diagram
Timeline
In response to these phenomenona, this design proposes to unbuild skyscrapers by carving out the bonus volumes to make ways for an archive of this rich urban history. First, the ground floor lobby, along with the privately owned public space, will be excavated and transformed into a public plaza. In addition, the core of the tower is remodeled to accommodate the storage space for documents as well as circulation system. And the documents will be sorted in a chronological order, organized from the top to the bottom. Then, a series of carved-out figures will be arranged along the core. These originally vacant spaces could be freely occupied by the public for various uses, such as parkours and protests. Every trace of the events, including burnt marks, ripped posters, wasted food, and rusted steel panels will be preserved, making the carvedout space a performative archive that physically stores and documents public events. And as the events layer and the left-overs physically aggregate, the skyscraper then becomes a site with its own history materialized and revealed.
Layering of Social Events
Masterplan
In the meantime, as the archive grows, it begins to invade other towers with the same logic, and this eventually results in a network of both vertical and horizontal public spaces within the compact urban environment of New York City. In this way, the archive could be perceived as an ever-changing element in the city’s skyline, and the general public would be exposed to this particular history and the tension between private and public, thereby promoting public awareness as well as engagement in the coming urban development.
Fragmented Dwelling Design III, Spring 2020 Professors: Stephen Rustow, Mersiha Veledar, Ife Vanable Among all the architectural typologies, housing is the one that has the strongest presence in shaping the urban environment due to its ubiquity. Consequently, this project conceives of housing as a device to shape urban form. Located at the northwest corner of Cobble Hill, the site could be subdivided into three smaller sites, from which specific contexts at different scales are identified: the Atlantic Ave on the urban scale, Cobble Hill on the neighborhood scale, and the bay on the architectural scale. The corresponding housing blocks as well as the landscapes react to the contexts both formally and programmatically.
L - Brooklyn The northwest corner of the site locates along Atlantic Avenue, a major thoroughfare in Brooklyn, New York City, stretching from the Brooklyn waterfront to Jamaica, Queens. This continuity is also manifested programmatically: grocery, deli, laundry, gym, café, and restaurant are placed at the ground level of the rowhouses, making the avenue one of the major commercial spaces for the neighborhood.
M – Cobble Hill Cobble hill is known for its casual live style. However, since most city blocks in the neighborhood are fully occupied, creating enclosed backyards that are privately accessible, only two public spaces and a tiny dog park are left for public and social events. Meanwhile, these public spaces are fenced and therefore, undermanaged, making them undesirable places to stay.
S – The Bay The bay at the southwest of the site offers a sense of serenity. It is a gift to the site, a place where people could turn their backs on their work and spend time with friends and families. Meanwhile, Pacific street on the south is an open street, offering additional outdoor spaces to pedestrians as well as cyclists.
Formal Diagram
Site Analysis
Array Unit Plan
Sweep Unit Plan
Array Through an array of rowhouses with punched windows, the Array aims to preserve the continuity of Atlantic Ave as a major commercial avenue across Brooklyn, offering various types of commercial activities at the ground level. The design features individual units for singles as well as outdoor balconies intended to encourage interaction among residents.
Sweep The lack of publicly accessible spaces inspires the units of the Sweep to rotate at an increasingly oblique angle, descending as they approach the public plaza, creating an opening at the corner of the block and inviting the public to enter the conventional enclosed backyard. The descending gesture not only offers a public path to the rooftop, but also creates varying heights in the housing units, making them ideal spaces for housing arts and artists.
Turn The Turn is the only place with a view to the bay. To maximize this advantage, it offers privately accessible shared balconies along the southwest facade. Meanwhile, four structural footings elevate the block from the ground to provide maximum privacy for units with multiple members, while liberating the ground for communal activities.
Typical Floor Plan
Turn Unit Plan
Ground Floor Plan
Seemingly fragmentary, the entire complex is integrated through a intricate system of public spaces, including ground floor shops, a courtyard, rooftop terraces, ramps, etc. It intends to offer an additional communal gathering space for the neighborhood.
Longyearbyen Hothouse Design II, Spring 2019 Professors: Michael Young, Yasmin Vobis, David Gersten An increasing number of tourists are drawn to the Arctic Circle every year, bringing plenty of garbage and wastewater and leaving with joy and happiness. While the solid waste could be compressed and shipped outside of the territory, wastewater is directly dumped into the sea, causing severe damage to the ecological system. While the environment is struggling to handle the increasing amount of wastewater, the locals are suffering from the shortage of fresh fruits and vegetables: the extreme climate makes it difficult for the locals to grow food on their own while the imported products are often sold out. This project sees this simultaneity as an opportunity and aims to offer an architectural intervention with programmatic duality to tackle this situation: a bathhouse and a greenhouse.
Located along the way of the Transpolar Sea Route, Svalbard, an archipelago in the Arctic circle, has been the battleground of multiple global forces due to its strategic significance. Among the four major settlements, Longyearbyen, a coal mining town established in 1907, is currently experiencing a major transformation in its industry – from coal mining to tourism.
Ground Floor Plan
Exploded Axon
The bathhouse represents the production of waste, the place where wastewater is produced and collected; on the lower level, the greenhouse represents the consumption of waste, the device that converts the wastewater from the bathhouse to electricity and nutrient solution to power the production of fresh fruits and vegetables. On the upper level, three bays accommodate nine different types of bathing experiences, each of which has a specific temperature and form of skylight. The liminal bays in between as well as their extensions function as thresholds that could be accessed from the ground level through a descending stair, incorporating the rituals before bathing: changing clothes and showering. On the lower level, five bays are joined into one, providing a field of vertical farms with precise temperature and light controls for the cultivation of fruits and vegetables. The greenhouse also features a lab for international scientists; it is accessible through an elevator at the opposite side of the stair.
The Street and The Island Design IV, Spring 2021 Professor: David Gersten The research project looks at two sites: Chung Ying Street, a 250-meter street that is a physical manifestation of the “One Country, Two Systems” policy that results a clear local identity but an ambiguous space; and Svalbard, an archipelago locating in the Arctic circle where the ambiguity in sovereignty written in the Svalbard Treaty in 1920 leads to endless attempts to legitimize one’s presence through spaces with clarity. Both sites are deconstructed into three characters, each carrying some critical aspects of its motherland. These characters offers a unique perspective of how political clarity or ambiguity affects behavior of nations and people.
Chung Ying Street On 9 February 1920, following the Paris Peace Conference, the Svalbard Treaty was signed by 14 countries (it expands to 46 parties till 2018), granting “full” sovereignty to Norway. However, since all signatory countries’ citizens were granted non-discriminatory rights to become Svalbardian residents and to have access to fishing, hunting, and mineral resources as long as they follow Norwegian law, this treaty makes Svalbard a politically ambiguous space in which nations, corporations and individuals often attempts to claim their clear presence/ownership over the regions.
Svalbard As a result of The Convention Between Great Britain and China Respecting an Extension of Hong Kong Territory, also known as The Second Convention of Peking, which was a lease signed between Qing Dynasty and the United Kingdom on 9 June 1898, the territory on the south of the Shenzhen River would be leased to the UK for free for 99 years. Along the 107-kilometer-long border line, there is a 250-meter-long street called Chung Ying Street at the east end. As opposed to the typical border condition where a physical line is drawn to brutally separate one side from the other, Chung Ying Street is known for an abnormal condition, in which one side of the street belongs to Hong Kong, operating under Capitalism while the opposite side is mainland China adopting the framework of Socialism.
Student
Smuggler
Husband
Being a Hong Kong citizen while living in mainland China with their family, as the victim of Family Planning policy, these students are not able to legally register as students in mainland China, forced to study in Hong Kong while living in Mainland China with their families. Consequently, they have to commute between kitchen and classroom/auditorium, between food and knowledge every day. Up to 2012, there are approximately 164,000 so-called “Shenzhen-Hong Kong cross-boundary students”.
Typically, smugglers would purchase a certain number of products from Hong Kong and, through an underground tunnel in Chung Ying Street bridging two apartments units on both sides, transport these products to the market in mainland China where these products could be sold at a much better price (sometime two to three times more). Smugglers bounces between two places, between factory and market, between production and consumption.
The income differences between Hong Kong and mainland China triggers a specific group of people, typically taxi/truck drivers in Hong Kong who are constantly moving across the borderline for delivery and shipment, to engage in another relationships in mainland China while being married to a different woman in Hong Kong. Under the camouflage of “working”, they are constantly squiggling between living room and hotel room, between responsibility and sex.
Coal Miner
Scientist
Each year, Russian government would sponsor millions of dollars in Barentsburg to make it look exactly like any other Russian mining town with the northernmost statue of Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik revolution, overlooking the town, frescos painted on the façade made out of standardized red brick depicting the great history of Soviet Union, and of course, the Cultural Palace celebrating the spirit of workers.
The ability to spectate and monitor is one way to claim one’s authority on a region. Taking advantage of the latitude and its pristine nature, most of the researches are centered around environmental and earth sciences. This requires researchers to setup facilities such as laboratories, radio station, and telescope, monitoring the local environment. The data is collected and then sent back to the headquarters in home countries in a regular basis for further investigation and studies.
Tourist Once they step on the permafrost covered with ice and snow, the electronic and optical devices – the cameras in their hands – kick off their performances. With layers of lenses, digital filters with emoji and texts, the landscape is put together with a selfie and framed into a composition of pixels with RGB values, depicting “the great nature in Svalbard!”, as they written in their Instagram posts along with tags such as #svalbard, #arcticcircle and #northpole – shouting out: “I’m here!”
Fanatic Urbanism Thesis Preparation, Fall 2021 Professors: Nora Akawi, Benjamin Aranda, Hayley Eber This thesis proposes to perform a close reading of the European football match, specifically the way in which it manages to create temporary enclosures. And it aims to conceive of the football club as well as football culture as a prototype of a new urban system, in which the urban form is no longer primarily determined by universal geometric compositions, axes and grids, but rather a set of daily, weekly, monthly and annual routines manifested spatially as the consequences of these ephemeral shockwaves. This temporal event delineates a compressed, insulated space, an ISLAND for its inhabitants in which the outside world is cut off and the embedded program is perfectly executed with accuracy and intensity. On the architectural scale, fan shops, bridges, and security checkpoints are deliberately placed in the stadium, along the way to the seating areas; on the neighborhood scale, stations are closed, streets are blocked, and districts are locked down. The football stadium as well as its surrounding creates a spatial vacuum through a series of physical thresholds, in which extreme behaviors such as physical violence and verbal insult are legitimized. Meanwhile, thanks to tv broadcasting as well as social media, this fanatic energy also activates the spaces beyond its territorial limit. Chants are written, tifos are painted, choreographies are rehearsed, the club and its faithful followers establish colonies across the globe. The city of London, the home of thirteen professional football clubs, is proposed as a testing ground to investigate the possibility of mobilizing a city as well as its social energy through a set of architecturally and urbanistically bounded territories, attempting to create an alternative understanding of urban, an archipelago that anchors the everyday life of the city.
Formal Analysis The Cooper Union, Fall 2019 Professors: Peter Eisenman, Elisa Iturbe, James Lowder
Guild House Robert Venturi
Villa Savoye Le Corbusier
Enschede Student Dorm O.M.Ungers
Dusseldorf Museum James Stirling
Scandicci Town Hall Aldo Rossi
In collaboration with Thomas Choi, Anh Nguyen, and Tiam Schaper
Other Works: Material Awakening
Other Works: CASE 1.1
The Cooper Union, Spring 2018 Professors: Benjamin Aranda, Oana Stanescu, Julian Palacio
Honorable Mention “What is small-scale architecture” Essay Competition, Fall 2019 In collaboration with Yilin Wang
CASE 1.1 On Small-Scale Arhitecture Kai Huang, Yilin Wang
Case 1.1
Case 1.2
Case 2.1
Case 2.2
Small Exterior, Small Interior
Large Exterior, Large Interior
Large Exterior, Small Interior
Small Exterior, Large Interior
Architecture reveals its scale (large or small) both in interior and exterior. Therefore, four different cases can be created through the interplay between “large-scale versus small-scale” and “interior versus exterior”. As shown in Case 2.1, for instance, in the Pyramid, while the interior responds to the human body scale in order to be used as a private tomb, the exterior becomes a large-scale monument which demonstrates the significance of the individual buried inside to the public. Meanwhile, a food cart, although appears to be small, is actually part of the food cart system which spreads around the city as illustrated in Case 2.2. In both cases, the change of its exterior scale is to fulfill its social and political purpose. On the other hand, in Case 1.2 where we have large-scale exterior and large-scale interior, architecture tends to further subdivide its spaces as required by the system, created by the internal relationships among its users. In an office tower, for example, the organization inside the office space, in which Chief Officer usually have their own office room while employees have to share a big working space, implicates the hierarchical relationships between employer and employee. And in this case, the re-
lationship between people inside the architecture and the ground becomes indirect. That is to say, the space that accommodates people is subsumed under a larger totality that establishes a relationship to the ground. On the contrary, there is no such system in Case 1.1 in which autonomous individuality is celebrated. Its own tectonic language allows a traditional Chinese pavilion to frame views through specified seats which position people to see certain sceneries. It constantly reminds people of their direct relationships to the ground. Moreover, it reveals its interior scale in order to become part of the scene when viewing from its exterior as opposed to the Pyramid which buries its interior scale under the spectacular masonry for social and political purpose. And finally, unlike food cart which relies on its flexibility to the site, the pavilion is usually situated at the best viewing spot and thus, its location/relation to the ground is unique. Due to its autonomy in the way it operates, its transparency in scale, and its specificity to the site, Case 1.1 diagrams small-scale architecture.
Thank You