Architectural Portfolio by Louis Zhang

LOUIE (LUYAO) ZHANG

ARCHITECTURAL PORTFOLIO & CV THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE BACHELOR OF DESIGN - UNDERGRADUATE

CONTENTS

3-9 Collective Housing, Northcote Multi-Unit Residential 10-16 Library in Chinatown Public Library 17-21 Terrace House, North Carlton Single-Unit Residential 22-26 Cockatoo House V2 Environmental Building Systems 27-30 Construction Flipbook Understanding Construction

CONTACT Louis1999zhang@gmail.com (+61) 402302002 PROFESSIONAL REFEREE Douglas Wan (professional tutor/mentor) NH Architecture 0406 429 810 jin@j-in.com.au

Academic, Individual, Third Year, 6th Semester

Collective Housing, Northcote Design Studio Epsilon Tutor: Edwina Brisbane Studio Epsilon is the capstone subject for the Architecture major in the Bachelor of Design at the University of Melbourne. The topic of the studio is collective housing, requiring the design of a multi-residential building in the present context of a middle-ring suburb (Northcote) in Melbourne, characterised by demographic changes, economic pressures and diversified ways of living. Participants in the studio play a dual role - both as architect, and as prospective residents of the housing project, with each student creating a fictional character that selected to become the clientele. The project then revolves around these clients, who are asked to fill out questionnaires throughout the semester to supply feedback and suggestions for each student's ongoing projects. My approach to the project is pragmatic. From analysing the site (Fig.1), I decided that three main conditions existed surrounding the site - first the mainly single-storey, single-unit residences to the north (Fig. 2), next the urban, mixed-use buildings to the east (Fig. 3), and finally the densely forested banks of Merri Creek, to the south (Fig. 4). The aim of my design was then to respectively create a dialogue, intensify, and introduce each of the three elements in the design. Thus, a strip of four-storey units line the north of the site to maintain the residential streetscape, a public square sit on the north-eastern corner of the site to encourage extroverted prgrams such as markets, and a taller building is sited at the south-east corner of the site to provide a sense of enclosure to the square, as well as framing a triangular grassed area that welcomes inwards the creek's forested banks. The massing and unit layout is optimsed so that communal areas are adjacent to the square, intensifying the square's potential as a civic/urban amenity. further, day-zones of dwelling units are organised towards the north to gather natural light, while also fronting onto built-up/urban areas in an extroverted disposition. Night-zones, by contrast, are oriented towards forested, natural outlooks that ensure privacy and the necessary introversion within a collective housing arrangement. The internal layout of the building is also left orthogonal: for the reduction of envelope size, streamlining of services, and structural efficacy, all contrbuting to affordability. Further development of the design was focused on an 1500sqm area, highlighted in Fig.1 in red. The building design aims at a careful treatment of interfaces and thresholds at each of the four sides of the building, with a light, permeable steel structure along the communal areas, softer external curtains to the south, glazed bricks towards the east against a busy road, and balustraded decks towards the west, providing a a vista down Merri Creek. The individual dwellings, per the resident's requests, contain their own kitchenette and living rooms, while they are also available in a communal capacity. The serviced areas of each dwelling are centrally focused, with the rest of the program highly adaptable and flexible to each client's needs. Two typologies exist on each floor: two interlocking L-shaped units accomodating larger households, and four rectilinear units, functioning as studio apartments for individuals or couples. The transition from the private to the public mimicks a terrace house typology, a colonnade marking the front porch and the front garden.

Fig. 1

Isometric

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

Massing Development

Building Services, Circulation, and Structure

South Elevation

Section A

Section B

Ground Floor Detail Section (E-W Cut)

Communal Space

Lower Ground Plan

South East Corner

Ground Floor Plan

Typical Floor Plan

South Corridor

North Elevation

Academic, Individual, Third Year, 5th Semester

Prospect and Refuge Library in the City

Design Studio Delta Tutor: Edwina Brisbane

Design Studio Delta is the penultimate studio subject in the Architecture Major. Different to Studio Epislon, the emphasis here is on speculative undertakings, specifically on the potential for autonomous innovation within architecture given that architecture thrives within an expanded field where influence, obligation, and opportunity extend to broader cultural and social considerations. The project is sited in the centre of the Melbourne CBD, on Little Bourke St, otherwise known as Chinatown (Fig. 5, 6, 7). The brief is to design a public library, with wider commercial/civic affordances to be provided, including a bookstore, an amphitheatre, and a gallery Space. In relation to my design, the project title "Prospect and Refuge" describes a fundamental duality of architectonics - one which implicates the human, ontological dialectic of territorialization and de-territorialization, the same force behind certainty/adventure, man/nature, self/larger-whole, etc. The library is chosen to expand on this duality because the act of reading is yet another iteration of this process - dwelling into a told-story is a making familiar, akin to refuge, and the decoding of the text is a negotiation between singular perspectives and wider landscapes, views, akin to prospect (Concept Diagram 1). In an wider architectural sense, "prospect" within prospect and refuge has historically/circumstantially been afforded a passive luxury: natural, agrarian landscapes unfold before cave openings with a topological inclination. Yet in a metropolis, where landscapes are precipitous, saturated with refuge, and a simple "view-out-of-the-cave" disappears, "prospect" anticipates a transubstantiation - a manifestation by architecture where rather than solely being the opening of the cave, "prospect" is the transparent cave; rather than refuge underpinning the architecture, prospect does instead. This architecture of pure prospect, pure view locates the subject within a city, a book within the wider world, as well as binarily reinforcing the effect of refuge - since, without the knowledge of an outside, there would be no conception of refuge (Concept Collage). The above thesis is manifested in the project with two formally identical forms, contrasting in terms of materiality - "Refuge" (east-tower) implies a permanence, staticism, lagging time held in the present with solid form-making by brick, moated by water as well as remnants of the site's past; it houses the territorializing programmes of the library - shelves, the gallery. "Prospect" (west tower) offers a impermanence, a contextually dependent interior, caught-up in a state of flux; it houses reading areas, the lecture theatre, as well as commerce. The tower is constructed from scaffolding (refering to the common Melbournian sight of construction sites) and unlike "Refuge", allows a fluent connection to the city. The vertical circulation between the two towers sprawls along the contrasting materiality, juxtaposing and thereby reinforcing both. Semiotically, the project is a declaration - "prospect" and "refuge" present to Little Bourke St as vertical signs: as do the colourful signs that announce each establishment along the street, each tower announces their mutual juxtaposition and relation as prospect and refuge (Concept Diagram 2).

Fig. 5

Fig. 6

Isometric

Fig. 7

Concept Diagram 1

Concept Diagram 2

Folding Refuge

Unfolding Prospect

Concept Collage

"Prospect" Scaffolding frame

Roof Terrace Reading Galleries YA's Collection Catalogue PCs Lounge

Gathering Stairs Children's Collection/ Lecture Theatre

Mezzanine

Foyer Bookshop Cafe

"Refuge" Rendered skin

Main Adult's Collection Quiet Study Area Meeting Rooms WC

Archives Manuscripts Room

Librarian's Offices

Gallery

Exploded Isometric

Corrs Lane (East)

Ground Floor

Little Bourke St (South)

Second Floor

Fifth Floor

View from Stair Platform

Reading Gallery

Section 1

Ground Gallery

Section 2

Section 3

Academic, Individual, Second Year, 4th Semester

Terrace House, North Carlton Design Studio Gamma Tutor: Matthew Azzalin

Design Studio Gamma focuses on the terrace house typology typical to Melbourne's urban and inner-urban areas. The studio places emphasis on preserving, negotiating, and contributing to existing historical streetscapes, whilst also promoting 21st century models of urban cohabitation. The design brief requires the redesign of a terrace house within the suburb of North Carlton (Fig. 8), with the required outcome of housing a multigenerational family, including grandparents, parents, and a single child, as well as being adaptable to the changes which might incur given such a living situation - for example grandparents' moving out, leasing, children leaving home, etc. Surveying the site context, three points of interest are determined, each the heavy and domineering form of the adjacent building's rooflines (Fig. 9), the wide, front-garden like nature strip and massive oak trees fronting the site (Fig. 10), as well as the closeness of buildings to the the footpath, with very few unobstructed openings onto the sky (Fig 11). The aim of the design was then to create negative spaces that allow the surrounding nature and sky to penetrate into the site, at once highlighting the rooflines of the surrounding houses and articulating depth amongst the streetscpe. This justifies the raised gardens (closer to the sky, raising gaze), the extension front nature strip into the site itself, and keeping the building at a low profile to highlight the surrounding building masses. In essence the design becomes a project of intensification (in each that the context is more strongly experienced by residents/passers-by, the greater presence of sky/space by the residents, as well as the increased number of residents) by minimalising and rendering the house itself almost imperceptable. The program and massing of the site (fig.3) formally separates the differences between living areas and sleeping areas. visual continuity and upwardly folding circulation links the living areas into a smooth, interconnect whole without major breaks, while the plurality of floor levels protect the singularity of each person within the family, allowing for each to maintain a degree of privacy. The sleeping areas instead take on a centralpetal formation to create refuge, and options for circulation either interactive or not. The decision not to provided sheltered paths between the front and back of the building draws a closer connection to the voidings that allow the penetration of the sky, as well as adding a multiple sense to the house - in that it can be combined, familial vessel (front half), or it can be a courtyarded, conversational entity. This also provides the practical elasticity of hosting future renters, who can reside either on the bottom or the top floor of the rear section and enter a conversational, democratic engagement with the house-owners.

Oblique Elevation

Fig. 8

Fig. 9

Fig. 10

Fig. 11

Sky

Nature

Iterative Massing Roofline Silhouettes

Roof & Context Plan @1:200

Raised Ground = Raised Gaze

Raised Courtyard

Rear Courtyard L1

Short Sections @1:125 1

Front Setback

Ground & First Floor Plans @1:125

North Courtyard Iso @1:125

Long Sections @1:125

Academic, Individual, Second Year, 3rd Semester

Cockatoo House 2 Environmental Building Systems Tutor: Adrian Chu

Environmental Building Systems covers key elements of building services and sustainability at a residential and commercial scale. It focuses on the provision of comfortable and effectively functioning buildings in terms of sun, envelope, services (water, waste, gas, electricity, data, fire protection), heating and cooling. This project was a continuous undertaking through the entirety of the subject, integrating and applying taught building strategies, systems, and technologies with an allocated, commercial house plan and site, and redesigning the house where necessary to both increase its performance and satisfy allocated clients. The allocated house plan was referred to as the Cockatoo House, hence the project's name. The allocated clients are the Ng's. The couple works full time (8am - 5pm) and are without child, but have two beloved dogs. They are socialites who look to entertain their friends regularly at their new address. The site for their new residence is located in the Williamstown, a bay-bearing suburb to the West of Melbourne, with the foreshore immediately on the east. The couple also looks to build a pool in the future when funds allow.

Cockatoo House

The Ng's are both environmentally conscious and requested for the design to employ good passive design strategies, particularly the harvesting of the sea breeze for cooling. They also both work in a solar energy consultancy firm and want to rely on solar energy as much as possible. The project focuses on both macro-components and micro-components to provide a good design outcome. On the macro level, for example, the orientation of the building is adjusted and areas of glazing are added/removed to optimise solar access and the harvesting of the cool sea breeze without drastic losses in thermal performance. Wall materials were considered, balancing embodied carbon footprint, cost, and the necessary insulation values. On the micro-level, types of solar panels, hotwater systems, and greywater systems are compared and chosen for the respective benefits. Overall, the building's performance was evaluated using FirstRate5 to determine a final star rating of 8.2/10. Excerpt pages from the project are shown.

Academic, Individual, Second Year, 3rd Semester

Construction Flipbook: 2D and 3D Construction Analysis Tutor: Petar Kevach

Construction Analysis explores the idea of construction as a process that strategically links structural principles to building elements, systems, materials, and techniques. Using John Wardle Architect's Queenscliff's House as a case study, the physical anatomy of a residential building is described and reviewed, emphasising how architectural ideas are conventionally translated into technological solutions. The 2D/3D Construction Flipbook showcased here involves the production of a series of chronological sections and plans that document the construction process. The drawings are to be construed from architectural and structural engineer's drawings, combined with an understanding of the different techniques and timeframes involved. These snapshots of construction are divided into 10 stages for 2D analysis*, and 6 Stages of 3D analysis**. *1) Site Clearance and Excavation, 2) In-situ Concrete Wall Formwork and Pour, 3) Foundation Systems and Ground Structure, 4) Ground Storey Steel and Timber Framing, 5) First Floor Structure, 6) First Storey/Roof Steel and Timber Framing, 7) Roof Cover and External Cladding, 8) Window Systems, 9) Services and Internal Cladding, and 10) Finishing Trades. **1) Structural Systems, Below ground, 2) Structural Systems, Above Ground, 3) Internal (Non-Load-Bearing) Partitions, 4) Environmental Protections, 5) Mechanical and Electrical Systems, and 6) Physical Enclosure Systems. See the following pages for a mixture of 2D and 3D components of analysis.

2D Flipbook (Plan & Section)

Academic, Individual, Second Year, 3rd Semester

1:20 Construction Model Construction Design Tutor: Petar Kevach

Construction design engages in identifying and following the logic of construction, more specifically the identification, description, and application of construction systems and types that are common in medium scale mixeduse projects. The 1:20 construction model involves the peeling back of each construction component of a school building, the Elizabeth Blackburn School of Sciences, by Clarke Hopkins Clake Architects. The model is construed from architectural, construction, strucural, and geotechnical drawings, by visiting the site. and by developing an understanding of the different techniques involved in the building's construction from tutorials and lectures by the architects. The model demonstrates understanding of the suite of construction techniques commonly used in medium-scale construction: including treatment of the soil profile, footing and ground floor slab composite action, reinforcement, structural steel, precast concrete panels, stud framing, use of pre-tensioned composite Bondek Slabs, detailing of block-veneer, waterproofing, cladding systems, and roof structure.

Elevations of Focus Component

Focus Area (Marked A), GF

Focus Area (Marked A), FF

Focus Area (Marked A), Roof