PORTFOLIO Wang Meichen MSAAD program, GSAPP, Columbia University mw3549@columbia.edu 2016-2020 Selected Works For the application of Student Assistant for the Edible [Eat Me] Brick Design Project
CONTENTS
01 Robinson Suspended
Educated Youth Museum of 1958-1981 Yinchuan, Ningxia Province, China, 2018.9-2018.11
In-between the Individual and the Field
02 Shuttling in Danwei Unit
Cultural and Sports Community Center of Yongding District Beijing, China, 2020.9-2020.12
The relationship between the individual and the field always reminds me of the typical scene in my hometown Yinchuan where a yellow sandstorm envelops the window with white plastic bags flying around the sky and covering people's faces. My grandfather once told me it was the very first scene he saw when he was assigned from Tianjin to Yinchuan at 16, as an educated youth . "Where am I from?" We usually answer this question by using the name of our hometown to define our identities. However, it becomes tricky when a person settles down in a new place for so long that he becomes alien to both his new home and birthplace. My family is not the only case that continually baffles, lacks a sense of belonging, and questions self-identities. In the context of China's rapid urbanization, people from different generations have become suspended, pushed and pulled between their hometown and real-life cities. Architecture extracts the types of urban history, whether it is spatial styles or materials. These typologies can discipline individual behavior or carry collective memory. Architecture allows individuals to perceive their existence and to shape their perception of themselves. As a part, when it adopts historical rules and structure, architecture can shape the field as a whole.
03 The Bamboo Teahouse
Bamboo Physical Construction Anji County, Zhejiang Province, China, 2019.7-2020.8
04 Eternal and Instant
Mountain Stage Dak of Wanglongmen Tram Ruins Chongqing, China, 2020.7-2020.9
05 A Tube Micro-city
A micro-city for adolescent over the remaining bus station Beijing, China, 2019.2-2019.4
Other Works
Ring of Fire - AA Visiting School How soft Is a Wooden Chair? Green Eats People - Howling Pi Village Surveying and Mapping of Chongan Temple Rural Revitalization Workstation Design and wallpainting of Li County
01
Robinson Suspended The Educated Youth Museum of 1958-1981 For my grandparents and their peers.
Tsinghua University Studio 2018.9 - 2018.11 Instructor: Weiguo Xu xwg@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn Site: Yinchuan, Ningxia Province, China
Individual Work
When a person becomes alien to both his hometown and the real-life city, he is a robinson suspended. "Where am I from?" We usually answer this question by using the name of our hometown to define our identities. However, it becomes tricky when a person settles down in a new place for so long that he becomes alien to both his new home and birthplace. My family is not the only case that continually baffles, lacks a sense of belonging, and questions self-identities. In the context of China's rapid urbanization, people from different generations have become suspended, pushed and pulled between their hometown and real-life cities. Field disciplines individual. In my design of the educated youth museum, the rammed earth wall and concrete roof anchor to the ground, and the lightly raising glass tower form the conflicting materiality, indicating the hometown's cognitive impact and the new place. The educated youth's experiences and emotions have been translated into different types of spaces, and the entire behavior of viewing the exhibition has become the object of discipline.
Location of the intersection of four roads
Raise or lower the roof with the emotional space setting to control the amount of light
The central glass tower connects the windmill-like layers in different ways
Polyphonic narrative, forming a continuous ramp of internal and external transformation
Strategy The museum uses the central glass tower and the surrounding windmill-like rammed earth exhibition space as the collision of materials. The internal and external ramps that display the chronology of events and the type spaces that carry different emotions and individual life restoration scenes form a polyphonic narrative. Feel the ups and downs of the educated youth's life in the light or dark, high or low, or wide or narrow rhythm. Feel the intense conflict in the collision of weathering steel, glass and concrete, and rammed earth. The concrete folded roof rises to enhance the sense of rotation
The First Floor Plan View from the Entrance
Underground Floor Plan
the Second Floor Plan
the Third Floor Plan
Section Perspective
Exhibition zooms
Model
Construction Axon
02
Shuttling in a Danwei Corridor Cultural and Sports Community Center of Yongding District
Tsinghua University Studio 2020.9 - 2020.12 Instructor: Jinxi Chen chenjinxi@tsinghua.edu.cn Site: Beijing, China Individual Work
A building is a city as a leaf is a tree. ——Aldo Rossi Field undertakes public memory. In the design of the cultural and sports community center of Yongding District, I experimented with activating publicity along Beijing's west fourth ring, which is lined with unit communities. To perpetuate collective memory, I translated the socialist building's inner corridors into free streets that traverse the area from east to west. "There is no secret in a tube building," indicates the tube-shaped apartment's corridor became a generator of public activities. The overall layout, the plug-in relationship of units, the way of closing ends, and the change in width came from the analysis of the type. This project echoed Beijing's urban structure, as Aldo Rossi pointed out – "a building is a city as a leaf is a tree." Through the bustling corridors, shuttles link up the physical memory of collective life in the cramped tube building, which is the sense of the field.
Model of detail of the Wall
Detail and rendering of the Wall
03
The Bamboo Teahouse
Worthy, Healthy, Aesthetic, Organic: A Bamboo Teahouse Embracing the Countryside
Anji Bamboo Construction Competition 2019 2019.7 - 2020.8 Instructor: Prof. Ning Zhu 13717742900@163.com Site: Anji,Zhejiang Province, China Collaborators: Jianing Wu, Zhaoren Sun, Qiuran Bao, Xinglong Wang Contribution: Conceptual design, modeling, structural design, technical drawings and architectural representation
The patio is the slope down which the sky flows into the house.
The design of Yucun Teahouse mainly completes the design of the core structural column, the realization of the structure and the treatment of soft and hard decoration, and is initially familiar with the Anji Cultural Tourism Group as the first party, and the bamboo border and after the contractor and other responsible subjects of the general package interior. I put forward more than ten amendments based on the interior design company’s preliminary interior design. I searched for bamboo construction sketches and finished bamboo furniture in Southeast Asia and Colombia, and made corresponding material drawings. Show and report documents. A key issue of the design is to transform the tea room with a hole on the top into a closed indoor space. In order to harmonize the overall atmosphere of the bamboo structure, we chose a single-layer bamboo weave and a polyester plastic board to make it from one When looking up on the second floor, it can achieve a light and unobstructed visual effect. The ground is made of permeable concrete and polished, continuing the unadorned temperament of rural architecture.
Construction Journal
The First Floor Plan
The Second Floor Plan
South Elevation
There are two kind of bamboo columns in an umbrella-shaped supporting system.Two opposite radial bamboo columns compose a portal frame. Tangential bamboo columns compose a three-dimensional space structure with intersections and connections in the middle. A radial bamboo column and two tangential bamboo columns on the other side compose an arch. The combination of ring beams and inclined beams can give horizontal constraining force to the connection and endpoints of bended bamboo columns.
Bamboo pillar lofting form There are 1m*1m steel plates casted in the concrete base and steel pipes are welded on the plates in 5*4 and 7*4 grid in 10cm intervals, which connect bamboo columns and the base. The inclined beams connect ring beams and columns. Colum and beams are composed of several bamboos which are joined by bolts and fixed by hemp ropes. In the connection of bamboos, we use steam nails as rigid joint and hemp rope as flexible joints.
Bamboo nodes
The bamboo hole is the slope down which the sky flows into the teahouse. The small bamboo tea room reflects the infinite picture of traditional country life, and the opening that brings out the light and the gentle breeze reveals the secrets of the sky. Section Perspective
04
Eternal and Instant
Mountain Stage Dak of Wanglongmen Tram Ruins
TEAMZERO Award International Architectural Student Design Competition 2020 the first prize 2020.7 - 2020.9 Site: Chongqing, China Collaborators: Qiaochu Yan, Mingxun Zou Contribution: Conceptual design, structural design, technical drawings and architectural representation
Long exposure on the way of mountain hiking and site structure
The design extracts different climbing ways and depicts the speed difference. The site is divided by winding zigzag loop and enlarged node platform to retain the original appearance of the mountain, which is for walking slowly; the concrete box crawls up with the help of the original cable car line structure to re search the speed of the cable car; the winding stairs, ramps and hanging stairs constitute the immediate experience of the mountain Museum. A hundred years later, the Shanxing Museum is a new standard highrise building, and the new building can be used as a pendant to realize the "mountain trip" connection in the sky. Plants climbed up the thin pillars, and the building disappeared for a long time.
Promenade Floor Plan
Site Plan
The design extracts different ways to climb the mountain and depicts the speed difference, divides the site with a meandering zigzag loop and enlarged node platform, and preserves the original appearance of the mountain, which is for slow walking; the concrete box crawls up with the original cable car line structure to find the cable car speed; The tortuous sills, sloping ramps, and pendant stairs together constitute the instant experience of the mountain walking museum, making mountain walking an urban behavior again. In order to protect the original appearance of the mountain, the main corridor is an erected "dangling building", and the part buried in the mountain adopts a shallow foundation. The slender columns, stairs, and cable car columns are to the building as the way of a mountain walk to the site, forming a unified landscape.
The museum connects the venues at different elevations and provides public space for community residents. The corridor glass can be folded to convert indoor and outdoor, introducing sky and river breeze. The gap between the cable car box is transparent and passes through the narrow bridge where you can see the ropeway to the corridor. The light spot of the thin column is scattered into the semi-underground, which is different at four times. Overlooking from the sky corridor of Baixiangju or from the cable car is a winding mountain plank road; watching from the other side of the Yangtze River is a light strip with a rich landscape interface.
Node Perspective Viewing the flow line
Axonmetric
Shows the relationship with the mountains and the community, the building is erected on the original rail structure
05
A Tube Micro-city
A micro-city for adolescent over the remaining bus station
Tsinghua University Studio 2019.2 - 2019.4 Instructor: Architect Wang Hui office@urbanus.com.cn Site: Beijing, China Individual Work
Linear youth life confined in an invisible pipeline. Tall buildings around, young people are like blood in a pipe being transported to various places, just as Koolhaas proposed the really important but hidden construction equipment in the foundamental. The design hopes to reveal this one-way life through pipelines, and to design a micro-city for young people that truly embeds the real context and activates the urban leftover space through different connection methods and scene ideas. The comprehensive reuse of public transportation stations also carries a series of urban functions that are urgently needed at this stage to achieve the goal of improving land value, intensive land use and promoting the vitality of urban communities. When the urban area gradually evolves from the unity of functions to the diversification, the comprehensive utilization of the existing public transportation stations in the urban stock can also achieve the principles of "multiple use in one place" and "multiple use in one station"; The functions of traffic depots and stations are integrated with the needs of cities and communities; from a single parking lot form to a complex space form that can accommodate traffic, young people's entrepreneurship and residence.
Beijing Third and Fourth Ring Bus Station Map
Huizhongli Bus Station There are many bus depots on the third and fourth ring roads of Beijing, which are the leftover space of the city.
Night perspective
Scence Axis
The heterogeneous collage axis reflects the life structure predicted by the architecture.In the heterogeneous and cyberpunkized urban environment, pipelines with different connections grow in a visible or hidden way, becoming a refuge for young people
Unit scene
Test tube farm
Pipeline canal
Garbage transfer
Living cabin
Rendering Scene
The Second Floor Plan (the first floor is the bus station)
Physical Model
Other Works Ring of Fire - Contemporary earthquake shelters
AA Visiting School & Base Studio felipe@basestudio.cl Kanagawa, Japan, 2019.7-8 Group Work Contribution: Test model making, graphic drawing, documentary filming
How soft is a wooden chair
Instructor: Pro. Zhu Ning 13717742900@163.com Collaborator: Wang Xinglong Contribution: Conceptual design, modeling, wood making
The ductility of the material wa s e xpl o re d t h rough t h e bending of wood. After testing t h e n u m b e r, d e n s i t y a n d spacing of the edge openings, experiments with different flexibility were carried out, and finally an ergonomic and flexibly adjustable wooden chair was obtained.
Surveying and Mapping of Chongan Temple
Green Eats People - Howling Pi Village
Point cloud Measurement of the shadow wall of Chongan Temple Tsinghua University Summer Semester 2019.6-2019.7 Instructor: Pro. He Congrong hcr@tsinghua.edu.cn
Tsinghua University Studio 2019.11-2019.12 Instructor: Pro. Rong Zhou jzxyzr@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn Individual Work
Individual Work
"Green eats people" dialectically considered the erosion of human living space by the green space that was not integrated into daily life. Pi Village, an urban village that is only seven kilometers away from the Capital Airport, serving as a hub for people from the countryside wh o wo rk i n t h e c ap i t a l . However, the construction of the green isolation belt has been expelling migrants. In the final utopian concept - a winding ramp hovering i n t h e g re e n sh el t e rb el t , residents who cannot make their own voice heard just walk along the slope and howl to the sky. Ironically, these howls about the individual and the field were overshadowed by the plane's roaring overhead every two minutes.
Wallpainting of the Rural Primary School
pattern design, voluntary activity organization and Interior renovation 2016.11
In-between the Individual and the Field