Shengqi Wang Selected Works
2018-2019 ktx992@gmail.com 540-200-5626
2
The Great Returning
4
Stumbling Field
22
A House, For The CUP
54
Curtain Wall Design
88
3
The Great Returning Partner: Huiru Yang 2018
4
The project rethinks burial culture,considering what a universal memorial for all could be. The project evokes universal emotions throug h primitive forms and off-scaled experiences,targeting the commonalities among all human beings where we grieve for our losses,fear for the unknown,and desire to understand. The project contains stone carvings from previews mausoleums and tombstones,rearranged and displayed art. New angles and perspectives on these old forms of art are introduced,paralleling and provoking new perspectives to funerary rituals. Interior spaces are tranquil and contemplative. The passage eventually brings visitors above ground into a new landscape freed from graves and returned to the city un-programmed. The project is revealed as an incremental and fragmented journey, macro to detailed / brig ht to dim/old to new with understanding unwrapping depending on point of view and access.
5
6
7
8
East to Woodlawn
By opening up woodlawn cemetery to the public,the green space per capita increases.
Population: 148,589 Green Space(SF): 3,920,400.00 Green Space Per Capita(SF): 26.38
South to Woodlawn
Population: 100,020 Green Space(SF): 12,109,680.00 Green Space Per Capita(SF): 121.07 North to Woodlawn
Population: 73,978 Green Space(SF): 17,641,800.00 Green Space Per Capita(SF): 238.47 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
Stumbling Field Partner: Yujun Yan 2019
22
Stumbling Field combines a psychotherapy camp and a performative art residency,creating a series of experiential space to be lived,wandered,and stumbled upon by psychotherapists,their visitors,performative artists,and the public,when we believe that exploring the world around is the path to self-exploration. The project tests architecture without roof,wall,and floor on various subsites,resulting in a direct exchange with the natural environment. It uses landscape as the new architectural facade,with curated moments of sensorial activation and serendi pitous encounters. The territorially shaped experience potentially builds a habit of mindfulness and encourages a tig hter relationshi p with the surrounding world. Stumbling Field finds Governors Island a place to be more than an urban recreational place,and a potential site for the exploration of the transaction among body, memory,and environment. The project proposes to work on the earth and flesh of the Island itself,creating a series of spaces for performance art and psychotherapy distributed throug hout the South Island,mobilizing visitors walk around for an embodied experience.
23
The current state of South island is developed by West 8, who covers the original military base with constructed nature. The main theme of West 8's design is outlook, treating the island as a foreground of views on the other side. Yet, We believe that governors island should be THE GROUND to be experienced. The Earth of the Island bares the mark of historical time. Layers of the bedrock - the Nature, vs. the natural - the Infill of 1900s, and the intervention of West 8. A section throug h reveal the island’s memory. While the distributed spaces, each having a different relation with the earth, and thus different environmental condition, mobilize visitors to establish a processional time, a memory of the individual.
24
25
The project propose to do acupuncture to the island: activating the whole island with minimal interventions,leaving behind sufficient land and space for future developments attracted by the growing number of visitors broug ht by the project.
26
The Phase One three sites are located by Hudson,on Outlook Hill,and the Oval. The project also proposes architecture without centrality. It has no fixed path approaching and circulating among the sub-sites, and uses landscape as the new architectural facade, with curated moments of sensorial activation and serendi pitous encounters.
27
28
29
30
31
1524-
32
-2237 33
Each subset has at least two distinctively different faces - a camouflaged one and a revealed one. Telling the complex relationshi p between Nature and the Constructed Nature. The idea of stumble comes from earlier study of people's behavior of pausing.
34
We found that people almost always subconsciously pause at soft edges of two zones. Our hypothesis is that those edges are ambiguous as they belong to both the static zone and the transient zone. Ambiguity creates a mental mark shaping people's behavior and experience.
35
36
37
38
39
Psychoanalytic theory has introduced the notion of body image of body schema as the centre of integration. Our bodies and movements are in constant interaction with the environment; the world and the self inform and redefine each other constantly.
40
The territorially shaped experience potentially builds a habit of mindfulness and encourages a tig hter relationshi p with the surrounding world. The first site locates by Hudson River, having a earth to water environmental condition.
41
42
43
44
45
The next sub-field is the outlook hill built for views to the statue of liberty. Yet as an artificial mountain, why should it only has exteriority like a natural one? We believe that it can very well have an interior that holds more inward oriented program as such group therapy and small performance while maintaining its outward viewing function. The project also propose to change the OVAL, originally another piece of open lawn, for outdoor performance and yoga. The Project pushed the earth to the peri phery to create a concave base, an outdoor interior, that blocked out sound and noise by this particular landform.
46
In this respect, West 8’s proposal is rather monotonous in terms of the experience they provide. I see a larger potential of attracting visitors and developments with a deeper experience, by revealing the back side of what they show - i.e. the constructedness and inwardness, and the deeply buried memory of the island. Linking the Historical Time with the Processional time of visits.
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
A House, For The CUP 'THE PRIVATE LIVES OF OBJECTS' Individual Project 2019
54
'The Cup'
55
Stories: I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself... - Joan Didion,The White Album
56
Until recently it could be said without much hesitation that the objects in our everyday lives were controlled by the people who use them. Information or stories was stored or registered on the surface of objects throug h the physical traces of how we used them and throug h the visible relationshi ps created between the various objects we collected. The object in material culture terms was both a tool and an artifact in a narrative written by individual people. Lately,we find ourselves surrounded by the A continued ubiquity of the eerily coined smart object.” Typically,I mig ht dismiss these as media theorist Ian Bogost does as simply a capitalist ploy to build data “about [our] toasting and grilling and refrigeration habits” in order to sell more toasters. Undeniably,the objects amongst us are conduit of information. A single person’s desire for golden brown toast is a raw data point in a pool of a million data points collected en masse from all toasters. But to observe the obvious,these toasting habits get reduced to invisible data stored now not ON but IN the objects. The data collected allows plain smart objects to continually get smarter. In this sense,no longer are people telling stories throug h objects; objects are recording stories about people. If the relationshi p of people to object has changed,click bait on Slate.com unintentionally hints at a possible,changed relationshi p between architecture and the object. A piece reviews the new Amazon 4-Star Store in Berkeley,CA. The author finds the store to be a random jumble of items. But in fact the group of items for sale isn’t random at all; an algorithm has selected them because they correspond most closely to the Berkeley buying-habit norm. The algorithm-selected-object is then housed in an architecture (here a store,but soon why not a house) designed to collect objects not mediated by any one person. In the store the lack of human curation— a method by which we construct narratives—presents the perception of randomness. The design of the Berkeley store is more warehouse than merchandised retail space. When extrapolated to the domestic,the smart object coupled with algorithmic selection can't help but soon transform the home radically as well. And suddenly one wonders, in the age of the “smart home” is the person no longer the central protagonist in the story of architecture?
57
Objects: Beds can become anything, buildings can become people, and people can suddenly merge and become objects. -Madelon Vriesendorp
58
Control of the narrative is shifting literally. Our relationshi ps to both objects and architecture have been destabilized. Yet this predicament is strangely familiar. We've always feared that the inanimate objects that surround us have complex inner lives. From Freud’s unheimlich or uncanny to almost any Disney cartoon,objects come to life—we both know them and they are unknowable and uncontrollable—familiar and unfamiliar. In the fictions we write,objects oscillate from cute to terrifying. It’s a spectrum in which the helpful dolls that populate Toy Story dissolve into the murderous Chucky in Child’s Play. Or perhaps,exemplifying just where we mig ht be rig ht now,the lazy apprentice Mickey in Fantasia,unwilling to clean the castle,gives life to an army of brooms that first cleanup but then take over. Our fantasies once imagined are alive. So then what are the private lives of objects? Film genre presents an interesting place to start—the buddy picture,the fantastic adventure or the horror movie. In each type,the object’s relationshi ps with people vary: the object is a companion,a group of objects go on a journey,the object is a killer of humans. Obliquely,these positions suggest possible interior worlds as objects in reality gain greater autonomy over people. But anthropomorphism may not be the only way to imagine that objects have private lives. The virtual or systems or the collection and organization of data mig ht write an object’s monologue and organize its relationshi ps. How then,if we still have time,mig ht we imagine the altered relationshi ps between objects and architecture moving forward if they don’t revolve firstly around people? If we search the disci pline of architecture for precedent it’s the house museum that comes into focus as an unlikely ally. Formerly architect or designer-inhabited houses make for convenient examples. Take the Charles Moore House in Austin,the Alexander Girard House in Santa Fe,the Sir John Soane’s Museum and House in London or the Eames House in Los Angeles. In the latter two as pointed out by Sylvia Lavin in her 2003 essay The Temporary Contemporary,the architecture becomes a mechanism for the display of collections of objects. Of the Soane House Lavin writes,“the story of the house is,in part,the story of finding the proper place for [his] improper quantity of things.” The building itself was stretched and modified continually to accommodate objects. In contrast to the expanding Soane house,the architecture of the Eames house remained fixed. The Eames conceptualized the relationshi p of objects to building as functional decoration.” Defined by historian Pat Kirkham, functional decoration was“carefully composed arrangements of disparate objects… within interior spaces. The aesthetic [is] one of addition,juxtaposition,composition, changing scales,and extra-cultural surprise. In both houses,a person in real-time curated the relationshi ps between the architecture and the objects. Now post-person, the house museum is experienced by a visitor as a binding of architecture,object and story alone. Mig ht these spaces hold some clue for us as we look over a threshold into a strange future of a destabilized relationshi p with the objects around us and the architecture that contains them?
59
Houses: But can there be a detective story of the interior itself, of the hidden mechanisms by which space is constructed as interior? Which is maybe to say, a detective story of detection itself, of the controlling look, the look of control, the controlled look. What do we have to go on? What clues? -Beatriz Colomina
60
Grappling with a destablized relationshi p of architecture to object and object to person,each student designed a house for objects. People are present in each project but not the central protagonists. The studio started with the collection of a group of objects that will become the ongoing protagonists of the semester. We looking at films that have imagined animate objects,we investigated genre as a guide to bring our objects to life and create the spaces in which they inhabit. We also examined other moments when object relations became destabilized as precedents both informational, aesthetic and otherwise. Beginning with André Breton’s charge that “... [Surrealism] was a revolution of objects and a revolution throug h objects” and moving throug h the twentieth century,we will looked at work by Meret Oppenheim,Dali and other Surrealists,the paintings of Henri Rousseau,the illustrations of Saul Steinberg,the sculptural work of Claes Oldenburg,and the drawings of Madelon Vriesendorp and early OMA and more.
61
THE INTERVIEW
1)Can you tell me a little about yourself? My name is Bennington. These tattoos you see, well they are not tattoos, they are birth marks. I’m not complaining. I was genuinely curious. 2)Where do you see yourself in 5 years? Hopefully, I will stay as one peace since most of my kind tend to crack and shatter into fragments. 3)What are your strengths and weaknesses? I have to say my strength is also my weakness. I’m very tough, I work well under pressure and in intense environments. However, because I was trained in such a way, I was fired in a kiln under 2000 fahrenheit, it made me brittle as well. It made me very sensitive towards some angles of impacts. 4)What is your dream job? Coffee, in the mornings, with milk. No, actually milk in the mornings with a hint of coffee. 5)Why did you leave your last owner? I didn’t, I was donated to a good will. 6)Why were you fired? I was not. If you have to ask, I think my last owner didn’t like the way I look so I was abandoned. Wait, are you asking about my transformation in the kiln? I had to be fired otherwise I would be a pile of mud.
62
7)What are you looking for from your new owner? I wish he doesn’t mind the way I look. To be honest I don’t fall short on my job at all. Whatever the rest cups can do I can do better. 8)What types of living environment would you prefer? Clean, I would like to be washed after each use. As much as I love milk, the residue attracts fies. If possible I also wish to be stored with other cups or mugs so I have somebody to talk to while waiting for my duty. 9)How would your co-worker describe you? You know, I’m an outcast because of my appearance but my co-workers respect me because I may look weird but hey, I feel so good in hands and hold whatever fits inside of me. 10)What do you like to do outside of work? I can stare into the fields all day long, those vast green fields with cows on them. Obviously, I can’t do that here (NYC) anymore so I just stare at people. New York City is filled with weird people. You know what? They made me feel less weird. 11)If you want to be an animal, which one would you want to be? A dolphin, I heard they live in an ocean. I have never seen oceans before, I heard they are big, like a 1000 times bigger than Lake Champlain. I have never seen a dolphin either. I have no idea what they are, I heard they are beautiful. I don’t mind turning into something beautiful.
63
THE CUP
64
Handmade with a purposeful mistake, the saggy indentation fit a thumb perfectly. Weird yet outstanding.
65
66
67
THE CONTAINER
68
The container was composed of many parts. 3D printed structure and hand stitched felts and cashmere providing cushion. Both a physical and psychological shield for the CUP to survive New York City.
69
70
71
THE ROOM: KITCHEN
72
The kitchen is where the CUP finds his inner peace. The wavy walls constructed with natural masonry which provides a firm core for the house, it holds water and fire in the dark. All appliance, the bed, the sink, the toilet seat, and benches are derivatives of the core and conform with human body, just like the CUP with the purposeful mistake that fits the thumb.
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
Curtain Wall Design 'ADVANCED CURTAIN WALL DESIGN' Individual Project 2019 Instructor: Robert Heintges Dan Vos
90
In this abstract painting, I see gravity, verticality and the floating of the striations of the paint. The curtain wall design takes these artistic elements and interprets them with architectural elements.
91
Fritted Glass
180
Clear Glass
Aluminum Fi
180
Glass Fin
180
Fin Elevation
60
60
60
60
60
60
Detail 1-1
92
s
in
Detail 1-2
Detail 2-2
Detail 2-1
Detail 2-2
180
Detail 2-1
180
Detail 1-2
93
94
8 13 16
8
1 87
Insulation Shadow Box Glass Fin Aluminum Fin 4 41 3 83 4 41
6
5
3
6
6 5 16
Vertical Mullion
1
7 8
5
5 16
95
3 4
Pressure Equalizing Seal
1 8
Air Gasket Thermal Break
Weather Seal Latch on and rotate 96
97
Screw Fixed On The Top
98
Milled Aluminum Recess
Weld On And Polished In Shop Plate Set In The Milled Recess
Free Sliding On The Bottom
Fin Connection Elevation 99
Thank You Shawn/Shengqi Wang ktx992@gmail 540-200-5626