Yan zhuang_ Portfolio

PORTFOLIO

YAN ZHUANG

A passionate architectural designer based in New York, with work featured on Archinect News and InProcess magazine, etc.

yan-zhuang.com

solemnyan@gmail.com

EDUCATION

Pratt Institute, Graduate Architecture and Urban Design, M.S. AUD, 2017- 2018

New York Institute of Technology, Architecture, B. Arch, 2011- 2016

EXPERIENCE

Architectural Designer

Robert Marino Architects, New York, Oct 2018 - Oct.20 & Freelance now

Conducted multiple site surveys with the internal team, including site measurement, hand sketch ing of elevations and plans on site.

Drafted essential project documents such as architectural plans, sections and elevations.

Conducted field researches, analyzed the cultural, historical and geographical aspects for a Chinese Project.

Project Manager

Zhejiang Jiangong Building Design Co., China, Dec.20 Aug.22

Manage construction schedule, including timeline, submittals, material tracking and shop drawings. Create and maintain schedules for construction subcontractors, architects. Arrange site meetings with private clients, project site manager and architect. Oversaw the construction process with client on site, ensuring construction quality.

Architectural Designer and Coordinator

DoThink Real Estate Group, Hangzhou, China, Sept. 2016 - Sept. 2017

Devised schematic designs for residential and commercial building projects.

Drafted essential project documents such as architectural plans, sections and elevations. Researched for land development, project positioning, for open design briefs.

Wore multiple hats as designer, project coordinator and manager, balanced the needs of multiple parties such as government, investors and home-buyers.

Intern Architect

Mastrogiacomo Engineering P.C., New York, March 2016 - Aug 2016

Conducted multiple site surveys and measurement for drafting.

Created technical drawings such as electrical plans, wall details, door and window schedules, etc. for construction documents.

FEATURES

Exhibition at Material Urbanism at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, 2019

Portfolio featured on Archinect News, 2018

Work published in InProcess Magazine, 2017 & 2018

The Iceberg was published in Nexttoparchitects, 2017 & 2018

HONORS SKILLS

Pratt GAUD Academic Scholarship, 2017- 2018

NYIT Incentive Awards/ Scholarship, 2012 - 2016

Dean’s Honor List at New York Institute of Technology, 2015

AutoCAD, Rhino, Revit, Maya, Adobe Creative Suite, Sketchup

3D Printing, Model Casting, CNC Mill, Woodshop

PROJECTS

SPECULATION ON SUPERBLOCK

ART

THE ICEBERG

URBAN DESIGN

PAGE

Mogan Mountain Culture Tourism Town

URBAN

THE REVERSED LIBRARY

LIBRARY

SQUARE ISLAND

LANDSCAPE

PAGE

Deqing Rural Cooperative Bank

Office

NEW MODES OF DENSE: NEW YORK ART CENTER

Brooklyn, New York

Hyperdense buildings today are discovered to lack of sense of social coherence. They are seen as generic, uniform and disconnected superblocks or high-rise towers. Culture is a connector to make the community closer together in a hyperdense environment. To maximize the urgent need of housing, the exterior of the superblock is all normal housing units. The interior becomes nature landscaped parks, cultural centers, offices, sports fields, and audi toriums. Large void sky openings allow light and air to come through the superblock and enable people to enjoy their lives.

Full-size blocks are usually divided into a series of individual lots and then developed with multiple projects. We are looking into the entire block as a singular mass. This will require strategies that incorporate courtyards and light-wells in order to make a single volume feasible for diverse programming. This strategy will be exploited towards new expressions in design and innovative organizational/structural schemes. The scale and speed of urbanization and its transformative forces for metropolitan areas worldwide is unprecedented and expected to accelerate further in the future. New York City, based on its geographic and economic circumstances, has historically been a vital testing ground for different modes of urban densification. Manhattan’s high-rise typologies, sectional urban space along elevated infrastructure in Brooklyn, and social mega-complexes like Co-Op City in efforts provide us with an intriguing catalog of references, they are mostly too outdated to meet the complex challenges the city faces today. New modes of densification are needed.

Plan

Site

Bird View Rendering

Axonometric

Overall Model

Section Model

Sectional Program Diagram

REVERSED LIBRARY I URBAN DESIGN

Interior Rendering

Zoning

The building envelope has to setback 20’ from the street.

Maximize Building Volume

Following the zoning rules and maximize the building volume.

Building Form

The reversed pyramid form setback floor from floor, provides better light quality.

Structureal System

Using thin columns as main design elegant.

System

main structure makes the Building Envelope

Semi see-through truchet panels feel the interior become exterior.

Maximum Green Area

Extruding one volume on the edge of the site gener ates space for a public park and recreational areas.

Final Design

Using culture is a connector to bring the community closer together in a green and health environment.

Cross Section

THE ICEBERG I URBAN DESIGN

Brooklyn, New York

Physical Model

The Challenge

In an age of accelerating urbanization and extreme resource shortage, cities must grow inward, and the most urgent challenge for urban designers is to develop new models for densification.

Urbanization is vast. It will add 2.5 billion people to the urban population by the middle of the century, when two-thirds of the global population will live in cities. The number of megacities - metropolitan areas with a population of more than ten million - has more than doubled over the last two decades and New York City, the largest in the United States, will be our living laboratory this semester. Urbanization is a driver of the major challenges we face in society - everything from climate change to questions of health, pollution, disease. It is is a global phenomenon that is not tangible, exceeds all human scales and defies analytic comprehension. Urbanization is a phenomenon for which there is no central authority, where those seeking the solution to it are also creating it. As such we consider Urbanization what Timothy Morton calls a “hyperobject” as this appropriation offers us a new ontological model for thinking about it, and ultimately for addressing it through design.

Over the past half-century the impact of human activity on the earth’s atmosphere - global warming - has moved from predict able and measurable, to intensely and devastatingly palpable. During that time the environmental movement has shifted focus from edu cating about sustainability to promoting resilience and adaptation. In a new state of constant crisis and perpetual recovery from shocks and aftershocks, we can no longer preserve the “first natural” environment, but must adapt to a “new nature.”

Plan

Design Concept

The iceberg is a contemporary design process of dealing with flooding, densification, and infrastructure issue in Dumbo, Brooklyn.The flooding islands in the front row are designed as a buffer zone to prevent flooding and rising water. The medium size islands and large island are built for housing towers. A new mode of creating a multi-leveled infrastructure platform is connected between each island. The urban canyon voids allow light and air to penetrate into the underground culture centers.

Density Analysis Diagrams

To generate a new urban form and landscape, I convert the physical texture to digital texture. After I make an urban fabric model, I 3D scanned the modell. It gives me a starting point to work with. Rendering the digital model with the urban texture as photorammerty, it creates new urban forms. Starting with material casting, and I use cooking foils, plaster, and pigment to create an urban fabric model. Thougout those experimental studies, the material gives me intelligence: the cracking effects provide me topological logic. When the material reacts with buildings, the cracking becomes finer. It becomes thicker and thicker into the water’s edge. It becomes my flooding strategy to protect the

Models

Mini Urban Fabric Models

Casting Process

Mini Urban Fabric Models

Rubber Mold

Photogrammetry Rendering -3D Scan & Urban Texture

Urban Landscape Model

Physical Model

Aerial View Rendering

Aerial View Rendering

Aerial Vew Rendering

Neighborhood Analysis

Water Diagram

Aerial View Rendering

Aerial View Rendering

Deqing Rural Cooperative Bank Deqing, Zhejiang, China