Choreography

Script.

Choreography is the intentional and aesthetic organization of spaces, defined by human beings’ perceptual experiences and interpretations of their surroundings as they move through space.

Choreography consists of two key components: organizational clarity (diagrams) and experiential quality (scenarios). Those two components are equally important in project formulations.

With a collection of five movements, the purpose of this script is to document and direct how each movement communicates certain cultural, and spatial narratives, and materializes them into recognizable projects of architecture.

Radicalizing Banality

Ann Arbor Cemetery and Funerary Complex

Fall 2022 | 10 weeks

ARCH 432: Hall (UG III)

Critic: Keith Mitnick

“Whereas copulation has become more and more mentionable, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon societies, death has become more and more unmentionable as a natural process. The process of death and decay have become disgusting.”

Whereas death was quite visible in Western societies centuries ago, since the 20th century, death has become more and more unspoken. Once, people consider death as a community-wide celebration; now, we rarely mention death in our society. Once people considered death as a process, where we anticipated it, prepared for it, and then memorialized it; now, we deny the existence of death until the moment it happens, and then we quickly move on from it.

As a response, this project tries to become a cultural proposition that makes visible death as a process. This project tries to construct a world where banal things become radicalized, confronts the American suburban residences with those radical objects in an architectural setting, and invites them to contemplate the existence of death and their proximity to death.

– Geoffrey Gorer, The Pornography of Death

This perspective captures the view as one drives from the Northside, a residential neighborhood, to Kerrytown, the city center of Ann Arbor. In this perspective, the project behaves like a gateway across a busy road, a monument that keeps confronting the audience with the notion of death.

Standing in the center of Ann Arbor, and across the busy Broadway Bridge, this project presents itself as an enormous monument that reminds the passerby of its presence. Formally, with soft fabrics wrapping around the concertized fabric, this project acts almost like a shroud that covers a stiff corpse. Such a formal move gives the project a sense of mystery, radicalizing our normal perception of a building at the gateway of a city.

(Top) Exterior Perspective

(Bottom) Site Map

This project sits in between downtown and a residential neighborhood in Ann Arbor.

Yicong Shan

(Left) Photo Narrative Studies

This set of photography tries to visually monumentalize the banal, intimate, and personal objects of the pillows and beddings.

(Middle + Top Right) Early Conceptual Diagram

This set of diagrams helps establish a design method of creating a linear sequence and wrapping the sequence into an interconnected piece.

(Bottom Right) Early 3-D Diagrammatic Model

This model is a translation of the early conceptual diagrams. It tries to study the effect of visual cross-registration in 3-D.

(Top) Spatial Sequence Diagrammatic Model.

This model is a 3-D materialization of the early conceptual diagrams. It tries to clarify the scale shifts as a linear spatial sequence in the project.

Through this process, the images of the banal pillows are transformed into an architectural element. The aggregation of those concretized objects defines the sequence of the

(Bottom Left) Process Sketches.

Those process sketches aim to wrap the linear spatial diagram into an intertwined set of spaces, with visual cross-registration between different spaces.

spaces and provides this perceptual experience that the audience is not traveling through a piece of architecture, but through a series of objects

(Bottom

This model is built from a speculative section drawing. It analyzes the exterior envelope of the building as a shroud that wraps around solid surfaces.

on the wall with varying scale shifts, and through the physicality and the abstraction of the fabric itself.

Perspectives Sequence. From left to right: Memorial Hall, Committal Hall, Columbarium, Altar of personal objects, Reflection Hall.

Yicong Shan

Right) Building Envelope Model.

From the memorial hall to the altar, this project presents with the audience a scale shift, with the concretized pillow as the definer of the space. Audiences were dwarfed by the excessive scale of the building elements at one moment, and then seemingly enlarged by them in the next by a perceptual shift to the scale of the personal objects of

the deceased. This sequence invites the audience to contemplate the discrete objects that symbolize death from both a community and an immersive individual scale. This linear diagram of the shifting scale, in the end, gets rolled together to create visual registrations between different spaces.

Unrolled Sequence Diagram

Rolled Sequence Diagram

A. Memorial Hall

B. Committal Hall

C. Columbarium

D. Altar of personal objects

E. Reflection Hall

1. Restroom

2. Staff Meeting Space

3. Staff Working Space

4. Mechanics

5. Kitchen

6. Reception Room

Longitudinal Section Perspective

Cutting through the Memorial Hall, Back of House service space, Committal Hall, Columbarium, Alter, and Reflection Hall. This section illustrates the visual cross-registration between different spaces.

Rolling the linear diagram up introduces moments of visual cross-registration. For instance, as the audience surround themselves with a gigantic rendition of a personal object, they are also able to see rows of the columbarium, almost like

the community of the deaths, just as the community gathers in the memorial hall.

Ultimately, through a series of material abstracting and scale shifting, this project tries to materialize death by

constructing a series of radical spaces out of banal things in our lives. Through this alternative world-building, this project tries to “re-tame” death, and acts against Gorer’s diagnosis in the “Pornography of Death.”

Process of Modeling: From Fabric to Concrete

Yicong Shan Movement I | Radicalizing Banality | Fall 2022

Rockite Bricks Casting

Image Transfer with Gel Medium and Papier Mache

Rockite Ground Casting, with Bricks Cast in Place Model Assembly

Prefabricated Concrete Bricks

Steel Stud

Fabric Gypsum Panel

Insulation

Final Building Chunk Model. 1/4”=1’-0”. The size of the final model is approximately 3’-6” x 2’ x 1’.

Materials include: White Foam Core, Basswood Sticks and Boards, 3-D Print, White Spray Paint, Rockite, Gel Medium, Papier Mache, White Poly Mesh Ribbon Fabric.

In this project, the concrete is casted out of ordinarily-made flat formwork with fabric as the surface texture, leaving the exterior of the concrete rugged, almost as pieces of solidified fabrics. Paints of pillows are also attached directly onto

the concrete. Through both methods, concrete loses its banal character and materiality, and becomes an abstraction of the pillow that contributes to the perceptual scale shifts.

Urban Stereotomy

Fall 2021 | 11 weeks

ARCH 312: Influence (UG I)

Critic: Melissa Harris

Winner: 2021-2022 Taubman College Student Show Undergraduate Award

“The word ‘precursor’ is indispensable to the vocabulary of criticism, but one must try to purify it from any connotation of polemic and rivalry. The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”

Resulting in an urban single-family retreat, Urban Stereotomy is a precedent-based project that seeks to analyze, critique, and translate prior works of architecture to generate new architectural propositions. Taking on the pre-existing work of “House

on a Stream” by Architecture BRIO, through three different acts, this project ultimately translates a rural country house into an urban retreat that invites the audience to engage with the street, building facades, and various symbols of the urban landscape.

– Jorge Luis Borges, Kafka and His Precursors.

the precedent “House on a Stream”. Built in collaboration with Hannah Baltzan + Austin Guthrie. Foam Core, Basswood, and Cardstock.

Translating a building precedent into an urban retreat

act. i. Precursor Research

Adding a room to “House on a Stream”. (Week 2-3)

The first act analyzed Architecture

BRIO’s constructed work “House on a Stream” with the goal of adding a room to the house. In an effort to strengthen the original project premise, “architecturalizing the environment”, the precedent analysis identified

a potential intervention to add a promenade sequence. This promenade turns the original linear, orthographic entrance sequence into a complex one that provides a point of entry and several points of pause, and invites wood, stream, and sunlight as natural

elements into the project. In doing so, this project tries to enrich the dialogue between walkable paths and occupiable rooms, and architecture and the environment.

1/4”=1’ act i Physical Model Museum Board, Foam Core, Basswood, and Cardstock.

Architectural Drawings Formulation Plan, section, and elevation. act. i. Intervention in Black, act. o. original building in Gray.

act. ii. Conceptual Translation

Optical Device, a cultural artifact. (Week 4-6)

Initially interested in the dichotomy between heavy versus light, poche versus visual openness, and flatness of the frame versus the spatial depth in the House on a Stream, the second act started by taking excerpts from the original plan and section and merging them to capture such dualism. Through

a series of iterative models, the final artifact becomes an Optical Device that captures the essence of the original house.

The Optical Device seeks to create a dualism between facts and implications, solids and voids, and the solid itself

and one’s perception of the solid. Here, a frame is transformed into a volume, and the reading of a mass is transformed into the reading of a framed void that ultimately becomes a machine for viewing.

The initial iterative model tries to analyze the discrepancies between the plan and the sections of the precedent. These unrolled surface excerpts illustrate the process of translating the initial orthographic projection drawings to the hand-drawn abstraction that becomes the surface map of the model.

(Right) Unrolled Surface of the Initial Iteration

(Left) Iterative Models, various materials Those models study the formal qualities, solids, voids, and threshold conditions of the “House on a Stream”.

Final

(Left) 9 Iterative Models

Those models act as an inquiry into the essential spatial strategies of the “House on a Stream”. Starting from a 3-D collage of excerpts of the original plans and sections, this iterative model series tries to test the solid-void, surface-object, and flat-depth relationships.

(Right) Optical Device, the final model for act ii. The Optical Device transforms a threshold into an extended volume. The final model becomes a resolution of a stacking model, with a focus on the abstract formal and spatial qualities.

Continuing with the investigation on the cones of vision and the extension of a threshold, the previous two acts are now transformed into a new architectural proposition.

act. iii. Building Proposition.

Commissioned as an urban retreat, this project claims that it falls on the architect to provide an experience that the client is living in the urban landscape while staying in the urban retreat. The identity of an urban retreat does not come from the architecture itself, but from its surrounding urban environment. Ultimate -

ly, this project proposes a new way of living that, rather than traveling through rooms, the inhabitant of this project is traveling through facades that defines the urban landscape as it is; rather than living in the house, the inhabitant is truly living in the urban landscape.

(Top Left) Sequential Sections. The 50%-50% solid-void relationship renders the interior surface as an extended threshold that shapes the cone of our vision.

(Bottom Left) Unrolled Surface Diagram The exterior form is rendered as a perspectival projection of several continuous planar surfaces folding into each other, collapsing the device into a 2.5-D bas relief.

(Middle) Optical Device, Final Model for act. ii.

(Right) Early iterations of Plans, Sections, and Models for act. ii.

Iteration 01: act. ii. Translation Iteration 02: Buiding Proposal

Urban Stereotomy, a single-family urban retreat. (Week 7-11)

Site Plan

Street-side perspective drawings on model. This set of drawings further renders the reading of this project, not as a self-referential form, but as a stereotomic mass embedded within the urban environment.

Conceptual Form Diagram

This project does not have its independent reading. Rather, it can be interpreted as extensions of its adjacent situations, including...

Site Condition

... all extending into a mass in the urban site and carve out the mass into habitable spaces

Adjacency to a Service building on South side. Adjacency to a Residential building on North side.

Adjacency to the Street on the East side. Adjacency to the Alleyway on the West side.

that are the volumetric extension of its surroundings.

1/4”=1’ act iii Final Physical Model with Site Model. Museum Board, Foam Core, and Cardstock.

Perspective Analysis Diagram

Analyzing the intersections and extensions of our cones of vision, resulting in the formulation of the building plan.

Perspective Sequence

In this sequence, the audiences’ cones of vision are first flattened, then extended through the placement of the partition walls. The location of this sequence is marked in the horizontal section below.

Horizontal Sections. Plans cutting at +24’-0”, +14’-0”, +4’-0”, -6’-0”.

(Left) Sequential Sections Documenting the serial changes in space, in dialogue with the manipulation on our cones of visions, controlling what to see and what not to see.

(Right) Final Physical Model, disassembled Museum Board, Foam Core, and Cardstock.

In carving out this urban mass, the four surrounding elements found themselves intertwining with each other. In such a way, this house appears to have no façade, walls, or enclosures of its own – rather, they are all facades, walls, and enclosures of its surrounding envi-

Longitudinal Section

ronments, reaching out maximally to claim their presence in an urban mass. In this way, this project also extends and accelerates the threshold condition in the urban environment.

Movement III

Vertical Market Piazza

San Francisco Housing Challenge

Summer 2022 | 4 weeks

Individual Competition Project

“On the 110th floor, a poster, sphinx-like, addresses an enigmatic message to the pedestrian who is for an instant transformed into a visionary: It’s hard to be down when you’re up.”

– Michel

Vertical Market Piazza is a housing complex that contemplates the relationship between apartment residents and the city. This project poses a statement against the conventional notion of an urban apartment complex: a modular-based, high-density highrise that is enclosed against the urban surroundings. Instead, with the

vertical section acting as a map, the public piazza placed at the center, behaving like roads connecting different parts of the apartment units, this project seeks to become a vertical extension of the urban pedestrian and piazzas, creating an illusion of a vertical urban landscape where the residents would continuously engage with the vibrant urban life

de Certeau, Walking in the City

As the Civic Center Piazza on the eastern side of Market St, the core of San Francisco urban life, appears as disconnected from the residential area of Octavia Blvd, this project seeks to act as an extension of Market street, reconnecting resident’s life with the lively urban scene.

With a series of 2D to 3D translations, this project takes inspiration from two Katrin Bremmerman paintings. Through the introduction of a series of curvature, spaces begin to intertwine, and the curvilinear form moves one’s eyes continuously through the space, encourages continuous motion, and provides a smooth pathway from the street, through the building, into different parts of the public programming or apartment units.

Translation and Iterative Process. (Left) Katrin Bremmerman Paintings and Rearranged Collage, (Middle) 2.5-D Bas-Relief Translation, (Right) 3-D Model Translation.

Collage

(top

(Left) Site Analysis. Speculative Site Collage and Site Map.

Week 1-2

(Left) Early Iterations of the Vertical Maps

Vertical sections are taken initially from the 3-D physical model. Through 4 consecutive weeks of iteration, this set of sections transforms into the final map.

(Right) Final Vertical Map

The Final Vertical Map is a vertical section that guides the residents through the spatial sequence of this vertical piazza.

Visibility: Wrapping Surfaces

Vertical Promenade, embedded within a Wall

Fall 2019 | 8 weeks

ARCH 218: Visual Studies

Critic: Yojairo Lomeli

“We are here concerned with ‘high fantasy’: that is, with the loftier part of the imagination as distinct from the corporeal imagination, such as is revealed in the chaos of dreams.”

This project is an architectural translation of Calvino’s chapter on Visibility in his work “Six Memos for the Next Millennium.” Parallel to Calvino’s approach of visibility as provoking visual imaginations from abstract languages, this project tries to redefine visibility by creating spaces at various scales and orientations, characterized by folded planes

wrapping around the space, to confound the audiences’ senses of orientation.

Applying the technique of folding, this project tries to create a set of continuous planes that wraps around both the promenade and the vertical ground, inviting the audience to trace through the plane wherever they travel in this promenade.

– Italia Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

In the process of space-making through folding and wrapping, the spaces inside the promenade became disoriented. As the audience walk onto this promenade, they would find themselves constantly traveling on tilted grounds, and

through tilted walls. The perception of horizontality and verticality became abnormal. Whereas the visitor would continue to trace through the folding planes through their eyes, they would nonetheless become disoriented in the space.

(Left) Early Iterations of Spatial Prototype Models

(Middle) Perspective Drawings

(Right) Longitudinal Section, Superimposed with the Final Model Disassembled Axonometric Drawing

(Left) Orthographic Drawings

2 Horizontal Sections and 2 Vertical Sections in adjacent to each other, documenting the sequence of the spaces, varying scales and orientation, and the “wrapped surfaces”.

(Right) Final Physical Model and Assembly process 1/4”=1’. Museum Board and Steel Rod.

Landscape Gateway

Boarder-to-Boarder Trail and Matthaei Forest Visitor Center

Winter 2022 | 10 weeks

ARCH 322: Fieldings (UG II)

Critic: Christina Hansen

Locating in the Matthaei Forest and at the start of the Boarder-to-Boarder (B2B) trail, Nature Gateway is a nature and wellness center that acts as a sequence of thresholds to prepare one to engage with nature. This visitor center proposes the relationship between humans and nature as dynamic and interactive by inviting nature into the built environment. In this project, nature no longer serves as the backdrop for human activities. Rather, nature is the subject and the medium.

By gradually inviting the visitor from a distant, dark space into a space that is completely open to nature, this project tries to create a sequence of spaces that invites the visitor to engage with nature in different ways. Throughout this process, this project hopes to inspire visitors to think about nature differently as they leave everything behind and move on to their adventure in the Matthaei forest and the B2B trail.

Massing Model. Museum Board, Chipboard, Papier Mache, Spray Paint, and Baby Roth

(Left) Site Map

(Right) Early Sketches, Excerpts, and Iterations of Models

The early models investigate excerpts of spaces and scenarios. Through a series of planimetric and massing iterations, those excerpts of spaces were mapped together, and the project becomes a diagrammatic aggregation of 6 different scenes.

This project tries to invite the landscape into the building by blurring the boundary between nature and artificiality, openness and enclosure. Through alternating enclosed spaces with open corridors, this project confounds one’s perception of interiority and exteriority. Through the utilization of rough concrete, throughout the years, nature would also grow on top of the building and gradually take over its exterior.

(Top) Exterior Perspectives, Birdseye view, and view from the Fleming Creek.

(Bottom) Final Sectional Models, 1/8” = 1’. Museum Board, Cardboard, Black Foam Core, Basswood Sticks, Flowers, Spray Paint.

This project tries to invite water into the building by negotiating the relative position between the building and the creek. Traveling through the spatial sequence, Fleming creek and the pond first emerge as a distant field of water that one can only look through the apertures. As you travel through space, this project leads the water in, and you would start to feel that you are walking on top of the water. Through the sequence, this project brings water closer and closer to you, at times becoming a part of the interior space, at times becoming something that you can walk on, and ultimately, inviting you to go directly into the water.

1. Staff Office

2. Staff Working Area (Upstairs)

3. Wet Room

4. Golf Cart Parking

5. Entrance Walkway

6. Information Center

7. Book Store

8. Cafe Reception

9. Cafe (Exterior)

10. Cafe (Interior)

11. Restrooms

12. Kitchen

13. Storage

14. Meeting Rooms

15. Exhibition Gallery

16. Garden

17. Public Gathering Auditorium

This project tries to invite weather into the building. Through a sequence of spaces opening to the sky, you will have drastically different experiences coming here on any day. On a sunny day, you might see periodic surprises of lights as you travel through the building, or get excited by the sun, kick off your shoes and embrace the water as you reach the end of this promenade; on a rainy day, you might see screens of water falling from the apertures, or feeling yourself surrounded by the rain as a barrier to the outside.

Perspective Narrative Series: act. i.

June 3rd. Friday.

Sunny. 80°F

Perspective Narrative Series: act. ii.

November 17th. Thursday.

Sleet storm. 40°F

Circulation Diagram: Spatial Choreography

Discrete Objects, Assembled Traces

Summer 2022 | 2 weeks

Miscellaneous Work Mix Media Sculpture

Choreography

Yicong Shan