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.

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.

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

(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.

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

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.