UPenn Penghui Henry Zhang Portfolio 2024

01. THE LIBERTY COMMUNITAS -- RESIDENTIAL IN RED HOOK

Residential design based on the Liberty Warehouse located in Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York City, accommodating to the verity of residents and immigrants

02. FRAME FUSION -- PRECAST CONCRETE PANEL DESIGN

Exploring the Art and Technique of Precast Concrete Paneling: A Practical Study

03. EXCHANGING FORIUM -- BUTTONWOOD MARKETPLACE

Marketplace located in Callowhill, a.k.a. Chinatown North, a.k.a. Eraser hood, in north Philadelphia

04. DECOLONIZING THE MUSEUM -- PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART EXTENSION

Annex of Philadelphia Museum of Art and Waterworks Public Theater

05. THE MEMOIR -- MONOLITHIC MACHINIC CHIMERAS : ONTOLOGICAL COMPUTATIONAL FORMATIONS

Date Center as A Digital Legacy Preservation and Commemoration

06. AGRARIAN PICTURESQUE: OJAI FARMLAND DESIGN

A Sustainable Farmland Design to Support Local Farmers and Promote Touism at Ojai, California

07. CONTEMPORARY AESTHETICS OF CONSEALMENT Super Car Headquarter Building with Migrant worker vocational traning and concealment

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10. PROFESSIONAL WORK CONTENT

CO-HOUSING

Housing for lower income groups is an enormous issue nationwide. Upscale and profitable development often undermines efforts to sanction land use to house families at or below the poverty line. For decades cities have been trying to figure out ways to deal with the issue.

REUSE VS BUILD NEW ANALOG 01

In most cases the ratio of developable existing buildings to empty lots is high. In cities like New York, nearly all of the empty developable building sites are on the periphery of the city in non-residential zoned areas. It is for this reason that the largest percentage of construction projects in urban centers focus on the renovation and development of existing building stock.

ANALOG 02

The studio will propose a solution for integration of existing red hook creative community programs and housing into the existing Liberty Warehouse. One third of the proposed building must interact directly with the existing structure while 2/3 to be new construction.

TECTONICS

For our precedent research, we examined the Broad Museum by Diller Scofidio Renfro in Los Angeles, CA. The Broad features a unique reinforced precast concrete facade system, known as the “Veil,” which not only provides abundant natural lighting throughout the building, but also is self-supporting and load-bearing enough to the extent of allowing the absence of columns throughout the building.

Another facet of the Veil that stood out to us was the window apertures, particularly as they wrap around the corners of the building.

FABLICATION

The shop ticket outlines all the components that went into our panel, with emphasis on the rebar and lifter placement.

Generally speaking, the biggest issue that our team had during fabrication was adjusting for the required depth of the insulation.

Preparations for pour day relied on the reliable precision of our shop drawings, which entailed a form-fitting plywood perimeter, correct rebar lengths, and accurate foam sizing.

The original panel design had a lot of depth, so there were areas that were very thick around the edge and then the middle area tended to become much thinner. To accommodate the 7” thick NU Ties we had to make many adjustments to the overall panel thickness and design depth.

The foam ticket goes into further detail about the sizing of the individual foam pieces and entailed careful strategizing to minimize the number of panels that would need to be cut.

The pour was separated into two parts, with the first pour going directly on top of the foam, and the second pour following the placement of the rebar and the foam.

MODULAR FRAME

While the assembly strategy took guidance from our precedent research with the wrapping window corner, the construction of the assembly follows more of a back-face support framing system where the individual framing members can attach to one another with greater ease.

Each iteration experiment with widely varying patterns, gestures, and styles. Using these separate studies, we identified common elements and behaviors between each and worked towards a synthesized panel design that incorporated aspects from everyone’s designs.

EXCHANGING FORIUM

A Marketplace located in Callowhill, a.k.a. Chinatown North, a.k.a. Eraser hood, in north Philadelphia

Plan: Ground Level

Weitzman School of Design | University of Pennsylvania

THE COLLAGE CITY

The project for this semester will be an urban market, a traditional “type” of urban building, but one which offers an opportunity for conjecture and refiguration as it might exist in a contemporary American setting.

Plan: 2nd Level

Weitzman School of Design | University of Pennsylvania

HISTOCICAL LENS: THE CITY AS COLLAGE

Our focus evolves out of an idea which emerged from European ideas of the city in the 1940’s as modern architects took on the city as an ultimate site. Their proposals, simply put: That extant pieces of the old city needed massive re-envisioning, that orders of vernacular houses and streets were no longer optimally habitable.

THE MARKET AS FORUM

Historically the urban market functioned as the agora, the center of social and civic life, as well as the commercial center of every city and town. While urban markets still function in this capacity to varying degrees around the world, the urban market in the United States can be traced through a series of diminishments.

DECOLONIZING THE MUSEUM PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART EXTENSION

An Annex of Philadelphia Museum of Art and Waterworks Public Theater

HYPERLAPSE CONTAINER – A Cast Object Studying Tectonics

The Hyperlapse Container explores the techniques and novel material formations of space and detail, more specifically will explore the intersections of virtual and the real.

PIPES AS GENERATOR

The concept envisions the transformative potential of these conduits to reshape and carve out a block mass into a captivating museum space.

Like a sculptor meticulously shaping clay, we employ a system of interconnected pipes, ingeniously designed to act as both generators and tools. The flowing energy within these conduits serves as a driving force, empowering the museum to emerge organically, guided by the artistic vision of the space.

THE MEMOIR

MONOLITHIC MACHINIC CHIMERAS : ONTOLOGICAL COMPUTATIONAL FORMATIONS

Date Center as A Digital Legacy Preservation and Commemoration

AI & Monolith Plug-in Generated Formation

While engaging in the production of ontological architectural axioms through the generative capacities of machine learning, one focus will be the relationship between computation and ai/stable diffusion.

Conceptually, the Sports/Entertainment and Data Center of the studio will operate as a platform to explore post-human and machinic architectural space.

DIGITAL LEGACY

The interior of the project is designed to create a unique atmosphere where users can experience a mix of mechanical and ethereal elements. The malleability of the memorial space provides a respite from the rigidity of the data center, while the sounds and tempreatures of the machines contribute to the heterotopian environment. This fusion of elements enables visitors to drift through the space, connecting with their digital legacies while experiencing a sense of tranquility.

Date Center as a Subconscious Infrastructure:

As more aspects of our lives becomes digital, the need for reliable data centers increases. The project proposes a data center as the backbone of our digital existence, acting as a safe haven for our virtual selves.

Acknolledging that our digital lives have lasting impacts and legacies, the project incorporates a digital cemetery as a space where digital memories, experiences, and data can be commem-oraiented.

Heterotopia:

The project aims to create a heterotopia, a space that exists outside of everyday social norms and encompasses both physical and mental dimensions. The concept challenges the boundaries of traditional spaces and invites users to experience a different kind of environment. By creating a heterotopia that merges the physical and mental, the project challenges conventional norms and provides a unique space for New Yorkers to explore their digital subconscious.

AGRARIAN PICTURESQUE: OJAI FARMLAND

AGRARIAN RSEARCH

This class tests an array of patterns and geometries to think of a pixel beyond a square. Taking as a base the work of Armin Hofmann and his book ‘Graphic Design Manual’ (1965), we use his rules and exercises to devise new graphic diagrams; these drawings serve as the base to create the agricultural fields.

Hofmann’s manual emphasizes the idea of formal iterations, where a simple rule can yield myriad variations. These rules will be played out in each project to intersect land with form and nature with geometry.

The first chapter combined the research on Pixel Farming with notation diagrams derived from the studies in Armin Hofmann’s ‘Graphic Design Manual.’ We selected different patterns and drew them graphically. An Atlas of plant species will also be developed.

Amidst these dynamic changes, the role of architecture in the city needs to be constantly challenged, revised, and updated to maintain its function, empower all its inhabitants, and continue to provide a vital platform for the exchange of ideas, innovation, and knowledge production.

PIXAL FARMING

Pixel farming is a cropping system design and management method that mobilizes high-resolution diversity in arable fields. It isgrounded in the hypothesis that high-resolution spatial, temporal, and genetic diversity will enhance ecological processes that support crop production and agro-ecosystem service delivery. In pixel plots we grow multiple food and service crops in complex arrangements in which individual communities of plants are allocated to small ‘pixels’. Ideally, pixel plots should be designed so that the right plant community is allocated to the right location, at the right time, and at the right resolution.

Determining what is right for each plant community should be based on the intrinsic behavior and needs of each crop and the (dis)services it provides to its neighbors. Pixel size and shape should be determined by the optimal ecological niche of each crop and the context in which it is grown, and matching crop communities to the right place in the field should be determined based on soil characteristics and other environmental factors.

AGRARIAN LANDSCAPE

The 701 Design Studios focus on the historical transformations occurring in 21st-century cities. These transformations are multi-faceted, deep-rooted, and have an impact on all aspects of contemporary urban life. The emergence of interconnected global markets has produced new economic and political realities resulting in unprecedented forms of urban expansion and densification. Rapid infrastructural and technological innovations are reshaping how we design, construct, navigate, and communicate in cities. The proliferation of cultural diversity necessitates adequate architectural representation and the pursuit of new opportunities. Environmental factors are shifting our design understanding towards a more organic and symbiotic approach that can thrive only through the consideration and incorporation of nonhuman actors and

The class presents a double title because it necessitates a technique of visualization and engagement, and that tool is the ‘picture,’ yet picturesque is more than just a picture; it is a way of seeing, a romantic tool of observation. In the same way, Latour looks at modernity as the moment technology separated us from the environment; the Romantic poets, painters, and writers questioned how the Enlightenment detached us from the natural world. Humans needed a view of nature to frame nature’s image in words or canvases, poems, and paintings.

AGRARIAN MODEL

By looking at Pixel Farming, we can look at plant species issues, geometry, and patterns. Suppose the Cartesian grid has converted all territories into subdivided parcels of land. In that case, this same grid can become a tool for rethinking the linearity of the agricultural field and breaking it down into smaller subdivisions. This would mean that geometry and nature must merge into a dense quilt that borrows from ecological diversity. The natural sciences and architecture’s drawing history will serve as tools for experimentation and novel inquiry.

AGRARIAN PICTURESQUE

The class presents a double title because it necessitates a technique of visualization and engagement, and that tool is the ‘picture,’ yet picturesque is more than just a picture; it is a way of seeing, a romantic tool of observation. In the same way, Latour looks at modernity as the m,oment technology separated us from the environment; the Romantic poets, painters, and writers questioned how the Enlightenment detached us from the natural world. Humans needed a view of nature to frame nature’s image in words or canvases, poems, and paintings.

Physical Model

NATURE

The focus of this class is Nature; we will question what Nature is from an environmental and aesthetic point of view. Today, it is impossible to detach out ethic debt to Nature from our aesthetic feeling for Nature. In this class, the medium to investigate Nature will be through agriculture and how it has shaped and transformed our relationship with Nature. For us, agriculture will become an image of an idealized form of Nature that has been filtered through aesthetics. This image is picturesque, and its view is the field of agriculture.

Fruit Feild Underground Teahouse

Greenhouse Aqueduct Market

Swimming Pool Rose Field Lavender Field Cable Car Bee Houses

“DARK ECOLOGY“

In his essay ‘We have never been modern’ (1991), Bruno Latour argues that modernity is the moment in which the technological power of cartesian geometry interjected nature, if culture (humans) and nature (non-humans) inhabit separate ontologies, since the advent of the enlightenment, then the only alternative to challenge this separation by purification is by a ‘work of translation’ and what he calls ‘hybrids.’ This implies that a flattening of culture and nature would create a network of diverse compounds as rich elements of an ecosystem.

Perfume Factory

Reservoir Transportation Track

Rose Field Water Tank Crops Field Trees

Orchard Pedestrian Fruit Field

CONTEMPORARY AESTHETICS OF CONSEALMENT IN DUBAI, AUE

Bugatti Super Car Headquarter Building with Migrant worker vocational traning and concealment

LESSONS FROM THE AUTO INDUSTRY FOR ARCHITECTURE

Recent developments in the automobile industry include form that is developed using sculpted surfaces, uses floating elements in space and inspired by nature. These formal techniques include integrating differences into surface continuity including opacity and transparency as well as LED lighting. Structure is also integrated into the material, particularly a new material called forged composite technology which reduces the monocoque structure to the thinnest of layers, simultaneously reducing body weight of the automobile by 40 percent.

AI Iterations Studying Auto Mobile Design Tectonics: Seaming, Nesting, Cradling Techniques

DESIGN RESEARCH: DISJUNCTIVE CONTINUITY

Contrasting geometries can be woven into one another. Design techniques derive from visual cues of these various details, generating formal, spatial, structural, and material innovation. In essence, ‘Disjunctive Continuity’ can be defined as any blending of dissonant elements which creates an original, inexhaustible beauty.

Novelty and innovation in Aesthetics with their direct impact on society is directly tied to technique and technology. To be influential and impactful in culture, Architects understand what technologies are at the forefront in their day, develop techniques that utilize these technologies for novel aesthetics, and find a way to make them architecturally useful.

CITY COLLAGE

History Theory: Collage Work based on Invisible City by Italo Calvino

Keywords:

Utopia

History

Diary

City Imagination

Leaving there and proceeding for three days toward the east, you reach Diomira, a city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of all the gods, streets paved with lead, a crystal theatre, a golden cock that crows each morning on a tower. All these beauties will already be familiar to the visitor, who has seen them also in other cities. But the special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when the days are growing shorter and the multicolored lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace, a woman’s voice cries ooh! is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy that time. 1

1. Calvino Italo, Invisible Cities, Giulio Einaudi, 1972.

Invisible Cities, written by Italo Calvano, illustrates a series of stories Marco Polo tells to the Mongolian emperor Kublai Khan when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions. Instead of documentary recording the travelling, these stories are more like a montage of imaginative scenarios from what the author saw during his own “expedition”.

In the book, we cannot find any recognizable cities because all of them are imaginary. Calvano gives every city a women’s name representing various properties of the cities. Some are mysterious, some are warm, and some are solitary, etc. However, we could see some iconic traits of the existing cities in the real world, including Venice, Barcelona, Istanbul, etc. Still, these various characteristics are collaged together, blurring the boundaries of nations and cultures and forming many new things. Calvano once talked about the process of the book in a writing lecture at Columbia University in 1983: he wrote a short piece whenever he finds out an intriguing object, including people, animals, and cities, then he classified these pieces of writing into different folders according to the above tags, gradually, these scattering writings became a diary of the author integrating with his imagination and emotions during different lifetimes. Finally, he organized these writings in the book, in which these cities are beyond space and time. The methodology I call that collage-like writing reminds me of the futuristic artworks attempting to break through the boundaries of time and space.

During the Renaissance, the artist applied the perspective method to depict nature, in which the sense of three-dimensional is embodied through Euclid geometry. But about 1830, a new sort of geometry was created, employing more than three dimensions. The artists have recognized that classic conceptions of space and volumes are limited and one-sided to depict the many-sidedness. The Cubists break through the three-dimensional space. They assume that the space could be folded or stretched to see the one side towards the viewer and see the backsides in distorted space. “The cubists dissect the object, try to lay hold of its inner composition. They seek to extend the scale of optical vision as contemporary science extends the law of matter.”

Based on exploring the new methodologies of viewing objects, the futurists add another dimension, time, to observe the thing. The viewer could see a static entity and discover the time track going through the object. For example, in the painting Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash created by Giacomo Balla, we can see the kinetic Motion trajectory of the dog as if time-lapse photography, in which the artist expresses the dimension of time subtly.

The book is not only an urban concept regardless of time but illustrates a series of discussions about modern cities. There are a lot of thoughts around these imaginary cities that urban planners could refer to rebuild modern cities. We need to think what the meaning of the city to us? Folks are iterating how urbanization impact the natural environment and the increasingly fragile ecosystem recoil in the urban areas, causing a series of catastrophe. Therefore, the book aims to put the living materials in an entity of memories, desires, and semiology. Cities are significant spots for exchanging not for goods but also ideas and thoughts. These utopian cities recall the memories of happiness, which is the crucial element we architect and city planners must constantly contemplate.

The collage is based on the depiction of the fictive city Diomira, in which we could see a hybridization of various iconic cities.

Invisible Cities leaves me with an indelible mark about Europe in my mind, which is my first impression of Europe. It triggers my tremendous curiosity about those gorgeous European towns. And what is interesting is that Italo delineates very such a realistic scene existing in the imagination, as if creating a parallel word juxtaposed with reality.

My dream was fulfilled in the summer of 2019 when I travelled to Italy. It was a summer course, including printmaking (Intaglio), painting, and art history, held by Pratt School of Fine Arts. During that, I went to Rome, Venice, and Pompei. The intact buildings saved from thousand years ago impressed me tremendously. Our history instructor gave a pretty comprehensive introduction to architecture from Ancient Rome to the peak of Baroque in Italy. I had just finished the History of Interior Design course, so I was so lucky that I could see what I learned from the class. When I studied printmaking in Venice, I could work with local printmaking artists, and they taught me a lot of exciting skills on Intaglio, which is a precious experience.

Therefore, this trip is an indispensable part of my memory, imagination, and professional pursuits in architecture. And the book Invisible Cities is like a journal that embodied my expedition.

WONDERLAND,

Intaglio (Hard Ground Etching, Dry Point, Aquatint on Copper)

BIOPHILIA HYPOTHESIS: A Conceptual Educational Program Based on the Microstructure of Leaf Blade