2022
VICTORIA WONG
ARCHITECTURE PORTFOLIO
SELECTED WORKS
CONTENT
INTO THE VOID: FRAMENTED TIME, SPACE, MEMORY AND DECAY IN HIROSHIMA ‘THE SHADOW PILGRAMAGE’
FOODS OF TOMORROW ‘A FOOD COMMON’
CHING CITY: THE NEW HUTONG PLAYSCAPE
‘URBAN DESIGN PROPOSAL FOR THE NEW TONGZHOU DISTRICT’
HAND DELINEATION
‘SELECTED DRAWINGS’
DELAYERING
‘A SPATIAL-PLANAR ANALYSIS OF SALLE LABROUSTE’
SAVOIR-VIVE
‘A REIMAGINATION OF THE JVB STUDENT CO-LIVING COMPLEX’
WINTER 2022
THESIS STUDIO - REASSEMBLING EARTH
PROFESSOR: EL HADI JAZAIRY
INDIVIDUAL
INTO THE VOID:
FRAGMENTED TIME, SPACE, MEMORY AND DECAY IN HIROSHIMA
‘THE SHADOW PILGRIMAGE’
LOCATION: HIROSHIMA SHI, JAPAN 2021-2022 BURTON L. KEMPNER MEMORIAL AWARD - HONORABLE MENTION
Into the Void: Fragmented Time, space, memory and decay in Hiroshima focuses on the imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete by investigating the death of human artifacts and illustrates the new possibility of reshaping our relationships with the planet. Inspired by the Japanese concept of Wabisabi, focusing on a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection, the project mimics the natural decaying process but in forms of lives, artifacts, architecture, and heritage. The project is to hold a conversation on how the end of one’s life cycle is related to its surrounding, both natural and manmade, environment. It discusses our ecological and heritage responsibility and rethinks our approach to death, and
views it as the essential/ final stage of completing the life cycle while seeing death as a new possibility to other forms of living.
In traditional Japanese aesthetics theory, three essential concepts are synthesized by Yoshinori Ōnishi, an esthetician who has an essential contribution to the history of modern aesthetics in Japan. Beginning from the publication of the Tale of Genji, the classic Japanese literature written in the early 11th century by Murasaki Shikibu, the noblewoman and lady-in-waiting, the three concepts, mono no aware, yūgen, and wabi-sabi, form a trilogy of aesthetic study.
THE MESSAGE AND THE DESTORYER
The collision of Oppenheimer’s message and the impressionist melody of La Plus Que Lente by Claude Debussy serves as a prelude to the crossover of Hiroshima’s historical scar and an reimagination of the sites.
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that one way or another.
Site Diagram displaying information and challenges of the three chosen locations
Pink cross: represents the ground zero of the WWII bombing
Circles: indicates the bombing heatwaves and damages
Teal: flooding areas if the sea level rises 3 feet
Yellow tags: locations that had significant meanings to the sites
Overlayed red squares: proposed follies scatered around Hiroshima
THE FORMULATION OF BEAUTY - FROM DECAY TO VOID
This thesis embraces the idea of acceptance and aesthetic appreciation of aging and flaws; the ideas are expressed through the three layers of meanings of Wabi-sabi. The beauty of the imperfect and the passage of time are being respected and celebrated rather than disguised. The appreciation begins when objects and structures start to age with time and expose their true beauty after abandoning their surface then revealing their true self. In western culture, the establishment of art and the aesthetic majority is based on kunstchöne, the formation of artificial beauty, while in Japanese aesthetic theory, art is a unique arrangement of both kunstchöne and natursehöne. Natursehöne represents the formation of natural beauty; it is difficult to define as it demonstrates the fluidity and constant transformation. It is unpredictable, uncontrolled, unstable, and delicacy characteristics display the beauty of nature. Natural beauty is as indispensable as artificial ones, and it is deemed an essential element in understanding true beauty; the journey of discovering beauty often lies in between the ambiguous boundaries between objects rather than on the objects themselves. The relationships between substances, mediums, boundaries, and realities contain unlimited possibilities for beauty to be developed, and it all depends on our understandings and perspectives on top of incidents in reality. Everything is impermanent, imperfect, and incomplete. The natural cycle of growth and decay is accepted and appreciated in the wabi-sabi theory. From decaying to transformation to
accepting flaws to appreciating imperfections, the degradation in time and space is first viewed as a cynical component. Imperfections, in general, seem to be flaws and blemishes. They are undesired and disappointing; it contradicts society’s mutual understanding. However, as proposed by Timothy Morton, beauty is described as the imminence of death, and it is an experience of a kind of warning light from one’s internal self.
Imperfections can be found in all aspects of life, creations, and events. One of the most prominent “disappointments” occurs at the end of our lives. Death, a permanent stoppage of life, the irreversible cessation, is associated with loss and essential to completing our life cycle. The unavoidable circle of life forms the foundation of Wabi-sabi aesthetic philosophy. However, instead of being an end to one’s cycle, death and decay can seem like the birth of new opportunities and an extension of the meaning of oneself and beyond.Architecture is essentially an internalization of the society yet an externalization of ourselves. The sites and reimaginations are witnesses and flaneurs throught time that capture the architectural scars in the parallel universe where the past, present, and future all coexist at the same time. The selected locations, Genbaku Dome, Yagenbori, and Shukeien Garden, are treated as experiemntal spaces that adapt to the spatial and environmental challenges and facilitate ‘changes’ according to our mental statues and behaviors. Through displaying site-specific elements, Into the Void aims to capture the ‘in-between’ heterotopia through various forms of void.
GENBAKU DOME - A VOID IN TIME
The three sites resemble the three different yet interconnected Japanese aesthetic theories. Each illustrates a specific void and how humans and architecture capture, adapt, and react to them. Each site provides an opportunity for people to pause, breathe, think, and allow humans and non humans to coexist in the parallel universe.
Genbaku Dome depicts the human-non human relationship and a void in time. As one of the very few standing structures surviving the WWII bombing, the site demonstrates fortification within the city and performs as a continue ruination and a glitch in space while being threatened by global warming. The mapping collage depicts the organizational strategies inspired by the ancient Hiroshima city layout that centered the Hiroshima Castle in the same district. The proposed structure at this location is to create an overlaying dissolved grid which peaks through the rivers. Inspired by the historical fishing practice in the area, different levels of platforms are to reveal themselves depending on the tides, currents, and event sea level rises according to global warming.
YAGENBORI - A VOID IN CULTURE
Yagenbori, locating in the south east corner of the city, is to depict human-human relationships and a void in culture. It was once the largest res-light distrcit in Western Japan and the cradle of geisha, the upper-clsas performers representing significant artistic and cultural values. Yet, Yagenbori is now deterioating, losing its identity, and displaying a heterotopia nature.
Unlike the Western definition of red-light district, the ones in Japan do not necessaryily involve the sex industry. In this specific site, Yagenbori, was the cradle of geisha, where the performers were trained in carious traditional Japanese arts, such as dance and music, as well as in the art of communication. Geisha are an iconic symbol of Japanese beauty. They are served as ambassadors of the Japanese culture and provides an illusion of pleaseure or something that cannot happen in reality to customers, which apprently is considered amusing in Japanese culture.
SHUKKEIEN GARDEN - A VOID IN NATURE
Shukkeien Garden, locating in the north east corner of the city, a historic Japanese garden partially destroye during multiple eras, including the WWII, depicts a void in nature. Home to one of the genkgo hibakujumoku (survivor trees) from the atomic bombing, Shukkeien Garden, demonstrates Japan’s indigenous spirituality belief Shintoism and captures the ‘unseen’ connectivity between non-human agencies.
The essence of Shinto, the indigenous belief in respecting nature, is the devotion to invisible spritual beings in Japan. Believeing everything is interconnected and comes in a complete cycle which also aligns with Mono no aware, wabi-sabi, and yugen, the believes in the beauty and appreciation of imperfection and impermanence, and to embrace that as one of the most refined qualities of our sensibility. The proposal conceptualizes the landscape of some small islands on the pong of Shukkeien and reimagine the possibility to witness changes and challenges from the ‘underworld’.
THE FINAL SCENES - FROM DAWN TO DUSK
From mono no aware to yugen to wabi-sabi...
From the dawn at Genbaku Dome,
To the afternoon in Yagenbori
To the dusk at Shukkeien Garden...
From when the world was paused and erased at once
To the dusk of identity and culture...
From the controlled above-ground
To the reuniation in the underworld...
Into the Void: Fragmented Time, Space, Memory, and Decay in Hiroshima captures the voids in time, culture, and nature while creates alternatives where people can pause and reinvent the relationship with the surrounds from different perspectives.
Conceptual College Human-Inhuman Relationship
FALL 2020
INSTITUTION STUDIO
PROFESSOR: JOSE SANCHEZ
INDIVIDUAL
FOODS OF TOMORROW
‘A FOOD COMMON’ LOCATION: DETROIT, MI
TAUBMAN COLLEGE ARCHITECTURE STUDENT SHOW 2021 - WINNER
Source Citations: Kelloway, Food and Power, Addressing Monopolization in America’s Food System
Foods of Tomorrow aims to rewilding the nature of Detroit, to reconsider relationship between ecology and social structure, and to investigate human and non-human relationship through a series of studies of the current neighbourhood conditions and redefining the nature of a food common.
AN EXTRACTIVE PLATFORM.
The American food supply chain has become concentrated in the hands of a handful number of giant multinational corporations in the past 40 years. The unsustainable monopolistic structure
has presented a glimpse of the presence of inadequate and inappropriate policies which lead to the over exploitation of land and natural resources. The U.S. agricultural industry is controlled by different monopolies on carious levels. For example, in the grain processing and commodities trading, four corporations, including Cargill, control roughly 90% of the global trading business. Vertical integration is common which farmers relying on the same corporations to purchase raw materials, seeds, and products. Additionally, with the advanced agricultural biotechnology and privatization of GMO seeds the natural circle of life is being disturbed.
1: Until 1820, 90% of the U.S. population lived on farms and produced their own food to eat.
2: Today, only 2% of the population produces food for the world to consume.
3: 70% of the world’s food is produced by 500M smallholder farmers.
Comparisons between crops diversity in 1903 commercial seed houses and in 1989 National Seed Storage Laboratory. Lighter shade represents species that went extinct and darker shade represents the ones that survive.
Institutions with high drop-out and absence rate
Food mart
Existing pipeline from St. Claire Lake Planned development of Detroit neighborhood Block located Detroit food desert Site location
DETROIT NEIGHBOURHOOD STUDY
Four major criteria are targeted in this neighbourhood study, including demolition rate, food deserts, areas with high dropout and absence rate, and Detroit planned neighborhood.
American cuisine philosophy takes root in philosophy of extraction due to its colonial background. Its protein-centric diet encourages a monoculture of agriculture and ignores the limits in nature. Inspired by The Third Plate by Dan Barber, a research is conduced to better understand the U.S. consuming behaviours and its relationship with agriculture practices and biodiversity. On the left, data are sorted into three categories, that, and major produces availability per capital; they are then transformed into urban filler in the analytic cityscape.
On a global scale, in order to gain a better understanding how and where Michigan overlaps with natural behaviours, bird migration pattern is
being examined to explore the possibilities of incorporating non-human agencies within the project.
In this neighbourhood where abandoned houses were burnt down and left to decay, the concept of “food” is interpreted as food for humans, micro-ecosystems for non-humans, and construction materials for buildings. The field study is organized by layering two geometry distinct networks. The forest-like structure provides additional vegetation support to the Commons while the linear prairie-like modular systems represent shelvings, furniture, and floating air platforms for the non-human agencies.
WINTER 2020
PROPOSITION STUDIO
PROFESSOR: ROY STRICKLAND
INDIVIDUAL
CHING CITY: THE NEW HUTONG PLAYSCAPE
‘URBAN DESIGN PROPOSAL FOR THE NEW TOD DISTRICT’ LOCATION: TONGZHOU, BEIJING, CHINA
CHING, a spectrum of colors generated by the color of ores in ancient China, represents the growth and possibilities. Ching City: The New Hutong Playscape is an urban design proposal on the new Tongzhou Transit-oriented development (TOD) adjacent to the new government capital center. With a site coverage of 43.5 hectares, the Tongzhou hyper-mix-use development is the largest TOD project in Beijing and will collaborate with the Beijing Municipality on the planning scheme. It is expected to be Beijing’s sub-center and performs as a catalytic point for the Beijing-Tianjin-Heibei mega region.
Ching City aims to reframe the Chinese street as a public space and focuses on the discussion of informal public spaces to promote the idea that different users have the
opportunity to reclaim those pocket spaces and hold various activities within this new city development.
HUTONG and PLAYSCAPE are the two primary components of the project. Hutong, in ancient times, is a regional street system in Imperial Beijing. Unlike the Western urban planning strategy, hutong is defined by the exterior boundaries of residential housings and complexes called siheyuan. The process began with locating underground water sources, building wells, and eventually, that became part of the internal courtyard of a siheyuan. Rooms and courts are built around courtyards, and exterior stone walls enclose the property. The ‘leftover’ spaces between the outer walls become a city void and a network of passageways formed passively with various widths and dimensions.
