Yumin Zhang architectural portfolio 2023

YUMIN ZHANG

Portfolio 2018 - 2022

TABLE

OF CONTENTS

Eight Million and One To See the Mountains

Plume Tower

Komorebi Courtyard

Roofscape Shelter

Facade Details

Nexus Community Center

Garden of Games In, On, and Above

Poetic Imagery Moments Movable Body A House as a Box

EIGHT MILLION AND ONE: A Scenery Film from a Future of Infrastructural Sublimes Design Studio

Fall 2022 DS 5000

Instructor: Jennifer Chen Partner: Eunice Yun Tung Liu

The film illuminates the geo-engineering approach, Direct Air Capture systems, or DAC. We imagine a near future where DAC has become economically viable so that they become an integral part of our landscapes and a new kind of infrastructural sublime.

In our story, we chart across landscapes and time, we see DAC systems grow and change as they become a part of our landscapes. The film is a homage to these systems that could clean up our world and remedy the climate, and a hopeful glimpse of what we could achieve if the world come together in a single vision. It is postcards of sublime infrastructural landscapes from our possible future.

DAC is an earth machine that helps us fight climate change. DAC is an urban furniture that is indispensable to our lives. DAC is an art work that emblazons and stays in our memories.

TO SEE THE MOUNTAINS Design Studio

Spring 2022 DS 5000

Instructor: Eric Owen Moss Partner: Anqi Wang

This project is an office-commercial complex with welcoming shaded open ground level that orchestrates its user experience towards the unusual natural scene in the middle of the urban context. It contains 4 conic opening that lead occupants’ sight to two mountains to the south of the site. The complexity of the conic pieces allows the interior to function differently and more efficiently that regular office spaces.

Design Development Design Studio

Fall 2020 Assemblies I DS 1030

Instructor: Ramiro Diaz-Granados

Partner: Anqi Wang

Watch video: https://youtu.be/6cQ7J6lwcp8

Fall 2021 AS 3040

Instructor: Scott Uriu, Pavel Getov

Team: Anqi Wang, Brandon Bown, Chris Gonzales, Dalya Bukhamseen, Khanh, Nguyen, Kimmy Van, Salih Albarrak, Yongjie Qi, Yuntung “Eunice“ Liu

Animated presentation: https://indd.adobe.com/ view/9d3c9dcc-2c7d-4763-b805-26e0f9155765

The project explores an extreme possibility of the pencil tower typology. Ten pencil towers are combined in a bundle to produce densed yet porous and buildable via repetition massing. Feet and plinth connect flows from urban fabric and lift the towers slightly off ground. Being a miniature of downtown Los Angeles skyscrapers, it poses itself as a scene in the neighbourhood.

KOMOREBI COURTYARD

Design Studio

Fall 2021 DS 1040: Position

Instructor: Tom Wiscombe

Partner: Khanh Nguyen

Located in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, this project embodies a vertical courtyard in and under a massive raised volumn which mimics the adjacent iconic restaurant street. Patterned shaders carrying solar panels, into the courtyard, letting in komorebi, or sunlight streaming through the trees.

ROOFSCAPE:

Crossing Screens

Design Studio

Spring 2021 Assemblies II DS 1031

Instructor: Maxi Spina

The project means to provide an enclave campus partially packed with rental spaces for the GFS, a film school for disadvantaged teenagers. Taking advantage of the low requirements for natural lighting, a canopy of three interconneting and intersecting Dutch Gable Roofs coheres with the neighbourhood as well as unifies masses.

SHELTER:

Smooth and Pointy Applied Studies

Spring 2022

AS 2583: CATIA Engines of Creation

BEDROOM OFFICE

SHELL

Instructor: Kerenza Harris

Partner: Nandar Thu

Fall 2020 AS 3033: tectonics

Instructors: Randy Jefferson & Maxi Spina

Team: Siyu You, Yun Tung Liu, Shuo Chieh Ho

This precedent study focused on unpacking facade systems. Detailed drawings show components making up the systems. To advance understanding of the facades, tectonic system of one existing facade was adopted to another one regarding its formal qualities.

Spring 2022

AS 3041: Construction Documents

Instructors: Pavel & Kerenza Harris

Team: Yoko Chan, Tsingofatso Dintsi, Nandar Thu, Francesca Ushindi

This project focuses on creating a vibrant community center and office spaces for a less developed neighbourhood in Los Angeles Downtown. Overscaled stairs creating semi-wrapped courtyards on every storey. Construction details were developed to bring the design into real life.

GARDEN OF GAMES

Design Studio

Spring 2020

Objects to World: Ground and Apertures II DS 1021

Instructor: Casey

Partner:

Ji In Jeong

Rehm

Watch video: http://vimeo.com/showcase/2ds20

Inspired by inaccessible landscapes backgrounds in games, the project generates an overwhelming vertical garden into an esports arena locates in Downtown Los Angeles. Imaginary architecture of Piranesi developed from precedent studies bounds spaces, displays the greenery, and curates how public and game-lovers experience access, games, and events. Color pixels extracted from the site create lively, vivid, floewry effects, adding to the impression of a garden.

Visual Studies IN, ON, AND ABOVE

Fall 2020 Visual Studies: Diagraming architecture

Instructor:

Andrew Zago

Partner: Jiaxin Zhao

This precedent study focuses on the relationship between the building and the ground. By putting precedents into three different categories, an understanding of continuity is developed and later employed to produce the artificial image of a mixed ground condition.

POETIC IMAGERY

Visual Studies

Fall 2020

Visual Studies: Beyond the Digital VS 2659

This visual studies seminar focused on image-making including photography, posters, and videos. By collecting and manipulating images from everyday life contents such as a garlic or a glance to the street, as well as architectural photos of well-known projects, we made an indirect path to the essence of the contents, rendering a poetic ambience. In this poetic world of images, clues are scattered to be found, information given but hidden behind veils, and beauty yet to be felt.

Instructor: Coy Howard

MOMENTS: Glimpses of Rooms and Spaces

Design Studio

Fall 2019

Objects to World: Ground and Apertures I DS 1020

Instructor: Alexis Rochas

Watch interactive video: https://ymzhang2776.wixsite.com/19fa

This project uses video footages to demonstrate the practise of plan-to-section transition. The building section or cut, as a mechanism, visualizes, alters, reveals, and ultimately designs an architectural intervention, for an otherwise interior-based program. The culture of the workplace is reimageind through narratives told in the form of animated images.

Fall 2019

This short assignment delivered a foldable bristol model and a stop motion animation documenting the folding and unfolding process. The texture map printed on the inner sides of the model derived from a plan of the Seagram Building.

Team: Ji In Jeong, Ling-Chieh Chuang

Design Studio

Spring 2019

Object: Mass and Interiority II DS 1011

Instructor: David Freeland

The project started as a cabinet of curiosities, a container for a series of objects. It then scaled into a single family house with a “plus“. A homeschool was added to the residential spaces. Two different sets of spaces with different uses stick to each other, sharing one coherent form, but have individual entrances. Rooms intentionally avoid direct contact to the rest of the project to insure privacy. Aggresive vertical circulation strengthens the privacy as well as holding scattered spaces into a whole.

MIXED COLLECTION

Design Studio

Fall 2018

Object: Mass and Interiority I DS 1010

Instructor: Betty Kasis

This project is a collection of heterogeneous objects with shared formal qualities. The collection then expands by producing hybrid objects from the original collection. The extension of the collection varies from photography, digital scans, interpreted digital model, and reproduction of physical models.