Apply for UCL Architecture Design-Zijun Wan

Human interaction, it is an important and complex theme in architecture and space design. Actually, its complexity result from the almost infinite number of signals which we process and 'read' — signals which influence our response or behaviour, which then again influence others, who in turn influence us. However, we know little about how the nature of space influences or encourages social and spatial transactions.

Due to my dynamic design background and my interest in this topic, I often start my project with caring about people's mind and their bodies, as well as their relationship with space and technology. In this way, a magic-realism quality has been rooted in my mind, which shows in those strange but poetic ideas appeared in my design proposals. At the time I also think questions about domesticity,tradition, structure, scale, nature, virtualizaion and so on.

In this portfolio I would like to express my critical points of view in context through texts, sketches, drawings, renderings and diagrams.Besides those main projects, my other works are extensions to this theme, that continue to express my ideas in various fields and from different perspectives

01 EVERYDAY MEMORIAL

Ancenstral Hall Complex in Changhe Town

CAUP 2020 fall Studio

Instructor: Wang Kai, Wang Hongjun, Liu Kenan

Site: Hangzhou, Bingjiang District

Building Area: 2,000 m²

Team: Individual Work, 8 weeks

Changhe Town is a degraded place that used to be developed and gave birth to many talented people in Old China. To revive the area, an ancestral Hall complex is designed for local villagers, providing a place for relaxation and recreation, and making it a modern memorial for the town.

The concept is further developed from decentralized memorial pavilions and traditional space prototypes. Each pavilion doesn't belong to a specific historical line — it has its locality and corresponds to the surrounding environment and people's behaviors. The design also releases my attention to the site by carefully handling the relationship between the area and space and using proper materials and construction methods.

The small pavilions list on the facade facing the lake, and the twofloor one breaks through the pitched roof, forming an exciting order. The different direction of the tops shows a sense of balance. The small pavilions list on the facade facing the lake, and the two-floor one breaks through the pitched roof, forming an exciting order.

SITE ANALYSIS

Changhe Town is located in Bingjiang District, Hang Zhou. With the development of urbanization, the town has become degraded, and it is now just beside the Caihong Flyover. Due to ongoing urban construction, many cities are shrunk and degraded, such as Changhe in Hangzhou. Traditional urban patterns based on water are broken, and new patterns are forming.

HISTORICAL CHANGES

Changhe town's history is scatted because it was first taken by people from north China and combined with local culture. Then it was eroded and destroyed by "the Taiping rebellion," "the Great Cultural Revolution," and modern urban construction. Therefore, I use pavilions to load these historical memories and let them interact with the people around them.

GENERATING PROCESS

As the traditional ancestral hall layout pattern is not helpful because people's behaviors and conventions are changing, I combine three functions(ancestral hall, museum, and activity center), forming a new complex. It means that I should balance spirituality and routinization.

PROGRESSIVE SEQUENCE

RELATION AMONG PAVILIONS, OBJECTS &

There are various ways of placement for exhibited items in these pavillions: hanging, inserting, putting, lying, and so on. However, furnitures are filled into the gap between pavilions, which builds relationships between people's behaviors on these furnitures and exhibited items in these pavilions.

ARCHITECTURE PROTOTYPE

As the main function of the ancestral hall, its spatial layout meets the requirements of the contemporary sacrificial function. All the family members go in from the front hall through the ceremony door formed by the portraits of ancestors and go into the 'Xiangtang' to gather for a public ceremony, during which the leader has to incense three times before the incense table.

Qian Yuan

"Qian Yuan" means the front courtyard. It is preparing space for crossing the main door to enter the "Xiang Tang."

Xiang Tang

"Xiang Tang" is the main space for the ceremony. The leader stands at the platform while others sit on a chair below.

Hou Qing

"Hou Qing" is the space for placing the memorial tablet. After the ceremony, the leader walks upstairs and enters the room to offer incense.

DETAILS

"The roof of the building is elaborately connected with the pavilions below by using special components, creating a curious spatial composition in the grey space under the roof. The high and low pavilions form a new order as people walk outside along the building.

03 KISS ABOVE SIPING ROAD

Student Center of Tongji University

Instructor: Wang Fangji, Zhang Ting, Zhang zhun

Site: Shanghai, Yangpu District

Building Area: 5,000 m²

Team: Wan Zijun, Xiao Lijun, Wu Xiran, Tang Xicheng

Group Work, 8 weeks

Like many Universities in Densely packed urban areas, some buildings are constructed outside the enclosure because of the lack of land. Therefore, the new student center tries to stitch the boundary that the Siping Road has torn.

During the design process, a structural symbol, a "kiss," came up and finally became the core concept of our building. The lightweight bridge comes across the road and kisses the building opposite. For the main building, we create various informal and formal spaces for students to ensure building areas are well used daily. Besides, the podium building is twisted for the need of citizens, creating a chance for recreation and communication. It is just like a wall but a soft and transparent one. Faculties and students have activities on the one side while citizens play and have fun on the other. A hided pathway from the plaza allows citizens for subtle views into the building.

The bridge structure design is learned from Tung-yen Lin's "The RuckA-Chuchy Bridge" scheme. Many steel cables constitute the hyperboloid cable surface, whose tension replaced the bridge pier. Therefore it can reach a large span. The body of the bridge is very distinctive. It is an arc with a radius of 457.2m with a hinge point in the middle of the span.

SPLIT ON BOTH SIDES

From the urban perspective, the Siping Road is a boring road with wide traffic ways, many ongoing constructions, and little public space for citizens. However, there is increasing demand for activities and their spaces for residents nearby; From the campus perspective, the condition is a little different. It has an abandoned boundary with several small buildings and a hidden passage opposite the road. Besides, it is a playground with energetic students

DYNAMIC FACADE

Starting from Shanghai's sub-center(The Pentagonal Field), the Siping Road could be more dynamic on the facade. Familiar houses and public buildings(especially commerce buildings) are arranged at intervals, which makes the road very boring. The old campus and new campus are divided by the road and inserted into two facades as plug-ins.

CAMPUS & URBAN

EXPLOSIVE VIEW

From the urban perspective, It is so interesting that the form of it is very similar to the shape of a bird seen from the road, which results in a strange but rational aesthetic balance between heavy building and light bridge.On the other side, the weight of the building acts as a robust anchor structure that can balance the bridge's load. Moreover, a membrane roof is designed to cover a large space.

Bridge

"You found himself in front of a mountain with a small opening from which a light loomed." And then you pass it to the other side.

Main Hall

The main hall is a large and multi-functional stair without many boundaries. You can sit at the lower level to watch a performance, or you can regard it as a passing corridor; Besides, you can even sit at a higher level for self-studying.

Underground Parking

The original underground parking entrance remains. The entrance of two sides, the left, and the right avoid this entrance and be split. This strategy turns this barrier into an advantage.

Study Room

The study room is skinny and transparent. It is twisted as a bow to form a facade at the urban side and a watching screen facing the main hall.

02 CRYPTO SALVADOR DYSTOPIA

A National Tube - Controlled Congress Narrative

Instructor: Yan Yu

Site: Conchagua Volcano, El Salvador Building Scale: 100,000 m²

Team: Wan Zijun, Jiang Shangyou Group Work, 6 weeks

My Role: Concept Design, Diagram Drawing, Manga Drawing, Collage Drawing, Technical Support(Crypto), Modeling

The narrative project was inspired by El Salvador's announcement that Bitcoin would be used for cryptocurrency as a legal coin, including a plan to build a "Bitcoin City" at the Conchagua Volcano. President Nayib Bukele even ordered the military to break into the parliament to achieve the goal. The gamble, however, has become crumbling because of the recent collapse of bitcoin.

In this design, "tube" is the core concept and form element. On the one hand, it is used as a media cybernetics for financial control; on the other hand, the tube is a financially hacked "tripartite" political system metaphor. Moreover, the news is transferred to spaces, illustrating the relationship between cryptocurrency, power, architecture, and citizens' living conditions.

El Salvador, known as the murder capital, has the highest murder rate in the world, with a population of more than 6 million, of which more than 1 million are gang members, and the number of troops is only 40,000. It is one of the "low- and middle-income countries" worldwide, with a total GDP of less than 70 billion US dollars.

PHILOSOPHICAL PRINCIPALS

COUNTRY PROFILE OF EL SALVADOR

Virilio developed the "war model" of the modern city and human society in general and is the inventor of the term 'dromology,' meaning the logic of speed that is the foundation of technological society. For Virilio, information technology and technologies of vision, such as cinema and photography, making possible that war can quite easily be continued in periods of peace.

camera gun in bunker

Contemporary accelerationists, such as Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, critique capitalism from Western Marxism's perspective. For accelerationism, it is significant to accelerate the machine of contemporary capital till its collapse. Capitalism has begun to constrain the productive forces of technology, or at least direct them toward needlessly narrow ends.

HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF POWER, MONEY AND ARCHITECTURE

Desires of Capitalists

El Salvador's domestic terrain is dominated by mountains and plateaus, with many volcanoes. It is known as the "country of volcanoes." The active volcano of Santa Ana in the territory is 2385 meters above sea level, the highest peak in the country. The Mayan Indians initially inhabited the El Salvador region. It became a Spanish colony in 1524, and the buildings have Spanish architecture characteristics. Now this country implements a representative democratic republic with the separation of powers.

WORLDVIEW SETTINGS

Paul Virilio (1932 — 2018)

Nick Srnicek (1982 — )

DANCING WITH TUBES

ARCHITECTURE CONCEPT & DESIGN STRATEGY

While separation of powers is one of the representative paradigms of governance in modern countries, the idea promoted by blockchain is to make power decentralized to a higher degree, putting it in the hands of each voter.

However, the so-called "Bitcoin fetishism" established by El Salvador's president places Bitcoin above all three powers (legislative/executive/judicial power), making it become the ultimate symbol of power.

Whether it's the Acropolis or the Athena Temple, when people perform rituals, they always circle around the sacred objects counterclockwise before entering the core space. This congress plays as a scared one, while citizens come here to walk around and pass all those puzzles.

A Suzhou International Design Week Exhibited Work

Instructor: Wang Fangji, Wang Bing, Fan Beilei

Site: Shanghai Old City Area

Team: Wan Zijun (Project Leader), Ding Kaiyi, Liu yunfan, Huang Lianhan Group Work, 4 weeks

My Role: Concept Design, Installation Design, Making Solid Models, Layout Design, Exhibiting Team: Individual Work, 8 weeks

The site is located in the Sanqingli area in Shanghai old city area, where there have many kinds of windows along the street. By visiting this place and its surroundings, we found the special form of windows along the lane and recorded fifty windows of them on the first floor. Through research, a phenomenon was spotted that due to the living conditions along the street, most of those windows were blocked with a piece of baffle or cloth to protect their privacy. Other windows were equipped with anti-mosquito nets, or used for stacking sundries and hanging clothes.

Theofore through analysing these windows,we found that most of the them were equipped with horizontal plates to protect the privacy of indoors from pedestrians passing through the streets.We want to design a mechine that can be installed on most of the windows: anti-theft, sheltering, anti-mosquito and etc. This can be realised by optimizing the security net, setting up integrated hanger, and providing useful plugin.

SITE SITUATION SURVEY

Shanghai old city area is where Shanghai began as a fishing village in the 13th Century, and it retains some of the City's oldest neighborhoods inside the former wall boundary. In 1912, the wall of this place was dismantled because of English and French concession's expansion.

Among the surveyed Windows, 16.7% are horizontal rectangular Windows 1600*1000, 20.8% are square Windows 900*900, and 62.5% are vertical rectangular Windows 800*1000

INSPIRATION FROM LOCALS

Due to the setting of wooden boards with 300-400mm's heigth, people's view are blocked and restricted by these boards, and other elements such as sound, lighting, ventilation and so on. Actually, it is very hard and uncomfortable to use these windows in old city area, because on the one hand, they need to block these windows to protect their own privacy, but on the other hand there is a demand for ventilation, lighting and other basic functional needs.

Kitchen

Most of those kitchens have limited space for storaging. Some residents set up planks for stacking sundries but difficult to use because of unsuitable scale.

Bedroom

Many bedrooms here are very dark and usually use as dinning room as well, so they usually put their beds directly against the wall to get more lighting and ventilation.between roads and factories.

Living Room

In addition to the bed besides the window, another way is put dinning table, but this approach usually cause inconvenience of opening the window.

活轴插件

FABRICATED PLUG-IN

FOUR-BAR ROTATING MACHINE

四杆摇机

For the kitchen, it hardly needs the function of antithefting and keeping privacy, so the most important spot is the storage function.

Therefore, we provide removeable horizontal planks and shelving accessories with hooks to provide more stacking space. Users can set up according to their needs.

活轴插件

Fabricated Plug-in

Fabricated Plug-in 11

对于厨房来说，防盗与这挡隐私需求 相对较弱，更重要的是储物功能。

因此我们提供可以拆卸的横向隔板以 及含有挂钩的置物架配件以提供更多 的置物空间、使用者可根据实际需求 自主装配。

Four-bar Rotating Machine

The bedroom is the most intimate place, for it the most important need is to protect users' privacy and also satisfy other needs.

Therefore we designed a foldable sheet metal device, it can be stacked with many sundries and also can be folded to keep privacy. Meanwhile, to match other function, we also set up a hanger at the bottom of the canopy, which makes it convenient for temporarily hanging for drying.

四杆摇机

Four-bar Rotating Machine

6

卧室是最私密的地方，最重要的是能够满 足隐私遮挡功能的同时还不能够影响卧室 的采光和通风。

因此我们设计了可翻折的金属板配件，一 方面可以堆置少量杂物、另一方面可以翻 折起来遮挡屋内隐私。同时，为配合卧室 功能，我们还在雨棚底部设置了小型挂衣 杆件，便于临时性的替换衣物晾晒。

FINAL OUTPUT & EXHIBITION

折叠转板

FOLDING ROTATABLE BOARD

Folding Rotatable Board

Our final output, the window studies and community renewal design of shanghai old city area, was funded to make a solid model and showned in Suzhou International Exhibition.

EXODUSOLARISM

Walking Cities in Light

Tutor: Yanyu, Zhang Xiaomeng

Team: Wan Zijun, Zongrui Chai Di Li, Ying xuan Liu, Rulin Ye, Haitian Xie, Zheyuan Lu, Yizhuo Zhang ,4 weeks

My Role: Concept and Architecture Design,Construction, Poster

The installation works take "Exodus" as the background and present the story of human beings escaping to a better sun and earth due to the expansion and collapse of the sun. Taking the "environmental control" of Banham's air-conditioning as the method, human beings' development becomes the inside of the environmental bubble, and the earth is contradictory to become a "leaky refrigerator" that humans have failed to cool and control. The exhibition speculatively unfolds the spatial narrative of the "internal" and "external" control of the global environment.

LOVE & DEATH BAR

MyStudio Built Work: MUA 2049 Art Museum and Bar

Site: Decentraland, (17,-17)

Team: Wanzijun(Project Leader), Tianyang Zhang, 3 weeks

My Role: Concept and Architecture Design, Presentation, Activity Planning

This project was first designed in an international competition held by MUA DAO, an organization for metaverse architects. At the end of September, it was constructed around the central plaza in decentral to support an important event called "MUA2049". This building was filled with sponsors' advertisements, and thousands of people worldwide came here to dance and visit this building. Our team also designed some clothing and accessories for visitors to use.

100 METERS' EXPANSION

A Environment-Invented Installation in a corridor

Instructor: Guo Cheng, Zheng Kangyi

Site: Shanghai, Tongji, Design & Innovation Institute

Team: Wan Zijun(Team Leader),Wang Tianhe, Zhao Ruiyi, 4 weeks

My Role: Concept Design, Installation Construction, Drawing, Presentation

"Expansion" was made of a single piece of cloth(100 meters) to follow the rule that the whole installation could be put in a suitcase to travel by airplane. It was installed in a negative corridor that led to the toilet. Here, there is no distinction between inside and outside, as well as up and down. Several chairs were also put in this space for people to rest and enjoy the wind from the window.

TWO POINT, ONE LINE

Competitive Installation in Subway: A Revolt Against the Monotony of Our Life

Instructor: Zhu Shikun

Site: Tate Modern, The Turbine Hall

Team: Individual Work, 4 weeks

Building Area: Alterable

Subway plays an important role in public life in China's big cities, and people repeat their daily routines between the place of living and the place of work. In the compartment of the subway, passengers gather together, but in a state of isolation from each other, with doing their own things. So I try to change the subway to a competitive game installation, which can be regarded as a reflection, thus a revolt against the monotony of our life. In addition to the subway installation, multiple forms of games are introduced into each compartment to allow visitors to have various interactions with the installation, games and space.