Salt Gallery Visitor Center for Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty

May 9, 2017

Mission 66 was a government initiative started in 1956 to drastically expand the number of visitor centers in National Park in the United States by 1966. In the decade long program, the initiative funded and built hundreds of visitor centers.

The Land Art movement began in the late 1960s as a way for artists to escape from the white cube and the commercialization of art. Earthworks artists wandered into the deserts of the Midwest to build monumental artworks away from the art scene to be discovered by solitary travelers. Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, locate in the Great Salt Lake, UT, is the poster child of this movement. However, the past 50 years saw dramatic changes to this art movement. Earthworks artists who are still practicing, like James Turrell and Michael Heizer, turned to building Land Art pieces that double as luxury destinations, often charging thousands of dollars per visit. The few works that remain free to the public are swamped by tourists, behaving like a second set of National Parks in need of their own visitor centers. This project takes on the mantel of designing a visitor center for Smithson’s Spiral Jetty.

Four regional paths—Marsh, Land, Water, and Mountain—converge at the visitor center, which sits in the Great Salt Lake 2,500 FT from Spiral Jetty. Each face of the building is designed to receive visitors arriving from each of the paths. Mountain to the north, Land to the east, Marsh on the south, and Water to the west.

The visitor center has four levels that each corresponds with one of the four regional paths. Vertical circulation is absent from the building. Instead, the rising and falling water level grants access to the different floors. For example, visitors arriving from the Marsh Path can only access the first floor because the Marsh Path inhabits the lowest elevation. When the water level rises enough for visitors to use the Water Path, it also becomes high enough for visitors to sail to the third floor of the visitor center.

The program of each floor relates to its associated path. The first level comprises of a stone installation of the same materials Smithson used to construct the Spiral Jetty. The second level displays informational material regarding the Spiral Jetty, the visitor center, and of this project as a whole. The third floor houses a series of basins of varying heights that fill with water to micro-changes of lake levels. The fourth level operates as an observation deck that provides a better view of the surrounding landscape.

When the Spiral Jetty emerged from the water in 2005, a layer of salt crystals had enveloped the art work. Due to the high concentration of salt in the lake (about 10x that of the ocean), salt crystallization of this form is unique to this lake. Much like the Jetty, the façade of the visitor center is designed to anticipate salt crystal formation where concrete forms the skeleton of the building while salt accumulate to form the walls.

Level 1 sees the most flooding, so its façade supports smaller apertures to maximize salt formation. The informational display on Level 2 requires more natural light for legibility, so the aperture is bigger. The openings are the largest on Level 4 to allow the most view corridors.

Salt Lake Land Art Pavilions

May 8, 2017

Driving over 3,000 miles to visit eight Land Art pieces spanning the entire Midwest revealed that, in many instances, the Land Art behaved as an excuse to experience the awesome landscape. The Spiral Jetty was no exception. This project takes on the mantel of designing a series of pavilions that map out a pilgrimage to Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and will serve as a barometer for the Great Salt Lake to pay homage to the artwork.

The journey begins at the Salt Lake International Airport located Downtown in Salt Lake City and ends at the visitor center by the Spiral Jetty. The journey responds to the changing water levels of Salt Lake much like the Jetty. It is split into four different paths that takes the visitor through the four different types of geology in the area. Pavilions unique to each path dot the visitors’ journey to enhance their experience.

As the water level of Salt Lake rises and falls, paths become accessible or inaccessible depending on their elevation. For example, the Marsh Path takes visitors through natural bird preserves that become flooded during wet seasons. Likewise, the water path only becomes available when the water level reaches 4,212FT above sea level because the Water Pavilions are only accessible to boats at this elevation.

The Marsh Path weaves through two major bird preserves native to the area. The Marsh Pavilions operate as wildlife observation outposts for birdwatching. The Land Path runs through several major cities along the I-15 and through the Golden Spike National Monument. The Land Pavilions are information centers designed to educate visitors about each milestone. The Water Path takes visitors through Salt Lake itself and passes by several islands along the way. The Water Pavilions are lilypad structures in the lake with surfaces reaching exactly 4,212FT above sea level. Visitors can dock and step onto the lake’s surface. The Mountain Path covers two islands and several mountain ranges leading to the visitor center. The Mountain Pavilions are observatories that tower above the landscape to help visitor position their location and to enhance their viewing experience.

Rotating Gear Wall System

May 7, 2017

Omnidirectional Breeze Block

December 18, 2016

Builders traditionally used breeze blocks as solar, wind, sound, and privacy screens. Cast using concrete or terracotta, breeze blocks proliferated due to their low cost and speedy construction. However, the efficiency that resulted from the use of identical molds and thick rectangular frames also yielded boring and repetitive installations.

Can we design a block that retains the breeze block’s economic, material, and construction efficiency while offering an unpredictable pattern driven by organic stacking?

In theory, a rectangular block has 12 anchor points located at the prism’s vertices, where adjacent blocks touch. As long as each anchor point is designed to receive the pattern from any other point, blocks can be rotated along their x, y, and z axes while still retaining a seamless transition between blocks. This opens up the block itself to be patterned freely.

Navy Yard Community Farm

December 14, 2016

The regional strategy proposes the development of vertical farms, rooftop farms, and traditional farms, as well as markets, food halls, and food labs in areas highlighted in gold. Preexisting dry docks highlighted in red are to be developed into fisheries and oyster farms. These areas sit in the middle of the area most in need of intervention. The area in blue, which already receives the most pedestrian traffic, will be turned into public access path to draw the public into the Navy Yard.

The key architectural intervention in the Brooklyn Navy Yard is the Vertical Farm. In the summer, a building in the Navy Yard will experience a 200° arc of useful light around its southern face. At its highest point, the sun will reach an altitude of 77°above the horizon. Sun path can be used to shape the farming area (blue) per floor of the Vertical Farm, which can then be staggered when stacking to allow solar penetration to all floors throughout the year.

Inside the Vertical Farm, rotating plant racks filled with fruit and vegetables line the exterior of the building in an arc to be exposed to sunlight. Stacked hydroponic racks using more controlled artificial lighting sit behind the rotating racks, offset in rows toward the center of the building. The Vertical Farm is designed to harness the power of a gravity fed watering system, with water flowing from the floors above to the ones below and from one rack to the next.Community spaces like markets, kitchens, labs, and educational areas are located toward the back of the building. The core concept behind the building is the lack of separation between the food production area and the community space. The public is encouraged to engage with the process itself.

Liquid Metal Facade

September 16, 2016

We are charged to design a facade system for the New Lab, next to the New Museum in Manhattan. We chose to employ chainmail due to its resonance with the metal mesh facade of the SANAA building. Its fluidity complimented the experimental and playful nature of the building’s program. Form is derived from manipulations of pulling, pushing, bunching, pinching, and draping.

Collectively Designed Pavilion

May 16, 2016

Tools like the robot arm are not neutral. The tools chosen for design ultimately influence how designers work and what they produce. The relationship between designer and tool is not one of utility, but collaboration.

Innovations in wireless technology has allowed unprecedented forms of communication and collaboration. By channeling this technology, the project creates a pavilion that is the physical manifestation of the collaboration between social, individual, and machine logic.

At the end of 2016, hundreds of professors, graduating students, and parents visited Avery Hall to attend the GSAPP End of the Year Show. We invited visitors to make drawings on a whiteboard, which were read by the UR3 via a webcam. The robot arm then imitated those drawings by depositing layers of diluted wood glue on sawdust. The project collected the inputs of over 20 participants. The hardened sawdust represented the record of human and machine collaboration.

(Bio-me)trick Research Center

May 6, 2016

Must woody organisms die to become construction materials? Long considered sustainable, clearcutting techniques used in timber farming actually causes many environmental issues, including habitat loss, species extinction, raised temperatures, and increased CO2 emissions, among others shown here. Can we alter our fundamental understanding of architecture by designing Living Architecture, exemplified by structures like the Living Root Bridges in India?

Buildings of the future will be grown from genetically engineered seeds, their lifecycles seen in terms of growth, care, and reuse instead of construction, maintenance, and demolition. Guided by grafting, lighting, and bracing techniques, seedlings will be slowly coerced into architectural components over decades. To take tangible steps toward realizing that future, the site will be divided into two zones: artificial (the reddish) and biological (the green), with the program for the artificial side separating into labs (the purple) and academic spaces (the pink). Artificial zones are dedicated to material research, while biological ones become ecological testing grounds for growing experimental materials like twisted bamboo and living wall systems.

Generative design using Grasshopper will optimize site planning for maximum contact between the two halves. Here you see the site iterating through various configurations, with each new iteration scoring higher than the last, from 293 pts to 449 pts. Buildings on site will utilize laminated timber structure, mycelium insulation, bamboo finishing, and deadwood facades made from salvaged wood. Plants will be grafted onto the deadwood using Phoenix Grafting techniques to test how they behave as architectural components in real site conditions. Laboratories with higher ceilings require mature deadwood with more girth, which can consequently host larger trees for grafting, while the shorter academic buildings can host smaller plant species. In the biome, more plant species are tested for their potential to become living building materials, where unpromising species are replaced by favorable ones over time.

Avian Ecological Gray Water Treatment Park

May 6, 2016

Far Rockaway has been identified by the Audubon Society as part of a critical ecological thoroughfare called the Atlantic Flyway, which hosts millions of birds migrating from as far as Canada to South America. It’s disappearing. As intensifying storms and rising ocean levels erode its shoreline, both animal and human populations suffer from waters and soils polluted by unsustainable energy and urban waste systems. The island shelters several species of endangered shorebirds whose populations plummeted due to human encroachment on their habitat and food sources. Correspondingly, people endure conditions like wastewater runoffs from infrastructural plants, flight noise pollution from JFK, street flooding from poor storm drainage, and damaged homes from Hurricane Sandy.

A system of intervention that mutually benefits the damaged human and natural worlds must be implemented. To this end, the Arverne Avian Ecological Gray Water Treatment Park is a center for learning, research, and environmental management that will revitalize habitat for endangered bird populations and re-connect the academic network of New York City to its natural systems and human consequences. The Avian Park achieves these goals by transforming the fence around the ecological preserve into a strip of raised park that collects and processes wastewater through bioswales and facultative lagoons, while providing a safe vantage point for the local population to observe these processes and the avian habitat beyond.

Gummyism: Answering the Robot Arm Arms Race

April 30, 2016

In 2013, an ABB robotic arm arrived at Princeton University’s School of Architecture. The Yale School of Architecture soon installed its 5-axis Kuka robot arm. Michigan University’s Taubman College then purchased six 7-axis Kuka robots. In 2014, UCLA’s IDEAS campus opened with two Kuka KR 150s, each boasting the largest carrying capacity of any robots operating on a university campus.

A robotics arms race is underway as the robot arm becomes the new fascination of the profession. But how productive is it for 15 leading experts to spend 6 months preparing a $20,000 robot arm to lay a line of bricks—something that Handy Ted can achieve more quickly and economically?

How can we use a technology like the UR3 6-axis robot arm more productively?
Gummy Bears.

Van Brunt Solar Theater

December 2, 2015

The Van Brunt Theater in Redhook sports a roof garden that simultaneously addresses sustainability, provides entertainment, and buffers against the building’s heat loss and gain. Photo-voltaic panels are installed on the south face of the dome to capture the most sunlight while LED strips are installed on the north face to create a light show visible to the roof bar at night. The soil layers that supports the vegetable garden also insulates the roof against solar radiation.

Wrapper Baugruppen

September 8, 2015

The Baugruppen building is composed of work space, live space, and buffer space. Light manufacturing programs like maker spaces and exhibition spaces stand at the core of each building, to be leased to businesses. A wrapper of housing surrounding the core offers the local community affordable rents, made possible by their minimalist design. Housing units provide little common and kitchen space, instead dedicating most square footage to areas of privacy, like bedrooms and bathrooms.

Areas connecting manufacturing to housing act as transitional space and sound buffer. They contain public programs outsourced from the residential units; community kitchens, libraries, gyms, common areas, and circulation paths are shared between workers and residents, their interaction leading to collaborative opportunities with mutual benefits. By combining work and live, some of the upside from the businesses can be directed to building and maintaining common areas that would otherwise make units expensive for residents.

Boulevard Bank

March 8, 2015

How can a bank stimulate the local community? A land development bank typically purchases land around New York to lease for profit. What if it leases its internal organs to the local community instead?

The Boulevard Bank takes after a busy street lined by small businesses that rotates into itself and rises vertically. An orthogonal, ten-by-twenty structural grid system—organized around a central void—supports the setup by limiting shear forces. A spiraling interior ramp provides upward circulation from the basement level, up five storeys, to the roof garden, while a parallel exterior ramp allows for downward circulation. Between the two ramps, inserted into the grid system are rooms of varying sizes that the bank leases as temporary spaces for community events like art shows, yard sales, and small business operations. The bank aims to stimulate interpersonal communication by creating a diverse, ad-hock marketplace of ideas and events that simultaneously serve as an attraction and a venue for local cultural and business endeavors.

Ant Farm Model: Redesigning KAIT Studio Interior

December 14, 2014

Junya Ishigami aims for his KAIT Studio to behave not as a box but as an environment, and takes design inspirations from nature to do so, but his surveillance footage shows that the occupants eventually fell into a predictable circulation and the building essentially returns to its role as the container. This is because unlike an ecosystem where the “occupants” and the “architecture” mold each other, Ishigami’s building has a dominating influence on its mostly passive occupants. To allow the building to behave as intended by Ishigami’s original concept, I was charged to redesign the building’s intricate interior.

If one wants to design a morphing environment, then why keep to static representation? I propose that a dynamic—even biological—model can inspire a dynamic and biological building. I reconstructed Ishigami’s building as an ant farm, and studied the ants’ circulation as they tunneled through the sand. The acrylic model and its many columns influenced the ant’s excavation while the ants carved and designed their environment. The architecture changed every day.

Driven by the biological model and the ants’ evolving circulation, I determined that a permanent interactive fabric installation would give users the opportunity to shape their environment. Taking advantage of the 305 columns signature to the KAIT Studio, the fabric walls would be anchored to the pillars at varying heights. The building would influence the arrangement of these walls, but the inhabitants would ultimately choose the specific setup, which would then shape their circulation. In this way, the architecture and users would build a bidirectional ecosystem.

Canyon Pool

December 10, 2014

A canyon—a distorted surface that bends around a climber—creates seemingly interior spaces that still remain exterior. The notion of “in” and “out” is replaced with that of “through”. Two landscapes arranged in a roof and floor composition encourage park-like access for people from all economic groups. A dual entrance setup allows users to fluidly navigate over, under, and through the space.

The roof level houses the recreation, kid’s, lap, and dive pools while the ground level the supporting programs, including concert areas, dining areas, showers, and saunas. Free membership for local residents paired with a public park-like design to encourage tourism allows the interaction between high and low income users. In the context of the pool, the materialistic descriptor “rich” and “poor” fades with the shedding of clothes. Pools are held on the roof level by structural fabrics draped over a steel girder grid system, so that water and “container” can mold each other’s shape. Movements in the water and noise from below oscillate the membrane, and the pool becomes the skin that communicates between levels, thereby breaking the rigidity of the barrier that normally separates the levels and programs within a building.

Blankets From Our Childhood

December 13, 2013

Blankets From Our Childhoods was a team project undertaken by 12 students. I led the development of the concept, assisted in preparing the installation, and acted as one of three photographers. Inspired by our realization that the class composed of international students, we decided to express our diversity in a manner that also honored our cultures.

Students draped their blankets from clotheslines that we hung in the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning’s main office, Sibley Hall. Apartments flanking narrow neighborhood paths that crisscrossed with clotheslines drooping with the weight of drying laundry seemed a common feature in the cities of developing countries like India, Mexico, and China. Blankets also projected an intimacy that was reminiscent of childhood because their durability kept them functional for decades. Many students, including me, immigrated to North America at a young age, so these blankets were time capsules from our childhoods. Our display in our new Cornell home was a reminder of our past and a tribute to our heritage.

长江万里图 (Yangtze River Ten Thousand Kilometer Painting)

February 27, 2013

I was born in Tianjin, a soon-to-be Chinese metropolis still in its slum-like infancy. My uncle often recounted stories about Zhang Daqian, a master painter renowned for the morphing brushwork in his paintings of the Chinese mountains. His most accomplished piece was titled长江万里图.

The Yangtze River was the birthplace of Chinese civilization. In 1968, Zhang Daqian sketched the shouldering mountains as he sailed down the river. He later translated his drawings into a 22”x787” assemblage of continuous landscape.

The decade surrounding the creation of the painting was a time of great change in China. As a result of Mao’s Great Leap Forward in 1958, China faced starvation. 1962 marked the start of the China-India War. In 1965, Mao began the Cultural Revolution, a campaign to purge the nation of old customs and ideas. Amidst the chaos, Zhang Daqian found that the country he knew since birth had disappeared. His journey and subsequent painting were his way of getting in touch with his roots.

China again faced similar struggles. In her ruthless pursuit to outpace America, China willingly sacrificed culture and history. As a continuation of the demolition of the 530-year-old Beijing city wall in 1965 to make room for subways, the destruction of over 1600 historic houses granted space for highway expansions in preparation for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The China I grew up in was nonexistent. I felt that it was ripe time to create another长江万里图.

Like my predecessors, I decided to make an image using techniques relevant to my time. In an age when tourists traveled digitally on Google Maps before leaving for vacation, when politicians demolished neighborhoods with phone calls, and when life was distanced from reality, the contemporary equivalent of sailing down the Yangtze River was creating a digital tour on Google Earth. I assembled the image of the river using sections that were devastated by the flood instigated by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. I also left the right panel unblended to suggest the vicious geopolitics governing the river. Finally, the arced shape gave the illusion of immersion while the satellite perspective continued to distance the viewers from the experience. 长江万里图 was both a contemporary fantasy that paid tribute to a great tradition and a critique of the current state of China.

Feeling Remember

September 23, 2012

Feeling Remember

Take a whiff

of Berkshire Bakery’s raisin baguettes as

you hug the bread bag

to parcel out a mintage Wisconsin quarter

from the change.

Memory settles in olfaction.

Inhale deeply—it’ll resurface.

You’ll recall the buttery aroma of

palmfruit oil, the dull-sweet

of leavened sourdough, the crispy cackle of

maple ovens, the wide grin, the

emphatic “Yes!”

Catching the

sour-sweet of autumn rain below

doughy cumulonimbi, you’ll have

suddenly felt an

inspiration of remember—

maybe the damp pine of your

childhood Housatonic attic or a word on the

tip of your tongue,

but (23 years) you’ll have forgotten. What

endures is the feel of remembering.

Reconstructing Utopia: New Orleans

May 3, 2012

New Orleans had been heralded as the most unique city in America. The largest city in Louisiana and a major United States port, it was known for its multicultural demographic, celebrated for its diverse culinary arts, valued for its pioneering Jazz music, visited for its lively festivals, praised for its French Creole architecture, and respected for its resolute people.

When Hurricane Katrina assailed the Gulf Coast in 2005, water inundated more than 80% of the city and killed over 1500 people. This artwork paid tribute to the tireless restoration efforts.

The project must extend beyond being a self-contained miniature model for it to resonate with the actual event. To achieve this goal, I constructed the model using a process that mirrored the real restoration, with its materials comprising of scrap wood and discarded artworks. Because recycling was a crucial component of the reconstruction, appropriating found objects linked the creation of the model to the restoration. Capitalizing on the photographic process, I also aimed to blur the sense of scale and to imply a space that transcended the feel of a miniature. I shot from a low angle perspective and lit the model using lighting that imitated the changing color temperatures of the day—specifically dawn and twilight—to remove the setup from the studio and place it in the natural environment. Furthermore, I designed the model and arranged the lighting to cast shadows that conveyed symbolisms hinting at the spirituality of New Orleanians. The cross shaped shadow against the backdrop illustrated their unwavering faith while the triangular shadow below the support platform elevated the structure, creating a visual ascension. The result portrayed an abstract landscape that resembled a floating half-constructed utopian city.

Gruesome

April 9, 2012

The fairy tales popularized by Disney were such happy narratives, but I fancied the sinister gems that inspired these modern counterfeits. In these earlier vocal stories, Little Red cannibalized Grandma alongside the Wolf before being devoured, Sleeping Beauty was raped and impregnated by the Prince while in her coma, and Repunzel was seduced by an adulterous and uxoricidal king.

This matter-of-fact violence could not be captured by representation, but instead only by essence. In these photographs, mood dominated role-play. “At Grandma’s” projected a predatory essence before revealing the narrative. “In Beauty’s Bedroom” gave the atmosphere of a musty brothel. “Below the Tower” suggested a larger, sinister environment before identifying the characters. Because the materials were not direct representations (toy soldier representing the Prince), the photographs became mercurial and spoke about many scenarios simultaneously. The use of found objects provided a familiarity that, in the context of the lighting and scene, was at once difficult to place and strangely appropriate, because they were chosen for their material properties and history. For example, the “wolf” was crumpled sandpaper, which was materialistically rough, harsh, and associated with eating into wood. Similarly, the “Prince” was a used moldy sponge and the “king” was literally a tool. Although it usually took two images to tell a narrative, these single photographs conveyed a backstory—a cause that led up to these situations—because they were not locked down by strict representation and were free to imply a bigger world with separate inner workings.