Dune Ducts




This installation exploits the effects of imaging to reshuffle landscape, environment, and building systems. A ductscape acts as a prosthetic device for a gallery’s HVAC system. A reshuffling of conventional MEP equipment inserts a vision of air as reflected landscape, amplifying existing systems for tempering and conditioning the architectural exhibition venue.








Perloff Gallery, UCLA AUD, Los Angeles











Dune Ducts draws on desert scenery as already commodified landscapes—widely distributed images of nature that serve as a backdrop to common computing platforms. The image of a duct-as-dune interprets the ceiling as an environment full of labor, design, and perhaps delight, or, at the very least, comfort. It considers the overhead site as a productive plenum for architectural positions.

Fall 2019



Dune Ducts is presented as half of Superposition, a joint exhibition with Katy Barkan installed in the gallery at Perloff Hall in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA. The joint exhibitions share an interest in the threshold between architectural objects and their spatial corollaries, skirting a clear boundary between the production of things and the production of environments. Superposition, as a model of working, does not attempt to resolve or reconcile. Rather, it serves as a counterpoint to the paradigms of synthesis and juxtaposition. The overlay of multiple categories of work and multiple authors allows for errors, transpositions, and irresoluble differences.




Photos by Joshua White

Patch & Fill





The Patch & Fill dwelling materializes overlapping forms of collective living. Over the past year, the demands of working from home (for those fortunate to do so) and households of simultaneous tele-activities posed challenges to the communal occupation of space. Architectural habits like the open floor plan require a constant negotiation of activities. Rather than minimize the negotiations of collective living, this house revels in them. The communal residence navigates the individual within the collective with a fluctuating series of overlays, openings, and boundaries. The overlapping parts and shared social spaces are legible in three distinct material systems: CMU (concrete masonry units), SIPs (structurally insulated panels), and stud frame construction.
With William Lyons

2020






Museums as Climate Policy 




Museums have often served as gatekeepers to collective knowledge, propping up repressive narratives through accumulated assets. The Museum as Climate Policy redefines institutions as a public resource where the nature of content is reassigned to the public.

The Museum as Climate Policy generates thought on climate change and green futures through user documentation and public policy contributions. Rather than conserving objects, this physical and digital museum is a center for documenting and untangling the web of climate impact, understanding the relationship between the individual and the collective. The museum addresses the need for urgent action on climate change by restituating the museum as the center of policy discourse and providing an infrastructure for direct action. 

The museum’s visitors are empowered to recover from climate guilt and doomism, and to instigate change via an exchange of object for knowledge and knowledge to action.

With Libby Ellwood, Hanna Mesraty, and Cheyenne Gurule.

Fall 2020


Drawing In-Painting














Drawing In-Painting is a project about a software. We're calling our software Match-by-Patches. Like the Content Aware tool in Photoshop or Warhol's Paint-by-numbers, it doesn’t introduce entirely new things, it just reshuffles existing content. We thought it fitting to use it for a renovation, in this case, an office. To force some comparisons with this method of working, it could be considered a form of painting. Indeed, the larger field of adjacent techniques and tools is called in-painting. Also known as image interpolation, in-painting is used to reconstruct deteriorated parts of images or to paint-in missing pieces based on surrounding imagery of materials. However, it also bears resemblance to what could be considered drawing. Moving a cursor across a screen to select a region of pixels relies on lines to enclose an area. If imaging can be described as a form of drawing with material, then drawing in-painting might serve to give material some form of coherence according to image logic.

Published in Room One Thousand, Issue 7: Material

Team: Hong Bae Yang and Yiran Chen



10 Casts






Plumbing standards and the protocols of tilt casting are brought together in 10 Casts. Supported by the UCLA Architecture and Urban Design Teaching Fellowship, the exhibition presents the back-side of the wall as a site of coordinated labor, loose material formation, and the internet of concrete. 


10 Casts constructed a one bedroom apartment’s worth of plumbing containing hook ups for a bathroom sink, shower, and toilet and a kitchen sink. Forced to fit in the space of 2426, a gallery for architecture in Los Angeles, the apartment’s walls were distorted around the floor grid of the gallery. Various formats of imaging inform casting and guide the pouring of concrete on tilted formwork: accelerometer readings, standards of plumbing flow rates, properties of thermal expansion, and edge-detecting video feeds of concrete slurry against a snap line grid.

The sensor readings and imaging feeds steer slumping in areas of need and produce void or thinness where a thickened mass was not required. Wifi enabled microprocessors and accelerometers attached to formwork both calibrate tilts and stream live to the web. After installation, the wifi boards streamed independent networks through which visitors could access drawings and instructions, merging the means of construction and dissemination.

Spring 2016