0 Xiaoxi Chen Portfolio

XX portfolio

single family home chattahoochee kayak center public smoking space la prison prêt-à-porter

Single Family Home Atlanta, Georgia 5064 sq ft Working with Hedgewood Homes, a block development proposal accommodates a park, condominiums with mixed retail, townhouses, and single-family houses in Mechanicsville, Atlanta to attract and stimulate growth and to dilute the concentration of poverty in the neighborhood. Taking advantage of Atlanta’s temperate climate of extended springs and autumns, the proposal integrates livable green space into the individual homes and community. The park becomes the public gathering space to service impoverished neighborhood. Driveways typically in front of houses are moved to the back to privilege a pedestrianfriendly front with wide sidewalks lined with green space. Views from the houses are directed toward the central green for a community security watch. The single-family house is composed of a formal shear to provide maximum defined lot usage of interlocking covered and uncovered spaces. The shear creates a public front yard and private back yard that are treated like exterior green open-air living rooms- bound by built elevations to create a sense of courtyardlike enclosure. Transparent floor-to-ceiling windows visually connect the interior to these exterior green rooms, pushing the architectural “wall” to the end of the lot as a trimmed hedge.

conceptual sketch

circulation diagram

highway railroad street public transit pedestrian 10 minute walk

site plan

b

a

ground floor

second floor

section a

section b

Chattahoochee Kayaking Center Roswell, Georgia 12000 sq ft Jutting out on a lush green slope, the kayak nature center bridges the Roswell Town Center down to the Chattahoochee River, acting like a long thin layered viewing screen that frames the human figure in nature. From the river, the chamfered edge is cut away from approaching kayakers floating downstream to give the illusion of an impossibly paper-thin edge. On foot, the existing dirt path cuts through the center of the building, connecting visitors with the lobby. The building anchors into the dramatic slope of the site to carve cave-like spaces in the earth that then extends out into long thin cantilevered viewing decks over the water, like shards of concrete slabs and glass cut into the hill. A continuous circuiting plane of water ties the building with the river- starting as a shallow reflecting pool at the top entrance of the building, folding through as a temperature-regulating water wall, dropping into a testing pool, through another cooling water wall and finally returns to the Chattahoochee via the inset wooden dock. The building juxtaposes the human figure and objects against the extraordinary site. One foot wide lightshelves shade the building on the exterior and extend into the interior for storage. Thus, visitors are suspended in a palimpsest of kayaking paraphernalia, veils of flowing water, and kayaks gliding in the suspended testing pool, all against the verdant kudzu-covered hills.

conceptual model

longitudinal section

axonometric section

Site Plan

Site Plan

Public Smoking Space la Petite Ceinture, Paris 2640 sq meters The ritual of smoking has sparked and fulfilled the eternal need for lingering conversation and intoxication with the self or with others. This urban reuse project proposes a public smoking space that is formed and characterized by its visitors. The petite ceinture along rue Ernest Roche in the 17ème arrondissement is lined by residential buildings and terminates over and under busy intersections from the bridge to the tunnel. The smoking space is a new gathering place to reclaim a banned tradition on the remnants of another, the former railroad. The space resolves changing ground levels. The tracks are held at the current 4.5 meters from below the bridge as a direct and regular path, wrapped by a series of ramps that spirals around it- accommodating two different types of smokers, the undulating dérive for the lingering sensualist and the direct route for those who needs the quickest fix. Ramped paths are perforated to fit modular lamps bought from tabacs. The lamps can be stacked to form totem poles that create an indexical map of clusters of social interactions, recording the natural paths that result from the flow of visitors. Without them, the space is a monumental relic to a disappearing ritual. When inhabited, the light, smoke, and company of its visitors soften and transform the space.

conceptual study

longitudinal section

site entrance

upper ramp

interior of tunnel

la Prison Prêt-à-Porter Paris, France 50 euros Architecture and costume both serve to protect and envelop the body. This design/ build investigates the overlap of tectonics and function between costume and architecture. The wearable tent is to be inhabited in a public space by a dissenter against the privatization of detention centers in the United States. A $65 million complex in Raymondville, Texas, built by the Management and Training Corporation, is rented by the state at $78/bed/night to imprison immigrants waiting deportation on the U.S.Mexican border. Private companies are making enormous profits from post 9/11 xenophobia, rejecting the foundations of American historyworking-class immigrants, raided from their lives and families. The imprisonment of people’s lives should be the very last obligation of a democratic society, never an economic incentive. The costume exposes the simultaneous and paradoxical evils of these corporate tensile windowless prisons- masked yet omnipresent, anonymous yet official, authoritative yet banal, temporary yet impervious, the nonhuman wrapped in human costume, teetering nauseatingly between dominance and submission, between power and helplessness. The costume ultimately investigates the boundary between two types of shelter- a house, which locks from the inside and a prison, which locks from the outside. The construction would be both- one that protects and one that imprisons.

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