ADR II — Yifei Yuan

Yifei Yuan

The Room As ...

Course: ARCHITECTURAL DRAWING & REPRESENTATION II

Year: SPRING 2021

Instructor: DAN TAEYOUNG
LEXI TSIEN-SHIANG
LORENZO VILLAGGI
VIOLET WHITNEY

Partners: RUONAN DU
NARARYA RADINAL

The Architecture Drawing and Representation II is about thinking and incubating our relationship with drawing, representation, and architecture by considering drawing as a collective practice of worldbuilding. The project starts with an analytical and detailed portrait of my desk as its current state. Here the physical space - my desk - is metaphorically illustrated as the entrance page of a website (Image 1). It shows my desk, chair, laptop, flip flop, and other daily objects positioning as they are around my desk. It is a still life portrait of my daily life. The perspective point of view is what I see in my room and desk everyday. All the objects, organisms, and actors are inter related factors of a network where the desk is placed in the center. It is mapping and highlighting of any entity that depends on the desk itself. To explore more about my desk system, please click the “enter” button at the bottom of the webpage.

1.My Desk Enter Page

2.My Desk Catalogue Page

3.Website Under Construction in Windows 98 Interface

Once you click the “enter” button, you are on the catalogue of contents webpage (Image 2). Here everything is arrayed on the floor in an axonometric order. As drawing is also a system of sorting through its composition, organization, and notation, axonometric order gives a rigid structure to what is always a chaotic situation - my room. It is an imaginary resistance to my not so clean and tidy daily life. Similar objects are segregated and placed close to each other such as “storage zone”, “cosmetics zone”, and “stationary zone” which are all mixed up in the “enter page” (Image 1). The desk is illustrated not only as a piece of furniture but as a self-contained system. The structure of the system can be cataloged based on its content’s purpose and function. This website is also made for selling my used objects - an online platform to reuse and recycle. If you click on the “crack”, it leads you to the sale page, where you can buy my objects listed in the catalogue page at 30% off. The development of web pages in the computer system itself is a worldbuilding behavior. We draw futures that don't exist. We draw, visualize, represent, and render new possibilities, new futures, new kinds of spaces, new imaginations. Here the “enter Page” and “catalogue page” are still under construction in the interface of Windows 98 (Image 3). It is in the process of constructing a new virtual system through another prerequisite operating system.

4.Yifei’s Room - Storage and Selling

5.Joan’s Room - Consumerism

6.Nara’s room - Production

The first three drawings depict my room as a single desk system. The 4th to 7th drawings explain how distinct desk systems combine together to form an ecosystem. Nara, Joan, and Yifei have joined their rooms to co-create a communal 20’x20’x20’ shared workspace (Image 7). The rectilinear 20’x20’x20’ space is divided into 4 quadrants - Nara’s room, Yifei’s room, Joan’s room, and the living room with a circulation courtyard in the center. Architecture representations are a start of a commitment to a social relationship. We combine and synthesize our desk systems into one communal workplace system. While drawing 1 - 3 illustrate the online selling and commercial part of used objects, drawing 4-7 expands the boundary from a single room and virtual platform to the entire second hand products business and industry with a focus point on the life cycle of a book. Combine rooms invent, define, and agree on shared types of notation, symbols, and social systems. Here Nara’s room, Yifei’s room, Joan’s room, and the living room all define and symbolize the different stages of the production and commercial activity of a book. Start with Nara’s room, the first stage of recycling used books from the “living room” (Image 6). The machine hand grabs the garbage bags from the living room, crushing the recycled books into smaller pieces. The paper pieces are soaked, washed, bleached, and pressed into new paper sheets. Along the moving belt, paper made from recycled books are collated into piles, printed with new contents, and bound into new books. The assembly line and machines are metaphors of the factory and industry which recycle used books to make new paper and books. After the production of the new book, it goes to Yifei’s room which is the storage and selling stages (Image 4). Prospective customers can check the website (Image 1-2) regularly for updated objects on stack for sale. Once an online order is made, the books will be shipped out from the storage shelf to the customer as the moving belt continues from Yifei’s room to Joan’s room. Here at Joan's room, the consumption of the books takes place (Image 5). When the reading of the book is finished, it will be put into the book shelf or thrown away. The thrown away books are dumped into the living room (Image 7), waiting to be recycled back to Nara’s room. The close loop of Nara’s room, Yifei’s room, Joan’s room, and the living room represent the object - book, and multiple hidden dimensions such as the shipping and commercial movement, ecosystem of material, manufacture, and consumerism, and even time corresponds to each stage of the cycle. This 20’x20’x20’ space with 4 rooms is a dynamic animation of the 4 major stages of the life cycle of a book: recycle, production, selling, and consumption.

7.20’x20’x20’ Shared Space

8.My City Enter Page

9.The Life Cycle and Production Loop of The Book

Now we scale up from a domestic and everyday scale to the world around us. How is the life cycle of the book being identified, measured, and represented at an urban scale? How are the physical, infrastructural, political, and educational systems being altered by a larger scope of perspective? Instead of recycling the book to make new paper, we can also: (1) donate to a local public library, (2) sell to second-hand book stories, (3) sell to book related businesses such as book cafes. Here is a web interface for possible destinations for used books: used book stores, book cafes and other commercial space, school, public library and other social institutes, audiobooks, and online platforms (Image 8). Once you click on “buy used books”, it leads you to the social interaction interface where you can find stories of used books in a larger geographical sphere (Image 9). It explains the life cycle, production and consumerism loop of the used books. You can also see more of the general posture and position of each social node by clicking on each architectural model.

Selected Works