Yang Tian: HM of the Re-Draw.05

+ Yang Tian 🇨🇳

Honourable Mention of the Re-Draw.05: Nakagin Capsule Tower

Portfolio: https://www.non-a.com/members/yang/portfolio/

1) Could you briefly introduce yourself?

I was born in China and studied in the US since high school. I started as a visual art major student at the University of Michigan to study graphic design and animations and started dual majoring in Architecture in my sophomore year where I saw a perfect match between visual communication and the built environment. I then went to Yale University to pursue my M. Arch I degree with a clear vision of not making architecture, but seeing the world through architecture.

2) What inspired you for the Re-Draw.05?

Instead of reconstructing and redesigning the Nakagin Tower, my approach is to build a metabolism archive for documentation and interpretation. I want to reconstruct a representation that embraces ephemerality rather than permanence and imagine modern domestic spaces as individual cells. They move, digest, grow, and decay, informing a new society where people no longer live in a fixed space, but in a nomadic, flexible, and replaceable capsule. 

3) Can you describe any particular challenges you faced during the design process and how
you overcame them?

How to visualize growth over time is a big challenge for me. Unfolding a Nakagin Story uses the newspaper as a medium to document and expand this Metabolism imagination. Through unfolding, readers gradually understand the patterns, colors, and orientations of different cells and gather information from occupancies to fabricate an urban story. Instead of only focusing on the drawing content, how to read the content solves this problem.

4) How do you think your educational background or professional experiences influenced your winning design?

Having both Architecture and Visual Art education opened up new ways of interpreting Architecture, and allowed me to experience multidisciplinary design processes for my works. In this case, Newspaper Design became an interesting feature that let me focus on visual legibility and the folding action. Not only do readers need to follow certain reading sequences, but the design needs to provide visual clarity and simplicity to a rather complicated architecture/social content.

5) What advice would you give to students or young professionals looking to excel in architecture competitions?

Try to establish and apply clear goals to Architectural representations. For example, If the goal is for viewers to have immersive feelings, then have perspective renderings; if the purpose is to explore components and scales, then try axon drawings. Also, for me, although complicated designs are impressive, creating clarity and distilling simplicity within complex circumstances is more thrilling.

6) What are your future aspirations in the field of architecture?

Since my works focus on visual communication, and letting people engage/play with each project by blurring the boundary between Architecture, Graphic Design, and Illustration, I’m intrigued by interdisciplinary research and multimedia design and want to pursue this path in the future.