Po-Hsien Hou

The STAGES set up hypothetical situations relating individual events or sequences to similar spaces or spatial sequences. The spaces range from common urban typologies to exaggerated architectural demonstrations. The events inside the architecture inspired from Japanese manga, the dramatic script and special perspectives create the unique stages for the people (as an actor / audience / staff behind the scene). As a series consecutive story, the STAGES were intended as an investigation of architectural concepts and techniques, exploring the relationship between events and architectural spaces, and transformational devices of a sequential nature.

MultiMultiMulti

Through a series of Polymorphic exercises and the design of a research institute and library this project will focus on the development of engendered expression and embodied haptic and multisensorial experience in architecture. Specifically, I will be looking at the alternate aesthetic systems of jolie laide and wabi sabi, as well as such techniques as serial vision, peripersonel space, tactile intimacy, and the architectural promenade.

Spring 17'

The Russian National Bank is called Sberbank

The bank intends to build a new headquarters in the Skolkovo portion of New Moscow, adjacent to ‘old’ Moscow, in a zone designated as the Skolkovo Innovation center, a Russian aspiration for its own Silicon Valley. It is intended that the new Sberbank will be the ‘icon’ of the new district, and a landmark for Moscow, old and new.

Fall 16'

High-Rise

Building types arose as a response to vernacular, programmatic, and/or ritualistic uses and carry with them a collective memory and cultural understanding of traditional built form. As a typology, housing has a rich catalog that spans from the pre-industrial revolution to today. In a sense, it is a parametric problem of the utmost, where local and global relations are intricately linked. This studio I explored conceptual, formal, and organizational deviations from the constricting demands of the typology of the residential tower with an eye towards the eccentric.

Spring 15'

Mike Kelly

We believe that moving fluidly between the formal and conceptual worlds is the key to making relevant work. However, it is the bias of this project that conceptual strategies and arguments can emerge from directed formal explorations, rather than vice-versa. Therefore it will be imperative for me to work consistently in studio through sets of formal stuies even while a conceptual framework may be incomplete, unclear, or just out of reach. In this way, I am promoting the idea of architecture as a material practice and not the outcome of critical intelligence.


Fall 14'

Fundamental Architectural Principles II

This project is about developed both knowledge of the discipline and sophisticated techniques for thinking about and creating architecture. The project begin with studies of a set of over arching conceptual, formal, and organizational strategies in significant architectural precedents, it will focus on the interaction between two and three dimensions, as well as various methods for the derivation of architectural form.

Spring 14'