Archinect
Shuang Yan

Shuang Yan

Berkeley, CA, US

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Working While Living

Nowadays, there is an increasing blur between the domestic realm and the labor realm and between the public and the private. The workspace is more reliant on the traditional office, but now there has been a shift in the work realm where work is not defined by the office space anymore, and the workspace has become highly flexible. The line between public and private is also becoming blurred, where the two realms are dictated by the limitation of spaces, such as size, form, opening, and lighting.

Because of this unpredictability and ambiguity of space in the work realm, space is created with a buffer zone that responds to the blurriness of work and lives and also to the volatility of the work realm. In the design, there will be clusters of living and working, with co-living and co-working spaces attached to them and a field that blurs between the two realms, essentially creating a range of conditions with different limitations. 

As a simple architecture element, the wall is redefined by using different configurations of wall opening, how it could be used to create porosity and enclosure in creating a field of transition and blurring. Because it's unsure if this trend is positive or negative, and while it is hard to predict the future of the workspace, a range of spatial conditions are created with different sets of limitations and possibilities so that users can inhabit those spaces in response to those change of trends in the working and living realm.

 
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Status: Unbuilt
Location: East Palo Alto, CA, US
My Role: Designer & Team Leader
Additional Credits: Collaborator: Douglas Lee