Reconfigurable “Part” Model, photo by Yojairo Lomeli.

Fellow Fellows is a series that focuses on the current eruption and trend of fellowships in academia today. These positions within the academic realm produce a fantastic blend of practice, research and design influence and traditionally within a tight time frame. Fellow Fellows sits down with these fellows and attempts to understand what these positions offer to both themselves and the discipline at large. Fellow Fellows is about bringing attention and inquiry to an otherwise maddening pace of refreshed academics while giving a broad view of the exceptional and breakthrough work being done in-between the newly minted graduate and the licensed associate. 

This week we talk to De Peter Yi who is currently the 2018-2019 Walter B. Sanders Fellow at University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. 

What fellowship were you in and what brought you to that fellowship? 

I was the 2018-2019 Walter B. Sanders Fellow at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. There’s a longer and shorter thread to how I came to Michigan. The longer thread is that I approach each stage of my education and career as a progression in a larger project. I actually attended Michigan for my undergrad, and subsequently went to Rice for my Master’s not long after Sarah Whiting became dean there. I was immediately drawn to the school’s prompt for its students to stake out their own contribution to the discipline. In my second semester, I did an independent study with Neeraj Bhatia, which the school generously funded with a travel grant, and four years later led to a book project supported by the Graham Foundation. The natural next step was to put together a proposal for a fellowship, which in itself is a reflection and advancement of the work. Having found the application process highly stimulating and being fortunate enough to receive an offer from Michigan, I decided to make the move back to Ann Arbor.

The shorter thread is that prior to starting my fellowship, I had practiced for four years at Studio Gang, an office that balances creative research with impactful design. With each project I completed, there were resonant ideas I wanted to explore within the time and space created in academia, and a fellowship provided the transition to a different pace of thinking and making.  

What was the focus of the fellowship research? 

I’ve been developing the idea that “everything is a part”, both in the sense that the current field of architecture supports increasingly divergent projects, but everything remains connected through the collective accumulation of shared elements in the built environment. For the fellowship, I attempted to define a project around the act of constantly “taking apart and putting back together” rather than focusing on any object, method, or topic in and of itself. This method is also inherently a way of form-making: the way I design is through drawing novel connections, scales, relationships, and aggregations through and across all the “matter” of architecture.

The way I design is through drawing novel connections, scales, relationships, and aggregations through and across all the “matter” of architecture

This focus on the “part” is related to the view that the various architectural movements of the 20th century, seemingly reacting in sequence to each other, are actually all responding to the distinctively modern condition of constant change. Since when I started my architectural education circa the 2008 financial crisis, I’ve been drawn to a range of emerging practices invested in projects of organized entropy. When such pronounced changes occur, there is typically a return to reimagining society through its component parts, as evidenced by the 2014 “Elements of Architecture” Venice Biennale curated by Rem Koolhaas. I am simultaneously defining this narrative and positioning myself within it, and my work to this point has primarily addressed urban and environmental change, as well as change brought on by my own dual cultural upbringing. I used my fellowship year to continue testing ideas of part-to-whole relationships in housing, while shifting towards an exploration of material re-use and tectonic connections.

What did you produce? teach? and/or exhibit during that time? 

For the fellowship, I initiated and produced a possible project that positions architecture as parts that operate at different scales toward different goals – some retrospective and some projective. The goal is to show how every effort around architecture also makes an impact – not just the design of a building itself. In lieu of working with a client and a site, I engaged a collaborator (a Detroit-based non-profit organization called 555 Arts) and defined a center of focus (their ongoing renovation of the former Banner Cigar Company building). My student team and I designed a series of full scale architectural parts that not only connected the building’s piecemeal transformation with a possible future vision, but also weaved the building’s existing tectonic elements with 555’s own production of metal art at its on-site foundry. Collaborating with a fantastic group of artists in residence at 555, we custom-built a series of molds that allowed each aluminum part to retain a hard-edged “controlled” portion and a soft-edged “overflow” portion that played with the idea of imperfect standardization.

The exhibition offers a chance for the parts to perform at full scale, placing the visitor within one of many possible scenarios for the building’s future staging. Photographs of the existing space were printed on aluminum and frame opportunistic intersections between the building’s past and present. Lastly, a large scale physical model distills the Banner building into relational elements open to reinterpretation and reconfiguration. Together, the installation provides three versions of an architectural project that flicker between different scales, image and reality, and material attributes, all of which key back to one another.

In a similar manner to my project, I approached the fellowship year as components that informed each other. In the fall semester, I taught a comprehensive graduate housing studio titled “Model Parts”, as well as a representation course that restaged existing structures through digital imagery. In the winter semester, I co-taught a studio that looked at blurring the lines between scales and tectonics of containers and the contained.

How do you see the fellowship helping to advance or become a platform for your academic and professional career? 

Moving forward, I can say I am most excited about the new connections I’ve made here at Michigan, including the fellows I came in with (Elizabeth Galvez and Gabriel Cuellar) as well as other faculty at the college, and students I’ve taught. One of the unexpected joys has been participating on invited reviews at the school, and seeing the breadth of intellectual curiosity and speculation occurring here. I believe it’s these newly formed relationships and the conversations over the past year that sets the stage for next steps, rather than any single tangible output of the fellowship.

What were some of the struggles? 

The struggles I encountered were not exclusive to the fellowship but inherent to the demands of putting together a project with tight budget and time constraints. On one hand, this struggle is the nature of any architectural project today, and on the other, it was driven by goals I set for myself to achieve. In a similar way, the negative sides I perceive do not pertain to the fellowship itself, but rather to the transitional moments around the fellowship year. Committing to a fellowship uprooted me from my previous context of work and life – one which I was already feeling fulfilled with in many aspects. And after the fellowship ends, a potentially uncertain future awaits.  

What is the pedagogical role of the fellowship and how does it find its way into the focus and vision of the institution that you worked with? 

As we become conscious of the finite quality of the resources that enable our existence, it becomes more pressing for us to look around with new eyes—Jesus Vassallo

Beyond bringing in a constantly rotating set of voices to the existing school curriculum, I see the pedagogical role of the fellowship at Michigan as staging conversations in response to larger trends happening within and beyond the school. Gabriel, Liz, and I tried to capture the recent undercurrent of finding potential within the ordinary and commonplace. By curating our efforts under a shared invitation, “Things Around Us,” we’re trying to engage the school and eventually the broader discipline toward generating a body of shared knowledge. “Things Around Us” partially references Seamless, authored by my Master’s thesis advisor Jesus Vassallo, in which he ends the book noting “… as we become conscious of the finite quality of the resources that enable our existence, it becomes more pressing for us to look around with new eyes and to invest our energy and creativity into creating a better world out of the things around us.” This quote has been particularly inspiring for my work. 

Where do you see the role of the fellowship becoming in the future and how does it fit within the current discipline of architecture? 

In the past year, I’ve noticed more fellowships being inaugurated in schools around the country, resulting in more visibility for the fellowship model itself as a new kind of platform for producing work. The fellowship is also very much a product of our current milieu, characterized by a generation of young architects accustomed to precarity, schools trying to maintain relevance in the face of increasingly ephemeral trends, and the rise of self-initiated projects propagated through Instagram. I do see great potential for this format in creating an “other” space that encourages new types of projects outside traditional frameworks of academia and practice. I could also picture a growing cohort of fellowship alumni forming an informal network that bridges conversations occurring at different schools.

What support, and/or resources does a fellowship supply that would be hard to come by in any other position?

Michigan has an amazing roster of faculty, students, facilities, and larger institutional support. This resource is accessible to the university community irrespective of the fellowship role. The greatest impact unique to a fellowship comes with the mindset it places you in. The financial resources and support structure provided by the fellowship is modest, but having a stage to make a claim pushed me to do things out of my comfort zone and rigorously question my work. This kind of optimism can lead to great momentum, as many former fellows who have gone on to successful careers have demonstrated. 

What is your next step after the fellowship? How will this inform future work?

Following my fellowship, I will continue evolving my work through teaching and practice. Most immediately, I am leading a spring travel course to the Netherlands, Germany, and Russia to study the interconnected movements of De Stijl, Bauhaus, and Constructivism, and how their narratives have evolved through preservation of certain canonical buildings.    

Later in the summer, I will be releasing Building Subjects through Standpunkte, edited by Reto Geiser and Tilo Richter. The book has been a four-year long collaboration with Renata Graw of Normal, Jeremiah Chiu of Some All None, and Nancy P. Lin, an art historian. Although initiated by my research into collective housing typologies in China, the collaboration has transformed the book into something that is more forward looking rather than historically focused. The goal is to use the book release to build cross-cultural connections between institutions in China and the U.S.   

Lastly, I’ve been working on a few projects in Detroit and Los Angeles with Laura Peterson, a very talented architect and inspiring friend whom I have known since we had our first architecture studio together in undergrad at Michigan. As I suggested in the beginning of this interview, the fellowship has already become another step in a larger conversation that will continue on: that is the real project.