Hanxi Wang and Jordan Young: Mash-Up

The exhibition is conceived as the culmination of the research produced during the 2022–2023 Design Teaching Fellowships:  a "mash-up" of our individual research which in turn shares overlapping interest in architectural, spatial, and urban "mash-ups" — assemblages, combinations, and medleys.

Hanxi Wang: City Gone Wild — The Ruralisation of Wuhan by Urban Homesteaders 

Through a series of worm's eye view perspective drawings, remote sensing data, and AR experiences of audio-visual materials collected from Chinese social media, the exhibition explores the intricate spatial transformations taking place in contemporary China and narrates the complex spatial agencies not only of the state in their rapid urbanization of rural and natural landscapes but also of elderly citizens in their illegal, yet morally justified, ruralization of the urban through an act called "城市开荒" (urban homesteading). The exhibition explores the volatile temporalities of rapid urbanization and how the "ruptures" they create are exploited by the very individuals marginalized by the process. From the scale of the city to the scale of neighborhoods to the scale of everyday life, the exhibition challenges the Eurocentric conceptions of the "right to the city" to provide an alternative provocation that resistance can exist, not through radical opposition to, but ambiguous entanglements with structures of power.

Hanxi Wang (B.Arch. '18) is a design teaching fellow in Cornell University's Department of Architecture. A graduate of Cornell AAP and the University of Oxford, Wang is a licensed architect, urban geographer, and ESRC-funded researcher whose work uses an interdisciplinary approach to question dominant narratives of power and agency within the urban environment. In particular, she is interested in informal practices of urban ecology and the complex and sometimes paradoxical ways in which their practitioners negotiate, adopt, or subvert top-down structures of governance to create alternative visions of the city. Her current research project, Ruralizing Urban Wastelands — Homesteads and Subversive Metabolisms in China's Growing Cities, investigates the subversive influence of displaced farmers in the wastelands of China's rapid urbanization and the potential of informal practices to create strategies for urban metabolism. 

Jordan Young: House Rules

The single-family home, complete with its pitched roof, green lawn, white picket fence, and backyard pool, has become deeply embedded in American culture and ideals ever since the rise of the catalog home in the early 1900s. Through typological variations, plan alternates, mirrored layouts, and add-ons, housing catalogs provided consumers with endless configurations to better fit their own domestic desires. Leveraging the plans and images in these documents as a set of inputs, House Rules extracts the organizational logics to develop a potentially infinite set of experimental and fantastical housing mutations. 

Jordan Young (M.Arch. '20) is a Design Teaching Fellow in Cornell University's Department of Architecture. He is a cofounder of office office, a design-research practice that develops multi-scalar projects that seek to defamiliarize everyday objects, materials, and spaces. Young's research explores new methods of architectural production by examining the productive intersections between architectural representation, computation, and digital fabrication techniques. Through exhibitions, installations, and drawings, his work reconsiders conventional techniques to develop alternative tactics for design thinking and making.

Young has received several awards including the Henry Adams Medal of Honor, the Eschweiler Prize, and the Mellon Urbanism Fellowship. As a Design Teaching Fellow, his work examines the formal peculiarities and organizational logics of the single-family house to generate speculative housing conditions.