Tommy CheeMou Yang

Carnegie Mellon SoA Option Studio - Once Upon a Pittsburgh

Instructor: Tommy Yang

This studio situates architecture design processes through animation, storytelling, and fieldwork to capture undocumented micro acts of socio-ecological stewardship and social cooperation. By embedding our practice in on-site investigations and mapping, we use the locality of Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill as a spatially and temporally heterogeneous social-ecological system, and as such provoke new emerging spatial imaginaries in the integration of architecture and ecology of the city. How can the labyrinth of urban edges, hacking, the city as a playbook, the urban porch, and histories of generational typologies allow us to imagine forms of making an architecture of and for the people?

Over the semester, students dwell in folk stories to frame a position of looking at the city - where they contest, rigorously draw, and map the neighborhood of Squirrel Hill. Through multiple visits to the site, as well as inspirational talks from designers internationally, we dwelled in multi-scalar design provocations. 

Technical Skills Taught: Socio-Ecological and Ethnographic Theory, Drafting Orthographic Visualizations, Critical + Embodied Mapping, Adobe After Effects and Animation, Model Making [Physical and Digital], Research Ethics, Integrative Design, Augmented Reaility and Communications

Augmented Reality Boards by Siyi Suzie Liu and Ziyi Eric Feng