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JIABAO ZHU



This is an old redecorated apartment I rented in Shanghai. It is a regular rectangle. The room is about 18 feet long and 11 feet wide. The window in left is about 4 feet long, the middle window is about 5 feet long, the door is about 3 feet long, and the wall is 5 inches thick. All my life, including sleeping, learning, watching TV, is realized in one room. The room has two windows at 90 degrees. On the left side of the room are desks, chairs, shelves and refrigerators. In the middle of the room are sofa, tea table and TV cabinet. On the right side of the room are beds and wardrobes. Most of the furniture in the room is provided by Ziroom this rental platform, so I made a distinction between the items I bought myself and Ziroom’s items.




This elevation shows the north side of the room from the center. The height of the room is 9.25 feet and the height of the window is about 5 feet. The left side of the room is my study area, the middle part is my leisure area, and the right side is my sleep area. I will choose this side as my elevation, mainly because there is a very interesting culture of drying clothes in Shanghai. People will hang clothes outside the window to save indoor space.




This Actor-Network map traces two parts. One is the rental platform I use to rent my apartment, which is Ziroom. It is a rental platform built on the housing resources of its parent company Lianjia, a real estate intermediary company. Ziroom provide residential products and services, mainly including renting houses, providing cleaning, maintenance, moving services and selling self owned furniture products. The process of Ziroom’s housing products is to get the management right of the house from the owner, then decorate the house in a unified style through the cooperative decoration company, and finally rent it to the tenant on the app. As the largest rental platform in China, I also trace the reasons why it is popular in the market, as well as its influence on other rental platforms. The second part traces back to the formation of Shanghai's clothes drying culture, and further traces back to how the culture formed by these old buildings in Shanghai is preserved and integrated with the architecture in the new period.




The main focus of my room's organization diagram is light, because I really interest in the two windows in my room. Light comes into the room from the windows on both sides, so I want to emphasize the edge of the object that the light illuminates. I also focus on other three parts, the circulation of movement in the room, the radius of activity of the three main areas in my room, as well as the main objects in the three areas, desk, sofa and bed.




This graphic composition is composed of five parts. First is the lines that represent light,  I turn them into two triangles with overlapping area. Second is the lines representing the edges illuminated by light, I turn them into solid lines of different thicknesses, the closer to the window, the thicker they are. Third is the lines that represent people's movement circulation, I turn them into thicker dotted lines. Fourth is the active radius of the line. I let it become a dotted line, and mark the area where they overlap. The last part is the rectangles representing the three main objects. I hatch them with different linetypes.




I made different changes to these figures in the order shown in the diagram. I want to find the balance between the solid and the void, the balance between the straight line and the curve. I changed the triangle into a pyramid with no top surface at different heights, so that the internal details can be seen. I stretched the figure representing the illuminated edge to make it solid according to the rule that the closer to the window, the higher. The pattern representing the moving circulation is stretched at random height, because my movement is irregular. I want to use random height to express this point. For the pattern representing the radius of movement, I stretched them and pipe them with a radial top. Because my activities in three areas are spread out with a center. I extruded the hatch according to some smooth curve, make it appear undulating.




This view shows the composition of the pattern in the diagram on the plan. You can see that objects of different heights will produce certain occlusion. Through the top-down cutting, the occluded part is displayed, making the whole model more clearly displayed on the plan.




This view shows the composition of the object to be stretched on the elevation. Through cutting the elevation of the model, the internal space of the model is clearly displayed.