Emily Xintong Yan Emily Xintong Yan is an architecturak designer, researcher and filmmaker passionate about space, design and their fables. She is currently pursuing a Master of Design Studies in the Narratives domain at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. 

Emily’s projects are driven by an intuitive desire to investigate and storytell. Her paper architecture explores the fictive potential of tectonic forms and embeds philosophies of dwelling inspired by film, literature and dreams. Her complex research projects are genre-bending pursuits, intriggued by the capacity of humanism and sociological space. Her narrative style emulsifies fiction and nonfiction, poeticism and facts, creative writing and reportage. She is dedicated to a multi-disciplinary practice where architecture, arts, and letters reaffirm our human presence in the world.

She was born in Singapore, raised in China, grew up in the UK and educated in the US. 




TypeProjectYear
Research, ExhibitionNuclear AlphabetOngoing
Research, DocumentaryIn Praise of Waiting RoomsOngoing
Set designStudio Wenjüe Lu x telos.haus2025
Architectural design
Residence for a jeweler family2025

Concept
Light-Haus2024

Arcihtectural design
Residence for two musicians 2024

Arcihtectural designStephen Friedman Gallery 2023
Concept, DesignIn Search of Settlement
2022

EditorialPostmarked
2022

Concept, Design
House for the Blind
2021

Concept, Design
Archiving the Archives
2021

Photography
Stones Feel, Trees Fly 2020

Photography
Space/Place
Ongoing

Concept House for the Blind
2021


The experience of blindness is not only the loss of vision but also the acquaintance and re-acquaintance with other ways of sensing, knowing and appreciating the world. Perception of vision is the condition of sight; the perception of the celestial is the condition of insight. The loss of sight should not hinder seeing the divine. The relationship between the sky and earth is reciprocal, for knowing the earth is knowing the sky and knowing the sky is knowing the earth. The spider makes its home by entangling a strand of thread into a intricately structured web. Atop its cobweb, the spider reposes and  catches changes in its surroundings.The web acts as an extended and reconfiguable auditory sensors.


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