Emily Xintong Yan
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Emily Xintong Yan is an architectural designer and researcher passionate about space, design and their fables. 

Her work are driven by an intuitive desire to investigate and storytell. Her ongoing research projects are genre-bending pursuits, intrigued by the capacity of humanism and spatial sociology. Her paper architecture explores the fictive potential of tectonic forms and embeds philosophies of dwelling inspired by film, literature and dreams. Her narrative style emulsifies fiction and nonfiction, poeticism and history, 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. The Alphabet
The Waiting Room
The Utopia
The Garden
The Residence I
The Lighthouse
The Residence II
The Gallery
The Bridge
The Postcard
The Shell
The Archives
The Museum
The Trees
The Place
Writing, Essay FilmIn Praise of Waiting Rooms
Ongoing

One of the first behaviors taught to a child, waiting is both a social ritual and a deeply personal encounter with time. Yet despite its ubiquity, to wait is rarely treated as a design problem in its own right; it is often dealt with as the residue of larger systems of organization. Waiting Rooms examines how architecture gives spatial shape to this obscured activity: how do designed environments structure our experience of time? And how may the architecture of waiting evolve as our experience of waiting diminishes?
Awarded MDes Research Award at Harvard GSD





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