Emily Xintong YanEmily Xintong Yan is an inter-disciplinary designer and researcher based in Cambridge, Massachusetts passionate about spatial design and place narratives. Trained as an architect and multi-displinary artist, she is currently pursuing a history- and theory- focused degree (MDes, Narratives) at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Committed to an interdisciplinary practice, she splits her time between multi-disciplinary research, filmmaking, as well as architectural and literary theory. Marked by her deep love for people and humanism, her work strives to hold meaning and create empathetic understanding for the lived experience.

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 In Search of Settlement
2022


1 Search is the ceaseless process of pursuing our place since the moment life began for us in complete darkness. Starting from the vast and vacant unknown, we are led to hold more and more awareness and understanding of the answers to “what are we doing here?” through the passage of time. It is the only methodology with which each of us go through the course of a life.

2 Settling is the strategy of adapting one’s position to cope with circumstances impossible to resolve. It is inherently unsettling to dwell in absurd existential conditions such as being “alive”, within a “body”, inside a “world” of “time” and “space”. In face of the oblivion we experience from the “World”, A settlement is where we go when we accept our impotence and their insolubility.

3 The thesis started with a sculpture made by decomposing and recomposing five pounds of beeswax.  Elogated by gravity and rescued by frost and solidified by time, the material creates a messy image of layered landscape ressembling the perpetual formation of rocks.

4 The methodology of this thesis is comparable to the stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Due to the reluctance to produce a deliberate topic or conclusion, my objectives only became clear as I exacavated my intuitions and chronicled my interior monologues. Neither its origin or end weighs more than the in-between.

Awarded Thesis Prize at RISD Architecture



5 Metaphor is a bridge. It brings closer two distant subjects; it marks one's significance to the world. Waking up is like shadowing the Sun; living is like carrying on the stream of time. Grief is a bridge. It occupies the void that splits one’s life into halves: the before and the after. To grieve is to dwell on the crossing of another’s life, it calls for ephemeral and eternal experiences of time.


6 A tool is a passage. It transforms friction into fire; words into truth; thoughts into reality. It brings about metamorphosis, evolution and the argument for imagination. The invention of tools elevated mankind by giving a purpose to their intentions. Architecture not only transcends the physical world but also the metaphysical world. It recalls ancestral memories of survival.


In your sleep I paddle the long oars of sorrow;
In my sleep I dangle the weight of a pillow.

You fade like the collapse of a dead star;
I rise with the swell of clear water.







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