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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

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.

Index

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Last edited in 2026