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

Architectural design Residence for two musicians
2024


A residence for two musicians, this six-storey townhouse integrates living and work under one roof. With the upper levels being a private Victorian-style apartment and the lower three levels embodying music and stylistic experimentation, the building itself symolizes the duality inherited and lived by the musician couple. The design strategy focused on restoring and reinterpreting the existing brownstone’s architectural character and creating two additional levels below the basement to expand on the spatial, functional, visual capacity. Referencing Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, the sub-basement levels are conceived as immersive cinematic spaces for music and video production. An exercise in total design, the project created an opportunity to design and fabricate everything large and small in the house and created a collaborative alliance between the client and designer.
Trimble Architecture



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