Mechanical Engineering: Personal Statement Of Purpose

As a mechanical engineer, I have dreamed of delving into architecture for many years. When I was a teenager, I applied two years in a row to my dream architecture school in China. Due to various circumstances, I was not able to attend. Instead, I ended up in the engineering school at one of China’s best universities, which unfortunately does not have a school of architecture. Back then, architecture was so irresistible but also inaccessible to me. However, studying engineering did not lessen my passion for architecture; rather, it strengthened and gave more rationale for my determination to pursue architecture. I spent my first year in the collage studying intensely into robotics and won the first runner up in the Asia-Pacific Robot Contest

For example, in a furniture design project, I saw the urban landscape of the Flatiron District as a cloud of a mosaic, which inspired me to use the mechanism of recursion in a transformable armature that converts the visual effects of the urban landscape into a 3-dimensional space (see Portfolio, Furniture + Room, pp.11-15). My extensive research experience in the robotics and materials labs not only developed my interests in and sensitivity to novel construction materials and building methods, but it also led me to use natural phenomena as inspirations for designs. In another project, I studied the structural and spatial feature of neoprene and integrated it with a rigid body mechanism to generate a fashion atelier growing on the façade of the Centre Pompidou, with the inspirations from the biological processes of parasitism and mutualism (see Portfolio, Structure, pp.

This interest is largely shaped by my formative years in China. I was born in Beijing at the end of the era during which the Chinese government had complete command over the economy. In an old Soviet-designed cohousing at a university, my parents were assigned a tiny room by their “Working Unit”, which was my first home. On our floor, twelve families lived in twelve identical rooms located along a corridor with a shared kitchen and bathrooms at each end of the corridor. More than a circulation path, the old corridor was full of activities: kids ran around to chase each other as if they were in the best playground; housewives washed clothes in big basins and gossiped; my parents, together with their colleagues at the university, held their regular academic discussions. People shared the space and interacted with each other. Till today, I am still impressed by the capacity of such a shabby corridor to contain abundant activities and interesting tensions among people. And my memories of the scenarios that took place in that corridor have always been