Xianming Sang

The Communal Core
05-2022
"The Communal Core" is a modern sustainable social housing model that transcends individualism and enhances community integration in urban living. Inspired by traditional East Asian courtyard house layouts, it features a flexible communal courtyard for social interactions and individual privacy. Using mass timber for sustainability, this design fosters community ties and reduces the urban carbon footprint. By blending traditional layouts with modern practices, it creates a dynamic communal space central to the living experience, promoting interconnected, denser living arrangements.
This design is a winner of the 2024 Architecture Masterpiece Award.

A House For Almost Everything
Instructor | Sharon Johnston
12-2020
The project aims to create a resilient civic building that connects the present with the past. The enclosed half houses the city’s memory; the open-air half acts as an urban living room. Along the central axis, a continuous public layer ascends from the ground to the upper floors, weaving together spaces on different levels, and connects the present life with the city’s past events. A modular system defines the interior spaces. The columns and beams, together with floor and ceiling patterns and furniture, emphasize the sense of individual rooms.

[Im]perfect Homes
Team Work | with Sharon Deng
Instructor | Oana Stanescu
05-2019
By proposing a network of living and social spaces whose boundary could be endlessly reconfigured to accommodate the evolving needs of its inhabitants, “Imperfect Homes” seeks to reassert the centrality of the ‘home’ beyond the rigidity of a ‘house’. The project introduces six modules that converge to form three assemblies with distinct spatial qualities and aggregation logic. At an urban scale, shared open and commercial spaces follow the same typological grain and rhythm of housing assemblies. 

Blurred Thresholds
Instructor | Elizabeth Christoforetti
05-2018
The project deals with thresholds and asks the question how a threshold can be dissolved to bring people together at urban, building and personal scale. There is a tension between the civic-minded millennial’s desire to stay connected and the demand to sleep well. The Sleeping Club invites citizens to congregate and establish closer relationship in a relaxed unrestrained setting. Club members will sleep together in a collective space, which transforms sleeping into a more intimate way to socialize, with personal space properly respected.

“Thickening”
Team Work | with Laura Cui
Instructor | Jeanne Gang & Claire Cahan
05-2021
The visitor center building from the 1970s is an enclosed concrete box, disconnected from and unwelcoming to the neighborhood. Recognizing this existing building as part of the community as well as to minimize carbon footprint, we developed the new convening center reusing most parts of the original building while renegotiating its relationship with its context. We designed a set of recycled CMU blocks made from local construction debris, hoping that the exposed aggregate would raise people’s awareness towards construction material recycling, and echo the brick buildings in Pullman from the 1880s.


Perkins&Will | Harvard GSD 22' | Assoc. AIA | LEED AP BD+C