Xianming Sang

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.

Two Squares
Team Work | with Ting Huang
05-2021

The small public resting facility is composed of two squares, different in size, diagonally placed across the river. The west half of the big sqaure is a “pavillion“; the east half is a “coutyard”; the small square is a ”platform“ - corresponding to a traditional Chinese garden. The three sections with distinct spatial characters provide possibilities for different activities.

Tree House
Team Work | with De Qian Huang
05-2020

The ruin of Chateau de Vibrac today is a slice of a long history. It represents a natural process. Every element has their own life cycle, varying from a few seconds to hundreds of years. The project tries to use tree houses to record the lapse of time. The architecture is uniquely connected to natural elements such as plant and water. The periodical change of these elements triggers varying dynamic experiences in the space.

Can Entertainment Architecture Also Serve Local Inhabitants?
Team Work | with Chengzhang Zhang
10-2019

Local inhabitants have been largely sacrificed, as the public leisure space are forfeited for the development of casino complexes. In this proposal, we highlighted ground floor as the major conflict between city’s development and local inhabitants. With the morphological reference of lotus, the symbolic flower in Macau, we propose a cluster of buildings with small footprints and large canopies, thus defining the space in between as public leisure space which opens to both tourists and local inhabitants. The top floor of the buildings is connected with each other, forming a continuous open space for malls, which used to take up the ground floor in the old entertainment architecture.

Samford University First Year Residence Hall
Perkins&Will
03-2024

The Samford University First Year Residence Hall is a prominent development, setting a new standard for student housing by creating a vibrant and inclusive community space. This project is noteworthy for its focus on enhancing the overall student experience, providing state-of-the-art facilities that promote both personal growth and academic success

Assembly Innovation Park
Perkins&Will
07-2022

Assembly Innovation Park (AIP) in Somerville, Massachusetts, is a premier life sciences destination, crafted to attract and support the industry's leading companies. The project is notable for its comprehensive focus on sustainability, featuring state-of-the-art facilities designed to achieve LEED Gold and WELL certification standards. The project has recently topped out and is slated to open in Q4 2024.

Exhibition Design: From Checkers To Complex Systems
Curator | Xingyang Cai
03-2021

Ferdinand de Saussure underscored a property of our linguistic systems through chess: everything pertaining to systems and rules are internal: what determines the validities of moves is not the attributes of each chess piece, but the rules that constitute the game. The exhibition design attempts to constitude its own system by using a new grid that is rotated from the museum’s orthogonal plan. Within the system, a big table, a small table, and a series of triangular modules accommodate the artworks and formulate different interactive experiences.

Parents’ House Interior
08-2020

With a very limited budget, my parents asked the house interior to be simple and effective. They would like a modern atmodphere, but also an  embed Chineseness that fits their imagination of poetic living. I began with a search for the local material and craftsmanship, only found out that in a modern globalized society, nothing is really local, and material honesty is often just an expression. Architecture has to use its own language to create a site specificity. Imported oak wood is used as the main material. Extended raillings become a continuous screen that wraps around the central stairs, anchoring the whole house. In the living room, a ring of thickened skirting intigrates the function of storages, seatings and stairs, freeing up the room for daily use.