Xinlei Chen
My current apartment is the Northwood I 2B1B type, one of the oldest room types of on-campus housing. Since I will only live in the room for the summer, I didn’t really have much furniture and item unpacked to put in the room, So I show the whole apartment layout to have more detail to cover. Through the main entrance with a 2’8” width door is the living room in front, in the living room there is a couch and coffee table belonging to the apartments and a set of IKEA dining tables & chair set my roommate purchased, and some of my storage boxes for personal belonging is put next to the table; on the right hand of the entrance is the dining room with the apartment-provided dining table & chairs, further down in the room is the kitchen and storage; on the left-hand side of the entrance is the stair to go up the stair. Follow the stair up, the restroom is right in front, turn left and walk through a short hallway, my bedroom s on the right, in my room there is a bed in the corner, and a floor wardrobe placed next to the bed, one IKEA study desk and an apartment-provided study desk are on the other side of the room, my suitcases that stored my daily clothes and items are placed in the middle of the living room. One of the important things I added to the plan is to show the power outlet of the apartments because it has caused some impact on how I use the room due to some outlets not working properly and that has raised my interest.
The room elevations show the kitchen and my bedroom, with some call out of appliances and furniture that I used most of the time. In the kitchen from right to left is the storage shelf for kitchen supplies, microwave, refrigerator, stove & oven. In my bedroom elevation, from the right to the left is the floor lamp, the IKEA desk, the extension socket, my suitcases, a tower fan, and my messenger bag I used a lot placed on top of the wardrobe.
This is a diagram showing my movement pattern in the apartment, the line indicates my rough movement track between different rooms, the red circle’s size indicates the rough amount of time I spent at certain spots, and the pink transparent circle indicates a rough movement range when I occupied the space.
This actor-network map is showing the research I did inspire by fixing my room’s power outlet, the research started by looking into the power outlet and digging further deep into the power infrastructure.
This figure-ground drawing is among a series of figure-ground drawings that look into the Chicago loop area building density pattern, I try to study the pedestrian sidewalk relationship to the street and the built space within different parts of the Chicago loop, so I use a thicker line to show the outline of the sidewalk to highlight each block to make the pedestrian space relationship more clear. This particular drawing is the view of Chicago's west loop, I choose to use this image because the building Presidental Towers which took up two entire blocks really stood up to me and it form an interesting relationship with the highway toward the west and the building group toward the east in the Loop area.
The select building is the Presidental Towers, it is a giant high-rise apartment building complex that took up 2 entire blocks of space located at the gate point of Chicago West Loop, it is the transit point between the skyscraper area and the low-rise building area in West Chicago.
As the end point of high-rise buildings in the western part the Chicago, PT is an unusual giant-scale high-rise apartment complex. It demonstrates how the 4 main resident towers are located and their relationship with the 2 blocks the building stood at through the oblique drawing. And the diagram shows the function of the different parts of the building, important traffic circulation around the building alongside surrounding buildings' basic information.
The Actor-network map looks into the PT through timeline-based research into its history, design detail, current state, and further plan. From each of the points, the research also derived other areas like the building's impact on the city, what is the difference between PT compared to other high-rise apartment buildings, etc.