Diplomatic

Jie Zhang

Boston

While at MIT, she has developed various architectural proposals, built exhibition installations, conducted an independent research on the application of low-cost mapping technique in informal settlements in India, and devised a digital decentralized healthcare system in Columbia. She holds a B.A in Architecture & Economics (with distinction) from Yale University.

Presenting an architecture that is diplomatic by function and diplomatic by disposition, this thesis declares an alternative methodology beyond the single pursuit of public-ness, capable of designing with oppositions, irony and latency. The project, being part investigation, part criticism and part design, exposes the absurdities in urban geopolitics while proposing ways of hacking into it. It describes a seemingly open US embassy for Beijing as an imploded fragment of a boundary. Away from popular strategies of conceptual and spatial blurring, an architectural porosity is employed to orchestrate spaces of varying openness, as a nuanced response to both the embassy’s double identities and schizophrenic agendas of city-building.