Alexa Zhang
Say hello ↗
STUDIO NOTEBOOK / CORNELL PRECOLLEGE ARCHITECTURE
From drawingto making.
Six weeks of studio and lectures gave my spatial ideas a new set of tools—and a new habit of building, testing, and revising.
CONTEXT
6-week architecture precollege
DIGITAL TOOLS
Rhino & Grasshopper
MAKING
Laser cutting & 3D printing
Cornell studio / project pin-up and models.
01 / A NEW WAY TO TEST AN IDEA
Model. Make. Look again.
Digital tools extended my handwork. Each model or material trial gave me another way to ask whether the imagined space worked.
01 / MODEL
Give the idea a structure.
Use Rhino and Grasshopper to develop a spatial idea through digital modeling.
02 / FABRICATE
Bring it into the physical world.
Learn laser cutting and 3D printing alongside hands-on model making.
03 / ITERATE
Let the model ask a question.
Test materials, revise the work, and talk through drawings and models in studio.
02 / LEARNING THROUGH MAKING
A model is also a conversation.
The studio archive brings together a hand-held structural study and a discussion around spatial drawings.
Making / hand-held structural study
Critique / discussing spatial drawings
03 / THE NEXT QUESTION
What if a room’s effectcould be measured?
Repeated iterations and material trials became a portfolio. They also gave me the technical foundation to investigate how spatial configuration relates to restoration through VR and multimodal data.
Handwork, digital modeling, and research are connected ways of asking how a space feels.
