1. Please introduce yourself in a personal and professional way.
My name is WangYue, studying the final year of the 5-year architectural design program in Tianjin University, China. I always believe that I am a person with strong curiosity and desire for exploration, and I care about the experience of personal growth and enjoy the fun brought by professional development. Therefore, I hope to get involved in all fields that I have never tried before——from narrative expression of architecture, to urban renewal and landscape planning, to parametric construction and modular construction; my exploration in each stage is a reflection of sticking to myself and constantly exploring my potential.


2. What is your design philosophy?
I often take emotion as a starting point or objective reality to think about the concept of architectural design. I think this kind of non-concrete emotion synthesizes different cultures and aesthetics and is difficult to be simply visualized and formalized, but it can guide my formal language to operate logic by guiding people's experience and perception.
The meditator, in solitude with himself, is infinitely close to the pilgrim’s soul; A loner, on the road to truth, establishes a relationship with the sea that belongs only for him.


3. Can you briefly explain your understanding of the topic and the source of ideas?
First of all, I'm interested in healing. It's not about religion or worship, but about meditation in a broader sense. By chance, we saw the amazing scene of the tide rising and falling in the Bay of Fundy in Canada in a single day. We couldn't help asking ourselves whether the intervention of the architectural space with the power of nature could achieve the function of purifying the mind.

So we started to study the relationship between the moon phase and the tide, and the change of the height of the building space when the tide rises and falls. Then came the design concept -- we wanted the size of the building to grow and shrink over time, so that the retreat could feel up close the cycle of the waves and the great power of the sea. Buildings are small, people are small, and the feeling of being "dominated" pervades the meditator's day, and all emotions are determined by nature.

4. When and how you were first introduced to architecture?
I got to know architecture for the first time probably in 2008, when I was lucky enough to go to Beijing to learn about Koolhaas's new work -- CCTV tower. At that time, I did not learn any theory of architectural design, nor did I know the whole industry, but I was deeply attracted by the relationship between function and form and structural aesthetics of this building, which opened the door of architecture for me.
In the subsequent growth, I gradually came into contact with architectural theories and different design techniques, but I always believe that concepts should be expressed by complete narrative logic and stories, rather than just fancy containers or aesthetic paranoia.


5. What does architecture mean to you?
For me, architecture is a vehicle of experience and sense. I, a future architect, also have deliberated on the meaning of architecture like whether it would cause people’s deep emotional reflection, resonance, and imagination and how we feel the space and generate various imaginations.
At the same time, I hope to establish the emotional connection between people and space on this basis, seek a balance between architecture and social humanistic care, and pay attention to the social value brought by architecture.