A survey of Kharkiv residents — conducted while the city was still under conflict — asked how they envisioned rebuilding. Their answers pointed not to monuments or landmarks, but to the rhythms of everyday life: routes, routines, the familiar fabric of the city. This became the design's departure point.

The proposal's morphology consists of three elements — each independent, each capable of standing alone, yet designed to combine. Depending on which is built or how they are assembled, Freedom Square takes on a different urban character and civic meaning.

In contrast to the strong, solemn presence of the surrounding architecture, the three elements embody a loose, prosaic essence — extending the civic life of the Regional Administrative Building and offering Freedom Square a forward-looking identity rooted in the lives of those who inhabit it.

A-Zenith has built its reputation on solid redwood furniture — a material tradition that defines both their craft and their identity. As the brand evolves toward a younger, more contemporary market, the renovation of their factory showroom became an opportunity to give this transition a spatial form.

The renovation project involved layout planning of a single floor showroom, exhibition module design and a 195-metre facade renovation.

From individual unit to cluster to full arrangement, the spatial layout is organised to mimic a real home setting — allowing buyers to better envision how the furniture lives in daily use, while creating a visiting path that feels intuitive and unhurried.

The display system draws from the brand's heritage in wooden craft: modular units that interlock like tetris pieces, foldable for transport and reconfigurable for different spatial arrangements.

The facade redesign addresses the building's prominent position along a primary highway. Metal cladding accentuates the full length of the building, transforming it into an understated billboard — a refined announcement of the brand at urban scale.

A 41,488 sqm headquarters for a Taiwanese fashion brand in Guangzhou — 13 storeys above ground with a sky garden, suspended office volumes, pilotis and a transparent vault serving as runway and sky lobby. The design is organised around four distinct volumetric elements, each with a different character and programme.

A 10-storey condominium in Kuala Lumpur — two spacious units flanking a central core on each floor. Double balconies on both long elevations open the building to its tropical climate, allowing it to breathe. The generous plans and layered outdoor spaces bring a quiet luxuriousness to everyday life.

The mechanised wooden screens on the facade were carefully studied and tested — rotating panels that modernise the craft tradition of Malay timber work. Together with local materiality throughout, the aim was a building that wears well with time: simple, organic, and rooted in its place.

A three-generation family set out to rebuild their home from the ground up. The original house was a single closed block — dim and humid — and light became the primary concern. Beyond that: a swimming pool for three children, a garden, a koi pond, and a collector's room for the owner.

The three hierarchic blocks in a C-shape layout emerged directly from this brief — each block loosely assigned to both a generation and a programme: the front to the living spaces and the master bedroom above, the middle to the kitchen and dining with the children's rooms on top, the furthest to the grandmother's quarters with the owner's collector's room above, all three connected around a shared courtyard.

Equal care was given to the linkages between blocks — the staircases, bridges and hallways were crafted to serve the light as much as to create unexpected spatial experiences along the way. Light was further invited through voids punched through ceilings and walls, coloured in different shades drawn from Le Corbusier's palette.

A former client asked for a tombstone to honour his late mother, who had been fond of gardens and horticulture. His father visited her resting place faithfully every weekend.

The response was a modest shelter in Carrara white marble — two cut-out religious symbols on each side allow sunlight and air to pass through. Nestled in grass, the design symbolises the enduring purity of their familial love and provides a tranquil space for reflection.

The house, originally built in the 1930s as a shophouse, was acquired by a young couple with a passion for modern design and vernacular art. The design bridges old and new — preserving the conservation facade while introducing a contemporary rear addition separated by a water court that draws light deep into the plan. The tiered profile of the new addition responds to Singapore's urban envelope regulations, turning a constraint into an architectural opportunity.

Double-height volumes, a hidden mezzanine, bridges and spiral staircases address the limits of a narrow plot while enriching daily life with changing spatial experiences. The vocabulary draws from early modernism — steel, glass, industrial craftsmanship — with red-painted fire-rated steel becoming a defining material element, a quiet homage to the Maison de Verre in Paris.

Quanzhou was once the largest port in the world — known as Zayton, described by Marco Polo, visited by Ibn Battuta. Yet when the city submitted sixteen monuments for UNESCO World Heritage status in 2018, the application failed: the nominated sites were too fragmented, too severed from the living fabric of the city to carry the weight of its history.

This essay challenges the conventional practice of urban heritage preservation — questioning whether isolated monuments and landmark-driven narratives can ever adequately represent the complexity of a living city. It asks: what happens to the heritage that exists not in objects but in everyday routines, spatial orders, and the accumulated memory of ordinary places?

Through walking, field observation and archival research in Jubao, a former trading district at the intersection of city and harbor, the work proposes an alternative reading — that Quanzhou's deeper civitas lies in its canals, temple-dock orders and embankments; in the traces of commerce, conflict and daily life that no single monument could represent alone.

Developed as part of the MA Architecture and Historic Urban Environment at The Bartlett UCL, 2020.