Linda Zhang

Architect Linda Zhang (CA) considers her practice to be a provocation of architecture’s capacity to communicate through felt experience—affect as a design process towards lived experience. Her projects engage with current issues our society faces, such as environmental topics and state sanctioned violence, through affect, memory, materiality, as well as emerging technologies including artificial intelligence. Zhang applied contrasting methods to re-create 3d scanned sites of contested and environmental memory, exploring how the process of making impacts the outcome. She used, for example, CNC-milled molds out of AI-trained 3d scans of Styrofoam and plaster, in contrast to hand-cast molds out of plaster. She then sits with the pieces to reflect on which process fits the work best. Besides the numerous experiments, Zhang worked mainly on two projects: 1. Looking at the phenomenology of the road at different sites of state-sanctioned violence across Canada and the US 2. By extracting materials for building, we intervene with geological entropy. Zhang brought 3D scans of a former gypsum mine in Switzerland with her asking questions such as: how do we relate with these voids? How can I connect people to these forms and sites, by not just replicating the cave? But what surprised her the most was working by hand-building and being able to explore the shape by hand.