This vertically proportioned single-family house project started from two narratives: a very personal story of the client couple and the very generic principles of dwelling types in Hanoi's climate.
The generic story of the regional climate and dwelling:
The project is inspired by a 19th-century Russian diagram that maps dwelling types to their corresponding climatic zones. This drawing assigns a compact tent to the tundra, a small log cabin to the northern zones, a timber frame house to the middle zone, and a porous straw house with wide open space to the tropical zones. This diagram clearly shows how the volume of the dwelling area increases when it gets hotter and more humid. Traditional houses in Hanoi follow the principles of the tropical zone. The house is connected to wide outdoor spaces for airflow and is surrounded by trees to filter the light. However, the modern development of the city has focused on accommodating the exponentially growing population density rather than preserving the traditional dwelling typology for passive thermal comfort.
This house tries to incorporate air circulation and sun filtration, features commonly found in regional architecture, within the highly dense modern context of Hanoi.
The house is composed of two vertical cores anchoring opposite ends of the site, connected by a spanning slab. One core facilitates human circulation while the other channels airflow through an open concrete tube that filters light and draws air through a semi-exterior courtyard. These layered vertical voids create natural ventilation throughout the living spaces. Western sunlight is tempered by louver facades and hollow-core sliding shutters. This facade can open wide during cooler morning and evening hours to invite cross-ventilation.
While the design doesn't aspire to be a thermally optimal passive house, it tries to bring a regional solution for thermal comfort to a challenging condition: a high-density urban block.
The very personal story of the client:
A long-married couple sought an idea to address their very different life cycles. The husband starts his day early, and the wife goes to bed almost just as he awakens. Rather than forcing convergence, we proposed maintaining distance between their private spaces while creating multiple indirect ways of sensing each other's presence and enabling gentle communication. The most direct connection manifests as an interior balcony—a small platform suspended within a tall void that facilitates brief interactions between the couple. Spatially, their rooms connect vertically through two shared voids where light and sound travel with different intensities.
These same voids carry cool air throughout the house, creating not only thermal circulation but also an intangible sense of co-living that honors their individual rhythms while maintaining their connection.
The generic story of the regional climate and dwelling:
The project is inspired by a 19th-century Russian diagram that maps dwelling types to their corresponding climatic zones. This drawing assigns a compact tent to the tundra, a small log cabin to the northern zones, a timber frame house to the middle zone, and a porous straw house with wide open space to the tropical zones. This diagram clearly shows how the volume of the dwelling area increases when it gets hotter and more humid. Traditional houses in Hanoi follow the principles of the tropical zone. The house is connected to wide outdoor spaces for airflow and is surrounded by trees to filter the light. However, the modern development of the city has focused on accommodating the exponentially growing population density rather than preserving the traditional dwelling typology for passive thermal comfort.
This house tries to incorporate air circulation and sun filtration, features commonly found in regional architecture, within the highly dense modern context of Hanoi.
The house is composed of two vertical cores anchoring opposite ends of the site, connected by a spanning slab. One core facilitates human circulation while the other channels airflow through an open concrete tube that filters light and draws air through a semi-exterior courtyard. These layered vertical voids create natural ventilation throughout the living spaces. Western sunlight is tempered by louver facades and hollow-core sliding shutters. This facade can open wide during cooler morning and evening hours to invite cross-ventilation.
While the design doesn't aspire to be a thermally optimal passive house, it tries to bring a regional solution for thermal comfort to a challenging condition: a high-density urban block.
The very personal story of the client:
A long-married couple sought an idea to address their very different life cycles. The husband starts his day early, and the wife goes to bed almost just as he awakens. Rather than forcing convergence, we proposed maintaining distance between their private spaces while creating multiple indirect ways of sensing each other's presence and enabling gentle communication. The most direct connection manifests as an interior balcony—a small platform suspended within a tall void that facilitates brief interactions between the couple. Spatially, their rooms connect vertically through two shared voids where light and sound travel with different intensities.
These same voids carry cool air throughout the house, creating not only thermal circulation but also an intangible sense of co-living that honors their individual rhythms while maintaining their connection.
single-family house,
Hanoi, Vietnam.
Art Steel (steel), DAO.CC (concrete), Daisy Ziyan Zhang (photography and video), GiaLong (timber), HGAA (architect), Hoang Le (photography), Jieun Jun (design), KAMiLY(client), Taewon Park (design), and naïve practice (Il Hwan Kim).
Cornell University / IIT
Ithaca, NY.
2024 Design Teaching Fellowship Fund.
Daisy Ziyan Zhang (movie, photography), Evan Levy, Weizi Song, and naïve practice (Il Hwan Kim)
With the growing division of roles of designers and builders, architects have lost sight of the design opportunities inherent to the making process. Architectural construction and craftsmanship involve more than simply translating geometric designs into an effective, quantifiable process that aims to achieve an exact materialized replication of architectural drawings. It is a creative and collaborative process that requires active engagement and coordination among bumpy construction sites, uncertain materials, and unquantifiable builders' skills. A series of "almost useful tools" are examples of making architecture through designing construction tools, not the form of the building.
3D Pourinter
The myth of 3D printing technology often suggests a seamless translation from digital 3D models to physical objects. However, 3D printing encompasses various fabrication techniques, each with distinct advantages and limitations. For instance, the layered material extrusion method, prevalent in 3D-printed concrete, involves the extrusion of slurry material layer by layer. This process achieves precision and automation through large gantry machines or robots. In contrast, the 3D Pourinter operates on a similar construction principle as 3D concrete printing without the precision of machinery. In this manual tool, every stage of the 3D printing process — pouring, extrusion, and layering of material — is executed by human hands with the assistance of the portable tool.
Earth Slingshot
Mudslinging, a technique that involves throwing mud over a mesh framework to fortify a mud wall, stands as a prevailing method in earth construction. The slingshot mechanism used in this tool provides a stable aiming platform and adjustable power for mud deposition. It makes it easy to throw mud over varying distances and heights without needing to repeatedly climb scaffolding or squat. The Earth Slingshot tool was developed in response to the question: why hasn't a mudslinging equivalent of a nail gun been developed?
Inflatable Concrete Formwork
In concrete construction, formwork consumes a significant portion of resources, often exceeding fifty percent of the entire construction budget. Conventionally, achieving a straight concrete column necessitates over-structured formwork capable of bearing the weight of the concrete without deformation. What if formwork could dynamically appear and vanish, providing temporary support to concrete through controlled air pressure, only to deflate once the material has cured? This concept explores the use of inflatable fabric as formwork, enabling the patterns and shapes to be programmed into the fabric through adjustments in air pressure.
John Hartell Gallery,
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY.
2024 Design Teaching Fellowship Fund.
Daisy Ziyan Zhang (movie, photography), Evan Levy, Nicolas Moussallem,Ray Wang, Weizy Song, and naïve practice (Il Hwan Kim)
Cave, shade, mass. Three words that explain each other. A cavity in the mass creates a shaded space. This is the imagination that initiated the project. The center core holds the entire tower, and the slabs cantilever out like a tree structure. The openings of the building are the endpoints of the interconnected cavities inside the mass, rather than curated cutouts of the façade. This solid structure is designed to be constructed layer by layer using rammed concrete with a laterite mix. Laterite is a material that falls between clay and rock. This regional mineral admixture can reduce the use of cement, and the warm color of the mineral creates unique-colored rammed concrete without additional pigment.
single-family house,
Hanoi, Vietnam.
KAMiLY(Client), Taewon Park, and naïve practice (Il Hwan Kim).
The fully exposed glass curtain wall in the Vietnamese climate is causing numerous problems, including excessive heat and glare. We added self-supporting horizontal elements to the glass facade. The staggered stone columns transfer the load from the new shading elements to the reinforced vertical columns through new beams.
commercial
Hanoi, Vietnam.
324 praxis, and naïve practice (Il Hwan Kim).
Unlike the current layered extrusion 3D printed concrete technology, Concrete Printing in Granular Medium (CPGM) extrudes concrete within a granular medium, which enables greater freedom in printable geometry without being limited by gravity constraints. The primary aim of CPGM is to facilitate the rapid fabrication of intricate concrete elements by removing the stacking process involved in layered extrusion. This project develops the design and fabrication workflow of the CPGM method and presents a case study involving creating a scaled model of a single-objective optimized concrete frame structure.
Thesis, MIT
Cambridge, MA.
Il Hwan Kim (author), Skylar Tibbits (advisor), Sheila Kennedy, Mohamed Ismail (reader).
related paper
Given evidence of climate change and the global supply chain crisis, it is no longer viable to continuously exploit nature and expect the global industrial system to remain perpetually dependable. We have to prepare for a world that is not entirely controllable or measurable, which is an inevitable architectural condition of the future. Geomorphic Concrete is an alternative design approach and construction methodology closely aligned with the geological formation process by incorporating natural forces as collaborators in concrete fabrication.
Geomorphic concrete is an alternate paradigm of material-based design and construction methodology achieved by exploiting the variation in material properties respond to elemental forces. Nature shapes geological formations through a diverse array of materials and natural forces. For example, sedimentary rock’s stratified planes have varied grain, strength, and other characteristics, resulting in unique shapes and patterns through natural processes such as weathering, erosion, and sedimentation. A series of experiments demonstrates how to design and construct concrete structures by mimicking the natural geological formation process, instead of relying solely on modernistic geometry-driven design.
This methodology utilizes an injection-printing fabrication technique, inserting reinforcement and suspension materials in liquid concrete to produce cast objects with varying material properties that erode, break, reconfigure, and recover through engagement with natural agents. This project explores an architectural fabrication concept that embraces elemental forces and material changes as agents in the building process.
Thesis, MIT
Cambridge, MA.
Il Hwan Kim (author), Skylar Tibbits (advisor), Sheila Kennedy, Mohamed Ismail (reader).
Alternative Approach for Fabricating Topology-Optimized Designs: Rather than attempting to fabricate the delicate shapes of topology-optimized designs, this research proposes an approach that maintains the prismatic shape of a structure while enhancing its performance by introducing reinforcement material into the concrete in a topology-optimized manner.
This method is less wasteful and simpler to fabricate compared to directly manufacturing topology-optimized geometries. Inspired by the geological process of igneous intrusion, where magma is transported and stored within the Earth's crust, resulting in complex structural characteristics, prototypes were fabricated with low-resolution topology-optimized beams by injecting a secondary material into concrete to fabricate topology-optimized concrete structures.
This method is based on the Concrete Injection 3D printing technique, which involves introducing reinforcement material into the concrete to create complex structural characteristics, ultimately enhancing the performance of the structure. To test this approach, this study applied it to three different design cases: injecting high-strength concrete into lightweight concrete, injecting a water-soluble gypsum mixture into regular concrete, and injecting coiled metal cable for reinforcement.
This method is less wasteful and simpler to fabricate compared to directly manufacturing topology-optimized geometries. Inspired by the geological process of igneous intrusion, where magma is transported and stored within the Earth's crust, resulting in complex structural characteristics, prototypes were fabricated with low-resolution topology-optimized beams by injecting a secondary material into concrete to fabricate topology-optimized concrete structures.
This method is based on the Concrete Injection 3D printing technique, which involves introducing reinforcement material into the concrete to create complex structural characteristics, ultimately enhancing the performance of the structure. To test this approach, this study applied it to three different design cases: injecting high-strength concrete into lightweight concrete, injecting a water-soluble gypsum mixture into regular concrete, and injecting coiled metal cable for reinforcement.
Thesis, MIT
Cambridge, MA.
Il Hwan Kim (author), Skylar Tibbits (advisor), Sheila Kennedy, Mohamed Ismail (reader).
related paper
The site is known for its controversial modern history of constructing a cultural complex and park on top of an archaeological site. We expanded the memory of the site to encompass geological time scales. We extracted core samples from the site to create standing poles that generate mist and water features within a concrete-paved park. Water changes its form from cloud to rain to ice throughout the seasons; the circulation of time.
2nd place
Seoul, Korea.
Archiplay, and naïve practice (Il Hwan Kim)
This project seeks a method of using warped plywood for the construction. We embrace bending and distortion through sewing techniques—a low-tech, no-power method that resists the dominance of digital fabrication and precision tooling. While the frame assembly involves some powered tools, the pavilion’s central construction relies on joining through tension and touch.
Catherine Wilmes, Eduardo Cilleruelo Terán, and naïve practice (Il Hwan Kim)