Thesis — Sean Chen Portfolio

XINLEI CHEN’S
PORTFOLIO

Graduate School Works
(University of Michigan)

2026 Winter
Thesis: Beyond Metabolism -
A Living Metabolic Architecture for Hong Kong

2025 Fall
Proposition Studio: Aether Ground Canopy
Sustainable and Affordable Architecture
Adv Dig Fab
Health By Design

2025 Winter
Collective Studio: Junction TAB

2024 Fall
Institution Studio: Urban Espionage
Representation

2024 Winter
Situation Studio: Cardboard Outlook
Fabrication

2023 Fall
Form Studio
Construction

2023 Summer
Foundation Studio

Personal Design Works

2025 Summer
Yi Tower

Application Portfolio Works

2022
Farm Slow Life
Huike Supermarket
Ataraxia
Elapse of Texture

Undergraduate School Works
(School of the Art Institute of Chicago)

2022 Spring
Capstone Studio: Perfume Chimney

2021 Fall
Studio 5: Greenblock Stack

2021 Spring
Studio 4: Rampant Flow

2020 Fall
Studio 3: The Little Italy Spine

2020 Spring
Studio 2
Light & Space

2019 Spring
Studio 1
Mater & Material

Personal Artworks

Watercolor Paintings

About

ARCH 660-662 Bio-Logics Thesis

Beyond Metabolism - A Living Metabolic Architecture for Hong Kong

Thesis Speculative Design Situated in Hong Kong’s Urban Context

Overview:

This thesis investigates how the Metabolism movement can be reinterpreted within contemporary architectural and urban conditions.

Rather than treating Metabolism as a stylistic language, the project reframes it as a systemic architectural framework driven by growth, transformation, and circular resource processes.

The thesis does not seek to reproduce the original movement, but to translate its organizational logic into a transferable framework for contemporary urban development.

Using Hong Kong as a testing ground, the project explores a living architectural system shaped by cyclical growth, infrastructural connectivity, and metabolic resource flows.

The work begins with research into Metabolism, understanding it as a movement shaped by the cultural and socioeconomic conditions of postwar Japan in the 1960s. Emerging during a period of reconstruction, rapid urbanization, and economic expansion, Metabolism proposed the city not as a fixed composition, but as an adaptable and evolving system.

In response to these conditions, a generation of Japanese architects developed visions of expandable urban structures defined by growth, replacement, and continuous transformation. This led to concepts such as modular infrastructures, megastructures, and capsule architectures designed to accommodate change over time rather than resist it.

These diagrams examine several of Metabolism’s core ideas across multiple scales: the conception of buildings as dynamic systems rather than static objects; the categorization of infrastructure by function; and the attempt to organize urban systems through modular, reconfigurable frameworks capable of expansion and adaptation.

However, many of these proposals ultimately proved economically or technologically unfeasible, while others became increasingly disconnected from contemporary urban conditions. Despite these limitations, the thesis argues that several of Metabolism’s underlying principles remain relevant today — not as formal or stylistic models, but as conceptual strategies requiring reinterpretation within contemporary environmental, infrastructural, and societal contexts.

These diagrams illustrate my current attempt to reinterpret Metabolism through a contemporary architectural framework.

It begins with a critique of the original Metabolist approach. Although Metabolism proposed replaceable modules and expandable megastructures to create dynamic urban forms, its organizational logic largely remained top-down. Individual modules were typically assigned singular functions and operated within a fixed part-to-whole hierarchy, in which larger systems determined the roles and behaviors of smaller components. As a result, despite its vision of change and growth, the architecture often remained structurally rigid and limited in adapting to shifting contemporary needs.

In response, this thesis explores an alternative framework based on bottom-up growth and part-to-part relationships. Rather than organizing architecture through centralized hierarchies, the thesis investigates how spatial systems can emerge through the aggregation, interaction, and continual reconfiguration of smaller components. The approach draws in part on principles found in chemical formations, where complex systems emerge from the bonding and interactions of smaller elements rather than from predetermined total forms.

The process begins by breaking architecture down into fundamental elements, each carrying different spatial, structural, infrastructural, or ecological functions. Similar to the formation of atoms from smaller particles, these elements aggregate to form architectural units capable of accommodating diverse demands and programmatic variation.

Units can further combine into larger clusters, much like atoms bonding into molecules. Because each unit already contains multiple functional capacities, clusters can establish internal systems for circulation, resource exchange, and shared infrastructure. These clusters remain open to rearrangement, expansion, reduction, and recombination over time. In contrast to the original Metabolist model, transformation is no longer treated as the replacement of isolated capsules within a fixed megastructure, but as a continuous process of systemic reorganization occurring across multiple scales.

At the urban scale, this logic extends beyond individual architectural objects to a larger infrastructural network that connects multiple clusters. Transportation, energy, water, waste, and resource management systems operate collectively across the network, enabling circulation beyond any single cluster. As with the formation of chemical compounds, the urban system emerges from relationships among interconnected yet reconfigurable parts.

While this approach aligns with Metabolism’s interest in growth, change, and adaptability, it also pushes beyond Metabolism by rejecting the idea of permanent organizational hierarchies. No component is treated as fixed or final; systems remain open to growth, reform, replacement, and continuous transformation.

In this thesis, “Metabolism” is therefore understood not as a stylistic reference, but as a broader framework for imagining architecture as a living system characterized by cyclical growth, resource circulation, and ongoing reconfiguration.

To examine the potential of this framework, the thesis situates a speculative project within the urban context of Hong Kong — a city whose conditions both parallel and diverge from those of the major Japanese metropolises that originally shaped Metabolism during the second half of the twentieth century.

The following analyses, mappings, and diagrams examine the specific territorial, infrastructural, ecological, and logistical conditions that inform the translation of this framework into the speculative project.

Hong Kong’s available land for development is nearly fully occupied or developed. There is a diverse range of functional needs mixed within its compact land area.

Composite Mapping of Hong Kong’s Maritime Territory

Hong Kong has a long tradition of Land reclamation. This suggests that developing the harbor is the most suitable way for Hong Kong to address land shortages.

Harbor is inseparable from Hong Kong’s condition. Land reclamation is severely damaging its marine biodiversity. Alternative approach is needed.

Hong Kong's harbor also plays a vital role in the maritime network, with both highly active internal and external waterway systems.

Like postwar Japan, Hong Kong is defined by extreme density, infrastructural intensity, rapid urban transformation, and limited land resources. Yet its political, ecological, economic, and maritime conditions also fundamentally differ from the context in which Metabolism first emerged. These similarities and contradictions make Hong Kong an effective site for testing, challenging, and reinterpreting metabolic thinking within a contemporary urban condition.

Speculative Design Concepts

Following research in Hong Kong, the design translates the elements into a kit-of-parts-based physical form that performs different functions.

Parts will form units that serve different architectural functions, following a set of bounding-box standards, which then form the cluster in alignment with the cluster-forming ideas.

Grounded in Hong Kong's territorial and maritime conditions, the project situates its architectural system in the harbor rather than on land. To avoid the physical and infrastructural limitations of vertical megastructures, the organizational logic shifts toward a more horizontal and distributed composition.

Drawing from Hong Kong’s dense maritime traffic network, the infrastructural framework is reinterpreted as a series of load-bearing floating platforms retrofitted from aging container ships. These platforms operate simultaneously as structural carriers, infrastructural systems, and resource circulation networks while remaining mobile and non-permanent within the harbor environment.

Multiple platforms can dock and connect into larger collective formations, inspired in part by the spatial organization of Hong Kong’s fishing communities, creating an expandable and reconfigurable living environment across the water.

To make the system operable, I envisioned a supply logistics for the whole system that leans toward Pearl Delta and mainland China supply. The map shows how the unit/cluster/platform is manufactured separately and shipped through the Pearl River Area Logistics System, along with local operational logic and potential anchoring sites for the platforms within Hong Kong.

These diagrams demonstrate the rule sets governing cyclical processes of growth, expansion, decay, reconfiguration, and replacement within the architectural system.

Platform Group Forming Demo:

AI-assisted visualization generated using OpenAI DALL·E; further composed and edited by the author.

Highlight from the illustrated glossary :
Taking advantage of the ship's bottom, the design turns it into a coral nursery mounting site, aiming to benefit the harbor rather than cause damage.

Ending Statements

My overall vision for this project is to operate less as a fixed masterplan and more as a form of “genetic code” for an evolving architectural system—one capable of behaving more like a living organism than a static urban composition. The rules proposed in this thesis are therefore not definitive, but provisional and adaptable over time; the architectural blueprints presented here should be understood as only a first generation of this evolving framework.

This thesis serves as an initial attempt to define what a contemporary “New Metabolism” could become, and how it fundamentally differs from the original movement: shifting from top-down megastructural planning toward bottom-up aggregation, from fixed part-to-whole hierarchies toward dynamic part-to-part relationships, and from static infrastructure toward continuously reconfigurable ecological and resource systems.

The project remains intentionally open-ended and establishes a foundation for continued research and development. Future investigations will focus on making the system more operationally and ecologically self-sustaining through measurable environmental and infrastructural performance; refining the role of food production, dedicated ecological space, and resource circulation within the harbor environment; and developing clearer organizational rules governing growth, decay, replacement, and spatial transformation.

Further work will also examine how architectural forms, materials, and construction logics may evolve differently under maritime conditions than in land-based urbanism, producing new cluster typologies and more feasible aggregation systems. Particular attention will be given to the relationship between spaces above and below deck, treating them as interconnected spatial ecologies rather than separate domains, while further testing questions of circulation, habitation, infrastructure distribution, and spatial hierarchy across different scales.

At the architectural scale, future development will continue to refine the logic of the module and unit system, the types of inhabitants and programs that the framework supports, and how everyday life within this speculative environment may fundamentally differ from that of the contemporary city. Rather than concluding with a singular solution, this thesis positions itself as the beginning of a longer research trajectory into architecture as an adaptive, living, and continuously evolving system.

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