Biography
Yuan Zhang is currently a Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University. She received a bachelor's degree from Tsinghua's School of Architecture, graduating first in her department. Yuan led a team that proposed a redesign of the Piazzale Loreto metro station in Milan that provided refuge for transient populations. Her other design projects have focused on redesigning mail delivery stations to improve couriers' living conditions and restructuring community markets for migrant workers. Yuan's undergraduate capstone project, which studied Chinese classical space and spatiality in Hongloumeng, received an award for top 1% theses at Tsinghua. Yuan's ambition is to become an architectural scholar, focusing on how the under-represented perspectives of China's displaced populations can inform architectural space.