ANEL ALPYSBAYEVA

Instagram

Are.na

Email

These Are A Few Of My Favorite Things
ARCHITECTURE

UCLA Art School Expansion

 Thick-Skinned

Jingdezhen Imperial Kiln Museum

Caravanserai

A View From The Upside Down
ART

Untitled

A Common Burn

StampsDESIGN

Soap Dish

The Urban Dead

BASQA

Peri / Jeztırnaq

UCLA Art School Expansion (2024).
        Our design for UCLA Arts DTLA centers around the concept of a public park - a community refuge that is creative, playful, open, and inviting to all. Like public parks, this building serves as a sanctuary for diverse groups, including students and the greater Los Angeles community. Formal features like overhanging masses, skybridges, and varying elevations instead of walls create a sense of openness, transparency, and flow. The lobby transforms into a park-like space with freestanding tree-like columns, terraced hills, and a flowing riverbank for working, lounging, playing, and gathering. Nooks along the entrance ramp's beams, a communal kitchen, donation center, community lawn, and public restrooms support the local unhoused community.

        The openness and spectacle reflect not only the park typology as a refuge but also the refuge found in art and creativity, akin to our precedent, Lina Bo Bardi's SESC Pompeia community center. A path guides visitors from the ground floor entrance through the hanging public gallery and cafeteria, with vantage points overlooking the creative community below. The inclined plane leading public visitors into the second-floor gallery entrance, along with the hanging masses that form the building program and the ramps negotiating between floors, make the act of circulation conscious, engaging, and playful.

        Student volunteers work in shared spaces like the kitchen and "Community Shed," sorting donations of food, necessities, and art supplies while hosting community craft events and mutual aid efforts on the outdoor lawn. Commuter bed and storage pods along the hallways provide convenience and proximity to living and working amenities. The integration of different groups - students and public visitors, commuters and long-term residents, housed and unhoused LA residents - ensures creativity and community are accessible to all.

As a space for art and learning, elements like the river, tree-like poles, and terraced hills create tranquil pockets for leisure, reducing stress and fostering creativity. By blending living and working spaces, with commuter areas and student workspaces nestled above studios, the design reflects a holistic, open approach to art and life. Acknowledging the local context of unhoused displacement through inclusive spaces like mutual aid assembly lines establishes a welcoming, socially responsible environment that challenges the often hostile public architecture of Downtown Los Angeles.

Thick-Skinned (2024).
        Original parking structure is located in the middle of the vibrant NoHo Arts District, and it’s specifically situated between a large residential and retail complex. This project delves into the fusion of parametric rigidity and globular organicism: seeking to challenge conventional facade design by proposing a thick-skinned structures that integrate programmatic functions while integrating the precision of parametric design with the fluidity of organic forms.  

        Ultimately, our goal is to embrace a holistic approach to design — emphasizing both aesthetic appeal and functional performance — in creating architectural interventions that blur the lines between the artificial and the organic, offering new perspectives on spatial experience and built environment interaction.

Jingdezhen Imperial Kiln Museum (2023).
        Collaborative Project with Dyson Salleh and Yiming Zhang: responsible for Interior and General Renders, Broad/Immediate Context Drawings, 3D-printing and assembling physical model.

        The Jingdezhen Imperial Kiln Museum, designed by Studio Zhu-Pei, is a harmonious blend of tradition and modernity, seamlessly integrating into the surrounding landscape. The building’s most striking feature is its undulating roof, which mirrors the curves of the traditional Chinese ceramic kilns. This distinctive form not only serves as a visual reference to the kilns but also creates a dynamic and inviting space for visitors.
        


        Located in a city renowned for its porcelain production, the Jingdezhen Imperial Kiln Museum is positioned in close proximity to the ancient imperial kiln sites, which were once exclusive to the production of porcelain for the imperial court. The museum serves as a gateway for visitors to delve into the rich heritage of Jingdezhen’s ceramic industry, offering a captivating journey through time and artistry. The interior spaces of the museum are meticulously designed to exhibit and celebrate the exquisite porcelain artifacts, showcasing the evolution of ceramic techniques and styles throughout history.

        Caravanserais were roadside inns along major trade routes like the ancient Silk Road, that doubled as hubs for the exchange of goods, ideas, and culture. This project aims to survey and decompose circulatory system of the Aminabad Caravanserai, the juxtaposition of public and private space and the processional movement, and to establish modes of expression to showcase said survey.




   Through this, the project aims to transform caravanserai utilizing contemporary design expressions while being in dialogue with its historical roots by superimposing its figments and fragments onto the second floor and vertical circulation system.

A View From The Upside Down (2022).


        Inspired by Greg Lynn’s The Secret Table, this project aims to disintegrate its points of contacts to the main two as well as propose a new kind of geometry that is reminscent of a glacier landscape. Thus, achieving a heterogeneous, organic shape that reimagines the blobs residing underneath the origional design.