ELINA CHEN

Prelude & Special Thanks
In the final review of a studio project in Fall 2023, French theorist and critic Françoise Fromonot posed a question that stayed with me as I began my graduate studies at the Princeton School of Architecture: 

Is CLT merely a substitute for concrete, or does it hold the potential for its own tectonic expression?

As I began my intellectural pursuit to this question, I encountered a series of teachers whose thinking and pedagogy profoundly shaped the project.

I first met Professor Darell Fields in Fall 2024 through his pro-seminar, where we engaged in Hegelian dialectical analysis across topics such as ornament, site, tectonics, and plan composition. Traces of this intellectual methodology are embedded throughout my thesis: the aggregational logic of traditional Chinese timber joinery enters into dialogue with the “innovative” material of cross- laminated timber, negates the simple domino replication of concrete structure, and produces a new tectonic language.

In Spring 2025, I took a seminar on the theory of the senses with Professor Paize Keulemans in the East Asian Studies Department, where I researched the sensorial knowledge and bureaucratic systems of wood craftsmanship through texts such as the Luban Jing and the Yingzao Fashi. This research became one of the design manuals within the thesis, grounding the project in both historical craft knowledge and embodied sensory experience.

At the same time, I studied in studio with Professor Lyndon Neri and in seminar with Professor Spyros Papapetros, where ideas such as “reflective nostalgia” and “liminality as a third space” were explored and translated into architectural form. These philosophical frameworks helped me understand architecture not only as construction, but also as a medium for memory, transition, and emotional resonance.

I would also like to thank my collaborators and friends who supported me throughout this process.

Jianmin Min Shifu, a timber craftsman based in Suzhou, generously allowed me to document his factory and his life story on film, and he also built the dougong sculpture for this exhibition. Maximilien Chong Lee Shin helped me design and fabricate the manual table for this exhibition. Tianyu Zhang offered valuable advice on the technical development of the CLT house. Jeremiah Neri helped me capture the sensorial details of the timber factory and Jiamin Shifu’s life story in Suzhou through film.

This project would not have been possible without the financial support of the Princeton University Butler Travel Fellowship and the institutional support established under the directorship of former dean Mónica Ponce de León. I am grateful for thesis coordination by Jesse Reiser, Kira McDonald, and teaching assistant Ellen Wong.

I would also like to thank the incredible technical support from the shop team: Marie Baretsky, Bill Tansley, and John Hunter. Structural guidance from Xin Yuan, Guy Nordenson, and Sylvester Black. Writing critique from Cynthia Davidson.

Support and guidance of my professors from Rice University, Jesús Vassallo and Mark Wamble, as well as my friends and colleagues across both Rice and Princeton: Nino Chen, Loretta Koch, Pouya Khadem, Manus McCracken, Chad Miller, Mayra Monge, Qunyue Qi, Yilin Lin, Chandler Yicong Shan, and Chenchen Yan.

I would like to especially thank my advisor, Paul Lewis, who guided the design development of this thesis throughout the academic year beginning in Fall 2025. Every week, he arrived with his long sketching scroll, drawing through ideas with me and constantly pushing the project toward a clearer architectural resolution—translating the scale of joinery into the scale of building. His rational and systematic approach to design, and his insistence on pushing even the most ordinary architectural elements toward innovation, have deeply shaped my thinking throughout this thesis process. I believe his influence will continue to guide my research and design work long after Princeton.

And lastly, my parents, who have supported me endlessly from the other side of the planet.

From Timber to Joinery

Imagine a future city that doesn’t rise from concrete slabs or steel cages but from a choreography of wooden joints—an entire skyline clicking into place like a giant, life-sized puzzle. This project of joints begins with the oldest trick in the carpenter’s book: the tenon-and-mortise. An encounter of a “male” tenon with a “female” mortise. A fit between two pieces of materials. A union between Yin and Yang. For centuries it held up temples and palaces; it became its full expression in dougong—timber units stacked, layered, and cantilevered into a rhythm of brackets and arms.

In Chinese Architecture and Metaphor: Song Culture in the Yingzao Fashi Building Manual, Jiren Feng argues that the “flowering” metaphor embedded in the Yingzao Fashi reveals how Song-dynasty builders and literati understood timber construction not as inert structure, but as a living, organic system. Through botanical language—flowers, branches, leaves, petals—the dougong bracket set was conceived as a form that “blooms” through the extension of protruding arms. Structure, visual perception, and poetic language were deeply intertwined, embedding technical knowledge within broader literary, cosmological, and sensorial frameworks. Construction was not merely mechanical, but culturally and bodily legible.


Tenon-and-Mortise Manual (榫卯之书), design by the author.


From Joinery to CLT

Today, in the United States and elsewhere globally, we encounter a new generation of engineered wood products—most notably cross-laminated timber (CLT)—that define what is commonly referred to as mass timber. Different from the traditional timber, where its strength and dimension are limited to the size of a tree and working hand tools, CLT offers structural strength, dimensional precision, and sustainability comparable to concrete and steel, while efficiently utilizing renewable resources and reducing carbon emissions and construction waste.

Yet despite its technical promise, CLT is often deployed as a direct substitute for concrete, following modernist logics such as the Dom-ino system, rather than advancing a distinct spatial or tectonic language rooted in wood itself.

Is CLT a substitute of concrete, or does it have a potential for its own tectonic expression?

This thesis project, as an intellectual inquiry and response to this question, asks: could a series of “new” joints be developed at the scale of CLT panels, not as nostalgic reproductions of traditional joinery, but as contemporary adaptations informed by aggregation, assembly, and material behavior? What new spatial sequences might emerge from the interaction between joint logic and the sheet-based materiality of CLT—between panel, connection, threshold, and space?

CLT Manual, design by the author.


A CLT House, joint inspired...

The project translates the tectonic logic of dougong into a contemporary CLT panel system. Here, 14' × 60' CLT wall panels function simultaneously as structural elements and spatial dividers, interlocking vertically through linear notch joints. Fabricated flat in the factory, transported by truck, and assembled on site, these panels form an efficient yet expressive construction system. A central vertical wall acts as the structural core, resisting lateral forces, stabilizing the overall assembly, and accommodating vertical circulation. Panels stack in two directions, expanding from 30 feet at the lower levels to 60 feet above, generating a stepped cantilever that provides shading and shelter at the ground plane. The notch joints stabilize this aggregation while simultaneously shaping rooms, thresholds, and voids that admit light, air, and spatial overlap.

In section, each 5-ply CLT wall panel notches 2 feet into adjacent panels on both sides, maintaining a clear 10-foot floor height for dwelling units. 3-ply CLT floor plates span between these walls, producing spaces that alternate between enclosed rooms and open-air platforms. The resulting 2-foot cavity beneath the floor plates accommodates mechanical ducts, forming a continuous plenum. Referencing Louis Kahn’s distinction between served and servant spaces, the spans between vertical walls vary between 3 and 10 feet, organizing compact service zones (restroom) alongside larger living areas (living room / bedroom). The entire structure is clad in a double layer of cork insulation, which provides both thermal and acoustic performance while serving as an exterior finish.

“Joint” at different scales:
(from left to right) the house at 1’=1/2”, the house at 1’=1/8”, the dougong at half scale.

Throughout the thesis process, multiple iterations of formal assembly and spatial organization were explored. In the final scheme, the system accommodates three dwelling units, articulated through subtle level changes and intermediate spaces that mediate between them. These units interlock through the joints of the CLT panels, establishing layered visual connections and spatial relationships that produce varying degrees of privacy.

Circulation is organized around a central vertical core, which anchors movement through the building. From this core, one enters a shared public platform, leading into the first unit, where spaces unfold sequentially from service corridor to living room to bedroom. On the second level, a similar sequence begins with a public platform, followed by living room, service corridor, bedroom, and an exterior patio.

The third level introduces a public corridor overlooking the living space below, before transitioning into living room, service corridor, and bedroom. The sequence culminates at the uppermost level with a rooftop garden, completing the vertical progression from collective to intimate and back to collective space.

In this CLT joint assembly, rooms slip between floors; voids emerge where panels almost, but not quite, touch. Light and air filter through these seams. Within this quiet choreography of timber, dwellings begin to take shape—duplexes, fourplexes, collectives—each defined not only by enclosure, but by the spaces in between.

Model View.


Plywood Model Assembly Video.


A return to the sensorial affinity for wood...

Returning to the origin of this investigation—the human sensorial affinity for wood—the project reclaims material as both structural and spatial. Through an attentiveness to grain, joint, and assembly, it recalls ancient knowledge not as nostalgia or mystification, but as a living intelligence embedded in making. It resides in the tactile world of the timber factory in Suzhou, in the careful crafting and painting of dougong, in drawings and manuals that both contest and resonate, forming a dialogue across time and space. It lives in a table built with a friend, a series of drawings that articulate the potential buildability of this project, and in a model made possible through the technical knowledge of the SoA shop staff.

Beginning with Françoise’s question and an early interest in Heidegger’s reflections on building and dwelling, this project arrives at a simple realization: wood is no longer concealed beneath systems of abstraction, but emerges instead as an expressive, legible, and generative medium.

In its assembly, architecture regains a tactile presence—one that is technically rigorous, environmentally responsible, and experientially rich.


View of Common Area.


View into Dining Room.

View of Living Room into Bathroom Corridor.


View from the Bathtub into Bedroom.


Fall 2025-Spring 2026, independent work. Thesis Advisor: Paul Lewis.