The Burner Next Door
Housing as a Value Capture Device for a Waste Incineration Plant
A tenant-owned affordable housing cooperative turns the stigma, energy and land-value effects of Shanghai’s waste infrastructure into a long-term collective resource.
Look into the Rust Belt
An Architectural Experiment to Rethink Tiexi District Redevelopment
A proposal for Tiexi District that makes room for new urban growth while preserving the physical memory, social systems and everyday lives of the old industrial city.
Urban Knitted Butterfly Corridor
A Multispecies Habitat for Mexico City
A knitted, three-dimensional pollinator highway choreographs butterfly life cycles with human rhythms, creating pockets for habitat, encounter and collective urban life.
Work in Practice
Built work, interiors and visualisation
Selected professional work across model making, early-stage architectural design, interiors and visualisation.
Karamba Test
Form Follows Forces and Functions
Structural simulation and iterative analysis transform the SANAA Serpentine Pavilion into an interactive roof with a delicate appearance and verified structural performance.
Sound of the City
Liverpool Musicians’ Co-living Apartment
Shared homes, rehearsal rooms, recording spaces and performance venues form a creative hub for emerging musicians and an auxiliary venue for Sound City.
Joyful Growth, Custom Childhood
Birkenhead Primary School
A compact primary school creates varied environments for different stages of childhood around a luminous central cone, supporting Birkenhead’s greener 2040 vision.
Windshell
Wind Surfing Centre
A timber, granite and glass windsurfing centre sits lightly at the forest edge, balancing the needs of athletes, visitors and the surrounding landscape.
About
Designing with systems,
stories and living worlds.
Yifan (Fia) Qian’s work moves between architecture, urban research, ecological systems and fabrication. Across scales, each project asks how design can make overlooked relationships visible—and turn them into shared spatial value.
View selected projects ↑