How material becomes judgment - and judgment becomes space.
Yuejun Han is an architectural designer based in Los Angeles whose broader work has been covered by platforms such as ArchDaily, Archinect, and Bustler, reflecting growing recognition of her practice across global and Chinese-speaking audiences. Her work focuses on architecture as a system of spatial judgment. At the core of her approach is a belief that material is not a neutral tool but a cultural and ethical medium - a way of responding to structural conditions, reassigning spatial roles, and framing human experience. She works across scales - from infrastructural residues to meditative domestic spaces - with a consistent sensitivity to form, context, and care.
In architecture, material is often treated as aesthetic finish. But for Han, it is judgment. Her work reveals how material becomes a spatial decision that reflects context, power, and care. Rather than finishing form, material expresses intent - a position that guides Han’s broader design methodology.
In Re-Landing, an adaptive reuse proposal for the Brise-Vent windbreak structure in Le Havre, Han and her team engage with a massive concrete arc originally built in 1947 to shield the harbor from violent northern winds. Once a critical piece of post-war maritime infrastructure, the 240-meter-long structure now stands abandoned - a monumental form suspended between utility and obsolescence. The design does not overwrite its legacy. Instead, she interprets the Brise-Vent as both landscape and artifact, working with its curvature, porosity, and wind-oriented logic to propose a contemporary museum and public promenade.
The project preserved the concrete shell while introducing restrained architectural interventions: reflective surfaces, floating volumes, and a translucent curtain along the south-facing voids. The curtain, in particular, performs a subtle environmental translation - echoing the original wall’s intent by shaping light and wind, but doing so with softness rather than mass. The project was awarded the MUSE Design Silver Award and named a Golden Winner in the Arch Design Award 25’ for its sensitive reinterpretation of modern industrial heritage.
In Behind the Curtain, softness becomes primary. Designed during the post-pandemic period for a meditative couple, the project is situated in Alentejo, Portugal - a region of expansive plains and stone pines (Pinus pinea) that shape the site’s tranquil rhythm. The treehouse is anchored on one of these umbrella-shaped pines, with two main spatial components: a platform in the tree canopy and a shrine that shifts vertically between trunk and roots.
Each level corresponds to a stage of meditative practice: the canopy, where curtains blur the line between interior and nature, supports physical openness; the trunk offers spatial solidity for inward meditation; the roots symbolize connection to the world outside. Materially, the structure relies on wood and fabric. A mechanically liftable hexagonal core enables spatial transformation. The use of curtain here is not simply visual - it reflects a meditative approach to non-duality, fluidity, and breath. It gently conducts natural light and imbues the core meditation space around the trunk with a quiet sense of ritual, while also addressing extreme spatial constraints. Rather than using hard walls to define boundaries, soft edges allow spatial conditions to overlap, be borrowed, and evolve as needed. The project received an Honorable Mention in the Volume Zero Tree House 2024 International Architecture Competition and has been featured on leading international architecture platforms.
Han’s material sensibility emerges from a broader design methodology that privileges judgment over preference. While her methodology remains consistent, she does not begin with typology or style. Instead, she begins by reading the tensions embedded in a site - spatial, emotional, historical - and identifying what kind of social response a material can support. For her, material is not selected for performance alone, but for its ability to clarify spatial ethics: to invite, to buffer, to endure. This approach remains adaptable across contexts - from infrastructural voids to compact retreats - while maintaining consistency in its values.
That consistency reflects a growing cultural and infrastructural need - particularly in the United States. In an era shaped by post-pandemic anxiety, housing precarity, and spatial inequality, Han’s work proposes architecture not as control but as calibration. She does not erase the past nor prescribe fixed uses. Instead, she uses material to offer ambiguity where rigidity once dominated, and to create new frameworks where old ones have failed. Her designs support healthier spatial experiences, including flexibility in housing, post-trauma recovery, and the cultural reuse of industrial heritage. In that sense, her contributions offer direct public benefit, especially in fields of social infrastructure and adaptive reuse.
The spatial logic of Re-Landing and Behind the Curtain differs, but their material clarity emerges from the same principle: material is a response, not an embellishment. Concrete preserves memory and grounds weight. Fabric enables air, motion, transformation. Both are tools of architectural judgment - declining differently in time, but speaking the same language.
Han's design process does not begin with material, but it often resolves through it. Material is where structure meets narrative, where context meets condition. The architectural outcomes she contributes to are not about spectacle, but about use. It asks: what should this space make possible - for the people in it, and for the systems around it?
Architecture that takes material seriously doesn’t ask how to make space look better. It asks how to make space more human. For Han, the answer lies in material that does not control, but clarifies - space, time, and care. Concrete and curtain, in her hands, are not opposites but partners - each capable of framing experience with precision, restraint, and intent.
