Architecture Portfolio

1. Choong-il Joseph Kim Portfolio 2019

2. Baird Prize First Place
Second Year First Semester, 2017
Studio-wide $1000 Competition
The challenge was to design a bird observatory and
overcome a cliff’s terrain. This proposal utilizes the crack
in the cliff to span hundreds of bird houses. The combined
effect imitates the murmurations of starlings. Viewers pass
through this experience and arrive at a view overlooking
Ithaca Falls.

4. Ex-Slaughterhouses
Third year Rome Semester 2018
The historical slaughterhouse complex of Rome is enclosed in its
layers of ruinous walls and buildings. In this project, the complex
is opened along two axes, which expose the slaughterhouses’
network of rusted rails to the public. These rails suspend and
weave throughout the campus of old and new buildings, binding
together harmonious programs including creative offices, galleries,
retail stores, and the existing architecture school of Rome.

7. Studio V Internship
Second Year Summer 2018
Buffalo’s Silo City marks the birthplace of the grain elevator, but the obsolete complex
has been in ruins for decades. This project aims to repurpose the decaying towers
into a campus of residential, cultural, and commercial programs, thereby cementing
Buffalo’s industrial heritage into the city. I was tasked with establishing the project’s
aesthetic and creating early visualizations. This involved flying to Buffalo, surveying
and modeling the site, meeting with developers, and rendering early design iterations.

8. Ithaca Commons Music Hall
Second Year Second Semester 2018
How can a musical instrument inform the design of a music hall? This investigation
began with taking a guitar’s linear components and wrapping them around the hands
to form a rotary instrument. Likewise, this music hall wraps the audience around, above,
and below the performer. In order to fit this concept into the L-shaped site, a mass
reaches over the stage and a perpendicular void reaches under it, much like the two
hands that meet together inside the musical instrument.

11. Dragon Day 2017
First Year Second Semester 2017
Construction and Design Head
I lead our team of 60 in the construction and
design for Dragon Day, Cornell’s biggest parade.
Our year was determined to make the biggest and
loudest dragon, so I designed musical pipes into
the ribs, and the retractable wings extended to
project noise across campus.

12. Water Ripple House
First Year First Semester 2016
I built a drawing machine that recorded ripples of
water and transcribed them into ink dashes. The
drawing inspired a wooden house and landscape
that floats above the water-level. As the tide
rises and falls, it intersects the house at different
heights and changes the interior spaces.

14. Groundworks
Architecture
Internship
High-school Junior Year Summer 2015
I lead the design and assembly of a series
of 11 ft tall plinths. These plinths hung
artworks for an art exhibition on liberated
women. The plinths themselves express
the ideas of freedom, movement, and
lightness. These plinths were then featured
in the Hong Kong Shenzhen Biennale.