Shengtao Shen
Shengtao Shen is an MArch Candidate at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. His research focuses on the weaving of coincidences in the structure of the physical environment and the emotional landscape of humans.
Projects
This prototype project introduces a reconnaissance rover designed to enhance firefighter safety and efficiency in hazardous environments.
Equipped with image recognition and environmental sensors, the rover can identify people, pets, and fire hotspots while monitoring air quality and temperature. All data is transmitted in real time to a head-mounted display, where key information is overlaid onto the user's view, providing critical insight before entering danger zones.
With a modular and adaptable system, the technology can be extended to drones, robotic platforms, or wearable devices, making it applicable to disaster response, industrial inspections, and other high-risk scenarios.
Equipped with image recognition and environmental sensors, the rover can identify people, pets, and fire hotspots while monitoring air quality and temperature. All data is transmitted in real time to a head-mounted display, where key information is overlaid onto the user's view, providing critical insight before entering danger zones.
With a modular and adaptable system, the technology can be extended to drones, robotic platforms, or wearable devices, making it applicable to disaster response, industrial inspections, and other high-risk scenarios.
Chimera
We are afraid of becoming something else.
Not of rupture, but of the slow drift toward unfamiliar states—where the self blurs, and identity dissolves.
Chimera is a condition. It holds together what should not coexist. Steel pierces leather; geometry grips flesh. These materials resist each other—they bind, collide, and compromise. Fear lives in this uneasy fusion.
We fear hybridity because it challenges purity and embraces contradiction. In architecture and the body, transformation disturbs us not because it wounds, but because it alters what we thought was stable.
This work is not about fear as reaction, but as presence—a quiet awareness that something has changed, and will not return to what it was.
Not of rupture, but of the slow drift toward unfamiliar states—where the self blurs, and identity dissolves.
Chimera is a condition. It holds together what should not coexist. Steel pierces leather; geometry grips flesh. These materials resist each other—they bind, collide, and compromise. Fear lives in this uneasy fusion.
We fear hybridity because it challenges purity and embraces contradiction. In architecture and the body, transformation disturbs us not because it wounds, but because it alters what we thought was stable.
This work is not about fear as reaction, but as presence—a quiet awareness that something has changed, and will not return to what it was.
BUILDING A TOWER
How can architectural narratives being a metaphor for the plight of the city today?
ABSENCE & PRESENCE
How to redefine the relationship between human existence and the eternal existence?
