Home

Structural Naturalization
Shuyu Yi
Structural Naturalization is a thesis book and visual research project that investigates how repeated pressures within urban systems become absorbed into everyday perception. Rather than focusing only on broken infrastructure, the project examines the relationship between large-scale structural cycles and personal emotional experience: delay, fatigue, adaptation, numbness, and routine. The book uses New York’s urban and transit environments as an entry point, but the subject extends beyond the subway itself. Through infrastructural case studies, service alerts, material textures, warning colors, archival fragments, and system-like language, the project visualizes how disruptions become normalized when they repeat often enough. A temporary repair becomes expected. A delay becomes routine. A structural problem becomes felt as personal stress. The final installation presents the thesis book as both a research document and a designed object. Its visual system combines coded fields, fragmented layouts, yellow warning layers, concrete textures, and repeated typographic structures to create a reading experience between archive, report, and emotional record. By translating systemic pressure into visual form, the project asks viewers to recognize what is often treated as background: the quiet process through which systems shape perception.

abelmadeportfolio.com