Plot

World renowned 'starchitect' Alexander Pan finds his professional and personal authority challenged when he returns to his alma mater...where his daughter Elaine is using cardboard as a design material for her final project.

Alexander Pan has just been awarded architecture's highest honor. And as a titan of his industry, he is invited to be a guest critic at his alma mater for the students' final projects. There, he finds his estranged daughter Elaine designing her final project out of cardboard tubes. Alexander, believing this to be an insult on the profession he so reveres, embarrasses his daughter in front of her classmates. It is then revealed that Alexander's wife/Elaine's mother perished in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake a decade prior; and thus father and daughter diverged on different paths in using architecture as an outlet of their grief. For Alexander, architecture must strive to never fail; while for Elaine, architecture meant more than grandeur and hubris, for perhaps there was a simpler solution to help ease the pain and suffering of natural disasters for those with lesser means. To reconcile with his daughter, Alexander must step outside of his own perspective to truly see something he had missed - something Elaine has found.