  扫码获取高清设计合集图纸 01 Animate Characters for a Potential City Evan OrfMArch IAdvised by Andrew Holder   02 Animate Characters for a Potential City Fan LuMArch IAdvised by Holly SamuelsonThermal qualities—warm, cool, radiant, airy—are an important part of our experience in a space. However, these thermal experiences are often oversimplified in architectural design considerations by tempering the indoor environment to a homogeneous room temperature. Despite being standardized people with a fixed and unchanging thermal preference of 21°C, occupants have a wide range of thermal needs that largely depend on what spaces we gather around and what activities are going on. The increasing demand of sustainability also brings about questioning the necessity to cool/heat a building to a desired temperature everywhere. New cooling and heating technologies, such as radiant systems, have already begun changing architectural design, saving a considerable space in floor height, and brought the potential of target cooling/heating with an environment open to nature. With a provocation that the thermal function of building and thermal comfort to accommodate various people could be used as an effective element of design, this project seeks to strengthen the relationship between people and thermal environments. Taking the emerging coworking/coliving culture as an opportunity, this thesis challenges us to redefine a working and living space that has a diversity of atmospheres and brings back thermal experiences, which can act as a catalyst for social activities. Against the homogeneity of the modern climate, the new coworking/coliving space serves as a vehicle for people to embrace thermal delight—a fresh gentle breeze back into the modern, enclosed glass box.    Designing Responsive Architecture: Human-Building CoevolvingIsa HeMArch IAdvised by Jeffry BurchardWhy is architecture thought of as static while its occupants are dynamic? What if architecture was not a building of programmatic requirements but dynamic and responsive to the rituals, habits, and behaviors of its occupants? Could we imagine architecture as living artifact, expressing its internal complexity by coevolving with its users? Could we imagine a different human-building relationship? The traditional understanding of our relationship to buildings is that we shape our buildings and afterward our buildings shape us. However, buildings are commissioned by clients and designed by architects who rarely inhabit those buildings. In this world, our relationship with architecture is one-sided and the nuances of our daily activities are lost in its static-ness. As users, we continuously reappropriate and modify spaces as more isolated and disjointed ad hoc interventions.    LeftoversMatthew MoffittMArch IAdvised by Sergio Lopez-PineiroFrom the next major earthquake in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, a field of rubbish will emerge: overturned transmission frames, distorted steel members, split freeway columns, freestanding chimneys, detached plywood roof panels, landslide blocks, fallen troughs, and debris slides; each having an intrinsic tactility, dimensionality, proportion, scale, texture, and rear-facing nostalgia. Iñaki Ábalos writes of castoffs: “Against luxury, bourgeois comfort . . . there arises an idea of space based on the decontextualization and proliferation of trivial objects that, once re-contextualized, acquire an aesthetic meaning . . . a creative parasitism of the production/consumption cycle.” This thesis takes rubbish as its medium, that which emerges not from newness and novelty, but rather from longstanding duration. Just as the log cabin comes from the trees of the forest, the leftover dwelling is conceived of using the rubbish of the earthquake. Traditionally, the individual spaces of the dwelling are bound to a fixed, positive notion of function and duration of use. In this hypothetical condition, the latent spatial value of the as-found artifact is activated through tactile design operations such as abutments to traditional construction methods, unexpected surface finishes, flexible custom furniture, scalar mismatches, and casting procedures. The tectonic measures necessary to juxtapose the residual, de-signified castoffs of the earthquake with quotidian design methods may render visible enigmatic and unforeseen ways of living. A Stubborn Room: Re-InscriptionsKaoru LovettMArch IAdvised by Tomás de PaorA strange precedent is persisting in Hawaii—snow-shedding roofs perch on tropical shelters as unused attics, walls frame expression more than buffer climate, houses are weighted rather than tied to foundations—architectural features that originally spoke a colonial dialect have become expressively mute. The persistent copy and paste of the colonial house is repeated so relentlessly that specific meaning is no longer held through architecture and, rather, lies somewhere in this stubborn redundancy. The lanai, as an architectural element, has not been repeated but translated, eventually abbreviated in both form and meaning to a porch or balcony. Absent of an archetypal predecessor, the lanai differentiates from the architectural characteristics of the stubborn colonial house as the space lacks any agenda when regarding typical spatial metrics—form, program, environment. If the cultural preservation of the stubborn house indicates that meaning in architecture, within the context of contemporary Hawaii, is derived from the image, then this project is to work through a process of image making as a means to inscribe meaning back into the domestic space. The construction of an image of the lanai will work as a testing ground for alternatives of embedding signification, without the crutch of a preexisting language structure, into the traditional architecture of Hawaii. 06 Gigantic MiniatureDavid LingMArch IAdvised by Martin BechtholdThe standard of timber construction is no longer the linear member, but the planar sheet. In both appearance and processing, cross-laminated timber resembles, at full scale, the rigid sheet materials used for model-making in the architectural design studio. Taken further, the resemblances between these materials go beyond likeness to become sameness, issuing a conceptual collapse between the representational object and the original, between the process of design and the process of construction. This project addresses these convergences by reconceptualizing the role of the physical model in the process of design, attempting to define a novel architectural expression through the tension found between the ontological and the representational status of full-scale model-making material. The model is normally a representation; it isn’t the real thing. We’ve collectively agreed to gloss over the medium itself, allowing loosely fit joints, propped walls, warped floors and laser burns to slip past us like static from a speaker. But a naive gaze reveals something different: the imprecisions inherent to the model’s construction, previously discarded as the noise of the medium, begin to form a syntax that could be described as a “studio vernacular.” The elements of this aesthetic form an ontological overlay to the representational surface of the model, inflecting the designer’s intended meaning with the grunts and sighs that index its material properties and constructional processes. Combining the representational-ontological tension embodied by the physical model with the scalar ambiguity resulting from CLT’s affinities to model-making material, this project takes on the multi-unit dwelling in the city of Vancouver to define a contemporary timber aesthetic paradoxically described as the Gigantic Miniature. Learning from My Past HomesDohyun LeeMArch IAdvised by Jon LottI am looking at my past homes to see if they have any common threads of principles that can be shared with the discipline of architecture. My hypothesis is that past homes are significant pieces of architectural experiences, but they are hard to analyze, rationalize, and use as valid precedents to design a building. I am constructing physical models of my past homes inhabited between 1993 and 2016 solely based on my memory, piece by piece and in close focus after focus, in order to visualize my subconscious reading of their form and space. Through this way of recollection, I am attempting to discover and rationalize their architectural merits as if they are historical precedents. My goal is to design a building with their merits. Through my thesis, I am trying to show the potential of self-reflective precedents in architectural design.
08 Sensitization: Functional Physiognomies for Mass HousingPeteris LazovskisMArch IAdvised by John May and Jonathan GrinhamThe facade of a building is its face to the world. As such, it has the potential to express what the building stands for. With few exceptions, the exteriors of mass housing projects convey either a dedication to cost concerns, or to aesthetics considered appealing. However, building facades can reveal unique character if sculpted by interwoven systems responding to localized physiological needs and climate peculiarities—pertinent to societies globally, as they begin to redress the environmental disregard with which many standardized residential ensembles have been designed. This provides an opportunity to rethink the face of mass housing. The serially deployed apartment blocks within the former Soviet Union epitomize this challenge. Designed with a narrow set of principles for construction efficiency, maximum component repeatability, and minimum aesthetic variety, these relatively identical buildings appear in different climates, housing different cultures. Currently, entire neighborhoods are approaching structural expiration, and refurbishment attempts generally treat the Soviet inheritance as an eyesore, to be masked, reconfigured, or demolished. This thesis, instead, proposes to sensitize the building bodies to their respective milieux, by coupling the material properties of their internal structures to new, articulated skins. Set in a Soviet-era district in Riga, Latvia, the project materializes northern climate considerations—low levels of sunlight, concerns about ventilation and heat loss, and a legacy of vernacular hearths in the “home”—into a network of functional geometries that is mapped onto the existing concrete armatures. Thus, an expanded definition of environmental considerations allows the interaction of their spatial pressures to generate surface variety, resulting in physiognomies unique to their setting. This hybrid assembly of efficient frame and idiosyncratic facade suggests a new architectural model for mass housing. New New England ChurchVivian Ho In KuongMArch IAdvised by Mark LeeWhat is the significance of religious architecture today, if there is any? The program of the church in America has, over the past few centuries, undergone significant typological, social, and cultural transformations: from the first wooden New England meeting house of the 1600s to the Romanesque revival of the 19th century, to today being absorbed into a type of American big box architecture. This thesis uses the backdrop of Plymouth, Massachusetts, to investigate the development of New England churches and their history and asks the question: What is the role of architecture in religious buildings? In 1938, the German architect Rudolf Schwarz stated that the postwar task of the time was “to build churches out of that reality which we experience and verify every day.”1 Rather than reminiscing on the nostalgic past of the church as an institution, this thesis reconsiders the church as it is currently and how architecture can facilitate its activities. The struggle between big box and cathedral, banal and numinous, institutional and communal, symbol and anti-symbol, duck and shed is manifested through a series of wall constructions that express these dilemmas as a struggle between the free section and the free plan. Given the events of a typical Sunday service, the proposal creates a novel way of looking at the sequential progression of the service in addition to the physical construction of a new New England church. 1 Rudolf Schwarz, The Church Incarnate: The Sacred Function of Christian Architecture (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1958). Preserving through Rebuilding: A Radical Preservation Method for Densifying Urban ContextMinyong KimMArch IAdvised by Andrew WittThe growing density of urban context has triggered urban renewal projects in big cities. However, as the projects only preserved the buildings and sites with very high historic value, the cities lost the architectural heritage (such as style or internal spatial logic) of some neighborhoods. Opposingly, other cities that learned from them have decided to preserve entire neighborhoods, failing to respond to the high demand of densification. This thesis proposes a new mode of preservation that bridges between the two extreme modes. Taking a similar attitude as Rem Koolhaas’s preservation idea for Beijing that did not deliberately select what buildings should be preserved, this thesis also does not examine the historic value of each building. Rather, it focuses on saving the most prevalent typologies in each neighborhood in a city. The technical component of this thesis performs a 3-D scan of every building in Boston to select the typologies in each neighborhood, stack their volumes on a new site, and rebuild their facade’s geometric texture and spaces. The resulting gaps between the stacked buildings are designed to provide interstitial spaces that connect different buildings with different programs together. With this method, this thesis aims to preserve important qualities of the representative building typologies of all neighborhoods in a city, as well as to provide opportunities for densification. 11 PETRIFICATIONS: Staging the FigureKonrad HoltsmarkMArch IAdvised by Jorge Silvetti and Erika Naginski“Sculpture records the first naive, unperplexed recognition of man by himself.” Playing on the contested space between the body and architecture, the thesis explores the classical figure as a device for manipulating form. Proposing the “Museum for Staging the Figure” as an extension to the British Museum, the suggested design deploys replicas from the existing collection to serve as figural abstractions of the visitor; now set halfway between the human body and the architectural object. The design argues that the modern conception of spatial experience follows from the 18th-century idea of the “aestheticized surface” of the figure as it separates from the ground. Architecture emerges in the form of the pedestal, the original construct that mediates figure and setting. Just as the pedestal allows for the duplication of the body into architecture, the manipulation of the interaction between the museum and its inanimate inhabitants blurs the line between the subject and object of the setting. This allows for an architecture to emerge out of a bodily empathy to the material frame, distinctly sensational in its muted narrative. The thesis’s exploration of part-to-the-whole begins with the limbs of ancient figure sculpture emerging from the ground in 15th-century Rome. Uncovered, they demanded a spatial setting novel to architecture. Tracing early museum case studies, the thesis centers itself on Michelangelo Simonetti’s 18th-century redesign of the Vatican Museum, understood in conjunction with a “haptic” way of seeing and the neoclassical fragment. 12Between a Child and the WorldYoung JuMArch IAdvised by Martin BechtholdThroughout the evolution of childhood educational theory, the immediate environment of learning has been critically considered by pedagogues since the Enlightenment. Reacting against the status quo of rote memorization and a disciplinary ethic, educational reformers argued that the setting of learning should be designed by the teacher with specific objectives for a child to learn by freely engaging with the provided surroundings. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the curated educational environment consisted of prearranged situations; for Friedrich Froebel, it was geometrical blocks; for Maria Montessori, it was sensorial materials. These thinkers were not only concerned with teaching children specific skills, but with the fundamental relationship between a person and the world. Designers of the built environment at large, however, have not acknowledged their role in crafting the educational setting, although it is physically the most dominant factor. Since the establishment of schools in response to child labor laws in the 19th century, educational architecture has evolved from a space to contain children while parents are at work to a place for education and protection. Nonetheless, designers have not specifically acknowledged children at different stages of physical, mental, and psychological development as the subject of their designs. Nor have they seriously undertaken the task of designing a space that influences how children relate to society and the physical world. This project proposes a preschool building that challenges the existing social and spatial relationships between a child and an adult, and between a child and space. It explores ways to offer spatial authority and autonomy to the child by recognizing the child as an autonomous actor in her learning environment. While negotiating between the necessary functional adult-oriented space and the unconventional child-oriented space, the project recalibrates architecture with respect to her scale, perspective, and activities. Blurring the Line between Natural and Built: Visualize the Invisible, Amplify the Subtle…Jingyuan HuangMArch IAdvised by Belinda TatoA city, as a built place, is often seen as the antithesis of nature. Transient changes that completely vanished from a rigid and definitive architecture over time are instead omnipresent in the cycles of nature. My thesis aims to explore the ambiguous boundaries between natural and artificial worlds. Could we employ weather, the natural elements, as an architectural device, suggesting new ways for the inhabitant to live and interact with nature in the dense and modern city, being less constrained and resistant, more welcoming toward the natural changes? Contemporary architecture has been more suitable for the dry season and good weather. Architecture is mostly viewed as a refuge from nature; I want to negotiate a rapprochement with it, to see architecture not as shelter, but as a changing environment itself. How could atmospheric architecture visualize the invisible, amplify the subtle in nature . . . acting as a provocation against the representation of modern architecture in photos of a weatherless context? And how could this experience redefine publicness as interwoven into a dense urban fabric? My desire is to set up a situation to which I take you and let you see. It becomes your experience. I chose Tokyo as the background based on research of the Tokyo void. It combines two seemingly contrasting entities: the largest city in the world and its everyday landscape of underutilized public space. My project is to dive into the possibility of transforming this kind of neglected and underutilized public space into inviting public places that bring the infinity of nature and immeasurable spatial expression back, and set up a frame for people to experience the sensitive change of nature through Tokyo’s small, organic, and scattered public space. Parti/Party Walls in Flooded KampungStella DwifaradewiMArch IAdvised by Megan Panzano and Rahul MehrotraSituated primarily on a swampy coastal plain along the Java Sea, Jakarta is natu-rally vulnerable to flooding. Global sea level rise and land subsidence put Jakarta further at risk as its complex flood mitigation system fails to address the additional burden. While an upgrade is direly needed for Jakarta to control water, the imple-mentation of such plans would mandate a total reorganization of the existing urban realm—one that is rarely ever a blank slate. “Kampung” has many different meanings. But for this thesis, the term describes an area of irregular and unplanned urban settlements found in Jakarta. As a community, a Kampung thrives on its proximity next to the water and close to the ground. However, its location is precisely the root of its problems. The river normalization efforts threaten the very existence of Kampung as both an urban form and as an Indonesian cultural artifact. Many families were uprooted and moved to the suburban fringe plots in sterile architectural towers, normalizing the vibrancy of their daily lives. This thesis investigates the Jakarta Kampung through an architectural lens that wishes to portray floodings as positives—specifically interested in how the vitality of this community and flooding of events can be retained in situ with water. Architecture becomes the middling agent between infrastructure and individual efforts that promises a new future for Kampung as it remains in place and anticipates its growth in the future.
15 DMV Kenneth Hasegawa MArch IAdvised by Tomás de PaorThere is perhaps no place in America more loathed than the Department of Motor Vehicles. This sentiment—a feeling caught between boredom, dread, and anger—is ingrained in American consciousness. The buildings themselves reinforce these misgivings; they are banal structures in desperate search of an architectural vocabulary. Yet, as an institution, the DMV is absolutely essential. It is a profoundly democratic space where almost everyone, regardless of social or economic status, must go. It is the gatekeeper to mobility, provides a rite of passage into adulthood, and is a place where individuals are given identity. Ironically though, its architecture lacks this very thing—identity. The DMV is clearly civic, but unlike court houses, or even post offices, they do not look civic. They are made of stucco rather than stone; they sit on parking lots rather than podiums. With the DMV there exists a stark misalignment between its extraordinary institutional importance and its utterly generic expression. It is time for the DMV to be remade. Critical Happening as a Project: Informing the Gaps in Nonaligned, Socialist SpaceAngeliki GiannisiMArch IAdvised by Eve Blau and Robert PietruskoThe urban architecture that defined the city of Zagreb during its nonaligned, self- managed course has been theorized as an “ongoing, open-ended project” and an “open work” in Umberto Eco’s sense.1 As an extension of the open work, critical happenings emerge as the dialectics between experimentation and discussion and as a collective project. It is precisely the specificity of those eventful moments that this project seeks to explore against the backdrop of nonaligned, self-managed Yugoslavia during the 1960s. To make a case in point, cross sections in the history of three separate yet interrelated urban architectural projects in Zagreb are drawn: the (dis)assembled department store, the Jugomont housing mikroraions, and Vladimir Bonačić’s light installations. The perception of the city as an open work populated by moments of critical happenings opens the way for the conceptualization of socialist space in Zagreb as a motivation of three processes: functional transformation, systemic renewal, and multiplication. By reading the case studies through these lenses and emphasizing the role of Yugoslavia as an ideological site and opportunity, this project suggests a distinct legacy of nonaligned self-management as a site of disruption, experimentation, and iteration. With this understanding, the case studies come forth not as proposals for a city in crisis, but rather as discursive tools for a political structure in crisis. They reveal an architecture with the potential to mediate and inform the shortcomings of a self-managed society that relentlessly attempts to find its place between open market and socialism. In light of ongoing privatization processes in the post- socialist context of Zagreb, critical happenings invite larger questions about the potential of architecture to act as a collective project for social change. 1Eve Blau and Ivan Rupnik. Project Zagreb: Transition as Condition, Strategy, Practice (Barcelona: Actar D, 2007). Inside-Out: An Investigation of the Assembly as an Equitable Mediator in the Wake of Climate Change DisruptionChristopher GallegosMArch IAdvised by Ashley Schafer and Rahul MehrotraThis thesis seeks to explore the Assembly as an implementor and educator of climate change strategies. Through inverting the perimeter wall model of Western diplomatic architecture, introducing time as a medium of design, and questioning the antagonistic relationship of water to the built environment, this thesis proposes a hybridized approach to relief implementation. Over time, these mechanisms can inform a less obscured form of diplomatic intervention. In a country with limited support and dwindling resources, can a building seek to leverage a country’s soft power as cultural, political, and foreign capital to a complex issue? Can a platform for engagement and education be established with the government to institutionalize sweeping change? In low-lying countries like Bangladesh, drought, flooding, frequent cyclonic activity, and the escalating influx of people (considered climate refugees1) toward cities like Dhaka, are already becoming realities. Within the capital of Bangladesh, new models of public assembly can serve as exemplars in rethinking the dialectic between colonial approaches, or local reactionary practices. Situated near the seat of democracy in developing Bangladesh, on Louis Kahn’s National Parliament campus in Dhaka, the proposal will draw upon reciprocal motivations to establish a new model. Inside-Out serves as the proving ground to consider how an architecture that is more open to the public and the environment might arm developing countries with models to address the long- term effects of climate change. Same:sameBenoit MarandaMArch IAdvised by Jon LottThe North American suburb produces a profoundly finite spatial sequencing from the urban to the architectural. The experience of the interior, primarily domestic space is kept dogmatically concealed, where rooms and the lives that are lived within them can only be approximated from the exterior, hidden behind manicured, patinaed exteriors. To begin to unravel this paradigm, the possibility of experiencing the other simultaneously with the self seeks to be given architectural form. The argument can be made that the suburban domestic interior is completely unremarkable until it is placed in visible comparison or juxtaposition with another similar interior, or by beginning to unravel the banality of the traditional container and contained dialectic. The thesis seeks to articulate methods by which the spatial polarity of the suburban house may be exploded, where interiors are divorced from their containers and become part of an open and informal, public spatial narrative. By this, the project hopes to expose hidden phenomena inherent to the architecture of the suburban home, such as mirrorings and hidden rooms, indulging the observer in their fundamental need to know, the curiosity of what lurks behind closed doors, and to compare the space of one’s own to that of the other. Through a series of inversions and formal manipulations, domestic space is duplicated into public space, transforming the domestic into spectacle. By simply replicating an existing context, the thesis radicalizes and accelerates sameness, while revealing its ultimately imperfect nature. SkyjackingMahfuz SultanMArch IAdvised by John MayOver a series of longform texts and image essays, the following publication uses the history of airplane hijacking as a device to poetically explore the role of flight and seizure of the sky by several speculative architects, artists, and filmmakers series of texts and image essays. This is neither a rigorous nor sociohistorical investigation into the relationship between flight and architecture. Rather, it is a series of digressions within digressions within digressions. A shared poetic imagination that a specific set of figures shared and that (perhaps) only an architect would recognize and valorize. This is a multidisciplinary art project narrated in the voice of an architect. Second Nature: A Healing MachineJessica YuanMArch IAdvised by Lisa Haber-ThomsonThe healing promise of nature plays a prominent role throughout the history of medicine. Hospitals in the 19th century were often located in rural retreats to isolate contagion and to heal through clean air and environmental therapies. Conditions with no direct cure could be treated through the physiological effects of light, air, water, and temperature. In this era, the trajectories of progress in medical technology, environmental systems, and architecture were braided together. These threads have diverged greatly today. In contrast to the open and porous historical hospital, today’s hospitals are closed systems designed for efficiency, homogeneous environments detached from the outdoors. Today, we are seeing a rise in anxieties around the economic and spatial inaccessibility of this model, as well as increasing suspicion of medical authority. Dead Reckoning: Scavenger Protocols for Unscripted StructuresOmar Valentín SilvaMArch IAdvised by Oana StănescuThe fishermen from the Aral Sea navigate the desert in search of fleets of stranded fishing vessels. Over the years, they learn to dismantle the carcasses of rusty hulls, forced to become part of a shipbreaker crew. In their state of dereliction, the boats are considered a form of asset. The unwanted scraps—the skeletal remains of a once living and breathing sea—yearn to be possessed. Dead Reckoning is a tale of the people who lived on the strenuous labor of cracking ships after the desiccation of the Aral Sea. In this story, buildings are understood as a form of narration, an account of events constructed upon both fictional and historical facts; changing and developing from their original form, because their future is unpredictable. Architecture then becomes a speculation upon a performative process of assembly and disassembly, caught up between scenes of decomposition and generation. New Chinese-nessXiaotang TangMArch IAdvised by Mark LeeSince the past century, there have been countless endeavors exploring the modernization of Chinese architecture. Through a survey of over 1,000 “old-new” Chinese architectural projects, despite the sheer volume of design strategies, it is discovered that both the scope and the means of Chinese old-new architecture are limited. According to the survey, two typologies, the big roof, and courtyard housing, constitute close to 90 percent of contemporary Chinese architecture. The design methodologies are confined to the “decorated shed,” a generic structure with identifiable Chinese motifs, and the “contrast,” the coexistence of historical context and contemporary additions. Acknowledging the limitations, the thesis aims to explore novel methodologies approaching the Chinese-ness under contemporary contexts. Instead of focusing on motifs or materiality, the thesis intends to probe into the core of Chinese-ness, the spatial organization. Three traditional typologies, overlooked by the mainstream—tower, palace, and cloister—are selected for the experiment. While preserving their spatial logic, the project converts the typologies into modern museums with contemporary motifs and materials. 23 “If it looks like a . . . and acts like a . . . ”Veronica SmithMArch IAdvised by Jennifer BonnerPost Up! Apparent Tectonics for an Arena in the CityAdam ShermanMArch IAdvised by May and Lisa Haber-ThomsonIn the design of stadiums, structure often plays simultaneous roles of performance and representation. The same enormous beams and columns that facilitate massive interior spans also serve as brushstrokes to depict exterior images of heroism and athleticism to the city. In these situations, structure brings inward- looking and outward-facing considerations into harmony, responding to two questions with the same answer. But perhaps this compatibility is limiting, and new architectural opportunities lie in the moments when interior structural reality and exterior structural expression do not easily align. This thesis explores the tension between the apparent tectonics of a building’s urban figure and the actual tectonics of its inner skeleton through the design of a new basketball arena for the Los Angeles Clippers. By decoupling structural function and structural image, the arena aims to address the complexities of assembling and communicating to diverse, contemporary publics. In this new arena, structure frames both the interior experience of the game and the exterior projection of the game’s reproduction. Integrating with these multiple ways of viewing—both live and mediated—the tension and compression members themselves begin to toe the line between reality and simulation. Structure straddles this divide as it operates across scales, negotiating between the individual and the arena and between the building and the city. From the individual member to the macro-assembly, this structural system demonstrates its flexibility, fulfilling competing roles of performance and representation as it simultaneously supports and frames collective experience. Displace-Making: A Center for the Rohingya Women and Adolescent Empowerment AssociationThomas SchaperkotterMArch IAdvised by Toshiko Mori and Rahul MehrotraThe unprecedented present of this century’s refugee crisis is also unmistakably a crisis of refuge. This crisis manifests in spontaneously built environments of perceived ephemerality, which fail to account for the protracted reality of displacement. Nowhere is this truer than in Kutupalong, today’s largest aggregation of camps. Located in the Ukhiya and Teknaf regions of Bangladesh, these camps host registered refugees as well as a stateless Rohingya diaspora from Myanmar. Following months of collaborative fieldwork with a self-employed women’s association in the camp, this thesis project proposes incremental architectural interventions to their existing structure and site in response to their extended tenure and entrepreneurial agency. The current center, built on a hilltop by members of the community, provides this group with their sole ability to congregate and earn a living for their families. As their homegrown movement evolves, the existing facility requires retooling to envision new programmatic possibilities that extend the breadth of their craft. Other TimesCara RobertsMArch IAdvised by Martin BechtholdHow has the shifting organization of time affected the organization and experience of space? The solar time of agricultural life and the standard time of the industrial age both created clear temporal and spatial divisions between work and rest. Now, periods of work, rest, and leisure have been subdivided into minute, dislocated units of personal activity, and projected into arbitrary interiors. At the urban scale, GPS enables us to immediately abstract the distance between any two places into a projected number of minutes, and to navigate from one to the other without ever looking up. This thesis posits that the flexibility afforded by the contemporary timescape, globally synced by satellite, and paced by email pings, is lessening our experience of the physical world. Certain sites, however, carve out pockets in the contemporary timescape. The ritual and rhythms of activity in these spaces work in tandem with their siting, materiality, and engagement with light to construct heterochronia, that is, other times. In essence, the physicality of these spaces changes participants’ sense of time. Sited in Berlin, this project inserts one heterochronia, the reverberating bunker of the Nightclub, into another: the patch of solar time defined by the allotment garden colony, or Kleingärten. By nesting one within the other, club goers will slowly discover the strangeness of the world around them, and gardeners will start to feel the familiar earth quiver beneath their spades. Building MagicSylvia ZhaoMArch IAdvised by Tomás de Paor2 Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 274. 28 YOU ARE NOW ENTERING A FOOD AREALuisa RespondekMArch IAdvised by Jeffry BurchardBefore the Industrial Revolution, the City of London was shaped through food and its trade. Where there used to be the bustle of food, however, nowadays we find London’s Central Business District. People in ill-fitting suits hurriedly rush to their next meeting while wolfing down premade sandwiches from thousands of identical chain restaurants. Of the four main wholesale food markets that used to be situated in the center of the city, only Smithfield Market remains today. Nonetheless, even that is slated for relocation. On a site that has held a meat market for 800 years, real history is being pushed out for the sterile-packaged history of a museum. This thesis proposes an alternative. By utilizing tools of the picturesque movement, this thesis seeks to reinvent the relationship between people and the nature that sustains them in a prevailing site of allure—their homes. With an existing building, the intervention frames, reframes, and internalizes images of food production and thus takes on the role of an architectural Claude glass. As such, it mediates between two-dimensional pictures and their three-dimensional experience to refocus and reverse the trend of departure of people from their food. With foreground, middle ground, and background, the picturesque is included in the project at three levels: dwelling, complex, and site. These aspects all unite to reintroduce food diversity into the center of London and thereby shape a larger food network that anchors Smithfield Market in its place. Hide and Seek: Perception and Disposition of Poché in Architecture Hyunsuk YunMArch IAdvised by Elizabeth ChristoforettiThis thesis explores how contemporary poché could intervene in the architectural design process, refabricating our perception and the disposition of space, and providing occupants with an everyday architectural hide-and- seek experience. The office building will act as a test bed, where we observe the tension between the high degree of practicality it requires, and new ways of working and collaborating will require new modes of designing space. Poché will be a mediator that catalyzes the synthetic reaction between them. 30 A New Civic Monument for Boston / An Architectural Natural History RevisitedBenjamin PollakMArch IAdvised by P. Scott Cohen—John Hejduk, speaking of Henry Cobb’s proposal for the Sainsbury gallery. 31 Archiving Shifts: The Changing Architectures of KnowledgeJihyun RoMArch IAdvised by Megan PanzanoAs knowledge changes in the face of digital culture, the identity of architecture as a physical edifice forms a fraught relationship with the mutating memory of itself stored in virtual space. In light of this tension, a question remains as to how new forms of digital engagement alter our traditional understanding of architecture as a recorder of collective memory and experience. Addressing the cultural epistemological shift experienced in today’s systems of information storage, my thesis considers the architectural consequences of this shift, exploring the ways in which architectural form can physically manifest the difference between the contemporary “shape” of knowledge presented by the digital database and older forms of knowledge collection and organization. Highlighting this difference, my thesis overlays a new method of form making onto existing historical architectural types employed in the construction of archival spaces, leveraging the movement from the real to the representational through the exploration of projection techniques that measure, order, and filter information within a contemporary digital language. 32 A Combinatorial ArchitectureClaire DjangMArch IAdvised by Andrew Witt and Jennifer BonnerThe characterization of computation in architecture is often that of pure rationality with no tolerance for vagueness. This thesis uses scripted syntax and aleatoric operations to invoke chance and articulate ambiguity within a computational framework. Printmaking and movable type serve as representational precedents in which the repetition of idealized figures and codes engender new wholes that are inflected by the material imperfections of ink on paper. The thesis attempts to generate unique and unpredictable spatial arrangements from a finite set of simple elements. By superimposing a matrix of formal moves onto the programmed spaces of a house-museum-art-residency, architecture is produced through com-binatorial algorithms. The typical country house museum was once occupied by a family and is handed over to the public as a form of anachronistic architecture. If history is removed from this model, and inhabitation is brought back in, is it possible for a contemporary domestic building and art collection to evoke as much wonder and fascination? By overlaying three distinct programs—house, museum, and studio—this question sets up a programmatic framework for the composition of spatial elements at the scale of the object, human body, and public realm. The assemblages of art objects and their display within domestic settings provide criteria for a scripted combinatorial assemblage of architectural spaces. At the smaller scale, the design seeks to address the display and framing of artwork within domestic space, and at a larger scale it choreographs a sequence of private-made-public rooms.
33 Anti-MuseumHenrik IlvesmäkiMArch IIAdvised by Toshiko MoriThe atmosphere of a room may be oppressive, the atmosphere of a valley may be joyful. But on the other side you can argue about atmospheres and you even can agree with others about what sort of atmosphere is present in a certain room or landscape. This thesis highlights our perception of atmosphere in architecture by creating a simulation of an art museum, devoid of artwork yet containing all the trappings of its contemporaries. The project is situated in Basel, which has its multitude of galleries and museums referenced in the design. This process results in what is essentially a model of signs that encourages the imagination—the catalyst for the perception of atmosphere according to Juhani Pallasmaa. The simulated museum promotes a pervasive sense of atmosphere by creating didactic, spatial gradients and juxtaposed, sudden clashes of different museum spaces. These experiences incite ambiguous associations that make one conscious of their own aesthetic memories, and focuses visitors’ minds inward. One stops looking at objects and elements and instead probes their subconscious, transforming the typical museum experience into its antithesis. The project is an experimental context to ask, is the feeling of atmosphere enhanced or weakened by personal associations, and how obvious or vague must they be in order for this to happen? 34 The Form of Lists: Parts, Models, Incongruity, Places to School, Corridors, Etc.Trent FredricksonMArch IIAdvised by Andrew HolderThink of your typical grocery list: lettuce, tomato, milk, carrots, bread, toilet paper, Clorox wipes, pepper, eggs, post office, ice cream, etc. Carrots are before bread and after milk, while pepper precedes eggs. The list’s sequence doesn’t correlate to the layout of the grocery store, alphabetical order, or the nutritional pyramid. Lists are sometimes hierarchical, but most often, they are ordered indiscriminately. Lists have an ability to hold together vast amounts of disparate parts, thanks to a common reason for being, sometimes described by a title. In doing so, the list helps us to parse out heterogeneous phenomena in order to better make sense of our world. In architecture, any building project begins with a list—the program document—which enumerates the anticipated spaces with determinately assigned uses and their expected square footages. The designation of determinate use produces particular biases in the organization of buildings, namely toward the arrangement of rooms along a double-loaded corridor. In order to produce alternative models for organization and figuration, this thesis departs by rewriting the list of a building differently than the program document. Demonstrated through the design of a K–12 public school in San Francisco, California, a new list is proposed that includes things such as display cases, places to take a drink, history, cliques, etc. Such a list reconfigures social and private distinctions for a more activated educational environment characterized by inexhaustible differentiation and a total entanglement of parts. 35 Vallecorsa: New Prospects for Ruined TerritoriesNicolás Delgado ÁlcegaMArch IIAdvised by Jorge SilvettiVallecorsa is a small valley of the Monti Ausoni, north of Sperlonga. To design a campus for an agricultural cooperative in this setting may at first seem a somewhat sylvan proposition. Vallecorsa is an environment that has been strongly shaped by human interaction for centuries, full of traces of the repeated attempts to dwell in harmony with place through acts of artifice. Its present condition, however, is dire. The valley is symptomatic of many of the challenges faced by the Italian countryside as a whole: depopulation, disinvestment, land abandonment, hydrological changes, soil erosion, and desertification trends. This thesis is a collective effort with the Cooperativa Agricola la Carboncella to imagine what an experimental rural campus for the organization may look like. It seeks to visualize the consequences of new practices and types of relations with a landscape in the midst of a transformation caused chiefly by abandonment. The valley’s stability for centuries depended on agricultural infrastructure and management practices that produced a unique cultural landscape. As many of these practices are suspended, and other are reinvented, what will be of this landscape and the people that inhabit it? What parts of its material and cultural heritage will be useful in reconstructing a way of life, and how will major losses affect people’s sense of place and identity? The design of a campus for this cooperative, strongly invested in regional development, is an effort to try to answer some of these questions; where the pragmatic and the existential are inextricably linked. 36 Mixed Doubles: Sensed Symmetry & Other OthersSamantha VasseurMArch IAdvised by John MaySymmetry doesn’t always occur in plain sight: it may, instead, exist as the sense of another, both fundamentally equivalent and different. One has been exhausting the women’s locker rooms’ spatial relationships for a number of years until one suddenly—perhaps as a child whose parents divorce—incidentally spends a stray minute in the men’s locker rooms and viscerally grasps the symmetry that was true all along. The projected reciprocal space occurs in the mind and is triggered by a wall. A façade is, according to Alois Riegl, a wall that implies that a room is behind it. The opposite of a wall, then, is the ground: a plane with nothing beneath it but earth. The retaining wall inside of a hole in the earth is then effectively a ground, whereas a floorplate is effectively a wall. The thesis imagines the negative of the room we are not in. Mixed Doubles proposes a public racquet club. Sensed Symmetry & Other Others is about our projection of the other, invisible behind a wall or unpredictable beyond markings on the ground. It draws from the history of Central Park as a constructed hole in Manhattan, the face that is the racquet—from the Arabic rahat, “palm of the hand”—and the opening gesture given by tennis, from the French tenez, “take heed” at the projectile that is coming your way. Pivoted FrontalitiesKevin ChongMArch IAdvised by Michelle ChangSymptomatic of the social fractures and economic inequality in postcolonial Hong Kong is a developer-driven typology of residential projects. The past decade has seen a proliferation of otherwise highly standardized residential towers on podi-ums clad in flattened and collaged imagery of such Western tectonic symbols as Greek columns and Roman arches. These aspatial and artificial facades, previ-ously only found in luxury residential complexes, have since infiltrated mid-priced markets, producing branded frontalities that no longer necessarily deliver on the expectations of tectonic integrity, generous living spaces, and first-rate amenities. Nevertheless, the pastiches of Western architectural syntax constitute a consider-able part of property values by appealing to a nostalgia of the now out-of-context “Western” high life, an aspiration repeatedly echoed in recent protests in the city. Sited in Sha Tin, a new residential town and recent hub of political disputes in Hong Kong, Pivoted Frontalities operationalizes the apparent discontinuity between facade and interior organization in the proposal of a mixed-use complex with residential and retail programs. Rather than treat the facade as a flattened afterthought, the thesis project embraces the mismatch between the aspiration for external legibility and the fidelity to internal layout standardization, reconciling the two through the production of assembly spaces and moments of connections. Speculating a pivot to the existing frontality-driven reading of mid-priced residen-tial projects in Hong Kong, the proposal seeks to resist the by-default reverence to predetermined political and cultural leanings and enable a productive coexis-tence of multiple narratives for living. 38 Deploying Functionless: Rechoreographing Living in JapanJonathan Tsun Hong YeungMArch IAdvised by Oana StănescuThe design of living spaces has always been centered around family as a basic unit. Yet in Japan, contemporary society has witnessed increasingly late marriages, ageism, and a trend in single living. Typical residential developments are unequipped to address this societal shift and further lead to an aggressive separation between individuals, exacerbating the rise of lonely living and dying. This thesis redefines co-living for individuals in Tokyo in response to the emerging needs for single living. Looking through the prism of the functionless space, how may the absence of predefined rooms add more to both the personal and the collective experience? Drawing inspiration from Shinohara’s wasteful space and Ito’s idea of flow in their design of homes, this project questions the productiveness of modern obsessions in functionally determined space. Through the introduction of a negotiable blank that inserts itself between public and private, the experience of living is enriched by moments of encounter. Such space may not only formulate relationships among individuals, it enables one to discover new lifestyles. By surrendering parts of their private space, individuals may in turn gain more through choreographing experiences beyond their enclosed territories. In order to replicate existing building programs without adding more square footage, this projects investigates in section to reshape the way individuals live. Rather than surrendering spatial flexibility to confining slabs, a new section allows for a continuous space that moderates privacy through changing levels. Investigating across 3 scales, the townhouse, the house, and the apartment, can the design of the functionless address the changing needs of individual living? 39 A Comprehensive Shed in Northeast ChinaAiling ZhangMArch IAdvised by Sergio Lopez-PineiroThis thesis proposes a socially sustainable Comprehensive Shed as a new type of public realm. This shed simultaneously accommodates urban Western, high-end retail experiences imported into China in the last 20 years along with centuries-old rural Chinese cultural activities, which are about to disappear in the city of Dalian in the Manchuria region of Northeast China. The investigation starts with three distinctive forces: A forthcoming global trend of declining interest in physical shopping: Malls are declining globally. Retailers in China are predicting tremendous challenges due to the growth of e-commerce and shoppers’ changing preferences. Customers may visit physical stores for feeling and fitting the products, but prefer to buy them online. An ongoing crisis of vanishing rural activities and their associated spaces in China: Northeast China is known for its idiosyncratic culture. Yet this regional identity has been displaced due to the disappearance of rural activities and their associated spaces, which are replaced by new constructions with imported Western forms. A current trend of emerging public spaces within retail spaces in China: Among the new constructions, the imported architectonic forms promote new ways of positive interactions. Western shopping centers, for example, have emerged as popular, multifunctional public spaces. Locals prefer them for their warm interiors and the convenience of walkable distance. These forces lead to my proposal: Can we design a spatial juxtaposition between modernized culture and traditional culture to revive both of them together with new experience for people to be inspired and socialized? 40 Instruments of Terrestrial TransformationJack Oliva-RendlerMArch IAdvised by Andrew WittEcological design, through devices of memory, function through projective mediums, as drawings, models, or simulations. Cyberinfrastructures installed by organizations like NASA’s Earth Observation System Data Infrastructure system and the United States Geological Survey provide measurements and information by remote sensing devices that are instrumentalized to visualize ecological systems. Bachelard states, “As a materialized noumenon, the instrument sits in the center of the epistemic ensemble” as an epistemology or theory of knowledge the instrument of terrestrial transformation organizes as an ensemble in a spatial information system, ontological flows of creation. Ontologically, interdisciplinarily, the architecture of ecology flows from abstract descriptive languages that are quantitative, statistical, and ideal and into materiality as geometry in its proportions delineates architectural, landscape, and urban construction in simultaneity. Movements of information generate terms of virtuality for the mind to navigate through a composition durable of increased complexity in circulating content. The spatial information system, composes through structures and sequences, alignments and interdimensional connections. Real worlds, conceptual worlds and geospatial worlds are bridged through the arrangement of languages. Instruments of simulation discretize and segment information to replicate or imitate a behavior process and identify causal relationships within. A network of these instruments at an international scale would form an informational basis from which collaboration may happen in response to the cumulative analysis datascape. In the envisioning deep futures in the nurturing of imagination by computation, perhaps the visions of the instrument are realizations of dreams or fantasy, bridging worlds of imagination and built reality at the scale of ecology. 41 Automatic Affinities: Human-Machine Framework for Creating Urban HybridsGia JungMArch IAdvised by Andrew Witt and Antoine PiconAutomatic Affinities proposes a framework for procedural design based on human-computer interaction. This system creates architectures of urban hybrids that serve as a new type of industrial space, intended for cohabitation of humans and machines. It is a system of design methods by the means of data curation, stochastic computation, and machine learning. The resulting architecture is a space of encounters and newly forged affinities that could not be otherwise achieved through conventional deterministic tools. In this framework, design becomes a series of orchestration: curatorial governance of sources, appropriation of processing resources, and editing of intermediary outcomes. In favor of chance encounters, predictive control of outcomes is deliberately suspended. Through data sampling, machine learning, and procedural assembling, the thesis proposes an interactive framework for human-machine collaboration in the design process, and simultaneously speculates a fantastically contemporary future in which men and machines think, make, and dwell in deliberate copresence. A proposed building project is a hybrid campus of manufacturing, lab, and researcher-in-residence for General Motors’s autonomous vehicle division. After dispersion and degradation of its corporate bodies across America in the ethos of assembly-line style determinism, GM aspires to, in the heart of New York City, an advanced research institution for the probabilistic age. Situated on the fringe of Long Island City’s Anable Basin, the project mirrors the delirium of Midtown Manhattan with Roosevelt Island as a central axis. The project collects, processes, and assembles sampled fragments of both urban and corporate bodies of Manhattan and GM. The resulting architecture is a space of encounters and affinities made of self-affine parts coexisting as a hybrid urban body 42 A Space Odyssey on Another Side of RealitySiyuan XiMArch IAdvised by Megan PanzanoIn the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, supercomputer HAL is introduced as the sixth crew member on the trip to Jupiter. This defamiliarization in an extraterrestrial context equalized the artificially constructed computer and human. This parallel interrupts the “normal” understanding of fake and real, a relationship usually concealed on Earth. Modernity is bounded to discretion. As claimed by Nietzsche, the moderns had become “walking encyclopedias” whose cover revealed nothing of the inside. This discretion is described as “masks” by Beatriz Colomina, as an important modern culture captured in Loos’s architecture. However, this discretion has been shaken by the radical interpersonal connectivity of digital media. We are confronted with a more transparent circumstance, influenced by our constant exposure to “fake” news, eccentric thoughts on social media like Twitter, and the giveaway of privacy, etc. Like the extraterrestrial environment, digital media creates another space where norms are interrupted, irritating, and changing our lives in the physical world. The questions are: Can we use these spaces as opportunities to peep behind the “masks”? How can architecture respond to the digital age’s culture of revealing? As a continuation of Kubrick’s fantasy, this thesis designs a series of interiors on a vast spaceship, which accommodate the everyday lives of its permanent residents. Factors like a 1.6-hour day-night cycle describe the normal settings on the ship, interrupting our familiar quotidian rhythm from Earth. They motivate the design of built environments in space, allowing us to rethink the familiarity of daily rituals within the context of the digital age. Duck, Duck, . . . , DuckTammy TengMArch IAdvised by Andrew HolderSometimes we work in offices. Sometimes we work remotely. Sometimes we work at WeWork. The media, technology, and startup disruption dominating contemporary business has questioned the rigid structure of established office cultures, but this shift has yet to discover a corresponding spatial response to the shortcomings of the open office plan. This lack of definition of the workspace is manifest in both new constructions and renovations. In the first, buildings like the Apple Infinite Loop Campus employ a totalizing and relentless design but foster only generic identities of the companies housed within. In the second, coworking spaces like WeWork amount to formulaic interior fit-outs with little spatial invention, reducing architecture to the scale of furniture. These recent developments fail to calibrate exterior form with interior organization and risk surrendering to the banality of the open office plans they were supposed to replace. Can the contemporary office express a company’s unique visual identity through form simultaneously tied to a range of different workspaces within? This thesis proposes an intervention on eight existing “finger buildings” in Brooklyn’s Industry City by “cutting and folding” the buildings back onto themselves. This operation transforms the hypergeneric open office plans into a number of specific workspaces. Situated somewhere between new construction and renovation, the proposal imagines a new office space that can both house and signify a diversity of spaces. By turning a singular duck, in Robert Venturi’s terms, into many ducks, such an architecture rejects the monotony of the contemporary office and proposes a new direction forward for work in the 21st century. Drastic Measures, or, Making Mountains Out of Molehills: A Park and Boarding School for Los AngelesAdam StrobelMArch IAdvised by Andrew HolderThe Thacher School was founded in 1889 to combine education with outdoor life in picturesque Ojai Valley, California. To that end, students are expected to care for and train with a horse during their high school years. This peculiar habit of life contributes to a collective identity that sets the school apart from its milieu. Theorists from Johan Huizinga to Michel Foucault have argued that some form of absolute limit is necessary to maintain such enclaves of differentiated space and behavior, a limit most readily associated with architecture’s perimeter. How might this absolute limit be rethought in order to open the enclave? This thesis proposes the mountain as an analogical device (long considered in the discipline, from John Ruskin to Stan Allen) to reconsider architecture’s perimeter and achieve this opening. As natural features generally defined by their exception from their surroundings, mountains are well-suited to host spaces of difference. Simultaneously, they provide a surface for hikers, explorers, and mountaineers—what might be understood as “the public.” This duality can be leveraged to imbricate an interior world of difference and a broader, exterior public. Rowena Reservoir, at the edge of the Los Feliz neighborhood, lies tantalizingly landscaped but closed to the public. This thesis seeks to catalyze the opening of the site through a partnership between the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) and an independent boarding school. In doing so, a hybrid institution—cultural, educational, and infrastructural—with its own peculiar habits of life can rise, mountainous, within the landscape of the surrounding city. 45 Healthy Building, Healthy People: Architecture is a Catalyst for ImpactAnne Elizabeth StackMArch IAdvised by Hanif KaraSpace is powerful. Spaces impact how you relate to the context and to the people around you. It can either invigorate you or oppress you. Whether we are conscious of it or not, committed to it or not, architecture has an impact on the people that interact with our designs. As the world steers toward a more urban environment—populations rise and statistics show that people spend an average of 90 percent of their lives inside buildings—we cannot ignore that architects have some of the greatest scalable impact: impact on individuals, communities, society, and the environment. We have a unique set of tools and training to find problems and orchestrate solutions. We intuitively approach the world with innovation and creativity while sifting through context, conditions, knowledge acquisition, wants, and needs. Designers should take ownership of these valuable characteristics and the vital role that architecture plays in the future of civilization and human growth. Architecture is a catalyst for impact. Designing a healthy building requires holistic thinking. It is not just the physical and mental health impact of the design, but also the environmental, educational, and economic impacts. Architecture has direct and indirect catalytic relations with users that go beyond the building walls. Everything from what type of wood we use to the location of windows has consequences that reach further than formal aesthetics. Some of these consequences and reactions are showcased in the design of a daycare for people with dementia and early childhood education in Chimanimani, Zimbabwe. Healthy building means healthy people. 46New Chinese-nessPeitong ChenMArch IAdvised by Mark LeeNew Chinese-ness is a thesis research topic focusing on the curation of a repertoire of Chinese architectural heritages and expanding the current periphery of old-new Chinese architecture. The repertoire aims to reveal and dismantle the rigidity of prevailing design schemes in order to provide novel viewpoints on visual and spatial knowledge of the new Chinese style. Borrowing and adapting from “analogue architecture,” the thesis project aims to strategically inherit traditional Chinese architectural logic in the context of a modern museum through the process of repertoire, analogy, and improvisation.
47 After a Lost OriginalG. Antonio CasalducMArch IAdvised by Sergio Lopez-PineiroBrick, like CMU, has a nominal dimension that differs from its material reality. This discrepancy between naming and the real permits a margin of error during the process of installation while still allowing for approximation to a desired outcome— form. Similarly, at the scale of the building, visual alignments, symmetries, series, and centers imply precise orders when, in reality, things are not organized in an exact totality. The center of a room is less a point and more a blotch. To transform implies that something that was there a priori undergo a transgression. The original: a preexisting artifact, a model, or type has a particular system of coherence. In adaptation projects, tolerance—the allowable deviation from absolute precision—is laid bare by the alignments and misalignments between an original and the transformation. The original here, a 19th-century neoclassical Spanish hospital, turned jail, turned asylum, turned tobacco factory, turned rum distillery, turned historical archive, will undergo an expansion to accommodate the national library of San Juan. The building, which has hosted through its life programs for surveying, inventorying, and distributing, is adapted to accommodate one of the last building types that allows for the public freedom of loitering. Its imprecise symmetries and misalignments serve as a foil to rethink the building in relation to this ambivalent status between exact and inexact, between certainty and ambiguity. Here, high tolerance is not just a useful tool for assembly but a framework that allows for budging, appropriation, and reinterpretation. 48 Five MotifsHan Cheol YiMArch I APAdvised by Mark LeeLet us direct our gazes at an object! The sentiment we experience derives from the manner in which the object affects us. A motif is a recurring theme in a literary or musical work. It can be a form, shape, or figure in a painting and, ultimately, any salient narrative feature within an artistic composition that engenders an affect. An architectural motif is situated between a model of systemic iteration, as in J.N.L. Durand’s notion of typology as a projective series of schematic variations, and Quatremère de Quincy’s concept of a type that deductively construes an indefinite ideal that is deprived of any formal parameters. Consequently, it is a combination that enables indefinite, sensual impressions to materialize in a definite, graspable form. Five Motifs of archaic buildings from different cultural pedigrees (Mosque of Córdoba, Naksansa Temple, Fujian Tulou, Medhane Church, Bandjoun- Hut) evoking humane sentient dispositions (levity, ardency, placidity, humility, curiosity) are portrayed anew in a contemporary design. The reinterpretation of these dissimilar cultural constructions entails a conscientious shift toward cross-cultural common grounds of intuition. Contemporary architecture is oversaturated by an unprecedented abundance of styles that are not rooted in historic continuity. As an antidote, the motifs are streamlined to their essence by the act of purification. The ongoing debate about the reestablishment of the Bauakademie by Karl F. Schinkel in Berlin sets the framework of this thesis, which embodies an alternative to the planned, nostalgic verbatim reconstruction that was recently issued by the German Parliament. 49 FENCE|OFF for a Plural HavanaSandra BonitoMArch I APAdvised by Jenny FrenchForeignness as a mean for architectural design offers a vehicle for constructing cultural identity that simultaneously beseeches and overrules history. FENCE|OFF positions itself at the intersection of binary oppositions: between the global-generic and the local-specific, between craft and the readymade; the monument and the courtyard house; the self and the other. Through the logic of Gestalt within a tropical mat typology, the thesis undermines the established unity of collective singularity by placing assimilarity at the center and in-betweens. It offers an architectural language—responsive to social and environmental climates of Havana—capable of constructing togetherness by blurring spatial and social boundaries. It settles questions of origin by posing that that which disturbs the established order arrives from the system itself, that the foreigner is a cultural construct that comes from within, and that the “other” is just another version of the self. FENCE|OFF ultimately proposes unrehearsed spaces for the production and display of collective learning. 50 Diplopia: Double Vision in the Diplomatic ChancelIan MileyMArch I APAdvised by John May and Andrew Witt“Diplopia” describes a disorder of vision in which two images of a single object are seen. Situated among other disciplinary -opias, diplopia is reimagined to invoke a double place, more narrowly, a space for diplomacy. Our modern concept of diplomacy emerged in the Italian Renaissance in the formalization of epistolary exchange between sovereign states. Ancestral letters—or diplomas—on the one hand an official state document conferring privilege, on the other simply a paper folded twice over, fold revelation within the act of concealment. This is the duplicitous act upon which diplomatic practices are founded. Since its emergence as a genre of space, the diplomatic setting has been framed by dramaturgical and optical techniques intended to produce a doubling of reality. This thesis considers the Chancery for the US diplomatic mission to the Russian Federation in Moscow, a structure wrapped up in a history riddled with espionage, listening devices, and labyrinthine construction contracts. The reciprocal subversions performed across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War—most succinctly captured in MAD Magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy” comic strips— appear to have been recently reanimated. Through the interplay of illusionistic techniques drawn from the ecclesiastical chancel as well as Gestalt psychology, distortive methods maintain a dialectic of concealment and revelation in architecture. The stagecraft of statecraft becomes a platform upon which the possibility of built form is projected through the production of doubt. 51 Tangent Primitives: An Immersive Arena for DroneYungi JungMArch I APAdvised by Andrew WittIn the recently invented sport of drone racing, drivers do not actually board the machine, but rather they pilot drones equipped with cameras while wearing VR headsets showing the drone’s livestream camera feed. The spectators watch the race through images on screens. As a hybrid of racing sports and video games, drone racing combines elements of reality and virtuality, which opens many possibilities of spectatorship to audiences who demand more dynamic and immersive experiences. However, current drone racing tracks are too planar to exercise the full potential and dynamism of drones, which have greater freedom of motion than any other air vehicles. Tangent Primitives is an investigation toward producing a form of immersive arena for drone racing. This form provides a new typology of volumetric racing arena that acts as a track for racing while simultaneously working as a display screen for viewing the race. Historically, the essential task of the track in racing sports is to test the limits of the machine and the driver or the athlete. Each geometric element of a racing track tests a different aspect of the competitor.The circular portion of the track is for testing how to overcome centrifugal force, and the straight part for measuring the maximum velocity. Using the geometric operation of Revolve, circular and straight curves are transformed into three- dimensional forms such as cones, cylinders, and spheres. The arena is made by integrating these primitive forms, which meet tangent to each other. The compound primitives can be transformed into spaces that accommodate various spectatorships for drone racing. 52 Pork and Beans (Liberty Square): An Architectural transference of violence and traumaChristina GraydonMArch I APAdvised by Lisa Haber-ThomsonA systematic and theoretical tool for the making of architecture. Bernard Tschumi in his theoretical text Architecture and Disjunction 1991 develops a two-part definition of Violence. The first is a formal metaphor: conflicts between objects (form versus form) where distortions, ruptures, compressions, fragmentations, and disjunctions are inherent in the manipulation of form. The second is programmatic: encompassing evil and destruction. However, this thesis complicates the discussion as it interjects the racialized production of violence in space by bringing into focus the more nuanced manifestation of the everyday reality of violence in American communities of color. In its totality, it dares to investigate how an architectural transference of violence and inhabited trauma can enrich our understanding of bodies in spaces of sustained disruption, disproportionately high amounts of daily stressors, and anxiety as a result of unresolvable histories and unacknowledged losses. In 1937, hailed as a utopian solution to black poverty, the Miami Housing Authority opened the first public housing project for Blacks in the Southern United States, Liberty Square (colloquially referred to as Pork and Beans). At the time, many New Deal planners considered Liberty Square one of the finest examples of low-cost housing in the United States. However, from infancy, Liberty Square’s disjunctive architectural challenges materialized in the form of a concrete segregation wall. On one side false certainties generally propagated by ideologists as Miami became the poster child for tourism, luxury, and utopia. While on the other, contemporary realities of complexity, poverty, and dystopia. 53 Post-Digital ConsumptionKaren DuanMArch I APAdvised by Grace LaDigital culture created remote possibilities, which questioned the relevance of architecture. Nowhere did this register more clearly than the case of shopping, where the “retail apocalypse” declared the death of an age-old architectural lineage. E-commerce—shopping’s touted heir—indeed redefined how we consume. Instead of perpetuating a congregational place, it introduced a solitary act. This shift from public destination to private dispersal threatened social rituals long embedded in our city fabric. Moreover, it trivialized an urban scale of public life, which risked irrelevance without recalibrating for the contemporary consumer.1 Under these new parameters, shopping demands an adaptation. This thesis reimagines the future of shopping for the digital age. Through the design of an all-inclusive bridal store, retail program blurs the boundary between our need to fit and hold, and our desire for instant convenience. What would it look like to merge the hyper-intimacy of bridal shopping with the anonymity of online shopping? More importantly, how do we leverage tensions between the physical and digital to re-envision stores more relevant to contemporary life? Set in San Francisco Union Square, this store occupies a faltering retail district, whose vacancies tripled in the past three years. Continued closings and volatile foot traffic all demand a new, more nimble model of retail: one that wields its own physicality for sensorial, experiential gain. When placed within an expanding digital realm, this thesis becomes one of exploratory redefinition, where questions of access, excess, and obsolescence nest themselves within a larger question of how we’ll consume tomorrow. 1Antoine Picon. Digital Culture in Architecture: An Introduction for the Design Professions (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2010). 54 1200 mm Living Fantasies: Rethinking “Toothpick” Tower Typologies in Hong KongJing ChangMArch I APAdvised by P. Scott Cohen“Pencil towers” are residential towers with small footprints and tall heights. The appearance of pencil towers occurs due to large demand for housing and limited land resources. Under various external pressures (historical, economical, and legal), pencil towers become exclusive for high-density cities, especially Hong Kong. This thesis focuses on Hong Kong as the context to research the implications of this phenomenon and to explore more possible and feasible “toothpick” tower typologies (the upgraded version of pencil towers) at both urban and architectural scales. Instead of the existing pure extrusion form, this new type of tower form could correspond to urban contexts, structural needs, and social values. However, on one hand, how could idiosyncratic sites open new opportunities to transform the tower type or to constrain it to change at the urban scale? On the other hand, how could compact spaces be a new design opportunity at the architectural scale? Based on the above questions, the intention of this thesis is to propose a design system of “toothpick” tower typologies that could adapt to various sites in Hong Kong: street gardens, unused ports, etc. Fully utilizing the land and picturing a variety of living images, the social reconfiguration that the typological transformation leads to, as well as the human-scale space design within the typology, could maintain a more intimate experience, giving Hong Kong its distinctive character. 55 A Matter of Life and Death: The Making of Architecture in the Paradigm of ConflictTsz Hung HuMArch I APAdvised by Lisa Haber-ThomsonThe making of architecture is historically embedded in a world system of conflicts—war, occupation, colonization, reconstruction, refuge, etc. Across the eras of World Wars and Cold War up until now, architecture’s creation has become an expression of fear and anxiety toward the incidence of conflict through forms of defense, separation, and control. From the destruction of the Atlantic Wall to the fall of the Berlin Wall to now the reappearance of border walls, such creations, paradoxically, did not lead to a promised betterment of the future, but a recurrence of conflicts through the destruction of architecture. Architecture is trapped in a dystopian loop of repeated creation and destruction, reiterating the presence of conflict through its making—an unstable and antagonistic relationship. The thesis questions the role of architecture in this vicious loop: Is the making of architecture merely a product of conflict? Does the making of architecture uphold agency in the recurrence of conflict? And how can architecture possibly harvest conflictual forces brought by its creation and ruination for a productive change? Focusing on one of the most contested spaces—the border zone as a testing ground—it tries to question and reposition the construction and destruction of border infrastructure as not merely a materialization of conflict, but moments of resiliency that convey spaces of exception, reconciliation, and encounter. 56 The Container House: Urban Interior as a Space for Art Production and DisplayBeining ChenMArch I APAdvised by Jon LottMemories (of mine) are often vague projections of fragmented enclosures, more vivid when they are tied to a sequence of “rooms” with changes in lighting and sounds. For example, by entering a brighter room from a dim stairway or entering a plaza through quiet alleys. A memorable city has plenty of these urban “rooms” acting as context for our personal stories. In a city that provides no such context, the Container House is simultaneously an extension of the city and an undisturbed context of its own. Its neutrality toward the exterior is in dialogue with the surrounding city, concealing an intricacy toward the individual inhabitant and their lives on the interior. Protected from the conformity and censorship of the world outside, the boundaries of the container seem oddly liberating. Entering this newfound space, the process of art production becomes part of what is revealed or concealed to the audience. The act of gazing through a wall creates a narrative of the “observer” and the “observed,” or the spectator and performer, on both ends. The Container House rethinks the threshold between two conditions of the inside and outside, as it celebrates the ambiguity of a third kind of inhabitable space, within its thickness, a space where creative dialogue is fostered in a confined space of free expression.
57 Building ElevationEuipoom Estelle YoonMArch IAdvised by John MayAs Alejandro Zaera-Polo argues for the politics of the building envelope, the surface of a building is always tasked with mediating between opposing realms of interior and exterior, between public and private. A material thickness caught between the representational image of a building and its organizational logic, the building facade adds yet another set to Zaera-Polo’s dialectics: the drawing and the material reality.This material thickness has diminished over time as the facade has shed its load-bearing responsibilities. This thinning of the facade has aided the economic demand for maximum interior square footage, working in tandem with the stacked, repeated, rectilinear floor plan. The conclusion of this progression into a totalizing, gridded curtain wall is the culmination of an orthographic mindset. However, as new technologies have challenged the dominance of an orthography in representation, can those changes also manifest in architecture itself? If vectors represent the computational equivalent to traditional orthographic drafting, then the direction forward lies in the raster. Rendered depth, a quality lacking in many of our conventional architectural drawing formats, has an affinity to the raster that is overlooked yet highly pertinent to a world of post-orthographic perception. An operation unique to a raster format, “blurring” resists dialectics of in or out, public or private, and drawing or material reality. It creates a productive ambiguity that a facade after the curtain wall can embody. This thesis proposes a blurred facade, envelope, and elevation situated along the High Line in Manhattan, where the clash of a compressed public sphere and insulated interior places new pressures on the role of facade. In so doing, the project interrogates the link between representation and design, and suggests a new direction forward for architecture in a post-orthographic world. 58 Building Biras: Hurricane Adaptive Adven-tourism in the British Virgin IslandsMacKenzie WassonMArch IAdvised by P. Scott CohenThis thesis seeks to answer the critical question: Can we use dynamic architecture as a means of hurricane adaptation and in the process create outrageous new realms of the resort guest experience? The impetus for this study arrived in September 2017 in the form of Hurricane Irma, at the time the strongest storm ever recorded in the Atlantic, which tore through the British Virgin Islands. With winds in excess of 200 miles per hour, the majority of buildings sustained irreparable damage. Maria and Dorian followed Irma, crippling communities and economies for years to come. We have arrived at a time when catastrophic hurricanes are the new norm. The knee-jerk reaction to widespread damage in the region has been to rebuild stronger structures with more steel and more concrete. I find this solution largely untenable. Not only is it exorbitantly expensive, but it often bypasses the opportunities associated with tropical living. This thesis explores another option for a British Virgin Islands resort—building lighter, not stronger—uprooting architecture so that guests may move and adapt buildings to explore the environment, not seek shelter from it. In the process of movement, the resort guest becomes an active participant, reigniting in them a sense of adventure, allowing them to author their own experience. Employing architecture as a vehicle (sometimes literally) for experience, the guest is compelled to embrace a newfound freedom, to assume (if only for a week) a new life, lured in by the magic of the islands and its lore. 59 Death in the CityRadu-Remus MacoveiMArch IAdvised by Grace LaAn unprecedented number of recent articles in popular and health journals focus on the physicality of death and dying. In this context, the thesis seizes this moment and proposes an architecture that constructs and registers the concept of death and dying and mediates the tensions between hope and fear, health and illness, sharing and isolation that lie at the core of the contemporary hospice. Over the course of time, architecture has provided changing forms to the condition of dying. Originally, it was institutionalized in ecclesial communal building typologies that would bring death to the altar, facilitating perpetual confession. It was followed by a shift to the modern hospital that transformed healthcare architecture into a machine for isolating illness and moving air followed. The hospice emerged in the 20th century as an alternative to dying in hospital environments, typically “devoid of feeling and which contribute much to the isolation of the dying.”1 At its core, the hospice accommodates the needs of those with less than six months to live in a comforting environment. However, this particular environment has yet to find its architectural language, merely cloaking hospital elements in assumed “homey” fabrics on the interior and cladding the exterior in half-timbered facades, a formula that recalls the domestic. In this context, a new hospice paradigm is envisioned to capture the changes surrounding death and its “culture of silence,” amplified to include contemporary rituals that engage the senses of sight, touch, and hearing. 1 Norbert Elias, The Loneliness of the Dying (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1985), 28. 60 Recovering Wā KāingaJessica LimMArch IAdvised by Lisa Haber-Thomsonwā kāinga (noun): distant home, true home, home, home base. Suspending the myth of architectural autonomy, this thesis draws from Māori mythology as embedded within the landscapes of New Zealand, to prompt an architectural approach that recovers ancestral telluric layers, not to analyze them, but rather to renew dormant kinships of site, memory, and affection. Engaging the work of one’s imagination, the quest of embodied, ancient knowledge proceeds from the deep wells of memory to the “bodying forth”1 of regenerated relations between peoples and lands. Whakapapa, the recitation of genealogical lists in Māori tradition, demonstrates this: a cosmology built on allegories of procreation that relate all things eternally as kin. Considering this spatiotemporal consciousness, this project proposes a path and a series of 12 pavilions corresponding to 12 lunar months, within a model for architectural engagement grounded in recursive and reciprocal relationships. Atypical ApartmentKun LuoMArch IAdvised by Sean CantyThe purpose of this thesis is to reproduce the prevailing Miesian space of apartment buildings by introducing Adolf Loos’s Raumplan typology, exploring the possibilities to incorporate a dynamic spatial composition and sequence into efficiency-driven space. Apartments, although varying vastly in forms, facades, and units, share a common space arrangement method: a single corridor that connects several units and a vertical stack of similar floor plates. It not only creates an unignorable gap between the urban context and the living unit, but also fails to provide an inspiring and enjoyable living experience. In the mid-20th century, several mid-rise apartments designed by Mies formed this prevailing apartment typology. During the same period, Adolf Loos’s Raumplan explored various possibilities in spatial connectivity and continuity, yet it has been never incorporated into the apartment space. The design experiments with the possibility of bringing the Raumplan typology into a typical Mies typology, thus providing not only circulatory and cost efficiency, but also the sensation and perception of spatial connectivity. With the unique spatial experience provided by the new typology, a new model of intergenerational student housing can be invented and supported. Student housing is the most complex residential type, which requires a mix of different programs and spaces. Since continued professional activity can greatly improve the life satisfaction of aging faculties, by incorporating retired faculties into this model, students could benefit from after-school programs or consulting while the aging faculties could be involved in the life of work, teaching, research, and professional activity. 62 Table and Bed: A Homeless Court in the ShelterRuize LiMArch IAdvised by Mark Lee and Rahul Mehrotra A table where judicial power is exercised is a table simply for dining, a bed simply for sleeping is a bed for social judgement. Architectural phenomena are produced through juxtaposition of functionality and power dynamics. As a type of problem-solving court, homeless court attempts to address homelessness through the justice system. It shifts the criminal justice paradigm to an alternative law practice, hosting collaboration instead of confrontation, exercising discipline through treatment instead of incarceration. Its mechanism often requires a programmatic paralleling with social services. However, the actual homeless court practice still resides in the criminal court building type. This produces a pragmatic mismatch between its law practice and spatial experience, and an overstating of the power of state agency when facing the municipal social issue of homelessness. This thesis is to design a courtroom that is embedded within a shelter. Deconstructing the courthouse spatial organization at different scales while blending the program of shelter and courthouse, the design aims to dissolve the political and judicial power dynamic of the court in the container of shelter while still serving as the municipal disciplinary agency.
63 Procedural TectonicsMatthew RosenMArch IAdvised by John May Like gravity or matter itself, the tools we use have deeply formative effects on the things we make. Because these tools are almost always inherited, we tend to see the choices we make with them rather than the choice to use them at all as critical. And yet, using 3-D modeling software is far from a neutral act. These tools come freighted with the poetics and problematics of our contemporary, statistically driven moment. They hold within the logical structure of their procedure, a deep truth of our epoch; everything is possible at once, and it is our choices, not material limits that are operative. Architecture has a rich history of embodying culture. Implicitly or self- consciously, aesthetic expression is what fundamentally defines architectural practice. Yet the tools we use, the objects most entangled in our work and in our historical moment, are rarely elevated to the status of process. 3-D modeling is rarely considered in the reciprocity between design and construction. How then, do we recognize the values of modeling and express its logics in our architecture? What does it mean to take seriously the differences in labor time between modeling, design, and construction? What are the aesthetics of an architecture that expresses the procedures of 3-D modeling in its construction? Procedural Tectonics explores these ideas through the construction of tensile architectures. The project draws from the rich history of tent making to consider how the tools of our moment shape our work and our buildings. 64 Detours: Experience of the CityEthan PohMArch IAdvised by Oana Stănescu The thesis is public space reimagined as a detour from the everyday, a plateau from which to experience the city, to create a sense of place. New York City has a reputation for its fast pace of life, its Instagrammable places, its symbol of American urbanity. But the urban experience is not a one-time consumable product. The richness of life in the city lies in unexpected interactions with diverse people and spaces. These experiences happen in public spaces, where anyone can gather and be in. It is these interactions that create a sense of place. The project reclaims public space at an infrastructural node that is at the heart of dramatic change—to make space of exploration and encounter. There were 1,000 residents living around Queen’s Plaza according to the 2000 US Census, but since then there have been over 11,000 residential units under development in the surrounding neighborhood of Long Island City. This scale of growth brings drastic change to the urban experience, where private developments have greatly outpaced public spaces and other community amenities. An elevated subway divides the plaza, becoming the defining feature amid rising skyscrapers. This thesis allows people to encounter each other in a public space shaped by infrastructure, to see and be seen, and to create relationships within the urban context. It is a break from daily routines, inserted directly into the daily commute at Queen’s Plaza, an area of rapid development and loss of place. As people navigate through the space, they discover detours that range from communal to personal. A sense of place arises as people encounter and explore, orienting their relationship to Queen’s Plaza and the city. 65 Gaza: To (Un)RuinLina Kara’inMArch IAdvised by Grace La and Martin Bechthold Reconstruction is often thought of as the counterpoint to destruction, while in reality, for a site like Gaza, these two moments in time are inextricably linked together in a vicious cycle. Since 1948, Gaza Strip has been destroyed and rebuilt more than 10 times. However, for the past five years, Gazans have struggled to reconstruct their home in the midst of three consecutive wars. Israel’s land, air, and sea blockade has restricted the entry of construction materials into the strip, slowing down the reconstruction of destroyed and damaged structures including schools, hospitals, and homes. As a result, the Palestinian people are dependent on Israel and foreign aid for construction materials and equipment. Within these intersecting forces of destruction and reconstruction, displacement and return, permanence and temporality, informality and formality, certainty and uncertainty, this thesis proposes methods to rebuild Gaza’s homes tested through the design of a multifamily residential unit in Beit-Hanoun, formed by its rubble and upon its ruins. In this project, rubble is imagined as a new building block, provoking new construction methods, which opportunistically leverage the material while embodying the recent destruction. The ruins are imagined not only as fragments of what used to be, but also as the first tracings of what can become. 66 Consolidating Suburban Ecologies: Remapping the Garden CityMark PantanoMArch IAdvised by Jenny French This project imagines the urban and rural future of suburban Boston over the next century. Ebenezer Howard’s conception of the Garden City champions a form of settlement where small islands of dense urbanism draw from a much larger adjacent territory full of productive rural uses. Contemporary suburbs ignore this interdependent relationship. Instead, rules dictating minimum lot sizes compel development of single-family houses spread randomly across the landscape with no relationship to civic collectivity or to the productive potential of the land. As Albert Pope identifies in his book Ladders (1996), the resulting disaggregation of ownership makes suburbs a de facto boundary for city expansion because cities cannot consolidate subdivided land into large enough tracts to extend the grid. Suburbs also bound agricultural zones because many agrarian uses require similarly large areas. As most Bostonians will continue living in suburbs in the future, this thesis intervenes to intensify the inhabitation of a typical neighborhood 20 miles from the urban core. Houses in low-density areas far from important nodes are abandoned or relocated so that their lots can be assembled for commercial forestry, sequestering carbon and recreating local production ecologies. Over decades, the harvested wood becomes raw material for construction in neighborhoods designated for density, linking the pace of urbanization with the pace of tree growth. New building types overlaid with existing single-family homes respect lot lines while subverting their function as boundaries, creating new scales of community. The consequences of this speculation play out through three lenses that address the divergent desires of zoning officials, community groups, and construction professionals. From Matrix to Assemblage: An Asparagus Nursery in the California DeltaCharles BurkeMArch IAdvised by Charles Waldheim Relationship among all things appears to be complex and reciprocal . . . a web of connections, infinite but locally fragile, with and among everything—all beings— including what we generally class as things, objects. This thesis explores the spatial estrangements and entanglements of the American countryside. At rural sites, industrialized efficiency atomizes architectural agency and redistributes its components across the matrix of the landscape. In this phase it can be unrecognizable; architecture may appear unlike agriculture, unlike infrastructure, unlike nature, unlike landscape. Still, these divisions are largely simulated: rural typologies, products, times, objects, and subjects all work together to form hyper-efficient and multifarious assemblages of human and other-than-human elements. By first examining the organizational protocols and codes nested deep within rural economies—the “suprarural” after Najle and Ortega—the project proposes to marshal a collection of types, artifacts, and elements into an arrangement and program that emphasizes their character as a network of connections, exchanges, transformations, and aberrations. By coalescing the architectural around the agricultural—as a nursery for the production of yearling asparagus plants—the emergent assemblage demonstrates the entanglements present in the genetic code of rural landscapes such as the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
68 A Latent Paradise in the Belly of the City: Food Markets in Southeast ChinaQinrong LiuMArch IAdvised by Peter Rowe and Max Kuo The market is a place that brings people the experience of exuberance and the expectation of a feast. It does not only feed the belly of the city, but also takes the interior land of the city to grow itself. Distinguished from other modern shopping spaces, a traditional food market has no brands or simulations. It is all about the social culture and atmosphere of community in the constant interaction between vendors and customers, the ever-changing flow and groceries. The way a market is built is not much different than a primary hut or temporary tent architecture due to its simple and open structure. The juxtaposition of its ephemeral building character and its spatial inertia induces the expedient form of market. In a congested Asian urban circumstance, the externality of the market leads us to a discussion of the thickness of skin, the abstraction of signification, and the threshold of boundary. The negotiation of a large-span roof system and how it is occupied and perceived has a long history from Vladimir Shukhov to Pier Luigi Nervi. The project is to explore the architectural relationship between generic large-span architecture and dense urban housing to trigger the hidden social space that nests in the back face of the city, and to examine the edge condition and tectonics that could emerge in the conversation between these two types of buildings and programs. The Last ResortFrancesca PeroneMArch IAdvised by Mack Scogin To live a good life is to combine states of pleasure and knowledge. Those who attempt to live this life are called amateurs, coming from Greek ερασιτέχνης: the combination of “love” and “craft.” These are people who search for meaning within a genuine love of things, undertaking efforts of both unmeasurable hedonism and quantifiable rigor. To produce an Amateur Architecture, we must construct it as elusively as “I’ll know it when I see it.” It is possible for the discipline of Architecture to occupy a space between incident and intention. For the amateur, this type of Architecture is the last resort: a space that enables both freedom and structure. An Amateur Architecture allows us an agility within our disciplinary canon. It remembers what it was like to rigorously do things for the love of them. It is a reminder of the vulnerable, authentic, and personal endeavor that cannot be concealed or replicated. The best swordsman I ever knew Until one day someone appeared: Not an expert, nor a master Pool 3.0Zhixin LinMArch I APAdvised by Peter Rowe and Max KuoAngelenos love pools. If the early 20th century marked the first golden age of municipal pools in the United States, we are now in pool 2.0 where the blue splash is booming in the domestic oases. As a signifier of hedonism, escapism, individual lifestyle, and Hollywood, backyard pools attached to single-family homes have swamped Los Angeles since the 1950s. County of Los Angeles Open Data shows that the number of residential pools hit 282,000 by 2019 and is still rising.1 On the other hand, there are fewer than 60 public pools in LA, and the infrastructure is slowly failing due to aging and maintenance issues.2 The thesis investigates the ancient archetype of the Roman thermae where baths were combined with libraries, theaters, and game rooms. Accessible to all classes of Roman society, they became essential public spaces of civic engagement facilitating social interaction, leisure, and mindfulness. A state of “productive idleness” as opposed to aimless entertainment, or otium in Roman terms, was achieved in the thermae. The thesis critiques the exclusive privileged space the backyard pools have created and seeks to revive the public pools as a civic field. Learning from the Roman, Pool 3.0 shall serve as a healthy space for both the individual and social bodies, juxtaposing programs of entertainment, education, culture, and sanitation for diverse communities. Located at the intersection of the Civic Center, Little Tokyo, and the Arts District in Downtown LA, the project reimagines a new urban ritual of public pooling for the Angelenos. 1 County of Los Angeles Open Data, “Assessor Parcels Data – 2006 Thru 2019” (County of Los Angeles), accessed September 20, 2019, https://data./Parcel-/Assessor-Parcels-Data-2006-thru-2019/9trm-uz8i/data. 2 Jon Kirk Mukri, “Department of Recreation and Parks 2006 Pool Assessment Report” (Los Angeles: City of Los Angeles, July 18, 2006). 71 Prosthetic/Machine/Index/AestheticWilliam F. SmithMArch IIAdvised by Andrew HolderThis proposal is a collection of Architecture’s multiple forms of environmental agency. Sidestepping the pursuit of an ideal response to environmental problems, a comparison of multiple approaches is brought together in one building. Within a spectrum of prioritization from the performative to the aesthetic, four different forms of environmental agency are represented: the Prosthetic, the Machine, the Index, and the Aesthetic. The Prosthetic finds Architecture’s agency in fixing external environmental problems through a manipulation of context. The Machine finds Architecture’s agency in avoiding external problems by creating calibrated internal environments. The Index finds Architecture’s agency not in solving problems but rather in making them visible. The Aesthetic finds agency in the production of heuristic experiences, questioning the boundaries of Architecture and environment altogether. With the building type of a city hall and office for governmental bureaus, this proposal finds a new role for Architecture in representing and hybridizing multiple forms of environmental agency. Through this representation, the public is invited to experience and debate the result of environmental ideologies and their hybrids being brought into form. Rather than a search for Architecture’s role in environmental problems being limited to a single answer, a production of new possibilities is opened to the general public and the discipline of Architecture. MArch I APAdvised by Jon LottWe are living through one of our democracy’s most intense crises in generations. Our political culture has divided our nation into our respective camps creating a world shaped by ideology instead of argument. As a result, polarization has become the current state of our communities as Americans look to embolden their respective camps instead of questioning ideas. The effects of this lifestyle have made a public seeped in certainty, claiming to have all the answers often before it even knows the questions. This thesis will attempt to create an architecture that challenges this culture of ideology and certainty by reinventing our temples to democracy, the state capitol. Historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock states, “For nowhere have Americans revealed quite so fully all the nobility and folly comprising their national character as in the building of their state capitols.” The state capitol as a monument is both austere and intimidating, representing authority made up of vast Roman temples and behemoths of the neo-Baroque. The state capitol is an exemplar of traditional mastery, and “at the core of this expertise lies a sense of correctness.” Where traditional mastery strove for a perfection of form and composition, this thesis posits a new mastery that will undermine the traditional by being awkward or incorrect. This architecture will be lacking the “right” proportions, size, or harmony of parts. An awkward architecture can challenge a public that is drowning in their own certainty by championing an awkward architecture, a public may start to ask questions instead of knowing answers. 73 The Shape of ThingsMilos MladenovicMArch IAdvised by John MayWhat emerges during the transformation of nominal things “as-drawn” into actual things “as-built” is the phenomenon of tolerance. Specifying construction tolerances when detailing assemblies at often larger-than-life scale both acknowledges the inevitable indeterminacy that accompanies any attempt to give specific form to matter, but also thwarts it by dictating, with impressive precision, accuracy, and standardization, just how much imprecision, inaccuracy, and variation is permissible. The construction technique of vertical slipforming promises the doing away with of tolerancing as an accepted disciplinary compromise for material contingency: the continuous, single-pour, cast monolith that produces no joints or seams removes any need to consider how well A might fit into, onto, or alongside B. With moving formwork, A is B. Discretization itself—in that continuous forms, at the scale of architecture, are unavoidably subject to piecewise construction—is, in theory, circumvented. This thesis tests that promise through the investigation of roundness tolerances across various scales in the design of a slipformed public structure. If fulfilled, the interminable tug-of-war between (immaterial) form and (formless) matter might see a drastic outcome. If not, certain aesthetics at scales both larger and smaller than that of the visible joint might be found latent within the technicalities of a media system that undergirds all of an architect’s work. Who either outcome affects depends as much on the shape of things “as-drawn” or “as- built” as the kinds of program that come to occupy them, “as-lived.” 74 Sacred Hat, Ordinary BodyPanharith EanMArch IAdvised by Oana StănescuThe thesis reclaims the role of a roof’s iconography to deploy as a symbol for social gathering space. The iconography of roofs has a long cultural history linked to religious structures. It symbolizes the intersection between the human and the divine. In Cambodia, the sacred roofs of Hindu stone temples intersect the human horizontal axis and the vertical axis of the central shrine. The same principle applies to Buddhist wooden pagodas. In both cases, the horizontal axis is a procession that moves through a series of social programs: gardens, ponds, libraries, schools, and food hall. The roof not only shelters worshipping halls, but also the social infrastructure that supports the livelihood of the community. As secular buildings are derived from religious buildings, the roof becomes an icon of status and power. In the current profit-driven society, roofs become a by-product of commercialism. Especially in an urban setting, social infrastructure also suffers in this market economy. Both the symbolic significance of roofs and the quality of social infrastructure deteriorate. Within the cultural lineage of roofs, this thesis restores the initial link between the roof and social infrastructure. It proposes social infrastructure as multifaceted urban amenities that serve the community and bond relationships between people. The thesis utilizes the monumental image of the roof as an anchor point to enable a space for social gathering. 本文素材来源： |
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