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Charging America: car access & incentive in a decarbonized future
Throughout the 20th century, the US invested heavily in a national highway network and sprawling communities that prioritize cars over people. Today, as we rush to find solutions to tackle the climate crisis, electric vehicles (EVs) should be a complement to the decarbonization puzzle, not the primary solution. While safer, more equitable modes of decarbonized transportation must be a priority, such modes are not possible everywhere. In these places, EVs may be the best solution for addressing the climate crisis. This thesis analyzes where and how the public and private sectors have developed EV charging stations to date. As the new Biden Administration and the private sector prepare for rapid development of EV infrastructure in the coming decade, understanding current patterns of development can inform future decisions to ensure EV infrastructure is prioritized for areas that lack alternative modes rather than contribute to incentivizing a culture of cars over people.
The World Was Their Garden: Plant Introductions at the US Department of Agriculture, 1898-1984
In 1898, the US Department of Agriculture established an Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction (SPI) to systematically collect and introduce plants of economic interest to US soil. Employing a cadre of trained “agricultural explorers” to collect plants from all over the world, the office is credited with establishing a dazzling array of multimillion-dollar industries—mangos, avocados, date palms, and soy, to name just a few—as well as securing staple crops against diseases, pests, and drought with infusions of genetic material for breeding improved varieties. However, in the histories of US plant introduction, a persistent American exceptionalism obscures the USDA’s dependence on, and contribution to, imperial scientific networks, as well as its operative role in facilitating settler-colonial expansion. This thesis thus resituates the SPI’s administrators and explorers as actors in the US imperial “environmental management state” emergent at the turn of the century by examining their living and non-living material traces. First, I attend to the SPI’s exhaustive record-keeping system—bulletins, inventories, photographs and films—as constitutive of its scientific authority and reputation, but also productive of a modern national identity. Then, I situate federal plant introduction work in the specific geography of Southern Florida, mapping out its impact on the landscape through the creation of the Fairchild Tropical Garden. Finally, with soy as perhaps the most significant crop introduced to the US in the 20th century, I follow the soybeans collected from the Dorsett-Morse Expedition of 1929-31 to East Asia to explore how living plant germplasm endures across changing institutions and landscapes. In so doing, this thesis elaborates how the SPI—and all its institutional complexity—serves as a conceptual and material precursor to our contemporary agrobiodiversity preservation initiatives and environmental politics.
Street Choreography
Street Choreography elevates the dynamic qualities of the city, designing through sequence, time, and experience. The street is highly regulated, often defined by its boundaries and limitations rather than its movements and rhythms. The work focuses on the public space of the street, defined as the surfaces between urban street trees, and imagines a future city that is carefully calibrated to the daily routines of its residents. The street is no longer dominated by vehicular movement and storage. It is not beholden to commercial activity, utility conveyance, and wasteful construction. Instead, it is the public space for urban life. Through the recovery and articulation of the surface, the insertion of canopy, and design of a new maintenance regime, the experience of being on the street is foregrounded. The design is observation-based and instructs a public realm that accommodates the upkeep of materials and public programs over time.
The Infant and Parent Urban Experience: Enhancing daily life and development through personal-scale interventions
Humans develop 90% of their brains during the first five years of life, a time where they are the most physically vulnerable they will ever be. Thus, it is both surprising and concerning that the built environment does not revolve around such a critical period. The longevity of a city and adulthood far preponderates the duration of infancy, causing architects, planners, and builders to design for the necessities and ergonomics of older and larger humans. With infant and parent ecologies more intertwined than ever before, the physical and environmental challenges a city poses ultimately pushes families to look for an easier, safer and more affordable environment to raise a child in. This thesis proposes artifact solutions that make use of varied technologies and analog interactions to improve the daily life of the urban family. A review of developmental milestones, an infant proxemic analysis, and a design thinking approach for identifying problems in the urban fabric suggest that interventions at the personal space scale can significantly facilitate care, increase mobility and improve safety. Some of the solutions are: for the micro-apartment, a furniture-scale baby station to replace the baby room; for the subway station with no elevator, a robotic self-walking stroller that can smoothly navigate stairs; for the downtown open-plan office, an office chair harness that promotes skinship while allowing parents to engage in focused work. Ultimately, these solutions make cities more accessible to both infants and caregivers.
Expanded Domesticity: Visual Sequencing in Collective Housing
The essence of the neighborly or collective interaction has all but disappeared from the housing experience. As one moves between and occupies a series of similarly standardized rooms, glimpses may be caught of the outside world, but these momentary glances lack any semblance of substance. Despite a close visual and physical proximity, views from residential units produce relatively little in terms of social connection to the collective experience of the city. Though a person may view others, they remain continually isolated. In contrast to this growing trend of housing in which domestic space has become increasingly internalized, autonomous and neglectful of their collective surroundings, this project explores opportunities for formalizing visual connections in order to provide new forms of intimacy both between neighboring residential units and the greater community. Visual relationships become physically manifested as mediators between households; creating shared spaces that act as ambiguous thresholds between the public realm and the individual housing unit. Sited along a public canal and cultural trail, larger visual forms bridge the divide between the public condition and the inmate household. Through visual sequencing, hierarchies within household spaces are reestablished and grow beyond the established boundary of the residential unit; rejecting the normalized spatial conditions prevalent in much of contemporary housing.
FROM PASTURE TO PRESERVATION : CATTLE AND CATALYZING AGRICULTURE AND REFORESTATION
Terceira Island, part of the Azores archipelago, is known for being home to more cows than people, its dairy industry, and its booming tourism. However, overgrazing and the influx of visitors threaten the island's agricultural economy and cultural heritage. To address these challenges, dairy farming is integrated with reforestation using Richard Foreman's 'Patch-Corridor-Matrix' theory. Corridors of degraded soil from cow movement are reforested with endemic Juniperus brevifolia, connecting patched woody ecosystems. The matrix of the stone lava walls across the island frame these new wildlife corridors and supports rotational grazing. The increased biodiversity and forested areas offer new streams of income for dairy farmers who can also provide spaces for tourists to interact with cows and stay in the pastures. This integrated approach promotes sustainable agriculture and tourism, while preserving the island's cultural heritage and opportunities for tourists to interact with and sample products from the island’s “happy cows.”
Cultivating the Renewal of Armenia's Housing Supply
The Republic of Armenia’s inadequate and deteriorating housing stock is among the nation’s most pressing challenges. With resources limited, how can policymakers and private developers help overcome this crisis, expanding access to safe and affordable housing for all Armenians? Centered on data from over 110 individual housing projects and in-depth case studies of four more, informed by official statistics, laws, and media reports, and enriched by interviews with developers, planners, brokers, and lawyers, this thesis reaches a cautiously optimistic conclusion. Over the past seven years, Armenia’s much-debated mortgage income tax credit has aligned with developers’ own strategies to produce large volumes of relatively affordable and high-quality new housing. This recent progress can be significantly expanded if Armenian policymakers wield land use and taxation tools to further promote affordability and seismic safety.
Planning for Urban Satisfaction
This paper aims to examine the strengths and weaknesses of social media platforms and proposes a vision for a better platform to invite bottom-up citizen participation in data-driven urban planning for urban satisfaction. The research proposes a method to measure the emotional response of individual citizens to the characteristics of the built environment focusing on proximity and convenience between pedestrians and nearby commercial and cultural activities. My proposed method requires a geotagged dataset with some measure of individual satisfaction with the built environment. The research demonstrates this method using Weibo posts tagged "Jiaxing", a small-sized city in China, coupled with a measure of each post's positivity, as estimated by the Baidu AI platform. The results illustrate that the combination of social media data and sentiment analysis is insufficiently specific to usefully inform planning decisions. I conclude with the proposal of a social media platform that could better measure individual satisfaction with the built environment.
Outside-In: A Hybrid Domestic Typology
With the increasing phenomenon of global migration and cultural diffusion today, fundamental questions of integration and assimilation remain an ongoing theme in the United States. Immigration has emerged as a very decisive, yet sharply divisive, topic in the U.S., with the country experiencing repeated waves of hostility toward immigrant populations, often viewed as a threat to the integrity of the nation’s culture. These triggering conditions for change require that current policies and practices be adapted to facilitate the integration of new immigrants into American society. That said, can social change be achieved through the mechanism of housing? Housing and immigration are both divisive issues, but addressing changing needs through focusing on common values can result in the advancement towards a more equitable and inclusive future. Sited in Dearborn, Michigan, housing the country’s largest Arab American population, the project aims to create a new domestic typology, addressing the unique needs of the community. The proposal aims to apply lessons learned from the MENA domestic fabric, integrating notions of privacy, interiority, and density with existing American typologies. The project addresses new ways of thinking about sharing and ownership, and attempts to attempts to address two starkly different domestic urban conditions, with very different ideas of what a home should look like.
Rest Stop Vending Machine, California (2033)
In the federal highway rest stop there are parking spots, picnic benches, a shade structure or two, and an irrigated lawn. There is also a vending machine. Vending machines are, by law, the only commercial activity allowed in rest stops; commercial activity is not allowed because it is opposed to rest. This thesis indexes rest to aesthetic sensibilities like comfort and peace, but above all to beauty. The project emancipates beauty from the relational or performance imperatives typically framed in landscape discourse; the apprehension of a beautiful landscape is instead immediate, discrete, and perceptible. The vending machine is the apparatus to distribute beauty, while the rest stop’s material components—water, toilets, walls, cars, and plants, both living and synthetic—are redirected to create vignetted experiences of the beautiful, in which dissonance is an essential trait. Press a button and encounter beauty!
Rereading Migration: Corridors of Circulation, Bordering, and Inhabitation
Infrastructural corridors of circulation and connectivity form the backbone of the colonial project of modernity, facilitating its rise, expansion, and domination over the past centuries. Contrary to the spatial imaginaries of the unhindered and smooth circulation spaces of commodities, energetics, wealth, and cargo, these global corridors are fragile zones that operate across multiple scales and temporalities of bordered and militarized circulation. This dissertation focuses primarily on the cracks and fissures of corridor infrastructures as they become entangled with postcolonial migratory moves and their creative inhabitation of these spaces for survival in the project of western modernity. Specifically, it focuses on Europe's post-2015 self-declared migration crisis through the framework of three corridor geographies of migration and bordering: the western, central, and eastern Mediterranean corridors. Instead of a linear projection of corridor geographies, this dissertation argues for the uneven and patchworked nature of these spaces which consists of the strategic coming together of nodes, lines, and zones of simultaneous bordering and circulation. Furthermore, this work argues for the nonlinear and circular understanding of the timespace of the migratory vernacular as it manifests against the horizontality of the modern corridor ontology of unlimited extractivism and commodification of bodies and nature. In conclusion, this project by closely examining infrastructural spaces of circulation sheds new light on the less studied in-between condition of the postcolonial migratory subject: her extended liminality of nondeparture (always of there) and nonarrival (never of here).
The People Look Like Flowers at Last: Coweeta College, Assisted Migration, and American Loneliness
This thesis posits that the bonded movement of plants and people can productively engage with American loneliness. The project expands Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory in western North Carolina into a forestry college campus. As the country’s 10th “work college”, Coweeta herein adds the production and management practices of climate-ready species to the traditional university outputs of liberal knowledge and social bonds. The campus, near the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, leverages McKaye’s project at once as a climate transect and social region, where the college’s cuttings and seeds are available to the trail’s 3,000 annual “thru-hikers” for distribution to a network of 56 Appalachian Trail communities. Through an “aesthetics of the infinite”, the thesis suggests reciprocal relationships between representation and land ethic. As a grassroots reorientation of assisted migration, the thesis claims landscape architecture as the operative medium for tethering people to place in the age of the “Mega-Eco” project.
Practicing Spatial Justice: Design-Organizing for Abolition
This project presents a critique of the profession of landscape architecture, extending the liability of a licensed professional to include accountability for slow, systemic violence, in addition to individual health, safety, and public welfare. The project is developed on the site of “Cop City,” a “public training facility” designed to uphold the police state in greater Atlanta, Georgia. The project documents racial and environmental harm on the site through a critique of the legal tools of the profession. It proposes a new kind of abolitionist practitioner, the designer-organizer, who works to build local power and repair relationships between plant and human communities. This requires new practices of codesign, featuring fuzzy future models that embed skills of organizing and designing into decision-making processes. Mutual liability is held between the community and designer-organizers to promote true public welfare in this abolitionist landscape.
Learning from the Wreck: Reframing Sentimentality
Cape Cod is characterized by a cyclical churning of land. Over timescales of decades, the Atlantic shifts, erodes, and redeposits the sandy sediment from which the Cape is almost entirely composed, rapidly reshaping its coastal profile. Those who have made their homes and livelihoods on it have learned to live with the instability generated by these fluctuations of the dunes. The Cape’s outermost stretch of beach is a zone in which the stability of our infrastructure, be it the hulls of our ships or the foundations and walls of our homes, is tenuous. Its shores have been dotted with countless wrecks over the years. Its dunes have seen many beachfront houses crumble down their steep faces. Yet we persist in inhabiting this zone of precarity. As described by authors like Henry David Thoreau, the draw to this liminal space between land and sea is rooted in strong human sentimentality and a fascination with the overwhelming sublimity of the sea’s vastness. This sentimentality, our ability to learn from the systemic failures of our infrastructure, and indeed a literal repurposing of cyclically reclaimed building material from housing and shipping results in a new architecture uniquely suited to meeting an important housing need for the region. It relieves pressure from the Cape’s broader housing stock by proposing new housing to accommodate researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. This new architecture may itself be ephemeral but acknowledges itself as simply one point in the very cycles of destruction and reuse that generated it.
Hanok, Stacked: An Alternative Urban Housing for the New Family
Around the world the concept and the demographics of ‘family’ have been changing. Especially in the developed countries, the 4-person heterosexual nuclear family ideal has begun to break down with increasing interests in alternative forms of family. Such is also the case in South Korea where there is a dramatic increase in the number of one-person households and complementing decrease in the number of 4-person households. The current state of the country’s housing stock, however, is yet to respond to this demographic shift. Within this context, this thesis seeks to propose a new form of urban housing in Seoul, Korea that better accommodates the shifting population and its needs. Specifically the project studies the district of Mapo, Seoul where there has been increasing political and social momentum to redefine the notion of family by challenging the nuclear family lifestyle. It draws parallels between the more fluid and dynamic ‘family’ lifestyles of Mapo and the extended family lifestyle that belonged to the pre-industrial Korean society. The defining domestic architecture of that time, Hanok, or traditional Korean courtyard houses, is incorporated into the project as the guiding principle. In order to respond to the urban density needs as well as to translate spatially the social dynamics that take place within more amorphous and multi-scaled types of families, this thesis experiments with vertical stacking of the Hanok typology. It utilizes the spatial flexibility and connectivity of Korean traditional courtyard houses to create fluid and porous housing for the arising new types of families in Korea.
Grounding the Cloud
This dissertation explores the dynamic relationship between material formations of data and the processes of data-driven urbanization within an increasingly planetary context. In this pursuit the project articulates the deeply territorial operations of tech corporations such as Google and frames their spatial footprints and urban projects within an inherently expansionist logic. In developing a contextual-spatial understanding of the landscape of data, this work addresses the grounded materiality and geographic specificity of data infrastructures on one hand, and the influence of the centralizing logic of “the cloud” on practices and processes of spatial production on the other hand. This work is enacted through three main lines of investigation: First, deconstruction of the ideologies, concepts, and politics underlying the sociotechnical construction of “the cloud,” as an emerging global organizational model that operates through platforms of data extraction and mediation. Second, clarification of the role of accidents, errors, and disruptions in unearthing the hidden forms and agendas of global infrastructures of data, as well as a historical contextualization of this hidden form within the long process of under-grounding urban infrastructure since the turn of the 20th century. And third, tracing the inherently global geography of data that materially, socially, and territorially grounds the forms and processes of data extraction and monetization of urban data within processes of advanced capitalism. These investigations bring together perspectives and methods from media studies, communication geography, critical urban studies, cartography, urbanism, and architecture to bear upon some of the most pressing issues facing cities and their citizens as they transition towards emerging paradigms of cloud-driven urbanism.
Encountering the Enigma: A Transformation of the Fulton Fish Market
With our increasingly advanced tools, we seem to be able to grasp the architectural object more exhaustively than ever in the most precise dimensions and countless components. However, this technical knowing does not give answers to what architecture is and all its excessiveness, and the infinite and immeasurable ways that we perceive and understand it. In fact, the seemingly stable architectural objects that we know are always assemblages of unnameable fragments of amorphous matter. This alienness of architecture is often repressed but can never be completely dispelled as we always work between completion and openness, the known and the unknown. In this open realm, our judgment is suspended; architecture unveils all its enigma and becomes again open to our interpretation. Can we work within this open realm of architecture, and conceive a building that engages our faculty of understanding upon encountering it, yet eludes it with its incessant enigmatic nature? In this spirit of a liberated interpretation of architecture, this project aims to unveil an enigmatic understanding of is objectivity and experience through a fictional transformation of the New Market Building of the Fulton Fish Market.
Design in the Convívio: Making Space for Landscape in Self-Built Communities
This thesis examines the roles in which a landscape architect can operate respectfully within dense, self-constructed communities. Piloting a design process within the context of the “convívio” -- a socially rich but spatially constricted network of communal open space -- demands a focus on the varied lived experiences of urban residents and a responsiveness to their stated needs. In collaboration with the community members of Chapada do Rio Vermelho in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, the work comprises remote interviews, auto-photography, and design conversations oriented around three feasible, site-specific landscape interventions. The thesis finds space for the landscape architect and design student to offer their skills as a listener, designer, facilitator, and advocate.
Pōhaku, Kalo, Wai: Stewardship in Contemporary Hawai’i
The bottoms of the deep, verdant green cliffs of Limahuli Valley were once terraced in stone pools of soaking kalo (Colocasia esculenta). Kalo is more than plant, its presence extends into mythology and origin. The old Hawaiian planters named it, the eldest brother of man’s own ancestor. For these planters, the arrangement of kalo, water, and stone was the heartbeat of the valley. The past two centuries have left the valleys without their stewards. This thesis is a direct critique of the practice of forest conservation and restoration, a 21st century response to land dispossession. Arrived at through extensive fieldwork, historic research and re-invention of past practices, the project offers a paradigm of ecological restoration that enables community through a framework of design and knowledge building between people and `āina (land, earth).
Alternative Rural Development in the Age of Internet: A Close Look at E-Commerce Village Typologies in Rural China
Taobao Village, a name created by Alibaba Group in 2009 to mark three Chinese villages heavily engaged in e-Commerce, has exceeded 5400 in number by 2020. The exponential growth of Taobao Village suggests that e-commerce is a generally applicable solution to alleviate rural poverty. Through data gathering and data analysis of the site information of 5400+ Taobao Villages, my research for this thesis project identifies 16 different types of Taobao villages; each represents a unique combination of product type, location, and power structure. This research looks at the road network connectivity of these villages, which shows that most of these villages are located within close proximity to cities and small towns despite the expanding internet network coverage. My research further identifies villages producing products related to local culture and heritage. Through a comparative study of the morphology of villages producing locally-based products vs. villages producing non-local standard commodities, the study reveals that immaterial resource, such as local culture, crafts, and heritage, often engenders a more diversified local industry, which may help maintain the original village form while contributing to local economic growth.
Harnessing Dynamics: Exploring Scale & Coastal Infrastructure in the Arctic
Infrastructure is crucial for survival in extreme environments. However, it is often built with little consideration for its environmental context or the broader needs of the community it serves. In the Arctic, small coastal communities are experiencing accelerating land erosion as a result of climate change. These communities have tight-knit cultures and are surrounded by dominating nature, sublime landscapes, and unpredictable weather. Introducing the coastal barriers necessary to protect these towns must be done with full consideration of the multiple scales at which the infrastructure will operate. Standard infrastructure neutralizes natural dynamics and separates people from the environment. From large-scale forces such as land erosion to harnessing local atmospheric dynamics such as waves, wind, and fog, architecture must mediate between infrastructure, the natural environment, and the local community to create tangible experiences and meet the community’s societal needs. Through the design of a coastal barrier system, this thesis proposes a framework for implementing critical infrastructure that becomes an extension of its surroundings and harnesses natural dynamics to facilitate experiential opportunities.
Juvenile Delinquents
Frederick Law Olmsted’s Franklin Park hosts a small hillside population of American beech saplings. Though juvenile in form, these small trees may be many years old, waiting for the mature canopy to die. This “micro-narrative” uses this case to describe the dilemmas of landscape architectural preservation in the public realm. Strictly form-based approaches are inadequate to respond to changing human use; approaches grounded in restoration ecology suffer from a “crisis of baselines” in the face of ongoing environmental change. The tension between material authenticity and ecological resilience can be productively explored to seek new design potentials for preservation.
Urban Renewal and Public Amenities: Adaptive Reuse of Gas Stations in Cambridge and Somerville
This thesis explores the innovative urban initiative of repurposing 28 gas stations across the city of Cambridge and Somerville into public restroom amenities, addressing the dual challenges of obsolete architecture and the scarcity of public amenities in urban settings. Through comprehensive analysis and design proposals, this work seeks to not only provide a practical solution to the lack of essential public facilities but also to spark a broader conversation on sustainable city redesign and the adaptive reuse of infrastructural elements. By transforming these gas stations, the thesis highlights a novel approach to urban development that leverages existing networks and spaces for public benefit, offering a model for cities worldwide to rethink their approach to future urban planning and development.
Hydrosocial Dynamics: Regenerative Interventions in Neighborhood 20, Buenos Aires, Argentina
The thesis addresses the hydrological and social injustices faced in Neighborhood 20, one of the largest and oldest informal settlements in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by designing a network of community spaces. It investigates the underlying factors contributing to this vulnerable landscape's emergence and proposes redefining public spaces as a catalyst for ecological urban renewal to tackle flooding and heat island effects. The methodology engages with the various publics to implement a series of artifacts to collect rainwater and mitigate flooding during large storms. The accumulated surplus water will be used to promote community programs and develop urban forestry to mitigate the heat island effect. The project aims to reflect on landscape architecture as a political and social act capable of transforming reality in vulnerable environments through bottom-up processes, contributing to the field by demonstrating the potential of community-driven ecological interventions in informal settlements.
How to Tailor 50-Story Office
The escalating office vacancy rates in urban environments have emerged as a prominent issue, significantly impacting both the real estate market and the urban landscape. It became visible that the pervasive presence of vacant office spaces not only undermines the vitality of cityscapes but also results in desolate streets, empty store fronts, and underutilized public spaces- everyday spaces that we inhabit. However, the challenges are not new. In response to this ongoing vacancy crisis, various attempts have sought to re-purpose office buildings for other uses, particularly- housing. Learning from the converted examples, it is evident that the adaptive conversions predominantly target buildings that exhibit inherent adaptability and a conduciveness for transformation. These building forms often possess optional access to natural ventilation and daylight, key considerations for conversion to residential architecture. Nonetheless, it is evident that there is a significant shift in the evolution of office plans. Notable office buildings, such as the Wainwright Building (1890s), the Chrysler Building (1930s), the Seagram Building (1950s), and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange Building (2010s), demonstrate that office plans have evolved from adaptable and malleable plans to highly specific entities optimized to maximize productivity in alignment with technological advancements and changes in business practices. However, when these highly specific machines eventually become obsolete, how do we envision an alternative future for these modern office buildings? This prompts the central exploration of the thesis project. This project explores ways to undo the specificity and alter, to not only address the vacancy crisis but also to redefine and reactivate the urban neighborhood.