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Our Village: a Queer Paradise in the 1980s
A drag queen is as American Dream as a suburban house surrounded by a white picket fence. Drag performance is more than entertainment in a night club: it is a way of expressing, dreaming, commenting, and escaping the crippling reality. For many, doing drag is their only way to achieve their dreams, however short-lived. “Drag is not a means of destruction but of rescue a little beauty, however perverse and rococo.” Our Village uses architecture to demonstrate that identities are not “natural” or an isolated act but social signifiers which drag unapologetically points out and celebrates and what should be the new face of American Dream. Set in the 1970s, the project provides a safe haven for the queer community excluded from mainstream society. It creates an architecture that embodies the vibrant subcultures within the community: a homophilic heterotopia on the Hudson River butting against the heteronormative city. Like the community that it hosts, the architecture is dynamic and adaptive, evolving along with the changing needs of the queer community over the past few decades. Taking a novelist’s approach, the project follows the scrapbook of a fictitious queer architect who designed the building in the 1970s and has been recording its evolution till today. Our Village demonstrates the agency we have as architects by showing how a humane architecture can alter history for the better.
There Goes the Neighborhood
How do we Build consciousness? This thesis positions automatic attention, the cognitive method of our unconscious, as the vital mechanism within which architects can construct awareness for non-architects. If it is true that we are living through an “Attention Economy,” then to consider attention only through its ‘active’ sense is futile. Though often associated with the instinctual, automatic attention is inherently learned. Continuously reinforced through associative signals, automatic attention reciprocally reinforces ‘normalcy’ in our perceptual field. Therefore, the presence of familiarity in our built environment more or less guarantees a portion of our attention. This thinking positions the uncanny or the monster as powerful mechanisms for subversion. The inability of our discipline to work with, and against, the Attention Economy goes hand in hand with our lack of involvement with most Building. Architects are responsible for just 1-2% of the housing market in the United States. The resultant stock is plagued by homogeneity that supports equally homogenous communities. The Developer Home exists within a system of fixed base types and quantified ornamentation -- a perfect breeding ground for the continual regurgitation of Classicism, without material integrity and without architectural order. Situated within the Florida Developer Community, as exemplary of such perpetual pastiche, this thesis proposes an exaggeration of an already latent wrongness. Utilizing the fragment across four scales -- development, street, house, and detail -- an odd-normality becomes increasingly apparent the closer one zooms in. Despite its use of satire, this thesis is sincerely hopeful in what may come after our constructions of ‘normalcy’ are interrupted by consciousness, built through a method of attention.
Machine —— A Utopian Transfomation Tower
Our society is transforming from a society of supervision which has persisted for a long time, to a controlled society. A controlled society is a softer, more adjustable, but also more irresistible social operation form. With the development of technology, we will have the freedom to choose. But before we choose, the future possibilities are all determined. It is like a machine, although its process will be different, the input and output things have already been set. “Our society is still presenting a shell of disciplinary society, but its core is changing to the controlled society". My thesis is based on the understanding of such a social operation form, abstracting this theory into an architectural proposal, and expressing my negative attitude towards this operation form. This thesis project will be an political and irony project. My thesis program is set to be a future educational center in 2035. With the decline of the labor force in the future, the government has begun to focus on vocational education to increase the labor force. Such educational centers are built as a kind of urban infrastructure in urban centers. Unemployed people, students are put into this new education center and through a softer education process, they are quickly reintroduced into society as labor forces again.
A Comprehensive Design and Policy Toolkit to Better Serve Survivors of Domestic Violence in New York City: Learning from Covid-19
The unprecedented crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic has brought into the limelight what many have unfortunately already known to be true, that times of extreme change, urgency, and tension too often correlate to a rise in domestic violence.1 This thesis attempts to address this recent amplification of cruelty, and how it has manifested in the largest public housing agency in North America, NYCHA (The New York City Housing Authority), to advocate for an interdisciplinary reform of both policy and design of shelters that use care to encourage nonviolent, inclusive environments and access to care and healing. In many ways, the Covid-19 pandemic has intensified conditions that already exist within the realm of domestic violence, including but not limited to isolation, economic insecurity, and trauma. Through an exploration of these connections, as well as a critique of the existing conditions of housing and emergency sheltering in New York City which allow domestic violence to thrive, this thesis provides way to address the current crisis while also both prevent future instances of violence. By doing so, its aim is to aid in the long-term health and healing of survivors and their families.
Marketing in the Metaverse: A Digital Brand Experience for Black Belt Community Builders
The metaverse, immersive, digital environments where social interactions can take place, is emerging and top brands and celebrities are leveraging it as a tool for marketing. In exchange for providing users with entertaining experiences, brands receive exposure and access to potential consumers. At a minimum, accessing a metaverse experience requires a computer and an internet connection, making it accessible and straightforward to get started in. This design research focuses on the development of a metaverse model that not only acts as brand promotion via an entertaining experience, but also 1. Acts as an educational tool and 2. Translates users to active supporters by giving users direct access to an e-commerce site. An NPO, the DDS is used as a case study and a virtual gallery and shop environment was created. The gallery is a digital experience documenting creations, identities, and memories resultant from the DDS’s summer of 2021 workshop series.
The Economics of Space and Time: Toward a True Mixed-Use
As the world’s population continues to gravitate towards cities (at the rate of 1 million per 5-6 days), perennial challenges in today’s cities - congestion, density, and high costs of living - will only exacerbate as this trend continues. On the other hand, buildings in cities have yet reached their potentials. According to U.S. Energy Information Administration (USEIA), in 2018, residential and commercial buildings accounted for about 40% of total U.S. energy consumption, but buildings are often designed only to be used for a third of a day’s time at any given point. With the rise of the sharing economy, we have seen more flexible models of space and property use, where individuals can lend out their underused rooms or spaces (Airbnb), and different people can share a working space traditionally lent to larger groups (WeWork). This is known as the arbitrage of space, where opportunities are created between different values and modes of space use. This could well extend to “time gaps” within physical environment where flexible design can accommodate for a space that is activated through 24 hours – as an office during the day, as a restaurant during the evening, as a bedroom at night, and as an athletic court on the weekends. The possibilities are endless…
Sea Level Rise and Housing Affordability in Small Coastal Communities: A Case Study in Maine
Significant portions of the United States’ coastal housing stock are vulnerable to inundation in coming decades. This will cause a direct loss of housing, result in higher prices for homes that are not vulnerable to flooding, and require investment to protect flood-vulnerable housing. In the context of nationwide housing affordability challenges, this scenario raises equity concerns for those impacted both directly and indirectly. Planners employ community adaptation frameworks that primarily draw from highly-populated urban areas. While some center equity concerns, few consider the distinct, poorly understood challenges that small coastal communities face. Using four towns in Knox County, Maine, as a case study, I find (1) that likely inundation from sea level rise varies in extent by town, but the value of affected parcels is consistent in pattern and (2) that climate-induced housing challenges have a greater likelihood of being solved if addressed at a regional level.
De Materia Perspectiva
“I inscribe a quadrangle ... which is considered to be an open window through which I see,” the artist and architect Leon Battista Alberti wrote in his 1425 treatise on perspective. This description surely reminds us of Albert Dürer’s woodcut of the draftsman, where a string is drawn from object to subject, intersecting the quadrangle at a single point. Da Vinci’s re-instauration of this diagram five decades later in the camera obscura jettisoned the draftsman’s string, re-casting perspective as an abstract and dis-embodied apparatus detached from medium, the apotheosis of which is arguably the contemporary perspectival viewport. This thesis re-situates the perspectival viewport in the material realm. Like the draftsman’s strings, the projector lines of perspective attain physical properties (applying a physics engine) and can be pushed and pulled by subjects and objects in the scene to modify how you see. Perspective no longer appears as a closed system in this material mode. It is malleable. Therefore, this thesis proposes an architecture where a singular perspective, an absolute definition of vision, and a stable view of objects is impossible, or at least elective.
The Oasis Effect: Reclaiming Tunis’s Indigenous Water Systems
This thesis addresses Tunis’s pressing water management challenges primarily caused by colonialism and ongoing climate change. It examines Tunis’s development across the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial, concentrating on how future water management can mitigate four key issues: sea level rise and flash floods, rising temperatures, social vulnerability, and habitat preservation. Historical water management in the Medina of Tunis was effective until colonial urban development since 1881 neglected traditional drainage systems, worsening flash floods. Inspired by traditional water management, the design proposes urban-scale interventions with canals and neighborhood-scale interventions using the “shallow water dictionary.” This collection of eight historical water management systems, implemented in urban leftovers and open spaces, aims to create vibrant areas for flood control, temperature regulation, and social interaction. This thesis proposes “Dynamic Zoning” for adaptable space use during floods and droughts. It envisions a commons-based urbanism focused on water to achieve social and ecological harmony, proposing the “Tunis Water Management Trust” to manage and maintain these systems.
Multi-objective building system control optimization using machine-learning-based techniques
The operation of buildings is responsible for 30% of the world's total energy use and 26% of global energy-related emissions. Proper control of buildings is thus economically, socially, and environmentally crucial for reducing energy consumption. However, most Building Management Systems (BMS) still operate on traditional principles, lack optimization, and function in isolation. This highlights a critical need for more advanced, adaptable, and interconnected solutions to collectively control buildings. The data-driven methods in building control show promise for scalability and transferability, offering the potential to eliminate the time and effort needed to create traditional physics-based models. This dissertation introduces a data-driven building control framework that adapts to changing environments, coordinates multiple building systems, and balances various optimization objectives utilizing both model-based predictive control and model-free reinforcement learning (RL) control methods. The research first investigates the multi-objective smart control of nonlinear dynamic systems: specifically focusing on natural ventilation. The Ensembled Multi-time scale deep-learning-based Adaptive Model Predictive Control (EMA-MPC) system is proposed. This innovative algorithm aims to optimize thermal comfort, better indoor air quality and energy efficiency by controlling automated windows in a naturally ventilated room during winter. The EMA-MPC system demonstrates better performance as compared to basic-MPC, enhanced-MPC and baseline rule-based control. Additionally, the proposed EMA-MPC system reduces modeling efforts and provides an effective approach towards reliable use of machine learning models in smart building control. Building on the model predictive control, the research further explores model-free approach. A multi-agent RL control algorithm is proposed to tackle the challenges of coordinating control systems with diverse response times. Specifically, the research examines the coordinated optimal control for delayed/slow response radiant floor cooling and fast-response window systems in summer period. The proposed RL algorithm illustrates also better performance compared to the rule-based control in ensuring thermal comfort, maintaining indoor air quality, and minimizing cooling energy consumption. Throughout the dissertation, both the EMA-MPC and RL control algorithms are comprehensively designed, constructed, and assessed in virtual testbed and applied in real building for physical experiment, demonstrating their effectiveness and significant promise for future autonomous building applications.
Integrated Shelter Units
Shelter is a basic human need, yet in many large cities, access to shelter is dependent primarily on the ability to afford it and public spaces are mostly confined to streets, sidewalks and parks, creating a vulnerable and “unsheltered” state for those working in and moving through cities. At the heart of architecture is the need to shelter, and its practice has developed out of an anthropological relationship between nature and man’s ingenuity in creating a more comfortable environment. Thus, when cities transgress the natural need for shelter, architecture must also transgress its limits and reconsider the way it engages with the public realm. This thesis proposes the reclamation of public shelter by inserting Integrated Shelter Units (ISUs) into the commercial ground floors of selected buildings, in order to offer privacy and repose in the public realm. Through the design of the architecture and an app-based operations service, the ISU aims to offer temporary, accessible, equitable, and safe shelter across the urban landscape. In so doing, ISUs will enhance the social experience of the street and support persons in various states of vulnerability, ranging from needing a place to work, to changing a baby's diaper, to taking a shower, or getting some rest.
The Ends of the Office: A Critique of the "White-Collar" Workplace
Although it is arguably the primary engine of capitalist urbanization, the modern office has largely avoided critical scrutiny as a physical site of labor. In this thesis, I explore the geohistorical developments that have led to the establishment of the office as a fundamental fixture of the American landscape in order to situate it within the neoliberal capitalist regime. I hold that the office is (and has been) incompatible with the requirements of accumulation and instead primarily serves an ideological function as an embodiment of inherited power dynamics. These conditions have left the office at risk of a restructuring, similar to what was seen with the American factory and deindustrialization, but along digital, rather than territorial lines. As such, the office stands at a crossroads between a continuation of the status quo of subjugation or a more pervasive form of exploitation, with implications that extend far beyond the cubicle.
A Cenotaph For Many
Hart Island, located in the Bronx, New York City, is the only place to bury the bodies of the unclaimed or unidentified in the city. The next of kin of some individuals buried on Hart Island opted for public burial. Others may have a next of kin who is unknown or unreachable. Some are unidentified or do not have a next of kin. Many others were also buried during the AIDS epidemic and COVID-19 pandemic, in 1980 and 2020 respectively. The burial process is simple: Department of Correction staff and incarcerated individuals serving time on nearby Rikers Island travel by ferry to Hart Island. The bodies of the deceased are transported and placed in pine boxes. The boxes are stacked three deep in a 36-inch trench below the surface, burying the remains of 150 to 162 adults and 1,000 infants and fetuses per trench. This burial method and its spatial efficiency seem to be democratic, while consequently removing the association of the person to their body. Those forgotten deaths are the consequences of poverty, apathy, loneliness, and isolation in New York City. Through reflection on the deaths of many minorities, the thesis will celebrate and appreciate their invisible existences, dismantling the conventional spatial characteristics of a “cenotaph”—an empty tomb for one prominent person. What if a cenotaph can be for many minor individuals? This attitude will lead toward a new understanding of death and a shift in perception of a typical memorial space in terms of its form, materiality, and spatial experience.
Urban Symbiosis
How can architecture redefine our current relationship with waste while offering a new way of coexisting within nature? For many, one’s experience with waste is minimal or even hidden. Once thrown, waste is rendered invisible from our consciousness. Waste management plants, located far from city centers, only further alienate our relationship with waste. Yet rather than challenging these legacy systems, greenwashing has instead become the go-to strategy in the pursuit of sustainability. By 2035, Singapore’s one and only landfill site, Pulau Semakau island, will be completely full. Despite this concerning reality, waste production has only continued to increase. While the importance of dealing with waste might be understood, the day-to-day realities of its management are far from enough. This thesis seeks to challenge our current status quo and proposes a new architectural hybrid that brings together housing and composting plant. Waste produced from the housing units are composted to produce biogas and fertilizer, which is subsequently utilized on-site or redistributed to residents, thereby creating a local metabolic cycle. Through the synergistic integration of its form, function and urban exchanges, the project presents an alternative environmental imaginary; one that does not perpetuate our current culture of consumption or the skin-deep imagery of sustainability. Instead, it provides a visceral and tangible feedback loop for residents to quantify and understand the impacts of their waste. In doing so, inviting residents to reconsider waste as more than just a linear end of our material consumption, but part of a much larger metabolic system, a new urban symbiosis for our future.
Oil and Leisure: Narrative Landforms for Curaçao
‘Like Oil and Leisure’ is a reimagining of Curaçao’s central harbor and beating heart, Schottegat. This port is home to the now-retired Refinery Isla, leaving an enormous economic and social gap that the refinery has filled for over a century. This landscape is a living memory of the past 500 years of human occupation. From the horrors of the colonial slave trade to safe haven for persecuted Sephardi Jews, economic boom to ecological disaster, these shores bear the scars of a complex history. Using the narrative arc of a round of golf, this thesis explores the stories embedded in the lands of the former oil refinery through a reshaping of its material grounds. Visitors. navigate nine sites around the harbor that compose the course, immersed in different elements of the island’s history. Tourists and locals alike engage with the legacies of Schottegat and imagine the site’s next five centuries.
Fragile Rules for Reading
This thesis aims to address those inheritances which have been managed into images of solidity, inheritances of game and study wrapped up in seemingly closed worlds. The playing field is one such world, one which aligns its conceptual and built architectures towards the production of a reliable uncertainty. Yet, something escapes.
Putting a Mall to Sleep: Domestic Collectives Beyond (Sub)Divisions
At a moment when shopping, consumption, and networked connectivity are increasingly taking over our domestic spaces, when sleep becomes the last standing ground in our life that is neither reducible nor assimilable by the 24/7 temporalities of the contemporary world, can we reclaim a mall of the past for the sleeping bodies? In a sprawling suburb where lives are demarcated in ever-higher resolution into districts and parcels, gated communities and commercial interiors, parking spots and traffic lanes, where divisions become an instrument of territorial management, can we imagine collectivity beyond isolation? In the suburb of Southwest Atlanta, this thesis considers a domestic collective of sleepers at the Greenbriar Mall. Wrestling with its history as a total-interior of consumption designed by John Portman in '65, and once a cultural anchor among African American Atlantans for decades, the mall is reimagined as a new form of common, not of consumption but care and regeneration. Destabilizing the readings of the bed as an object and the bedroom as an interior, the project recasts the mall into a planted semi-outdoor garden, a shared "bed-room" for rest. Reconsidering the absolute divide between individualized suburban households and between the closed interior of shopping and the surrounding sprawl of parking, domestic lives overlap and intersect, moving across old divisions, between waking and sleeping, between the collective and the individual.
Dreamlike
This thesis examines the “Cinderella Home” in Southern California which was known for bringing the fairytale into the everyday. In the 1950s, the home was sold through a catalog and built in hundreds in Anaheim. These homes were built for white middle-class families, reinforcing ideas of homogeneity and traditional gender roles, serving as a framework for assimilation. Anaheim’s demographics have shifted, now consisting of large Mexican, Filipino, and Vietnamese communities. How might the fairytale home be reconstructed for these communities? This thesis proposes an additional catalog home which meets the needs of these communities and embraces their cultural heritage. The reconstruction will retain fairytale characteristics such as scalloped trim, diamond pane windows, and brick veneer aligning with images of the American Dream and adhering to Anaheim’s Historic Preservation Guidelines. The characteristics will be designed to emphasize aspects of immigrant lifestyles, maintaining the home’s enchantment while becoming more familiar.
Power of Narratives and Narratives of Power: Storytelling of, in, and for Placemaking in “Nantou Ancient City” in Shenzhen, China
Urban planning and placemaking are in part implemented through storytelling. What are the dominant and demotic or popular narratives of, in, and for placemaking during the regeneration process of urban villages recently and over the past decades in Shenzhen? What are the embedded power relations among their narrators? There are two reasons these questions are important. First, the present and past historical, political, and cultural narratives have become useful tools for dominant narrators to manipulate placemaking, achieving their desired outcomes at high speed and excluding the “undesirable” groups. Second, those creating the demotic or informal stories have constructed an important part of the city’s development but are relatively powerless faced with the dominant ones. This thesis challenges orthodox storytelling, providing a new perspective in examining how “culture” acts as an agent in urban regeneration that draws more attention to bottom-up narratives told by the less empowered group. In making this sense, I examine the case of “Nantou Ancient City,” where the conception of “culture” has been introduced into the regeneration strategy of the urban village. The thesis first articulates the historic and demotic narratives ranging from ancient times to the recent past to reveal what made this place’s identity before regeneration, which is essential to understanding the foundation of present interventions. In the next step, I analyze how the central political will, nostalgia and patriotic emotions, middle-class values, and a closed benefit coalition are embedded in the rhetoric of planning strategies and actions. Finally, the thesis finds out that the “Nantou Ancient City” is packed by the new branded identity of an internet-famous place for tourism and consumption and the “future heritage” conception, which has served the spatial cleansing of the blue-collar migrants while attracting the rising creative class.
Biologically inspired compliant building façade systems with tunable heat transfer capabilities
Energy consumption for building thermoregulation is a major contributor to the environmental impact of our built environment. Building envelope systems that actively tune their heat transfer rate in response to environmental stimuli and leverage the free energy the exterior environment has to offer, thus represent a promising solution to make building thermoregulation more energy efficient. This dissertation investigates the means and methods to develop façade systems that tune heat flow by drawing inspiration from nature and leveraging the unique properties of compliant materials. The research encompasses a wide range of highly complementary fields including thermodynamics, materials science, and soft actuators, all of which are framed within the context of employing nature’s design rules for tuning heat transfer and generating motion. From these interdisciplinary investigations, two novel thermoregulatory concepts are presented in the form of mechanically actuated designs made from the optically transparent elastomer polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). Inspired by the chromatophores in coleoid cephalopod skin, the first example is a novel infrared light-modulating technology constructed from a PDMS film with a thin gold surface coating. Inspired by the cutaneous cardiovascular system in endothermic homeotherms, the second example consists of a PDMS-based vascular device that modulates conductive and convective heat transfer. Through both experimental projects, the work investigated how to translate biological design principles into our own concepts for tunable systems, how to fabricate these systems, how they can be actuated, how to evaluate their performance, and where and how to apply them in our building envelopes to benefit building thermoregulation. To achieve these goals, the research encompasses an extensive literature review of the biological precedents, iterative and functional prototyping, and performance analysis through numerical modeling and experimentation. The results from these efforts demonstrate how the new concepts provide opportunities for optimizing heat transfer and utilizing freely available solar energy and wind, and consequently, significantly reducing energy use for building thermoregulation. Fundamentally, the work demonstrates how a design strategy that integrates science, technology, and design creates new design opportunities for façade systems with tunable heat transfer.
Power Play: Leaders and State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in the Making of Shenzhen
Since its inception, Shenzhen has been widely understood by both academics and the public alike as a city whose development is, and has been, primarily driven by strong market forces. However, if one looks beyond the surface of this conventional view, we see that the Chinese party-state (primarily in the form of SOEs, especially central SOEs) has been the true underlying force advancing the city’s development, especially in its early stages. Mainly through the use of industrial zones, Chinese SOEs have continuously intervened in the city’s development, shaping the city’s urban structure, and arguably operating as the invisible planners who have guided the city’s overall development. Thus, against to the predominant conventional view, I argue that the Chinese state (in the form of SOEs) had been in fact the driving force behind the development of Shenzhen. In addition to shaping the city’s physical and economic structures, the central SOEs (especially the China Merchants Group in Shekou) are also responsible for pioneering China’s reform experiments. Against this backdrop, I explore the critical question of “Why SOEs for the reform?” First, by analyzing the important role of personal power interests in policy making on the basis of many veteran scholars’ lengthy observations of political developments in China, I contend that the success of the reform is where Deng Xiaoping’s legitimacy and political power came from. Here it is important that significant temporal pressure was built into the reform. As such, for Deng and his pro-reform allies, I argue that along with the cumbersome politics and tightened fiscal situation of the central government at that time, Deng and his allies could not rely on the existing formal bureaucratic system to function efficiently as the main policy implementation channel. This is why Deng and his allies made use of SOEs (especially central SOEs) to implement their reforms. This is what I call the “political logic of the SOEs in the making of Shenzhen”. The case study of the establishment and development of Shekou by the China Merchants Group clearly embodies this political logic. Highlighting the informal political decision-making processes between the pro-reform central leaders and the leaders of the China Merchants Group, I argue that Deng, along with his allies, came to rely on the China Merchants Group as a personal political tool for carrying out his political and economic visions and ultimately to consolidate the political power. My claim that China’s central SOEs functioned as the personal political tool of Deng and other leaders is further substantiated and generalized after identifying a similar practice in the era of Xi Jinping. By analyzing the role of central SOEs in the “Belt and Road Initiative” and case studies in the development of Chinese metropolitan regions, I further argue that central SOEs have continued to play a critical role in implementing Xi’s foreign and domestic policies, which not only serve national interests but also Xi’s interest for the consolidation of his political power. Beyond contributing to our understanding of the state-driven development model of Shenzhen, this study advances our knowledge of the political logic of China’s SOEs in the making of the city as well as the role of the individual leaders’ motives in the politics of leadership surrounding the use of SOEs in China. This analysis of SOEs within the context of the pursuit of leaders for political power helps to illuminate many of the decisions concerning SOEs as well as the rationale behind many of the activities carried out by China’s SOEs.
“Northing Must be Fastened to the Ground”: Mobile Informal Work in Indian Cities
This thesis investigates how the architecture of regulation addressing street vendors’ livelihood protection in India relies on either enforcing mobility or suspending it. It proposes that narratives of spatiality must accompany the contestations around the regularization of informal work. Using the city of Chandigarh as an empirical case, the thesis poses a set of policy considerations that link workers’ conditions of spatial, social, and economic informality, through a framework of ‘dignified work’. In doing so, it addresses the limited scholarly accounts on the dimensions of informal street work in India and aims to move the discussion around formalization beyond the economic rhetoric of public policy.
Inventing Greenland – Designing an Arctic Nation
Inventing Greenland is a critical and timely assemblage of stories highlighting a shifting landscape—one born from the imagination, projections, and ambitions of a wide range of actors. Today, especially within the design discipline, there is a lack of understanding of Greenland as a complex constellation of perspectives, histories, and forces. This book aims to fill that knowledge vacuum. Geared towards architects, landscape architects, and urban planners, this book combines spatial sensibilities with local cultural, social, and environmental realities. More specifically, spatial sensibility is understood as a way of responding to and reading beyond a diverse array of relationships in the built environment. Furthermore, Inventing Greenland provides a broad understanding of a unique island undergoing intense transformation while drawing attention to its historical and current challenges and emerging opportunities. Distinctly, each individual story is anchored to a common thread and interest in architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism.
Misappropriating Camp’s Walls: From the Japanese American Camps to American Camp
This thesis reexamines the site of the Japanese American Incarceration Camps of World War II as a site of architectural precedent. The Camps occupy what has become a quiet chapter in the history textbook, often regarded as an eccentric aberration within American history. Yet they embody the constructions of the American mythos, a mythos based in camping the frontier, a mythos of American Camp. American Camp is and has been fundamental to the construction of the country and to the actions that have shaped the landscape. Built on a notion of occupying and colonizing an empty frontier, American Camp is a recurrent condition across the American landscape, from exterior to the nation’s borders as military base camps, to within as both a form of recreational leisure and as the site of growing wealth inequalities and housing dispossession. American Camp, in all of its associations with the temporary occupation of space, represents a paradoxical construction of America that both resists and reinforces American notions of permanence and of rights and access to space by individuals. I use the Japanese American Incarceration Camps as a case study to construct the spatial device of misappropriation that allows for the reclaiming of site within the context of spatial dispossession. Misappropriation allows for the establishment of a self-determined site from which to orient and direct oneself and allows for the use of non-architectural precedents within architecture, calling attention to limits the field has traditionally defined itself within. This thesis conceptualizes space through the lens of postcolonialism and critical race studies, and theorizes ways in which architects may explore histories of dispossession as a way to create spaces that inhabit these histories and their associated conversations. This inhabitation is important to developing architectural practices that are rooted in critical examinations of space by inviting into the discipline conversations that have traditionally been excluded from it. To better examine camp as an architectural phenomenon and to bring it into the purview of the architectural practice, this thesis uses the walls that make up camp as a synecdoche for architecture. Using the conditional statement, if it is a wall then it is architecture, this thesis considers the architect not just as a sculptor of space but as an agent capable of addressing and participating in the political narratives that surround and affect our relationship to space. The walls of camp, and by extension their architecture—from our primary case study to a close reading of the different strands of American Camp—become the medium through which space is seen as an act of construction by a political agent, and thus works to bring attention to the political agency of the architect.
The Civic Value and Economic Promise of Medical Cities in the United States and China
The capacity of health care has transcended the provision of medical care in the past decades. Consumption associated with public and private spending on health care, as well as innovation produced by advancement in biotechnology, have together constantly reshaped the socio-economic order and urban landscape of cities. In the United States, health care is an urban asset that transforms the urban economy from the industrial past to the knowledge economy around life sciences. This economic transformation has produced medical cities that aggregate medical, university, and research institutions in cities. As an international counterpart, medical cities in China originated from a vastly different socio-political background. The changing demography and central leadership’s policy directives promoting various aspects of health have created opportunities for the government and real estate developers to build various forms of medical cities to mobilize resources from the market, universities, and medical institutions. As the semantic definitions of “medical city” have departed in the distinct institutional contexts in the United States and China, their practical experiences should also be contradistinguished. This dissertation aims at offering insights into medical cities in the United States and China, and contextualizes them in the different institutional, political, and economic environments. The research concerns the differences between medical cities in the two countries and explores the underlying factors that have shaped these differences. It proposes the “Knowledge-Material Circuit” to examine the significance of American medical cities, and the “Institutionalized Spatial Practice” to unfold the complexities of medical cities in China. Supported by comparative studies of four case studies in Boston, Houston, Beijing, and Shanghai, medical cities are situated in their wider narratives of the transforming economy, the shifting realm of urban governance, the varying degree of civic engagement, and the changing perception of the civic-health relationship. Drawing upon the findings, recommendations are made to address the future path of medical cities. The research finds that medical city in the U.S. is a reaction to the public and private, for-profit and non-profit interests of the health care system, a result of the state, market, and civic leadership, a culmination of place-based policies by the entrepreneurial states, and a representation of the spatial concentration of knowledge production and innovation. Medical city in China is a result of the changing state-market interests, a contestation between central and local governments, a trophy to inter-local competitions, an instrumentalized mega project to mobilize state resources, a negotiation between the public and private hospitals, and an experiment for the health care system under reforms. The significance of medical city extends beyond its physical planning and urban form – its interpretation has to be embedded in the dialogues among various participants from the state and the market, from the public and the private.