Kasama College of Education

Items

• Project for a Model, Sacramento: Waste Objecthood, Indeterminacy, and the As-found
  Insofar as architecture can be considered a medium at all, it is a medium first and foremost of preformed material objects, objects with histories of their own. This thesis seeks to develop an alternative environmental aesthetics for architecture in working through the scalar problems inherent to using as-found waste objects as both building materials and modeling materials. The studies completed as part of the project endeavor to move away from the standardized abstraction of commodity materials (which the modern architect is assumed to treat as a kind of translational medium through which to project absolute ideas of abstract space) and instead towards the messily contingent specifics of as-found objecthood. Three primary indeterminate qualities characterize found waste objects: formal indeterminacy, tectonic indeterminacy, and scalar indeterminacy. The project aims to develop a methodology for working with these kinds of indeterminacy through architectural scale models.
• The British new towns: lessons for the world from the new-town experiment
  For more than a century the idea of building new towns has captured the imagination of urban planners. Britain has been a centre of both theory and practice, particularly in the early years of the planned-town idea and in the golden period of new-town development from the Second World War to the middle of the 1970s (Forsyth and Peiser, 2020; Wakeman, 2016). While in the last decades of the twentieth century such developments became less common globally, a recent resurgence of activity in Asia, and increasingly elsewhere, has brought new attention to the type. Even the UK has announced a new round of garden-style developments (UK Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government, 2018; National Health Service England, 2018).
• Loft living in Hangzhou: fitting in an inclusive and affordable practice
  Loft living in Hangzhou, while sharing a similar name with its western counterpart, comprises a type of residential unit with unique spatial and cultural features that correspond with Chinese fast development and societal changes. The thesis argues that living in lofts in Hangzhou is driven by more than fashion; instead, the typology of loft living indicates the swift ever-changing demographic, cultural, economic, and urban patterns of major Chinese cities in recent decades. In a hyper-competitive, hyper-stressed city, loft living offers a more inclusive and affordable practice that not only helps immigrants from outside the city overcome the hukou barriers to becoming an urban house-owner but also provides pedestrian-based spatial amenities that make the traditional/modern disjuncture visible in the urban fabric and contrasts with the now conventional gated residential communities; loft living allows “non-conformists,” the unmarried, and the “creative class” to live better in the cities in their preferred lifestyles that challenge the traditional core family values. The thesis suggests that the city planners should acknowledge the rising diversity among the public and consider planning a gender-conscious and inclusive cityscape that embraces various housing types to accommodate diverse lifestyles.
• Raindrop Prelude
  Modernism drew hard lines to distinguish between human, nature, and machine, three key players forming where we live and what we use as tools. Being the sole agents, humans have utilized nature and machine as entities forming a rigid trichotomy. But with the advance of technology, including ChatGPT, the boundaries have evolved and will further evolve to be dissolved in many fields. While modernism still dominates in architecture with strict division, this thesis questions how architecture may work and what activity or logic could be introduced if a porous framework applies to it. It imagines the potential of a building for machines, a data center, to experiment with such a framework and explores the potential of the data center to also be used for humans, incorporating the conceptual logic of nature for its spatial organization. In this way, a highly comprehensive ecology of human, nature, and machine can be achieved, intertwining three different systems to coincide in the same mechanism. The data center is a warehouse for machines arranged in an extremely efficient grid system. Together with layers of hallways for security and white background noise, it creates a transcendental atmosphere suitable for meditation; a gradual process to reach emotional and mental stability. Once a dispersed mind goes through the process and reaches its stability, it disappears as moisture condenses to fog, and to clouds, becoming nothing again by falling down. Thus, spaces are sequenced and layered with increasing spatial density till one reaches the cloud in the center, where the machines are. One travels through spaces as a water droplet journeys to be a raindrop. It is a story before a raindrop—a raindrop prelude.
• Making Green Work: Implementation Strategies in a New Generation of Urban Forests
  The concept of “urban forest” (UF) is gaining momentum in urban planning in the context of climate adaptation. Principles from the field of urban forestry are mainstreamed into urban planning, but little is known about effective tools for the successful implementation of new UFs. This article presents explorative research comparing how three cities (Almere, Madrid, and Boston) are dealing with the planning of a UF project, and their alignment with distinct organisational and typological interpretations of a UF. We employed a mixed-methods approach to gain insights into the main goals of the project, their organisational structure, and the employed planning process through the analysis of project documents and expert interviews. Our results point to an effective mainstreaming of environmental questions among stakeholders, but also indicate a poor development of objective criteria for the success of a UF. We note that municipal planners circumvented current internal rigidities and barriers by relying on intermediaries and local academia as providers of external knowledge, or by facilitating experiments. Finally, our results show that there may not be just one UF type to achieve the desired environmental and social goals and overcome implementation barriers. Conversely, each of the governance and organisational models behind the implementation of each type present collaborative and mainstreaming challenges. Therefore, we see an opportunity in further research examining processes and institutions towards the collaborative building of UFs that could bridge gaps between top-down and bottom-up approaches and activate different types of agencies.
• Sweating Building: A Study of Self-Cooling Hydrogels for Application in Adaptive Architecture
  Hydrogels that are responsive to changing environments could have applications in passive cooling and indoor air temperature control for buildings. Most of the current studies of these applications are still experimental and remain on small-scale. In this thesis, I propose a self-cooling roof module that makes use of single network hydrogel with polyester-foam as structure (SN-Gel-FoS). In a climate like the one in Abu Dhabi, these roof modules would absorb moisture from the indoor air, reducing latent heat from the atmosphere during the nights, and release water via phase separation, cooling the air of the interior environment during the day. The SN-Gel-FoS demonstrates much higher tensile and compressive strength and less deformation after multiple cycles, compared to other SN-Gels. In this thesis, I adopted SN-Gel-FoS for a design proposal for 16 meters wide, 160 meters long farm school. There are 4328 square meters of 5-cm-thick SN-Gel-FoS embedded in the flat roof of this building. By supplying air through this composite roof, we can provide enough cooling for this building without any active heat exchanger or heat pump. This passive cooling method could reduce the operational energy consumption of this institution by more than 75%. At the same time, this translucent layer of hydrogel also provides ideal ambient lighting and unique spatial experience for its inhabitants, which includes children, teachers, and different types of farm animals.
• Enactive Genesis: Toward Generative Architecture with Human-Centric Artificial Intelligence
  Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms are gaining increasing popularity in the domain of architecture, urban design, and landscape architecture. However, most of recent generative design workflows using image-based AI such as generative adversarial neural networks do not incorporate human-centric evaluation metrics and are prone to potential bias embedded in the dataset researchers used to train AI agents. Moreover, the outcomes of such approaches are pixelated images that are not directly useable in real world scenarios. Inspired by enactive learning in developmental psychology, the machine learning community has developed increasingly powerful AI agents that learn emergent behavior through unsupervised and reinforcement learning approaches such as self-play or actor-critic that do not rely on human heuristic datasets. Therefore, I propose Enactive Genesis, a novel environment to train generative architecture AI agents through reinforcement learning and human-centric evaluation metrics. The environment is composed of three open-source Software Development Kits (SDK), each comprising a novel and foundational infrastructure towards general and human-centric AI in generative architecture design: 1. BIMGen: An open-source SDK that researchers could leverage to create generic architectural designs using a universal BIM grammar. 2. Promenader: An open-source SDK game engine asset that uses phenomenology as an explicit evaluation criteria for architecture design. We implement accessibility and phenomenal transparency as numeric evaluation metrics in an embodied architecture simulation. 3. EnGen: An open-source SDK for training intelligent agents to generate and modify grammar in component 1 according to human-centric evaluation metrics in component 2. EnGen allows user to perform enactive learning, using the generation system from step1, and the human-centric evaluation metrics from step 2 as loss function for artificial neural networks. With EnGen, AI agents can gradually learn emergent strategy for generating an architectural space that has high accessibility and phenomenal transparency value.
• Products of its Circumstance: Homegrown Housing
  My thesis, "Products of its Circumstance: Homegrown Housing," addresses the intricate layers of a teeming, congested conurbation of sixteen cities collectively known as Metro Manila -a megalopolis shaped by 350 years of Spanish Colonialism, 50 years of American colonialism, generations of intensive rural to urban migration, and rapid privately driven urban development (virtually unchecked by government oversight), each of which has contributed to a more than century-long housing crisis. Private developers' proht-driven models routinely sever connections between citizens and their cities, often sacrihcing substance for spectacle. This project navigates the challenges of this urban condition, recognizing every citizen's right to safe and adequate housing. This thesis, an architectural response to the complex circumstances shaping Philippine Urbanism, began as an exploration of found objects and personal curiosities that in themselves embody and thus illuminate the close relationship between Philippine culture and the built environment. This study provoked an architectural response: a vital infrastructure that serves as armor and trellis, a design approach that takes its cues from established patterns of collective living, while catering to a persistent desire for greater personal security. By catering to the housing needs of marginalized groups, this infrastructure emerges as a catalyzing force, balancing cultural values and safeguarding a fiercely protected core of communal living against the post-modern city's pressing forces of fragmentation. It is also a potential exemplar of a homegrown urban Filipino residence, marking a significant step towards an inward-looking and locally spirited dwelling.
• Spatialisation of Conflict in Ayodhya: Urban Shifts in Post Babri Masjid Era
  The demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya remains a pivotal moment in modern Indian history. Against a backdrop of mounting communal tensions nationwide, this town continues to serve as the focal point for discussions on democracy, secularism, and communal harmony in the country. This thesis explores the complex dynamics of communal conflict in post-Babri Masjid Ayodhya. By identifying the factors fueling communal tensions and deconstructing their spatial dimensions, the study analyzes how urbanization amplifies the likelihood of communal conflict occurrences. The thesis offers a framework to foster social resilience in a once-agrarian town that is now rapidly urbanizing under political pressures. By redesigning a section of Ayodhya, this thesis aims to create replicable urban design strategies that promote social cohesion and reduce risks of future conflicts in a communally charged urban landscape.
• PLANTATION FUTURES: Foregrounding Lost Narratives
  Oak Alley Plantation, located in Louisiana, is preserved as a master narrative: a cultural heritage landscape reflecting the values and cultures of the Antebellum era. Reconstructed cabins in the rear of the property stand as the only recognition and acknowledgment of the forged Black landscapes used for refuge, joy, and resistance The thesis critically engages in the plantation as a landscape system of white supremacy that linked the exploitation of racialized bodies and fertile lands to commodities. Moments for accountability and restoration are conceived, such as the Citizen Assembly, which holds industry and systems of dispossession to account through new forms of democratic processes and landscape-based evidence collection. Through the layering of archival narratives, poetry, literature, and drawing, Black ecologies emerge on site, foregrounding lost narratives within the plantation. These narratives envision radically different futures, where interspecies kinship and empathy surface as new ecologies that point to new Black futurities.
• Geminate Forms for Social Supports
  The severity of Boston’s addiction crisis can largely be attributed to the closure of the city’s public health campus on Long Island (Boston Harbor) in 2014. This project proposes to dispense with the ineffective and superannuated model of centralized addiction treatment embodied at Long Island and instead design a series of interventions across greater Boston that complete a continuum of care for those struggling with addiction, to be built using public funds won in lawsuits against drug companies. Reviving the discourse of typology, each intervention will provide a spectrum of services while acting as a node of the network. This approach embodies the harm reduction principle of “meeting people where they are,” both in terms of their addiction and their physical location. The Long Island campus will persist in the re-use of its bricks in the interventions, which will be a mixture of new buildings and additions to existing facilities.
• Understanding Design Responsibility in Human Health: A Case-Study Approach for Evaluating Sunlight Use in Chilean Public Housing and Its Lack of Design Variability
  Given the importance of sunlight on human health and how the built environment influences human interaction with sunlight, does the design of public housing in Chile address the country’s large geographic variation in order to incorporate sunlight more robustly into its design? To answer this question I look at the last thirty years of Chilean public housing development. Chile's geography spans a North to South length of 4,270 km (2,653 mi) and has an average sunshine variation that more than doubles between the northernmost city of Arica compared to the southernmost city of Punta Arenas. In addition, in the last thirty years Chile has built over 1,250,000 public houses having with these provided homes for close to a third of its total population (27.8%). The first part of this thesis takes a close look at the medical research that studies the consequences of sunlight on health and uses this information, along with existing design recommendations to create an assessment framework through which to evaluate public housing developments in the field. The second part focuses in unraveling the historical precedents that led to the current typology, so prevalent in Chilean public housing projects today.
• Public-Private Partnerships for Affordable Housing in Brazil: Promises and Pitfalls
  This thesis examines the adoption of Public-Private Partnerships (P3s) in the delivery of affordable housing in Brazil. Using as a case study São Paulo’s Casa Paulista Program, the country’s first P3 for affordable housing, it investigates the shifting role of government in housing and space production, moving away from development to serving as a facilitator. It documents and critically assesses changes and continuities in affordable housing governance, and details the rising conflicts between state, market, and civil society actors. Findings show that PPPs have failed in their central ambition of leveraging private capital, in scaling up production, and have excluded citizens from engaging in policy decision-making. It concludes by proposing special attention to planners and public authorities of specificities of space and time in the implementation of universal planning ideas.
• Yamanashi Now: From Iconic Relic to Urban Incubator
  In 1966, Kenzo Tange devised a powerful apparatus of disseminating mass media, Yamanashi Broadcasting and Press Center. A concrete innovation and an urban fragment, the Yamanashi Building applied the joint-core system that could fulfill his imagination of an indefinitely intensified production environment at an urban center. Nonetheless, Tange could neither foresee social challenges, such as a sinking economy and aging society, nor could he realize the fragile nature of mass media. His efforts of self-containing a monochrome production service inside a monolithic structure led the Yamanashi Building, like many other concrete urban renewal buildings during the postwar era, to quickly derail from its original metabolism projection. This thesis attempts to adapt the existing concrete structure to reengage with the contemporary social and urban context. The rehybridization of the production-centric program, through reintroducing a lifestyle of production, living, and consumption, reinstates the visibility and dynamics of production. Aiming to reactivate the building vertically, the proposal challenges the construction of servant space, decentralizing the structure through liberating circulation and redefining the boundary of public and private. By occupying the surface of structure, the intervention creates a transparency that contrasts with the historical image at multiple scales, attracting a population of diverse ages. At an urban scale, the adaptation physically and programmatically mediates the institutional scale urban renewal and adjacent neighborhood, reinvigorating vacant blocks. Once an iconic urban concrete relic, the Yamanashi Building becomes an urban incubator that celebrates the history of production with a contemporary fashion.
• Afterlife of the Grande Arche: Re-materializing Digital Artifacts
  The thesis project envisions how architecture is being transformed and represented in a hyper-digital age. It is quite fascinating to me that today we have found numerous ways to digitally access and interact with architecture, without the need to physically enter the space. It seems that we’ve only been focusing on how our experience with architecture is shaped by digital technologies, but there’s very little discussion around how existing architecture is being altered through digital operations. With the evolution of cyberspace and the digitization of material culture, architecture becomes liquified, ambiguous and multitudinous. Using the iconic Grande Arche de la Defense in Paris as its site, the thesis project questions what constitutes the preconceived permanence and endurance of monumental built structures, and whether these assumptions still remain valid in a digital environment. The project begins with speculative propositions that undermine existing assumptions about monuments. It follows an iterative process that constantly goes back and forth between digitization and re-materialization of architecture. It is essentially a provocation about a future scenario, an architectural imagination on how monuments survive physical death in the form of digital reincarnation.
• The Analogous New Block
  No place ever has an absolute existence, a place is invented through the drawing of boundaries. The thesis illustrates the dual face of the intangible border crossing. From the authority’s point of view, the community is reconnected through the completion of the urban blocks. it heals the scar from its colonial past while suggesting a prosperous and utopian city’s future. The repleted block can be read as a form of erasure, paradoxically, through the presence of the urban fabric where it becomes a palimpsest of the disappearance. The community center represents a terra incognita between the two domains, resisting the disappearance of the disappearance. Where it reveals the underlying question about the city existence other than the soil that it is sitting on. Boundary Street was a former borderline that sit between the Qing Territory and British Kowloon Peninsula. The city, other than its name, was nowhere to be found. Although the physical boundary no longer subsists, the void remains as the demarcation of both the existence and disappearance. The community center is formed by a 232 meters long structure that fill up the void space between the blocks. The programs are located inside the adjacent existing buildings while the added premise is left uninterrupted, program-less and uncertain. It is a border that sits between buildings and the street, the ordinary and the peculiar, reacting to the surrounding activities. It is a public realm yet being voluntarily and involuntarily monitored.
• 'Functional Follies' for an Urban Slum
  “The challenge for Africa is no less than the restoration of its intellectual freedom and a capacity to create—without which no sovereignty is conceivable.”1 The general attitude toward architecture on the African continent is that it must primarily deal with needs, or that it should be involved in a retrospective exercise that imagines what could have been prior to European colonialism. This attitude denies Africans the freedom to create by looking within; instead, it insists on African creativity only as a relative other to whiteness, giving the impression that colonialism is the constant present lens through which to see the continent. This thesis rejects that notion, instead daring to imagine what is possible when African architects are allowed to dream, even while designing within difficult contexts and with limited means. The folly in architecture is a symbol of perverse indulgence often reserved for the architecture of the wealthy. Follies are individual sites for architectural expression and exploration. In this way, they allow the free exploration of architectural form. This thesis explores the erection of a series of “functional follies” in Agbogbloshie, an urban slum in Accra, Ghana. In a tradition where beauty divorced from tradition is an alien concept, these follies assume a usefulness that makes it possible for them to be assimilated into the community. These follies, therefore, act as both indulgent elements of beauty as well as tools to reintroduce traditional social and spatial relationships into the community that have been lost in the exodus from rural communities to the current urban reality. 1. “COVID-19: An Open Letter from African Intellectuals to Africa's Leaders,” accessed May 27, 2020, https://africanarguments.org/2020/04/16/coronavirus-open-letter-african-intellectuals-africa-leaders/.
• Uncanny Nostalgia: Nine Homes of the Land Surveyor
  Architecture is a desire where its origins are at once imagined but remain elusive. For Jacques Derrida, “the question of architecture is … the taking place in space. It invents something which didn’t exist beforehand and yet at the same time there is the inhabitant, man or God, who requires the place prior to its invention or causing it. Therefore, one doesn’t quite know where to pin down the origin of the place.” The permanent and stable house, as property and symbol, is so reassuring and comforting that many would call it a “home.” But “Home is where the heart is,” a space in the mind, in memory, a fabric that is beyond the built, physical, finite house, and as Gaston Bachelard aptly put, “a place that shelters daydreaming and protects its dreamer.” Synonymous with home, Architecture is a desire which seems to always express itself as missing or a lack. Similar to the search of the self, the desire for “being at home” is never fulfilled. Home is always on the move, oscillating between nostalgia and uncanny. Nostalgia is an accumulation of memories into a place; uncanny is the doubts towards that place. A home does not offer reassuring familiarity, nor does it regulate or limit its inhabitant. It provides the everyday needs but departs from the norms. It contains memories but asks for a different way of remembering. This home is completely incomplete, a starting point of departure——Architecture that liberates. Because of the transient qualities of Home, this thesis uses a different way to approach architecture through new representational methods that trace emotions, memories, thoughts, and dreams. The Thesis is a fiction that combines memories, dreams, thoughts, and emotions of domestic spaces, temporal stays, traveling, migrating into episodes of nine different abodes for an imagined Land Surveyor. It questions the notions of boundary, property, ownership, the self, and the singular archetypal home.
• Incognito: Sensorial Interpretations of Covert Physiological Signals for Therapeutic Mediation
  As our demand for technologies that mediate our environment continues to rise, our day-to-day activities have been increasingly overloaded with devices that collect our physiological signals. Our phones, watches, and jewelry now collect continuous personal data about us, from our location to our variable heart rate, and more features continue to appear in these technologies daily. And yet, despite the sensibility of these machines, little has been explored in decoding the highly informative signals collected by these devices to temper our physical environment. In particular, these signals have the potential to communicate one’s cognitive state and, in turn, address mental health. Embracing the open access to these technologies, this paper seeks to question how covert physiological signals can be turned into perceived sensorial experiences to increase awareness of one’s cognitive state and elicit positive affect through material interfaces. Acting not as a substitute for traditional therapies but as an alternative antidote, these sensorial interventions seek to process, analyze, and interpret physiological patterns, such as electrodermal activity and heart rate variability, to recognize signs of high and low emotional arousal and pair them with tactile, olfactory, auditory, and visual alterations in our surroundings. It is predicted that through the repeated association of the actuated stimuli with specific physiological states, a certain conditioning can be evoked to subsequently promote an instinctual response to malleable matter. The results illustrate that the fabric of our environment can not only be empathetic to our subconscious mood but also able to foster positive affect through psychophysiological adaptation.
• Surface Traces: Tokyo’s Forgotten Rivers
  The disappearance of the Shibuya River and water sources that were once vital to Tokyo have led to an introverted water culture. Despite recent picturesque efforts to reveal fragments of the Shibuya River through large-scale developments, water remains an elusive part of the city. Still, remnants of the lost river linger as urban ghosts, evoking episodic experiences of its absence within the built environment. In today’s dense urban fabric where the continuity of the river is neither possible nor productive, what are alternative methods of recollecting water’s significance? The thesis proposes a series of mnemonics – a fountain, botanical garden, and bathhouse – as urban elements to spatialize and reimagine the forgotten role of water through soundscapes and collectivity. Different modalities of addition, modification, and new construction envision the transformation of a locality. These interventions, scaling between artifact, architecture, and urban, posit the thesis’s bottom-up approach across Tokyo to unveil the city’s Anthropocene.
• Apartment Number:N/A
  “The modern apartment, or that which is referred to as a studio or one-room apartment, is the material realization of a tendency toward cell formation, which can be recognized as the architectural and topological analogue of the individualism of modern society.” – Peter Sloterdijk Lying beneath the condition of housing as aggregations of cells is the notion of private property. Capitalism has assigned the familial unit the minimum of space required to reproduce itself. The commodity of housing is simply that space where reproduction can occur and labor regenerate. Architecturally speaking, commodity housing in a dense urban development consists of individual cells connected horizontally by hallways and vertically by elevators. We should wonder why the universal urban housing typology is undifferentiable from for-profit temporary lodging, i.e., hotels. Is a neighbor just the stranger next door? This thesis is interested in how capitalism has infiltrated every aspect of our everyday life and the ways architecture orchestrates the endless repetition of work, rest, and consumption. It is an attempt to find moments where a new housing typology can exist within capital’s urban framework. So what if we get rid of hallways and relieve ourselves of the burden of discrete private properties? What if we utilize the embedded possibilities of elevators as collective spaces? If there is no “yours” or “mine,” then perhaps we humans are no longer merely agents to produce and reproduce. We, the people, are communities in spite of the imposition of a dense urban reality.
• MORE THAN BAMBOO SCAFFOLDING
  Over densification, scarce building plots and overuse of curtain walls are critical social problems in Hong Kong. My provocation of bamboo scaffolding in such a context aims to provide an additional layer of space with minimal ground impact as a parasitic “enclosure” or “facade” element. This thesis postulates several subsequent questions: With its ancillary and parasitic nature, can bamboo scaffolding be a protagonist spatial and design element in the architectural realm? Can bamboo scaffolding perform multiple functions other than pure structural and maintenance implications? What can the traditional and yet temporal construction technique transform the dense urban scenario in Hong Kong? The use of bamboo scaffolding is a traditional construction technique only utilized as a means of maintenance or construction, mainly on façade or surface level in Hong Kong. Tracing back to history, bamboo scaffolding had its origin associated with non-maintenance uses such as theatricality and ritual performance. Bamboo itself is also a very sustainable material for constructing different types of architecture. Therein lies the possibilities of bamboo scaffolding in other programmes. With the introduction of the domino system in modernism, structure is pushed further to the interior, and the load bearing needs are solved by columns and interior core walls to achieve freeplan. The enclosure of architecture is “set free” again. Inspired by the text ‘The Four Elements of Architecture’ by Gottfried Semper, bamboo scaffolding is a technique that can be perceived as a craft of weaving enclosure and applied back to the surface. Bamboo scaffolding can pursue the origin meaning of “enclosure” and possibly cast new implications with its structural integrity.
• The Post Office Is Now A House
  The Post Office Is Now A House positions the United States Postal Service’s national network of 35,000 post offices as a site for exploring two progressive policies: the Green New Deal and the Homes for All bill, which call for adapting and upgrading existing buildings and constructing 9.5 million social housing units, respectively. By integrating social housing and other public programs, such as day cares or credit unions, alongside updated postal services, the post office can continue to play a vital role in local civic life. Adapting post offices to meet these policy objectives requires a design approach that is at once repeatable, and thus nationally relevant, and highly specific, responsive to community aspirations and site constraints. Referencing the 20th century history of constructing post offices based on standard Federal plans, the project proposes a series of “assemblies,” common relationships between old post offices and new housing, which can be adapted for different sites and regions.
• How to Mourn: When Life and Death are not Enough
  Oh wretched ones, how cursed are your fates. The pair are frozen in the face of a pre-ordained demise, rendered dumb by forces uncontrollable and indomitable. What happens when something dies over and over and over again, or never at all? A search for a new term in place of both “Life” and “Death” is necessary for these two characters. Herter Park and the New England Deposit Library (NEDL) are accidental twins, inasmuch as they are paired in their search for meaning and nomenclature in the space between life and death. They were both built in the middle of the 20th century, and both are scheduled for demolition in 2030. Both, too, have witnessed inextricable scenes of political malpractice, financial mismanagement, and territorialist struggles. And so, they are yoked together by when and where they are situated just as much as how and why they will end. But, what if death is insufficient? They, instead, must be mourned. They must become melancholic, spiting their destruction in the face of doing nothing. A game arises wherein the troubles these buildings have served as scapegoats for are therein revealed by the very determination of them to last on and on and on and on. Mourning and Melancholia are tools of architectural reparation, of anti-idolic monumentalization, of post-capital reuse. As building is turned inside out, as bricks are counted, asbestos catalogued - as column stabilized, window replaced, trash carted out - so too is story unearthed, futures unbounded. Mourning proposes an infinite delay in the face of ramping capitalistic and symbolic enterprises bearing down upon “aging” architecture. It is palliative as much as it is a death knell. Reuse can extend beyond the adaptive and the monument. And so, we march on in our task of doing almost nothing. This thesis proposes the NEDL be deconstructed, catalogued, and stored within its own basement, as WWII documents found within the dead-books depository are declassified on site, and asbestos found within the architectural skin is interred permanently. The building site becomes a garden and also a radical unbuildable plot, spiting Harvard’s expansion plan into Allston - at least within a 200x250 foot rectangle. The building lasts forever in its astounding absence and sheer presence. The Herter Center, meanwhile is proposed to enter a cycle of infinite maintenance. The ecosystem of the park it sits within is too fragile to bear demolition, let alone construction. It, instead, becomes a school for maintenance, as the building itself becomes the corpse-operada. It is maintained, much to everyones chagrin or behest, forever. And so, the buildings learn how to mourn.
• From Humboldt to Caldas: On Environmental Liberations by Means of Tropical Altitudinalization
  When we stand on earth and think of the world in latitudinal terms, we are minimal, yet this is the world we attempt to conquer and pretend to comprehend. When we stand at low altitudes in the tropics, in front of tropical glaciers, we can see the world – through Altitude – without the need to go out in space to synthesize an image of this planet. This thesis proposes a deviation from reading the world in latitudinal terms, to see beyond North vis-à-vis South dichotomies, and to transcend binary norms that have largely defined and misinterpreted tropical environments. While many of these territories have achieved political independence, the colonial structures of power and imperial views remain, and they continue to govern us. The work is developed through two interconnected components. First, a group of essays that examine and conceptualize a series of “Environmental Liberations” in the tropical Andes, which include liberations of ecologies, grounds, and publics, but most importantly, liberations of the mind, social constructions, and imposed norms that are constantly manifested in the built and non-built environment. Second, these ideas are also narrated and abstractly projected through time and space to generate a “Tropical Journey,” as a timeline to disseminate history and a device to assess tropical diversity. This historical trip and landscape narration are an invitation to read the earth’s short elevation, which only extends a few kilometers, and explores how altitude becomes “a Tropical Liberation” – a disassociation from misperceptions of “Tropical” as a homogeneous hot and humid climatic condition.