Kasama College of Education

Items

• If You Build It, Will They Innovate? Investigating the Design and Operation of Higher Education Innovation Centers
  This dissertation examines how design teams have created and users have occupied spaces intended to support interdisciplinary collaboration, connections to the community, and innovation activity on higher education academic campuses. It combines several forms of investigation, including a review of academic and professional literature, an inventory of existing buildings, an evaluation of building assessments, and a case study of an exemplar innovation center using interviews with 50 occupants and design team members to evaluate the design and operation of the emerging postsecondary innovation center typology. Through these investigations, three themes emerged. First, although proponents of innovation centers suggest that “if you build it [an innovation center], they will innovate”, most occupants already had begun to innovate prior to visiting the innovation center. Second, occupants did report that the design of the case study innovation center did aid many of their innovation activities, particularly their informal collaborations with peers and mentors. Third, contextual factors can increase or reduce the extent to which occupants find innovation center buildings useful, including building location, occupant characteristics, tensions between design team goals and user needs (e.g., transparency vs. privacy), and a lack of a universal design approach. Based on these findings, a series of considerations are proposed to support future postsecondary innovation center design team members.
• Stacked Daydreams: Ceiling-scape for the Neglected (Hong Kong Factory Adaptive-Reuse for Elderly Care)
  This thesis operates at the intersection of three domains of neglect: 1. In the realm of building elements, the ceiling is often considered as an afterthought in the design process. 2. Across building types, the vertical factory sits abandoned and anachronistic to its surroundings. It spiraled into disuse due to Hong Kong’s shifting economic focus. 3. In society, the elderly is often subjected to social neglect, seen as a financial burden, and forced toward the fringes of society. These parts experience obsolescence that led to indifference, and subsequently to boredom. I intend to draw the parallel of deterioration between the body of the elderly and the body of the vertical factory. Using a set of ceiling parts in the manner of prosthetics to reactivate the spaces into elderly care facilities, revert boredom to daydreams, and re-imagine the concept of elderhood as an experimental second stage of life.
• Commoning the Seed: Ritual and Preservation as Practice for the Modern Monastery
  Characterized by strict organizations of time, rules, and divisions of space, the monastery has provided the ideal set of conditions for early religious practice. While monastic practice has been categorized as increasingly anachronistic, it is precisely these rules that have allowed possibilities for freedom of thought throughout the centuries. Situated upon the site of a former monastery complex now left as a public open ground, this thesis proposes a contemporary renewal in the form of a commons within the city. By adapting to a world of shifting cultures and climates, it seeks to strengthen what may be shared for all communities. The assemblage of spaces and discrete elements shape attitudes upon the individual, the collective, as well as the public by framing and choreographing ways of communing at various scales. Specifically, the proposal calls attention to the growing seed crisis amid the roots of capitalism and sees potential in the monastery as a closed-loop ecosystem for preservation through practices of ecological and cultural commoning today.
• The Magic Carpet
  The “Persian Carpet” and the “Persian Miniature” painting have served as representation tools for the “Persian Garden” and the idea of paradise in Persian culture since antiquity. The word “paradise” derives from the Persian word “pari-daeza” meaning walled enclosure. The garden is always walled and stands in opposition to its landscape. It is experienced as much in terms of what it is not as what it is. This thesis investigates the idea of a contemporary image of paradise in the Iranian imagination by using carpets and miniature paintings as a tool for designing architecture. The garden with its profound associations provided a world of metaphor for the classical mystic poets. One of the manuscripts describing the Persian garden is called the “Haft Paykar” known as the “Seven Domes” written by the 12th century Persian poet called Nizami. These types of manuscripts were made for Persian kings and contain within them miniature paintings and poetry describing battles, romances, tragedies and triumphs that compromises Iran’s mythical and pre-Islamic history. Through the process of copying, the “Seven Domes” has been repeatedly reinterpreted and recreated as a contemporary object filled with contemporary fashions and ideals of beauty. The carpet is the repeating object in the miniature paintings of the manuscript. This thesis deconstructs the carpet in seven ways in order to digitally reconstruct the miniature paintings of the “Seven Domes” and the image of paradise with new techniques.
• Between the Past and Future: The Transformation of the Pearl River Delta
  Between the Past and Future: The Transformation of the Pearl River Delta examines the Pearl River Delta (PRD) and its spatial transformation from 1370 to present. It unravels the complex evolution of the Pearl River Delta in five distinct stages and probes the proposition of the region as a changing urban concept through a methodology that is the aggregation of the important maps, plans and critical mappings. Through the objective interpretations and spatial analysis on the urban reality of the Pearl River Delta, the dissertation challenges whether or not the most recent blueprint of the central government of making it into the Greater Bay Area as a consolidated singularity is in fact viable or achievable. It brings the scholarship on the Pearl River Delta a new dimension, which contains different and special meaning compared with the previous studies on the Pearl River Delta from the geographical and social-economic standpoints. The dissertation offers certain abstract models and conclusive remarks generated from different stages of the PRD’s development, puts forward the vital implications of these observations, and conclude with six different spatial models of the Pearl River Delta across the history. The main body of the dissertation is structured in six chapters: a geography with three distinct cities (1370s-1900s), developing into territorial regions (1900s-1980s), constructing a territorial chain of twin-cities (1980s – 2000s), experimenting with new districts (2000s-2010s), the new infrastructure of the Pearl River Delta (2010s-present), and towards a polycentric megalopolis. The central finding of the reading on the Pearl River Delta is the presence of its sheer diversity issue regardless of infrastructure and other attempts to consolidate connectivity. It consists of a diverse set of parts, principally centered at Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Macau, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Foshan, Dongguan, and Zhongshan. The dissertation concludes with a critical review of the current scheme of the Greater Bay Area through six lenses including built-up area, population, economic pattern, accessibility, administrative complexity and cultural multitude to scan the “conditions” of the urban reality of the Pearl River Delta. The outcome indicates the importance of vive-la-différence that the Pearl River Delta as a polycentric megalopolitan aggregation should respect, nurture and when necessary even amplify the differences of the eight PRD cities in order to reach a long-term regional prosperity.
• HOW TO MOVE STUFF WITHOUT A CAR: Designing municipal services that provide the means for moving and storing our things without trunks, hatchbacks, glove compartments, or passenger seats
  Cars are not just devices that move people from A to B. They are also tools that we use to move heavy objects like groceries or bags of potting soil. They provide us with storage anywhere we go. They facilitate spontaneity, flexibility, and emergency preparedness by making it easy to bring extra warm clothes, equipment, or almost anything else that we might want or need. Cars serve many functions, but we don’t have good substitutes in American cities for most of these roles. This thesis argues that if we want to build more equitable cities and reduce our reliance on cars, we need to pay attention to the ways that people move and stash their possessions while they navigate through their day. This thesis uses Cambridge and Somerville as a site to explore a suite of design interventions that would make it easier to transport, store, and access objects without needing cars.
• Anticipatory Architecture
  Contemporary architects are often excluded from the project of the city. Handed a plot of land and predetermined boundary conditions, architects lack the agency to shape the future development of the city. However, before disciplinary specialization, architects have historically tackled more than the design of the object building. They possessed a broad skill set ranging from geographical to territorial organization. Today, sites in the American city are increasingly hybrid and leftover - between architecture, landscape, and infrastructure. There is a necessity to transform less than ideal existing conditions. This thesis explores an alternative process in which given conditions of the city can be revitalized through the framework of anticipation. An anticipatory architecture eagerly expects. When applied to an urban strategy, it prepares the land for what is to come while being malleable to accommodate change over time. Rather than the masterplan, ideas for development and event are conceived incrementally through a close reading of the as found.
• Au Milieu [Becoming/In Between] Spaces: Repurposing Protocol for Advocating Rights to the City
  The study aims to identify and establish ways in which abandoned structures and buildings can be repurposed to generate the spatial places and infrastructures to meet existing and anticipated threats to free democratic life, such as terrorism, pandemics, and climate change. In terms of studying the specific typologies of repurposing projects, the abandonments once had their incentives for their existence, and justifications for their escape from eventual demise. Two ways of improving the old structure in response to new threats include preemptively generating as many plans as possible before the threats become real, and the second is to get a more adaptable spatial structure. The parking garage was propagated around the world in response to industrial and technological revolutions, but is going to be abandoned due to severe environmental problems such as the climate crisis. The repurposing of this typology ensures the environmental, cultural, and economic benefits of the country, such as reduction of energy consumption and carbon emission. After a series of assumptions about non-linear temporality, the consequence is the extrapolation of a space-the type that is event-oriented, risk-resistant, and resilient. Although the design process was based on the study of current housing typologies, in order to distinguish the newly introduced resilient space from existing architectural typologies such as social housing or affordable housing, I tentatively name this space “Au Milieu”, a french word describing the bothe of the situations: “in between” and “becoming”, which is a good illustration of the characteristic that resilient space should obtain. As an experimental field, I propose Tokyo, a critical city with a complicated and risky environment to launch the “Au Milieu”, thus becoming the pioneer of advocating the inhabitants’ right to the city.
• A School with Room for Queerness
  The thesis is an exploration of what is experienced in the learning sphere from a queer perspective. Traditional schools in Japan have followed a very regimented plan, with linear corridors leading into highly standardized classrooms – here, “straightness” is literally engineered into the architecture of the school building. This thesis explores a school that leaves room for queerness, fluidity and ambiguity. The proposed school is on Nakanoshima, Osaka, where commercial mega buildings live as discrete objects on the island in the center of the city – an antithesis to the dense, intimate gay districts in Japan. Studying queer spaces in Japan is especially relevant today because the social climate on LGBT acceptance is shifting. Queer spaces like the gay district in Shinjuku Ni-chome are becoming more “normalized” and even transforming into tourist destinations. However, because “queerness” is still not legally accepted nor protected, there is still a need for safe queer spaces to exist. Queer spaces have typically occupied residual spaces, many of them hidden. This includes gay and lesbian bars which are considered spaces for adults and are in some cases sexualized. This thesis is not about gay bars and other queer spaces that we may typically think of. Rather, it explores queer architecture for youth who are still in their adolescence and beginning to explore their identities, especially in a country like Japan where an outdated legal system largely ignores the existence of the queer population and where the pressure to conform is high.
• Graphitecture:Utilizing AI and Graph Theory in the Architecture Design Process
  This thesis investigates a graph-based generative AI model for architectural design, transforming abstract graph representations into detailed architectural forms. It addresses a crucial gap in computer-aided design research, overcoming the limitations of traditional image-based methods in capturing architectural compositions. In this model, nodes represent programs and edges denote adjacency, facilitating the creation of diverse domestic structures and their grouping into clusters through graph similarity analysis. The model also showcases the ability to explore extensive design possibilities from a single input graph, thus inspiring the design process. The methodology is demonstrated through the design of collective housing communities, employing a multi-scaled graph system and various graph algorithms. The objective is to create vibrant living spaces characterized by social diversity and architectural variety, thereby activating urban environments. Ultimately, this thesis harmonizes the dichotomy between functional rationality and aesthetic integrity in architectural forms, advancing design exploration by integrating computational techniques with deep learning.
• Insurgent Geology: Mineral matters in the arctic
  “Insurgent Geology” is about oil, fossils, power, and people. It is about blowing up pipelines and taking care of the soil. Shifting from deep time to speculative near future, it calls for both insurrection and geo-poetics for environmental and social justice in the Arctic. Projected in 2051, “Insurgent Geology” unearths past land trauma, speculates on the post-oil landscapes of Alaska, and investigates alternative geo-social practices and mineral kinships. It critiques geology as an extractive, neocolonial discipline and practice, where a novel geo-social classification and geo-ethics is proposed and alternative geo-aesthetics is explored through the design of “mineral gardens.” “Insurgent Geology” reinterprets the concept of the Site and Non-Site. A counter-exhibition is designed (the non-site), paired with a pilgrimage through the extractive landscapes of Alaska. Following the oil, the pilgrimage is connected by site-specific interventions designed along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (the sites).
• Governance Capacity Towards Floods: the provision and social impacts of FEMA grants
  In this thesis, I consider the effect of climate change related flooding threats on relations between national, state, and local governments. I examine the relationship between previous FEMA claims of property losses experienced by Massachusetts cities and towns and the future fiscal dependence of such local governments on FEMA. I also examine how more or less fiscal dependence on FEMA and other federal funding may result in more or less use of local exclusionary land use regulations. My thesis finds that property losses from previous floods increase the local government’s financial dependence on FEMA and generally the federal government, and this increased dependence has bifurcated results regarding local exclusionary land use regulations.
• The Obituary of Aral Sea- Balancing aesthetics and performance in the Anthropocene
  If the extinction of a place is irreversible, how do we design the slow, beautiful death of a place? With the Aral Sea’s desiccation as a site for landscape design intervention, this thesis highlights ecological markers to create a range of instructional encounters of Aral Sea’s slow demise. In the face of irreversible anthropogenic extinction, the markers signal to future generations the effects of human activities such as extractive water diversion, cotton plantation, fisheries, and open-air bioweapon testing. This thesis includes five ecological marker events that provide an alternative to restoring the hydrological system. They include salt narratives of the brine pool, rapid decay of a shipwreck, tillage mounds of resistance, sand accumulating machines, and growing a licorice corridor. Working with nonhuman entities such as sand, salt, and licorice, these markers slow down desiccation processes, promote the coexistence of nonhuman agencies, and form new ecological relationships.
• Transit-Oriented Development or Development-Oriented Transit: Measuring the Effect of Proximity to LA Metro Rail on Residential Construction
  The expansion of Los Angeles Metro’s rail network in recent decades presents a meaningful opportunity to understand how land use and transportation planning interact. This relationship is critically important to planning decisions about both land use policy and major transportation infrastructure investments. Using multivariate logistic regression on parcel-level data, I explore the factors that influence where and when transit-oriented development occurs across the region. By examining temporal components of these interactions, I determine how different project milestones—plan approval, groundbreaking, or service start dates—correspond with changes in the built environment. There is some evidence that residential development is more likely to occur on parcels near newly constructed rail transit at all project phases, with the most significant effect visible following the start of construction. However, when considering whether the development that takes place is at densities high enough to support transit use, the results are less conclusive. These dynamics provide useful information for planning practice about whether barriers to transit-oriented development exist in Greater Los Angeles, or alternatively, for evaluating choices related to rail rapid transit route selection.
• Art for Kmart: A Very Long Opera House
  The production of an opera is as much an act of world building as an act of music. The operatic interior expands outward, carried by its audience and practitioners into a blended universe consisting of opera's constructed worlds and daily life. In the earliest era of opera, Baroque houses used flat scenography with forced perspective conveying the infinite. Technological systems and the operatic form evolved in tandem, resulting in the complex fly systems and acoustical engineering now associated with the opera house. Opera has struggled to adapt to the 21st century; perceived as an inaccessible art form, experimental models are slowly emerging, but new opera has not found easy footing in the US. Simultaneously, economic precarity has further removed rural regions of the US from cultural capitals, eroding the relationship of the arts with everyday life. This thesis imagines a future for opera in the United States where a new vision for the art form affirms community life through an intimate relationship with a quotidian typology. To house the new opera, the thesis converts an empty Kmart in rural Ohio, building drama through procession and reinventing the experience of opera. By exploring the unending flatness of the midwestern fieldscape, the project discovers the latent potential of the big box to host horizontally infinite artistic spectacle in the spirit of Versailles.
• Cities Through a Closing Window: Indigenous and Insurgent Climate Planning
  The International Panel on Climate Change released the Sixth Assessment Report, Summary for Policymakers, in early 2023, describing our current historical moment as within a “rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all”. The report emphasizes the significance of sub-national and urban adaptations in inclusive planning for infrastructure, land use, and coordinated resource consumption to avoid climate collapse. This thesis examines these three points of intervention through the lens of Insurgent Planning and Traditional Ecological Knowledge, arguing that both are necessary to meaningfully accomplish the goals articulated by the IPCC. This thesis outlines frameworks for an “urban mycorrhiza” composed of a Civic Climate Corps (CCC), a Climate Adaptation Planning (CAP) process, a Climate Optimization Modeling Program (COMPanion), and a New England Climate Accords. Such a “mycorrhiza” would use democratically articulated community priorities and ecological constraints to algorithmically optimize tax structures, financial incentives, and land use planning. These frameworks are situated in the New England context due to the projected inflows of people and capital and attempts to answer the existential question of how we shift urban metabolism towards one based in a critical climate consciousness.
• Accessibility Impacts of Transit Development Areas in Seoul
  This dissertation used multidimensional assessment methods for transit development areas associated with accessibility, land use, building density and diversity, population, socio-economic, and transit connections. The research applied a combined analysis framework using spatial network analysis for subway services, pedestrian flows, statistical approaches, and visual studies. The regional subway accessibility assessment investigated the pattern of supply for citywide subway service. The pedestrian accessibility assessment revealed the pattern of pedestrian behaviors for potential trips between a subway station and other places on foot in transit development areas. Measuring walkability helped understand how diversity, density, and design factors of station areas influence the subway user’s choices. Statistical analyses revealed the causal relationship between urban factors and transit demand in station development areas, helping planners and policymakers objectively examine the urban formation and transit users’ needs. Visualization analyses of urban forms and architectural typologies in transit development areas were also conducted as a critical component of the design research to conclude the relationship between urban form and pedestrian accessibility around station areas.
• Home Away from Home: Senior Immigrants’ Culinary Nostalgia
  A group of senior immigrants in the United States, who left their home countries decades ago and have since established themselves here, often find themselves immersed in nostalgic moments, reliving their childhood memories. The dishes prepared in their homes, deeply rooted in the flavors of their hometowns, create a profound connection to their cultural heritage. Their culinary skills were acquired through hands-on guidance from the older generations within their families, evolving into a cherished tradition. With society aging, the “Home Away from Home” thesis project aims to foster a unique bond among seniors from diverse ethnic backgrounds, nurturing a culinary and conversational community that uses food as a means to both rekindle and preserve the memories of the elderly. Drawing inspiration from architectural influences spanning Asia, Europe, and Africa, including Chinese Hui architecture, Italian villas, and Moroccan riads, the project, located in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood, artfully incorporates the essence of traditional housing experiences into a modern architectural language. The kitchen and the act of cooking serve as practical repositories of cultural memory, capturing the very essence of their heritage through tangible methods. By examining these three examples, the project introduces the concept of weaving together these cultural influences while respecting their unique differences, fostering a gesture that implies broader integration among ethnic groups. The inclusion of a daycare program brings laughter and companionship to seniors while providing the younger generation with a connection to their cultural heritage. This initiative promotes a vibrant and inclusive community, celebrating diversity and tradition.
• The Evolving Carbon Balance of High-Performance Buildings
  Highly operationally-efficient buildings typically require significant embodied flows to guarantee low energy consumption. To highlight this tension, an operational energy simulation of a prototypical mid-rise apartment was equipped with all-electric heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. The building was then upgraded from the comparatively under-performing ASHRAE 90.1-2004 standard to the higher-performing PHIUS 2021 certification, while the grid that supplied the building was simulated with aggressive, moderate, and business-as-usual emissions intensity scenarios. To assess life-cycle impacts, changes to the building’s structure, foundation, enclosure, and mechanical equipment were evaluated using life-cycle assessment (LCA), and refrigerant impacts were calculated separately using a range of 100-year global warming potentials (GWP) and leakage assumptions. In the end, the ranking of optimal high-performance building strategies is sensitive to different combinations of grid, refrigerant, and carbon accounting assumptions. As an example, the results suggest that, given a rapidly decarbonized grid, operationally-inefficient buildings with low-embodied-carbon materials will emit less life-cycle carbon than certain low-energy buildings with standard materials.
• A Diasporist Guide to Camping Here
  At Camp Doikayt, the landscape is a vehicle for remembering histories of diaspora and reimagining Jewishness beyond Zionism. Summer camps proliferated in the United States after the Shoah, using the Zionist invention of the “muscular” Jew, to cultivate Jewish continuity. Camp Doikayt proposes an alternative modeled after the Jewish Labor Bund’s concept of “hereness.” In the form of a guidebook, the camp's design unfolds through a set of rules that ritualizes a land ethic of solidarity and participation. As camp wanders year to year to different abandoned Jewish sites in the Catskills, we reconfigure the materials, adapt ecological remnants, and reinterpret Jewish cultural memory.
• Composing Soundscapes for Social Integration: Psychogeography of Bhutanese refugee elders in Worcester, Massachusetts
  Sound can transcend the boundaries of time and space. This thesis leverages the potential of sound to capture a sense of place and reinterpret space by transplanting it to new environments. Working with the Bhutanese refugees of Worcester, MA, this thesis explores how soundscapes of home can be used to address the social isolation of refugees in resettlement communities. Even within progressive communities, host residents can be indifferent to refugees even though they share the same space. By facilitating social integration and community well-being, this work seeks to move places from multicultural to intercultural societies where social interactions among people from different backgrounds move beyond mere coexistence. Interviews and observations are compiled to gain insights into how refugee elders navigate the resettlement environment. Soundscape compositions that demonstrate their psychogeographical understanding of resettlement experiences are produced based on the sounds collected from places elders spend most of their time, such as living rooms, kitchens, gardens, and craft spaces. By introducing the composition and a notation in new environments, boundaries between refugees and non-refugees physically and mentally are blurred, culminating with the proposed design intervention.
• Valuing Adaptation: Real Estate Market Responses to Climate Change Adaptation Measures
  This research examines the economic impact of climate change adaptation measures on the housing markets of two representative coastal cities in the United States located along the Atlantic Ocean. The results shed light on how adaptation measures and investments influence housing values and local economies with respect to their place-based and local forms of implementation. Numerous quantitative approaches, including multiple sets of geospatial modeling and panel-data hedonic regression analyses, are used to examine changes in property values associated with climate adaptation measures and the dynamics of risk perception. The results also signal how risk perception and hurricane characteristics are reflected in housing markets, thereby shedding light on the effects of anticipatory and reactive adaptation strategies in the reclassified categories of hard infrastructure, green infrastructure, adaptive capacity, and private adaptation on property values in these coastal communities. Collectively, the study suggests which adaptation strategies, characteristics, and attributes can contribute to maximizing both community resilience and economic benefits against the weather extremes caused by climate change. This study highlights that natural green infrastructure as a climate adaptation measure is associated with a housing price appreciation of 9.6% in Miami-Dade County and 2.7% in New York City. Structural elevation achieved by raising foundations provides 6.6% and 13.8% in housing price increases in Miami-Dade County and New York City, respectively. Adaptation measures for storm surges provide the largest positive impact on housing prices at 15.4% in Miami-Dade County. The study further suggests that implementation of climate adaptation should be based on local-specific information, rather than relying upon national or state-level data, due to local idiosyncrasies, location-specific storm characteristics, and the subjective nature of risk perception. Together, this study helps to provide a clearer understanding of how different types of climate adaptation measures interacting with storm characteristics and risk perception are contributing to reinforcing a coastal community resiliency.
• How MEGA Eclipsed the ALMIGHTY: Reclaiming the American Megachurch
  The American Christian church is witnessing a widening rift instigated by Christian Nationalist extremists from a decades-long authoring of toxic political influence seeping into the church. The American Megachurch reflects the political motivations of a capitalist society revolving on success through scale. At best, the architecture does not engage against this religious misuse and, at worst, facilitates some of the behavior. The Ancient Church was counter-formative and radical, yet the megachurch adopts today’s capitalist culture described by the French anthropologist Marc Augé in his work, Non-Place: An Introduction to Supermodernity. This architecture is mega, corporate, and aloof negating identity formation. Visitors to this architecture are subjected “to a gentle form of possession, to which [they] surrender [themselves] with more or less talent or conviction, [they] taste for a while – like anyone, who is possessed – the passive joys of identity-loss, and the more active pleasure of role-playing.” An assembly of similitude breeds false teachings of comfort and alignment. To recapture place and a Christ-centered liturgy and assembly, a new understanding of megachurch architecture is proposed that is counter-formative to its history. The work develops within the megachurch context to reclaim the territory and achieve success through an engaged architecture of temporality and timelessness placed in dialogue with urban interventions of permanent church-led social missions.
• Through the Lens of Color: An Interview with Gareth Doherty, Author of Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State
  This interview by Mark Tirpak with Gareth Doherty of Harvard University Graduate School of Design, focuses on his Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State (University of California Press, 2017). With Paradoxes of Green (2017) and via the interview, Doherty recounts some of the findings of his ethnographic fieldwork in the Kingdom of Bahrain and describes tensions arising from differing conceptions of what ‘green’ means or signifies within this growing and predominantly arid region. An argument that Doherty makes in Paradoxes of Green (2017) is that color and form are interlinked, and that color deserves deeper consideration by policy-makers and other formal shapers of cities. The interview draws from Paradoxes of Green (2017) to discuss some of Doherty’s findings as well as his latest work on the intersections between landscape architecture and anthropology.
• DataHub: Data Centers for Cities and People
  This thesis looks at how to design data centers for the urban context in a way that benefits cities and the people who live in them. COVID-19 has only reinforced the sentiment that our physical realm will require more and more room for the digital infrastructure that sustains it. Every day, the average person produces 15GB of data. By 2025, the globe will have produced 17.5 trillion GB. While invisible to us, all of this data needs physical infrastructure to store and analyze it multiple times. Where do we store all of this data? How can we do it in a sustainable way? How can we reintegrate the physical store of data in a thoughtful and sustainable way? This thesis reimagines a new type of data center for our cities that is an integrated and sustainable home for the digital infrastructure that our society and economy demand. In so doing, the methodology of this thesis examines the project from a number of lenses including: data analysis to find ideals sites and opportunities; design to integrate the industrial and functional nature of data centers with urban needs; energy to understand where mutual needs can be met between urban data centers and other uses, and real estate to understand the financial incentives.