Kasama College of Education

Items

• Beyond Nature: Envisioning New Alaskan Supernatural Geothermal Landscapes
  This thesis examines the impacts of a "supernatural landscape" on public awareness and political action toward climate change and clean energy. A supernatural landscape refers to landscapes where specific natural characteristics or processes are artificially intensified to make the landscape appear more natural than nature itself. This thesis focuses on Alaska's conflicted approach to rapid climate change due to its hindered climate policies and identifies geothermal energy as a potential solution. The proposal imagines a set of supernatural landscapes heated with geothermal energy and used as climate change plant laboratories and forecasting landscapes. These landscapes intensify and accelerate climate change processes to act as political tools to encourage climate policies through their aesthetic appeal and scientific research output. Ultimately, this thesis expands landscape architecture's influence on political decisions through aesthetic means.
• Climate Grief: Relearning the Future
  Prince Edward Island (PEI), Canada, is eroding at an average rate of about one foot per year. People are grieving the losses, both past and future, of meaningful places embedded with memory. While the field of landscape has often separated climate change adaptation projects from work focused on human healing, this thesis brings the two sides together in a community-centered landscape regeneration project on PEI. The meaning of loss is different for every individual on the island, whether human or non-human. At the root of environmental degradation is the property line, a legacy of ongoing colonial practices that continue to facilitate deforestation at the edge and exacerbate land loss. These imagined lines motivate landowners to try and stop erosion, and limit many other peoples’ access to the shoreline. However, steady levels of erosion are also part of a broader ecology of disturbance that supports biodiverse habitat. This project imagines how environmental strategies can be integrated across property lines to reweave the ecological gradient from the inland forest to the intertidal zone, creating new relationships with healthy erosion. As the fabric of the island is rewoven, human and ecological healing become intertwined.
• Repair in Spaces of Exception: The Encampment of Refugees in Jordan
  Refugee camps, although designed and perceived as temporary structures that support communities in times of crisis, are long-lasting. On average, a refugee spends seventeen years living in a camp. In Jordan, a 74-year-old refugee camp presents a paradox. Although part of the urban fabric, it is not fully integrated with the city and impoverished conditions. This raises questions regarding the social, political, and spatial dynamics between the camp, the refugees and the host city’s institutions and services. To address these concerns, this project pursues the potential of repair and maintenance as a design alternative for the camp, allowing it to adapt and accommodate varying influxes of people. Through examination of the camp from the architectural to urban scale, this research aims to shed light on how the space of a refugee camp intertwines with the urban fabric by revealing its perception and evolution, typology, and relationship to the existing city.
• ERASURE
  Despite technological advances in AR and VR, a clear dichotomy between virtual and real still dominates. Current augmented reality (AR) experiences—characterized by floating UIs and low-poly models—augment rather than merge with our reality, underscoring the need to redefine this relationship. This thesis proposes a new concept of 'Augmented Reality' that reimagines the digital and physical as partial contributors to a composite whole, achieving a new balance of interaction. It examines the field of mixed reality, dissecting the persisting divide between the physical and the digital, through a film format. The film, with its world-building, captures the banal lives in a post-augmented city that are often overlooked in sci-fi fantasies. With occasional glitches, it finds serene purity, capturing both the “aftermath” of the physical space and the emergence of a new augmented urbanism.
• Housing Adaptation: The Fall and Rise of Modernist Residential Districts
  This thesis analyzes design strategies used to adapt modernist housing projects. During the first decades of the twentieth century, the modernist residential district was designed as the new and standardized form of collective living in response to the mass relocation of workers from the countryside into urban production centers. These districts became the most widespread manifestation of Modernist architecture, housing millions of civilians worldwide. From the turn of the twentieth-first century, these projects face physical degradation, cultural obsolescence, and socio-economic challenges. In response, we are witnessing an unprecedented number of demolitions and adaptations of these architectures. Demolition is problematic because it necessitates the eviction of residents, typically elderly and low-income, and discards usable material and energy. In contrast, adaptation becomes a vehicle for social, environmental, and cultural regeneration of cities. Through the analysis of one hundred case studies across the world, this research reveals six distinct spatial strategies of adaptation: addition, subtraction, diversification, reprogramming, camouflaging, and augmentation. The thesis deepens understanding of eighteen case studies turning the architectural, urban, and landscape practices deployed to enable this work and their impacts on communities into visible objects of contestation and debate. Collectively, these cases describe a renewed role for designers supporting the adaptation of modernist housing projects rather than their neglect, abandonment, or demolition.
• Living Chinatown - Familiar Unfamiliar
  Over the last two centuries, San Francisco Chinatown’s resistance towards architectural change has resulted in the identity of the neighborhood becoming increasingly misaligned with the present – a place losing its sense of purpose and serving as a shelter rather than a home. What were once distinctive elements within the city have now become fixed iconography, more destructive towards immigrants’ dreams than an image of opportunity and rebirth. Without the freedom of an evolving identity in buildings, existing Chinatown architecture will only perpetuate the fatigue in the built environment. It becomes critical to ask: how do we design buildings that are sensitive to the cultures of those who inhabit them? How can we move beyond the shells of previous architectural tropes and towards a more dynamic vessel? Though we have typically considered façade preservation synonymous with honoring cultural identity, many residents create their own communities within these exterior walls. This thesis proposes two residential buildings that demonstrate a new attitude towards a transformed Chinatown; one that prioritizes the people living and working there and respects the connection between past and future. These humble spaces express deep cultural values and the vitality of the people they house through contextual responses, innovative structural strategies, material sensibilities, and ultimately evocative atmospheres. These animate frames call for an urban change and a shift from the ornament to activity; from iconography to a framing of energy. A constant transformation and an architecture that adds to the air that we breathe. Amidst the growing redundancy and formulas of familiar cities, the two interventions aim to respond to the sincere imperative to prioritize cultural identity in the postulation of tomorrow’s world.
• Aesthetics of Extraction: Reconfiguring Images of Empire
  The so-called “Company Paintings” or Kampani Kalam in Urdu and Hindi, developed in the Indian Subcontinent over the 18th and 19th centuries under the “patronage” of the East India Company as a result of British attempts to survey, record, and display the practices, people, architecture, flora, and fauna of the region. Even today, these paintings continue to be displayed in major museums and private collections and all over the world Distinctive of these paintings is their “anthropological” aesthetic stylization. That is, these paintings endeavor to portray their subject-matter in a “natural” manner in order to persuade viewers that such subject-matter is neutral, scientific, and objective. However, both this stylization and the continued curatorial practices and contexts in which these paintings are displayed are highly problematic. The stylization of these paintings was an attempt on the part of British colonizers to efface the authorship and labor of native artists as well as to commodify and fetishize the peoples and practices of the subcontinent. Still more problematic for our own historical moment, though, is the fact that this culture of effacement persists today in the ongoing curation of the paintings. Even now the paintings are typically displayed in museums with no acknowledgement of their original authorship, let alone any historico-cultural contextualization provided by critical postcolonial, decolonial, or subaltern scholarly discourses. By focusing on these “images of empire”, I seek to offer an alternative ground, a “determination otherwise” (Spivak) of our understanding of these paintings and the ways in which museums and archives continue to efface them through a legacy of epistemic violence. Accompanied by a collection of annotated exhibition labels and paintings, I investigate how the creation of empire and the politics of image making are entwined.
• Territorial Instruments
  This thesis investigates the reciprocal relationship between architecture and territory. How are discrete architectural instruments shaped by the territories which they inhabit? In what ways do these instruments structure and order the territories in which they are found? How can architecture be conceived as a fulcrum between built and un-built, between object and void, between building and territory? Tuktoyaktuk, NWT was established in the 1950s, around a Distant Early Warning Line station - one in a series of radar stations constructed in the Canadian Arctic to detect incoming aerial threats from across the north pole. These decommissioned artifacts, like other architectures of distance, oscillate between the technical as well as the ordinary and the local and the global. This thesis proposes three buildings for this town at the forefront of an environmentally and spatially changing Arctic: a small airport, a research station, and a road maintenance depot. These instruments leverage a historical analysis of technological and representative tools to imagine new modes of understanding, responding to, and establishing territory.
• An Attempt to Approach A Void, or Georges Perec, Cause Commune, and the Infraordinary
  In February 1973, Jean Duvignaud, Paul Virilio, and Georges Perec introduced the infraordinary in the fifth issue of their small journal, Cause commune. The infraordinary subsequently became attributed mostly to Georges Perec, to describe his keenness for the everyday in his prolific literary works. Infra-, a spatial preposition, meaning under or below, modifies the ordinary, or everyday life, in a call to action “to question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us.” Such a simple, local act can have immense consequences. Rather than removing “the everyday” from its context in order to defamiliarize it, as Cause commune critiques of mass media, the infraordinary studies the context itself, a seemingly blank space, or void, upon which the everyday is written. By choosing interdisciplinary essays to include in Cause commune, with a vast array of subject matters, the editorial team demonstrates the infraordinary is not just applicable to the literary, sociological, and architectural disciplines, but formulate an art of living upon this blank background. The following thesis is an attempt to approach the infraordinary not only as the subject of exploration, but as a method of writing itself. The aim of this thesis is to trace the infraordinary conceptually through the immediate textual context of Cause commune issue No. 5, the work of Georges Perec, and the work of Cause commune’s other contributors. It is not an origin story, but a text enumerating ideas and forms of thought on everyday life that coalesce in this journal. By excavating what is below everyday life, the infraordinary shows just how unfamiliar we are with everyday life in the first place as we constantly come up against and avoid a void, and how we are equipped to do something about it—through creative acts and life itself.
• Enactive Robotics: An Action-State Model for Concurrent Machine Control
  Industrial robots have been around since the 70s, with massive rates of adoption in the manufacturing industry. Additionally, during the last decade, there has been an increasing interest in the potential of robotic making in non-engineering fields, such as digital fabrication, architecture and art installations, with designers, researchers and artists experimenting with creative applications of these technologies. However, the typical tools used to program and control robots usually fail to address the needs of these groups. Most robots can only be controlled by writing routines through their own graphical user interfaces or vendor-specific programming languages, which often require significant knowledge of spatial transformations, forward and inverse kinematics, mechanical engineering and computer science. These requirements make robots notoriously hard to program, and pose a great entry barrier, especially for novice and non-technical users. Moreover, and similarly to 3D printers, robot programming tools are biased towards the offline control style, one where all the planning and decision making are pre-generated on a digital environment and, upon execution of the compiled instruction file, the programmer becomes completely detached from it. This model is suitable for highly calibrated and predictable environments, but can hardly accommodate more complex forms of control such as responding to feedback from the context, adapting to changing conditions on a construction site or on-the-fly decision making by a controller agent. This research introduces Enactive Robotics, a conceptual model for the design of concurrent control systems for mechanical actuators. The main goal of this model is to blur the distinction between creating and executing a robotic program, integrating them into a process where behavior can be enacted on the machine during the design phase. Drawing inspiration from developmental and cognitive theories, the model is grounded on the capacity of a central decision-making agent to interface in real time with the control system via a set of high-level, universal and platform-agnostic requests named actions. These actions conform the atomic units of cognitive interaction with the robot, and their effect on a particular device is dependent on its nature and state. This paradigm crucially involves considering the large-scale shift between mechanical and computational run times, and proposes the centrality of a state representation as the core mediator between them. The action-state model seeks to break from the unidirectional offline control paradigm, and favor programming styles that are reactive to changes in the dynamic execution of the robot, rather than prescriptive about it. The main thesis in this dissertation is that applications built following the principles of the Enactive Robotics model provide an easier and more immediate entry point to robotics for novel users, since they provide an enactive, rather than symbolic representation of the system, hence aiding the cognitive processes that lead to understanding motion planning and control. Additionally, it provides a framework with greater depth of possibilities for advanced users, in which its real-time nature and immediate feedback facilitates experimentation, flow of thought and creative inquiry. While the work presented in this dissertation focuses mainly on industrial robotic arms, it will be shown how this model can be extended to any programmable machine that performs spatial motion. In this dissertation the general architecture of the model is presented, as well as two sample technical implementations following these principles. The first implementation is a pure .NET library designed for power-users and tech-savvy individuals, while the second is an ecosystem of UI-based applications and utility libraries geared towards novice and entry-level users. A collection of projects built with these implementations is presented as case studies, to showcase the capacity of the model to systematically enable richer interaction paradigms with robotic systems. Furthermore, the results of a controlled user study are presented, in order to evidence the capacity of the model to provide an easier and more accessible entry point to robot programming for novice users.
• On the mathematics of Memetics
  As technology, embeds itself in almost every facet of our society, new rules of interacting and signalling emerge, specifically in the case of mass communication. These new imitated non-genetic behaviours that are called memetics are the chief area of inquiry of this thesis. The thesis is an exploratory project in which I present a study of memetic social behaviour and how belief structures form amongst groups online. I specifically look at the case of Reddit. More interestingly, I look at early belief propagation, how and what causes conflicts amongst these groups, and the interdependence of beliefs and the conflicts that result in the mutation and spread of memes. I hypothesize and verify that these belief spread methods are a function of the differential rates of updates in the belief sets of the groups. In the process of enquiry, I draw upon existing trans-scaler methods of studying social behaviour and build upon them to introduce new metrics based on proxy information as derived from sentiment data of messages exchanged amongst groups. Subsequently, I present a method by which to plant these ideas, in this case, memes, so that they may propagate most effectively amongst people as a verificatory process. Lastly, I examine other online spaces where these memetic exchanges take place and speculatory prospects of applying these methods and tools that were developed; looking at the case of fake news and response methods that are proactive as opposed to reactive
• VOLUNTARY ENERGY EFFICIENCY PROGRAM: The Work from Home (WFH) Trend Presenting a Win-Win Opportunity for the Triple Bottom Line
  The global pandemic COVID-19 has led to an advanced exploration of the remote world, with many employees and employers wanting to continue with the current work-from-home scenario even after offices reopen. Consequently, it becomes essential to understand the impact of energy load shifts from commercial to residential buildings and the resultant opportunity for the energy-efficient design community with this new trend. Simultaneously, businesses and companies are increasingly declaring net zero goals and adopting various green market approaches, to tread a socially and environmentally responsible path. In this thesis, we are proposing the creation of a new program for such companies which would bring them closer to their carbon reduction goals while also benefitting their employees. It encompasses an opportunity for employers to incentivize energy efficiency upgrades of their employees’ homes, in a manner which proves to be financially feasible for both the primary stakeholders, i.e., companies and employees. We began the research by analysing utility load shifts due to employees shifting to a workfrom-home (WFH) setup. Then, we collected information for residential green building retrofit techniques, identifying the most cost-effective and impactful ways to create healthier WFH environments while reducing GHG emissions. Further, we evaluated the viability of the new proposed program relative to the widely used existing decarbonization strategies. Next, we theoretically tested the implementation of the program through a case study of Cambridge Savings Bank, Waltham. The report culminates with different suggestions to standardize the roadmap of such a voluntary energy-efficiency program and a discussion about its practical implementation to enable win-win feasibility for the triple bottom line of the planet, people and profits.
• Unpaving Paradise : Envisioning a Healthy Hialeah
  Hialeah is a city of “unhealthy” urban character in terms of green coverage, economic opportunity, and medical care; however, its strong sense of community and interpersonal “weak ties” could help overcome these characteristics with reinvigorated participation for a reformulation of the city. Imageability as a method of participation invites the minds of community members acting as designers to formulate a strategy for the health of their own city, ascertaining “what does a healthy Hialeah look like?” This relationship between individuals in the act of imageability is not merely a connection, or even many connections, rather it is defined by an exponential almost intangible network of relations and actions, known to us as complexity. The fruits of this discussion on imageability and health are integrated and designed into a framework for Hialeah that challenges its health infrastructure by redesigning a connective network centered on a synthetic urban orchard.
• Extending Material Preservation: A Bridge Reconstruction Festival in a Chinese Rural Valley
  This project explores the preservation of the Covered Bridge as heritage in a rural valley of Southeastern China and develops a form of resiliency for the local community against capitalist development. The Covered Bridges are an infrastructure heritage that embodies broad social and religious significance. The material conservation of the bridges is challenged by intensifying summer floods, together with aging, depopulation, and poverty of the rural population. This design prioritizes the process of culture preservation over material conservation. The preservation of local knowledge and culture practices are the keys to cultivate a continuous and sustainable relationship between village development and bridge preservation. Set in the context after a prospective flood, the design involves the bridge reconstruction process in a two-year bridge festival which encapsulates the meaning of intangible vernacular heritages, through a combination of local rituals, food cultures, geomantic knowledge, traditional forestry, and the native hydrology system.
• Cheap Wonder, TYP.
  The materials available on institutional building projects with limited budgets today are not the concrete of Le Corbusier, the bricks of Louis Kahn, the terracotta of Louis Sullivan, or the steel of Mies, instead they are inexpensive building products: sheet-rock, metal studs, gypsum board, and ducting. Instead of determining a building’s overall form and subdividing it into these materials, this thesis focuses on the strange beauty of these building products, mines them for their perceptual and experiential potential, and deploys them to create effects of wonder. The creation of a sensibility of wonder and vastness has been accomplished already in architecture through the design of large and repetitive spaces on private projects that can afford the material and real-estate. In art, it has been realized with material and labor that serves one function for a short period of time and is visible to an audience already seeking it out. This thesis tests how vastness, luxury, and flicker can be created instead with an economy of means: in small spaces with the material implicit in the flows of ordinary construction. Through the design of an urban public high school on an ordinary site – a brief that involves default tectonics, practical problems, and a collective fractured by cliques – the project seeks to enchant the tectonics of common materials and to create a diversity of experiences within a singular whole. Can this focus on material effects carve out spaces for collectivity that feel grand and vast but are actually practical, inexpensive, and small?
• Dwellings, Paths, Places: Configurative Habitat in Casablanca, Morocco
  The Modernist project in Casablanca resulted in unique urban and architectural interventions in a quasi-forgotten city. In particular, distinct typo-morphologies such as Michel Ecochard’s Carrières-Centrale housing development have been in a constant state of flux, thereby transforming the urban fabric, its architecture, and interiors in rather ad-hoc ways. Responding to the ways in which such typo-morphologies have changed over the decades, the thesis operates on Ecochard’s original proposal to speculate on how a modernist housing development could allow for growth and change in such a way that retains the original typological features (e.g: courtyards, streets), but also remains relevant to Moroccan spatial traditions. The goals of the thesis seek to determine the possible urban design strategies that would allow for configurative habitat in this particular context, to determine the appropriate density to support a dynamic urban environment, to position this site amongst many others across the city that suffer from similar typo-morphological shortcomings, and to recognize them as imperative constituents in the development of urban design between North Africa and Europe.
• Building Backward: Archaeology of a Queer Built Future
  Any center forms an edge. In Marseille, France – a city built on concrete and tile production – the spirit of industrial progress has fallen to ruins and toxic soil. What if architecture’s agenda for repair was not to erase and redevelop, but to inhabit the time it takes to heal earthly damage? This light tenure takes hold of the ruined Rio Tinto mining site above Marseille while it undergoes an ambivalent remediation: a queer form of life that appears at the postindustrial edges of many cities. Reading through dust, water, and graffiti, the project works from details at the body scale up and from cartography back down to the mediated ground. Accumulated building waste is stacked into new forms, returning a localized material cycle to the site. This method produces a series of interventions that calibrate human occupation to shifting soil. The “territory awaiting development” above the city is now the test site for a new maintenance regime: a queer narrative method for architecture to suspend animation and rearrange the parts. In this space, health is made legible. Bodies are loosely engaged – through bathing, play, building, and taking out the trash – in architectural cycles they can witness. By taking care, these interventions make room for peripheral lives to register themselves and hold territory. Queer architecture forms a soft new center.
• Emerging Consumer Cities - Mixed land use, amenities and housing prices in Shanghai
  This research quantitatively studies how mixed land-use planning impacts the housing prices in Shanghai. To answer the question, I collected data and constructed a database on housing price and land use to measure the impacts of urban amenities and mixed land-use on housing prices in Shanghai. This work makes an important empirical contribution to existing studies in the field of consumer city, mixed land-use, valuation and housing prices, and the on-going debate on land market reform in China. This study provides a key quantitative analysis of the efficiency of current land use structure in Shanghai and the level of willingness-to-pay for mixed land-use. This can shed light on a major policy debate about land efficiency in China, including Shanghai, and the land market reform which has been a key policy under the current administration. Based on the analysis, an oversupply of industrial lands intended to attract foreign investors and an inefficient public land market is found to have attributed to the distortion of land structure in China. This research quantifies the impact of land use pattern on housing prices and proposes improvements in land use planning. In terms of methodology, this research applies multiple regression models in addition to the traditional hedonic models, in the estimation of willingness-to-pay for mixed land-use or amenities. Based on the analysis of first-hand collected land use and housing price data of Shanghai, this study provides estimates for the land use’s impact on housing value and offers policy considerations on efficient land use. The 2013 China’s Third Plenum of the 18th Congressional Conference has highlighted optimizing land use structure and city’s physical structure as a major reform objective; however, so far there has been limited quantitative studies that assess the relationship between land use patterns and housing prices in China, which reflects the lack of and the difficult access to related data. Using a novel dataset, the analysis produces a variety of quantitative results. One estimate is that one percent more land use in greenspace in a 500 by 500 meters grid attributes to an increase of RMB6,600 in property value. Similarly, having one percent more land use in shophouse and shopping center in such a grid also elevates property values, by RMB5,900 and RMB7,900 respectively. The results drawn from Shanghai can serve as a good starting point to understand other cities in Yangtze River Delta economic zone – China’s most vibrant economic agglomeration. The empirical and methodological framework developed in this study can be generalized in future research and applied to other cities.
• Behind the Scenes: Pregnancy Portrait
  The pregnancy portrait underlines the position of female reproductive bodies within a cultural moment, creating identity, agency, and capital. Social and cinematic mediums animate the pregnancy portrait, showing the pregnant body as both a dynamic state and a moment frozen in time. Public figures—from celebrities to local influencers—receive payment from advertisers by monetizing their pregnant bodies. These branded posts reinforce the concept of motherhood as defined by consumption and spending. Celebrities, influencers, and mommy bloggers provide a model of how ordinary people should live and spend. The sponsored pregnancy portrait blends the format of ad and personal announcement, creating a new model of pregnancy that is both private and public, seemingly organic yet also highly choreographed, and most importantly, highly profitable. The social media pregnancy requires new flexible spaces that allow for the broadcasting of the pregnant body, a broadcasting that is inhibited by the inward-facing nature of existing clinics. Filmic space organizes and reorganizes itself around the camera’s view and can contract and expand to frame or exclude subjects from the scene. The public pregnancy requires new spaces to accommodate new subjects and new forms of viewership. By combining the programs of sound stage and clinic, I want to arrive at a new typology that allows for the broadcasting and publicization of the production of family and home, inverting the assumed privacy of motherhood. The resulting clinic becomes an anatomical theater and a space for the production of media.
• Sympoietic City: a Forest of Plant/Human Kinship
  With the financialization of ecosystem services and putting forests to work, our relationship to the trees continues to be rooted in the design legacies of the botanic gardens, herbaria, and gridded property systems. Operating within these legacies perpetuates a land ethic that fosters inequality within our cities. The thesis proposes a reorientation of Americans’ relationships with trees. Situated within the complex palimpsest of political, colonial, and activist histories within the nation’s capital, Washington D.C., this process begins with a constitutional amendment that defines the spatial, visual, and political rights of trees. Moving through spaces inhabited by D.C.’s emblematic trees - the Japanese Cherry, American Elm, and Scarlet Oak, these rights are manifested throughout the District. By eschewing notions of ownership over nature and cultivating spaces that embody plant/ human kinship, Sympoietic City renegotiates Washington D.C. as a landscape held in tandem by humans and trees.
• BODIES OF EARTH: Abduction - Death - Grief - Rebirth
  In the Acropolis, the past and the future converge. The marble that produced the citadel monuments altered our future and drained the mountain stone. Here, our cultural artifacts are evidence of our destructive relations with the Earth. Life starts and ends in the soil that gives birth to all sorts of bodies. In today's complex world bodies blur with other bodies, machines, and networks. The Bodies of Earth is a catalog, a collection of snapshots, recent memories of cultural and visual consumption of artworks and design projects that are placed together to help us re-examine our relationships with plants, animals, and machines. It aims to explore the body's agency in establishing a partnership with Earth in the era of climate destruction and recognizing that our kinship with the soil is intrinsic to establishing an ethics of eco-responsibility. How can a shift in human consciousness lead to a collective restoration of the environment? Right now, humans dominate the planet without responsibility. Carbon dioxide emissions, global warming, and over-extraction of natural resources are only some evidence of the problems they cause. The structure of this catalog deploys Greek mythology to talk about the circle of life and death. The first chapter, “Abduction”, investigates the body under surveillance and extraction mechanisms. The second chapter, “Death”, explores the material and the digital transformations of a dead body. The third chapter, “Grief”, talks about the shifting landscapes of ecological destruction and memories from the past. The last chapter, “Rebirth”, presents a post-anthropocentric ethical thinking and provides design alternatives for a regenerative future.
• Aggregation of Allegories
  In our lives, certain geometric spaces hold profound meaning. For instance, a room with a sloped floor instantly evokes cinematic or theatrical connotations. We instinctively adjust our orientation, distinguishing between the viewing area and the observed end. Another example is the familiar gabled house shape, synonymous with the concept of home. These geometric spaces act as signs, inherently laden with meaning and associations. In contrast to traditional postmodernist and deconstructionist abstracting signs as sculptural objects, which are interpreted externally, what if spatial signs could also be multiplied and abstracted as well? This thesis seeks to put a common set of programs into two aggregations of shapes in two contexts. The programs will include both living and screening, corresponding to the gable and the trapezoid shape. Yet all the programs are crammed into the trapezoids when they are in the city, and into the gables when they are in the rural. The programs are warped by contextual situations, and the geometries are then warped by the programs. The thesis endeavors to develop a design methodology that is geometrically both multiplicative and divisional, which ensures architectural signs remain consistently intelligible from both external and internal perspectives. By using this pair of buildings as a foundation, the thesis aspires to propose a method for infusing programs with significance and redefining programmatic relationships through the spatial sign.
• Landscapes of Repulsion: Hidden in Plain Site
  This thesis interrogates landscape architecture’s participation in the cleaning and concealing of repugnant sites of industry through the creation of fabricated mountains constructed from the wastes of Iowa’s booming commercial hog industry. The constructed mountains, dubbed the De Sotos, are proposed to be located just north of the town of Manson in northwest Iowa. These constructed megaforms are in constant negotiation between industry and nature, always changing and never complete, to reimagine the landscape’s relationship to active industry. The De Sotos are constructed over time as waste material is collected, processed, shaped, and, in some cases, planted. The mountain range is both a force of its own, shaped by the by-products of its natural and artificial processes, as well as being a product of consumption and construction. The mountains make visible the repulsions of this industry as an immeasurable force altering the land of Iowa and its value as a site of production.
• Not Quite Uncertain & Likely Imprecise
  Empress Market was inaugurated in 1889 on top of a former British mass execution ground: a calculated obfuscation of colonial violence. In post-British Karachi, the market spontaneously burst and haphazardly expanded, subconsciously becoming reclaimed by the locals. In 2018, local authorities weaponized the unsanctioned mode of this growth to demolish all encroachments, evict all vendors, and reinstate the colonial building as a monument-in-the-round. A second massacre at Empress Market. At a distance, Empress Market’s re-instantiation presents the idealized image of its colonial legacy. But the true register of Empress Market’s complicated past becomes visible on closer inspection: scars—of gradual weathering and of sudden demolition, of authoritarian violence and of popular life—are inscribed on the building’s surfaces. Empress market today is paralyzed: an uncanny void in a dense city: a “public” space without a public, plagued by congestion and trash. This literal and infrastructural gap in the city is further deepened by the double ecological crises of heat and rainwater, which materialize in unpredictable but severe concentrated surges. Hinging on the urgency for urban shade and rainwater control, this thesis improvises a roof to accommodate a return to the site’s mercantile past. A set of instructional documents produce an accumulation of imprecision in the improvisational construction they incite. Gaps in the groundscape hold excess rainwater, rifts within slabs produce a punctuated ceiling, cracks between roofs draw in light and air. The incremental and imprecise outcome rejects the precise and tyrannical colonial instigator.
• The Ecological Pulse of Electric Flows: Enriching Georgia’s Solar Landscape
  This thesis explores the dissonance between the creation of solar landscapes and the disconnected conditions they produce. In the United States, tech corporations are the largest purchasers of renewable energy - they buy energy credits generated by remote solar sites in order to claim their data centers are ‘powered by 100% renewable energy.’ The companies morally and monetarily benefit from these claims while the solar sites’ conditions are anything but ecological. The project proposes new logics, practices, and metrics that can be used to equitably transform post-agricultural landscapes into grounded photovoltaic solar sites. It rejects the current standard of surrounding the space with screenings and the sacrificial paradigm associated with infrastructural landscapes. Instead, this thesis imagines a reality where landscape architects design solar sites to be visible manifestations of corporate accountability, community connection, and ecological restoration. This new design standard ensures that both human and nonhuman stakeholders benefit from the space.