Kasama College of Education

Items

• "If I see another palm tree, I will have a conniption!": Re-presenting Hospitality Landscapes in Jamaica
  ...Indeed, almost from the inception of tourism industries on the islands, hoteliers, colonial administrators, and local white mercantile elites (re)created or tropicalized many aspects of the islands precisely in the image of these representations. They physically transformed areas of the islands through planting campaigns or cleanliness drives, in efforts to make the islands appear as they did in photographs—orderly, picturesque, and tropical. Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque, Objects/Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 40. This thesis re-presents the image of the tropics at the site of the hotel, a “space where ideals of the picturesque tropical landscape were re-created in miniature” (Thompson 2006, 1). To do so, it draws upon the vernacular landscape of the Jamaican yard, embracing its public-private spatial logic and botanical diversity, to propose a hotel landscape that renders visible the lifeways, natural heritage, and the people of the island.
• Past, Present and Future Sentiments Towards CAD [Computer Aided Design]
  With new technologies, come hopes, expectations, and speculations of potential new futures. This thesis attempts to understand such attitudes, specifically around the development and evolution of Computer Aided Design (CAD) technologies. To this end, text corpora from 1980 onwards that centers on CAD is extracted from 880+ PDFS of the AIA magazine corpus. AIA corpus was chosen as the AIA has historically dominated design discourse and educational pedagogy and is much of the reason of why architecture exists the way it does today in America. Furthermore, their archives offer free and available past issues since the publication’s inception (1913). These bodies of extracted text are then compiled into four timescales 1980–1989, 1990–1999, 2000–2009 and 2010–onwards. These categories are then compared and analyzed using a natural language processing (NLP) word embeddings approach revealing semantic and syntactic relationships between words. This analysis frames language as a partial reflection of social values and hopes to reveal insights into understand past, present, and future sentiments around CAD since its inception.
• From Forecasting to Scenario Planning: The Case of Autonomous Vehicles
  Efforts to forecast travel demand have led to the development of complex models which attempt to replicate human daily actions, choices, and movements. However, a growing body of literature suggests that the complexity of these models and their limited consideration of uncertainty have adversely affected their usefulness in the planning process. This dissertation argues that transportation planning should shift to methods that facilitate understanding and communication of uncertainty instead of relying on seemingly deterministic predictions of complex models. Two modeling paradigms – activity-based and scenario-based models are analyzed to show how they handle uncertainty in the case of assessing the travel impacts of autonomous vehicles. Three metropolitan areas, Seattle, San Francisco, and the Detroit region, are used as case studies to estimate the impacts of autonomous vehicles on total travel and accessibility. The results of the activity-based modeling indicate that the effects of autonomous vehicles are different in different regions, primarily due to the differences in income, density, and access to public transit. While vehicle miles increase in all three regions, 17% in Seattle, 22% in the Bay Area, and 11% in Detroit, accessibility is highly dependent on the local context. The scenario-based model is not able to produce the results with this level of granularity. However, due to many unknowns associated with emerging technology, the scenario-based model proved to be better suited to incorporate various aspects of autonomous vehicles. Beyond the estimates of travel impact, the results show that more informed planning can be achieved by moving away from deterministic forecasting and especially away from the urge to improve forecasting accuracy by building bigger models. Every piece of additional data and every additional parameter has an uncertainty cost that is compounded with the previous uncertainty costs. Instead, the modelers should aim to create more useful models by increasing the transparency of the modeling process and by reducing its complexity.
• Tracing Narratives: the Mauritian-Chagossian Sovereignty Dispute
  In a treaty for Mauritius to gain independence from the United Kingdom in 1968, the island was to relinquish one of its own, the Chagos Archipelago. From then on, Chagossians were evicted from their homes to make space for the United States Navy. Now known as the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), the complex politics that it carries is a neo-colonial marker in Mauritian history – an imperial move that has only recently been acknowledged by the United Nations and the World Court as unlawful. In attempting to decentralize western narratives, this project is a call to action for international territories to recognize pan-African and post-colonial issues. Still, in doing that, it also questions who has the right to access research. And not only is the thesis a field guide to the multiple hurdles of the undertaking research; the existing colonial dispositions towards post-colonial systems, and questioning of gatekeeping history, but also a personal journal and critique of what it is truly like to be treated as an alien in a supposed culturally intimate space.
• Highway to The Bottom: Recasting Baltimore's Highway to Nowhere
  This thesis explores the potential for the landscape architect to flip the script on designing with remnant landscapes from the mid-20th century era of urban renewal, focusing on West Baltimore’s Highway to Nowhere. The form and materiality of the sunken highway have become ingrained in the cultural landscape; there is an opportunity to design a new landscape typology from this existing infrastructure, without modifying its form or material. Through resurfacing historic residential and commercial fabric and making the site ecologically productive for surrounding context, the Highway to Nowhere is recast as the Highway to The Bottom. The Highway to The Bottom operates in opposition to the structures undergirding it: annexation/blotting, demolition, and greenwashing. This thesis recasts these obstructions as productive design frameworks in the form of ownership, material, and experience, all as expressions of the hole in the ground in West Baltimore.
• The Lāhaināluna Views: New England Missionaries and Transplanting of a Vernacular
  In 1820, Protestant missionaries from New England arrived in the islands of Hawaiʻi. They expressed their goal of introducing Christinity in distinctly material terms, prioritizing especially the execution of an imagined landscape, one they planned to realize by “fill[ing] the habitable parts of those important islands with schools and churches, fruitful fields, and pleasant dwellings.” Engraved landscape views produced by scholars at a Seminary in Lāhaināluna, Maui, capture the missionʻs attempts at realizing this ideal, and expose the many ways it was a nearly rote replication of the built environment they had left back east. Looking closely at the images themselves, which were widely distributed in journals and books in New England, I examine the ways they promote three stages of mission intervention, the imposition of barrenness that allowed the missionaries to justify the “filling” they proposed, the conversion of that blank slate into fields dictated by American agricultural practices, and the population of those fields by imported and whitewashed, woodframe houses. Although the mission figured these landscape alterations as American ‘im- provements,’ they were heavily contrived and frequently unsuccessful, often remaining foreign fantasies that fit clumsily into the landscape of the islands. In these moments of mission failure, we can experience the persistence of Kanaka Maoli lifeways, and the multitude of instances in which the mission relied upon these practices even as they actively attempted to erase them.
• “Vieques es Nuestra Casa": Ecological Reparation through Embodied Action
  This thesis is set on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, a territory subjected to US Navy occupation and decades of munitions testing. To counter the alienation and destruction imposed by military exploitation, this project looks to the activist group the Alianza de Mujeres Viequenses who demanded demilitarization for the protection of their island home. Acts of care by womxn respond directly to postmilitary site conditions to repair toxic and highly disturbed grounds for community access and benefit. This response to soil (through remediation, composting, planting, and erosion control) generates a series of networked garden landscapes. Tending the soil and plants shifts power over territory from Washington, DC, to locals through reciprocal interactions between human and nonhuman community members. This approach underscores the impacts of long-term colonial violence as registered in the granular nature of the ground, adding an important sectional dimension to our interpretation of the impacts of colonial military projects and a call for reparative action.
• edit architecture*
  Editing just one detail can alter the entire structure of a concept. This thesis explores architecturally editing existing buildings to challenge their conceptual framework. The global construction boom of the past fifty years has resulted in the production of more buildings than ever before. Today, these buildings face either demolition or repair due to average building lifespans of thirty to fifty years. In addition to these intrinsic expiration dates, contemporary environmental constraints and growing spatial needs require the extension of building lifecycles. However, the resulting misalignment between these structures’ original intentions and present-day limitations calls for a practice of conceptual and structural editing that both confronts initial intentions and integrates new desires. This thesis considers the modernist office tower as an example of the conflicted condition that characterizes buildings approaching their expiration dates. While the public holds these towers in contempt for their sitelessness, the embodied carbon within the heavy structure outrules demolition and redevelopment. Specifically, this project edits the Postbank Tower in Berlin, built in 1971. Because the original building privileges programmatic specificity over site specificity, my proposal challenges this existing prioritization, eschewing functional prescription in favor of programmatic ambiguity. The editorial concept is driven by a structural re-grounding, resulting in a spatial entanglement of old and new structure, where strategic additions and subtractions make a new concept of the building legible.
• Investigations in Metropolitan Form: Architecture, Infrastructure, and the American City
  This thesis challenges the discipline of architecture to reassert its agency at the scale of the city, the region, and the territory. Using Austin, Texas and Richmond, Virginia as case studies, it proposes a transformation of mid-sized American cities through the redevelopment of urban expressways. In the United States, highways are symbolic of the overreach of Modernist planning, and of the ignorance and animus with which architects and the state have addressed people of color and the poor. They are infrastructural engines which drive our rapacious consumption of natural resources through suburbanization. The urban renewal era was a product of Modernist ambition, but also a harbinger of its end. Since then, the authority of the design disciplines has been righteously assailed from below, leaving designers themselves either unable or unwilling to affect large-scale change. The moment for totalizing planning and gestural megastructures has passed, but architects must find a way to develop ambitious proposals if we are to respond to the linked crises of our own time. By envisioning a new metropolitan condition from the scale of the territory down to the civic space, this thesis demonstrates how a revival of architectural interest in urban form can alter patterns of life in the American city. The proposals for Austin and Richmond function as both illustrations of a mode of argument and as concrete solutions to the pressing problems of mid-sized cities.
• Nature State: Incentivized Forests in Southern Ontario
  Nature State: Incentivized Forests in Southern Ontario investigates the rapid growth of voluntary private land conservation efforts in suburban and rural Ontario, focusing on the rise of incentivized management from the mid-1990s until present day. Using a mixed methods approach the study combines semi-structured interviews, archival research, and GIS analysis with case studies in southern Ontario. This research considers the coevolution of new taxation schemes for conservation, devolved governance, and privatized approaches to owning land and resources. In particular, this work examines the growing use of programs such as the Managed Forest Tax Incentive Program in order to manage environmental change and biodiversity of forested lands within an extended urban fabric. Incentivized environmental management raises important questions about the growing interdependence between suburban land conservation and urban housing affordability, the changing scales of stewardship, and the increasing role of finance in land conservation. My findings reveal the development of new actor assemblages and knowledge geographies that have come about due to the transfer of forest management activities from the state to landowners, the new spatialities of protected areas and their land use dynamics, as well as the integrated role of civil society and stewardship in addressing urban climate futures. Committee: Neil Brenner, Charles Waldheim, Sonja Dümpelmann
• The Wardian: Confiscated Dendrobiums and Displaced Identities
  The Wardian: Confiscated Dendrobiums and Displaced Identities is an art-based research project that addresses issues around displacement and migration. By retracing the personal journey of this illegally traded, ecologically endangered, confiscated - then rescued - Dendrobium orchid, currently held in quarantine at the Botanic Garden of Smith College, this project investigates the mechanisms by which institutions and legal systems transfer and detain plants. The installation consists of five hand-welded metal structures, the primary artifacts for my research. Each structure stands as an individual signifier of the legislative, the sociopolitical, the biotic, and finally the ethnomedicinal knowledge systems. Together, the artifacts enter in a dialogue which invites the viewer to question, beyond the journey of the Dendrobium orchid, our relationship with one another as living beings.
• Measuring atmosphere: relationships between room ambience, activity, and human emotional responses in virtual reality
  This exploratory study aims to create a framework for measuring the strength of atmosphere in interior spaces, as defined by the architectural elements within them. A survey questionnaire based on PANAS was created, along with 10 3D modeled rooms that were simulated in virtual reality. The rooms were designed using parameters derived from studies in environmental psychology that informed the creation of a room activity level scale (RALS). Each of the rooms was given a score on this scale. 24 participants were asked to report their feelings while in the VR spaces using the questionnaire. The rooms were first shown to them in color and afterwards in grayscale. It was hypothesized that 1) the participants would report stronger emotional responses in the rooms that were lower on the RALS, 2) that participants would report stronger emotional responses in colored rooms compared to their grayscale counterparts, and 3) that participants with a background in spatial design fields would report weaker emotional responses than participants without such a background. The data was analyzed using a mixed methods approach, where quantitative and qualitative data was gathered during the surveys. The quantitative data was analyzed with a linear regression model that informed the qualitative analysis. The results showed that hypotheses #1 and #3 were not supported, while hypothesis #2 was partially supported. It was determined that the opposite of hypothesis #1 was true, and that spaces higher on the RALS featured stronger emotional responses, alluding to the greater strength of atmosphere within them. Common architectural knowledge would claim that more mindful, less active spaces would feature a stronger atmosphere, as atmosphere is thought to be easier to perceive in such spaces. Opposing this notion, I suggest that the strength and perceivability of atmosphere are two different constructs.
• Platforms: re-framing urban relocation through an ownership model for resident-led transformations of the built environment
  Changing economic, demographic, and technological forces are shaping new balances of power across the planet. Systems of exchange fueled by urbanization, regional dynamism, the commodification of land, and increasingly unilateral economic and spatial policy frameworks are transforming the built environment and result in the displacement and relocation of infrastructures, buildings, and residents. In mono-industry cities, whose labor markets depend on the continued productivity of a single industry or company, the ability of residents to engage and participate in the decision-making process when it comes time to move is restricted by their economic and regional dependence, the extent of physical infrastructure outside of the urban area, and their capacity to initiate large-scale action. In practice, there is a need to re-define the systems of urban relocation, in terms of authority, process, and outcomes, in order to create a multilateral framework that can be applied across contexts. First, it is necessary to understand and critically examine the current scalar systems of exchange that drive relocation, including: local property rights transfers; regional spatial, environmental, and land use policy; and the interrelated components of telecoupled interactions. Then, a new integrative systems framework proposes four operational platforms developed in response to key issues of ownership, infrastructure, housing, and services to increase the capacity, choice, and financial mobility of residents on both near- and long-term timeframes. Design strategies that consider user-occupant flexibility and value-creation address growth, management, and social stability in a model of stakeholder capitalism that places residents on the other side of the decision-making table.
• Of Two Minds: Excavating the Split Estate
  The split estate is a political-legal framework in the United States that severs surface property from subsurface. This effectively duplicates available property in the United States and establishes a palimpsest of ownership of land with the ground as delimiter. In practice, this condition decouples land from its geologic underpinnings and establishes distinct rights to the access and use of landed property and minerals. It calls into question the flat condition of property. This thesis unpacks the effects of this splitting as a precedent of the continuous commodification of the American public domain. I use the split estate to frame landscape as a political-aesthetic instrument through which to question notions of territory, divisibility and the image of public lands in the United States. I take as my subject sites within the United States where the surface is public land (National Parks, National Forests, et al.) and the subsurface is private extraction. Using imagery, mapping and drawing, this is explored through six ways of seeing the split estate: territorial, geological, hydrological, financial, sublime and legal. Through this excavation, the competing ideologies of private extraction and wilderness imaginary are brought to the fore, questioning how use of the underground reinscribes the boundaries of property above. Finally, this thesis projects ways the split estate could be understood within the socio-cultural landscape of America. It proposes didactic tools, which engage the greater public in this topic and seeks to upend traditional representations of the extraction/conservation dichotomy.
• Two strip mall plazas Edison, New Jersey
  Through a suburban counter-ethnobotany, this project examines how plant and human migrations land in two strip mall plazas in Edison, New Jersey. Edison became home to large communities of immigrants from East and South Asia after the 1965 Immigration Act; these communities had culturally specific needs which they fulfilled through the appropriation of the strip mall plaza. Plants also inhabit this peripheral asphalt world, both within the mall and around. Brought by historically complicated global mechanics, their presence, like that of the people around, is politicized. As local plant migrations increase due to changes in climate and the built environment, this project responds by proposing a choreography of stripping asphalt from the road and parking lot, facilitating planting. After de-paving, the material and program inside is brought outside and the spontaneous growth of the back end brought to the front, and the plaza becomes a garden in migration.
• Home-Coming | Coming-Home: A Discourse Deriving from Black Domesticity
  When imagining a discourse around Black domesticity, it is essential to create new parameters, or for that matter, no parameters at all, no longer relying only on colonial Anglo-Saxon methods telling how to appropriate or deem What is considered space-making and What is not. What is comfortable and What is not, What is safe and What is not, What is beautiful and What is not and so on. This discourse interrogates and respond to gaps within the cannon. A discourse that is no longer concerning with the individual and more about the collective. A discourse of collective cultivation, cultural tracing, a discourse around being. No longer relying on the built environment as the only enabler of space-making but relying also on that of the human body and of earth. This thesis searches for traces of spatial liberation and cultural identities within the domestic realm of Blacks. Analyzing historical typologies within Black vernacular ranging from the slave plantation to that of the current day suburb, identifying spaces and bodily movements of liberation within these communities. Using this framework to reveal how the study of Black Domesticity has the power to reimagine and reassemble how we think about housing in America. Using these findings to then return to a site of Black Domesticity such as Pruitt Igoe, creating a rebuttal against the system. For Blacks to return to this site, it can represent the ultimate act of home-coming/coming-home in which this time through Black domestic space-making indicates WE ARE HERE TO STAY.
• Eggs Frying, Sweeping: A Series of Reprojective Footnotes
  In her fantastical children’s book Tar Beach, Faith Ringgold writes from the perspective of an eight-year-old girl named Cassie Louise Lightfoot. Cassie could fly, and anything she flew over she could claim and own forever. Her flight took place over Harlem, USA, a nation within a nation, carrying the weight of an age-old collective imagination. Harlem is “the mecca” of Black cultural production that accommodated the heartbreaking ills of racial inequity throughout the 20th century only to watch its buildings become derelict and its property values fall. By the 2000s, Harlem was gentrifying at a rapid pace with new developments culturally appropriating the fragments of collective imagination that were left. The thesis reprojects Cassie’s flight over one building in particular, the Rennie Luxury Housing Complex. The name of the complex, “the Rennie,” appropriates the nickname of the building that was demolished for its construction, “the Renny.” The demolished building, formally named the Harlem Renaissance Casino, Theater, and Ballroom, emphasizes the tragic, ongoing loss of architectural landmarks for Black communities across America. The thesis responds by proposing a series of architectural reprojections (footnotes) toward the new luxury housing complex to afford communal forms of living and ownership. To do so, the project intervenes within the typological history of the Harlem Airshaft, reimagining it as an architectural sampler bearing witness to Harlem’s sonic lineages.
• Fringe Benefits: Accessories for a Bulldoze City
  Urban sprawl is the result of giving cars priority over people in the design of our cities. Designing buildings for the automobile as the audience results in larger, faster registrations of architecture, removing human-scaled subtleties from the built environment. The parking garage is the poster child for car-oriented architecture, plaguing cities like Houston, TX, and encouraging more sprawl. While the parking garage trend might be drab, trends at the human scale offer something far more enticing. Pop media and fashion trends revolving around Houston are colorful, sparkly, and anything but drab. As businesses continue to implement flexible work-from-home policies and Houston works to incentivize alternative forms of transportation, the need for parking garages at city centers will likely dwindle, opening new post-era occupancy possibilities for these infrastructural buildings. How can the vibrant sensibilities found in contemporary southern fashion trends help inform the reclamation of parking structures for public engagement? Acknowledging the amount of embodied carbon associated with these massive concrete infrastructures, this thesis calls for a solution rooted in incremental reclamation, rather than demolition, of these buildings. Appropriating the function of the fashion accessory as a timeful strategy for refreshing basic apparel, this thesis utilizes accessorizing as a lens for transforming “basic” underutilized parking garages at city centers from dull monuments for stacking cars into vibrant spaces for connecting people. Through playful materiality, speculative facades, and an expanded narrative on the architectural accessory, this thesis contemplates the benefits of fringe for a bulldoze city.
• Princeton Architectural Laboratory, 1949 to 1954: A Matter of Maintenance
  This dissertation describes the institutional history of Princeton Architectural Laboratory from 1949 to 1954. While recent scholarship in architectural history and building science clarified the Laboratory’s enduring contribution to environmentally informed design strategies, the circumstances of its establishment remain underreported. This work argues that a closer look at this early history is warranted. It reveals the administrative mechanics and challenges involved in establishing an organizational capacity for experimental design research. Using maintenance as the governing theme, this account describes the relationship between the Laboratory’s intellectual project, its material expression, and institutional support. Based on archival research, it contends that Labatut’s project and its ultimate failure were necessary preconditions for the Olgyay’s arrival at Princeton and the Laboratory’s subsequent success. This dissertation elucidates the continuity between the two iterations of the Laboratory. It offers a historical account of how Princeton University’s architecture program established an organizational capacity for experimental research. This work seeks a new audience interested in developing a design laboratory or a research center within an academic institution.
• Fortress Science: The Spatialities of Radio Astronomy
  The production of space as an internal condition to the scientific production of knowledge is an under investigated and seldom theorized process within the studies of science, technology, and society (STS), and the spatial disciplines. Through a comparative study of the world’s four leading radio telescopes (the Arecibo Observatory, the Atacama Millimeter/submillimeter Array, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, and MeerKAT), I examine the territorial, concentrated, and contingent spatialities of these scientific sites through the multidisciplinary lens of fortress science. Each telescope embodies differing spatial formations as a product of their institutional makeup, scientific goals, and political contexts, but exhibits similar spatial formations with regards to territorial transformations and human material concentrations. We can read these formations through the metaphor of the glacis, an historical fortress technology that acts as an obscuration in which apparent ‘emptiness’ conceals significant influence and connectivity. I draw on this analogy as an embodiment of the conceptual tools underlying the dissertation – that of technology and infrastructure, and landscape and territory – and I use these tools to position fortress science as structuring an analytical fusion of space and science. Spatial process is found to be enmeshed in the structure of scientific research itself, and as a result scientific production is found to alter, structure, and restructure space as an active force.
• The Taiping Transcripts: Tracing Vernacular Landscapes Through Time
  Heritage is understood as a cultural construct through which values, ideologies, and identities are projected. In alignment with this manifesto, "The Taiping Transcripts" aims to illuminate the intricate social-ecological history of the Grand Canal world heritage site. Yangzhou’s fate and prosperity have closely followed the ebbs and flows of water transportation. By framing and juxtapositioning landscape views in Yangzhou’s shanty village, Taiping, this project traces the site’s dynastic shifts, from the salt economy and heavy steel industries to its contemporary significance in ceaseless water transportation. "The Taiping Transcripts" derives its design by modeling the historical timeline, demonstrating a modern interpretation of traditional Chinese landscape framing and clipping techniques. It confronts the conventional practices of architectural museums, which are usually confined indoor spaces that selectively showcase exclusive social values. By introducing two experiential routes crafted from processed demolition materials, the project provides a comprehensive and immersive experience that surpasses traditional museum confines.
• Housing, the Built Environment, and the Good Life
  At any age, the pursuit of a good life is easier in a physical environment that promotes health, supports activities important to self‐fulfillment, and facilitates connections to the larger community. In old age, the home and neighborhood environments are particularly important: they are the locations where older people spend most their time, and they can have a great impact on independence, social connection, feelings of self‐worth, and physical and emotional well‐being. Within the urban planning field, home and neighborhood characteristics are important dimensions of debates about the measurement of human progress and quality of life, particularly as an alternative to purely economic measures. They are also key issues in public health, particularly as they relate to physical, social, and mental well‐being. Here, we focus on how to improve the fit of environments for people as they age.
• 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.
• I Want to Live Together: I Want to Hear You Even as Extinction Tears You Away
  This project is an attempt to grapple with how to live in a time of increasing extinction and loss. How should we go on? Knowing everything we know about how implicated we are in the unraveling of lives? The project envisions a social infrastructure to catalyze both spatial and intrapersonal change, grounded where I live, in a peri-urban neighborhood of Los Angeles. The Garapito Creek Community School is an experimental design-build lab, galvanizing community members as agents of change through radical multispecies politics and interventions that address the needs of the entire community, human and non-human. It is the center of gravity for existential reckoning. The project, and thus the politics of the school, insist that a design practice in the face of these existential threats must be personal, must be embodied, must honor grief, and must come into being through the rebuilding of deep relationships with others. These others are the plants, animals, people, and fungi who we must hear if we are going to live, together.
• Toward a Resilient Architecture
  Today, sustainability is recognized as a technical problem and is relegated to engineers. However, the issue of environment and design are so interdependent that one can shape the other. Therefore, Architects need to get back into the discussion to reclaim the issues of environment and ecology as inevitable parts of the design. This separation of art from science has its roots in the 17th century with the debates between Perrault and Blondel which eventually turned into the great split between architects and engineers in the 18th century. I believe these two topics (environment and architecture) can reconcile and fall into one category of design in which one architect can navigate both of them at once. My project-based thesis, which is focusing on rethinking residential design rules of thumb, states how sustainability as a tool can update conventional design rules of thumb by which architects designed houses. Therefore, I propose using computational simulation method to create an updated chart suggesting vernacular rules of thumb such as building proportion, window to wall ratio, shading, skylights, façade, and volume, which all vary latitude by latitude. I will then pick up one location for a final project (A house) on which I will apply my findings. The final product will not only be an extensive example of a sustainable and vernacular design, but it also will preemptively enter in the discourse of architecture as a discipline. The thesis which is curiously named “Toward a resilient architecture”, is an attempt to update the conventional design thinking and eventually to show how “A house is a sustainable machine for living in”.