Kasama College of Education

Items

• A Shell of a Good Time: A Design Framework for Oyster Sanctuaries and Playful Parks
  Oysters play a crucial role in maintaining healthy marine ecosystems through their ability to filter water and provide habitat for various species. The Billion Oyster Project, a New York-based initiative, has been working tirelessly to educate the public about the importance of oysters and restore their populations in the waters around the city. This project combines education and restoration efforts, with a mission to engage both marine life and people in a symbiotic relationship. The central inquiry of this architectural thesis is: How do we design spaces that harmoniously coexist with marine life and serve as recreational and educational resources for the public? In the context of contemporary discourse, this research question addresses critical issues of marine conservation, urban environmental reclamation, and flood protection, as well as modular design and fabrication. The rapid depletion of oyster populations, the reclamation of post-industrial waste sites, and the need for resilient coastal infrastructure have become pressing concerns. By exploring a novel approach that integrates oyster restoration, public engagement, and architectural design, this thesis aims to bridge the existing gaps in these crucial domains. This thesis envisions the creation of an educational and recreational park for the Billion Oyster Project using modular forms inspired by existing wave dissipation blocks. While providing oysters with a habitat to thrive and filter the surrounding water of what was historically an industrial waste dumping site, the modularity also considers replicability and fabrication, as issues of marine conservation and coastal resilience are not endemic to only New York City. The park not only contributes to oyster restoration but also offers a unique platform for public education and recreation. The project postulates that architecture can be a catalyst for the synergy between human and marine life. The outcomes of this research project provide a conceptual framework for future urban waterfront development that can balance the needs of marine ecosystems and human communities.
• Spaceport: Technical Lands for Departing Earth
  Spaceport: Technical Lands for Departing Earth proposes a new way of understanding how technological uses of place-based science was designed and imagined for both industrial and military activities in postwar America. It is argued in this book, the American spaceport as a complex series of technical lands were enabled through its architecture and aesthetics in the background of Cold War politics, economics, and technologies. Beginning with the opaque blockhouse underground as a port and expanding facilities for assembly, the entire spaceport complex can be understood as an enclosed system of both architectural and geographic space. This design research of the spaceport is not a linear history of postwar America. As dissertation of design, this research is structured by moving across space and time—beginning inside the launch complex interior and outwards through the mobile architectural objects at the departure of earth. This translation of spatial movement starts with the core and ends with the capsules at the scale of the expanded geographic frontier. The spaceport signals changes in structure, scale, and space. Departing earth through a series of carefully enclosed and discrete objects, architecture began to move further outwards in space. As a nuanced condition, the spaceport as a constellation of architectural objects problematizes its contribution with respect to the policies and history of aerospace technology. As a non-linear critical narrative, this dissertation is told as a concept from the construction of the spaceport imaginaries to its inevitable abandonment as wasteland.
• Body-ody-ody: A Formal Redress of Harlem
  Ornamentation (architectural decoration) is a deliberate act of shifting perspective, envisioning possibilities that recognize contingency. Formalism (embodied ornamentation enabled by today’s technology) gives architecture agency to express people and place. Recent critiques of formalism echo the cultural elitism seen in modernist advocacy for functionality over ornament. Modernist architecture, designed with the body of a 6-foot-tall white man as its historical referent, persists in building norms, neglecting a broader set of bodies: the majority. The focus on a single body has created a misfitting urban fabric. But what if we could create an unapologetically formalist architecture strategy to create accessibility through beauty? And what if, through this, the architecture itself could become an activist work? The resulting constructions would surely counter rigid norms. Harlem offers an apt testing ground with its rich history of Black self-determination, social consciousness manifested through creativity and diverse populations. Peppered with retail spaces obedient to codes written around an unreflective people group amongst a palette of intriguing historic visual types, building with vernacular and a broader community can challenge contemporary disdain for formalism, reimagining a range of proportions, celebrating culture, and welcoming diverse identities. Close study and illustration of the New York code for historical districts provides a spatial ribbon of potential redress and selective adaptation to existing architecture at its skin that invites a range of bodies to engage with form and space. By embodying ornamentation, we can disrupt traditional hierarchies, inviting and exciting a broader array of human bodies into a new architectural body of work.
• Liquid Pedagogy
  Liquid Pedagogy is a critical reflection on pedagogy and the discipline of architecture which historically is shaped by but also has shaped the learning spaces in architecture schools. The thesis is materialized in a design project: a new graduate school of architecture in a dense urban fabric in Baltimore, Maryland. Zygmunt Bauman in "Liquid modernity" characterizes the transformations of today’s global societies from hard modernity to liquid modernity, where we believe there is no certainty and stability in the world, and everything is in constant flux. Consequently, the discipline of architecture is in turmoil. On the one hand, the sheer plurality of design trends fueled by technological developments has contributed to what we call today "disciplinary dilemma." On the other hand, design pedagogy as an institutional affair is resistant to rapid transformations, and it has lost control. In such circumstances, and in order to gain their agency back, architecture schools need to de-institutionalize pedagogy. The thesis attempts to develop a model for the future of the design pedagogy by proposing a decentralized curriculum as intellectual support, reflected in an open and adaptive architecture. As a critique of the contemporary model of architecture schools as big-box production factories disconnected and isolated from society, the school becomes more amalgamated and connected to the city, offering public resources to Baltimore residents as a part of its deinstitutionalization. Liquid Pedagogy is exploring a new model that sponsors the transformation of social relations, where the environment is constantly re-invented through community engagement and the potentials of architectural imagination.
• ke kai momona: sustaining Kānaka Maoli identity through limu cultivation
  The project explores cultural and ecological sovereignty through limu cultivation in Hawai‘i. Limu (seaweed) was a central component of the traditional Native Hawaiian diet and the personification of ea (sovereignty) in the ocean. The loss of indigenous limu ecosystems is directly tied to the loss of cultural practices, ‘ike (knowledge), and spiritual identity. Through theories and strategies of ahupua‘a reconnection, the project considers the process of reviving culturally and ecologically “dead” areas within an occupied urban sphere. Interventions seek to reactivate and rehabilitate the hydrology and ecology of the Waikīkī ahupua‘a to create the conditions for limu to thrive. Design compliments existing limu restoration efforts and advocates for spaces for ho‘ike (knowledge sharing) and community in these new hybrid environments.
• Growth under Controlled Conditions to Explain the Hierarchical Distributions of a Moss, Tetraphis pellucida
  Version of Record
• Turing landscapes
  published in Bradley Cantrell and Adam Mekies, 'Codify', Routledge 2018
• Blurred Lines: From Fragmentation to the Common on the Urban Coastal Edges
  Landscape architects often regard sea level rise on urban coastal edges as solely an environmental issue, relying on the design of edges and lines to fortify the coast. However, this thesis believes that climate adaptation is also a socio-culture issue. This project starts from inside to outside, as we need a new type of city to co-exist with future conditions. Castle Hill neighborhood on the Southern coast of the Bronx, New York City is selected as the case study site. Driven by urban developments of Manhattan, this area went through urban fragmentation and is likely to be severely impacted by the climate crisis or climate-related issues in the future due to the vulnerability of the community. This thesis regards the preparation for climate change as an opportunity to re-frame the urban system, bringing in the hydrological, ecological, and social infrastructure, blurring the edges and boundaries, and reversing urban fragmentation. The ecology acts as a means to activate the blurring, mediating the edges and lines with water and land. It encapsulates the social interventions that engage with multiple social groups to generate a matrix of eco-hydro-social conditions, gradually transforming the fragmented spaces into a common landscape. The thesis uses a website as the media to simulate an online forum. The forum connects governments, professionals, public interest organizations, and residents to plan and progressively carry out a series of transformative projects in the urban spaces within the neighborhood. The forum’s format can improve the efficiency and universality of communication, turning hierarchy into partnerships. It encourages all kinds of social groups related to Castle Hill Neighborhood to provide their opinions, forming a community with voice and power.
• Mediated Departure, 22 January 2029
  Since 9/11, Guantanamo Bay has provided the US with a legal loophole where detainees were captured without the same legal rights as if they were on the American land. Today 30 detainees still remain on site. This thesis proposes a temporary offshore airfield as a conclusion to this notorious past. On Jan 22nd, 2029, press around the world gather at the new airport to witness and document all 30 detainees leaving Guantanamo Bay permanently. The airfield is an architectural space that accommodates this mediated event. The sequence of actions and the spectating relationship together choreograph an event that would occur only once in history for the specific day of Jan 22nd, 2029.
• Middle Ground: Between Monument and Fabric
  This thesis re-assesses our contemporary distinctions between monument and fabric to discover methods for intervening in historic cities. Antwerp, like many European cities, was faced with the consequences of urban exodus and economic expansion during the 20th century, leading to extensive sprawl that left the core as a static center for commerce and tourism. Today, Antwerp has to contend with a crisis in the medieval center after a long focus on developments at the periphery. In response, the city is investing in cross-parceling strategies to create density, as well as investing millions each year on the restoration of its monuments. With these are two contradictory desires -the updating of medieval city fabric and the preservation of monuments – there is however no consensus or declarative strategy as to how these ambitions are to be reconciled urbanistically. This thesis looks at Antwerp’s mandated development of new construction not as a plague, but as an opportunity to re-evaluate both the symbolic and programmatic status of the church in a changing city. In this context, a double-sided approach is taken, adapting both the interior and surrounding fabric of Antwerp’s St. Jacobskerk (St. James’s Church). A conservation hall and a procession of galleries linked to St. Jacobskerk is proposed in order to house the church’s Baroque and Renaissance artifacts, as well as clear the nave for the conservation of hidden medieval murals. Coming together with a new housing proposal, the extension creates a continuous elevation in front of the church, addressing the monument’s symbolic status in the contemporary city.
• THOSE PREGNANT IMAGES I WOULD LIKE TO BRING BACK TO CHINA
  Since modernity, the term “atlas” has garnered a meaning beyond an accumulation of maps, referring also to the practice of collecting images. Aby Warburg collected 971 images in his Bilderatlas Mnemosyne to create a model of historical memory that transcends cultures. Gerhard Richter brings atlas to the level of a methodology, as a means to reflect upon his own geopolitical identity. It was never a rare practice even to architects — Aldo Rossi had his private Polaroid collection, Eduardo Souto de Moura has his “wall atlas” in his atelier. From the thousands of images that I have amassed, I collect 60. There are photos I took, illustrations I claimed, and pictures I borrowed. From there I dare to say, a building will be made. In these images, I am looking for what Roland Barthes calls the noeme - the essence. Punctum should be separated from studium to allow us to twist meanings. Images should be played with, just as they have by the likes of Richard Prince, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Salle, and Annette Lemieux. Images ought to be exhausted, and only then can we make the jump to designing a building. The project in the end shall contain only images - those I collected as well as those I produced. Good architects rarely reveal the path from their images to their buildings, and are reluctant to explain their process. The thesis is to unfold this process.
• Green Apparatus: Ecology of the American House According to Building Codes
  In 2008, California introduced the first-in-the-nation Green Building Standards Code to encourage sustainable construction practices. While the adoption of the CALGreen Code marked a significant moment in the process of the greening of building regulations, it represents only one moment in the nation's history of code-making, and that of environmental action. Two parallel narratives, and their eventual mergence are the subject of this study. The first one is a story of the agendas that shaped the American house, and the regulations that govern it; the second an account of the rise of environmental awareness as gradually standardized by law-makers and normalized by economists. The goal is to evaluate the wide-ranging consequences of their convergence - not just the isolated green building standards. Essentially, while environmentalists criticize the devastating global effects of consumerism, free trade, and fossil fuels; governments and local authorities focus on fine-tuning of individual standards, and diffusion of efficient technologies at the scale of households. It remains to be seen whether these measures will minimize the environmental impact of American houses, or simply perpetuate the market-driven image of sustainability, and further complicate the multi-layered building code that they try to mend. This research is ultimately concerned with an apparatus which uses the house, and green technologies as a vehicle for economic growth. For this reason, it would remain incomplete if it exclusively focused on ecological ideas and legislative programs, disregarding economic forces, market instruments, and technology. The first part of this study provides an account of ecological ideas, economic agendas, and regulatory programs as they emerged, influenced each other, and informed the character of environmental action and American households, specifically those built in California, and the City of Los Angeles. The second part investigates the mechanics of the regulations used to standardize building practices, and financial incentives used to promote green technologies. As Bateson observed, ideas and programs interact and survive in circuits. It would then be a fallacy to assume that by changing ideas and programs, and updating standards and recipes, we can change our environmental awareness. Ideas and standards must be questioned, but the matrix from which they originate needs to be occasionally re-circuited as well.
• The Storied Landscape of Tkaronto: Seven Generations Toward the Indigenous City
  Cities across North America are built on the traditional territories of Indigenous peoples; their design and planning do not reflect this reality. Colonialism sought to disrupt the connections between Indigenous people and their land, culture, and nations through processes of assimilation. In Canada, Reconciliation provides a process to address these wrongs and dismantle systems that led to generations of Indigenous people knowing little of their cultures. With the adoption of the Reconciliation Action Plan in 2021, the City of Toronto committed to: decolonize their “structures, processes, and ways of working”, “give land back to…Indigenous communities”, and make “financial reparations” . This project explores how the colonial city of Toronto can give way to the Indigenous city of Tkaronto over the next seven generations through climate adaptations informed by Indigenous ways-of-knowing centered on storytelling, oral histories, and the regeneration of socio-ecological connections.
• "As If!": Reimagining Suburban Forms through the Accessory Dwelling Unit
  Featured in the New York Times article “The Next Affordable City is Already Too Expensive,” Spokane, WA finds itself in the throes of the national housing crisis. In response, this thesis proposes to design a series of ADUs (accessory dwelling units) along the back alleys of West Central, one of Spokane’s most affected single-family residential areas. In recent years, ADU construction has emerged as a viable method of increasing both the quantity and diversity of the existing housing stock. However, beyond these nominal benefits, the popular conversation around ADUs has not offered much critique of the suburban codes (both explicit and implicit) that privilege isolation and normative conceptions of property. Thus, there remains a latent opportunity to consider the insertion of ADUs as a method of interrogating the suburban forms that contributed to the housing crisis in the first place. In response, this thesis mines the Spokane municipal code for ambiguities in formal regulation in order to push the ADU out of its typical conception as architecture that merely miniaturizes the single family home into unexpected new territory. The question is posed: what if ADUs acted as if they were not ADUs at all? What if instead they acted as if they were the instrumental components that comprise and uphold the existing suburban fabric - like fences, balconies, or parking spots - in order to interrogate the assumptions embedded within them? Possible answers to this question may give rise to hallucinatory new neighborhoods - and along with them, new forms of living together.
• The Evolution and Retrofitting of Work-unit Communities Under a Self-organizing Logic: Cases in Nanjing, P.R. China
  During China’s thirty years planned economy era (1949-1978), including the following two decades, the work-unit system has played a significant role in the country and has effectively promoted its economic growth by virtue of the system’s combined political, economic and social functions. However, as the domestic and international environment changed around the 1980s, the government slowly abandoned the work-unit system after deeming it an impediment to the country’s modernization. While the policies could be implemented quickly, the system’s physical space, which mostly consists of the working quarter and the living quarter, was not so easily erased. In reality, because of the economic situation’ limitations and the political priorities concerning the working quarter redevelopment in the reform’s early stage in the country, there has appeared a separation of working and living, and a lag of the work-unit community (the living quarter) development in the country. While large numbers of working quarters have been regenerated, relocated or demolished, and lots of researches have been done on the work-unit redevelopment, the majority of which are centered around the working quarter, most of the work-unit community are left behind and faced with the lash of the market economy, rapid urban development and physical deterioration on their own. Today, forty years have passed since the 1978 economic reform, due to all kinds of changes that have happened in the country, such as the new economic situation, urban sprawl and the existing stock-based development policy, there now exists a viable housing stock in the work-unit community area and it would be necessary and enforceable to retrofit them. In this context, in order to fill the gap of the work-unit community study in the country, to provide innovative research ideas and methodologies for the field, to provide strategic support for the national existing stock-based development policy, and to enrich the research on work-units in the second-tier cities of the country, this research aims to explore reasonable and applicable retrofitting strategies that would follow the inner self-organizing logic of the work-unit community. This will be done by studying both the administrative and morphological evolution of specific work-unit community cases in Nanjing, with the self-organization theory as a supporting theory and the typo-morphology approach as the primary physically-oriented methodology. In summary, administratively, residents’ sense of autonomy is the key to the retrofitting of the work-unit community. In the meanwhile, other participants in the community management should assist residents in the process, especially the street office, residents’ committee, planners and designers. Morphologically, three main retrofitting strategies are finally proposed. Namely, to increase the degree of openness in a limited way, to improve the competition mechanism in the work-unit community, and to focus on variable retrofitting strategies.
• THE GLOBAL OFFICE: A NEW OPPORTUNITY FOR THE CITY OF BUENOS AIRES?
  Across industries, companies are reducing costs by minimizing office space and sourcing talent from geographic areas with lower salaries. These two changes have accelerated the adoption of teleworking and could foster an exodus of jobs from leading innovation hubs ("sending cities") to emerging areas ("receiving cities"). In response to the pandemic, municipalities have launched programs to lure workers worldwide and underpin sectors such as tourism and hospitality. This thesis analyzes the main enablers and barriers for teleworking in the City of Buenos Aires and explores the potential economic, spatial, and social implications, particularly considering the influx of high-income earners. Understanding the factors that affect these initiatives and their implications can contribute to the design of national and local policies that attract new visitors and residents, while preserving urban inclusion, resilience, sustainability, and livability.
• Mental Wellness and the Socio-Spatial Condition of Black Communities
  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has received the designation of “Most Livable City” despite widespread structural inequities that harm marginalized people, making it one of the worst cities in the country for Black women. This stark contrast reveals a tale of two Pittsburghs, in which race and class have a significant bearing on health, educational, and economic outcomes. These inequities are rendered in the built environment. Structural racism, historic urban planning and policy decisions, and the post-industrial context have contributed to the creation of an apartheid condition in which environmental stressors negatively impact Black residents’ mental health. Utilizing Pittsburgh as a case study, this thesis proposes a methodology to analyze the linkages between race, the built environment, and community mental health. Building on radical mental health frameworks, such as healing justice, this thesis suggests alternative approaches to urban planning in order to cultivate spaces that are liberatory, caring, mutually affirming, and just.
• What is the huachicol-scape? —Navigating the multiple identities, landscapes, and architectures of an ecology of stolen gasoline
  This project used Harvard Graduate School of Design tools and resources to treat fuel theft as an object of study through three frames: 1) politico-economic, 2) socio-environmental, and 3) historic-spatial. Following the tradition of urbanists looking at conditions that do not fit our current frameworks, these proposed frames aim to document and thickly describe the unique spatial, socio-economic, political, and environmental structures enabling an informal gasoline supply chain in central Mexico. The goal is to use traditional architectural tools (diagrams, plans, sections, elevations) to reveal the 1) symbiosis between gasoline theft, the state, and private capital, 2) how this symbiosis materializes into the built environment, and 3) how ecologically entangled these urban types are into the landscape. With more than 60% of the population actively participating in the informal economy, in Mexico, "informality" is the most accessible mechanism for providing livelihood, income, and service development, especially for disenfranchised populations. Fuel theft, known in Spanish as huachicoleo (pronounced "watchy-coh-leh-oh"), have exponentially increased since the introduction of NAFTA, today representing an annual market of 3 billion dollars. Despite existing socio-economic studies regarding petroleum’s role and impacts, what is the role of space as an agent in shaping the environment that oil — and in this case, the state (or Pemex)— has made possible? This work contributes as a disciplinary critique towards traditional economic and urban formal-informal dualisms by introducing an alternative state-enabled and controlled informality that is not just vernacular but also corresponds to a particular political-economic shift.
• Tracing Architectural Authorship through the Archive of Indian Modernist Achyut Kanvinde
  Independence from British rule for several colonies was not just a political and ideological phenomenon, but also spatially articulated through modernism. In India, the adoption of the International style was symbolic of a shedding of identity tied to a colonial past. Nehru, often lauded as the “architect” of modern India for his development of science and technology in a bid to catch up to the modern west, sent young professionals abroad for further studies to America and England. They were to be tasked with rebuilding a new, “modern” nation on returning. One such architect was A. P. Kanvinde, who studied at Harvard under the instruction of Walter Gropius in 1946. This thesis positions itself in the growing body of work that attempts to subvert the west-dominated canonical reading of modernism, instead trying to bring in counter-narratives from the third world. In looking at Kanvinde’s work, it examines architecture and authorship, not just through the development of style and quest for an “Indian” identity, but also through questioning the trope of the architects as heroic figures and asking if they can truly be sole authors. Works of architecture come out of a process of collaboration, and are implicitly shaped by socio-political context, and by constraints such as site, climate, and budget. These inquiries into the process of architectural production are made through the project of the National Science Centre, New Delhi. This thesis deals with the twofold theoretical problems of an incomplete archive and proximity to subject matter, by reexamining the accepted way of conceiving of and writing history, to instead include personal oral histories and written correspondence to supplement the material archive of written works and architectural drawings.
• Embedding Transience in Permanence: The School Pandemically Reconsidered
  The greatest catastrophic threat cities face today is not nuclear weapons but viruses. The intention of the project is to rethink the way cities can be prepared for future pandemic crisis in terms of architecture. Fusing the similar spatial organizations of a school and a pandemic hospital, the project proposes a new type that functions as both, asynchronously. The new type is capable of adapting to the needs of a health crisis by temporarily shutting down the education program and facilitating remote learning to make space for a pandemic hospital. The thesis combines the permanent but flexible idea of type with the transient idea of rapid expansion/contraction to adapt to the sudden but temporary need for an enormously increased amount of hospital space in the city. Through systems of circulation and modularity, the built form is able to convert, expand, and contract according to the requirements of its alternating programs. New spatial opportunities for both the school and the hospital are also created by the integrated systems that eases of the transition. The sites of the hypothesis are located in Beijing, the densely populated political center of China. By embedding the emergency healthcare infrastructure within the city rather than relegating it to peripheral locations, the proposal aims to have a significant impact on the city, both socially and morphologically.
• Subject-Object Ambivalence: An Archival Institution
  The project of Subject-Object Ambivalence is to design a cultural institution which privileges, and spatializes, Blackness. In this new vision of cultural space, individuals occupy both the subject and object positions. The simultaneous awareness of being seen by others as an object, while occupying a racialized subjectivity, is a dissonant reality of the Black experience in America. In his seminal 1903 work "The Souls of Black Folk," W. E. B. Du Bois referred to this dissonant reality as “double-consciousness,” the “veil,” or, more simply, “two-ness.” Occupying a place to both see and be seen, as Tony Bennett writes, collapses the disconnected experiences of either being a subject who sees or being an object that is seen. The resulting ambivalence — of being both a subject and object — is the exact experience of two-ness Du Bois speaks to and Black people experience. My project posits that providing a subject-object experience in an institutional context actively subverts and dismantles the traditional hierarchy, power, and distance imposed by institutions through time. What results is a framework for rethinking institutions and challenging the dominant paradigm of the production of knowledge and culture.
• The Channel is a Garden: Radical tools for a just transition on the Houston Ship Channel
  As global economies transition from fossil fuels, landscape architecture serves as a means of futuring the post-fossil environment. This thesis draws from ecological urbanism, degrowth, and climate justice to speculate on a just transition scenario for the Houston Ship Channel. It aims to answer the questions: What would a just transition along the Houston Ship Channel entail? How can landscape architecture renew a commitment to justice? While the Channel facilitates regional prosperity, it has proved to be a trans-scalar detriment to ecological and public health. The San Jacinto Monument, a colossal obelisk on the Channel mouth marking Texas’ independence, symbolizes this contemporary hubris. This thesis proposes a landscape intervention at the Monument as a staging ground for a landscape-driven drawdown of fossil industries along the Channel. The work addresses Houston community organizations and climate activists, and contributes to the futuring of contaminated soils, renewable energy, and the just transition.
• Mendenhall in Motion: Inscribing Glacial Time and Animating Ecological Thresholds
  Sited in Juneau, Alaska, this project interrogates the aging tourist infrastructure surrounding Mendenhall Valley’s retreating glacier and proposes novel modes of access and interaction. Mendenhall Valley’s existing agenda of visitation dilutes landscape through staged, distanced, and static encounters. This approach to landscape engagement has perpetuated a detrimental culture of visual consumption and results in image-centric encounters devoid of haptic intimacy. As glaciers retreat, they inscribe a legible succession of interactions between bedrock, ice, water, soil, and plants. The proposed visitor experience strives for ecological comprehension through tactile encounters that prioritize discovery, movement, and material accessibility. Several designed interventions enable haptic engagement with the variety of ecological processes occurring within and around Mendenhall Glacier. By reorganizing tourist infrastructure and expanding local research institutions, this project strives to create narrative material compositions and interrogate relationships between viewer and viewed.
• Equity and Climate Change Adaptation: Toward a Better Understanding of Resource Allocation
  With climate change adaptation becoming ever more urgent, decisions about how to allocate adaptation resources have become increasingly important. For instance, should decision-makers in flood-prone areas fund a sea wall to protect a larger community, provide subsidies to property owners to raise minimum floor heights to avoid flooding, or consider relocating a neighborhood to accommodate increased river discharges? Making these choices means evaluating and prioritizing potential responses to climate risks and understanding how they will impact communities living in these vulnerable areas. Though questions of who benefits and who is burdened apply to all public policy decisions, climate change adaptation forms a particularly challenging context due to its conditions of high urgency, existential threat, deep uncertainty, conflicting notions of justice and stakeholders’ valuation of risk and prioritization of objectives. This doctoral research investigates how local governmental bodies are making decisions on resource allocation to address flood risk in the context of climate change adaptation and in what ways they take into account social equity in their adaptation responses. Through plan analysis of adaptation plans in the United States and the Netherlands and two in-depth case studies of the flood-prone urban regions of Houston, TX and Rotterdam in the Netherlands, I develop a set of lessons learned on equitable climate change adaptation. These lessons learned include the need for political and administrative commitment at all levels of decision-making; the effectiveness of an explicit and formal framework for equity consideration; the role of inclusive stakeholder engagement; the need for a broad and dynamic understanding of social vulnerability; the role of data in countering systemic injustice; the importance of trust, accountability, transparency and recognition of historical marginalization and injustice; and opportunities for a comprehensive assessment of benefits and costs of adaptation measures.
• An Attempt to Approach a Ceiling
  “You sleep… with your eyes wide open. You count and you organize the cracks in the ceiling. The conjunction of shadows and stains, and the variation of adjustment and orientation of your gaze, produce effortlessly, slowly, dozens of nascent shapes, fragile coalitions that you are able to grasp only for a fleeting second…”* You don’t think of the ceiling often. Your body, upright, walks along plans and look at spaces in elevation. You design for circulation, for interaction, for uprightness. But, at times, you reorient yourself to upend uprightness. You lay down. Now, the ceiling is your elevation. Your movement is relegated to your eyes, which graze the surface of the ceiling, imagining what is beyond it. Below its concealment, below its labyrinthine textures, below the plaster, you seek direction and a definition of space. This thesis is an attempt to approach the infraordinary: the background of everyday life, which writer Georges Perec asks us to question. You find the infraordinary in the cracks of the ceiling, where you can look below it, and find a labyrinth to explore with none less than the ceiling itself as a compass rose. *: Georges Perec, “A Man Asleep,” in Things: A Story of the Sixties; A Man Asleep, trans. Andrew Leak (1967; repr., Boston: Verba Mundi, 2004).