Kasama College of Education

Items

• Materializing Access: Intersecting Walksheds, Viewsheds, and Supply Sheds
  Materializing Access is a thesis which investigates the opportunity for landscapes to provide an array of resources within the public realm. Situated in Pittsburgh, PA, the project navigates the varying topography and current park network to provide each citizen with a five-minute walk to an open space. Steep and unmaintained hillsides create barriers within the city, but this proposal explores utilitarian and fantastical landscapes for connecting amongst those barriers. The landscape interventions include the sculpted (a path embedded in the wooded hillside), the leveled (a cultural space along the public right of way), and the excavated (a sheltered cut through the earth). Through strategic use of materials available on site, the design extends and integrates existing parks with the rest of the urban fabric. It takes advantage of Pittsburgh’s material past, drawing on a historic sense of place and geology while providing future resources for further manipulation.
• Here Lies Darby Vassall: Rendering the obscured and concealed history of slavery at Christ Church Cambridge
  The material conditions of “historic” preservation and institutional presentation communicate a particular version of the past through, what the late historian and professor of geography, David Lowenthal, terms selective forgetting and selective recall. Common myths of white benevolence and exceptionalism (in the North) contribute to the perceived “invisibility” of slavery in New England and across the nation at sites similar to “historic” Christ Church Cambridge in Harvard Square. By reading against boundaries, materiality, and identity projections, this project situates the church within broader, interconnected landscapes of dispossession and extraction, making connections to places and people beyond the fiction of “historic” boundaries – in W. E. B. DuBois’ words – to the “foundation stone” (Black labor) of “Northern manufacture and commerce.” The goal of this project is to construct what bell hooks calls a “subversive historiography,” an alternative spatial narrative of place that allows us to revise and expand the storytelling of Christ Church Cambridge in its context. My work aims to render visible this (currently invisible) history through research and exploratory mediums of knowledge sharing and representation. A temporary art installation provides a platform for bringing the hidden past into view.
• THE [ OFF - CORE ]
  The [OFF - CORE] is a thesis that encourages us to imagine what the definition of [OFFICE] be like in the future and how could the design of the [CORE] in a tower facilitates this paradigm shift. Can an [OFFICE] be less solely about the free plan but more inclusive of different kinds of workspace? Can a [CORE] be expressed spatially and pragmatically in the foreground than being buried in the background? Can the dichromatic relationship between the [OFFICE] and the [CORE] get blurred? Using Hong Kong as the testing ground and the IFC tower as the main precedent, the thesis proposal is presented as a prototype sister tower adjacent to the IFC with the same dimensions but displaying a new [OFF - CORE] concept for the future.
• Staying Put: Plans for Aging Suburbia
  Few aspects of the human experience are more universal than the experience of aging, but more people are reaching old age than ever. For the first time in history, people over the age of 65 outnumber those under 5. Between 2015 and 2050, the global population over 60 will double. This phenomenon is called Global Population Aging. As we age, one of the most present interactions in our daily lives is that we have with our homes. However, the giant of America’s housing stock, the suburban single-family detached home, is not fit for the very individuals who saw its conception around the 1950s. These are the places that provide aging individuals with residential normalcy, however, the hard truth is clear; American suburbia may be among the worst places for older people to live, but it is where they choose to stay. For a phenomenon so universal, so often inevitable, as aging, why does something so innate to survival as housing often ignore it? Our spaces were built for a younger population and must be reprogrammed for unprecedentedly older users. Sited in the 1980s-era neo-colonial-style suburbs of Virginia, this project obscures, adds, subtracts, and amalgamates icons of a familiar fringe. It questions how we enter, live, use and stay in these spaces– and with whom. This thesis reckons with the exclusive history of American Suburbia from the lens of Global Population Aging, using manipulations of pervasive suburban elements to make what is old supportive of who is becoming older.
• Aging Within: A Catalog of Reinterpreted Traditional Courtyard Houses
  This project is about challenging the traditional senior living community layout by building a system constructed with modular reinterpreted traditional courtyard houses to sustain a closely-knit senior living community. It is designed for the emergence and expansion of the subgroup of the old, which is also called the Young-Old. As one of the oldest dwelling typologies, the courtyard house typology occurred in distinctive forms in many parts of the world. In China, there is also a variety of traditional courtyard houses. Among them, the Beijing courtyard house is considered the most outstanding example. This project would reinterpret this traditional housing typology while maintaining its strength in flexibility and variations. The hierarchy and dynamics of courtyards would be explored to create a flexible system that could foster interaction within the community. This project seeks to organize the buildings in the vernacular style of a courtyard typology that is not uniformed. For the building type "courtyard house," the courtyard is the core of living fun and actively. In this project, there are courtyards from small to large and from private to public. And common areas are an integral part of the community, designed for daily use and supplementing private living areas. The private courtyards within the units are arranged around the central public courtyard in different sizes and orientations. By shifting and indenting the units, dynamic circulation connecting each unit's entrance and public courtyard is established. This project tries to pursue a specific spatial order to integrate each household's internal demands and external environment, creating a dynamic community space with both cohesion and openness. It tries to establish a public life space for the community and bring flows of light, shadow, and time to the place.
• Design Practice / Practice design
  The strategy, mission, and organization of architecture firms – here loosely defined as organizations that produce designs – have profound impacts on the outcome of the built environment. Because contemporary building practices require collaboration between multiple parties over long periods, how these actors are brought together and organized to realize building designs inevitably affect the results. Therefore, the architecture produced by these practices bears the marks of their makers: different models of service delivery, capital structures, and organizational strategies of firms inevitably influence the architecture they produce. This thesis surveys the spectrum of contemporary architecture firms and the business models through which they render their services and proposes a new model of architectural practice by synthesizing emergent models and ideas. First, the project dissects a wide range of firms from boutique startups to multinational conglomerates; then, a prototypical practice is proposed fusing attributes from these firms; finally, an architectural “product” of the firm is imagined and deployed to multiple sites, completing a closed loop connecting the business of the firm to its work.
• Upon Concrete: Retrofitting Architecture with Malleability
  Throughout history, architecture has evolved and advanced in parallel with the technical development of reinforcements. With the innovations of processing and shaping smelted metals and the development of reinforced concrete structural systems, the concrete structure — which could only provide short-span spacing — was reinforced with iron and other metals to achieve a more expansive and porous space. As a result, the strengthened structural system could enable architecture not only to accommodate various scales of programs and occupancies, but also to retain the impartiality between humans, space, and structure. In other words, the structural reinforcements could be integrated with building retrofits and become the component that creates spatial flexibility and adaptability in architecture and the urban environment. Concrete structures are gradually becoming underused because of the unadaptability and the oppressive qualities of the space. The concrete parking structure, selected within Chicago’s dense urban area, provides an opportunity for experimenting with the steel reinforced techniques for further uses of various programs and occupancies. Different steel reinforcing techniques are integrated together into a system that can infuse the structure with the capacity to accommodate heterogeneous habitable spaces. Retrofitting existing concrete structures with zinc-plated steel reinforcements significantly elevates the structural elements into which could endow the architecture with more diversity, sustainability, and other social urgencies.
• The Molding House
  Moldings have been an architectural element since the prehistory. The Greeks were the first to recognize, in their temples, the unique value possessed by moldings, which, occupying an intermediate position between the ornamental sculptures and the simple architectural lines of the main structure, gave a richly decorative effect to the latter without interfering with the beauty of the former. Then the Romans simplified the Greeks’ shapes, enriched the moldings vocabulary, and built plenty of precedents for classical architecture studies. Fifteen hundred years later, Palladio and other Renaissance architects theorized, categorized, and documented the classical moldings, educating anyone who yearns for Classicism the principles to reproduce it. Yet now, 500 years after the Palladios, with abundant knowledge about moldings and intelligent machines at our fingertips, architects still apply moldings in the same manner as the ancestors did centuries back. Too often, we see mass-produced lumber trims contouring the frame of double-pane windows and antique-looking cymatium garnishing the entrance of a glass-and-steel high-rise. The juxtaposition of conventional usage of moldings and modern technology has almost become a mockery of the 21st-century architects: Is there no other way to honor the moldings without copying and pasting the past? This thesis explores an unprecedented way to adopt classical moldings in a contemporary house in Newport, RI. Situated among many extravagant mansions built in the Classical style, the Molding House showcases a post-modern deconstructivist technique to honor moldings in a fashion unlike any of its neighbors.
• Home, Homing, Home-Escape: Achieving Sustainable Rural Tourism in Post-COVID Huyuan Town, China
  Rural tourism in China has gained unprecedented popularity among the urban middle-class, leading to a significant reduction in the permanent rural population and the gradual erosion of native rural culture. This thesis navigates the complex space-time relationship between three main groups of occupants in Huyuan Town: rural residents, city migrant workers, and urban tourists, all converging around the central theme of "Home". Rural residents hold a unique position on the idea of “Home” and a stake in preserving its cultural legacy as the sole citizen group in China to possess full ownership of their homes by the Chinese “Hukou” system. In contrast, city migrant workers who annually engage in a "homing" journey, returning to their villages for the spring festival celebration, driven by a longing for familial reunion and a sense of belonging. Yet, the burgeoning demand for high-end rural retreats, often overly romanticizing the Chinese Idyll, has created a paradox where tourists in search of a “Home-Escape" from the urban hustle and bustle are removed from experiencing the authentic local culture and heritage while inadvertently competing with and undermining local businesses in the tourism sector. By fragmenting and descaling industrialized hotel services into small infill programs, replacing vacant space in rural residential houses, as well as generating large tourism infrastructure collectively operated by rural resident shareholders, this architectural intervention tackles the pressing issues of cultural preservation, rural population stability, and the economic empowerment of rural residents. It serves as a blueprint for revitalizing rural areas while ensuring they remain true to their authentic roots in the face of evolving urban-rural dynamics and post-pandemic tourism trends.
• Reforesting Fort Ord
  This thesis examines the potential for the conservation of Monterey pine biodiversity through the active planting of an experimental forest in the Impact Area of Fort Ord: a former US military firing range soon to become part of a national monument. It confronts the delicate balance between passive ecosystem restoration and destructive total-remediation of compromised landscapes. Through choreographing munitions disposal with planting and tactical access to establish a human-assisted forest, the thesis challenges the colonial freeze-frame of what species can be “native” and where. In doing so, it provides a framework for re-connecting communities to locked-up public lands, and envisions how experimental forests, designed landscapes, and collaborative management can cultivate identity and social investment in a newly designated urban national monument. Here is a place once forbidden to people and to pines, where finally there is a possibility for more than preservation.
• The New Collective Courtyards
  The New Collective Courtyards looks into the traditional courtyard type in contemporary urban settings and aims to experiment with more sustainable models of urban co-living that enhance the interrelation between dwellers. The experiment is conducted by developing three different schemes on the same site, dealing with the low-, medium-, and high-density housing respectively. The courtyard type is one of the many recurring paradigms, emerging across various geographies and cultures. Though, in the last two centuries, its use has diminished. Today the courtyard house experiences a resurgence aided by a growing desire to bring the outdoors in. What comes with it is the inherent collective value of the courtyard. Existing urban housing typologies, including the detached single-family house, the townhouse, and the apartment building, have historically been used as a way to spatially organize the idea of private property as an individual right. The one-entrance system ensures that the house is perfectly individualized and that there is a clear threshold between the private and the public domain. This also means that people are isolated and severed from families and neighbors. The contemporary task of residential architecture is, on the contrary, to re-establish connections among people, reinforce a sense of trust and solidarity among dwellers, and promote a more sustainable way of living. Learning from the courtyard type, residual spaces around private properties can be integrated into the center of a house, making it a communal outdoor space, so that it can continue its role as a transitional space, but also take the center stage in people’s everyday life. Three kinds of courtyards are paired with three existing housing typologies in America to generate new models of co-living for three different densities. Each of the three courtyard houses uses the condensed cores to free up the rest of the space and makes both the indoor and outdoor spaces functional. In this way, the courtyards become an extension of the interior space, and begin to not only separate but at the same time connect dwellers.
• The Migrant Landscape: Padrinos y Madrinas of Architecture
  Mexican migrants make the decision to uproot their lives, submitting to legal and social instability and housing insecurity in order to help provide better lives for their families. Through Hometown Associatiations (HTAs), migrants have collectively contributed small sums of money to fund large, infrastructural projects back in their hometowns. Through these networks, migrants have been able to transform the urban fabric of Mexico, creating what Sarah Lynn Lopez calls a ‘remittance landscape’. However, the reverse side of this trade remains mostly unexplored. This project focuses on how migration between Mixteca Puebla in Mexico and Mott Haven in the Bronx can form a new, migrant landscape. Prior to its dismantling in 1955, the Third Avenue El train served as a migration corridor between Mott Haven and South Ferry, drawing European migrants, as well as the tenement typology, into the South Bronx. This project seeks to reclaim the remaining urban void left by its track to cultivate a market space, park, and plaza which celebrate the migrant experience. While Urban Renewal devastated the area by razing hundreds of tenements and introducing the ‘tower in the park’ typology to the area, this project proposes an intervention that integrates the urban scale to enable the immersion of a new Mexican migrant housing typology. By importing Mexican architectural typologies, this project aims to find their synthesis within the Mott Haven urban fabric. This thesis proposes a new housing typology, collective financing structure, and urban space that celebrates Mott Haven, its history, and its migrant community.
• Inter-Infra: On Data centers and Infrastructure
  Data centers stand as material structures of the digital world. Given the permeance and expanding necessity of digitalization, this thesis examines the notions of data centers as infrastructure and the contemplations required for such a definition. Despite being an emerging building typology, data centers are predominantly classified by their computing capacity, utility supply and business model. This project investigates data centers geospatially and the environmental and social complications of their presence. It analyzes five sites—(1) Mesa, Arizona, (2) The Dalles, Oregon, (3) Chantilly, Virginia, (4) Secaucus, New Jersey, and (5) New York, New York—based on site characteristics of environment, energy, land use, density, and economy. The endeavor (1) elaborates why data centers are infrastructure and the considerations required for such a paradigm and (2) posits design strategies that reimagine data centers as multifunctional infrastructure that serves beyond the cyber edifice and their futures post-decommission.
• Tectonic Inflections: Additions Logic
  "Tectonic Inflections: Ruling Logics" investigates the confluence between form and tectonic assembly through the typology of the add-on. Architectural confluence, as described by Nader Tehrani, is the merging of structure, function, and material systems towards a singular figure. This thesis applies these ideas of form and tectonics to combat single family zoning by advocating for densification by way of additions. Ranging from single room additions to accessory dwelling units(ADUs), the old and new are synthesized through formal and tectonic logics. The irrationality of the geometric addition to the existing system, is able to push back on domesticity.
• Vertical Publics: Landscape Transformation of Vacant Office Towers
  Vertical Publics explores the potential for reimagining vacant modernist urban office towers through transformative public space interventions. It challenges the conventional use, access, and ownership by blurring the boundaries between landscape and architecture, public and private, street and building. Set in the speculative future of 2058, this thesis introduces the Urban Arboretum Network (UAN) program and uses the Seagram Building as the first experimental site in New York City. This project vertically expands the streetscape by creating solar voids, programmed vertical surfaces, and an accessible circulation system that threads through the new urban experiences.
• Building (,) Set (,) Prop
  Every building is a living archive of its history. The archive, legible through the envelope’s fading color, surface marks, or structural cracks, transforms in a complex and nonlinear way. Recognizing the importance of preserving a building's unique history and character while also enabling it to evolve and adapt to new uses and contexts, this thesis investigates a self-referential method for the adaptive reuse of architecture. Borrowing terms from theater and film production, Building (,) Set (,) Prop repurposes a Somerville industrial warehouse into an architecture depot for the city by critically translating the existing building finishes and inserting “theatrical” elements conceptualized as “sets”, “props”, or “set-props” into the as-found structure. These elements provide storage for physical materials, backdrops to curate new civil memories, and spaces for managerial activities. Each category possesses a different life span for inhabitation and interactions. The project advocates the democratization of cultural heritage and seeks to subvert the traditional archival typology through performative and participatory means. It also raises questions about the visibility and construction of collective memories and their public access, eventually blurring the boundary between the “front of house/on the scene” and the “back of house/behind the scene.”
• MUNDANE AMBIGUITY: MAKING PUBLIC REALM WITH BALLAST WATER INFRASTRUCTURE
  This thesis proposes landscape infrastructure as the agency for managing ballast water exchange, conducting mass recycling of waste materials, and creating new public realms. It asks if infrastructure could inform spatial qualities valuable for imagining new public realms – public realms that accommodate uncertainties and keep the ambiance of ordinary lives in an unassuming, modest yet powerful manner.
• Urbanism and Autonomy
  This dissertation introduces urbanism to the discourse on autonomy within design. Autonomy is a critical method in design, engaging the social, economic, political, racial, gender, or environmental tensions derived from the processes of urbanization. The introduction of autonomy into architecture in the 1930s created a design system sensitive to cultural phenomena. However, architectural autonomy gradually departed from social, cultural, human, and urban conditions as the century matured. The social and cultural unrest in the second half of the twentieth century precipitated the use, and abuse, of the term, acting as a catalyst to redefine the disciplinary parameters of architecture. When autonomous discourse within architecture reappeared, it overemphasized architectural form to counter the commodification of culture, the professionalism of architecture, reliance on quantitative methods, and the degradation of the modern city. But the impulsive conception of autonomous architecture remained prevalent, condemning the term’s cultural and historical formation to oblivion, leading to the alienation of disciplinary knowledge over time. This dissertation offers a critical reconsideration of the evolution of the term within the design fields, from its initial formulation in the eighteenth century by Immanuel Kant (autonomy of the will), to its introduction to architecture by the art historian Emil Kaufmann (autonomen Architektur) in 1933, to the successive interpretations of architectural autonomy in Europe and the United States. In contrast to etymological wisdom, Kant’s “autonomy of the will” implies engagement rather than detachment. The Kantian autonomy influenced the construction of the modern consciousness of the Western individual as both cause and consequence of eighteenth-century social and political changes, such as the French Revolution. Autonomy’s influence on aesthetics, political theory, and architecture during the subsequent centuries attests to its importance as a reflection on our cultural successes and failures. Nevertheless, the design fields often omit that autonomy implies a productive tension between individual and collective aspirations. Galileo Galilei’s use of the telescope promoted the autonomy of the modern individual. Scientific discoveries expanded our knowledge of the external world (Galileo’s telescope) and motivated the philosophical exploration of our inner selves (Kant’s epistemology). With these examples in mind, the more we look outside ourselves, the more we need to look inside ourselves. We have developed a critique within architecture (architectural criticism) but not a self-critique. Instead, it is a critique of design by design through our engagement with the urban condition. This self-awareness redefines the terms of our engagement as individuals, designers, or members of society with the world. Thus, the more design explores the urban reality, the more it needs to reevaluate the premises of its disciplinary engagement with the urban condition. Individuality is not individualism. The general maxim of autonomy is that (disciplinary) self-governance is sensitive to social, cultural, human, and urban conditions despite, paradoxically, its rebuttal of cultural and historical determinism. The alliance between Urbanism and Autonomy adopts the artist's critical eye and rejects the supposed moral superiority of the religious and non-religious priest. In contrast, this dissertation aspires to operate in a social space that escapes the jurisdiction of traditional disciplines or the aesthetic blindness of dogmatic critiques. This effort advocates an epistemological search, through cinematic language, for new knowledge, experiences, methods, contents, contexts, and aesthetics.
• Reciprocal Ruination: Nature & New York City
  This thesis is set in New York City, between the years of 2060 and 2300, a period in which the earlier warnings had escalated to full, protracted cataclysm. In the eventful first half of the 21st century, the United States dissolved its united federal government and transitioned to a confederation of autonomous city-states. Taking advantage of its new independence and increased control of revenue, by 2060, New York City had begun construction of a massive circular “sea wall.” This wall was a final, drastic attempt to protect the famed city from the destructive forces of the rising seas and the increasingly volatile weather events; a desperate, material reaction to a cosmic power shift. In its scale and ambition, the wall represents a monument to the bygone contemporary era. The structure physically manifested the perceived opposition between “nature” and “culture.” But, while inside and outside were now segregated by firm borders, the roles of aggressor and victim nevertheless maintained their steady process of reversal. The cosmic reckoning culminated in the failure of the wall in 2180 CE. In its subsequent fragmentary, ruined and overgrown state, the wall ultimately achieved a tragic, but harmonious integration of the formerly oppositional forces. It exemplified a brief period of equilibrium amidst the violent transition between two world orders.
• Burnt Earth: Whisky Landscapes of a Post-Peat Scotland
  Peat is a uniquely carbon-rich soil type, and the bogs where it is found globally sequester twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests. It is also a traditional component of whisky production on the Scottish island of Islay, where smoke from peat-fueled fires imbues grain with a distinct flavor and terroir. Islay and whisky are inextricably linked, but today the island is scarred by trenches where peat has been industrially extracted for global consumption. This thesis explores the remediation of Islay’s destroyed bogland through paludicultural test plots, experimentally growing media for use in the whisky industry and beyond. Exploring the tension between historic preservation and ecological restoration, Islay serves as a case study in adapting cultural practices to address a climate in crisis.
• A Beijing Anecdote: Folly as Commentary for Social Values, Space and Time
  “Social value posters + folly” is to Beijing what “Duck” is to Las Vegas. In the role-shifting era in Beijing, cultural revival creates a new focus on citizens’ mentality and engagement in everyday civic life. Public space marked out by social value posters, a national concept promoted by the government since 2006, becomes the non-consuming stage. It is both for the middle-ground communication between citizens and government and as the projection of individual’s pleasurable imagination. In the city where miniature and craftsmanship are long-term tradition, folly is introduced as commentary. It stands as a Trojan Horse but in the metaphoric pleasure garden. In this graphic novel, it is an anecdote documenting the real-time; it is an encyclopedia for urban toys; it is an amusement guidebook for all people.
• Coproducing Sustainable Urbanization in Rosario: Building Cooperation Between Formal and Informal Systems for Urban Development and Climate Resilience.
  Rosario is the third biggest urban agglomeration in Argentina, where its urbanization processes demonstrate diverse physical and climatic unsustainability. The formal development, rooted in the Spanish grid, has shown efficacy in fostering urban growth, but the current repercussions of climate change—manifested in heat islands and urban floods—cast doubt upon its viability. In contrast, informal development, shaped by underused railway infrastructure, though presenting challenges in physical development, showcases systemic-adaptable characteristics that can offer innovation to design climate resilience strategies. This thesis examines the unsustainable relationship between formal urbanization and climate change, as well as informal urbanization and physical urban development. It rejects the reinforcement or romanticization of the formal-informal dichotomy, instead advocating for collaboration between both systems through urban design. Hence, the coproduced city emerges as a process grounded in two actions to achieve sustainable urbanization: formalizing the informal for physical development and informalizing the formal for climatic adaptation.
• The Sovereign Table: Embedding Knowledge Infrastructure within a Tribal Homeland
  As climate change exacerbates the consequences of Western land and resource mismanagement, landscape architects are increasingly soliciting traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). This thesis calls landscape architects to resist the exploitation of TEK and join efforts to decolonize public land. A Sovereign Table challenges the ongoing eco-ethnocide in the Klamath River Basin by proposing a new “Land Back” form that supports tribal biocultural sovereignty while fostering intra-basin co-stewardship. Funding designated for basin restoration from the Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act shifts co-stewardship decision-making from federal space to sovereign tribal land. Monuments of colonization are then reconfigured into a physical knowledge infrastructure network that invites tribal, local, and federal stakeholders into a co-stewardship relationship. By making space for knowledge negotiation and creation, while making visible biocultural processes, the Bio-Cultural Sovereignty Area encourages ideological barriers to splinter and supports the creation of symbiotic, basin-specific co-stewardship.
• Lines in Sand: Abortion and the Lone Star State
  On June 24th, 2022 the Supreme Court overruled the 1973 landmark decision of Roe v Wade with Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Within a month, eleven states had banned abortion completely or implemented a ban starting at six weeks of pregnancy. In the state of Texas, twenty-three clinics closed their doors, and a vast landscape of inaccessibility to reproductive healthcare was created. The dire need for safe and legal abortions for Texans became wholeheartedly unmet, with the only state bordering Texas with legal abortion rights being New Mexico, a rural and already healthcare deficient state. This created a huge emotional, infrastructural, and financial barrier for many Texans required to drive hundreds of miles to receive an abortion. My thesis looks at the architecture of abortion clinics and the landscape of accessibility to reproductive healthcare. It explores ideas of boundaries and overlapping contested space at a multitude of scales. In what ways can design articulate these boundaries as safe, steady, and secure while also communicating ideas of openness, transparency, and resiliency? Can overlapping boundaries and layers of law, terrain, ownership, and infrastructure be used to form, site, and compose the spatial experience of a new system of clinics along the fringes of Texas? With these thoughts in mind, I explore how the scale of the clinic can subvert the power of state legislation and provide much needed care for women throughout Texas.
• Natural Ventilation in Building Design: Dynamic Performance Metrics and Interactive Modeling
  This study proposes a new method to evaluate natural ventilation performance in the early design phase by introducing dynamic performance metrics of natural ventilation and developing an interactive tool that applies the metrics. The tool will help understand how a given design utilizes natural ventilation and which spatial variances could improve the effectiveness of natural ventilation. It also looks into important design aspects, including materials, thermal mass, aperture configurations, occupancy etc. These factors influence whether or not natural ventilation might be effective for the given design. There are four sub-topics: natural ventilation metrics, thermal mass and window controls, validation, and tool implementation. These sub-topics, in this order, structure the thesis. First, it introduces dynamic metrics that gauge the degree of cooling power that is achieved through natural ventilation. The metrics will be first developed under steady-state conditions, and be demonstrated in a feasibility study using an interactive design platform. Second, once metrics for steady-state are established, the effect of thermal mass and window controls are considered. Thermal mass interacts with its environment through time in a dynamic way which must be explored to refine the natural ventilation metrics. Therefore, this part will analyze the temperature change through time, examine the impact of different window operations, and further suggest efficient ventilation routines. Third, the process of calculating the dynamic metrics is validated with experiments. This ensures that the proposed method works as intended. Lastly, an interactive design procedure that utilizes the dynamic performance metrics is demonstrated in the 3D modeling environment. This study contributes to early-staged building design in three ways. First, quick simulation time and interactivity will provide users with rapid feedback on different design possibilities. Second, natural ventilation performance is estimated for a customized building design, albeit with some limitations, as opposed to a general box model. The tool may yield different results for buildings with different sizes, features, and construction conditions. By yielding metrics for a specific design, it will help users to alter the design to enhance performance. Third, the tool helps designers understand that the thermal environment is influenced by important factors including window operation, thermal mass, and internal heat gains. Users will be able to learn the sensitivity of the thermal environment to various construction materials and thermal masses, which is pedagogically important.