Kitwe College of Education

Items

• A Comparative Framework for Building Life Cycle Embodied Carbon Emissions Databases and Its Application for Public Databases
  Data availability and accuracy are some of the main obstacles to calculating the life-cycle embodied carbon emissions in buildings. There have been several studies to assess life cycle assessment (LCA) databases in the past. These database studies often rely heavily on commercial databases, and most studies only evaluate a single data point for each material in the building life cycle inventory. Comparing databases in this manner can be potentially biased, not representative as a whole, and lacking a systematic approach. This study proposes a systematic comparative framework as an addition to existing methods to aid the comparison of construction-material embodied carbon¬ databases, which comprise a part of LCA. The framework identifies the underlying issues and difficulties in comparing embodied carbon databases. It then provides a fair method for data comparison across the databases. Finally, it assists the understanding of data availability and data homogeneity within and across the databases. The framework's applicability is demonstrated by comparing three publicly available databases: EC3, the ICE Database, and the ÖKOBAUDAT Database. Life cycle embodied carbon assessments (LCECA) on a single-family house are performed using the aggregate data from the three public databases and the commercial database Gabi Database within the LCA tool Tally. The embodied carbon study suggests that the materials' median embodied carbon factors value from the aggregated public database provides a reasonable embodied carbon assessment compared to the commercial data. However, the heterogeneity of possible results from the public dataset highlights the potential errors and consequences of single material data selection.
• The Oculomotor Correlates of Exploratory Model Making: A Mixed-Methods Eye Tracking Study
  In this thesis, I take a post-cognitivist view of design and use eye-tracking to study the oculomotor behavior of architects during different exploratory model-making activities. My interest is to determine to what extent eye movements may yield a useful low-level, fine-grained understanding of design cognition in exploratory model making. I do this by designing and conducting a mixed-methods, observational exploratory eye-tracking study. The study consists of a series of block assembly tasks that are increasingly complex from a design standpoint. I develop a multi-tier coding scheme and propose original metrics that link eye movements, hand motoric action, and design operations together. By doing so, I show the unique opportunities that eye-tracking methods offer to the understanding of design cognition in exploratory model making ;furthermore, I outline a set of preliminary hypotheses about the role of eye movements in exploratory model making to inform future research in this topic.
• Nonlinear Fabrication: A Data-Driven Framework for Evaluating and Calibrating the Toolpath Design of 3D Printing Cementitious Materials
  Clay, just like other natural, paste-like materials, offers a potential reduction in the embodied CO2 that the production of buildings using conventional materials emits, yet its large tolerances during printing remain an obstacle. In paste-based 3D printing, the material dries and shrinks at unpredictable rates while new layers continue to be deposited, causing increased self-weight onto the lower layers that are subjected to variable displacement. The ability to anticipate and correct the complex material behavior during the extrusion process is important in the effort to achieve accurate building components and assembly. While a possible approach is highly specialized models or workflows guiding designers to understand and model material and process variances, comprehensive models or workflows dealing with the nonlinearity of paste-based 3D printing processes are still lacking. Nonetheless, these processes promise efficient, waste-free, and sustainable production workflows at the architectural and building scale. This dissertation investigates how computational techniques based on machine learning models can enable rapid assessment and calibration of design solutions before fabrication, allowing for the prediction and simulation of final geometrical outcomes for accurate printing. The research contributes to digital fabrication by connecting digital design processes with material outcomes through a data-centered framework that leverages machine learning in novel ways. The framework offers: 1) a scanning method for a real-time calibration workflow that corrects the printing trajectories of the design object and serves as a rapid data-collection technique for machine learning applications; 2) a method for building an optimized dataset to evaluate the printability of design solutions; and 3) a method for training neural network models to calibrate the printing trajectories before fabrication. Tested in the context of clay lattice printing, an unorthodox extrusion scenario characterized by a large feature space and high material uncertainty, the framework demonstrated the ability to evaluate and calibrate the toolpath geometry of clay lattices with sufficient accuracy for manufacturing while using minimal resources, presenting an important step toward next-generation solutions for sustainable 3D printing.
• Aggregate, Aggregation + Geotechnical Urbanism
  Within the architectural engineering and construction industry we have developed diagrammatic representations and software translations of cultural patterns, extruded 2D cities, and built architecture of processed materials palettes. We are not yet able to diagrammatically compute the translation (intent to manifestation) of wild contexts and materials systems. This thesis seeks a hybrid software approach to the bulk manipulations of aggregate, somewhere between that of a wild randomization and a refined aesthetic.   By developing new software tools toward the aggregation of “wild” (i.e. rock, soils and organic matter) rather than “cultured” (cast-in-place concrete, steel beams, and pre-fabricated urbanism), we may not only achieve new opportunities in the ecological landscape definition of the terms, but also provide tooling for new forms of urban aggregate across more dynamic, and less predictable cultural conditions, so called geo-technical urbanism(s). This experimentation is applied conceptually to sea-level rise and coastal urbanism surrounding the Boston harbor. The thesis was produced as a media-heavy thesis and presented through PPT and online Website. GeotechnicalUrbanism.com - the converted PDF is uploaded here.
• YE DEJI ABEBA NEGN: Sonic Floral Imaginaries in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
  Ye Deji Abeba Negn: Sonic Floral Imaginaries in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, illustrates and creates new sonics in Ethiopian floral imagination. Composed as a series of essays, graphic scores, and sound works, the thesis examines Ethiopia’s embodied relationships with flowers, synthesizing and transmuting existing floral discourse to create a new mode of floral discourse and creative practice in Addis Ababa’s shifting urban terrain. Situated at the intersection of indigenous Ethiopian epistemologies, soundscape, and landscape theory, Ye Deji Abeba Negn argues that if one wants to understand flowers in Ethiopia, one should listen. One might then ask, listen to what? The sonic world of flowers is tied to a series of constituent parts: Ethiopian time theory, music culture, urban development, industrialization, and gender relations. The thesis first illustrates two flower protagonists, Adey Abeba, the wild yellow daisies of Ethiopian New Year that grow in fallow land across the country, and the Rose, the most profitable flower of Ethiopia’s booming cut-flower industry. Next, examining the capital Addis Ababa’s formation and namesake, the ‘New Flower’, Ye Deji Abeba Negn, illustrates the city’s sprawling network of rose greenhouses rapidly replacing fallow and cultivated land of local farmers while bringing in foreign currency and employing hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians. From the flowers and Addis Ababa, we conclude with a series of graphic scores that synthesize and transmute existing modes of floral discourse in Ethiopia with a new mode of speculative flower pedagogy. Unfurled textually and graphically, these realms are then sonified using the Ethiopian New Year’s pentatonic music scale of the flowers. Through the documentation and excavation of sonic floral cultural artifacts, the thesis recomposes the constituent parts of Ethiopia’s embodied relationship with flowers, revealing the capacity of flowers as drivers of spatial and cultural production. The essays gathered here tell this story of Ethiopia’s embodied relationships with flowers. The central aspiration of this writing and its accompanying sonic works is to reflect back to Ethiopians the way we imagine our relationship with landscape, as embodied in our floral imaginaries.
• Socio-Spatial (In)Equality of Access to Urban Green Space: A Case in Beijing
  Green space, as an important component of urban system, deliver multiple benefits to urban residents. From an ecosystem service perspective, these benefits include: provisioning services, regulating services, supporting services, and cultural services. Unfortunately, studies have confirmed that green spaces are not equally accessible among different socio-economic groups in urban areas. Such unequal socio-spatial pattern of accessing green spaces lead to many other undesirable outcomes including social segregation, dislocation, and gentrification, and finally causes exclusive urban development benefiting a smaller portion of population. It is in this context that my dissertation explores how urban green spaces and their varying benefits accessible for different social groups intertwining with geo-morphological, historical, socio-economic, and political factors in complex urban circumstances by using Beijing as a case. Relying on multiple open source data sets and spatial statistical analyses, this dissertation addresses three major questions: 1) How are urban green spaces distributed among socio-economic groups (a cross sectional study in 2017)? 2) Are urban green spaces more often provided to advantaged socio-economic groups (a longitudinal study 2000-2010)? And 3) Does adding new green space gentrify the neighboring communities in Beijing, thus resulting in the dislocation of marginalized groups? In the cross-sectional study, the results indicate the public green spaces tend to serve marginalized groups more, while advantaged socio-economic groups are better served by internal vegetations in the gated communities in which they live. The results of longitudinal study did not identify significant associations between the changes of green spaces and the socio-economic statuses in Township (census tract unit), indicating afforestation process exerts little discrimination against marginalized groups. Finally, adding new green spaces can trigger gentrification by increasing the housing prices in the neighboring communities, although the capitalization scale of green spaces depends based on a variety of features. Distance to a property, area, vegetation quality, presence of water features, and types of green space all play different roles in affecting the housing price thus having divergent capacities of triggering gentrification.
• Pair of Dice, Para-Dice, Paradise: A Counter-Memorial to Victims of Police Brutality
  Recently, America was once again awoken by protests spurred on by the unjust murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and several others; but this phenomenon is nothing new. America has always had a healthy tolerance for violence against people of color. The very foundation of this country was rooted in the legal and violent policing of Black slaves, and although slavery in the traditional sense has long since been abolished, the unjust policing of people of color has continued on just the same. What’s more is that America has routinely exploited our profession by using architecture to pat itself on the back for no longer being a slave-owning nation when almost nothing is being done to address the many ways in which African Americans are still being persecuted today. More simply put, America (and architecture) is clearly more concerned with marking progress than making it, and one of the many ways the built environment helps do this is via self-important memorials. But what if architecture were to actually combat police brutality? The result would surely be counter to the neat and static memorial type: a confluence of Black aesthetics, Black narratives, and Black protest. It might even fashion itself as several lacerations into some 18,000 police stations—a constant reminder of America’s immoral past and unfolding future. It might even look like paradise.
• Beyond Artifact: Reframing the Chilean Desert
  This thesis explores design as a mode to challenge dominant cultural narratives of the Atacama Desert in Chile. The project reframes an understanding of life in the desert through alternate knowledge systems specific to this landscape and material actors plant, rock, and water. The proposed reframing is in response to a cultural imaginary that treats the Atacama as a desolate extractive zone, with a myopic focus on industrial artifacts and a legal policy framework that classifies all materials in the desert through a logic of mineral wealth and extraction. An observatory and garden program connect histories, living cultures, and ecologies while fostering submerged multi-species life to reframe living matter in the desert.
• Empowering Rural Communities: Bioenergy for Energy Democracy and Prosumer Engagement
  In preparation for the forthcoming climate crisis, cities have been understood as the rational scale of action. However, urban-driven political frameworks and social agendas to expand renewable energy generation can inadvertently disrupt the social and physical territoriality of the rural. Photovoltaics has emerged widely as a result, and its visceral expansion has displaced rural farmers, of which 50 percent are tenants. The thesis proposes a physical manifestation of an energy democracy where rural farmers are incorporated into the energy regime as “prosumers” by reshaping the socioeconomic structure of the rural. The project uses Yongji-myeon, South Korea, as a case owing to its vulnerability to photovoltaic intervention. The final product is an infrastructural landscape design that transforms rural farmers into bioenergy producers. It envisions reengineering the agriculturally monochrome economy into an energy landscape with a socioeconomic reconfiguration of marginalized populations who are critical participants in the renewable energy regime.
• Working in the Fun Palace: Revisiting Kinematics in the Smart Building
  Archigram’s playful experiments in kinematic structures were an early precedent to the smart building systems we find commonplace today. Driving techno-utopian visions of moveable spaces in projects like Fun Palace and Generator, Cedric Price, Archigram, and their contemporaries imagined cybernetic building intelligences that would “provoke, delight, and otherwise stimulate” their occupants. “Provoke; Delight; Stimulate;” the language Archigram used to describe their proto-smart-buildings in the 60’s is a far cry from the dry, efficiency-driven goals of today’s “smart” designs. Contemporary building systems are lifeless tools for optimizing space use + energy consumption, interfaced with through the dull 2d-screens of dashboard in lobbies, iPhone apps, and Outlook plugins. What might today’s smart building’s learn from Archigram? Working through the office building type, which has fervently adopted smart space optimization schemes, this thesis challenges the efficiency-driven smart building paradigm. Where smart offices typically focus on economizing space use, our project injects Archigrammatic attitudes towards computerized buildings to create more stimulating workspace experiences. We test new forms of human-building interaction on two tracks: On one hand, Archigram’s ideas of kinematic, programmatically fluid spaces are redeployed as a more responsive way of managing the “space-as-a-service” economy. On the other, their playful, moveable systems are tested as an alternative to screen-based interactions with the smart building, suggesting more humanistic forms of UX design for the built environment. This alternative attitude towards the smart building draws from fantastical visions of the 60’s to imagine more engaging interactions with our increasingly-ubiquitous digital building systems.
• After Water: The Infrastructure and Politics of Desalination in Kuwait
  This research examines the role of desalination in the process of urbanization. The focus of the investigation is Kuwait, a country situated within a region containing some of the highest levels of water stress and per capita consumption around the world. The aim is to reveal the spatialization of desalination infrastructure, its underlying ecological epistemology, and the historic urbanization patterns that it has generated and will continue to perpetuate into the future. In doing so, this research reveals a novel view of water politics that is less focused on crisis and scarcity to instead examine the spatial practices that inform water management and consumption from the extraction of salt water to the metabolism of potable water in everyday household use.
• Expo-nential Futures: How Mega-Events Continually Reshape Milan
  How have repeated mega-events in Milan changed the form and nature of the city? This thesis tracks threads between universal and particular conditions that influenced Milan’s decision to participate in Bureau International des Expositions (BIE) events. By analyzing urban development patterns and planning archives, I am interested in critically examining planning history to uncover the embeddedness of mega-event planning within notions of power, social imaginaries, and distinct stakeholder groups, and how this impacts urbanization processes. I argue that participation in the BIE is not an inescapable economic strategy – as records have suggested – but instead reflects the complicated entanglements between politics, economy, and civic input of planning in decision-making processes. Through the project, I find that BIE events have enabled a distinct set of space protagonists that shape the city's future development trajectories and social imaginaries, requiring planners to rethink long-term strategies for the short-term duration of BIE events.
• The Crossing: A Utopian Vision of Migration in the Central Mediterranean
  This thesis treats human migration as an essential human right– one which deserves durable, designed solutions. Sited in the Central Mediterranean, the project reframes the choreography of the harrowing journey from Tripoli to the shores of Lampedusa as a suspense of flight. By inviting people to stay, receive care and prepare for the landing in Europe, the Mediterranean becomes a watery grounds for agency and self-determination among those migrating. The design outcome of the thesis is the building of a nomadic, mission-based utopia among the discards of offshore oil technology: a collectively governed, stateless, and artificial island which resists the carceral qualities of state-run camps. The sea is no longer the final frontier in a long flight from home, but a stepping stone to self-actualizing one’s dreams.
• The Prairie Condition: The Frontier, Myth and Other Symptoms
  Meaning, aesthetics, and value are imbricated throughout history. The United States’ land ethic operates within an episteme of prominence, where the sublime, the biodiverse, the rare are protected. As the climate crisis unfurls and uncertainty continues, we carry assumptions that are not our own, positions that may be inherited. That is, what we protect and what we replicate are connected to what we value. This thesis traces through history the movement and meaning of specific figures and conditions in and on the American Prairie. As a complicated and contested landscape protagonist, the Prairie remains in aesthetic and conservation limbo. This thesis explores the aesthetic shifts, drifts of taste, and symptoms regarding the Prairie from the nineteenth century to the present. Through the interplay of texts, histories, and subjects, this thesis aims to untangle and expose the mutability of meaning and value of the Prairie.
• Exceedance Degree‐Hours: A new method for assessing long‐term thermal conditions
  Accepted Manuscript
• A Renter's Right to Return: Deprivatizing Resilience In The California Context
  Drawing from history, sociology, architecture, and disaster and housing planning and policy, this thesis seeks to address how disaster preparedness and recovery efforts in the United States have failed renter communities and what can be done to create more equitable risk mitigation strategies for non-homeowners with a focus on the case study city of West Hollywood, California. With rent control as one of the few remaining safeguards for housing affordability in U.S. cities, a scarcity of affordable rental housing, if combined with the potential for a damaging seismic event, would require much of California’s rent-controlled housing stock to be pulled off the market for repairs. This would create a ‘perfect storm’ of widespread evictions under the State-level legislation with no affordability guarantees should survivors seek to return to their homes and communities after a catastrophic event. As we have learned from previous crises and the ongoing pandemic, disasters amplify existing vulnerabilities and stress-test our systems for protecting citizens. If we don’t enshrine renter protections within our policy, planning, and development strategies at the city, state, and national levels, renters will continue to lose access to urban spaces. This period in time yields the potential for changes in renter protections at all levels of government by revealing the weaknesses in our existing emergency mitigation and response systems while also presenting a window to reevaluate biases and policies around housing provision and disaster recovery until recently, considered firmly entrenched. To strengthen a renter protections in a disaster context and to evaluate what should be the model of engagement to advance these protections, different stakeholders must work together with renters and tenant rights advocates to address biases around housing and continue to build on community-driven initiatives to protect a renter’s right to return. At this moment in time, where renter protections and rights are at the forefront of the political consciousness, could there be a new motivation from actors to protect renters and address their root vulnerabilities before the next disaster event?
• Between A Kid And Nature
  Over the past several decades, Taiwan is undergoing the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Industrial pollution, excess consumption, and excessive belief and reliance on technology and construction are resulting in deterioration of the natural environment including the shortage of water resources, deterioration of water quality, damage to the ecosystem, loss of habitats of plants and wildlife, etc. Meanwhile, surrounded by booming digital technologies, kids growing up in urban areas are getting fewer connections with nature than ever before. While age three to six is the critical period kids form their value of the world and nature, it is essential to “explicitly educate children in both the ethics and practices of sustainability to promote a sustainable earth.”1 Pedagogically, the thesis studies the curriculum of project-based-learning methods rooted in the Reggio Emilia approach to understand the key features of kids’ learning process especially related to their appreciation of nature. Architecturally, the thesis is questioning: Framing the ordinary, enlarging the subtle, capturing the fleeting moment of nature . . . being an interface between a kid and nature, could architecture be a lens through which kids are observing, imagining, experiencing, and exploring nature? Could all seemingly ordinary natural elements be exceptional through the eyes of a kid with the interface? Instead of a traditional fixed kindergarten building, the project examines the possibility of a curriculum-shaped, calendar-year-based kindergarten—an infrastructure and setting system located in a wetland border—possessing rich natural elements with diverse sensory experiences and seasonal changes to uncover the questions proposed above. 1. Julia L. Ginsburg and Shannon Audley, “‘You don’t wanna teach little kids about climate change’: Beliefs and Barriers to Sustainability Education in Early Childhood,” International Journal of Early Childhood Environmental Education 7 (3): 42.
• Grounding UPS: An Infrastructural Ethnography of a Logistics Corporation
  United Parcel Service Inc., universally known as UPS, is the largest shipping company in the world. Holding one of the largest cargo airlines, continental ground networks, and oceanic freight forwarding systems across the globe, UPS is one of the key players in commercial and industrial logistics, globally. Crossing over two hundred countries and territories, and passing through all climate zones, UPS operations navigate terrestrial, oceanic, and fluvial spaces of the earth into a practically seamless and thickened landscape of logistical movements. Through an aggressively integrated process of incorporation and diversification of products, services, operations, and modes of transportation, UPS has become a vastly incorporated spatial system of adaptation, whose primary function is, as the company claims, “synchronizing the world of commerce.” In this sense, this incorporated state of logistics can be understood as a centralized organizational mechanism of contemporary global trade and internalized computational platform of a globalized supply chain of third-party agents, where geospatial arrangements and configurations follow temporal forces of an ever-expanding transnational trade space. Enabled by and engaged in a range of urban territories, regions, and spaces, UPS not only ships goods according to an ever-growing electronic market place, it actually responds to and shapes processes of urbanization through a calibrated process of mobilization of resources, systems, services, cargo, and labor. Building upon a range of empirical, analytical, and observed sources, this study purposely and necessarily engages multiple fields of expertise at the intersection of geography, landscape, and territorial studies, and the fields of political economy, science and technology. Through text, image, and mapping, this infrastructural ethnography thus depicts, and potentially redefines, the world according to UPS. Rethinking the conventions of corporate case studies, this dissertation formulates an understanding of urbanization through the infrastructural and ethnographic lens of UPS Inc. drawn by an emerging series of processes, including manifold processes of technological mobilization and the grounds they require for the largest logistics systems company in the world to operate, expand, and adapt. Avoiding the positivism of techno-logistical narratives, this dissertation seeks to establish a much-needed discourse on both the nascent territorial agencies and spatial limits of logistical states of incorporation beyond the flattened fiscal, financial, and legal space of corporate and industrial entities. Exposing the intensively-material grounds of these logistics systems, this dissertation seeks to untangle the messiness of movements and flows of goods in an otherwise globalized supply chain by revealing the deep and multi-layered organizational intelligence of geographic, spatial, and biophysical interdependencies that is often masked by the simplicity of synchronized, apparently smooth, and so-called seamless systems of commodity circulation. Proposed as a set of large, integrated infrastructural systems, the organizational ecology of UPS can therefore be understood far beyond its economic calculus of balance sheets and minute signals of barcodes, but through its realization and manifestation as territorial agent and political force whose forces are simultaneously planetary as much as they are bodily—a countermap to metropolitanization. How then can corporate systems be understood as spatial and geographic? How do technical demands invoke new and existing territories? How do market pressures and logistical demands transform urban space? Adopting an ethnographic approach to studies in industrial planning and scientific management, this dissertation is therefore organized in three case studies to address these questions by analyzing three different dimensions and layers of this complex of logistical incorporations—sites, systems, and standards—through the lens of the world’s largest shipping company. Titled UPS Worldport: from Port to Plot, the first chapter delineates the geospatial and geohistorical extents of UPS logistics bases that originate from its central operating headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky. Beyond and between these sites, the second chapter titled UPS Freight: from Fleet to Fuel traces the geopolitical and biotechnological interdependencies that support and secure its operational fleet and attendant mobile infrastructures in response to market demands, globally. And finally, the third chapter titled UPS Supply Chain Solutions: from Box to Barcode reveals how UPS system of standards—from containerized packaging to controlled spaces to monitored environments—not only regulate environmental conditions of logistical movements but also shape consumer demand through attendant infrastructural imperatives. Taken together, these case studies not only break down the complex footprints of port-hub-outpost that characterize this corporate logistics complex but redraw their territorial imprints that have been adapted and re-adapted over the past century. Seen across time, these case studies delineate and decode the intricate temporalities that are registered, inscribed, and embedded within these ecologies of operational and organizational logistics. Working in between and across the space of nation-states, the lens through which UPS operates can then be understood as an emergent spatial strategy, a state of territorial adaptation, whose sustainability uniquely and exceptionally depends on perpetual techniques, technologies, and methods of adaptive, minute-by-minute management and large scale, systemic synchronization. In other words, UPS not only manages time but it also draws and designs time, as its contingent, operational territories continually transform, move, and change.
• Relate, Relate, Relate: In the Age of Machine Learning
  Recognizing the impact of image-generating machine learning models on architectural discourse, this thesis offers a fresh perspective on the role of machine learning in conceptual relationships within architecture. The thesis explores ML's capacity to interrelate architecture beyond tradition lineage framework or categorization framework. Structured into three chapters, the first correlates projects from the "five on five" lecture series with large language and image-based models, forming a cloud of relationships. The second chapter delves into machine learning-aided design by relating projects and generating conceptual text. The final chapter investigates the challenge posed to museum design as the traditional architectural history framework is also challenged, proposing a museum embedded within a material reuse center. Through these explorations, the thesis uncovers ML's potential to contextualize and interconnect architecture, highlighting its significance beyond its prowess in generating realistic images and text.
• An Intrinsic Model for a Non-neutral, Plural National School
  When Malaysia gained independence from the British in 1957, it took on a national architectural identity that was rooted in the language and neutrality of tropical modernism, which was deemed appropriate for the multi-ethnic Malaysian society. At the turn of the century, the government of Malaysia built a new capital city, Putrajaya: a singular ethnocentric construction, modeled after architectural forms of the Arab nations, that elevates Malay-Muslim identity above others in the plural nation. As opposed to the homogeneous, imposed ethnocentrism of Putrajaya, the former capital city of Kuala Lumpur embodies a hybridized, heterogeneous accumulation of multiple identities and differences. If Putrajaya represents an extrinsic model that outwardly exhibits a Malay-Muslim identity by reproducing the architectural forms of Arab nations and turning them into consumable artifacts, Kuala Lumpur represents an intrinsic model of a contested city where confrontations and accumulation of differences produce new hybridized conditions in a constant state of flux. In its search for a national identity, the Malaysian state has oscillated between two extremes: a singular ethnocentric iconography on the one hand and a flattening neutral modernism on the other. This thesis asserts the relevance of iconography in producing an architectural identity in the context of a plural society. It draws on the found conditions of Kuala Lumpur to propose the intrinsic model as a technique which calls upon culturally diverse referents to produce an inclusive and plural national architectural identity. This technique is investigated against the program of the Malaysian national school: a pervasive and relentlessly banal modernist typology that serves an ethnically diverse populace but is neutralized by prescriptive government pre-approved plans and generic facades. This thesis proposes an intrinsic model for a non-neutral, plural national school.
• Real-time Architecture: Quantifying the Spatial Performance of Workplaces
  The shift from traditional 9:00 am to 5:00 pm work hours to more flexible work arrangements in white-collar knowledge-based private companies has increased the emphasis on minimizing workplace spatial footprint. While emerging evidence-based methods rely on real-time spatial technologies and utilization rate analysis to determine workplace spatial optimization strategies, existing methods frequently overlook daily, weekly, and monthly variations in occupancy. Consequently, there is a lack of effective methods for reducing spatial footprint that balance benefits for the company, employees, and environment. The Real-Time Architecture dissertation presents a method through two studies for evaluating workplace utilization rates in real-time, using hourly peak measurements and accounting for employee interactions. This method shows significant improvements in estimating potential spatial downsizing. The first study analyzed 162,778 spaces across 115 companies. The results revealed the crucial significance of a detailed analysis of utilization rates in determining the potential for spatial reduction. The data indicated that individual spaces exhibit a higher frequency of use than collaboration spaces, contradicting the prevailing viewpoint among practitioners advocating for a greater emphasis on collaborative spaces. Furthermore, the findings challenge the assumption that adaptive designs are necessary. The second study, which was conducted at the Panasonic headquarters in Japan, aimed to investigate the impact of workspace reduction on employee interpersonal interactions and meeting behavior in a controlled setting. Specifically, the study tested a reduction in formal meeting spaces by 79.3%, resulting in an overall decrease of 26.7% in the total workspace area. The utilization rate methodology, which was established in the first study, was utilized to evaluate the effects of workspace reduction. The study's results revealed that while the occupancy of social spaces increased significantly, the hourly utilization rate of the remaining formal meeting spaces in the open-plan environment remained the same. In other words, the formal meeting spaces were used for the same time per day as before the workspace reduction. Additionally, the duration of meetings held in the formal meeting spaces decreased, with a rise in the proportion of short meetings (30 minutes or less) and a decrease in the number of lengthy meetings (1.5 hours or more). Furthermore, teams were more inclined to utilize the meeting rooms for collaborative purposes rather than individual use. The two studies above provide valuable insights into optimizing workplace spaces by utilizing occupancy and employee interaction data. The conclusions of these studies offer a comprehensive framework for architects and corporate real estate professionals to evaluate workplace performance and identify redundant spaces. Furthermore, to advance the understanding of the effects of spatial reduction on employee interaction behavior, a comprehensive set of de-identified datasets, including 456,451 records of interactions and the building information model of the space, extracted from the second study, has been made available for use by other researchers.
• On Vision: The Science and Cultural History of Spatial Perception and Imagination
  This thesis investigates the relationship between evolving modes of visual perception and the space of architecture. The design of architecture is intimately linked to the way space is imagined to be seen, and thus to the scientific and cultural understanding of vision. And yet, the scopic regime of retinal projection as embodied by the camera obscura has dominated architectural imagination, even as empirical understanding of vision drastically changed. The monocular observer is accurate only when the observed object is far enough that the two eyes’ horizontal separation—parallax—can be neglected. Whereas the space of retinal projection is single, continuous, and homogenous, the space of binocular vision is split, ambiguous, and haptic. A more recent but definitive shift in the understanding of human vision came with the discovery of orientation-selective cells in the primary visual cortex of cats. The algorithmically assembled image-space is pixelated, fragmented, and noisy. In contrast to the model of retinal projection, which assumes that we passively perceive objects through their image in the retina, vision has come to be understood as the active extraction of relevant information in hierarchical stages: from edges to textures to patterns to objects. How architectural space can engage with each and all these spatial schemas is the central question underlying my project. I think it is urgent and necessary for architects to understand and engage with the biology of seeing. Only then can the design of space become relevant, just, and humane. This project is conceived as an effort in that direction.
• Architectural Hybrids Shaped by the Times: Moments of Public Housing in the US
  This dissertation questioned the tendency toward varied architectural forms in US housing projects, given that the function of the public housing program evolved over time. This work contributed to existing studies on public housing by driving at the heterogeneity in the architecture hit by the forces at play—ideological, political, racial, and economic—echoing certain norms prevalent in the nation’s urban centers. In other words, beneath the story of variation in US housing project designs, the architecture reflected and expressed ‘cultural moments,’ defined here as the temporary alignment of beliefs about society, politics, the economy, and architecture that prevailed at periods of time. The investigative lens used in this study—the concept of cultural moments—extended conceptual frameworks on historical progressions to the architecture of public housing—notably, geographer Peter Taylor’s (1999) ‘prime modernities’, and, alternatively, ‘modernity’ in the work of historian Miriam Levin et al (2010). The methodology employed was case study-based, a qualitative research design which combined historical, cultural, and architectural analyses. The dissertation’s core methods relied on archival research, architectural precedent study, the generation of interpretive drawings, census data, and four in-depth interviews. To answer the research question, the study investigated three housing projects illustrative of their milieux—subdivided into three chapters. These projects were Langston Terrace in Washington, DC, Schuylkill Falls in Philadelphia, and Centennial Place in Atlanta. The three projects were chosen because they reflected housing project design’s evolution, representing critical periods of intensification in the history of public housing—the 1930s, 1950s and 1990s. The methodology interrogated the key reasons why, in each period, abrupt shifts in American’s attitudes toward low-income housing provision followed a pattern of breaking with the past. Our findings showed that political forces lie beneath the variation in US housing project designs in nearly every aspect of their creation. The findings also revealed that integral to each cultural moment were change agents and their motivations—political, social, and economic—shaping the architecture. Third and most important, our findings underscored that hybrids in style and form, embodying their cultural moments, were indispensable to America’s housing officials in achieving social good when little consensus existed. Architectural hybrids defined in this dissertation—the combination of any historical style in a single project—resulted from the necessary convergence of competing claims about location, projects’ financing, construction, and tenantry, spread across a wide range of stakeholders' opinions. Taken together, our findings show that housing project design, by nature, was an iterative process shaped by the times.
• The Late Capitalist Skyscraper Theoretically Considered
  This dissertation outlines a portrait of the skyscraper within the context of the contemporary urban world, undertaking an analysis that spans the period contained between 1973 and the present. Through a critique of key theoretical texts from the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the project traces the building’s manifold relations with logics of financial abstraction and urbanization, as well as its complex symbolic and spatial roles amid a period characterized by global crises and the deployment of capital at a planetary scale. Assembled as a multilayered narrative in which architectural theory intersects with a constellation of critical discourses and a mosaic of visual materials, The Late Capitalist Skyscraper reads the ongoing metamorphoses of the type as intrinsically connected to emerging modalities of capital accumulation and its associated socio-spatial implications across a wide range of vertical urban landscapes and territorial formations.
• Kreat.Kreat...Taktak-Toktok: Between the Gaps of Conservation
  We often hear the question, what is conservation?, but rarely do we ask, when is conservation? This subtle shift redefines conservation as a series of experiences through space and time. It moves it away from the typical natural reserve scale of 1:50 000 towards more grounded ones looking at crafts through ever-changing relationships between the living and built environment. In her book Friction (2004, 175), Anna L. Tsing defines gaps as “conceptual spaces and real places into which powerful demarcations do not travel well.” This thesis looks between the gaps of conservation through the materiality of unbuilding and building practices in Bali, a complex island of Indonesia. Through the story of streets in Ubud and the edge of the forest, the work reflects on the transition from global to local material realities in public spaces for Anak Bali, people from Bali. In other words, I am asking when is conservation for Bali in relation to its inhabitants, humans and their fellow-beings.