Kitwe College of Education

Items

• 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.
• Our Village: a Queer Paradise in the 1980s
  A drag queen is as American Dream as a suburban house surrounded by a white picket fence. Drag performance is more than entertainment in a night club: it is a way of expressing, dreaming, commenting, and escaping the crippling reality. For many, doing drag is their only way to achieve their dreams, however short-lived. “Drag is not a means of destruction but of rescue a little beauty, however perverse and rococo.” Our Village uses architecture to demonstrate that identities are not “natural” or an isolated act but social signifiers which drag unapologetically points out and celebrates and what should be the new face of American Dream. Set in the 1970s, the project provides a safe haven for the queer community excluded from mainstream society. It creates an architecture that embodies the vibrant subcultures within the community: a homophilic heterotopia on the Hudson River butting against the heteronormative city. Like the community that it hosts, the architecture is dynamic and adaptive, evolving along with the changing needs of the queer community over the past few decades. Taking a novelist’s approach, the project follows the scrapbook of a fictitious queer architect who designed the building in the 1970s and has been recording its evolution till today. Our Village demonstrates the agency we have as architects by showing how a humane architecture can alter history for the better.
• There Goes the Neighborhood
  How do we Build consciousness? This thesis positions automatic attention, the cognitive method of our unconscious, as the vital mechanism within which architects can construct awareness for non-architects. If it is true that we are living through an “Attention Economy,” then to consider attention only through its ‘active’ sense is futile. Though often associated with the instinctual, automatic attention is inherently learned. Continuously reinforced through associative signals, automatic attention reciprocally reinforces ‘normalcy’ in our perceptual field. Therefore, the presence of familiarity in our built environment more or less guarantees a portion of our attention. This thinking positions the uncanny or the monster as powerful mechanisms for subversion. The inability of our discipline to work with, and against, the Attention Economy goes hand in hand with our lack of involvement with most Building. Architects are responsible for just 1-2% of the housing market in the United States. The resultant stock is plagued by homogeneity that supports equally homogenous communities. The Developer Home exists within a system of fixed base types and quantified ornamentation -- a perfect breeding ground for the continual regurgitation of Classicism, without material integrity and without architectural order. Situated within the Florida Developer Community, as exemplary of such perpetual pastiche, this thesis proposes an exaggeration of an already latent wrongness. Utilizing the fragment across four scales -- development, street, house, and detail -- an odd-normality becomes increasingly apparent the closer one zooms in. Despite its use of satire, this thesis is sincerely hopeful in what may come after our constructions of ‘normalcy’ are interrupted by consciousness, built through a method of attention.
• Machine —— A Utopian Transfomation Tower
  Our society is transforming from a society of supervision which has persisted for a long time, to a controlled society. A controlled society is a softer, more adjustable, but also more irresistible social operation form. With the development of technology, we will have the freedom to choose. But before we choose, the future possibilities are all determined. It is like a machine, although its process will be different, the input and output things have already been set. “Our society is still presenting a shell of disciplinary society, but its core is changing to the controlled society". My thesis is based on the understanding of such a social operation form, abstracting this theory into an architectural proposal, and expressing my negative attitude towards this operation form. This thesis project will be an political and irony project. My thesis program is set to be a future educational center in 2035. With the decline of the labor force in the future, the government has begun to focus on vocational education to increase the labor force. Such educational centers are built as a kind of urban infrastructure in urban centers. Unemployed people, students are put into this new education center and through a softer education process, they are quickly reintroduced into society as labor forces again.
• A Comprehensive Design and Policy Toolkit to Better Serve Survivors of Domestic Violence in New York City: Learning from Covid-19
  The unprecedented crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic has brought into the limelight what many have unfortunately already known to be true, that times of extreme change, urgency, and tension too often correlate to a rise in domestic violence.1 This thesis attempts to address this recent amplification of cruelty, and how it has manifested in the largest public housing agency in North America, NYCHA (The New York City Housing Authority), to advocate for an interdisciplinary reform of both policy and design of shelters that use care to encourage nonviolent, inclusive environments and access to care and healing. In many ways, the Covid-19 pandemic has intensified conditions that already exist within the realm of domestic violence, including but not limited to isolation, economic insecurity, and trauma. Through an exploration of these connections, as well as a critique of the existing conditions of housing and emergency sheltering in New York City which allow domestic violence to thrive, this thesis provides way to address the current crisis while also both prevent future instances of violence. By doing so, its aim is to aid in the long-term health and healing of survivors and their families.
• Marketing in the Metaverse: A Digital Brand Experience for Black Belt Community Builders
  The metaverse, immersive, digital environments where social interactions can take place, is emerging and top brands and celebrities are leveraging it as a tool for marketing. In exchange for providing users with entertaining experiences, brands receive exposure and access to potential consumers. At a minimum, accessing a metaverse experience requires a computer and an internet connection, making it accessible and straightforward to get started in. This design research focuses on the development of a metaverse model that not only acts as brand promotion via an entertaining experience, but also 1. Acts as an educational tool and 2. Translates users to active supporters by giving users direct access to an e-commerce site. An NPO, the DDS is used as a case study and a virtual gallery and shop environment was created. The gallery is a digital experience documenting creations, identities, and memories resultant from the DDS’s summer of 2021 workshop series.
• The Economics of Space and Time: Toward a True Mixed-Use
  As the world’s population continues to gravitate towards cities (at the rate of 1 million per 5-6 days), perennial challenges in today’s cities - congestion, density, and high costs of living - will only exacerbate as this trend continues. On the other hand, buildings in cities have yet reached their potentials. According to U.S. Energy Information Administration (USEIA), in 2018, residential and commercial buildings accounted for about 40% of total U.S. energy consumption, but buildings are often designed only to be used for a third of a day’s time at any given point. With the rise of the sharing economy, we have seen more flexible models of space and property use, where individuals can lend out their underused rooms or spaces (Airbnb), and different people can share a working space traditionally lent to larger groups (WeWork). This is known as the arbitrage of space, where opportunities are created between different values and modes of space use. This could well extend to “time gaps” within physical environment where flexible design can accommodate for a space that is activated through 24 hours – as an office during the day, as a restaurant during the evening, as a bedroom at night, and as an athletic court on the weekends. The possibilities are endless…
• Sea Level Rise and Housing Affordability in Small Coastal Communities: A Case Study in Maine
  Significant portions of the United States’ coastal housing stock are vulnerable to inundation in coming decades. This will cause a direct loss of housing, result in higher prices for homes that are not vulnerable to flooding, and require investment to protect flood-vulnerable housing. In the context of nationwide housing affordability challenges, this scenario raises equity concerns for those impacted both directly and indirectly. Planners employ community adaptation frameworks that primarily draw from highly-populated urban areas. While some center equity concerns, few consider the distinct, poorly understood challenges that small coastal communities face. Using four towns in Knox County, Maine, as a case study, I find (1) that likely inundation from sea level rise varies in extent by town, but the value of affected parcels is consistent in pattern and (2) that climate-induced housing challenges have a greater likelihood of being solved if addressed at a regional level.
• De Materia Perspectiva
  “I inscribe a quadrangle ... which is considered to be an open window through which I see,” the artist and architect Leon Battista Alberti wrote in his 1425 treatise on perspective. This description surely reminds us of Albert Dürer’s woodcut of the draftsman, where a string is drawn from object to subject, intersecting the quadrangle at a single point. Da Vinci’s re-instauration of this diagram five decades later in the camera obscura jettisoned the draftsman’s string, re-casting perspective as an abstract and dis-embodied apparatus detached from medium, the apotheosis of which is arguably the contemporary perspectival viewport. This thesis re-situates the perspectival viewport in the material realm. Like the draftsman’s strings, the projector lines of perspective attain physical properties (applying a physics engine) and can be pushed and pulled by subjects and objects in the scene to modify how you see. Perspective no longer appears as a closed system in this material mode. It is malleable. Therefore, this thesis proposes an architecture where a singular perspective, an absolute definition of vision, and a stable view of objects is impossible, or at least elective.
• The Oasis Effect: Reclaiming Tunis’s Indigenous Water Systems
  This thesis addresses Tunis’s pressing water management challenges primarily caused by colonialism and ongoing climate change. It examines Tunis’s development across the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial, concentrating on how future water management can mitigate four key issues: sea level rise and flash floods, rising temperatures, social vulnerability, and habitat preservation. Historical water management in the Medina of Tunis was effective until colonial urban development since 1881 neglected traditional drainage systems, worsening flash floods. Inspired by traditional water management, the design proposes urban-scale interventions with canals and neighborhood-scale interventions using the “shallow water dictionary.” This collection of eight historical water management systems, implemented in urban leftovers and open spaces, aims to create vibrant areas for flood control, temperature regulation, and social interaction. This thesis proposes “Dynamic Zoning” for adaptable space use during floods and droughts. It envisions a commons-based urbanism focused on water to achieve social and ecological harmony, proposing the “Tunis Water Management Trust”  to manage and maintain these systems.