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Eggs Frying, Sweeping: A Series of Reprojective Footnotes
In her fantastical children’s book Tar Beach, Faith Ringgold writes from the perspective of an eight-year-old girl named Cassie Louise Lightfoot. Cassie could fly, and anything she flew over she could claim and own forever. Her flight took place over Harlem, USA, a nation within a nation, carrying the weight of an age-old collective imagination. Harlem is “the mecca” of Black cultural production that accommodated the heartbreaking ills of racial inequity throughout the 20th century only to watch its buildings become derelict and its property values fall. By the 2000s, Harlem was gentrifying at a rapid pace with new developments culturally appropriating the fragments of collective imagination that were left. The thesis reprojects Cassie’s flight over one building in particular, the Rennie Luxury Housing Complex. The name of the complex, “the Rennie,” appropriates the nickname of the building that was demolished for its construction, “the Renny.” The demolished building, formally named the Harlem Renaissance Casino, Theater, and Ballroom, emphasizes the tragic, ongoing loss of architectural landmarks for Black communities across America. The thesis responds by proposing a series of architectural reprojections (footnotes) toward the new luxury housing complex to afford communal forms of living and ownership. To do so, the project intervenes within the typological history of the Harlem Airshaft, reimagining it as an architectural sampler bearing witness to Harlem’s sonic lineages.
Fringe Benefits: Accessories for a Bulldoze City
Urban sprawl is the result of giving cars priority over people in the design of our cities. Designing buildings for the automobile as the audience results in larger, faster registrations of architecture, removing human-scaled subtleties from the built environment. The parking garage is the poster child for car-oriented architecture, plaguing cities like Houston, TX, and encouraging more sprawl. While the parking garage trend might be drab, trends at the human scale offer something far more enticing. Pop media and fashion trends revolving around Houston are colorful, sparkly, and anything but drab. As businesses continue to implement flexible work-from-home policies and Houston works to incentivize alternative forms of transportation, the need for parking garages at city centers will likely dwindle, opening new post-era occupancy possibilities for these infrastructural buildings. How can the vibrant sensibilities found in contemporary southern fashion trends help inform the reclamation of parking structures for public engagement? Acknowledging the amount of embodied carbon associated with these massive concrete infrastructures, this thesis calls for a solution rooted in incremental reclamation, rather than demolition, of these buildings. Appropriating the function of the fashion accessory as a timeful strategy for refreshing basic apparel, this thesis utilizes accessorizing as a lens for transforming “basic” underutilized parking garages at city centers from dull monuments for stacking cars into vibrant spaces for connecting people. Through playful materiality, speculative facades, and an expanded narrative on the architectural accessory, this thesis contemplates the benefits of fringe for a bulldoze city.
Princeton Architectural Laboratory, 1949 to 1954: A Matter of Maintenance
This dissertation describes the institutional history of Princeton Architectural Laboratory from 1949 to 1954. While recent scholarship in architectural history and building science clarified the Laboratory’s enduring contribution to environmentally informed design strategies, the circumstances of its establishment remain underreported. This work argues that a closer look at this early history is warranted. It reveals the administrative mechanics and challenges involved in establishing an organizational capacity for experimental design research. Using maintenance as the governing theme, this account describes the relationship between the Laboratory’s intellectual project, its material expression, and institutional support. Based on archival research, it contends that Labatut’s project and its ultimate failure were necessary preconditions for the Olgyay’s arrival at Princeton and the Laboratory’s subsequent success. This dissertation elucidates the continuity between the two iterations of the Laboratory. It offers a historical account of how Princeton University’s architecture program established an organizational capacity for experimental research. This work seeks a new audience interested in developing a design laboratory or a research center within an academic institution.
Fortress Science: The Spatialities of Radio Astronomy
The production of space as an internal condition to the scientific production of knowledge is an under investigated and seldom theorized process within the studies of science, technology, and society (STS), and the spatial disciplines. Through a comparative study of the world’s four leading radio telescopes (the Arecibo Observatory, the Atacama Millimeter/submillimeter Array, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, and MeerKAT), I examine the territorial, concentrated, and contingent spatialities of these scientific sites through the multidisciplinary lens of fortress science. Each telescope embodies differing spatial formations as a product of their institutional makeup, scientific goals, and political contexts, but exhibits similar spatial formations with regards to territorial transformations and human material concentrations. We can read these formations through the metaphor of the glacis, an historical fortress technology that acts as an obscuration in which apparent ‘emptiness’ conceals significant influence and connectivity. I draw on this analogy as an embodiment of the conceptual tools underlying the dissertation – that of technology and infrastructure, and landscape and territory – and I use these tools to position fortress science as structuring an analytical fusion of space and science. Spatial process is found to be enmeshed in the structure of scientific research itself, and as a result scientific production is found to alter, structure, and restructure space as an active force.
The Taiping Transcripts: Tracing Vernacular Landscapes Through Time
Heritage is understood as a cultural construct through which values, ideologies, and identities are projected. In alignment with this manifesto, "The Taiping Transcripts" aims to illuminate the intricate social-ecological history of the Grand Canal world heritage site. Yangzhou’s fate and prosperity have closely followed the ebbs and flows of water transportation. By framing and juxtapositioning landscape views in Yangzhou’s shanty village, Taiping, this project traces the site’s dynastic shifts, from the salt economy and heavy steel industries to its contemporary significance in ceaseless water transportation. "The Taiping Transcripts" derives its design by modeling the historical timeline, demonstrating a modern interpretation of traditional Chinese landscape framing and clipping techniques. It confronts the conventional practices of architectural museums, which are usually confined indoor spaces that selectively showcase exclusive social values. By introducing two experiential routes crafted from processed demolition materials, the project provides a comprehensive and immersive experience that surpasses traditional museum confines.
Housing, the Built Environment, and the Good Life
At any age, the pursuit of a good life is easier in a physical environment that promotes health, supports activities important to self‐fulfillment, and facilitates connections to the larger community. In old age, the home and neighborhood environments are particularly important: they are the locations where older people spend most their time, and they can have a great impact on independence, social connection, feelings of self‐worth, and physical and emotional well‐being. Within the urban planning field, home and neighborhood characteristics are important dimensions of debates about the measurement of human progress and quality of life, particularly as an alternative to purely economic measures. They are also key issues in public health, particularly as they relate to physical, social, and mental well‐being. Here, we focus on how to improve the fit of environments for people as they age.
A Diasporist Guide to Camping Here
At Camp Doikayt, the landscape is a vehicle for remembering histories of diaspora and reimagining Jewishness beyond Zionism. Summer camps proliferated in the United States after the Shoah, using the Zionist invention of the “muscular” Jew, to cultivate Jewish continuity. Camp Doikayt proposes an alternative modeled after the Jewish Labor Bund’s concept of “hereness.” In the form of a guidebook, the camp's design unfolds through a set of rules that ritualizes a land ethic of solidarity and participation. As camp wanders year to year to different abandoned Jewish sites in the Catskills, we reconfigure the materials, adapt ecological remnants, and reinterpret Jewish cultural memory.
I Want to Live Together: I Want to Hear You Even as Extinction Tears You Away
This project is an attempt to grapple with how to live in a time of increasing extinction and loss. How should we go on? Knowing everything we know about how implicated we are in the unraveling of lives? The project envisions a social infrastructure to catalyze both spatial and intrapersonal change, grounded where I live, in a peri-urban neighborhood of Los Angeles. The Garapito Creek Community School is an experimental design-build lab, galvanizing community members as agents of change through radical multispecies politics and interventions that address the needs of the entire community, human and non-human. It is the center of gravity for existential reckoning. The project, and thus the politics of the school, insist that a design practice in the face of these existential threats must be personal, must be embodied, must honor grief, and must come into being through the rebuilding of deep relationships with others. These others are the plants, animals, people, and fungi who we must hear if we are going to live, together.
Toward a Resilient Architecture
Today, sustainability is recognized as a technical problem and is relegated to engineers. However, the issue of environment and design are so interdependent that one can shape the other. Therefore, Architects need to get back into the discussion to reclaim the issues of environment and ecology as inevitable parts of the design. This separation of art from science has its roots in the 17th century with the debates between Perrault and Blondel which eventually turned into the great split between architects and engineers in the 18th century. I believe these two topics (environment and architecture) can reconcile and fall into one category of design in which one architect can navigate both of them at once. My project-based thesis, which is focusing on rethinking residential design rules of thumb, states how sustainability as a tool can update conventional design rules of thumb by which architects designed houses. Therefore, I propose using computational simulation method to create an updated chart suggesting vernacular rules of thumb such as building proportion, window to wall ratio, shading, skylights, façade, and volume, which all vary latitude by latitude. I will then pick up one location for a final project (A house) on which I will apply my findings. The final product will not only be an extensive example of a sustainable and vernacular design, but it also will preemptively enter in the discourse of architecture as a discipline. The thesis which is curiously named “Toward a resilient architecture”, is an attempt to update the conventional design thinking and eventually to show how “A house is a sustainable machine for living in”.
Intermission
Nine spaces: A billboard, a stretch of scaffolding, a stretch of caulk, a street shrine, a car park, a water tank, a missing brick, a pedestrian bridge, a pocket watch. Each: An intermission in the urban fabric. An in-between space, connective tissue between discrete moments. A pause, a break, an interlude, a respite. A timeout. A place outside of the trajectory of time’s linear progression. A portrait of such a space can only be captured in the oblique, in fragments that aren’t able to be strung together, not without interpolation, inference, imagination to fill in the blanks. representation A story—a fictional narrative that weaves through and across each space—also approaches it from the oblique, not centering it as an object-in-the-round, but inhabiting it as spatial, material, social framework. A walk—a journey woven across specified spaces—adds yet another layer of inferential representation, experienced in linear temporality yet suggestive of layered, non-linear spatial and temporal experiences. Drawing from social theory and literary theory to inform a methodology for space-based narratives, this thesis takes the form of a collection of multi-media short stories titled Intermission. Pairing prose fiction with a guided walk, Intermission is a narrative exploration of the act of movement out-of-place, into the margin, the in-between, the timeout. By shifting the focus away from space as a designed and embodied structure, to space as a discursive construct, this thesis aims to bring to the fore systems, relationships, material and social networks, as well as standpoints (both human and non-human) that are integral to the existence and maintenance of the built environment, but that remain invisible in existing architectural narrative frameworks. The subject matter of these narrative exercises in text and lived experience are spaces, characters, and perspectives that step outside the fabric of everyday life. The experimental narratives woven around these subjects cast as the center the edges, namely those between spaces and experiences that are real and imagined, between remembering and forgetting, between documentary and fiction. In breaking with linearity, convention and expected mediums in architectural representation and speculation, the collective body of work produced through this thesis hopes to offer a fertile test bed for experimentation with discursive frameworks.
Digital Starlight Memorial: An Online Memorial System with Tangible Interactive Interface
The Internet has created countless possibilities for commemorations dedicated to tragic or catastrophic events and for exercising collective memory, which has not only gradually hidden our physical bodies but is also changing the way we experience the death of those around us. People who died in some extreme events could not be buried well. Meanwhile, their relatives shared collective memories and trauma. Thus, I want to create a digital cemetery that collects the digital "soul". Besides, the digital cemetery could gather the people who have relatives who died in the same event and experienced the same trauma, forming a place that not only communicates but can heal each other. I will create a website as the main digital platform for the community where people can bury their loved ones in a virtual Constellations system and build them a monument. Along with an Augmented Reality mobile application, people can see the exact location of their relatives or friends buried in the constellation and resonate in the community. What's more, they can have an additional physical interaction device. When someone visits a buried person, the interactive device will produce haptic feedback, and people can experience tangible visualizations from the device and comfort from those who have shared trauma. To join the community or merely to experience it, both strains and reinforces the mutuality of the “Collective memory” said to be in this together.
The Architecture of the Collective: The Block and Ideas of the City in Modern China
This dissertation interrogates the idea of the block and its manifestations in the socio-spatial development of the modern Chinese city—particularly from the 1950s onward. It delineates the existing discourse of the block and renews its idea against the continuity and transition of modern China. The underlying argument this dissertation puts forward is that, as opposed to conceiving the block as a modernist development directly imported from the West, the architectural and urban operations, together with its socio-political processes in modern China, constitute a rather internal yet continuous logic in understanding the Chinese city. By introducing the dialectical logic of tongbian that encompasses continuity through change, this dissertation examines one of the most canonical Chinese cities—Xi’an—as a case study by focusing on its planning practices in the transitional periods of the 1950s, 1980s, and 1990s, alongside the urban and architectural developments of the Xi’an Textile City project. It maps out the trajectory of Xi’an’s urban form and the role of block in the modern era while foregrounding its transitional episodes through major urban and architectural projects, policies, and socio-cultural practices. In doing so, the idea of the block and the modern Chinese city is theorized through three key propositions: First, it interrogates the concept of the block against its realities—the developments and nuances manifested in specific architectural, urban, and social configurations in China. In doing so, it defines the concept of the block in modern Chinese cities as two specific models: the perimeter-block and the parallel-block, and reconsiders such concept as a modern iteration of a long-existing and continuous socio-spatial construct in the Chinese city. Second, it concerns the block in modern China as an essential planning apparatus in cultivating a common socio-spatial framework, one that is informed by both the continuity of its internal cultural logic and the transitions of specific socio-political conditions, strategies, and practices at moments in time. Third, it postulates the idea of the modern Chinese city as one that spatializes the social collective and encompasses the ‘largeness’, ‘multiplicity’, and ‘bounded figure’ in constituting the architecture for the collective, which remains consistent with the idea of the Chinese city as a continuous cultural project at large and has the possibility to be charted towards a renewed model of urban and architectural production for the future.
Dissolving Urbanism: Trans-scalar Spatial Framework for Water Integration
This thesis research investigates a spatial framework to effectively address urban water management in Chennai, a city facing extreme hydrological events and climate change-induced challenges. Given the inadequacies of current management approaches, the research introduces a concept and method to incrementally integrate water into the urban form, thereby “Dissolving Urbanism.” This strategy intends to foster more sustainable livelihoods for the residents by breaking down existing physical, spatial, and governance barriers between scales, spaces, and policies. Utilizing historical studies, literature reviews, and data evaluations, a tripartite framework is proposed to (1) spatially address scalar mismatches in urban water management, (2) integrate 'water space' at a neighbourhood scale via proposed water “blocks,” and (3) incentivize private stakeholders to adopt progressive water management solutions through advocacy tools and policy methods. Using an extreme event projection with scenarios and a cost-benefit analysis between traditional and proposed models assess the framework’s efficacy. The study highlights that the proposed framework establishes an interconnection among various scales by creating the currently lacking “middle scale” characterized by the inventiveness, creativity, and imaginaries of water “blocks” that facilitate water-sharing and promote equitable water access and bottom-up flood management. These findings will contribute to urban resilience and water management in the context of climate change, offering valuable advancement to core knowledge and contemporary expression in the field of urban design.
The Dust Up: Adapting Kuwait's Civic Infrastructure to SDS
This thesis aspires to redevelop public infrastructural spaces in Kuwait to interact with the natural phenomena and challenges of local sand and dust storms (SDS) that disrupt the city, by embracing these processes to create unique social and ecological relationships for the city and its people. The research challenges the existing ‘greening’ strategies that arose from Kuwait’s 1952 masterplan developed by the foreign practice of Minoprio Spencely and Macfarlane. The work specifically explores the neighborhood parks and highway interchange networks. Today these exist as static landscapes that require excessive irrigation and resources to maintain their ‘green’ image, while disregarding the cultural and climatic context. As they currently stand, these networks have proven to fail at the scale of the ecological process, neither designing for or against these storms, but instead completely ignoring them.
Seismic Futures: Expanding the Retrofit
Advances in structural engineering and updates to building codes have rendered older buildings in seismic regions obsolete. Evans Hall, a hub for the economics, mathematics, and statistics departments at UC Berkeley, faces demolition due to its poor seismic rating. The future of buildings like Evans Hall is guided by financial and engineering constraints, often leading to demolition or a strict seismic retrofit. The traditional seismic retrofit, largely ignored in the discipline of architecture, relies on structural engineering principles through mathematical analysis. How can architecture expand the spatial possibilities of the retrofit? This thesis challenges and expands on structural engineering techniques for seismic retrofits through architectural interventions such as spatial methods of twinning, overscaling, replacing, and subtracting structural and nonstructural elements. The dual use of structure restabilizes Evans Hall while also generating adaptability by introducing new public space, access to light, and flexible space for existing and new program.
land (reciprocity and other methods of defining the) fill
Tomkins Cove Quarry is a marginal site expressing a central contradiction: once a bustling open pit quarry that supplied crushed limestone for construction in New York City, it is now abandoned and slowly filling with water while rusting conveyor lines stretch to a Hudson River they no longer supply. Absurdly, the current plan by Tilcon New York Inc. to fill the quarry with demolition waste from the city and cap it with “nature” underscores the standard practice of erasure of such zones of otherness, ultimately seeking to sanitize a wasted landscape and recycle it into salable land. Through a semantic approach, this thesis sets out to deconstruct and examine the relationship between the "land" and the "fill," specifically between the quarry and the waste as symptoms of culture and symbols of labor and extraction. This thesis asks: are there other ways to facilitate the flow of matter and simultaneously the sustenance of abused landscapes? Moreover, how can we resist relegating waste to the margins and instead foster a practice of centering it as an invaluable resource that recycles the dominant and spatial order? Lastly, is it possible to untangle the politics of waste and its designated sites and think of materials not as inert products but as continuous with land and the people that shape them?
The Memory of Sangatte 1999 - 2002
Despite the complete demolition of the Sangatte camp in 2003, both its existence and the fear consistently portrayed in the political and media campaign still deeply influence the political and geographic formation in Calais. The complexity of the history of Sangatte Camp was reduced to a useful political rhetoric to dehumanize homeless migrants and illegalize humanitarian support provided by the solidarity network in Calais. In this text, the history and the memory of Sangatte Camp unfolds with the process of bordering in Calais from 1999 to 2002 through policy and spatial analysis, literature and archive review, archival findings from the French Red Cross, UNHCR, and GISTI, and testimony from former Red Cross staff, migrants, and social workers. In this text, the immigration and border policies, including local government orders, national, bilateral, trilateral, and regional policies and collaborations in controlling and removing undesirable migrants from Calais are analyzed in the context of how those policies shaped the experience of asylum seeking and border crossing. Then, the spatial transformation in Calais is portrayed, including the migrants’ occupation of abandoned buildings and public parks with the support of local solidarity networks, along with the process of bordering and fencing in ports and the Eurotunnel site. Next, the development of the Sangatte Camp is explored, including its spatial evolution, camp management, and the daily life of migrants living there. Finally, the stories of female migrants are recounted, ranging from memory segments in Calais to a whole journey across several countries. Though the stories of women were not often portrayed in the media and literature findings at that time, buried in silence, this research has uncovered the stories of women, who each had their own memories of Sangatte.
Like Oil and Leisure: Narrative Landforms for Curaçao
‘Like Oil and Leisure’ is a reimagining of Curaçao’s central harbor and beating heart, Schottegat. This port is home to the now-retired Refinery Isla, leaving an enormous economic and social gap that the refinery has filled for over a century. This landscape is a living memory of the past 500 years of human occupation. From the horrors of the colonial slave trade to safe haven for persecuted Sephardi Jews, economic boom to ecological disaster, these shores bear the scars of a complex history. Using the narrative arc of a round of golf, this thesis explores the stories embedded in the lands of the former oil refinery through a reshaping of its material grounds. Visitors navigate nine sites around the harbor that compose the course, immersed in different elements of the island’s history. Tourists and locals alike engage with the legacies of Schottegat and imagine the site’s next five centuries.
Single Non-family Home
Travel is inherent to the development of our social instincts, used as a means to raise our sensitivities to unfamiliar contexts and peoples. The act of travel itself had architectural impositions during one’s journey. Shelter became the backbone to support long journeys, but was also tied to additional program that was relevant to its context - Roman bathhouses as rest-stops for traveling tradesmen to engage with local consumers, or monasteries offering beds for both nomads and laymen in the middle of a long journey. In these scenarios, the place of shelter was primarily an anchor for the local community, while the act of shelter was more of a secondary possibility to this other-programmed space. By tying home, as quality, to shelter, as program, a space is domesticated. When accommodating transient and temporary use, this provokes a parallel between the politics of domesticity - who and how we are at home - with the business of shelter - what do we need to get by and how can this be mutually beneficial. Sited in Amman, Jordan, given its developmental history tangled with surges of transience and unintentional stay, this thesis will study how architecture can engage with existing urban and sociocultural conditions to facilitate the relationship between the permanent and the transient user of a city. A housing project for the non-resident user, the architecture will explore program as a series of interpersonal, interspatial exchanges through the lens of domesticity.
After Bath: Crossing the Social Skin
Water is an immersive body, and bathing is a medium of not only physical but also psychical identification and connection, through the bodily proximity created between strangers. The thesis explores notions of body and identity in the urban context through a contemporary re-read of the Turkish bath from an intersectional feminist point of view. Starting from the notion of gaze and objectification of female bodies, permeating into concurrent forms of oppression and solidarity, the thesis aims to liberate the bath from its orientalist architectural context and leak into the city of Istanbul by tapping into its water infrastructure. It explores ways of warming up (in terms of social intimacy) to create tactics of immersion in the public space for marginalized bodies. By liberating the bath representationally from the male gaze and the orientalist canon, the project inverts and fragments the interior space of the bath and attaches it onto the existing public water infrastructure of Istanbul. Dispersed across neighborhoods and the waterfront, the “leaked bath” explores gradients  of collectivity, identity, and immersion. Architecture takes on affective characteristics that break binaries of interior / exterior, heavy / light, permanent / ephemeral. The interventions become a set of surfaces and desires: fountain, pool, deck, mist, shade, lingering, swimming... They attempt to take an interiorized typology and disperse it across the urban fabric to create spaces of comfort and engagement. They’re not about encasing but sheltering. They’re not about the thick poche but the dashed line. Partitions instead of walls, canopies instead of roofs, groundscapes as permeable surfaces... Depths of water and shade define levels of engagement and proximity, reactivating the collective body to cross the social skin and create new forms of solidarity.
Migrant Middle: Revealing the South-Asian Diaspora through Community Making in Shrewsbury
Recent quantitative data shows that the American suburb is rapidly diversifying, prompting the question: How is American space produced, and who is producing it? The South-Asian diaspora represents 2.2 percent of the total American population and has significantly contributed to the American cultural, economic, and political landscape. To understand the South-Asian diaspora in the context of Shrewsbury, a suburb located in Massachusetts, this thesis uses an ethnographic study to weave together patterns of transnational migration, identity, and everyday culture through the lens of the South-Asian community. Stories and investigations of the temporal relationships between diaspora and the built environment reveal that the architecture of everyday South-Asian life is internalized and distributed throughout the region. Migrant Middle proposes an alternative reading of the American suburb, not as an auto-centric place defined by its spatial boundaries but rather considered as a heterogeneous, regional network. How might (or not) a regional mobility strategy enhance connectivity and more prominently reveal the South-Asian diaspora?
A Walk in the Grid
How could the design of a regional shopping center reconcile the loss of architectural scale in globalized brownfields? This thesis explores alternative arrangements of form and proportion in search of a new composition that redefines an architectural typology and optimizes its agency for public service. It positions arcades, or mid-door corridors, as the operative mechanism with which architects can organize spaces. When organized in a grid, as a field of intersecting linear massings, architecture obtains an inverted role that defines boundaries from outside-in and therefore encloses exterior rooms of charged voids, stageable for diverse scenarios. Since the key factor is density and not footprint, this experiment seeks to create an instrument to dissolve the single object, subdivide its volume, and return to a scale that could effectively weave the surrounding fabric, thereby instigating alternative strategies and tactics for the city to maintain a high-quality environment as it continues to expand – spatially, socially, and ecologically. This design concept challenges the usual ways in which we shop as well as our perception of commerce as a normative – and isolated – activity; it also serves as a counter monument that critiques contemporary maneuvers of star architects conquering regional sites by implementing their signature symbols in a foreign architectural language that locals could seldom relate. Situated in Sunnyside Queens, an exemplary suburban neighborhood amid overscale developments, this thesis aims to conceive, rather than a universal solution applicable everywhere, a tailored design method with which architecture could begin to engage a particular context, through an empathetically regional gesture.
DeepGreen: Additive Manufacturing of Carbon-Negative Algae Biocomposites
As populations rise, the global building stock is predicted to double in floor area in the next 40 years. As a result, the embodied carbon footprint of the construction industry, which the UN has estimated to be 11% of global emissions, becomes a critical impasse in attempts to confront the climate crisis. This dissertation attempts to develop a new material system to address the issue of embodied carbon in construction from both a top-down ecosystem and a bottom-up material perspective. A circular approach to the cultivation of carbon-sequestering microalgal biomass is proposed, and the research develops the technological capacities to 3D print the micron-sized biomass into structural objects. After optimization, the final algae-based material features similar mechanical properties to engineered wood products. The proposed systems exhibit a negative upfront carbon footprint, as the carbon dioxide absorbed by the algae through photosynthesis outweighs the cultivation and manufacturing emissions. Furthermore, analysis shows an immense capacity to grow this biomass as a part of nutrient recovery systems. The dissertation points towards a possible future in which architecture itself is used as a carbon sequestration device, storing tons of atmospheric carbon for the lifetime of the material.
Sanctuary State: California's Cowscape in Transition
Sanctuary State, set in an idealized future in which cows are not exploited for meat or dairy, transforms an 800-acre feedlot into a sanctuary, a healing site for cows. Feedlots, common in California’s San Joaquin Valley, are degraded landscapes that demonstrate fraught human-animal relations that invisiblize, instrumentalize, and condemn domesticated animals. While cows have been implicated in over 10,000 years of domestication, the feedlot-to-sanctuary transformation envisions alternative relationships with animals in a future where transitional interspecies justice is achieved through ecological reparation and animal liberation. Humans must first dismantle the feedlot to initiate the restoration, in the process confronting the injustices of mass animal production. Infirmaries replace slaughter loading docks, woodlands memorialize cow passings, perennial plantings remediate the damaged soil, and waste accumulates into feral habitat islands that entice cows to meander and forage. Cows and other beings participate as co-designers, revealing the feral sociality of the site’s post-industrial reality. Feral ecologies and self-determining animals, at the sanctuary and the Valley beyond, establish themselves as agents of resistance and growth in the most degraded of places and situations.
Biking is Labor: App-Based Food Delivery Cyclists and Infrastructure as Justice in New York City
In New York City, app-based food delivery cyclists face exploitative labor conditions as independent contractors for the gig economy and dangerous streets as vulnerable road users. By defining biking as labor and street as workplace, this thesis applies labor justice theory to transportation planning. The gig economy imposes a changing political economy, requiring a reimagining of who uses the street, how, and why. How could transportation planners respond to the rise of the gig economy’s influence on urban space in New York City by providing app-based food delivery cyclists with the physical infrastructure required to perform their work safely and fairly? Qualitative methods draw from three perspectives: delivery cyclist, policies and plans, and public narrative. Findings may inform transportation planners of the ways in which they can provide fairer and safer infrastructure by understanding delivery cyclists’ essential status, recognizing policy’s spatial limitations, balancing safety and efficiency, understanding delivery cyclists’ disproportionate risks, and acknowledging that delivery cyclists have a specific understanding of their infrastructure needs. Applying a labor justice perspective may be useful for creating safer streets for all existing roadway users as the gig economy continues to reshape who uses streets and in what ways.