Mansa College of Education

Items

• Expositions universelles,doctrines sociales et utopies
• The pattern of foreign property investment in Vietnam: the apartment market in Ho Chi Minh City
  As globalization proceeds, transnational property development is increasing. Especially in emerging markets, foreign developers’ influence in changing the local landscape is becoming significant. In this research, the behavioral patterns of foreign developers in the apartment market of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam were identified. To understand the dynamics of foreign developers, the types of products that were being created, where the investments were located, and the differences in development strategies adopted by foreign developers in comparison to domestic counterparts were identified. To accomplish this, data on apartment projects and statistics were collected, and a series of spatial analyses including sieve mapping, histogram analysis, factor analysis and logistic regression was conducted. In addition, closer examination was made of specific cases to understand the dynamics among foreign and domestic developers, also allowing the identification of some regularities in the patterns of foreign developments. Besides presenting detailed results, this paper also seeks to account for the conditions that appear to have generated these patterns and characteristics.
• Are master plans effective in limiting development in China's disaster-prone areas?
  The effectiveness of urban master plans in limiting development in a disaster-prone area of China was empirically investigated by measuring cities’ land-cover changes against their master plans. If a master plan serves as guidance for urban polices that reduce property loss from earthquakes, floods, landslides,land subsidence, and rises in sea level, it will substantially limit urban development in areas at risk from environmental hazards. An environmental risk map weighted toward valuable forms of land cover was generated using geospatial databases of China’s Yangtze River Delta region. Based on this data, the effects of five master plan measures—ring-road patterns, block size, the area of urban built-up lands, the locations of industrial sites, and preservation zoning—were tested using the multiple regression method. Cities showing a high degree of compliance, in particular with preservation zoning, had a smaller amountof urban land located in high-risk zones, on average, by 14 km2. Among the top ten cities exposed to disproportionately high risks, eight were towns and only two were cities like Huzhou and Kunshan.
• Does large-sized cities' urbanisation predominantly degrade environmental resources in China? Relationships between urbanisation and resources in Changjiang Delta Region
  Outward expansion of urban lands in the developing nations is often associated with a substantial loss of environmental resources such as forests, wetlands, freshwater and cash crop fields. Yet, determining how different aspects of urbanisation – such as city population size and spread pattern of built-up lands – contribute to the cumulative loss of resources remains controversial. In this study, data sets were constructed describing changes to land cover across 65,200 grid cells at 1 km2 spatial resolution for China’s Changjiang Delta Region over the past 60 years. The results showed that the region lost 12.2% of total resource sites. The distribution of resource degradation showed a highly dispersed pattern and was not confined to a few intense areas associated with large cities. No empirical evidence was found that city population size alone accurately predicts the distribution of resource loss. Very large cities (N = 4) contributed 35% to the total loss, demonstrating impacts similar to those of much more scattered towns (N = 230). Urban expansion of large cities may lead to extensive resource loss; however, a set of non-linear mechanisms, such as the diminishing effects of per-unit area urban spread on resources and interactions between urban patterns and the size of urban spread, can also play a significant role in downsizing the negative effects of large cities on resource sites. Thus, effective urban policies should carefully weigh the cumulative urban spread mechanisms of both large and small cities responsible for spatially dispersed degradation of environmental resources.
• Assessing Potential Public Health and Air Quality Impacts of Changing Climate and Land Use in Metropolitan New York: A Study by the New York Climate & Health Project
  Version of Record
• Architecture and the Sciences: Scientific Accuracy or Productive Misunderstanding?
  Proof
• Heliomorph
  Heliomorph is an investigation in testing the feedback loop of using solar geometry for architecture’s ability to react, transform, and inform existing and new architecture. Heavily influenced by the work Ralph Knowles developed with the “Solar Envelope”, this thesis continues explorations of heliomorphism through multiple scales: from the urban fabric to the building, the room, and detail manipulations. Research in Heliomorphism leans on stereotomic massing, boolean operations, and chiseled carvings. Heliomorph infuses the scientific research with artistic precedents from Gyorgy Kepes, , Kurt Schuerdtfeger, and László Moholy-Nagy's work of shadow and light play allowing the investigations to expand beyond stereotomy and carves. The body of work explores temporality and animation through surface tectonics, and concepts of double exposure, among other surface and medium transformations. The technological developments of the last decade enable an unanticipated degree of precision and recursion, infusing new possibilities into a Ralph Knowles process and bringing questions of how we navigate the liminal space between data input and output. How can we responsibly use available data, establish parametric flows, and arrive at an architecture that is more than the result of data inputs? Heliomorph tests architecture that negotiates between the precision of data points and the contradictions between the city's spatial and social politics and the desire for buildings to reach impactfully sustainable, ecological, and cultural conditions.
• Back to Basilica: A Triptych of Church Unbuilding
  Christian churches have accumulated disproportionate real and symbolic capital in America. A result of an outdated truce between Church and State, Christian monuments, however underused, are a protected discourse—too sacred to be touched and too private to be entered. Paralyzed in inertia, the implied homogeneity perpetuates a skewed system, urging the churches into private development or petrifying them into a slow public death. How do we re-form the church to retain it within the civic realm? How can we productively deconstruct the notion of sacredness to accommodate non-discriminatory public use? Imagining an afterlife for churches in the United States, this thesis points back to the beginning of the symbolic contest between Church and State. The medieval Church borrowed legitimacy from the Roman State in the architectural typology of the Basilica, a judicial and civic building. In this typological appropriation, the Church rotated the axis ninety degrees to accentuate the ritualistic single path, undermining the inherent ambiguity of the many in the original Basilica. This thesis proposes a triptych of church unbuilding as an act of reclamation. The publicness is reasserted with the program of USPS post offices, a pervasive State network fixture, serving a non-discriminatory, secular public. Through the architectural and programmatic re-formation, the project prompts the typological deconstruction of the sacred and the social construction of the secular public.
• Domesticated Exterior
  Human intention of domesticating nature has never stopped， projecting an anthropocentric imagination onto their surrounding, shaping the land and non-humans living in it to their own advantage. The architecture of domestication has been at the center of such acts of captivity. We build fences around farms to keep certain animals away, and coops and stables to keep certain animals in; we turn forests into non-forests and only prescribe certain species to grow in. When we talk about buildings for animals, we normally associate them with captivity and hostility, yet we forget the original intention we build, which was to protect and nurture. To be a human is to share space with other species; to build is to build for humans and other animals. To question the anthropocentric relationship with nature, the project aims to reverse the role of architecture from a tool of confinement to an instrument of rewilding, engaging the human presence in a way that stops to manage nature, and allows nature to take on its own course. And as we imagine the indispensable future of multi-species co-living, we confront the reality that this must go beyond the confines of human imagination.
• Degendering Suburbia: Speculations on a New Dream
  Made specifically for the white American nuclear family, the 1950s suburban tract house embeds gendered notions of space and excludes anyone not representative of the mold. The midcentury American dream was spatialized in visual media and advertising, reinforcing gender norms and the nuclear family. But the suburbs are changing, jobs are dispersing, and the cost of living in urban centers is increasing. The 1950s version of the “American Dream” has long been outdated, yet our suburban housing models continue to reinforce the social norms of a past era. “Degendering Suburbia: Speculations on a New Dream” proposes a degendering of the 1950s American tract house suburb through the speculative addition of shared social spaces and alternative housing typologies. These additions to the existing homogeneous suburban landscape produce interwoven social gradients that delaminate the traditionally isolating nature of the “feminine” domestic realm in the private house. The familiar construction methods of the framed wall and the gabled roof are reappropriated to make visible the fluidity and flexibility necessary for modern domesticity. Strategic deconstruction and reallocation of domestic program and property operate against the physical bounds of the private home and the social bounds of the property line. To this end, the thesis speculates on a new dream through the comparative retrofitting of two typical suburban tract housing developments.
• A Stadium Tower: Decongestion of congestion
  STADIUM A stadium is a place where a flock of people get charged and discharged at a moment in time, before and after a game. To avoid congestion in the city, stadiums have been pushed away from the center and are located at the border, where the urban fabric meets the suburban scenery. However, mass migration from the city to the stadium and from the stadium to the city disturbs urban traffic and exacerbates congestion. What if a stadium were to stay in the city and exploit the urban condition of congestion? The ambition of this project is to rid the stadium of congestion and explore a new method of gathering within the metropolis. MANHATTAN Limited by the two-dimensional discipline of the grid, buildings in Manhattan aspired to three-dimensional freedom. The invention of the elevator made that dream come true. As the horizontal density of the ground is absorbed by towers, the planar congestion becomes vertical congestion. Manhattan’s fully loaded towers set a precondition for this project in order to experiment with creating a new way to densify the vertical. Sited in the financial district of Manhattan, a stadium tower is interlocked by six office towers. Each office tower's density becomes a source for new density and occupies a stadium in the middle. A stadium tower proposes a vertical form of stadium that sustains its vitality by exploiting the vertical congestion prevailing in the city.
• Acoustemological Resonances: Brewster’s Archive and the Emergence of Ethical Observational Science
  This dissertation examines William Brewster’s (1851-1919) seminal yet underappreciated contributions to ornithology through the analysis of his extensive archival materials—including field notes, journals, diaries, systematic bird observations, photographic prints, and voluminous correspondence. The thesis elucidates the development and impact of Brewster’s ethically driven, non-lethal observational methodologies, contrasting substantially with the earlier practices of John James Audubon (1785-1851), which involved the widespread killing of birds for illustration purposes. Brewster’s approach marked a pivotal shift towards more ethical scientific inquiry and early conservation principles. Housed at Harvard University’s Ernst Mayr Library at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Brewster’s archives span five decades and provide an unparalleled dataset of bird behavior, habitats, vocalizations, and population changes, alongside notes on the changing landscape. This dissertation probes the evolution from visually biased scientific methods to sensory-integrated observational practices, examining the implications of Brewster’s auditory and multi-sensory engagements in the broader context of 19th-century scientific epistemology. By intersecting theoretical frameworks such as Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, Tim Ingold’s work on “phenomena of the weather-world” and Steven Feld’s “acoustemology” with archival methodologies informed by Jacques Derrida’s concept of “archive fever,” Frédérique Aït-Touati’s analysis of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, and Friedrich Kittler’s media theory, this work offers an analytical discourse of the archive as a technological apparatus. Key research questions guiding this dissertation include: How did Brewster and Audubon’s ornithological methods navigate tensions between scientific objectivity and subjectivity in the representation of birds? What do their methodologies reveal about the evolving notion of the scientific self and ethical engagement with avian species during the 19th century? How did contemporary technological advancements and cultural perceptions of the so-called “nature” shape their observational practices and understanding of human-animal-machine interactions? Critically, how did Brewster’s implementation of non-lethal observation methodologies and his meticulous documentation of ecological changes contribute to early notions of conservation and foreshadow contemporary multispecies approaches as articulated by scholars like Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing? By integrating frameworks from the history of art and sciences with critical theory across critical posthumanities, new materialisms, cultural geography, media, and sound studies, this interdisciplinary inquiry underscores the vital role urban environments play in conservation efforts. The study foregrounds how contemporary artistic practices and digital scholarship could not only contextualize Brewster’s legacy within the historical trajectory of ornithology but also advocate for the re-evaluation of ethical practices in current scientific disciplines. It underscores the urgency of fostering multispecies cohabitation and sustainable living practices in the Anthropocene (a contested term), thereby addressing broader ecological crises and redefining human-animal-machine relations. Engaging multispecies perspectives in multiple modalities offers insights for cultivating more ethical and sustainable ways of living on a damaged planet (Tsing 2017).
• Throwing Shade: Heatwaves, Emergency Preparedness, and Produced Risk
  Throwing Shade introduces a series of public cooling landscapes designed to offer relief both daily and in emergencies. Through considering networks of infrastructure and public acupuncture, the design proposes heat escapes situated within, and with the capacity to be leveraged by, the social infrastructure of New Orleans’ Seventh Ward neighborhood. Inspired by the routes of Second Line parades, held by Social, Aid, and Pleasure Club mutual aid organizations, the project focuses on movements and moments within the neighborhood—specifically, the library, park, highway underpass, and street medians. Each site has both distinct and connected histories, encompassing legacies of racism, resistance, and celebration, that are reflected in the design. Elements include infrastructure un-building, shade structures, tree plantings, de-paving, grading, water features, and solar energy capture. Through the throwing of shade, the project provides a framework for spatial memory and climatic justice.
• Reparative Planning in Theory and Practice: The Case of The Alliance for Community Transit - Los Angeles
  This thesis investigates the case of the Alliance for Community Transit Los Angeles as an example of reparative planning ‘in action’. Over the past few decades urban planning not only moved from a technocratic, topdown approach towards a more participatory one but also became more attuned with the harms and wrongs caused by the field in the past. There is a growing body of work on how repair and healing relate to planning theory, however there are few empirical case studies that examine how reparative planning translates into practice. Through this research I explore how a regional coalition of grassroots organizations advocate and plan for equitable development and transit justice in the Los Angeles area, specifically analyzing the tools and methods used by ACT-LA to better understand how these processes can be scaled up and implemented in planning practice to move the field towards a more reparative direction.
• Recombinant Urbanization: Agrarian–urban Landed Property and Uneven Development in India
  This article develops the concept of recombinant urbanization to show how agrarian landed property and land‐based caste/class relations shape the production of post‐liberalization urban real estate markets in India. I focus on two interrelated but differentiated agrarian property regimes in western Maharashtra to argue that real estate development is building on prior uneven agrarian land markets, which were themselves sociotechnically produced by colonial and postcolonial development politics. Through an examination of the organizational form of sugar cooperatives, which mediated agrarian capitalism in an earlier era, I track how these primary agricultural cooperatives are now being reorganized into real estate companies, sometimes with former sugarcane growers as company shareholders. The same caste‐based political and social capital that made sugar cooperatives possible in a capitalist agrarian society is now being leveraged by agrarian elites to ease their own and their constituents’ entry into an urbanizing economy. The concept of recombinant urbanization opens new methodological entryways to analyze the entangled agrarian and urban question in predominantly agrarian and late liberalizing societies.
• Congested Cities vs. Sprawl Makes You Fat: Unpacking the Health Effects of Planning Density
  Since the contemporary version of urban planning emerged in the nineteenth century, the field has been centrally concerned with the issue of density. Planners have variously tried to solve problems created by densities that were too high or too low, manipulate densities via regulations and infrastructure investments, and search for optimal density patterns to achieve social and environmental goals. Density has been of particular interest because, depending on the topic, different density levels and types appear to cause problems or create benefits, can typically be measured and compared with some precision, and are amenable to manipulation via the toolkit of urban and regional planning strategies. Here, Forsyth defines and classifies planning-related densities proposing that measured planning-relevant densities come in two types--discrete and proportional--both with area in the denominator of the calculation.
• Un Folklore Vitivinicola: Exploring Relationships between Indigeneity and Coloniality through High-Altitude Viticulture in Northwest Argentina
  Traversing the high-altitude landscapes of Northwest Argentina’s Calchaquí Valleys, Salta’s Ruta del Vino weaves through a palimpsest of indigenous, colonial, and viticultural histories, forming a series of extensive landscapes transformed by centuries of human inhabitation. Despite emerging from parallel histories, the viticulture of the region remains independent of indigenous precedents, continuing to draw upon processes and methods that emerged with the grapevine at the time of the region’s colonization while ignoring the local community’s spiritual relationships to the landscapes they occupy. These independent landscape practices have resulted in the fragmented territory that exists today, occupied by patches of productive agricultural lands, forests, and a series of disjointed riparian corridors threatened by unprecedented impacts of climate change. Un Folklore Vitivincola envisions an alternate model through which we can begin decolonizing viticulture, interweaving mono-cultural vineyards with landscape practices of the region to re-establish greater territorial and social integration.
• Los Angeles Dreams Itself a Post-Oil City
  Oil was never really new—not in Los Angeles—but its 1892 discovery in the city would fuel expansions of profit, policy, and population that would reshape the region and the world. Soon after, ecstatic boosters peddled dreams of tropical refuge while prospectors sold plots ripe with oil. The city ballooned amid the smog, between the palms, pipelines, derricks, and freeways. In 2022, a City Council vote sentenced all oil extraction within city limits to sunset by 2045. Los Angeles Dreams Itself a Post-Oil City imagines one of these thousands of extraction sites—the Murphy Drill Site (MDS)—as it finds a new life. Dreams for MDS are a place of contest: of energy transition fantasies and effaced environmental histories, of the post-industrial's picturesque remediation. It asks us to dream of a world where energy and its landscape are no longer sites for oppressive productivity, but a liberation from it.
• Urban Semiotics and Solastalgia
  This thesis explores the semiotic changes within the London borough of Hackney between 2011 and 2021 and their emotional impact on long-term residents. Analyzing three sites, the research highlights how semiotic transformations indicative of gentrification, urban renewal, and shifting immigration patterns can engender solastalgia, a type of psychological distress caused by alterations to one's familiar environment. The study introduces an 'Dictionary of Urban Semiotics' as a tool to underpin new forms of planning impact assessments and safeguard the aesthetic and cultural assets that foster residents' sense of belonging and solace. Advocating for planning assessments that protect the fabric of lower-income and working-class neighborhoods, this thesis underscores the necessity of balancing urban development with communities' emotional and cultural well-being, promoting a socially just and empathetic approach to urban change.
• Fluid Permanence: A Shotengai-Archive in Tokyo
  Today Tokyo stands as a “brand new city”. Buildings are regularly uprooted to make way for new buildings that completely wipe out traces of the previous structure. The idea of a propelling monument, as described by Aldo Rossi in Architecture of the City, is the means by which we can begin to rethink architecture’s relationship to time and history. This thesis questions the notion of linear time and deals with concepts of adaptation and modification. It explores propelling permanence that provides a past that can still be experienced and is attached with the present everyday reality. It asks the question: How can we construct an architecture that allows us to explore the intersection of past and present and to rethink the notion of active history? Can public space be repositories of collective memory and achieve propelling permanence in a city that is constantly changing? This thesis contains a plurality of functions in dialogue, bringing the informal next to the formal, the institution next to the everyday, and extending its influence beyond its architectural footprint to the larger urban context. The juxtaposition of two programs—the archive and the shotengai, and the crossing of the new with the existing construct an architecture that preserves, presents, and promotes historical and cultural resources without fossilizing them in time. The past and future are captured here in the present moment.
• Living on the Skyline: Rooftop Housing in Seoul, Hong Kong, and Taipei
  Rooftop housing is a living urban legacy, encapsulating the history of the city as well as the evolving needs of its people. This study explores rooftop housing in Seoul, Hong Kong, and Taipei. In all three cities, the rooftop houses are ubiquitous, interwoven throughout the city’s skyline. Although each city’s rooftop community has its own context, rooftop housing in these cities shares common qualities and attributes, having been formed through comparable development processes. In the past century, East Asian cities have undergone a period of spectacular development driven by economic progress, industrialization, and urbanization. Amidst a sea of skyscrapers and high-rises, informal settlements have sprung up to fill the void left by these buildings. These informal settlements have provided alternative housing options for low-income residents and migrant workers, though the living conditions in many of these informal settlements have been inadequate. Rooftop housing is a type of informal settlement built through a haphazard process in order to meet the needs of these emergent urban dwellers. Much have been written about the informal settlements, but the existing literature has not focused specifically on rooftop housing; this lack of attention led to a general oversight of the important issues pertaining to this specific community. This dissertation expands on the existing framework of informal settlements to comprehensively study rooftop housing as an independent urban phenomenon. Studying rooftop housing communities presents a unique set of challenges, including the physical location of such communities, complex legal issues, lack of existing research, and a general lack of information. To overcome these challenges, this research is a holistic study of academic literature, news articles, popular and social media, and a collection of first-hand accounts of tenants and landlords through questionnaires and interviews conducted on site, as well as physical assessments carried out as part of the fieldwork. The key finding of this dissertation is that rooftop housing has distinct characteristics compared to other types of informal settlements. Its legal status is ambiguous: These informal residences sit on top of formal housing, putting them in a gray area between formal and informal. Public perception and awareness of the subject issues is low, partly due to their simplistic treatment in the media. Some media platforms romanticize the positive aspects of rooftop housing while ignoring the harsher realities, while others focus solely on the inadequate living conditions. All of these elements contribute to a set of narratives that are often contradictory and ambiguous, sending mixed messages to the general public. The study also produces rooftop housing typologies by studying the location, neighborhood environment, building types, and housing configuration of various settlements. An assessment of the building materials and the state of maintenance evaluated the condition of the housing and the level of deterioration. Despite the unconventional shapes of the units and haphazard development processes, this study found that there was a certain order in these structures—a set of organic developments that produced certain recurring patterns. The physical typologies of rooftop housing are shaped by the residents and their evolving needs. Moreover, rooftop houses are occupied by generations of tenants and undergo a process of iterative development to meet the tenants’ changing needs. Ironically, the flimsy materials that contribute to the inadequacies of these shelters also make them versatile, spaces that can be modified to suit the evolving needs of their tenants. In this way, the rooftop housing typologies reveal the evolution of the needs of these emergent urban settlers. When viewed from the perspective of the tenants, the rooftop housing represents a temporary space, one that often persists largely due to convenient location, affordability, and a lack of viable alternatives. Although there is a wide range, the sizes and conditions of rooftop houses are quite livable and preferable to other types of informal settlements. Some of the issues and complaints concern insulation and accessibility, and in the case of Hong Kong, the size of the units, but overall, close to half of the surveyed tenants found their living conditions to be adequate. Compared to the other forms of inner-city informal housing—semi-basement housing or cage homes—rooftop housing is privileged, an extension of formal housing, entailing privacy, views, and convenient location. Ultimately, this dissertation is an attempt to formalize the discourse on rooftop housing by examining the subject matter through various perspectives. By establishing rooftop housing typologies that are shaped by changing demographics and social needs, this study contributes to building a framework for future studies on this subject. Finally, a side-by-side comparison of the three East Asian cities—Seoul, Hong Kong, and Taipei, and their unique history and relationship with rooftop housing—is an effort to capture an important part of the urban fabric.
• Counterpoints to Cultural Colonialism
  Counterpoints to Cultural Colonialism Formal notions of religion, education, and health were weapons against indigenous populations. The church, school, and hospital, as mechanisms of institutional control, place architecture at the forefront of cultural imperialism. Indigenous Kalinago people on the Eastern Caribbean Island of Dominica put up great physical and cultural resistance against dominant settlers for over four centuries. In 1903, in an effort to isolate the Kalinago people, their colonizers proposed to them their own reserve with clearly defined boundaries. As a result of this rigid delineation of space, approximately 3000 Kalinago descendants now settle on communally owned land in a remote and mountainous area on the island’s Atlantic coast – the Caribbean’s only remaining designated indigenous territory – where they practice Western constructed forms of Christianity, formal education, and health. This thesis questions architecture’s role in the portrayal of power by proposing counterpoints to the institutional frameworks that yield cultural colonialism of the Kalinago people. Kiosks dispersed in the Territory will perform as antagonists to the church, school and health center and serve as symbols of cultural reclamation. This confrontation emerges through the double-sidedness of culture - its materiality and non-materiality – as a coalesced form of storytelling. How does architecture define the non-materiality of the performing arts as a catalyst for physical form, while presenting and representing the Pre-Columbian material technique of basket weaving through varying tectonic relationships between structure and membrane? The coalescence of material and non-material culture produces the space to perform the story but also the space that performs the story.
• Stir-Fry Urbanism: Geography of Chinese Restaurants and the Spatial Politics of Race and Iden-tity in Boston’s Urban Development 1880 – 2020
  If you think of McDonald's as the icon of American food, America might taste more like General Tso Chicken than a Cheeseburger. There are currently over 45,000 Chinese restaurants in the U.S., more than all the McDonald's, KFC, Wendy's, and Taco Bells combined. However, the Chinese comprise less than 1.6% of the total U.S. population despite being present in this country as early as the 1850s. So what explains the ubiquity and popularity of Chinese foods despite the marginal size of the Chinese population in the U.S.? I examine the changing geography of Chinese restau-rants in Boston from 1880 to 2020 because they are the quintessential example of how diasporic identity is expressed, produced, and transformed in the built environment through constant negotia-tions and interactions across the color line. Using data from U.S. Census, Boston City Directory, and Yellow Pages, I map the changing geography of Chinese restaurants in Boston for the past 140 years to show that Chinese restaurants have not only functioned as essential means of econom-ic survival but also key spaces of cultural production and political mobilization that enabled the Chinese diaspora to negotiate their belonging and carve out spaces of living and livelihood in Bos-ton which in turn shaped the city into the multiethnic and multicultural metropolis that we know today.
• Priorities in building decarbonization: Accounting for total carbon and the time value of carbon in cost-benefit analyses of residential retrofits.
  Energy consumption in new construction is decreasing thanks to stricter building codes, but few codes limit emissions of existing buildings, particularly in existing homes. This study investigates the carbon- and cost-effectiveness of three decarbonization strategies in residential retrofits: electrifying buildings, upgrading envelopes, and adding renewable energy. Each strategy is further broken down into distinct retrofit interventions to guide homeowners and policymakers in prioritizing energy upgrades. Focusing on single-family homes built before 1980 in Houston, Los Angeles, and Chicago, the study analyzes homes in three cities with distinct climates and grid emission rates. Many studies on building performance upgrades have investigated the operational carbon reductions associated with different retrofit strategies, but embodied carbon, grid decarbonization, and the time value of carbon (TVC) are often omitted. And if those subjects are addressed, they are rarely analyzed all together. Using energy simulation and Life Cycle Assessment, we quantified the total carbon reduction and Life Cycle Cost associated with each retrofit, ranked the interventions accordingly, and calculated how the rankings would change if electricity grid emission rates decreased or if we accounted for the TVC. Assuming current grid emission rates, envelope retrofits tended to rank better than renewable energy and electrification upgrades in terms of carbon reduction per dollar spent. However, as anticipated emission rates decreased, electrification upgrades improved in rank, while renewable energy upgrades declined. Including the TVC generally caused retrofits with high initial carbon investments to drop in ranking. The results illustrate that considering total carbon and the TVC has important implications on decarbonization recommendations. Future work could explore policy tools to incentivize different retrofit approaches or propose an appropriate discount rate to more accurately assess the TVC.
• Permanent Impermanence with the House in Three Climates or Living and Perceiving with Material Temporal Cycles
  In a civilization of rapid temporality and supposed linear progress, a human-nature dichotomy proliferates from our ways of living all the way to the building wall section. As our temporal rhythm of the solar movement became diagrammed to a circular clock face and our architectural conceptions became built with anonymous materials, we have constructed a way of living in which the materials’ reactions to the environment became imperceptible. This silencing of the materials’ relationship to the environment and to the inhabitants of the building is an outcome of the well tempered environment, where interior spaces are insulated and severed from the exterior environmental conditions. This thesis proposes the antithesis to ocularcentric buildings and thermostatic lifestyles. Can perceiving materials and its ability to mediate the exterior climate allow for a building that creates an understanding of the environment through our inhabitation? By being able to perceive and interact with materials, a relationship with the building can be formed where inhabitants will live with and care for the materials through diurnal, seasonal, generational, and material timescales. The thermal fluctuations of diurnal and seasonal changes recalibrates material and spatial organization to consider thermally active surfaces and heat retention, which can render programs, as we currently understand it, secondary to gradients of thermal qualities. Thick materials resist obsolescence by generational and material changes, offering materials the ability to weather and have continual use, becoming a form of carbon sequestration. The building moves through three different climates for three generations of family, reorganizing and re-layering itself to adapt to the new environment, while continuously building a reciprocal relationship with those who live with it.