Mansa College of Education

Items

• From Hinterland to Hinterglobe
  From Hinterland to Hinterglobe investigates urbanization as a mode of generalized geographical organization in which agglomerations, although covering no more than 3% of the total land surface, are connected to the reconfiguration of most of the 70% of the planetary terrain currently used. Urbanization has always been characterized by a condition of biogeographical interdependency between areas of concentration of population and economic activity, and extensive areas of primary production, circulation and waste disposal. Historically confined at the regional scale, what has been conceptualized as a relationship between cities and their hinterlands, is becoming increasingly elusive to define under conditions of globalized urbanization: On the one hand, agglomerations densify, diffuse and expand into unprecedented, increasingly continuous zones. On the other hand, through a thickening web of transport infrastructures, they become increasingly interwoven with the operationalization of multiscalar, increasingly discontinuous and specialized agricultural, forestry, grazing, energy and mineral extraction zones. The later constitute the majority of the used part of the earth’s surface; yet they remain a ‘terra incognita’ to the study of urbanization. Although various strands of scholarship have highlighted the multiscalar impact of urbanization on shaping global patterns of socio-economic development and environmental transformation, the question of the hinterland has remained deeply inscribed within a set of persistent dichotomies: From a demographic perspective, the dichotomy between densely populated ‘urban’ agglomerations and low density ‘rural’ hinterlands; from a land-use perspective, between densely built-up ‘hardscapes’ of agglomerations and thinly equipped ‘softscapes’ of hinterlands; from an economic perspective, between agglomerations as economic generators, and hinterlands as void of economic performance; and from an ecological perspective, between agglomerations as ‘entropic black holes’, and hinterlands as producers of ecological surplus. Building upon the agenda of Planetary Urbanization, I critically revisit and deconstruct the concept of the hinterland aiming to transcend its associated dichotomies and limitations. I introduce the meta-categories of agglomeration landscapes and operational landscapes as landscapes of possible externalities associated with particular operations: Agglomeration landscapes are characterized by the presence of ‘urban’ and ‘clustering’ externalities; operational landscapes are mostly connected with ‘locational’ externalities. I investigate how these externalities emerge out of, or are prohibited by, particular compositions of asymmetrically distributed, but largely continuous, elements of geographical organization (elements of the natural environment, elements of infrastructural equipment, demographic factors, institutional and regulatory frameworks). Instead of trying to delineate the particular hinterlands of cities, or chart the flows that connect them, I suggest that all processes of urbanization include the activation of a multitude of both agglomeration landscapes and operational landscapes. These are brought together through complex webs of commodity chains, reflecting the advanced division of labor that characterizes industrial and postindustrial societies. According to this framework, agglomeration landscapes are presented as the main locations for operations of the secondary and tertiary sectors of the economy, while operational landscapes for operations of the primary sector of the economy. In this way, I claim that, while urban economies have been only associated with the former, the economies of urbanization should be also stretched to include the latter. In addition to introducing these novel categories, I also explore how they could be cartographically defined through the composite charting of the various geographical elements that constitute them. As a result, my research blends a theoretical apparatus, building upon theories of the social and ecological production of space under capitalism; with a cartographic and geostatistical apparatus, building upon a critical engagement with selected global geospatial datasets. Finally, as a means of exploring the capacities of these novel concepts, I attempt a historical overview of the development of urbanization as geographical organization over the past two centuries: I claim that as urbanization generalizes a condition of biogeographical interdependency, operational landscapes expand and specialize constructing a globalized shared assembly. Instrumentalized through global commodity chains, this planetary operational totality signals the shift from the universe of fragmented hinterlands, to the totality of the Hinterglobe: an alternative interpretation of the complete urbanization of the world.
• Public Water Works, or, Staying Cool at the Pool
  This project seeks to reimagine the municipal pool; reinforcing it as a vital urban space, and reprioritizing it in the climate crisis. As New England anticipates extreme heat, Boston must respond with creative infrastructures of cool outdoor spaces for its residents. Public Water Works projects a city / community approach to the public pool as a landscape. The pilot project, OUR POOL, is proposed in the Grove Hall neighborhood. With water levels reinterpreting tidal flows, OUR POOL encourages an active relationship between bodies of people and bodies of water. These basins work within a system of water that mists, falls, flows, drains, and pools. Through smaller modular pools, dynamic water movement, filtering vegetation, and seasonal rotation, Public Water Works demands participation in infrastructures of joy and of cooling to create new typologies of public space in our ever-warming city.
• Omnipresence: Machine Vision in the Adversarial City
  This work follows the trail of Omnipresence, a mobile program of public safety lighting in New York City. Unpacking its historical and design precedents, it argues that Omnipresence is just the latest component of an urban dispositive as old as the modern city itself: one that illustrates the connections between public lighting, organized policing, racial hierarchies, and bureaucracies for collecting spatial data about the city and its inhabitants. Part of a massive network of AI-driven surveillance technologies called the Domain Awareness System; this work fuses the digital tools of landscape architecture with machine learning models to reverse engineer Omnipresence, visualize how the Domain Awareness system sees and crafts the urban landscape, and propose design interventions that neutralize their harms and craft "Dark Commons." Finally, it strives to make all of the research, AI tools, and design interventions available to the public for use, development, and collaboration.
• Citing the Native Genius
  For over 120 years Americanization has tried to demean and erase Hawaiian language, culture, and architecture. In contemporary discourse, the vernacular architecture of Hawai'i is mostly referred to as ancient and vague. As with many indigenous cultures, western perspectives tend to fetishize or patronize the Hawaiian design aesthetic. Within the western hierarchy of knowledge is a systemic assumption that Hawaiian vernacular architecture cannot effectively serve as a precedent resource for contemporary architects. Those who do reference the original vernacular will often classify it as utilitarian or resourceful. Regardless of intent, this narrative takes design agency away from the people involved. As a corrective, a respectful use of vernacular domestic form would benefit designers that are struggling to connect with Hawai'i’s cultural and architectural traditions. Fluent communication through form requires analysis and classification. Mining the European gaze and influence out of revivalist publications, archeological surveys and historic images reveal unique characteristics of Hawaiian domestic space. Geometric quotation and symbolic referencing are the foundational instruments in applying the discrete components, form and organizational logic of the vernacular. The result is a design process that creates an amalgamation of decolonized form and contemporary technique. This residential project intends to revive Hawaii’s erased domestic experience by revisiting the precolonial vernacular style. The outcome suggests that when designers look to the original vernacular as a primary source to solve architectural problems, a culturally unique and deeply symbolic space can emerge from the process.
• Surviving Survival: Landscape Futures for Climate Catastrophe
  This thesis advocates for landscape architecture to mitigate risk and plan for adaptation to catastrophic climate events. It develops an adaptive response and critique of Tacloban, the Philippines, as it responded to Typhoon Yolanda in 2013. As government authorities displaced populations from places of risk, the relocation burden heavily fell on informal coastal settlers. The process of relocating inland reinforced injustice by stripping them of their identity and livelihood. This design thesis proposes landscape interventions to enable a more culturally relevant and ecologically informed path toward adaptation. The project explores landscape approaches to embed income-generating agriculture and fishing activities in green infrastructure systems that alleviate calamity. The design of social spaces within productive communal landscapes strengthens the community's identity despite the chaotic resettlement histories. Furthermore, the proposed flexible spatial usage of the existing engineered solutions honors the local population's agency. After surviving a natural disaster, people are facing considerable difficulties to survive the post-disaster conditions. Landscape architecture is responsible for serving as a tool for long-term recovery and reconstruction from natural disasters, both physically and psychologically.
• Designing Green Walls: An Early-Design Framework to Estimate the Cooling Impact of Indirect Green Walls on Buildings in Six Different Climates
  Green walls are a component of urban green infrastructure and if designed properly, require only moderate human intervention and maintenance during their lifespans (Cameron, Taylor, & Emmett, 2014). The benefits of green walls are numerous for both building and urban scales. Green walls reduce building heat gain by providing shade (Ip, Lam, & Miller, 2010) and increasing surface albedo (Holm, 1989). They offer thermal insulation for buildings by acting as wind screens and cavity walls (Susorova, Azimi, & Stephens, 2014) and improve indoor air quality by trapping airborne pollutants (Ottelé, van Bohemen, & Fraaij, 2010). Furthermore, they negate the urban heat island effect through solar radiation interception and transpiration (McPherson, Nowak, & Rowntree, 1994). Green walls are also an effective solution for storm water management, provide ecosystem services, and improve the quality of human life (Meier, 1990). A literature review from this field highlighted three major problems: (a) lack of an effective method for making research findings useful to practitioners, (b) limited understanding of the morphological and biophysical characteristics of vines, and (c) lack of a standardized research methodology across the field. The objective of this research is to provide practitioners with a series of matrices to easily and quickly evaluate the cooling efficacy of indirect green walls during the early phase of a project. These matrices account for the biophysical traits of the plants used, canopy geometry, and environmental variables for six climatic scenarios. The climate scenarios are based on summer conditions (e.g., ambient temperatures, precipitation, and relative humidity) and are broken down into the following climates: cool and humid, cool and dry, warm and humid, warm and dry, hot and humid, and hot and dry. Special attention is given to plant biophysics and performance evaluation methods used in fields such as biophysical ecology and agronomy. The cooling effect of green walls is broken down into two major components: transpiration (W/m^2) and solar radiation interception, or shading (W/m^2). A modified version of the FAO 56 method was used to evaluate the cooling power produced. FAO 56 is a method developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to estimate the transpiration rate of crop fields. Additionally, a library of stomatal resistances for 97 vine species expanding through 13 countries was created from measurements from existing field studies. Variables impacting the transpiration rate were reviewed and possible green wall designs corresponding with the maximum cooling power for each climate condition were investigated. The results show that canopies with a resistance of lower than 100 s/m, a height of 3 to 6 m, and Leaf Area Index (LAI) of 3 or larger produce the maximum possible cooling power. Taking into account the aforementioned design considerations (LAI and height), and average stomatal resistance, it is estimated that the largest cooling power (300 W/m^2) corresponds with the hot and dry climate. The smallest cooling power (50 W/m^2) corresponds with the cool and dry climate. Similarly, variables impacting the shading effect of indirect green walls are reviewed. A technique for estimating the extinction coefficient of a canopy by combing empirical and statistical methods is introduced. The predicted solar interception calculations show good agreement with field study measurements, with only ±10% margins of error. Three sets of matrices for designers are introduced. The first two sets provide designers with the cooling power values (W/m^2) of various green wall designs in six climatic scenarios through transpiration and solar radiation reduction. These values show good agreement with the findings of other studies. The results show an average summer cooling power of 42 W/m^2 for the cool and dry climate and 176 W/m^2 for the hot and dry climate. These two sets of matrices are intended to provide designers with back-of-the-envelope estimations of the cooling power of green walls during the early design phase of a project. The last set of matrices provides designers with the cooling effects of green walls through transpiration and solar radiation interception as a percentage of total incident solar radiation received by the canopy in each climatic scenario. The cooling power from transpiration accounts for 20% to 30% of the cooling effect of green walls for cool and dry, cool and humid, and warm and humid climates. The contribution from transpiration increases to 48% for warm and dry climates, and 52% for hot and humid climates. The largest contribution from transpiration occurs in hot and dry climates (99%) due to the oasis effect. For almost all climates, the cooling effect of solar radiation interception was approximately 70%, 80%, and 90% for Leaf Area Indices of 3, 4, and 5, respectively. The results show that the total cooling power of green walls exceeds 100% for all climates. The canopy not only provides shading, but also acts as a heat sink by storing solar radiation energy in water and releasing it to the environment as vapor via latent heat transfer. The largest cooling power values correspond with the hot climate, followed by the warm and cool climates. The percentage of cooling power from transpiration in dry climates is larger than that in humid climates. The exception is the cool and dry climate. This exception is due to the high canopy resistance associated with the cool and dry climate.
• Plantation Futures: Foregrounding Lost Narratives
  Oak Alley Plantation, located in Louisiana, is preserved as a master narrative: a cultural heritage landscape reflecting the values and cultures of the Antebellum era. Reconstructed cabins in the rear of the property stand as the only recognition and acknowledgment of the forged Black landscapes used for refuge, joy, and resistance. The thesis critically engages in the plantation as a landscape system of white supremacy that linked the exploitation of racialized bodies and fertile lands to commodities. Moments for accountability and reparations are conceived, such as the Citizen Assembly, which holds industry and systems of dispossession to account through new forms of democratic processes and landscape-based evidence collection. Through the layering of archival narratives, poetry, literature, and drawing, Black ecologies emerge on site, foregrounding lost narratives within the plantation. These narratives envision radically different futures, where interspecies kinship and empathy surface as new ecologies that point to new Black futurities.
• Between Historicism and Modernization: Co-operative Village for Future-proof Printing District in Seoul
  This study begins with an awareness of the dilemmas encountered during rapid social changes in Seoul, South Korea from the 20th century to the present. The question is why the methods of “urban improvement” in Korean cities, especially Seoul, have become entrenched in the dichotomy of Historicism and Modernization. This question can be answered by examining the direction in which urban structures have been renovated from existing medieval city structures during the Japanese colonial period, the Korean War, and the military regime era, and what that signifies. This study argues that the conventional development approach, seeing improvement and development as synonymous, has led to the creation of urban redevelopment methods accompanied by complete demolition. However, issues such as immigration problems and the deprivation of the right to survival caused by demolition have been presented as solutions centered around the keyword “preservation” since the 2010s. This dichotomy between development and preservation has been a major obstacle to arriving at design proposals for how cities can be truly regenerated. Furthermore, this study extends its focus to the Euljiro and Sewoon District, which have been subject to continuous and varied discussions over the past two decades, particularly from the first half of the 21st century to the present. The reason for concentrating on this area is that it succinctly demonstrates the dichotomous debate on “improvement” of Korean cities discussed earlier. Therefore, by considering this area as a test bed, it is believed that a powerful alternative beyond the dichotomous approach of Historicism and Modernization can be proposed. This study examines how the morphology of the city has been structured through overlapping urban fabrics from different periods and identifies what architectural typologies have taken place in the city through this process. The spatial information obtained from this investigation serves as a basis for proposing alternative urban improvement methods beyond the dichotomy of Historicism and Modernization. Furthermore, the spatial scope of applying design is determined based on the research, and among these sectors, two are selected to propose urban, institutional, and architectural solutions. Finally, as Euljiro and Sewoon Districts typify the framework of historical changes experienced not only by Seoul but also by different cities in South Korea, this study aims to argue that the design framework can be applied to other areas of Seoul with similar characteristics as well.
• The Artist-Developer: A case study of impact through art-centered community development in neighborhoods of color.
  In this dissertation, I explore the community development work of three prominent African American artists who have used arts-based real estate development to create positive change in their neighborhoods. Through a multiple case study approach, I investigate the real estate, design, and artistic actions that led to the creation of these projects and if there were social benefits that followed. These benefits include social cohesion, adherence to social health determinants, minimization of displacement, and the perception of a strong cultural identity for each neighborhood. By comparing the work of all three artists, I gain insights from community partners, residents, and those within the organizations. The first chapter of my dissertation highlights the importance of arts in city and neighborhood development and government policies to aid vulnerable communities. The second chapter reviews scholarly literature on the relationship between artists, neighborhood change, and development. In the third chapter, I discuss my research methods and evaluate the benefits and limitations of the case study approach. Chapter four investigates each artist and their organization, exploring their creative practices, the motivations behind their projects, and the real estate actions that made them possible. I examine neighborhood dynamics and the perceived impacts of these projects, discussing the opportunities and challenges they present. In the fifth chapter, I critically analyze the effects of these projects. In the final chapter, I draw conclusions and highlight areas for further research. While these arts-based development projects have positively impacted their neighborhoods, it is essential to note the challenges of maintaining an arts-led community organization. Ultimately, these projects cannot please everyone, but their benefits are far reaching including improved social cohesion and cultural preservation.
• Mobility Oriented Design: The Case for Miami’s Metrorail
  Mostafavi, M., Waldheim, C. & Keenan, J.M. (2018). Mobility Oriented Design: The Case for Miami’s Metrorail. Cambridge, MA.: Office for Urbanization, Harvard Graduate School of Design.
• Suburban Exaptation: Densification Without Demolition
  Wood framing, widely available and easy to assemble, has come to embody the ideal of a modular architectural system but not the image. Despite this inherent ability to enable change, its rigid implementation through the single family type has created an urban monoculture which encompasses two thirds of the Canadian population. As zoning rules are loosened to promote the creation of “missing middle” density housing, the greatest barrier to accommodating this need has become the suburban house itself. Whether through lot splitting, infills, or property aggregation, these single family communities can be densified, but only at the expense of premature demolition. Their replacements, constructed using the same techniques as the homes they replace, call into question the misappropriation of wood framing’s flexibility. By viewing these existing homes not as barriers to densification but as the means for its rapid implementation, this thesis approaches wood framing as a modular system in place of its current use as a disposable commodity, embedding the opportunity for density within the single family house. Leveraging the similarities between low and high density housing types in Calgary, one of Canada’s most suburban and fastest growing cities, the proposal seeks to enable the densification of the Calgarian suburbs without demolition, subverting existing zoning and visual approaches in individually subtle but exponentially impactful ways.
• Naming Expeditor: Reimagining Institutional Naming System at Harvard
  The "Naming Expeditor" project aims to demystify the institutional process and principles of naming, including denaming and renaming, at Harvard University. Through research on historical archives and contemporary testimonies, the project seeks to understand the meaning-constructive nature of naming as a dynamic and iterative device in the public realm. By integrating theories and practices from the realms of art and activism, the project explores alternative channels, forms, and tools to reimagine a collective naming process and system that amplifies community voices with increased awareness, democracy, and participation. The project's final deliverable contains an image essay analyzing the current institutional naming system at Harvard and proposing the niche and strategies of an agency named "Naming Expeditor", as well as a live performance, aiming to display the power behind the texts in the existing institutional naming system, and evoke public discussion and actions in the broader community.
• The Trojan Cinema: A Confabulation of AlKhayam
  In 1956, the premier of the film, Helen of Troy, took place in the newly finished building complex of Al Khayam; a 1,500 seat cinema engulfed by a hotel located in Baghdad, Iraq. The opening of the cinema happened to fall at a time where the tale based film had just recently come out, it was perhaps an innocent choice that fortuitously predicted the trojan horse-like quality of the architectural vessel. The theater’s witnessing of and adaptation to political events has revealed its double consciousness; it at once houses a spectacle and is one itself. “To be afflicted with confabulation is to be of two minds, to be in two places at once, to experience, counterfactually, simultaneous irreconcilable truths.” Paul Emmons and Luc Phinney in Confabulation: Storytelling and Architecture. The Trojan Cinema inverts the use of architecture as a weapon or a trope in an attempt to create a confabulated place of positive suspension. Architecture … The Trojan Cinema, was simultaneously weaponized and destroyed. And in both cases, through the gift of giving, or a given gift. By examining and utilizing the relationship between storytelling/myth and the sustainment of place/architecture, this project attempts to create a cinema of convalescence; a space of celebration of the abject through incantation. The oscillating confabulated space is presented through analogical layering, creating and engendering an epic of sailing shadows.
• Identities of Past and Present: Conservation and its Consequences
  This thesis explores the concept of “Radical Indigenism,” outlined by Julia Watson, as a critique of traditional notions of cultural heritage and preservation in landscape architecture. To investigate this concept, the project is situated in a reflooded area within the Mesopotamian Marshes called Chibayish. It creates an agricultural network that designs an interconnected cultural system enabling productive practices to support the native Marsh Arab community known as the Ma’dan. The project imagines an alternative retooling of flows in the landscape, where it participates in the conception of a new community network. It advocates for the projective potentials of bottom-up productive technologies positioning indigenous Ma’dan philosophies within new, hybridized infrastructures. The sites act as infrastructural prototypes that can meaningfully shape the ground for water and soil remediation, plant distribution, and knowledge production. More broadly, the project explores the dichotomies of preserving cultural landscapes and identities with present social and climatic pressures.
• Extracting Reparative Power: redistributing power in post-mining transition
  This thesis explores landscape as a medium for ecological reparation in the energy transition by pairing renewable energy infrastructure with regenerative agriculture. The project's goal is to visualize the reorganization of energy infrastructure through Just Transition, with an emphasis on agroecology, the welfare of vulnerable communities, and post-mining intervention. It is an inquiry into the efficacy of landscape architects in the contemporary challenges of the energy transition. First, the project explores how Thailand’s fossil fuel ‘empire’ is depleting, triggering geopolitical issues, and contributing to climate change. Second, it models Thailand’s fundamental infrastructure shift to renewable energy, exploring the potential placements, connections, and storage capabilities. Third, it deploys bottom-up, decentralization, and permaculture strategies to redistribute electrical and socioeconomic power. Finally, it imagines how Mae Moh Lignite Mine in Lampang, Thailand, could terraform into Pump Storage Hydropwer (PSH) through lignite extraction and serve as the region’s battery, critical to the intermittent renewable system.
• Interlacing Latent Features: Synthesis of Past and Present in Architectural Design through Artificial Intelligence in a Case Study of Japanese Houses
  Machine Learning (ML) algorithms have shown great promise for expanding the conventional limits of human perception, thereby augmenting the architect's imagination and design agency. This thesis extrapolates global implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in architecture that challenge the trends of globalization and standardization. Through case studies, an ML-enhanced approach is demonstrated, integrating contemporary Japanese houses with elements of historical context and cultural heritage. Initially, datasets of their plan and façade images are scraped from the internet, curated, and annotated with Japan's six latest historical periods. These datasets are employed to train an image classification model. This model quantitatively predicts the likelihood of the dataset houses belonging to each historical period. Subsequently, these datasets are utilized to fine-tune Stable Diffusion with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), synthesizing past and present styles in response to specific period prompts. Images generated by the fine-tuned model, which offer design suggestions, are dissected into layers representing different architectural elements. These elements, interpreted by me, are restructured into a three-dimensional model to construct novel residential typologies learned from both historical and contemporary styles. This case-study intervention suggests the potential of AI application in architectural design to promote cultural diversity, sustainability, and the continuity and enrichment of design heritage.
• Red Star Rising: The Coverage of Mikhail Gorbachev by U.S. Network Television, 1984-86
  My dissertation presents a case study of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's coverage by U.S. television news. This work aims to increase the current understanding of both the effect of politicians on the media, and the effect of the press on policy making. My dissertation addresses three main questions. First, how did Gorbachev cultivate positive media coverage from the American press? Second, what kind of coverage did the American media give Gorbachev? Third, did the press coverage have an effect on U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union? I limited my examination to Gorbachev's first two years in power, when I theorized that the effect of the media would be greatest, and to television news because it is the single largest source of news for the American citizenry. I performed a content analysis of nearly 900 network evening news reports on Gorbachev, 150 of which I viewed on tape, and interviewed journalists, policy makers and academics--both in the United States and Soviet Union-about Gorbachev's tactics and their effect. I found that Gorbachev used the media strategically to further his policy goals. Even before he assumed the office of General Secretary of the Communist Party, Gorbachev began a deliberate campaign to solicit positive public opinion at home and in the West. Although Gorbachev was continually introducing new tactics during the time period of this study, not everything that he did was "strategic" in nature -that is to say, not everything Gorbachev did to cultivate press coverage created an effect or impression above and beyond the content of his message. In 1984 and 1985, Gorbachev's cultivation of media coverage was far more strategic than in 1986. Gorbachev's emphasis on image and his attraction of positive press coverage affected both the style and substance of Soviet-American relations. "It [the press] has an effect on policy," as one Reagan administration official put it·. The Reagan administration responded to Gorbachev by trying to neutralize Gorbachev's popularity. This response included policy actions, such as the renewed effort at arms control negotiations which later led to a treaty on intermediate range nuclear weapons. But the President also sought to match Gorbachev's momentum stylistically in what the networks termed "the battle for world public opinion."
• Deconstructing a Landscape Out-of-Place: the Afterlife of Rural Hollowing
  This thesis explores declining villages in the process towards rural hollowing. Rural hollowing, this phenomenon exhibits increasingly in depopulating rural settlements, results from fading infrastructural services, disintegrating population structure, and incremental land abandonment. The project emphasizes against the current capitalist-oriented tourism scheme and proposes landscape architecture as a medium to remediate the disintegrating village by recognizing these rural villages’ declining reality: by reintegrating its public service infrastructure and formulating a sustainable farming economy. This thesis looks at a village in rural Fujian, China and explores landscape architecture’s agency in rebuilding abandoned rural spaces in reformulating village composition and creating a place for a community that is smaller but in a life that is still rich in culture.
• John Andrews's Laconic Legacy
  John Hamilton Andrews (1933–) is the quintessential knockabout Australian; terse and straight-forward, his affable personality won him the respect of his American peers and mentors, but his laconic sensibility would ultimately prove a liability later in his career. His brevity in publication as well as a reluctance to theorize or historicize his work would frustrate later attempts to situate his career and projects within American modernist or brutalist narratives. This thesis places the importance of communication—how design is spoken, drawn, performed, and published—at its core: how does a given architect communicate her/his work and how do those efforts impact the reception of the architect and the architect’s oeuvre? The thesis examines Andrews’s work through several modes of communication by cataloging and analyzing diagrams and drawings, published writings, interviews, and audiovisual recordings produced by Andrews’s practice between 1962 and 1982. These materials serve as valuable evidence in understanding the rapid early success of the practice and the practice’s transition, between the years 1964 and 1969, from elaborately rendered sections to easily comprehensible sectional diagrams—an innovation in visual communication which prefigured a later trend towards diagram architecture. The legible section diagram, in the built form of Gund Hall (1968–1972), is Andrews’s most important contribution to the Harvard Graduate School of Design; a contribution that has since been overlooked in part because of its poor reception upon completion, but also due to Andrews’s reluctance to engage in the forms of communication necessary to sustain an understanding and reception of his work. Communication explains both his early success and his difficult legacy.
• The Construction of an Image
  This thesis investigates the agency of the photograph and the passage of time to imagine the future life of a building. The project adopts a reflexive image-based method that is simultaneously contingent on the past and projective of a future that demands the participation of the audience’s imagination. The method prioritizes narrative and storytelling, offering a new way of comprehending and registering the life of a building over a longer period of time. Photographic realism is utilized as part of this approach, constructing fictional archives of the past and future that coexist with and register one another.
• Go Listen to the Mountain: Propagating the Sacred from 'Holler to Hilltop
  Go Listen to the Mountain is a journey intended to enliven in people dormant sacred landscape relationships that are critical for successful ecological stewardship. Located in North Carolina’s Appalachian Mountains, it proposes a seven-stage walking trail that uses its varied topographical conditions to cultivate and distribute diverse communities of regionally significant plants. The sites are also choreographed to provide a cyclical energetic experience designed to iteratively weave new sacred human-landscape relationships by people’s movement through the seven stages, as well as their participation in a three-part ritual at each: the cultivation, preparation, and consumption of that specific plant community. As people and plants go forth beyond the trail, they seed the world with the meanings and relationships generated upon it.
• Halftone Dissonance
  This thesis aims to induce a public conversation in the public sphere. The COVID-19 pandemic public health policies and social isolation altered the way people interact, while consumer culture has increased and shifted. We are continuously exposed to massive amounts of information that can be easily manipulated. Our thesis installation presents critical figures that can transform our day-to-day life; however, it is up to the viewer on which portrait they align with. As designers, we want to expose two opposing points of view on a controversial topic and bring it to the public sphere following Chantal Mouffeís writings in Art as an Agnostic Intervention in Public Space1, in which public spaces are always plural. Our installation is an intervention in a pluralistic public space. Rather than an agnostic approach, our project translates controversial topics into complex geometry. The goal is to identify a problem and situate our specific intervention to address that issue. The medium is an installation that was created with rigorous amounts of digital manipulation through the 3D plane and CNCing production methods. The two sides of the board juxtapose Governer Kochul and the real estate mogul Stephen M. Ross and their stances on the 421A Tax Abatement law about the post-pandemic world, where the socioeconomic disparity also refers to the post-pandemic world is accelerated at an unprecedented pace (source: IMF). Our intervention aims to enact a public conversation and inform the public about the 421A policy. We let the viewers of our project decide which side they are supporting through the daytime and nighttime readings. During the day, the installation will reveal itself as an obscured image of Governer Kochul, while the nighttime reading will reveal an obscured image of Stephen M. Ross. An informative and interactive website accompanies the installation.
• Governing the night-time city: The rise of night mayors as a new form of urban governance after dark
  Keywords urban governance, planning, urban night, nightlife, night mayor
• Climate Change, Aging, and Well-being: How Residential Setting Matters.
  How do older people’s living environments influence their vulnerabilities to climate change? Much has been written about the physiological consequences of climate change for older individuals, particularly the dangers of increased incidence of severe heat. Less is known about how older people’s residential settings moderate their exposure to climate stressors, their particular sensitivities to the effects of climate change, or their capacities to respond to extreme events or adapt to long-term environmental changes. Drawing on literature in English, with a focus on work relevant to the United States, we examine how the housing, neighborhood, and urban or rural contexts in which older people live shape their experiences of climate change, moderating their exposure to risks related to climate change, sensitivity to those events and trends, and their capacities to adapt and recover. Older people face multiple life changes, making prioritizing climate readiness more challenging. They are also diverse, with different vulnerabilities and perceptions of risks and the ability to manage them. This paper lays out an agenda where additional research can inform policy and planning efforts aimed at reducing older individuals’ risk and building the capacity to adapt to climate change. The agenda includes understanding specific vulnerabilities and how older people and their housing providers are already responding.
• Land Form Architecture: Bridging the Narrative of Korean Urbanism
  Korea, as compact as one could imagine, is dominated by housing complexes that resemble factories of living cells. These literal house-building machines constructed through re-useable concrete formwork are endlessly repeated that one is hardly able to identify which house belongs to whom. Further, infinitely duplicated housing-machines are in the process of construction waiting to operate every day. In the absence of other architectural agendas, economical and functional efficiency is the only algorithm that defines the characteristics of apartments. Relentless homogeneity of urban fabrics generates monotonous scenery of daily life and community networks are severed by their distribution inside strictly partitioned structural frames. While the sole purpose of the housing complex is the production of more housing, in effect it imposes an ideology of extreme isolation, disconnection, and discretization by its masterplan, circulations, forms, and construction methods altogether. The question becomes how to leverage the existing socio-economic infrastructure and its architectural typologies to roduce different social and spatial outcomes. The intellectual tradition of horizontality shows us a possible for opportunities of the integration. When the typical apartment complexes are regularized stacks of living cells, horizontality would allow communal, cultural, and social programs to penetrate, stitch, and interact with the existing repeated blocks. By doing so, programmatic coherence and collision would provide new types of relationship within the larger urban landscape, and between people and the built environment. This thesis investigates on the built environment of contemporary society in Korea, and proposes a new typology driven by the idea of ‘horizontality.’ By deconstructing and re-formulating the relationship between form and program, the new prototype of Korean cultural park will suggest a new possibility of urban life in Korea.