Mansa College of Education

Items

• Cuisine & Empire: Multi-Species Care on the American Farm
  On the American Farm, Empire reigns. A power structure that encompasses an ahistorical spatial totality, it creates the conditions for the control of human life and nature. Empire is also a place. It is located in McLean County, Illinois, the top producer of corn in the United States. This corn, no. 2 yellow dent, drives our cuisine, yet we eat almost none of it. Cuisine & Empire intersect in the farm as a problem of land. Cuisine & Empire: A Framework for Multi-Species Care on the American Farm re-grounds landscape architecture in agrarian practices. By reconceiving the land ordinance, it counters the scalable practices of Empire that reduce multi-species life to yields and quotas. Using non-scalable farm ecologies, infrastructures, economies, and land practices, Cuisine & Empire re-assembles food cultivation and culture.
• Little 2. Little 4. Little 6. Little 11.
  Living alone as a female is appealing, but also difficult. Women have been fighting for “a room of one’s own” for a long time. From the Bororo village Kejara to the Spinster’s House gupouk in the South East Asia, narratives of female communes in the history used to be studied as a diagram in the matriarchal society, a refuge from the world of inequality, or an asylum for outcasts in the counterculture. The collective construction of these utopian residences has transcended both time and culture, piecing together a palimpsest of the untold feminine space. Little 2/4/6/11 is designed as a diagram of flexible dwelling system, a female commune of soloing and caring in the post-marriage and aging society. Today, the increasing number of single women at all ages has indicated the alternation of social structures and gender identities in China. The creation of a home for single women is a response to the evolving gender identity of female in the Chinese patriarchal culture. This new housing system is established on the small-scale grouping of female alliance, which attempts to find a balance between individuality and collectivity in co-living. On the one hand, it respects the individual space of female and their independency; on the other hand, it explores the potential of female alliance and imagines a communal relationship between the caregivers and the vulnerable groups. The shared housing offers individuals a choice of living in united cohorts, instead of conforming to the social expectation of family building. It tells another story of the little women.
• Dear GSD
  My motivation for writing this thesis is my passion for using front-end design techniques to construct social justice in the digital domain and find solutions for particular design problems. This thesis proposes a digital platform to customize posters as a new means of communication in the Harvard GSD virtual community. To make visible the hidden reality to the public, it extracts underlying rules and design languages from significant poster designs at GSD before the pandemic. These rules and conventions are translated into visual patterns in a system for potential customization. The thesis demonstrates how to use this system to explore how students and the administration communicate without public space under specific circumstances and design rules of posters. It takes examples from Strike Poster Workshop and other student organizations at GSD and embeds their conventions and components to illustrate an implementation of such a system. In the past decades, printing has become the most powerful tool to deliver messages in the public realm while it helps students build a sense of belonging to GSD. Every year, the administration announces public programs by making posters in the Gund Hall. These posters follow specific rules of the layout with icons of GSD, which give the audience a sense of belonging to the school community while student groups work in a similar way. The abstract texts and shapes on the paper successfully assemble both students and faculty in the public space and reflect the diverse culture of GSD in the long term. At the beginning of the 2021 Spring semester, posters of public programs were sent to students as Gund hall was shut down temporarily. Due to the pandemic, the remote studies disassembled the community. However, the pandemic is not the only reason students lose their sense of belonging to the school. The lack of transparency in the conversations between students and the administration reveals institutional autocracy over time. The new communication platform enables students to communicate with the administration by making their posters for protests, public events, and fearless expressions. Users could access the platform through the link https://deargsd.net/.
• Care Agency: A 10-year choreography of architectural repair
  “El mundo que queremos es uno donde quepan muchos mundos.” / “The world we want is one where many worlds fit.” -Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional “What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities.” -Ruth Wilson Gilmore Our thesis is a dispatch from a possible future. A worldwide moratorium on resource extraction sets the scene for the establishment of a Care Agency, a state-administered public platform that provides free and networked care services in Mexico City. Included in those services is the repair of the built environment.The public solicits care services through Requests For Care (RFCs), a vehicle for the expansion of authorship in spatial design. Here, ‘repair’ does not seek to restore past conditions, but adapts to future ones. It is a transformative act of care. In this future, architects are care workers, part of a team of public servants in the Care Agency. This agency recognizes ‘waste’ as an unstable and contrived category as well as a fertile resource, and through the creative labor of collaborators, seeks to re-distribute and work with the abundance present in the urban context. In our imagined roles as design fellows within the Care Agency, we develop “patchwork architecture,” a framework and methodology wherein all design is care, repair, maintenance and reuse. We share this methodology through three case study sites, each of which had been deemed ‘waste’ by a different value system and thus invite different modes of spatial care: an aging and unprofitable stadium, a topography-defying mansion spaceframe, and a sinking vacant low-rise building. Our dispatch takes form as a series of narratives weaving across time and voices, from sistered beams that share loads, to sistered networks of mutual support with indigenous roots, telling a story of collective care interventions that undo that waste.
• An Invitation to Walk within Walls: A Salt Shed
  Across New York City lie mountains of road salt brought to its shores from mines as far as Tarapacá, Chile. These migrant minerals spend most of their days in sheds across the five boroughs until they are dispersed atop the city’s grid in anticipation of inclement weather. Before the salt disappears snow and ice though, salt mountains are themselves disappeared by a maintenance infrastructure that keeps them inaccessible to the public. “Out of view, they die a second death,” as Michael Jakob writes; road salt, in fact, is rendered visible only where it is absent—in the piles of snow and patches of ice that accumulate on the asphalt. An Invitation to Walk within Walls calls attention to the city’s mountains of rock salt by revisiting a salt shed on Pier 52 that was demolished in 2016 amidst the gentrification of the Meatpacking District. As opposed to the sanitized, idyllic visions of New York City’s waterfronts where traces of industry allude to a nostalgic heritage, this project fuses industry and leisure, enabling a broad public to circulate within the shed’s skin. In this surface tangent where walls contain salt and people, visitors behold shed’s decaying, rusting, and leaking, admire salt’s gradual consumption of the building, and witness the maintenance work upon which the city rests. On a site where disappearance is experienced in more ways than one, this intervention makes salt unmistakably present and invites it to escape, and eventually conquer its shed.
• Autocriticism: Architect-neurosis
  Autocriticism challenges normative boundaries and meanings of ‘self’. This thesis reviews primitive self-perspectives that verge on singularity between environment and self, suggesting a certain reciprocity between self-ideation and community-realizations. The theoretical construction is narrativized in script one: “two poets on the meaning of autocriticism”. The dialogue incorporates frameworks of psychoanalysis and contemporaneity in literary criticism. Within it, two poets contextualize criticism “-in house, today”, effectively reversing the plane of projections and introjections. The phenomena of criticism becoming no-criticism is demonstrated “-in house” for the reviewers of this M. Arch thesis, in the second script: “two analysts on architect-neurosis”. As a set, the two scripts foreground three “viewings” of ‘self’ that each actualize its own art of subjectivity: Designer’s Block on Kirkland street, Resident’s Safe over Cambridge-Somerville, and Students’ Sandbox for Blackstone Steam Plant. Individually, the projects cultivate different forms of community-realization at respective sites, but collectively, they produce a patterned body that reflects the voyeur’s understanding of the relative environment.
• Reciprocal Optimism: Projecting Terrestrial Analogues
  Human intervention is going extraterrestrial, and landscape architecture is going with it. This thesis positions landscape architecture as essential to taking measure of places yet to be touched in the Anthropocene, now only experienced remotely. As a provocation, this thesis speculates on outer space as a subject for how to design for a future with optimism. The design project is an Interplanetary Expo, promoting cooperation between nations through transparency and participation in decision-making for interplanetary interventions. Instead of abstract policy, this project offers a sublime confrontation with the analog landscape of potential intervention. The goals of this event are not just to demonstrate a novel future, but to make visible extractive processes and outcomes, and to convene a new public tasked with one of the most pressing queries of our time: the future bounds of human intervention. By engaging in the Exposition as a typology deeply embedded in the field’s past, this project strives to look towards the future and inspire hope.
• How Are 'We' Living? Reevaluating the Chicago Boulevard System
  At its inception, the Chicago Boulevard System was heralded a civic “success” as it connected the city through a “magnificent chain of parks and parkways,” and provided ample space for carriage transportation and leisure activities for a certain class of Chicago’s residents. But what have we today? Or in the words of notable planner Daniel H. Burnham, “How are we living?” This thesis explores what are the Chicago Boulevard Systems’ past, current, and future purposes as a connection infrastructure within the city. A dive into archival documents, along with GIS data and a set of semi-structured interviews with users of the boulevard and local nonprofit organizations in the adjacent community areas, allows us to address the boulevard’s current underutilization, the city’s evolving social-economic and racial color lines, and propose a process-inclusionary framework that connects and supports neighborhood and city constituents at both the macro and microscales of the city. The resulting propositions generated during this process suggest that while the city of Chicago intends to fund and distribute resources unto the boulevard, through programs like the ‘Open Boulevards’ pilot, a productive mechanism for the control of this funding must be established with the explicit involvement of existing neighborhood representatives. In an attempt to reframe this program's generative potential, two sections of the boulevard have been examined. Local non-profits from the community areas surrounding Franklin & Garfield Boulevard were interviewed and helped produce both micro and macro-scale propositions to the boulevard like the introduction of a unified public transportation network connecting the entire boulevard system with mobility stations. At the micro-scale, organizations surrounding Garfield Boulevard focused discussions on workforce potential, food scarcity and reclamation of cultural narratives. Along Franklin, a concern for infrastructures supporting existing organizational centers and programs along with housing concerns were discussed. Through a design proposal, these suggestions were applied on site with the use of a kit of parts assembly of modular objects that serve as temporary placemaking tools. Depending on what the programing intentions were, these kit of part objects were organized accordingly. Additionally, a set of lot configurations using these kit of parts were examined in order to best inform how vacant and abandoned lots surrounding the boulevards can be used as testing grounds for programming ideas. Succesful lot configurations have the potential to be deployed within the community through more permanent measures with directive funding allocation.
• Camp Molasses
  The traditional idea of the “camp” dates to the mid-late 19th century, where the idyll of nature was cast as a reprieve from a changing society where urban spaces were quickly transmuted by the fits and starts of industrial capitalism. This project utilizes the camp idea as a different kind of liminal space, casting it instead as a zone for active experimentation in building regenerative and localized flows of material within a place of production. The camp idea shifts, then, from a space that encourages the consumption of nature to, instead, a landscape that is continually being made and remade by teenage camp-goers themselves, underscoring the reality that their own environments are and have always been constructed. As the climate crisis looms, this thesis tests whether the seeds of a just transition can begin to be sown by camp-goers pursuing community through slow, meaningful labor and reciprocity with their environment.
• "Our History is our Resource": Historic Narrative as Urban Planning Strategy in Chicago's Pullman Neighborhood
  The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the ways that site and neighborhood history can potentially inform material neighborhood development in the present. The investigation focused on Pullman, a historic area on the south side of Chicago, and conducted interviews with 23 area stakeholders, in addition to comprehensive literature and data analysis. Findings indicate that the historic narrative of the place itself is perhaps less important than the way the community chooses to interact with and institutionalize its own history. In Pullman, neighborhood history was developmentally relevant in three broad categories: history as informing community activism, institutionalization of history across diverse stakeholder groups (community organizations, residents, and businesses), and history as informing design decisions and the preservation of naturally occurring affordable housing. These findings are important for the field of urban planning because they illuminate potential ways to leverage and institutionalize site history as a planning strategy in the present.
• Andean Cultural Landscapes in Danger: The never-ending battle between developmentalism and heritage conservation in the Cusco Region
  The Chinchero International Airport, set to become Peru's second-largest airport, will directly connect Chinchero and the Cusco to major American cities. This unique cultural and ecological region was once the capital of the Incan Empire and is now recognized as Peru's tourism capital. The thesis explores how tourism has driven explosive informal and illegal urbanization and analyzes how this economy has influenced the Peruvian government's decision to develop aerial infrastructure to promote decentralization and regional economic growth. The research explores the detrimental effects of the airport on the social and ecological systems of Chinchero, raising questions about how the inadequate development of the airport's surrounding area could further exacerbate the challenging living conditions of the local communities. It will propose an urban and landscape design intervention to create an alternate passive economy, channeling the massive influxes of capital from tourism, addressing and revindicating the spatial, socioeconomic, and racial exclusion these communities face.
• Sticking Together: Community-Controlled Housing in New York City
  In New York City, ever-increasing housing costs and threats of displacement have led to a renewed interest in community-controlled housing—housing where community members are involved in the structuring, ownership, and regulation of their homes in order to control speculation and ensure permanent affordability. While this housing model is not new to New York, its recent resurgence calls for an understanding of its position within the city’s current housing ecosystem. This thesis investigates two types of community control—limited equity cooperatives and community land trusts—to understand what challenges and opportunities exist in initiating, sustaining, and growing this housing type. I find that, given market conditions in New York, a substantial amount of local government support is necessary for communities to gain control over their land and property. By understanding the current state of community-controlled housing, planners and policymakers can better serve city residents and support the growth of affordable housing.
• Hybrid Soluble and Insoluble 3D Printed Formwork
  This thesis investigates the potentials of hybrid 3D printed concrete formwork. Water-soluble Polyvinyl Alcohol (PVA) formwork allows for the creation of intricate forms that would be difficult, if not impossible, to create using standard formwork methods. Informed by finite element analysis, the PVA formwork allows for a gradient of variable porosities across a series of concrete units (blocks) in relation to structural loading and other possible design intentions. The goal is to optimize material use while addressing pathways for reusable formwork, reduced waste, and reduced embodied carbon. A series of blocks are fabricated for performance testing and a proof-of-concept quarter vault structure. The performance testing seeks to assess the blocks' strength without reinforcement, and additional investigations explore the integration of macro fiber reinforcing to increase stability. The PVA formwork allows for designed anisotropy. When fibers are mixed into concrete, their orientations are typically random making them less effective. PVA formwork could allow for new hybrid formworks that would enable intentional placement of reinforcing fibers perpendicular to the compression force, potentially increasing their utility. The vault case study revealed that the porous vault structure uses seventy-five percent less material than a solid block structure with the same structural strength. It has been found that the PVA can be conserved through dehydration which could allow the material to be reused in a cyclical system.
• Evaluation of the Environmental and Economic Impact of Urban Development vs. 20th Century Modern Heritage Conservation in Kuwait City
  Following a law passed in 2004 alleviating maximum building height, historic architecture in Kuwait City is under threat of demolition and replacement by high rise buildings. The impact is three-fold: first, the demolition of historic properties – many of which are the result of 20th century Modern Movement and are a local embodiment of the country’s “Golden Age” following the discovery of oil. Second, the consequent environmental impact –the loss of buildings that may have already been designed to adapt to climatic conditions by integrating passive design features. Third, the proactive depletion of embodied carbon stocks amidst a local and global need to draw down carbon emissions. This study looks to comparatively evaluate the individual performance and life cycle assessment of two commercial building developments: 1. An existing building attributed to the said Modern Movement, which calls for a lower carbon capital investment. 2. A high-performance high rise (eligible for LEED Gold certification), which significantly increases the built floor area on the site, and thus allows for increased economic productivity, and maintains low/efficient operational energy use per square meter. The results identify a preliminary framework for policy makers to evaluate the priorities in historic designation/building reuse and high-performance urban development.
• Designing Architecture’s Hyper‐Reality: Leveraging mixed reality as architectural components
  The thesis explores how mixed reality can be employed as an additional layer of architectural elements. The developments in mixed reality have changed the affective relationship between inhabitants and spaces while redefining architectural boundaries. Namely, the embodied interface, which can significantly alter the perceived reality, will become an architectural element inseparable from the rest of the spatial components when deployed in a room. The project explored aged nursing homes to examine the instrumental effect of embodied interfaces as a slice into the discussion of its implications as elements of architecture. Design for aging has been gaining attention within the architectural discourse. Its innate social and spatial specificities offer a terrain to investigate the utility of embodied interfaces, including augmenting spatial qualities and enhancing the connection between the site and its inhabitants. The project designs a prototype that examines the affective impacts of perceived architecture experiences and asserts mixed reality as architecture’s new design paradigm.
• Huffing and Puffing: A New Language for Straw Bale Construction
  Situated in the Hauts-de-France, a region in France grappling with a severe housing shortage, this student housing project services the capital of the region, Lille, a prominent student hub, and its neighbor, Roubaix. In addition to the Nord's industrial history, the Hauts-de-France is renowned for agriculture, being France’s second-largest producer of straw. Straw bales, an agricultural byproduct, are load-bearing modules, exceptional insulators, and when used as a building material, a renewable resource drawing down carbon. Pairing the availability of the material with the region’s housing needs, the project capitalizes on straw bales’ structural, thermal, and ecological properties to expand their use in construction beyond the one-story home and develop multi-story student housing. It seeks to generate a structural and material expression unique to the straw bales to bring greater spatial and sensory diversity to extant, repetitive student housing typologies. As the discipline becomes increasingly concerned with its environmental and social impacts and shifts towards engineering new materials and building systems, there is a unique opportunity to reconsider natural materials long used in construction and address disciplinary misapprehension surrounding biogenic materials such as straw. The project diverges from trends in digital and material fabrication to embrace this hyper-local, renewable byproduct and unite ecological, architectural, and social aims.
• Digitizing Urban Governance: Understanding the transformation in a mid-size American city
  Dissertation Advisor: Professor Antoine Picon Mojdeh Mahdavi ABSTRACT Digitizing urban governance: Understanding the transformation in a mid-size American city This dissertation explores the digital transformation of urban governance, the city and its governing institutions, and its dynamic relationship with urban restructuring and economic development. As digital transformation policies expand in the political agendas of local governments of various sizes and socioeconomic backgrounds, the in-depth and up-close study of existing smart cities becomes critical to understand, challenge, and improve this policy instrument. The dissertation asks: how path-dependent is the digital transformation of governance in a mid-size American city? To set the analytical framework for the empirical inquiry, the research asks what policymaking context mainstreams digital governance institutions and whether digital governance is a new governance model or the continuation of existing models through new technological tools. In Syracuse, NY, a mid-size and post-industrial city, which serves as the contextual focus of this research, the digital transformation policy agenda is instrumentalized to reverse the urban and economic decline through Syracuse Surge, the city’s strategic plan for the growth in the New Economy. This research is enacted through four main lines of inquiry: first, investigating how digital transformation policy responded to the complexity of coordinating operationally autonomous yet systematically inter-dependent networks of individuals and organizations in a rapidly changing environment. Second, identifying actors, the symbolic media of communication such as money, law, and knowledge they use, and its efficiencies to create a shared agenda to advance urban governance transformation. Third, tracing moments of disjuncture that happen through accidents, errors, and disruptions due to the immaturity of the technological tools and methods and insufficiency of infrastructural and implementational capacity. And fourth, grounding the smart city spaces of visibility and related urban revitalization projects to pinpoint the change in intra-urban geographies of uneven development within capitalist production processes. The investigation brings together perspectives and methods from political science, critical governance and policy studies, and urban studies to bear upon some of the most pressing issues facing local governments and their constituents as cities transition towards emerging paradigms of digital transformation. The main finding is that the utopian rhetoric of the project did not correspond with the reality due to the lack of resources, problematic national regulations, organizational readiness, and co-ordination problems among multiple stakeholders and expectations. Therefore, the implementation of the policy agenda is highly context-specific and path-dependent. At the theoretical level, the research finds that even though the extant political and economic policymaking conditions have not changed, multiple interdependent actors, perspectives, and resources involved in the digital transformation policy agenda negotiation and implementation have changed the organizational settings and governing techniques. I conclude that the heterarchic urban governance that foregrounds and is forged by the instrumentalization of the digital transformation policy agenda captures the current changes in urban governance.
• Crossing Paths: Strategies for the Gowanus Basin
  Over the past few centuries, the Gowanus has transformed from natural to pastoral to industrial to post-industrial. Its history is tied to the development of Brooklyn. Once a tidal inlet with orchards and mills, it industrialized when the local population exploded in the 19th century. A canal replaced the marshland to service very polluting plants settled along its banks. Soon one of the most polluted waterways in the country, it remains so today. The industrial legacy is one of deep soil contamination and toxicity which, with the site’s natural cycles (rain, tides, hurricanes) combine to make it a forbidding ground for development. Yet, the city is proposing a massive densification of the area, one opposed by the varied communities living and working there. This project considers the entire Gowanus watershed as its site. It positions itself as an interface between the natural and the built. It offers solutions to connect the neighborhoods now surrounding the canal by making use of the fragmented urban grid and existing structures. Taking inspiration from Japanese models, it proposes to restore horizontal and vertical continuities by developing city blocks as a series of landscapes where floodable and inhabitable surfaces are layered and woven to accommodate ecologies, architectures, and people. An infrastructure of access organizes new development and facilitates the interactions between the shifting natural ground, and existing architectures. Ramps and platforms define the spaces of public life while leaving room for a dynamic ecology below. The circulation structures bridge the public spaces and streets to new and existing buildings, while defining the perimeter of public and private life. Lessons from Ando’s Azuma House, Shinohara’s House in Uehara and Atelier Bow Wow’s Tower House, among others, inform this effort to imagine circulation as dwelling, and conceive of the organization of the urban block as an urban house. The project goes on to suggest building rules to establish an ecologically sound relationship between the built and natural environment.
• Traversing the Monumental and the Vernacular
  Instead of activating culture, the museums exist in Hanoi, Vietnam as a political tool that propagates the Communist Party’s ideals. Most major museums, which are dressed in cavernous and colossal architecture, are politically affiliated, including Ho Chi Minh Museum, Military History Museum, Police History Museum, Air Force, and Air Defense Museum. The thesis questions how architecture can negate the concept of the museum as institutional indoctrination and reclaim the art museum as a public cultural amenity. The new museum inserts itself in the middle scale between the monument and the vernacular, exists as an intermediary between the institution and the residence. It is an institutional program cross-dressing in vernacular architecture language. The building will be a Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, situated on the same block as the monumental Soviet Friendship Palace, surrounded by political institutions such as the Hanoi Police Headquarter, the Ministry of Public Safety, and the Museum of Police History. Externally, the museum responds to its context, camouflaging its monumentality in the scale of the residential context. Internally, the experience provokes the spatial quality of the typical tube house residence – the most representative typology of Vietnamese modern dwellings. The new modern art museum aims to be educational, inclusive, and participatory: the program includes not only the exhibition and gallery wing but also an education wing with workshops, studios, classrooms, and an art library.
• Architectural Arbitration: The Lore of Land, Law, and Home
  Architects who appropriate ancient “primitive” forms and construction draw on a foundation of “indigeneity” that appears to overlap with, but fundamentally contradicts, the use of this concept by tribal nations. Architects privilege aesthetic symbolism or “primitive” building techniques as defining indigenous architecture. Tribal nations, however, articulate their own architecture as reflective of political status and cultural dynamism in the present. The understanding of “indigeneity” written into United States Federal Law illustrates foundational notions of identity. This thesis explores the various lores of indigeneity that are the foundation of Tribal Law. I draw examples from legal cases that entangle legal rights to land, native culture, architecture, and citizenship with folklore of essentialized indigeneity. This thesis explores the legal lore of land and home through the case of the Cherokee Nation because of the tribe’s lineage of land dispossessions and impact on American Indian Law as well as the tribe’s legal prominence in matters of sovereignty, land, and nationhood and domestic architecture that questions essentialist identities. I examine contexts of indigeneity necessary to understanding legal land conflicts and tribal law, including territory, citizenship, and sovereignty that confronts essentialist lore. Complications between lore and law are explored in a close analysis of five legal cases: the first three are known collectively as the Marshall Trilogy, the fourth, “The Dawes Act,” and the last - McGirt v. Oklahoma. Architecture arbitrates these legal, intellectual, and material foundations to affirm and contest the lore of land, law, and home.
• Hyphen - American: The Making of Hybrid Identities
  ON BELONGING – DISPLACEMENT We seek to feel “in place.” However, one cannot feel a sense of belonging if there is nowhere to belong. In the 21st century, globalization has increased the mobility of people, information, and goods, ultimately destabilizing the spatial permanence associated with identity. The mass displacement of people contributes to a conflicted sense of self – a crisis of belonging. Waves of immigration in America established pocket enclaves throughout the country. Born out of systemic oppression and discrimination, these ethnic enclaves historically served as an entry-port, generating forms of collectivity around the basis of shared culture and identity. They were a recreation of a remembered past home, providing a sense of belonging in the context of displacement. ON MEMORY – IDENTITY The nostalgic memory of a space emerges from a dislocation in place. It is a sentiment of loss and longing for a past identification with a specific time and place. Originally thought of as a psychological disease, nostalgia is dismissed as an unproductive engagement with the past, consistently paired as the opposite to progress. However, nostalgia and progress are two sides of the same coin. If remembering the past and imagining a future are parallel processes, what can the contemporary overlay of two cultures, the ‘American’ and the ‘other,’ look like? This thesis explores the grafting of a personal past cultural-scape with the present American urban-scape to reimagine a dying enclave and project an architecture that encapsulates the condition of hybrid identities within an immigrant nation.
• The Unspoken Narratives of the Empty Quarter
  The desert, commonly understood as a barren and infertile landscape, is not empty. This thesis reads the desert landscape as an archive full of social, economic, and political narratives using the Empty Quarter as a case study. The Empty Quarter, in Arabic Rub al-Khali, stretches across the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula including Oman, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. The overarching understanding of deserts as a void has obscured the Empty Quarter’s image as a home to Bedouin tribes and a site of natural resource extraction, agricultural land, and a testing ground for scientific research. Furthermore, the inability to understand the desert ecology is causing current urban processes to be resource intensive as the adjacent cities expand. By providing a new reading of the desert ecology, this thesis speculates how design and planning in arid regions can mediate between social values, aesthetics, and environmental challenges to arrive at ecological urban development. This thesis draws from multiple sources, including the analysis of archival materials, historic maps, artworks, field observation, myths, and tribal poetry, in order to arrive at a novel understanding of the Empty Quarter’s ecosystem. It is not a void, but rather a space that adjacent cities depend upon to meet the social and material needs of their inhabitants.
• Spherical deployable shield for robot arm
  This thesis focuses on the construction of deployable shields for robot arms in extraterrestrial situations that protect them from possible threats by minimizing the area of the robot's end-effector that is exposed to external job site conditions. The deployability is key since the shield’s shape should be compact not to hinder robot’s movement when folded, but also able to adapt to the various geometrical characteristics of the job site when deployed, which could include flat surfaces, curved domes, or even edged areas. To address this necessity and meet those constraints for the shield, this research proposes a deployable spherical shield after exploring a few of the potential possibilities. The research explores scissor, parallelogram, and spherical linkage patterns as possible ways of creating deployable spherical geometries. Parametric modeling and simulation of those linkages were conducted to analyze deployment movement and possible collision. Ultimately, the research focused on a multi-layered spherical linkage construction method that can create a fully covered sphere surface while minimizing overlapping area while it is deployed. Physical prototypes actuated by multiple motors demonstrate how this method can be used to achieve the goal of creating deployable shields that are adaptable and provide full-coverage. This research has great potential for robot arm applications in a variety of risky environments both extraterrestrial and terrestrial.
• The Borges Cloisters
  The 20th-century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is best known for his fantastical stories of labyrinths and libraries, but his early poetry evokes the sacredness of ordinary urban spaces in his native Buenos Aires: patios, for instance, that are “the slope / down which the sky flows into the house.” The monastic cloister operates analogously. As the heart of the monastic polis, it synthesizes street, public square, and paradise garden, situating the daily rhythms of life “at the crossway of the stars.” It embodies a deep story of hope. The cloister therefore offers an ideal typology for the urgent ecological task of urban rewilding: the practice of reawakening latent ecosystems in their sacred complexity. Less a means of exclusion than of inviting the soul to turn inward, the cloister can become a rich space for reconnecting cities with the land to which they belong. The unique perimeter walk, in particular, forms a contemplative and social space between inside and out, blurring “culture” and “nature.” This thesis reimagines part of the Austin State Hospital’s languishing campus in Austin, Texas — the city where Borges writes he “discovered America” in 1963 and which he found reminiscent of Buenos Aires — as a communal urban village structured around cloisters of varied shape, size, and ecology: a monastic mat urbanism where architecture, city, and landscape entwine. The Borges Cloisters are spaces of discovery and refuge, of cultivation and symbiosis, of death and new life, inviting residents and guests into renewed relationship with the earth family.
• Body-ody-ody: A Formal Redress of Harlem
  Ornamentation (architectural decoration) is a deliberate act of shifting perspective, envisioning possibilities that recognize contingency. Formalism (embodied ornamentation enabled by today’s technology) gives architecture agency to express people and place. Recent critiques of formalism echo the cultural elitism seen in modernist advocacy for functionality over ornament. Modernist architecture, designed with the body of a 6-foot-tall white man as its historical referent, persists in building norms, neglecting a broader set of bodies: the majority. The focus on a single body has created a misfitting urban fabric. But what if we could create an unapologetically formalist architecture strategy to create accessibility through beauty? And what if, through this, the architecture itself could become an activist work? The resulting constructions would surely counter rigid norms. Harlem offers an apt testing ground with its rich history of Black self-determination, social consciousness manifested through creativity and diverse populations. Peppered with retail spaces obedient to codes written around an unreflective people group amongst a palette of intriguing historic visual types, building with vernacular and a broader community can challenge contemporary disdain for formalism, reimagining a range of proportions, celebrating culture, and welcoming diverse identities. Close study and illustration of the New York code for historical districts provides a spatial ribbon of potential redress and selective adaptation to existing architecture at its skin that invites a range of bodies to engage with form and space. By embodying ornamentation, we can disrupt traditional hierarchies, inviting and exciting a broader array of human bodies into a new architectural body of work