Mansa College of Education

Items

• Rest Stop Vending Machine, California (2033)
  In the federal highway rest stop there are parking spots, picnic benches, a shade structure or two, and an irrigated lawn. There is also a vending machine. Vending machines are, by law, the only commercial activity allowed in rest stops; commercial activity is not allowed because it is opposed to rest. This thesis indexes rest to aesthetic sensibilities like comfort and peace, but above all to beauty. The project emancipates beauty from the relational or performance imperatives typically framed in landscape discourse; the apprehension of a beautiful landscape is instead immediate, discrete, and perceptible. The vending machine is the apparatus to distribute beauty, while the rest stop’s material components—water, toilets, walls, cars, and plants, both living and synthetic—are redirected to create vignetted experiences of the beautiful, in which dissonance is an essential trait. Press a button and encounter beauty!
• Rereading Migration: Corridors of Circulation, Bordering, and Inhabitation
  Infrastructural corridors of circulation and connectivity form the backbone of the colonial project of modernity, facilitating its rise, expansion, and domination over the past centuries. Contrary to the spatial imaginaries of the unhindered and smooth circulation spaces of commodities, energetics, wealth, and cargo, these global corridors are fragile zones that operate across multiple scales and temporalities of bordered and militarized circulation. This dissertation focuses primarily on the cracks and fissures of corridor infrastructures as they become entangled with postcolonial migratory moves and their creative inhabitation of these spaces for survival in the project of western modernity. Specifically, it focuses on Europe's post-2015 self-declared migration crisis through the framework of three corridor geographies of migration and bordering: the western, central, and eastern Mediterranean corridors. Instead of a linear projection of corridor geographies, this dissertation argues for the uneven and patchworked nature of these spaces which consists of the strategic coming together of nodes, lines, and zones of simultaneous bordering and circulation. Furthermore, this work argues for the nonlinear and circular understanding of the timespace of the migratory vernacular as it manifests against the horizontality of the modern corridor ontology of unlimited extractivism and commodification of bodies and nature. In conclusion, this project by closely examining infrastructural spaces of circulation sheds new light on the less studied in-between condition of the postcolonial migratory subject: her extended liminality of nondeparture (always of there) and nonarrival (never of here).
• The People Look Like Flowers at Last: Coweeta College, Assisted Migration, and American Loneliness
  This thesis posits that the bonded movement of plants and people can productively engage with American loneliness. The project expands Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory in western North Carolina into a forestry college campus. As the country’s 10th “work college”, Coweeta herein adds the production and management practices of climate-ready species to the traditional university outputs of liberal knowledge and social bonds. The campus, near the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, leverages McKaye’s project at once as a climate transect and social region, where the college’s cuttings and seeds are available to the trail’s 3,000 annual “thru-hikers” for distribution to a network of 56 Appalachian Trail communities. Through an “aesthetics of the infinite”, the thesis suggests reciprocal relationships between representation and land ethic. As a grassroots reorientation of assisted migration, the thesis claims landscape architecture as the operative medium for tethering people to place in the age of the “Mega-Eco” project.
• Practicing Spatial Justice: Design-Organizing for Abolition
  This project presents a critique of the profession of landscape architecture, extending the liability of a licensed professional to include accountability for slow, systemic violence, in addition to individual health, safety, and public welfare. The project is developed on the site of “Cop City,” a “public training facility” designed to uphold the police state in greater Atlanta, Georgia. The project documents racial and environmental harm on the site through a critique of the legal tools of the profession. It proposes a new kind of abolitionist practitioner, the designer-organizer, who works to build local power and repair relationships between plant and human communities. This requires new practices of codesign, featuring fuzzy future models that embed skills of organizing and designing into decision-making processes. Mutual liability is held between the community and designer-organizers to promote true public welfare in this abolitionist landscape.
• Learning from the Wreck: Reframing Sentimentality
  Cape Cod is characterized by a cyclical churning of land. Over timescales of decades, the Atlantic shifts, erodes, and redeposits the sandy sediment from which the Cape is almost entirely composed, rapidly reshaping its coastal profile. Those who have made their homes and livelihoods on it have learned to live with the instability generated by these fluctuations of the dunes. The Cape’s outermost stretch of beach is a zone in which the stability of our infrastructure, be it the hulls of our ships or the foundations and walls of our homes, is tenuous. Its shores have been dotted with countless wrecks over the years. Its dunes have seen many beachfront houses crumble down their steep faces. Yet we persist in inhabiting this zone of precarity. As described by authors like Henry David Thoreau, the draw to this liminal space between land and sea is rooted in strong human sentimentality and a fascination with the overwhelming sublimity of the sea’s vastness. This sentimentality, our ability to learn from the systemic failures of our infrastructure, and indeed a literal repurposing of cyclically reclaimed building material from housing and shipping results in a new architecture uniquely suited to meeting an important housing need for the region. It relieves pressure from the Cape’s broader housing stock by proposing new housing to accommodate researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. This new architecture may itself be ephemeral but acknowledges itself as simply one point in the very cycles of destruction and reuse that generated it.
• Hanok, Stacked: An Alternative Urban Housing for the New Family
  Around the world the concept and the demographics of ‘family’ have been changing. Especially in the developed countries, the 4-person heterosexual nuclear family ideal has begun to break down with increasing interests in alternative forms of family. Such is also the case in South Korea where there is a dramatic increase in the number of one-person households and complementing decrease in the number of 4-person households. The current state of the country’s housing stock, however, is yet to respond to this demographic shift. Within this context, this thesis seeks to propose a new form of urban housing in Seoul, Korea that better accommodates the shifting population and its needs. Specifically the project studies the district of Mapo, Seoul where there has been increasing political and social momentum to redefine the notion of family by challenging the nuclear family lifestyle. It draws parallels between the more fluid and dynamic ‘family’ lifestyles of Mapo and the extended family lifestyle that belonged to the pre-industrial Korean society. The defining domestic architecture of that time, Hanok, or traditional Korean courtyard houses, is incorporated into the project as the guiding principle. In order to respond to the urban density needs as well as to translate spatially the social dynamics that take place within more amorphous and multi-scaled types of families, this thesis experiments with vertical stacking of the Hanok typology. It utilizes the spatial flexibility and connectivity of Korean traditional courtyard houses to create fluid and porous housing for the arising new types of families in Korea.
• Grounding the Cloud
  This dissertation explores the dynamic relationship between material formations of data and the processes of data-driven urbanization within an increasingly planetary context. In this pursuit the project articulates the deeply territorial operations of tech corporations such as Google and frames their spatial footprints and urban projects within an inherently expansionist logic. In developing a contextual-spatial understanding of the landscape of data, this work addresses the grounded materiality and geographic specificity of data infrastructures on one hand, and the influence of the centralizing logic of “the cloud” on practices and processes of spatial production on the other hand. This work is enacted through three main lines of investigation: First, deconstruction of the ideologies, concepts, and politics underlying the sociotechnical construction of “the cloud,” as an emerging global organizational model that operates through platforms of data extraction and mediation. Second, clarification of the role of accidents, errors, and disruptions in unearthing the hidden forms and agendas of global infrastructures of data, as well as a historical contextualization of this hidden form within the long process of under-grounding urban infrastructure since the turn of the 20th century. And third, tracing the inherently global geography of data that materially, socially, and territorially grounds the forms and processes of data extraction and monetization of urban data within processes of advanced capitalism. These investigations bring together perspectives and methods from media studies, communication geography, critical urban studies, cartography, urbanism, and architecture to bear upon some of the most pressing issues facing cities and their citizens as they transition towards emerging paradigms of cloud-driven urbanism.
• Encountering the Enigma: A Transformation of the Fulton Fish Market
  With our increasingly advanced tools, we seem to be able to grasp the architectural object more exhaustively than ever in the most precise dimensions and countless components. However, this technical knowing does not give answers to what architecture is and all its excessiveness, and the infinite and immeasurable ways that we perceive and understand it. In fact, the seemingly stable architectural objects that we know are always assemblages of unnameable fragments of amorphous matter. This alienness of architecture is often repressed but can never be completely dispelled as we always work between completion and openness, the known and the unknown. In this open realm, our judgment is suspended; architecture unveils all its enigma and becomes again open to our interpretation. Can we work within this open realm of architecture, and conceive a building that engages our faculty of understanding upon encountering it, yet eludes it with its incessant enigmatic nature? In this spirit of a liberated interpretation of architecture, this project aims to unveil an enigmatic understanding of is objectivity and experience through a fictional transformation of the New Market Building of the Fulton Fish Market.
• Design in the Convívio: Making Space for Landscape in Self-Built Communities
  This thesis examines the roles in which a landscape architect can operate respectfully within dense, self-constructed communities. Piloting a design process within the context of the “convívio” -- a socially rich but spatially constricted network of communal open space -- demands a focus on the varied lived experiences of urban residents and a responsiveness to their stated needs. In collaboration with the community members of Chapada do Rio Vermelho in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, the work comprises remote interviews, auto-photography, and design conversations oriented around three feasible, site-specific landscape interventions. The thesis finds space for the landscape architect and design student to offer their skills as a listener, designer, facilitator, and advocate.
• Pōhaku, Kalo, Wai: Stewardship in Contemporary Hawai’i
  The bottoms of the deep, verdant green cliffs of Limahuli Valley were once terraced in stone pools of soaking kalo (Colocasia esculenta). Kalo is more than plant, its presence extends into mythology and origin. The old Hawaiian planters named it, the eldest brother of man’s own ancestor. For these planters, the arrangement of kalo, water, and stone was the heartbeat of the valley. The past two centuries have left the valleys without their stewards. This thesis is a direct critique of the practice of forest conservation and restoration, a 21st century response to land dispossession. Arrived at through extensive fieldwork, historic research and re-invention of past practices, the project offers a paradigm of ecological restoration that enables community through a framework of design and knowledge building between people and `āina (land, earth).
• Alternative Rural Development in the Age of Internet: A Close Look at E-Commerce Village Typologies in Rural China
  Taobao Village, a name created by Alibaba Group in 2009 to mark three Chinese villages heavily engaged in e-Commerce, has exceeded 5400 in number by 2020. The exponential growth of Taobao Village suggests that e-commerce is a generally applicable solution to alleviate rural poverty. Through data gathering and data analysis of the site information of 5400+ Taobao Villages, my research for this thesis project identifies 16 different types of Taobao villages; each represents a unique combination of product type, location, and power structure. This research looks at the road network connectivity of these villages, which shows that most of these villages are located within close proximity to cities and small towns despite the expanding internet network coverage. My research further identifies villages producing products related to local culture and heritage. Through a comparative study of the morphology of villages producing locally-based products vs. villages producing non-local standard commodities, the study reveals that immaterial resource, such as local culture, crafts, and heritage, often engenders a more diversified local industry, which may help maintain the original village form while contributing to local economic growth.
• Harnessing Dynamics: Exploring Scale & Coastal Infrastructure in the Arctic
  Infrastructure is crucial for survival in extreme environments. However, it is often built with little consideration for its environmental context or the broader needs of the community it serves. In the Arctic, small coastal communities are experiencing accelerating land erosion as a result of climate change. These communities have tight-knit cultures and are surrounded by dominating nature, sublime landscapes, and unpredictable weather. Introducing the coastal barriers necessary to protect these towns must be done with full consideration of the multiple scales at which the infrastructure will operate. Standard infrastructure neutralizes natural dynamics and separates people from the environment. From large-scale forces such as land erosion to harnessing local atmospheric dynamics such as waves, wind, and fog, architecture must mediate between infrastructure, the natural environment, and the local community to create tangible experiences and meet the community’s societal needs. Through the design of a coastal barrier system, this thesis proposes a framework for implementing critical infrastructure that becomes an extension of its surroundings and harnesses natural dynamics to facilitate experiential opportunities.
• Juvenile Delinquents
  Frederick Law Olmsted’s Franklin Park hosts a small hillside population of American beech saplings. Though juvenile in form, these small trees may be many years old, waiting for the mature canopy to die. This “micro-narrative” uses this case to describe the dilemmas of landscape architectural preservation in the public realm. Strictly form-based approaches are inadequate to respond to changing human use; approaches grounded in restoration ecology suffer from a “crisis of baselines” in the face of ongoing environmental change. The tension between material authenticity and ecological resilience can be productively explored to seek new design potentials for preservation.
• Urban Renewal and Public Amenities: Adaptive Reuse of Gas Stations in Cambridge and Somerville
  This thesis explores the innovative urban initiative of repurposing 28 gas stations across the city of Cambridge and Somerville into public restroom amenities, addressing the dual challenges of obsolete architecture and the scarcity of public amenities in urban settings. Through comprehensive analysis and design proposals, this work seeks to not only provide a practical solution to the lack of essential public facilities but also to spark a broader conversation on sustainable city redesign and the adaptive reuse of infrastructural elements. By transforming these gas stations, the thesis highlights a novel approach to urban development that leverages existing networks and spaces for public benefit, offering a model for cities worldwide to rethink their approach to future urban planning and development.
• Hydrosocial Dynamics: Regenerative Interventions in Neighborhood 20, Buenos Aires, Argentina
  The thesis addresses the hydrological and social injustices faced in Neighborhood 20, one of the largest and oldest informal settlements in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by designing a network of community spaces. It investigates the underlying factors contributing to this vulnerable landscape's emergence and proposes redefining public spaces as a catalyst for ecological urban renewal to tackle flooding and heat island effects. The methodology engages with the various publics to implement a series of artifacts to collect rainwater and mitigate flooding during large storms. The accumulated surplus water will be used to promote community programs and develop urban forestry to mitigate the heat island effect. The project aims to reflect on landscape architecture as a political and social act capable of transforming reality in vulnerable environments through bottom-up processes, contributing to the field by demonstrating the potential of community-driven ecological interventions in informal settlements.
• How to Tailor 50-Story Office
  The escalating office vacancy rates in urban environments have emerged as a prominent issue, significantly impacting both the real estate market and the urban landscape. It became visible that the pervasive presence of vacant office spaces not only undermines the vitality of cityscapes but also results in desolate streets, empty store fronts, and underutilized public spaces- everyday spaces that we inhabit. However, the challenges are not new. In response to this ongoing vacancy crisis, various attempts have sought to re-purpose office buildings for other uses, particularly- housing. Learning from the converted examples, it is evident that the adaptive conversions predominantly target buildings that exhibit inherent adaptability and a conduciveness for transformation. These building forms often possess optional access to natural ventilation and daylight, key considerations for conversion to residential architecture. Nonetheless, it is evident that there is a significant shift in the evolution of office plans. Notable office buildings, such as the Wainwright Building (1890s), the Chrysler Building (1930s), the Seagram Building (1950s), and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange Building (2010s), demonstrate that office plans have evolved from adaptable and malleable plans to highly specific entities optimized to maximize productivity in alignment with technological advancements and changes in business practices. However, when these highly specific machines eventually become obsolete, how do we envision an alternative future for these modern office buildings? This prompts the central exploration of the thesis project. This project explores ways to undo the specificity and alter, to not only address the vacancy crisis but also to redefine and reactivate the urban neighborhood.
• Materializing Access: Intersecting Walksheds, Viewsheds, and Supply Sheds
  Materializing Access is a thesis which investigates the opportunity for landscapes to provide an array of resources within the public realm. Situated in Pittsburgh, PA, the project navigates the varying topography and current park network to provide each citizen with a five-minute walk to an open space. Steep and unmaintained hillsides create barriers within the city, but this proposal explores utilitarian and fantastical landscapes for connecting amongst those barriers. The landscape interventions include the sculpted (a path embedded in the wooded hillside), the leveled (a cultural space along the public right of way), and the excavated (a sheltered cut through the earth). Through strategic use of materials available on site, the design extends and integrates existing parks with the rest of the urban fabric. It takes advantage of Pittsburgh’s material past, drawing on a historic sense of place and geology while providing future resources for further manipulation.
• Here Lies Darby Vassall: Rendering the obscured and concealed history of slavery at Christ Church Cambridge
  The material conditions of “historic” preservation and institutional presentation communicate a particular version of the past through, what the late historian and professor of geography, David Lowenthal, terms selective forgetting and selective recall. Common myths of white benevolence and exceptionalism (in the North) contribute to the perceived “invisibility” of slavery in New England and across the nation at sites similar to “historic” Christ Church Cambridge in Harvard Square. By reading against boundaries, materiality, and identity projections, this project situates the church within broader, interconnected landscapes of dispossession and extraction, making connections to places and people beyond the fiction of “historic” boundaries – in W. E. B. DuBois’ words – to the “foundation stone” (Black labor) of “Northern manufacture and commerce.” The goal of this project is to construct what bell hooks calls a “subversive historiography,” an alternative spatial narrative of place that allows us to revise and expand the storytelling of Christ Church Cambridge in its context. My work aims to render visible this (currently invisible) history through research and exploratory mediums of knowledge sharing and representation. A temporary art installation provides a platform for bringing the hidden past into view.
• THE [ OFF - CORE ]
  The [OFF - CORE] is a thesis that encourages us to imagine what the definition of [OFFICE] be like in the future and how could the design of the [CORE] in a tower facilitates this paradigm shift. Can an [OFFICE] be less solely about the free plan but more inclusive of different kinds of workspace? Can a [CORE] be expressed spatially and pragmatically in the foreground than being buried in the background? Can the dichromatic relationship between the [OFFICE] and the [CORE] get blurred? Using Hong Kong as the testing ground and the IFC tower as the main precedent, the thesis proposal is presented as a prototype sister tower adjacent to the IFC with the same dimensions but displaying a new [OFF - CORE] concept for the future.
• Staying Put: Plans for Aging Suburbia
  Few aspects of the human experience are more universal than the experience of aging, but more people are reaching old age than ever. For the first time in history, people over the age of 65 outnumber those under 5. Between 2015 and 2050, the global population over 60 will double. This phenomenon is called Global Population Aging. As we age, one of the most present interactions in our daily lives is that we have with our homes. However, the giant of America’s housing stock, the suburban single-family detached home, is not fit for the very individuals who saw its conception around the 1950s. These are the places that provide aging individuals with residential normalcy, however, the hard truth is clear; American suburbia may be among the worst places for older people to live, but it is where they choose to stay. For a phenomenon so universal, so often inevitable, as aging, why does something so innate to survival as housing often ignore it? Our spaces were built for a younger population and must be reprogrammed for unprecedentedly older users. Sited in the 1980s-era neo-colonial-style suburbs of Virginia, this project obscures, adds, subtracts, and amalgamates icons of a familiar fringe. It questions how we enter, live, use and stay in these spaces– and with whom. This thesis reckons with the exclusive history of American Suburbia from the lens of Global Population Aging, using manipulations of pervasive suburban elements to make what is old supportive of who is becoming older.
• Aging Within: A Catalog of Reinterpreted Traditional Courtyard Houses
  This project is about challenging the traditional senior living community layout by building a system constructed with modular reinterpreted traditional courtyard houses to sustain a closely-knit senior living community. It is designed for the emergence and expansion of the subgroup of the old, which is also called the Young-Old. As one of the oldest dwelling typologies, the courtyard house typology occurred in distinctive forms in many parts of the world. In China, there is also a variety of traditional courtyard houses. Among them, the Beijing courtyard house is considered the most outstanding example. This project would reinterpret this traditional housing typology while maintaining its strength in flexibility and variations. The hierarchy and dynamics of courtyards would be explored to create a flexible system that could foster interaction within the community. This project seeks to organize the buildings in the vernacular style of a courtyard typology that is not uniformed. For the building type "courtyard house," the courtyard is the core of living fun and actively. In this project, there are courtyards from small to large and from private to public. And common areas are an integral part of the community, designed for daily use and supplementing private living areas. The private courtyards within the units are arranged around the central public courtyard in different sizes and orientations. By shifting and indenting the units, dynamic circulation connecting each unit's entrance and public courtyard is established. This project tries to pursue a specific spatial order to integrate each household's internal demands and external environment, creating a dynamic community space with both cohesion and openness. It tries to establish a public life space for the community and bring flows of light, shadow, and time to the place.
• Design Practice / Practice design
  The strategy, mission, and organization of architecture firms – here loosely defined as organizations that produce designs – have profound impacts on the outcome of the built environment. Because contemporary building practices require collaboration between multiple parties over long periods, how these actors are brought together and organized to realize building designs inevitably affect the results. Therefore, the architecture produced by these practices bears the marks of their makers: different models of service delivery, capital structures, and organizational strategies of firms inevitably influence the architecture they produce. This thesis surveys the spectrum of contemporary architecture firms and the business models through which they render their services and proposes a new model of architectural practice by synthesizing emergent models and ideas. First, the project dissects a wide range of firms from boutique startups to multinational conglomerates; then, a prototypical practice is proposed fusing attributes from these firms; finally, an architectural “product” of the firm is imagined and deployed to multiple sites, completing a closed loop connecting the business of the firm to its work.
• Upon Concrete: Retrofitting Architecture with Malleability
  Throughout history, architecture has evolved and advanced in parallel with the technical development of reinforcements. With the innovations of processing and shaping smelted metals and the development of reinforced concrete structural systems, the concrete structure — which could only provide short-span spacing — was reinforced with iron and other metals to achieve a more expansive and porous space. As a result, the strengthened structural system could enable architecture not only to accommodate various scales of programs and occupancies, but also to retain the impartiality between humans, space, and structure. In other words, the structural reinforcements could be integrated with building retrofits and become the component that creates spatial flexibility and adaptability in architecture and the urban environment. Concrete structures are gradually becoming underused because of the unadaptability and the oppressive qualities of the space. The concrete parking structure, selected within Chicago’s dense urban area, provides an opportunity for experimenting with the steel reinforced techniques for further uses of various programs and occupancies. Different steel reinforcing techniques are integrated together into a system that can infuse the structure with the capacity to accommodate heterogeneous habitable spaces. Retrofitting existing concrete structures with zinc-plated steel reinforcements significantly elevates the structural elements into which could endow the architecture with more diversity, sustainability, and other social urgencies.
• The Molding House
  Moldings have been an architectural element since the prehistory. The Greeks were the first to recognize, in their temples, the unique value possessed by moldings, which, occupying an intermediate position between the ornamental sculptures and the simple architectural lines of the main structure, gave a richly decorative effect to the latter without interfering with the beauty of the former. Then the Romans simplified the Greeks’ shapes, enriched the moldings vocabulary, and built plenty of precedents for classical architecture studies. Fifteen hundred years later, Palladio and other Renaissance architects theorized, categorized, and documented the classical moldings, educating anyone who yearns for Classicism the principles to reproduce it. Yet now, 500 years after the Palladios, with abundant knowledge about moldings and intelligent machines at our fingertips, architects still apply moldings in the same manner as the ancestors did centuries back. Too often, we see mass-produced lumber trims contouring the frame of double-pane windows and antique-looking cymatium garnishing the entrance of a glass-and-steel high-rise. The juxtaposition of conventional usage of moldings and modern technology has almost become a mockery of the 21st-century architects: Is there no other way to honor the moldings without copying and pasting the past? This thesis explores an unprecedented way to adopt classical moldings in a contemporary house in Newport, RI. Situated among many extravagant mansions built in the Classical style, the Molding House showcases a post-modern deconstructivist technique to honor moldings in a fashion unlike any of its neighbors.
• Home, Homing, Home-Escape: Achieving Sustainable Rural Tourism in Post-COVID Huyuan Town, China
  Rural tourism in China has gained unprecedented popularity among the urban middle-class, leading to a significant reduction in the permanent rural population and the gradual erosion of native rural culture. This thesis navigates the complex space-time relationship between three main groups of occupants in Huyuan Town: rural residents, city migrant workers, and urban tourists, all converging around the central theme of "Home". Rural residents hold a unique position on the idea of “Home” and a stake in preserving its cultural legacy as the sole citizen group in China to possess full ownership of their homes by the Chinese “Hukou” system. In contrast, city migrant workers who annually engage in a "homing" journey, returning to their villages for the spring festival celebration, driven by a longing for familial reunion and a sense of belonging. Yet, the burgeoning demand for high-end rural retreats, often overly romanticizing the Chinese Idyll, has created a paradox where tourists in search of a “Home-Escape" from the urban hustle and bustle are removed from experiencing the authentic local culture and heritage while inadvertently competing with and undermining local businesses in the tourism sector. By fragmenting and descaling industrialized hotel services into small infill programs, replacing vacant space in rural residential houses, as well as generating large tourism infrastructure collectively operated by rural resident shareholders, this architectural intervention tackles the pressing issues of cultural preservation, rural population stability, and the economic empowerment of rural residents. It serves as a blueprint for revitalizing rural areas while ensuring they remain true to their authentic roots in the face of evolving urban-rural dynamics and post-pandemic tourism trends.