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Accessibility Impacts of Transit Development Areas in Seoul
This dissertation used multidimensional assessment methods for transit development areas associated with accessibility, land use, building density and diversity, population, socio-economic, and transit connections. The research applied a combined analysis framework using spatial network analysis for subway services, pedestrian flows, statistical approaches, and visual studies. The regional subway accessibility assessment investigated the pattern of supply for citywide subway service. The pedestrian accessibility assessment revealed the pattern of pedestrian behaviors for potential trips between a subway station and other places on foot in transit development areas. Measuring walkability helped understand how diversity, density, and design factors of station areas influence the subway user’s choices. Statistical analyses revealed the causal relationship between urban factors and transit demand in station development areas, helping planners and policymakers objectively examine the urban formation and transit users’ needs. Visualization analyses of urban forms and architectural typologies in transit development areas were also conducted as a critical component of the design research to conclude the relationship between urban form and pedestrian accessibility around station areas.
Home Away from Home: Senior Immigrants’ Culinary Nostalgia
A group of senior immigrants in the United States, who left their home countries decades ago and have since established themselves here, often find themselves immersed in nostalgic moments, reliving their childhood memories. The dishes prepared in their homes, deeply rooted in the flavors of their hometowns, create a profound connection to their cultural heritage. Their culinary skills were acquired through hands-on guidance from the older generations within their families, evolving into a cherished tradition. With society aging, the “Home Away from Home” thesis project aims to foster a unique bond among seniors from diverse ethnic backgrounds, nurturing a culinary and conversational community that uses food as a means to both rekindle and preserve the memories of the elderly. Drawing inspiration from architectural influences spanning Asia, Europe, and Africa, including Chinese Hui architecture, Italian villas, and Moroccan riads, the project, located in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood, artfully incorporates the essence of traditional housing experiences into a modern architectural language. The kitchen and the act of cooking serve as practical repositories of cultural memory, capturing the very essence of their heritage through tangible methods. By examining these three examples, the project introduces the concept of weaving together these cultural influences while respecting their unique differences, fostering a gesture that implies broader integration among ethnic groups. The inclusion of a daycare program brings laughter and companionship to seniors while providing the younger generation with a connection to their cultural heritage. This initiative promotes a vibrant and inclusive community, celebrating diversity and tradition.
The Evolving Carbon Balance of High-Performance Buildings
Highly operationally-efficient buildings typically require significant embodied flows to guarantee low energy consumption. To highlight this tension, an operational energy simulation of a prototypical mid-rise apartment was equipped with all-electric heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. The building was then upgraded from the comparatively under-performing ASHRAE 90.1-2004 standard to the higher-performing PHIUS 2021 certification, while the grid that supplied the building was simulated with aggressive, moderate, and business-as-usual emissions intensity scenarios. To assess life-cycle impacts, changes to the building’s structure, foundation, enclosure, and mechanical equipment were evaluated using life-cycle assessment (LCA), and refrigerant impacts were calculated separately using a range of 100-year global warming potentials (GWP) and leakage assumptions. In the end, the ranking of optimal high-performance building strategies is sensitive to different combinations of grid, refrigerant, and carbon accounting assumptions. As an example, the results suggest that, given a rapidly decarbonized grid, operationally-inefficient buildings with low-embodied-carbon materials will emit less life-cycle carbon than certain low-energy buildings with standard materials.
A Diasporist Guide to Camping Here
At Camp Doikayt, the landscape is a vehicle for remembering histories of diaspora and reimagining Jewishness beyond Zionism. Summer camps proliferated in the United States after the Shoah, using the Zionist invention of the “muscular” Jew, to cultivate Jewish continuity. Camp Doikayt proposes an alternative modeled after the Jewish Labor Bund’s concept of “hereness.” In the form of a guidebook, the camp's design unfolds through a set of rules that ritualizes a land ethic of solidarity and participation. As camp wanders year to year to different abandoned Jewish sites in the Catskills, we reconfigure the materials, adapt ecological remnants, and reinterpret Jewish cultural memory.
Composing Soundscapes for Social Integration: Psychogeography of Bhutanese refugee elders in Worcester, Massachusetts
Sound can transcend the boundaries of time and space. This thesis leverages the potential of sound to capture a sense of place and reinterpret space by transplanting it to new environments. Working with the Bhutanese refugees of Worcester, MA, this thesis explores how soundscapes of home can be used to address the social isolation of refugees in resettlement communities. Even within progressive communities, host residents can be indifferent to refugees even though they share the same space. By facilitating social integration and community well-being, this work seeks to move places from multicultural to intercultural societies where social interactions among people from different backgrounds move beyond mere coexistence. Interviews and observations are compiled to gain insights into how refugee elders navigate the resettlement environment. Soundscape compositions that demonstrate their psychogeographical understanding of resettlement experiences are produced based on the sounds collected from places elders spend most of their time, such as living rooms, kitchens, gardens, and craft spaces. By introducing the composition and a notation in new environments, boundaries between refugees and non-refugees physically and mentally are blurred, culminating with the proposed design intervention.
Valuing Adaptation: Real Estate Market Responses to Climate Change Adaptation Measures
This research examines the economic impact of climate change adaptation measures on the housing markets of two representative coastal cities in the United States located along the Atlantic Ocean. The results shed light on how adaptation measures and investments influence housing values and local economies with respect to their place-based and local forms of implementation. Numerous quantitative approaches, including multiple sets of geospatial modeling and panel-data hedonic regression analyses, are used to examine changes in property values associated with climate adaptation measures and the dynamics of risk perception. The results also signal how risk perception and hurricane characteristics are reflected in housing markets, thereby shedding light on the effects of anticipatory and reactive adaptation strategies in the reclassified categories of hard infrastructure, green infrastructure, adaptive capacity, and private adaptation on property values in these coastal communities. Collectively, the study suggests which adaptation strategies, characteristics, and attributes can contribute to maximizing both community resilience and economic benefits against the weather extremes caused by climate change. This study highlights that natural green infrastructure as a climate adaptation measure is associated with a housing price appreciation of 9.6% in Miami-Dade County and 2.7% in New York City. Structural elevation achieved by raising foundations provides 6.6% and 13.8% in housing price increases in Miami-Dade County and New York City, respectively. Adaptation measures for storm surges provide the largest positive impact on housing prices at 15.4% in Miami-Dade County. The study further suggests that implementation of climate adaptation should be based on local-specific information, rather than relying upon national or state-level data, due to local idiosyncrasies, location-specific storm characteristics, and the subjective nature of risk perception. Together, this study helps to provide a clearer understanding of how different types of climate adaptation measures interacting with storm characteristics and risk perception are contributing to reinforcing a coastal community resiliency.
How MEGA Eclipsed the ALMIGHTY: Reclaiming the American Megachurch
The American Christian church is witnessing a widening rift instigated by Christian Nationalist extremists from a decades-long authoring of toxic political influence seeping into the church. The American Megachurch reflects the political motivations of a capitalist society revolving on success through scale. At best, the architecture does not engage against this religious misuse and, at worst, facilitates some of the behavior. The Ancient Church was counter-formative and radical, yet the megachurch adopts today’s capitalist culture described by the French anthropologist Marc Augé in his work, Non-Place: An Introduction to Supermodernity. This architecture is mega, corporate, and aloof negating identity formation. Visitors to this architecture are subjected “to a gentle form of possession, to which [they] surrender [themselves] with more or less talent or conviction, [they] taste for a while – like anyone, who is possessed – the passive joys of identity-loss, and the more active pleasure of role-playing.” An assembly of similitude breeds false teachings of comfort and alignment. To recapture place and a Christ-centered liturgy and assembly, a new understanding of megachurch architecture is proposed that is counter-formative to its history. The work develops within the megachurch context to reclaim the territory and achieve success through an engaged architecture of temporality and timelessness placed in dialogue with urban interventions of permanent church-led social missions.
Through the Lens of Color: An Interview with Gareth Doherty, Author of Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State
This interview by Mark Tirpak with Gareth Doherty of Harvard University Graduate School of Design, focuses on his Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State (University of California Press, 2017). With Paradoxes of Green (2017) and via the interview, Doherty recounts some of the findings of his ethnographic fieldwork in the Kingdom of Bahrain and describes tensions arising from differing conceptions of what ‘green’ means or signifies within this growing and predominantly arid region. An argument that Doherty makes in Paradoxes of Green (2017) is that color and form are interlinked, and that color deserves deeper consideration by policy-makers and other formal shapers of cities. The interview draws from Paradoxes of Green (2017) to discuss some of Doherty’s findings as well as his latest work on the intersections between landscape architecture and anthropology.
DataHub: Data Centers for Cities and People
This thesis looks at how to design data centers for the urban context in a way that benefits cities and the people who live in them. COVID-19 has only reinforced the sentiment that our physical realm will require more and more room for the digital infrastructure that sustains it. Every day, the average person produces 15GB of data. By 2025, the globe will have produced 17.5 trillion GB. While invisible to us, all of this data needs physical infrastructure to store and analyze it multiple times. Where do we store all of this data? How can we do it in a sustainable way? How can we reintegrate the physical store of data in a thoughtful and sustainable way? This thesis reimagines a new type of data center for our cities that is an integrated and sustainable home for the digital infrastructure that our society and economy demand. In so doing, the methodology of this thesis examines the project from a number of lenses including: data analysis to find ideals sites and opportunities; design to integrate the industrial and functional nature of data centers with urban needs; energy to understand where mutual needs can be met between urban data centers and other uses, and real estate to understand the financial incentives.
"If I see another palm tree, I will have a conniption!": Re-presenting Hospitality Landscapes in Jamaica
...Indeed, almost from the inception of tourism industries on the islands, hoteliers, colonial administrators, and local white mercantile elites (re)created or tropicalized many aspects of the islands precisely in the image of these representations. They physically transformed areas of the islands through planting campaigns or cleanliness drives, in efforts to make the islands appear as they did in photographs—orderly, picturesque, and tropical. Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque, Objects/Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 40. This thesis re-presents the image of the tropics at the site of the hotel, a “space where ideals of the picturesque tropical landscape were re-created in miniature” (Thompson 2006, 1). To do so, it draws upon the vernacular landscape of the Jamaican yard, embracing its public-private spatial logic and botanical diversity, to propose a hotel landscape that renders visible the lifeways, natural heritage, and the people of the island.
Past, Present and Future Sentiments Towards CAD [Computer Aided Design]
With new technologies, come hopes, expectations, and speculations of potential new futures. This thesis attempts to understand such attitudes, specifically around the development and evolution of Computer Aided Design (CAD) technologies. To this end, text corpora from 1980 onwards that centers on CAD is extracted from 880+ PDFS of the AIA magazine corpus. AIA corpus was chosen as the AIA has historically dominated design discourse and educational pedagogy and is much of the reason of why architecture exists the way it does today in America. Furthermore, their archives offer free and available past issues since the publication’s inception (1913). These bodies of extracted text are then compiled into four timescales 1980–1989, 1990–1999, 2000–2009 and 2010–onwards. These categories are then compared and analyzed using a natural language processing (NLP) word embeddings approach revealing semantic and syntactic relationships between words. This analysis frames language as a partial reflection of social values and hopes to reveal insights into understand past, present, and future sentiments around CAD since its inception.
From Forecasting to Scenario Planning: The Case of Autonomous Vehicles
Efforts to forecast travel demand have led to the development of complex models which attempt to replicate human daily actions, choices, and movements. However, a growing body of literature suggests that the complexity of these models and their limited consideration of uncertainty have adversely affected their usefulness in the planning process. This dissertation argues that transportation planning should shift to methods that facilitate understanding and communication of uncertainty instead of relying on seemingly deterministic predictions of complex models. Two modeling paradigms – activity-based and scenario-based models are analyzed to show how they handle uncertainty in the case of assessing the travel impacts of autonomous vehicles. Three metropolitan areas, Seattle, San Francisco, and the Detroit region, are used as case studies to estimate the impacts of autonomous vehicles on total travel and accessibility. The results of the activity-based modeling indicate that the effects of autonomous vehicles are different in different regions, primarily due to the differences in income, density, and access to public transit. While vehicle miles increase in all three regions, 17% in Seattle, 22% in the Bay Area, and 11% in Detroit, accessibility is highly dependent on the local context. The scenario-based model is not able to produce the results with this level of granularity. However, due to many unknowns associated with emerging technology, the scenario-based model proved to be better suited to incorporate various aspects of autonomous vehicles. Beyond the estimates of travel impact, the results show that more informed planning can be achieved by moving away from deterministic forecasting and especially away from the urge to improve forecasting accuracy by building bigger models. Every piece of additional data and every additional parameter has an uncertainty cost that is compounded with the previous uncertainty costs. Instead, the modelers should aim to create more useful models by increasing the transparency of the modeling process and by reducing its complexity.
Tracing Narratives: the Mauritian-Chagossian Sovereignty Dispute
In a treaty for Mauritius to gain independence from the United Kingdom in 1968, the island was to relinquish one of its own, the Chagos Archipelago. From then on, Chagossians were evicted from their homes to make space for the United States Navy. Now known as the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), the complex politics that it carries is a neo-colonial marker in Mauritian history – an imperial move that has only recently been acknowledged by the United Nations and the World Court as unlawful. In attempting to decentralize western narratives, this project is a call to action for international territories to recognize pan-African and post-colonial issues. Still, in doing that, it also questions who has the right to access research. And not only is the thesis a field guide to the multiple hurdles of the undertaking research; the existing colonial dispositions towards post-colonial systems, and questioning of gatekeeping history, but also a personal journal and critique of what it is truly like to be treated as an alien in a supposed culturally intimate space.
Highway to The Bottom: Recasting Baltimore's Highway to Nowhere
This thesis explores the potential for the landscape architect to flip the script on designing with remnant landscapes from the mid-20th century era of urban renewal, focusing on West Baltimore’s Highway to Nowhere. The form and materiality of the sunken highway have become ingrained in the cultural landscape; there is an opportunity to design a new landscape typology from this existing infrastructure, without modifying its form or material. Through resurfacing historic residential and commercial fabric and making the site ecologically productive for surrounding context, the Highway to Nowhere is recast as the Highway to The Bottom. The Highway to The Bottom operates in opposition to the structures undergirding it: annexation/blotting, demolition, and greenwashing. This thesis recasts these obstructions as productive design frameworks in the form of ownership, material, and experience, all as expressions of the hole in the ground in West Baltimore.
The Lāhaināluna Views: New England Missionaries and Transplanting of a Vernacular
In 1820, Protestant missionaries from New England arrived in the islands of Hawaiʻi. They expressed their goal of introducing Christinity in distinctly material terms, prioritizing especially the execution of an imagined landscape, one they planned to realize by “fill[ing] the habitable parts of those important islands with schools and churches, fruitful fields, and pleasant dwellings.” Engraved landscape views produced by scholars at a Seminary in Lāhaināluna, Maui, capture the missionʻs attempts at realizing this ideal, and expose the many ways it was a nearly rote replication of the built environment they had left back east. Looking closely at the images themselves, which were widely distributed in journals and books in New England, I examine the ways they promote three stages of mission intervention, the imposition of barrenness that allowed the missionaries to justify the “filling” they proposed, the conversion of that blank slate into fields dictated by American agricultural practices, and the population of those fields by imported and whitewashed, woodframe houses. Although the mission figured these landscape alterations as American ‘im- provements,’ they were heavily contrived and frequently unsuccessful, often remaining foreign fantasies that fit clumsily into the landscape of the islands. In these moments of mission failure, we can experience the persistence of Kanaka Maoli lifeways, and the multitude of instances in which the mission relied upon these practices even as they actively attempted to erase them.
“Vieques es Nuestra Casa": Ecological Reparation through Embodied Action
This thesis is set on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, a territory subjected to US Navy occupation and decades of munitions testing. To counter the alienation and destruction imposed by military exploitation, this project looks to the activist group the Alianza de Mujeres Viequenses who demanded demilitarization for the protection of their island home. Acts of care by womxn respond directly to postmilitary site conditions to repair toxic and highly disturbed grounds for community access and benefit. This response to soil (through remediation, composting, planting, and erosion control) generates a series of networked garden landscapes. Tending the soil and plants shifts power over territory from Washington, DC, to locals through reciprocal interactions between human and nonhuman community members. This approach underscores the impacts of long-term colonial violence as registered in the granular nature of the ground, adding an important sectional dimension to our interpretation of the impacts of colonial military projects and a call for reparative action.
edit architecture*
Editing just one detail can alter the entire structure of a concept. This thesis explores architecturally editing existing buildings to challenge their conceptual framework. The global construction boom of the past fifty years has resulted in the production of more buildings than ever before. Today, these buildings face either demolition or repair due to average building lifespans of thirty to fifty years. In addition to these intrinsic expiration dates, contemporary environmental constraints and growing spatial needs require the extension of building lifecycles. However, the resulting misalignment between these structures’ original intentions and present-day limitations calls for a practice of conceptual and structural editing that both confronts initial intentions and integrates new desires. This thesis considers the modernist office tower as an example of the conflicted condition that characterizes buildings approaching their expiration dates. While the public holds these towers in contempt for their sitelessness, the embodied carbon within the heavy structure outrules demolition and redevelopment. Specifically, this project edits the Postbank Tower in Berlin, built in 1971. Because the original building privileges programmatic specificity over site specificity, my proposal challenges this existing prioritization, eschewing functional prescription in favor of programmatic ambiguity. The editorial concept is driven by a structural re-grounding, resulting in a spatial entanglement of old and new structure, where strategic additions and subtractions make a new concept of the building legible.
Investigations in Metropolitan Form: Architecture, Infrastructure, and the American City
This thesis challenges the discipline of architecture to reassert its agency at the scale of the city, the region, and the territory. Using Austin, Texas and Richmond, Virginia as case studies, it proposes a transformation of mid-sized American cities through the redevelopment of urban expressways. In the United States, highways are symbolic of the overreach of Modernist planning, and of the ignorance and animus with which architects and the state have addressed people of color and the poor. They are infrastructural engines which drive our rapacious consumption of natural resources through suburbanization. The urban renewal era was a product of Modernist ambition, but also a harbinger of its end. Since then, the authority of the design disciplines has been righteously assailed from below, leaving designers themselves either unable or unwilling to affect large-scale change. The moment for totalizing planning and gestural megastructures has passed, but architects must find a way to develop ambitious proposals if we are to respond to the linked crises of our own time. By envisioning a new metropolitan condition from the scale of the territory down to the civic space, this thesis demonstrates how a revival of architectural interest in urban form can alter patterns of life in the American city. The proposals for Austin and Richmond function as both illustrations of a mode of argument and as concrete solutions to the pressing problems of mid-sized cities.
Nature State: Incentivized Forests in Southern Ontario
Nature State: Incentivized Forests in Southern Ontario investigates the rapid growth of voluntary private land conservation efforts in suburban and rural Ontario, focusing on the rise of incentivized management from the mid-1990s until present day. Using a mixed methods approach the study combines semi-structured interviews, archival research, and GIS analysis with case studies in southern Ontario. This research considers the coevolution of new taxation schemes for conservation, devolved governance, and privatized approaches to owning land and resources. In particular, this work examines the growing use of programs such as the Managed Forest Tax Incentive Program in order to manage environmental change and biodiversity of forested lands within an extended urban fabric. Incentivized environmental management raises important questions about the growing interdependence between suburban land conservation and urban housing affordability, the changing scales of stewardship, and the increasing role of finance in land conservation. My findings reveal the development of new actor assemblages and knowledge geographies that have come about due to the transfer of forest management activities from the state to landowners, the new spatialities of protected areas and their land use dynamics, as well as the integrated role of civil society and stewardship in addressing urban climate futures. Committee: Neil Brenner, Charles Waldheim, Sonja Dümpelmann
The Wardian: Confiscated Dendrobiums and Displaced Identities
The Wardian: Confiscated Dendrobiums and Displaced Identities is an art-based research project that addresses issues around displacement and migration. By retracing the personal journey of this illegally traded, ecologically endangered, confiscated - then rescued - Dendrobium orchid, currently held in quarantine at the Botanic Garden of Smith College, this project investigates the mechanisms by which institutions and legal systems transfer and detain plants. The installation consists of five hand-welded metal structures, the primary artifacts for my research. Each structure stands as an individual signifier of the legislative, the sociopolitical, the biotic, and finally the ethnomedicinal knowledge systems. Together, the artifacts enter in a dialogue which invites the viewer to question, beyond the journey of the Dendrobium orchid, our relationship with one another as living beings.
Measuring atmosphere: relationships between room ambience, activity, and human emotional responses in virtual reality
This exploratory study aims to create a framework for measuring the strength of atmosphere in interior spaces, as defined by the architectural elements within them. A survey questionnaire based on PANAS was created, along with 10 3D modeled rooms that were simulated in virtual reality. The rooms were designed using parameters derived from studies in environmental psychology that informed the creation of a room activity level scale (RALS). Each of the rooms was given a score on this scale. 24 participants were asked to report their feelings while in the VR spaces using the questionnaire. The rooms were first shown to them in color and afterwards in grayscale. It was hypothesized that 1) the participants would report stronger emotional responses in the rooms that were lower on the RALS, 2) that participants would report stronger emotional responses in colored rooms compared to their grayscale counterparts, and 3) that participants with a background in spatial design fields would report weaker emotional responses than participants without such a background. The data was analyzed using a mixed methods approach, where quantitative and qualitative data was gathered during the surveys. The quantitative data was analyzed with a linear regression model that informed the qualitative analysis. The results showed that hypotheses #1 and #3 were not supported, while hypothesis #2 was partially supported. It was determined that the opposite of hypothesis #1 was true, and that spaces higher on the RALS featured stronger emotional responses, alluding to the greater strength of atmosphere within them. Common architectural knowledge would claim that more mindful, less active spaces would feature a stronger atmosphere, as atmosphere is thought to be easier to perceive in such spaces. Opposing this notion, I suggest that the strength and perceivability of atmosphere are two different constructs.
Platforms: re-framing urban relocation through an ownership model for resident-led transformations of the built environment
Changing economic, demographic, and technological forces are shaping new balances of power across the planet. Systems of exchange fueled by urbanization, regional dynamism, the commodification of land, and increasingly unilateral economic and spatial policy frameworks are transforming the built environment and result in the displacement and relocation of infrastructures, buildings, and residents. In mono-industry cities, whose labor markets depend on the continued productivity of a single industry or company, the ability of residents to engage and participate in the decision-making process when it comes time to move is restricted by their economic and regional dependence, the extent of physical infrastructure outside of the urban area, and their capacity to initiate large-scale action. In practice, there is a need to re-define the systems of urban relocation, in terms of authority, process, and outcomes, in order to create a multilateral framework that can be applied across contexts. First, it is necessary to understand and critically examine the current scalar systems of exchange that drive relocation, including: local property rights transfers; regional spatial, environmental, and land use policy; and the interrelated components of telecoupled interactions. Then, a new integrative systems framework proposes four operational platforms developed in response to key issues of ownership, infrastructure, housing, and services to increase the capacity, choice, and financial mobility of residents on both near- and long-term timeframes. Design strategies that consider user-occupant flexibility and value-creation address growth, management, and social stability in a model of stakeholder capitalism that places residents on the other side of the decision-making table.
Of Two Minds: Excavating the Split Estate
The split estate is a political-legal framework in the United States that severs surface property from subsurface. This effectively duplicates available property in the United States and establishes a palimpsest of ownership of land with the ground as delimiter. In practice, this condition decouples land from its geologic underpinnings and establishes distinct rights to the access and use of landed property and minerals. It calls into question the flat condition of property. This thesis unpacks the effects of this splitting as a precedent of the continuous commodification of the American public domain. I use the split estate to frame landscape as a political-aesthetic instrument through which to question notions of territory, divisibility and the image of public lands in the United States. I take as my subject sites within the United States where the surface is public land (National Parks, National Forests, et al.) and the subsurface is private extraction. Using imagery, mapping and drawing, this is explored through six ways of seeing the split estate: territorial, geological, hydrological, financial, sublime and legal. Through this excavation, the competing ideologies of private extraction and wilderness imaginary are brought to the fore, questioning how use of the underground reinscribes the boundaries of property above. Finally, this thesis projects ways the split estate could be understood within the socio-cultural landscape of America. It proposes didactic tools, which engage the greater public in this topic and seeks to upend traditional representations of the extraction/conservation dichotomy.
Two strip mall plazas Edison, New Jersey
Through a suburban counter-ethnobotany, this project examines how plant and human migrations land in two strip mall plazas in Edison, New Jersey. Edison became home to large communities of immigrants from East and South Asia after the 1965 Immigration Act; these communities had culturally specific needs which they fulfilled through the appropriation of the strip mall plaza. Plants also inhabit this peripheral asphalt world, both within the mall and around. Brought by historically complicated global mechanics, their presence, like that of the people around, is politicized. As local plant migrations increase due to changes in climate and the built environment, this project responds by proposing a choreography of stripping asphalt from the road and parking lot, facilitating planting. After de-paving, the material and program inside is brought outside and the spontaneous growth of the back end brought to the front, and the plaza becomes a garden in migration.
Home-Coming | Coming-Home: A Discourse Deriving from Black Domesticity
When imagining a discourse around Black domesticity, it is essential to create new parameters, or for that matter, no parameters at all, no longer relying only on colonial Anglo-Saxon methods telling how to appropriate or deem What is considered space-making and What is not. What is comfortable and What is not, What is safe and What is not, What is beautiful and What is not and so on. This discourse interrogates and respond to gaps within the cannon. A discourse that is no longer concerning with the individual and more about the collective. A discourse of collective cultivation, cultural tracing, a discourse around being. No longer relying on the built environment as the only enabler of space-making but relying also on that of the human body and of earth. This thesis searches for traces of spatial liberation and cultural identities within the domestic realm of Blacks. Analyzing historical typologies within Black vernacular ranging from the slave plantation to that of the current day suburb, identifying spaces and bodily movements of liberation within these communities. Using this framework to reveal how the study of Black Domesticity has the power to reimagine and reassemble how we think about housing in America. Using these findings to then return to a site of Black Domesticity such as Pruitt Igoe, creating a rebuttal against the system. For Blacks to return to this site, it can represent the ultimate act of home-coming/coming-home in which this time through Black domestic space-making indicates WE ARE HERE TO STAY.