Malcom Moffat College of Education

Items

• Un Folklore Vitivinicola: Exploring Relationships between Indigeneity and Coloniality through High-Altitude Viticulture in Northwest Argentina
  Traversing the high-altitude landscapes of Northwest Argentina’s Calchaquí Valleys, Salta’s Ruta del Vino weaves through a palimpsest of indigenous, colonial, and viticultural histories, forming a series of extensive landscapes transformed by centuries of human inhabitation. Despite emerging from parallel histories, the viticulture of the region remains independent of indigenous precedents, continuing to draw upon processes and methods that emerged with the grapevine at the time of the region’s colonization while ignoring the local community’s spiritual relationships to the landscapes they occupy. These independent landscape practices have resulted in the fragmented territory that exists today, occupied by patches of productive agricultural lands, forests, and a series of disjointed riparian corridors threatened by unprecedented impacts of climate change. Un Folklore Vitivincola envisions an alternate model through which we can begin decolonizing viticulture, interweaving mono-cultural vineyards with landscape practices of the region to re-establish greater territorial and social integration.
• Los Angeles Dreams Itself a Post-Oil City
  Oil was never really new—not in Los Angeles—but its 1892 discovery in the city would fuel expansions of profit, policy, and population that would reshape the region and the world. Soon after, ecstatic boosters peddled dreams of tropical refuge while prospectors sold plots ripe with oil. The city ballooned amid the smog, between the palms, pipelines, derricks, and freeways. In 2022, a City Council vote sentenced all oil extraction within city limits to sunset by 2045. Los Angeles Dreams Itself a Post-Oil City imagines one of these thousands of extraction sites—the Murphy Drill Site (MDS)—as it finds a new life. Dreams for MDS are a place of contest: of energy transition fantasies and effaced environmental histories, of the post-industrial's picturesque remediation. It asks us to dream of a world where energy and its landscape are no longer sites for oppressive productivity, but a liberation from it.
• Urban Semiotics and Solastalgia
  This thesis explores the semiotic changes within the London borough of Hackney between 2011 and 2021 and their emotional impact on long-term residents. Analyzing three sites, the research highlights how semiotic transformations indicative of gentrification, urban renewal, and shifting immigration patterns can engender solastalgia, a type of psychological distress caused by alterations to one's familiar environment. The study introduces an 'Dictionary of Urban Semiotics' as a tool to underpin new forms of planning impact assessments and safeguard the aesthetic and cultural assets that foster residents' sense of belonging and solace. Advocating for planning assessments that protect the fabric of lower-income and working-class neighborhoods, this thesis underscores the necessity of balancing urban development with communities' emotional and cultural well-being, promoting a socially just and empathetic approach to urban change.
• Fluid Permanence: A Shotengai-Archive in Tokyo
  Today Tokyo stands as a “brand new city”. Buildings are regularly uprooted to make way for new buildings that completely wipe out traces of the previous structure. The idea of a propelling monument, as described by Aldo Rossi in Architecture of the City, is the means by which we can begin to rethink architecture’s relationship to time and history. This thesis questions the notion of linear time and deals with concepts of adaptation and modification. It explores propelling permanence that provides a past that can still be experienced and is attached with the present everyday reality. It asks the question: How can we construct an architecture that allows us to explore the intersection of past and present and to rethink the notion of active history? Can public space be repositories of collective memory and achieve propelling permanence in a city that is constantly changing? This thesis contains a plurality of functions in dialogue, bringing the informal next to the formal, the institution next to the everyday, and extending its influence beyond its architectural footprint to the larger urban context. The juxtaposition of two programs—the archive and the shotengai, and the crossing of the new with the existing construct an architecture that preserves, presents, and promotes historical and cultural resources without fossilizing them in time. The past and future are captured here in the present moment.
• Living on the Skyline: Rooftop Housing in Seoul, Hong Kong, and Taipei
  Rooftop housing is a living urban legacy, encapsulating the history of the city as well as the evolving needs of its people. This study explores rooftop housing in Seoul, Hong Kong, and Taipei. In all three cities, the rooftop houses are ubiquitous, interwoven throughout the city’s skyline. Although each city’s rooftop community has its own context, rooftop housing in these cities shares common qualities and attributes, having been formed through comparable development processes. In the past century, East Asian cities have undergone a period of spectacular development driven by economic progress, industrialization, and urbanization. Amidst a sea of skyscrapers and high-rises, informal settlements have sprung up to fill the void left by these buildings. These informal settlements have provided alternative housing options for low-income residents and migrant workers, though the living conditions in many of these informal settlements have been inadequate. Rooftop housing is a type of informal settlement built through a haphazard process in order to meet the needs of these emergent urban dwellers. Much have been written about the informal settlements, but the existing literature has not focused specifically on rooftop housing; this lack of attention led to a general oversight of the important issues pertaining to this specific community. This dissertation expands on the existing framework of informal settlements to comprehensively study rooftop housing as an independent urban phenomenon. Studying rooftop housing communities presents a unique set of challenges, including the physical location of such communities, complex legal issues, lack of existing research, and a general lack of information. To overcome these challenges, this research is a holistic study of academic literature, news articles, popular and social media, and a collection of first-hand accounts of tenants and landlords through questionnaires and interviews conducted on site, as well as physical assessments carried out as part of the fieldwork. The key finding of this dissertation is that rooftop housing has distinct characteristics compared to other types of informal settlements. Its legal status is ambiguous: These informal residences sit on top of formal housing, putting them in a gray area between formal and informal. Public perception and awareness of the subject issues is low, partly due to their simplistic treatment in the media. Some media platforms romanticize the positive aspects of rooftop housing while ignoring the harsher realities, while others focus solely on the inadequate living conditions. All of these elements contribute to a set of narratives that are often contradictory and ambiguous, sending mixed messages to the general public. The study also produces rooftop housing typologies by studying the location, neighborhood environment, building types, and housing configuration of various settlements. An assessment of the building materials and the state of maintenance evaluated the condition of the housing and the level of deterioration. Despite the unconventional shapes of the units and haphazard development processes, this study found that there was a certain order in these structures—a set of organic developments that produced certain recurring patterns. The physical typologies of rooftop housing are shaped by the residents and their evolving needs. Moreover, rooftop houses are occupied by generations of tenants and undergo a process of iterative development to meet the tenants’ changing needs. Ironically, the flimsy materials that contribute to the inadequacies of these shelters also make them versatile, spaces that can be modified to suit the evolving needs of their tenants. In this way, the rooftop housing typologies reveal the evolution of the needs of these emergent urban settlers. When viewed from the perspective of the tenants, the rooftop housing represents a temporary space, one that often persists largely due to convenient location, affordability, and a lack of viable alternatives. Although there is a wide range, the sizes and conditions of rooftop houses are quite livable and preferable to other types of informal settlements. Some of the issues and complaints concern insulation and accessibility, and in the case of Hong Kong, the size of the units, but overall, close to half of the surveyed tenants found their living conditions to be adequate. Compared to the other forms of inner-city informal housing—semi-basement housing or cage homes—rooftop housing is privileged, an extension of formal housing, entailing privacy, views, and convenient location. Ultimately, this dissertation is an attempt to formalize the discourse on rooftop housing by examining the subject matter through various perspectives. By establishing rooftop housing typologies that are shaped by changing demographics and social needs, this study contributes to building a framework for future studies on this subject. Finally, a side-by-side comparison of the three East Asian cities—Seoul, Hong Kong, and Taipei, and their unique history and relationship with rooftop housing—is an effort to capture an important part of the urban fabric.
• Counterpoints to Cultural Colonialism
  Counterpoints to Cultural Colonialism Formal notions of religion, education, and health were weapons against indigenous populations. The church, school, and hospital, as mechanisms of institutional control, place architecture at the forefront of cultural imperialism. Indigenous Kalinago people on the Eastern Caribbean Island of Dominica put up great physical and cultural resistance against dominant settlers for over four centuries. In 1903, in an effort to isolate the Kalinago people, their colonizers proposed to them their own reserve with clearly defined boundaries. As a result of this rigid delineation of space, approximately 3000 Kalinago descendants now settle on communally owned land in a remote and mountainous area on the island’s Atlantic coast – the Caribbean’s only remaining designated indigenous territory – where they practice Western constructed forms of Christianity, formal education, and health. This thesis questions architecture’s role in the portrayal of power by proposing counterpoints to the institutional frameworks that yield cultural colonialism of the Kalinago people. Kiosks dispersed in the Territory will perform as antagonists to the church, school and health center and serve as symbols of cultural reclamation. This confrontation emerges through the double-sidedness of culture - its materiality and non-materiality – as a coalesced form of storytelling. How does architecture define the non-materiality of the performing arts as a catalyst for physical form, while presenting and representing the Pre-Columbian material technique of basket weaving through varying tectonic relationships between structure and membrane? The coalescence of material and non-material culture produces the space to perform the story but also the space that performs the story.
• Stir-Fry Urbanism: Geography of Chinese Restaurants and the Spatial Politics of Race and Iden-tity in Boston’s Urban Development 1880 – 2020
  If you think of McDonald's as the icon of American food, America might taste more like General Tso Chicken than a Cheeseburger. There are currently over 45,000 Chinese restaurants in the U.S., more than all the McDonald's, KFC, Wendy's, and Taco Bells combined. However, the Chinese comprise less than 1.6% of the total U.S. population despite being present in this country as early as the 1850s. So what explains the ubiquity and popularity of Chinese foods despite the marginal size of the Chinese population in the U.S.? I examine the changing geography of Chinese restau-rants in Boston from 1880 to 2020 because they are the quintessential example of how diasporic identity is expressed, produced, and transformed in the built environment through constant negotia-tions and interactions across the color line. Using data from U.S. Census, Boston City Directory, and Yellow Pages, I map the changing geography of Chinese restaurants in Boston for the past 140 years to show that Chinese restaurants have not only functioned as essential means of econom-ic survival but also key spaces of cultural production and political mobilization that enabled the Chinese diaspora to negotiate their belonging and carve out spaces of living and livelihood in Bos-ton which in turn shaped the city into the multiethnic and multicultural metropolis that we know today.
• Priorities in building decarbonization: Accounting for total carbon and the time value of carbon in cost-benefit analyses of residential retrofits.
  Energy consumption in new construction is decreasing thanks to stricter building codes, but few codes limit emissions of existing buildings, particularly in existing homes. This study investigates the carbon- and cost-effectiveness of three decarbonization strategies in residential retrofits: electrifying buildings, upgrading envelopes, and adding renewable energy. Each strategy is further broken down into distinct retrofit interventions to guide homeowners and policymakers in prioritizing energy upgrades. Focusing on single-family homes built before 1980 in Houston, Los Angeles, and Chicago, the study analyzes homes in three cities with distinct climates and grid emission rates. Many studies on building performance upgrades have investigated the operational carbon reductions associated with different retrofit strategies, but embodied carbon, grid decarbonization, and the time value of carbon (TVC) are often omitted. And if those subjects are addressed, they are rarely analyzed all together. Using energy simulation and Life Cycle Assessment, we quantified the total carbon reduction and Life Cycle Cost associated with each retrofit, ranked the interventions accordingly, and calculated how the rankings would change if electricity grid emission rates decreased or if we accounted for the TVC. Assuming current grid emission rates, envelope retrofits tended to rank better than renewable energy and electrification upgrades in terms of carbon reduction per dollar spent. However, as anticipated emission rates decreased, electrification upgrades improved in rank, while renewable energy upgrades declined. Including the TVC generally caused retrofits with high initial carbon investments to drop in ranking. The results illustrate that considering total carbon and the TVC has important implications on decarbonization recommendations. Future work could explore policy tools to incentivize different retrofit approaches or propose an appropriate discount rate to more accurately assess the TVC.
• Permanent Impermanence with the House in Three Climates or Living and Perceiving with Material Temporal Cycles
  In a civilization of rapid temporality and supposed linear progress, a human-nature dichotomy proliferates from our ways of living all the way to the building wall section. As our temporal rhythm of the solar movement became diagrammed to a circular clock face and our architectural conceptions became built with anonymous materials, we have constructed a way of living in which the materials’ reactions to the environment became imperceptible. This silencing of the materials’ relationship to the environment and to the inhabitants of the building is an outcome of the well tempered environment, where interior spaces are insulated and severed from the exterior environmental conditions. This thesis proposes the antithesis to ocularcentric buildings and thermostatic lifestyles. Can perceiving materials and its ability to mediate the exterior climate allow for a building that creates an understanding of the environment through our inhabitation? By being able to perceive and interact with materials, a relationship with the building can be formed where inhabitants will live with and care for the materials through diurnal, seasonal, generational, and material timescales. The thermal fluctuations of diurnal and seasonal changes recalibrates material and spatial organization to consider thermally active surfaces and heat retention, which can render programs, as we currently understand it, secondary to gradients of thermal qualities. Thick materials resist obsolescence by generational and material changes, offering materials the ability to weather and have continual use, becoming a form of carbon sequestration. The building moves through three different climates for three generations of family, reorganizing and re-layering itself to adapt to the new environment, while continuously building a reciprocal relationship with those who live with it.
• Through Water and Air: Digital Infrastructures for Indigenous Land Management
  In many parts of the world, digital connection has become the norm, constantly present and overbearing. However, there are, at the same time, marginalized groups in more remote places who are suffering from a lack of connection. This thesis argues that those groups have the right and need to be connected, but in the building of those connections, there are opportunities to consider alternative forms and customs in the digital infrastructure that can support different systems of values. Along the Klamath River in Northern California, the Yurok tribe, one of those marginalized groups, has been managing the forest for centuries, caring for the land and shaping it to suit their needs. Building on their grounded connections and worldview of land and nature as sacred, my goal is to design a digital network that improves their quality of life while allowing them to continue and evolve their way of living.
• Blankness (留白): Revisiting the Future of Nostalgia
  In the era of “Make America Great Again” and other populist movements, an increasing demand for fictions of nativity has marked the global zeitgeist. In fear of racial, national, or cultural identity disappearance, we eagerly look at the past, whether accurate or not, to enforce our modern-day personhood with a collective identity. Urban appearance and iconicity supply our demand with nostalgia, upholding these fictions we so desire. But as the late Harvard philosopher Svetlana Boym warns, these architectures can either be used to innocently reflect upon history or sensationalized to stoke right-wing populism. In Shanshui painting, the artistic technique of Liú Bái (留白—“leave blank”) is the compositional technique of synthesizing ink and blankness. “Blankness” in this context is a relative notion to the other presences on the rice paper canvas; it is not to be confused with absolute whiteness. Liú Bái affords a universality for viewers to subjectively interpret the blank in relation to the inked figures. This thesis borrows from Liú Bái in hopes of capturing this subjective and nondeterministic quality to foster new collectives, identities, and communities on the test site of Queen's Road, Hong Kong. Until we depart from this paradigm of intense identity insecurity, Liú Bái aims to sidestep the over-determining gaze of the zeitgeist. What is proposed here is not a tabula-rasa emptiness, nor a laissez-faire conservation of as-found urban conditions, but something in between. Something that is intentionally “Liú Bái.”
• Country Parks from Hong Kong to Shanghai: Hierarchical Landscape as Economic Engines
  The past decade has seen a rise in the number of country parks in Mainland China, which are described as an “import” of those in Hong Kong. However, based on their different topographies (mountains vs. fields), the country parks in Hong Kong and Mainland China have developed into varied typologies. This thesis asks whether there are actual connections between the country parks in these two systems. I am looking at the newly established country parks in Shanghai to determine if their “precedents” derive from colonial and post-colonial Hong Kong because the adaptation of country parks from a colonial environment to a modern urban system indicates that while the purpose of parklands is green space, they appear to function in a very different manner in Hong Kong than in Shanghai, in order to 1) compare the country parks in Hong Kong that were created to maintain elite class identity by social exclusion, with the country parks in the modern Chinese system that fabricated pastoral tourism for the middle class and 2) to determine whether the British colonial model was adopted by the Chinese government to manipulate land use and change land ownership. My thesis uncovers the intersections of the economic, political, and cultural factors, both explicit and implicit, and the mechanisms of how they are applied differently to the context of country parks in Hong Kong and Shanghai. I further compare the differences in how the land policies function and how protecting the interest of certain social classes while excluding others is a common goal.
• Transitive Gestures: Everyday Structures at Play
  Transitive gestures describe the direct linkage between a space as outcome and the action as process through a physical form. In the case of mining, a mine prop not only mechanically supports the space of a mine, but also serves as means through which the action of mining takes place. The prop is more than just a component in a space; it is an embodiment of a mechanism that realizes the space through actions. Scaffolds, alongside fences, nets, and other utility props, outlast the most enduring buildings in New York City. These everyday structures embody a unique state of perpetual transience in the city. They establish a shared syntax of everyday architecture, directly connecting physical activities to the barest architectural forms. This inherent link between action and form offers a mechanism to shape an architecture that actively enables and engages everyday activities within parks and streets as their natural venue. This thesis examines architecture as devices that enable activities by mediating the relation between body and space across various scales. It proposes two temporal interventions in two parks on the Lower West Side of Manhattan: one involving partial disassembly of an existing structure as an interim solution and the other as a seasonal shelter for a sports court. Evoking everyday structures as both source and context, the thesis employs tactical appropriations to preserve and enhance parks as vital civic spaces against current challenges such as scarcity of public space, extensive deconstruction, and deterioration of aging urban structures.
• Machine in Bloom: Industrial Park and Energy Timescapes within the Remnants of the Colstrip Power Plant
  The relics of the Colstrip coal-powered plant in eastern Montana remain as a mausoleum to the once sublime, a polemic of American westward expansion in the name of efficiency. Engagement with the landscape and retained infrastructure for residents and visitors is a tense involvement as one acknowledges the level of toxicity these forms of non-renewable energy contribute to human and environmental health while simultaneously appreciating the economic prosperity the plant provides. As polluted groundwater is cleaned through phytoremediation technologies, the power plant transitions to biomass, using the phyto-crops as the new primary source of energy. Over time these industrial practices and additions will be broken down or repurposed as energy futures shift and renewed ecologies take over. The thesis contributes to ongoing practices of landscape architecture as a transformative tool for sites of cultural heritage and ecological reclamation and how the discipline may advance the underlying social conversation of mending polluted environments by non-renewable energy industries that are currently being decommissioned around the world.
• Schemas in a Design Problem: Building in Seismic Regions Diversely Considered
  In most design problems, there are multiple schemas, or ways or orienting and organizing the knowledge content in the problem domain, and which by extension defines the range and bearing of solutions. This dissertation examines the properties of individual and clusters of schemas in a problem domain through the highly specific problem of building in seismic regions, a persistent class of design problem found around across diverse cultures and geographic regions. Using case studies, mostly of exemplary historical and contemporary building projects from seismic regions, as well as examples from a wider range of genera and disciplines, including artworks, literature, religious texts, and academic papers, this dissertation identifies and traces six prominent schemas in contemporary design practice, examining its conceptual origins, historical development, and opportunities and limitations in design applications. The six schemas are: 1) lightness, or the subtraction of weight, 2) quickness, or the maintenance of readiness, 3) exactitude, or the need for approximations, 4) visibility, or the rendering of invisible problems, 5) multiplicity, or the curation of diversity, and 6) consistency, or the assurance of a predictable sameness. The general schemas structures, if not the specific know-how of seismic engineering, appears to be widely applicable across problem domains.
• Recess Reimagined: The Intergenerational Campus
  This thesis project tackles Los Angeles' severe housing crisis, evident in the Los Angeles Housing Element, while also addressing the urban heat island effect, social isolation, and a growing aging population. Elementary school campuses in Los Angeles are currently covered in heat-absorbing asphalt, intensifying the heat island effect. The central question of this thesis revolves around finding a comprehensive solution to Los Angeles' housing crisis, social isolation, and the urban heat island issue, with a particular focus on the elderly. The project's relevance lies in its response to urban development challenges and pressing societal issues. It draws from research demonstrating the positive effects of intergenerational programs and innovative strategies for reimagining underutilized LAUSD-owned land. The project proposes a prototype for senior housing on LAUSD elementary school campuses, complemented by redesigned play spaces and improved arts and fitness facilities. This holistic approach offers a scalable solution to the housing crisis, social connectivity, and heat mitigation, targeting up to 140 elementary schools strategically selected based on their proximity to hospitals and public transit.
• National Garden for Subterranean Heritage: A Repository for Human/Earthly Matter
  The National Garden for Subterranean Heritage reconceptualizes the botanical National Garden of Athens, Greece, as a networked repository for human/earthly stories. Critiquing colonial practices of transplantations and classifications of imposed fragmentations embedded in the National Garden, the repository investigates situated knowledges of ground matter exposed within the subterranean metro network. National is redefined as the temporal entanglements of human inhabitations and geologic transformations, unearthed in proposed Gardens of Human/Earthly Matter within the Syntagma, Acropolis, Monastiraki, and Evangelismos stations and curated at the Repository of Subterranean Heritage within the existing botanical garden. Reacting to the absence of earthly agencies in Athens’s historical narratives, the repository restores Theophrastus’s didactic empirical gardens exhibiting conglomerated strata as coauthored systems of air, water, earth, fire, and live matter. Ancient fragments, infrastructures, and material flows are resurfaced in the decentralized gardens, exposing the agencies of power, culture, economy, and life in the formation of the city.
• The Influence of Urban Form and Socio-Demographics on Active Transport: A 40-Neighborhoods Study in Chengdu, China
  In China, a centralized planning culture has created similar neighborhoods across the country. Using a survey of 1,048 individuals conducted in 2016 in Chengdu—located in a carefully conceptualized typology of neighborhood forms—we analyzed the associations between individual and neighborhood characteristics and active or nonmotorized transport behavior. Using several multiple logistic and multilevel models, we show how neighborhoods were categorized and how the number of categories or neighborhood types affected the magnitude of the associations with active transport but not the direction. People taking non-work trips were more likely to use active compared with motorized modes in all neighborhood types. Neighborhood type was significant in models but so too were many other individual-level variables and infrastructural and locational features such as bike lanes and location near the river. Of the 3-D physical environment variables, floor area ratio (a proxy for density) was only significant in one model for nonwork trips. Intersection density and dissimilarity (land-use diversity) were only significant in a model for work trips. This study shows that to develop strong theories about the connections between active transport and environments, it is important to examine different physical and cultural contexts and perform sensitivity analyses. Research in different parts of China can help provide a more substantial base for evidence-informed policymaking. Planning and design recommendations were made related to active transport need to consider how neighborhoods, built environments, and personal characteristics interact in different kinds of urban environments.
• Improving America's Housing 2023
  Sparked by pandemic-induced changes in household routines and use of living space, home improvement and repair spending soared to new heights in 2022, reaching an estimated $567 billion. Despite this enormous investment, the nation’s homes need more investment to prepare against disasters, improve energy efficiency, and meet the needs of an aging population.
• Lost in Translation: Creative Urban Regeneration in Bangkok, Thailand
  Over the last decade, developing countries across Asia are increasingly fostering creativity-based industries to regenerate neighborhoods in their global cities. Multilateral institutions, government agencies, and academics have lauded these new urban redevelopments as successfully supporting local creative industries and communities. With its development models originating from the Global North, does creative regeneration in the Global South represent successful fast policy transfer? Focusing on the creative district initiatives in Bangkok, Thailand, my thesis finds that while professional and government narratives illustrate successes, deeper on-the-ground examinations reveal deviations from policy intentions as well as the limits of market-based development. To understand the gap between image and reality, I posit a shift away from conventional planning metrics to a mixed-methods analysis of the roles of actors and socio-cultural capital to explain causes of development. I identify a piecemeal style of development that emerges from public institution and urban form limitations as well as from lifestyles-led, rather than market-led, redevelopment. Revealing implementation complexities beyond policy transfer logics, this research aims to expand analytical approaches and to develop richer examinations of regeneration processes in developing contexts.
• Factory
  In a series of essays critiquing industrialized manufacturing entitled Factory Work: As It Is and Might Be (1884), William Morris elucidated the social underpinnings of the British Arts and Crafts movement, which found in handicraft a philosophy that unified labor, education, and economic production. One hundred and forty years later, the relationship between learning and labor continues to bear relevance, with increasing visibility placed on the nature of work post-Covid, and the four-year bachelor’s degree regularly questioned as the best path to a career. This thesis foregrounds the contemporary importance of Craft as a theory of labor, tracing its educational ideology as it evolved within the context of American craft schools before investigating a manifestation of Morris’s vision for the present moment. Unlike a “makerspace,” “research incubator,” nostalgic craft school, or any other contemporary dilution of craft philosophy, Factory places on the table a method of production which considers the end-product secondary to the empowerment gained through traditions of learning that surround handwork.
• Yasser Elsheshtawy, Temporary Cities: Resisting Transience in Arabia. Review essay by Gareth Doherty.
  Book review.
• Uncommon Knowledge: Practices and Protocols for Environmental Information
  The databases that landscapes architects rely on to design future-oriented infrastructure—the SHP files and CSVs that describe a site’s climate, plants, and soils—often involve inadvertently appeal to extractive forms of knowledge production and storage. What if we were to design information infrastructures, both physical and digital, that are premised on collective ownership as opposed to existing systems that privatize, accumulate, and collect? This thesis, Uncommon Knowledge, responds to the contemporary environmental information economy at the site of Google’s first hyperscale data center in water stressed The Dalles, Oregon. On the banks of the polluted Columbia River straddling Washington and Oregon, the thesis projects futures where watershed scale data commons produce knowledge materially, through the infrastructure of plants, and immaterially, through networks and servers. By deepening the connection between people, their environments, and information, the landscape stokes political agency and action in at-risk watersheds through uncommon models of knowledge production.
• Advancing Housing and Health Equity for Older Adults: Pandemic Innovations and Policy Ideas
  During the pandemic, many older adults faced social isolation and disruptions in access to food, medical care, and supportive services. In response, organizations that support older people improvised solutions to address these challenges. This report, co-authored with The Hastings Center, examines how these responses, most of which were intended to be temporary, might improve housing and supports for older adults and address longstanding inequities.
• Comparing energy and comfort metrics for building benchmarking
  Benchmarking energy use is increasingly mandated and tied to consequences such as fines for underperforming buildings. Yet, standard benchmarking methods and metrics may not adequately align with policymakers’ or building owners’ goals. We demonstrate how benchmarking metrics are non-interchangeable and how they can lead to substantially different building rankings. We analyze the performance of 29 case study buildings using different methods and metrics, divided into three categories: simple energy benchmarking, regression, and comfort. We find that Energy Use Intensity (EUI) serves as a poor proxy for harder-to-measure but more meaningful metrics. For example, factoring in the number of occupants (“EUI per person” rather than EUI) changes a building's ranking in our group by 24%. We demonstrate how a custom regression analysis and the “Observed-to-modeled” ratio can be useful for large-portfolio building owners, and how this differs from available benchmarking tools like Energy Star. We benchmark a subset of buildings via reported and monitored comfort factors and, importantly, propose the metrics “Overheating/cooling Degree Days”. These metrics measure discomfort relative to a building's operation mode and highlight cases of energy waste. The Overheating Degree Days metric highlighted operational problems in one case study building.