Malcom Moffat College of Education

Items

• Marronage as Methodology
  Marronage, the practice of escaping bondage from slavery, is an inherently spatial practice. Maroons, or fugitive slaves, understood their environments as fluid, multilayered, and inseparable from the land; they superimposed multiple forms of spatial knowledge in order to communicate with one another, find cover for social and spiritual rituals, organize work stoppages and other labor tactics, and to navigate the world both inside and outside the plantation. Historians, geographers, and other scholars have used marronage as a conceptual tool to illustrate the political and topographic importance of spatial autonomy for fugitive groups, both in the context of chattel slavery in the Americas and in other historical and geographical contexts. Understanding marronage as a methodology or mode of inquiry for any discipline means examining inherited tools and methods, questioning who has wielded them to what ends, and learning ways that we might use them differently. Despite their utility, or perhaps because of it, architectural drawing conventions neutralize the potential political and social agency of architecture as such. If architecture has been acknowledged to be complicit with histories of white supremacy and imperial conquest, architects today require a different set of methodologies to overcome the politically neutralizing function of our inherited drawing conventions. Marronage as methodology opens up the possibility for architects to challenge and subvert the logics of enclosure and domination that inform both drawing and building today. By examining a firsthand narrative of marronage in Alabama alongside archival building records from 18th- and 19th-century Cambridge, how can we uncover spatialized histories from the margins and reorient architectural practice away from rigid material and symbolic hierarchies and toward mobility, mutualism, and liberation?
• Dot as Architecture
  This thesis project investigates the role of a Dot, first by defining the Dot within Architecture and second by situating the Dot within the contemporary city as a new proposal of nonfigurative architecture. Introducing the Dot in the contemporary city disrupts the urban scenography as the current image of the urban landscape no longer reflects the entire present condition of work. The Dot becomes an active instrument in addressing contemporary workplace needs by questioning the role and relation of those who represent new forms of work and workers to the city. The Dot doesn’t dictate how one works. The Dot is a place that allows those who don’t have a place to work within the city a place to go. The Dot represents a form of work based on individualism, startups, and the public as agents; the Dot presents a new form and image of work within Detroit.
• The Way of Mount Tai: Cultural Heritage and Everyday Life in Contemporary China
  What does the past mean, and how might it be operationalized, in contemporary China? “The Way of Mount Tai” explores these questions through a heritage-informed urban regeneration project at the foot of one of China's most famous peaks. The project develops 2km of streetscape, with adjacent parcels, from the historic temple to the base of the mountain. This area is equally an everyday urban neighborhood and an internationally significant pilgrimage route; the project’s strategies—shared mobility, graduated spaces, different directional experiences, and flexibility of building use over time—manage the tension between tourism and the everyday through the cultivation of an intense street life. This cauldron of bubbling sociality is a shared urban heritage as ancient as it is novel, as quotidian as it is spectacular.
• Planning Climate Philanthropy
  Nearly every local climate plan in the United States is, in some way, funded by philanthropic sources, whether through direct underwriting of government programs, capacity building, sponsorship of academic research, or support for not-for-profit advocacy organizations. This exchange represents an extension of the historic and ongoing dialogue between public sector planning and philanthropy, which remains a relatively opaque phenomenon. This thesis argues that there is a need for holistic evaluation of philanthropic programs in the public interest rather than solely programmatic or internal analysis. With this goal, I examine foundation-funded climate programs in Boston to determine their success at leveraging future funding, creating policy change, and furthering equitable outcomes. Utilizing this analysis, this thesis puts forth a framework for the evaluation of future funding and best practices for identifying needs moving forward into the next phase of climate philanthropy for adaptation.
• Big Roof, Little Roof
  Towards the end of the 19th century, American architecture came into its own. The houses of the briefly ascendent Shingle Style took full and unapologetic advantage of the Gilded Age’s gaudy romanticism. Shingles wrapped uninterrupted around interwoven gables and complexly curved surfaces. Dormers seamlessly devolved from roof planes, and covered porches emphasized horizontality amidst the proliferation of building wings. Conic rooflets, spiraling towers, bending walls, and other architectural anomalies were all contained within the vacuum-shrunk uniformity of the shingled aggregate. In the words of Vincent Scully, the genre’s pre-eminent scholar, the houses of the Shingle Style comprised “the freest and, on the whole, among the most generous forms that the United States has yet produced. In their own way they were also the gentlest forms: the most relaxed and spiritually open.”
• A Pool in the City
  American municipal pools exist in cities, often surrounded by car-centric spaces such as freeways, parking lots, big-box stores, and industrial sites. They have traditionally employed a typology of “maximum building, minimal boundary.” This typology concentrates the bulk of design and construction in one building (with essential amenities such as changing rooms), whereas the boundary, required by law for safety purposes, is lightly built and often realized in the form of chain wire fencing. Careless boundaries like chain wire fencing not only exposes swimming pools to their industrial, car-centric sites, but it also heightens an image of exclusion that has long plagued American municipal pools. This thesis proposes a typology of “maximum boundary, minimal building” for the American municipal pool. Through a study of materials, lighting, proportions, tectonics, and local construction practices, this new swimming pool seeks to revive the American municipal pool as an active public space by altering the way swimmers relate to their surroundings and the way the public relate to the pool.
• Playing with Fire: Three Stories of Burning the Forest
  This thesis follows the language of fire between three characters and a forest in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. In this region, growing interest in the “good fire” of prescribed burning is routinely deployed in a non-human ecological silo, failing to embrace its histories -- and potentials -- as an agent of social and political transformation. This project invites that challenge, suggesting forms of communal burning that highlight fire’s potential as a catalyst of dialogue between each other, the stories we bring, and the forests we inhabit. This reading of fire invites complexity, framing the site as at once an experimental forest operated by the U.S. Forest Service, a home for the town of Challenge, and the ancestral homeland of the Nisenan people. These stories guide us into a future of fire in three acts: as participation in the burn, as the cultivation of non-extractive forest-relationships, and as leverage for land access. Within each, spaces of design welcome us into the frictions of burning together -- in pursuit of fire as a collective and elemental force of human nature.
• Form Transition: Decarbonization Beyond Settler Modernity
  Recent discourse about climate change and the spotlight it has put on global energy systems have raised calls for new relationships to energy under a variety of open-ended terms: decarbonization, energy transition, green economy, etc. Following architectural theorist Elise Iturbe [and others], this project understands such calls for energy transition as a deeper contradiction in the structures of global modernity as not just dependent on fossil fuels but in fact shaped by their logic, perpetuated through practices, norms, and institutions in a self-replicating carbon form. Carbon form works to name carbon modernity as form inclusive of the cultural, economic and political conditions of social life sedimented into a spatial algorithm made possible by a certain source of energy, though not dependent on its continued usage. Thus, as Iturbe writes, “if solar panels are increasing the value of a real estate object, in a precarious neoliberal economy, that is carbon form” – that is, it is not just decarbonization of energy infrastructure but the dismantling of carbon form itself that is needed to break the structural norms of carbon modernity. Drawing on indigenous epistemologies, critical feminist studies, decolonial theory and situated entanglement, this thesis identifies carbon modernity not just as carbon form but as form shaped and maintained by the violent legacies of settler colonialism, and argues that dismantling cycles of extraction and exploitation – settler form – requires form transition. Form transition must be messier terrain than energy transition, by design. Bound up in form are affective orientations, electrical wires, invisible signals, concretes, silicones, borders, bodies and world-views. A turn to form transition demands experimentation in methodology and praxis. This project contemplates form transition through a multiyear engagement with a collective indigenous initiative tending to climate change planning at home in the Yukon Territory, Canada – a landscape where the impacts of climate change and questions of conservation are taken up in different ways by the First Nation and State bodies that co-govern the territory’s lands and resources. Highlighting aspects of methodology, process and results, the project reflects on epistemological frameworks supporting settler form and those needed to transcend it.
• Divided we drown: Segregation and climate resilience in Metro Manila
  In a flood-prone megacity like Metro Manila, how does urban segregation impact a city’s ability to prevent, mitigate, endure, and recover from climate-related disasters? In this thesis, I combine urban form analysis with qualitative methods to understand how the physicality of the city interplays with the lived experiences of government officials and residents during flood events in Metro Manila. Through the examination of two barangays, Damayang Lagi of Quezon City and Malanday of Marikina, I identify cases in which segregation poses a threat to the safety of residents, such as walls obstructing critical evacuation routes. The thesis culminates in a proposal that explores alternatives to disaster risk management and governance set in motion by spatial negotiations that transcend segregation boundaries. The institutional and urban design interventions that make this possible show that a fragmented barangay could become united against the impending crises that threaten its security.
• Cuisine & Empire: Multi-Species Care on the American Farm
  On the American Farm, Empire reigns. A power structure that encompasses an ahistorical spatial totality, it creates the conditions for the control of human life and nature. Empire is also a place. It is located in McLean County, Illinois, the top producer of corn in the United States. This corn, no. 2 yellow dent, drives our cuisine, yet we eat almost none of it. Cuisine & Empire intersect in the farm as a problem of land. Cuisine & Empire: A Framework for Multi-Species Care on the American Farm re-grounds landscape architecture in agrarian practices. By reconceiving the land ordinance, it counters the scalable practices of Empire that reduce multi-species life to yields and quotas. Using non-scalable farm ecologies, infrastructures, economies, and land practices, Cuisine & Empire re-assembles food cultivation and culture.
• Little 2. Little 4. Little 6. Little 11.
  Living alone as a female is appealing, but also difficult. Women have been fighting for “a room of one’s own” for a long time. From the Bororo village Kejara to the Spinster’s House gupouk in the South East Asia, narratives of female communes in the history used to be studied as a diagram in the matriarchal society, a refuge from the world of inequality, or an asylum for outcasts in the counterculture. The collective construction of these utopian residences has transcended both time and culture, piecing together a palimpsest of the untold feminine space. Little 2/4/6/11 is designed as a diagram of flexible dwelling system, a female commune of soloing and caring in the post-marriage and aging society. Today, the increasing number of single women at all ages has indicated the alternation of social structures and gender identities in China. The creation of a home for single women is a response to the evolving gender identity of female in the Chinese patriarchal culture. This new housing system is established on the small-scale grouping of female alliance, which attempts to find a balance between individuality and collectivity in co-living. On the one hand, it respects the individual space of female and their independency; on the other hand, it explores the potential of female alliance and imagines a communal relationship between the caregivers and the vulnerable groups. The shared housing offers individuals a choice of living in united cohorts, instead of conforming to the social expectation of family building. It tells another story of the little women.
• Dear GSD
  My motivation for writing this thesis is my passion for using front-end design techniques to construct social justice in the digital domain and find solutions for particular design problems. This thesis proposes a digital platform to customize posters as a new means of communication in the Harvard GSD virtual community. To make visible the hidden reality to the public, it extracts underlying rules and design languages from significant poster designs at GSD before the pandemic. These rules and conventions are translated into visual patterns in a system for potential customization. The thesis demonstrates how to use this system to explore how students and the administration communicate without public space under specific circumstances and design rules of posters. It takes examples from Strike Poster Workshop and other student organizations at GSD and embeds their conventions and components to illustrate an implementation of such a system. In the past decades, printing has become the most powerful tool to deliver messages in the public realm while it helps students build a sense of belonging to GSD. Every year, the administration announces public programs by making posters in the Gund Hall. These posters follow specific rules of the layout with icons of GSD, which give the audience a sense of belonging to the school community while student groups work in a similar way. The abstract texts and shapes on the paper successfully assemble both students and faculty in the public space and reflect the diverse culture of GSD in the long term. At the beginning of the 2021 Spring semester, posters of public programs were sent to students as Gund hall was shut down temporarily. Due to the pandemic, the remote studies disassembled the community. However, the pandemic is not the only reason students lose their sense of belonging to the school. The lack of transparency in the conversations between students and the administration reveals institutional autocracy over time. The new communication platform enables students to communicate with the administration by making their posters for protests, public events, and fearless expressions. Users could access the platform through the link https://deargsd.net/.
• Care Agency: A 10-year choreography of architectural repair
  “El mundo que queremos es uno donde quepan muchos mundos.” / “The world we want is one where many worlds fit.” -Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional “What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities.” -Ruth Wilson Gilmore Our thesis is a dispatch from a possible future. A worldwide moratorium on resource extraction sets the scene for the establishment of a Care Agency, a state-administered public platform that provides free and networked care services in Mexico City. Included in those services is the repair of the built environment.The public solicits care services through Requests For Care (RFCs), a vehicle for the expansion of authorship in spatial design. Here, ‘repair’ does not seek to restore past conditions, but adapts to future ones. It is a transformative act of care. In this future, architects are care workers, part of a team of public servants in the Care Agency. This agency recognizes ‘waste’ as an unstable and contrived category as well as a fertile resource, and through the creative labor of collaborators, seeks to re-distribute and work with the abundance present in the urban context. In our imagined roles as design fellows within the Care Agency, we develop “patchwork architecture,” a framework and methodology wherein all design is care, repair, maintenance and reuse. We share this methodology through three case study sites, each of which had been deemed ‘waste’ by a different value system and thus invite different modes of spatial care: an aging and unprofitable stadium, a topography-defying mansion spaceframe, and a sinking vacant low-rise building. Our dispatch takes form as a series of narratives weaving across time and voices, from sistered beams that share loads, to sistered networks of mutual support with indigenous roots, telling a story of collective care interventions that undo that waste.
• An Invitation to Walk within Walls: A Salt Shed
  Across New York City lie mountains of road salt brought to its shores from mines as far as Tarapacá, Chile. These migrant minerals spend most of their days in sheds across the five boroughs until they are dispersed atop the city’s grid in anticipation of inclement weather. Before the salt disappears snow and ice though, salt mountains are themselves disappeared by a maintenance infrastructure that keeps them inaccessible to the public. “Out of view, they die a second death,” as Michael Jakob writes; road salt, in fact, is rendered visible only where it is absent—in the piles of snow and patches of ice that accumulate on the asphalt. An Invitation to Walk within Walls calls attention to the city’s mountains of rock salt by revisiting a salt shed on Pier 52 that was demolished in 2016 amidst the gentrification of the Meatpacking District. As opposed to the sanitized, idyllic visions of New York City’s waterfronts where traces of industry allude to a nostalgic heritage, this project fuses industry and leisure, enabling a broad public to circulate within the shed’s skin. In this surface tangent where walls contain salt and people, visitors behold shed’s decaying, rusting, and leaking, admire salt’s gradual consumption of the building, and witness the maintenance work upon which the city rests. On a site where disappearance is experienced in more ways than one, this intervention makes salt unmistakably present and invites it to escape, and eventually conquer its shed.
• Autocriticism: Architect-neurosis
  Autocriticism challenges normative boundaries and meanings of ‘self’. This thesis reviews primitive self-perspectives that verge on singularity between environment and self, suggesting a certain reciprocity between self-ideation and community-realizations. The theoretical construction is narrativized in script one: “two poets on the meaning of autocriticism”. The dialogue incorporates frameworks of psychoanalysis and contemporaneity in literary criticism. Within it, two poets contextualize criticism “-in house, today”, effectively reversing the plane of projections and introjections. The phenomena of criticism becoming no-criticism is demonstrated “-in house” for the reviewers of this M. Arch thesis, in the second script: “two analysts on architect-neurosis”. As a set, the two scripts foreground three “viewings” of ‘self’ that each actualize its own art of subjectivity: Designer’s Block on Kirkland street, Resident’s Safe over Cambridge-Somerville, and Students’ Sandbox for Blackstone Steam Plant. Individually, the projects cultivate different forms of community-realization at respective sites, but collectively, they produce a patterned body that reflects the voyeur’s understanding of the relative environment.
• Reciprocal Optimism: Projecting Terrestrial Analogues
  Human intervention is going extraterrestrial, and landscape architecture is going with it. This thesis positions landscape architecture as essential to taking measure of places yet to be touched in the Anthropocene, now only experienced remotely. As a provocation, this thesis speculates on outer space as a subject for how to design for a future with optimism. The design project is an Interplanetary Expo, promoting cooperation between nations through transparency and participation in decision-making for interplanetary interventions. Instead of abstract policy, this project offers a sublime confrontation with the analog landscape of potential intervention. The goals of this event are not just to demonstrate a novel future, but to make visible extractive processes and outcomes, and to convene a new public tasked with one of the most pressing queries of our time: the future bounds of human intervention. By engaging in the Exposition as a typology deeply embedded in the field’s past, this project strives to look towards the future and inspire hope.
• How Are 'We' Living? Reevaluating the Chicago Boulevard System
  At its inception, the Chicago Boulevard System was heralded a civic “success” as it connected the city through a “magnificent chain of parks and parkways,” and provided ample space for carriage transportation and leisure activities for a certain class of Chicago’s residents. But what have we today? Or in the words of notable planner Daniel H. Burnham, “How are we living?” This thesis explores what are the Chicago Boulevard Systems’ past, current, and future purposes as a connection infrastructure within the city. A dive into archival documents, along with GIS data and a set of semi-structured interviews with users of the boulevard and local nonprofit organizations in the adjacent community areas, allows us to address the boulevard’s current underutilization, the city’s evolving social-economic and racial color lines, and propose a process-inclusionary framework that connects and supports neighborhood and city constituents at both the macro and microscales of the city. The resulting propositions generated during this process suggest that while the city of Chicago intends to fund and distribute resources unto the boulevard, through programs like the ‘Open Boulevards’ pilot, a productive mechanism for the control of this funding must be established with the explicit involvement of existing neighborhood representatives. In an attempt to reframe this program's generative potential, two sections of the boulevard have been examined. Local non-profits from the community areas surrounding Franklin & Garfield Boulevard were interviewed and helped produce both micro and macro-scale propositions to the boulevard like the introduction of a unified public transportation network connecting the entire boulevard system with mobility stations. At the micro-scale, organizations surrounding Garfield Boulevard focused discussions on workforce potential, food scarcity and reclamation of cultural narratives. Along Franklin, a concern for infrastructures supporting existing organizational centers and programs along with housing concerns were discussed. Through a design proposal, these suggestions were applied on site with the use of a kit of parts assembly of modular objects that serve as temporary placemaking tools. Depending on what the programing intentions were, these kit of part objects were organized accordingly. Additionally, a set of lot configurations using these kit of parts were examined in order to best inform how vacant and abandoned lots surrounding the boulevards can be used as testing grounds for programming ideas. Succesful lot configurations have the potential to be deployed within the community through more permanent measures with directive funding allocation.
• Camp Molasses
  The traditional idea of the “camp” dates to the mid-late 19th century, where the idyll of nature was cast as a reprieve from a changing society where urban spaces were quickly transmuted by the fits and starts of industrial capitalism. This project utilizes the camp idea as a different kind of liminal space, casting it instead as a zone for active experimentation in building regenerative and localized flows of material within a place of production. The camp idea shifts, then, from a space that encourages the consumption of nature to, instead, a landscape that is continually being made and remade by teenage camp-goers themselves, underscoring the reality that their own environments are and have always been constructed. As the climate crisis looms, this thesis tests whether the seeds of a just transition can begin to be sown by camp-goers pursuing community through slow, meaningful labor and reciprocity with their environment.
• "Our History is our Resource": Historic Narrative as Urban Planning Strategy in Chicago's Pullman Neighborhood
  The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the ways that site and neighborhood history can potentially inform material neighborhood development in the present. The investigation focused on Pullman, a historic area on the south side of Chicago, and conducted interviews with 23 area stakeholders, in addition to comprehensive literature and data analysis. Findings indicate that the historic narrative of the place itself is perhaps less important than the way the community chooses to interact with and institutionalize its own history. In Pullman, neighborhood history was developmentally relevant in three broad categories: history as informing community activism, institutionalization of history across diverse stakeholder groups (community organizations, residents, and businesses), and history as informing design decisions and the preservation of naturally occurring affordable housing. These findings are important for the field of urban planning because they illuminate potential ways to leverage and institutionalize site history as a planning strategy in the present.
• Andean Cultural Landscapes in Danger: The never-ending battle between developmentalism and heritage conservation in the Cusco Region
  The Chinchero International Airport, set to become Peru's second-largest airport, will directly connect Chinchero and the Cusco to major American cities. This unique cultural and ecological region was once the capital of the Incan Empire and is now recognized as Peru's tourism capital. The thesis explores how tourism has driven explosive informal and illegal urbanization and analyzes how this economy has influenced the Peruvian government's decision to develop aerial infrastructure to promote decentralization and regional economic growth. The research explores the detrimental effects of the airport on the social and ecological systems of Chinchero, raising questions about how the inadequate development of the airport's surrounding area could further exacerbate the challenging living conditions of the local communities. It will propose an urban and landscape design intervention to create an alternate passive economy, channeling the massive influxes of capital from tourism, addressing and revindicating the spatial, socioeconomic, and racial exclusion these communities face.
• Sticking Together: Community-Controlled Housing in New York City
  In New York City, ever-increasing housing costs and threats of displacement have led to a renewed interest in community-controlled housing—housing where community members are involved in the structuring, ownership, and regulation of their homes in order to control speculation and ensure permanent affordability. While this housing model is not new to New York, its recent resurgence calls for an understanding of its position within the city’s current housing ecosystem. This thesis investigates two types of community control—limited equity cooperatives and community land trusts—to understand what challenges and opportunities exist in initiating, sustaining, and growing this housing type. I find that, given market conditions in New York, a substantial amount of local government support is necessary for communities to gain control over their land and property. By understanding the current state of community-controlled housing, planners and policymakers can better serve city residents and support the growth of affordable housing.
• Hybrid Soluble and Insoluble 3D Printed Formwork
  This thesis investigates the potentials of hybrid 3D printed concrete formwork. Water-soluble Polyvinyl Alcohol (PVA) formwork allows for the creation of intricate forms that would be difficult, if not impossible, to create using standard formwork methods. Informed by finite element analysis, the PVA formwork allows for a gradient of variable porosities across a series of concrete units (blocks) in relation to structural loading and other possible design intentions. The goal is to optimize material use while addressing pathways for reusable formwork, reduced waste, and reduced embodied carbon. A series of blocks are fabricated for performance testing and a proof-of-concept quarter vault structure. The performance testing seeks to assess the blocks' strength without reinforcement, and additional investigations explore the integration of macro fiber reinforcing to increase stability. The PVA formwork allows for designed anisotropy. When fibers are mixed into concrete, their orientations are typically random making them less effective. PVA formwork could allow for new hybrid formworks that would enable intentional placement of reinforcing fibers perpendicular to the compression force, potentially increasing their utility. The vault case study revealed that the porous vault structure uses seventy-five percent less material than a solid block structure with the same structural strength. It has been found that the PVA can be conserved through dehydration which could allow the material to be reused in a cyclical system.
• Evaluation of the Environmental and Economic Impact of Urban Development vs. 20th Century Modern Heritage Conservation in Kuwait City
  Following a law passed in 2004 alleviating maximum building height, historic architecture in Kuwait City is under threat of demolition and replacement by high rise buildings. The impact is three-fold: first, the demolition of historic properties – many of which are the result of 20th century Modern Movement and are a local embodiment of the country’s “Golden Age” following the discovery of oil. Second, the consequent environmental impact –the loss of buildings that may have already been designed to adapt to climatic conditions by integrating passive design features. Third, the proactive depletion of embodied carbon stocks amidst a local and global need to draw down carbon emissions. This study looks to comparatively evaluate the individual performance and life cycle assessment of two commercial building developments: 1. An existing building attributed to the said Modern Movement, which calls for a lower carbon capital investment. 2. A high-performance high rise (eligible for LEED Gold certification), which significantly increases the built floor area on the site, and thus allows for increased economic productivity, and maintains low/efficient operational energy use per square meter. The results identify a preliminary framework for policy makers to evaluate the priorities in historic designation/building reuse and high-performance urban development.
• Designing Architecture’s Hyper‐Reality: Leveraging mixed reality as architectural components
  The thesis explores how mixed reality can be employed as an additional layer of architectural elements. The developments in mixed reality have changed the affective relationship between inhabitants and spaces while redefining architectural boundaries. Namely, the embodied interface, which can significantly alter the perceived reality, will become an architectural element inseparable from the rest of the spatial components when deployed in a room. The project explored aged nursing homes to examine the instrumental effect of embodied interfaces as a slice into the discussion of its implications as elements of architecture. Design for aging has been gaining attention within the architectural discourse. Its innate social and spatial specificities offer a terrain to investigate the utility of embodied interfaces, including augmenting spatial qualities and enhancing the connection between the site and its inhabitants. The project designs a prototype that examines the affective impacts of perceived architecture experiences and asserts mixed reality as architecture’s new design paradigm.
• Huffing and Puffing: A New Language for Straw Bale Construction
  Situated in the Hauts-de-France, a region in France grappling with a severe housing shortage, this student housing project services the capital of the region, Lille, a prominent student hub, and its neighbor, Roubaix. In addition to the Nord's industrial history, the Hauts-de-France is renowned for agriculture, being France’s second-largest producer of straw. Straw bales, an agricultural byproduct, are load-bearing modules, exceptional insulators, and when used as a building material, a renewable resource drawing down carbon. Pairing the availability of the material with the region’s housing needs, the project capitalizes on straw bales’ structural, thermal, and ecological properties to expand their use in construction beyond the one-story home and develop multi-story student housing. It seeks to generate a structural and material expression unique to the straw bales to bring greater spatial and sensory diversity to extant, repetitive student housing typologies. As the discipline becomes increasingly concerned with its environmental and social impacts and shifts towards engineering new materials and building systems, there is a unique opportunity to reconsider natural materials long used in construction and address disciplinary misapprehension surrounding biogenic materials such as straw. The project diverges from trends in digital and material fabrication to embrace this hyper-local, renewable byproduct and unite ecological, architectural, and social aims.