Malcom Moffat College of Education

Items

• Building Backward: Archaeology of a Queer Built Future
  Any center forms an edge. In Marseille, France – a city built on concrete and tile production – the spirit of industrial progress has fallen to ruins and toxic soil. What if architecture’s agenda for repair was not to erase and redevelop, but to inhabit the time it takes to heal earthly damage? This light tenure takes hold of the ruined Rio Tinto mining site above Marseille while it undergoes an ambivalent remediation: a queer form of life that appears at the postindustrial edges of many cities. Reading through dust, water, and graffiti, the project works from details at the body scale up and from cartography back down to the mediated ground. Accumulated building waste is stacked into new forms, returning a localized material cycle to the site. This method produces a series of interventions that calibrate human occupation to shifting soil. The “territory awaiting development” above the city is now the test site for a new maintenance regime: a queer narrative method for architecture to suspend animation and rearrange the parts. In this space, health is made legible. Bodies are loosely engaged – through bathing, play, building, and taking out the trash – in architectural cycles they can witness. By taking care, these interventions make room for peripheral lives to register themselves and hold territory. Queer architecture forms a soft new center.
• Emerging Consumer Cities - Mixed land use, amenities and housing prices in Shanghai
  This research quantitatively studies how mixed land-use planning impacts the housing prices in Shanghai. To answer the question, I collected data and constructed a database on housing price and land use to measure the impacts of urban amenities and mixed land-use on housing prices in Shanghai. This work makes an important empirical contribution to existing studies in the field of consumer city, mixed land-use, valuation and housing prices, and the on-going debate on land market reform in China. This study provides a key quantitative analysis of the efficiency of current land use structure in Shanghai and the level of willingness-to-pay for mixed land-use. This can shed light on a major policy debate about land efficiency in China, including Shanghai, and the land market reform which has been a key policy under the current administration. Based on the analysis, an oversupply of industrial lands intended to attract foreign investors and an inefficient public land market is found to have attributed to the distortion of land structure in China. This research quantifies the impact of land use pattern on housing prices and proposes improvements in land use planning. In terms of methodology, this research applies multiple regression models in addition to the traditional hedonic models, in the estimation of willingness-to-pay for mixed land-use or amenities. Based on the analysis of first-hand collected land use and housing price data of Shanghai, this study provides estimates for the land use’s impact on housing value and offers policy considerations on efficient land use. The 2013 China’s Third Plenum of the 18th Congressional Conference has highlighted optimizing land use structure and city’s physical structure as a major reform objective; however, so far there has been limited quantitative studies that assess the relationship between land use patterns and housing prices in China, which reflects the lack of and the difficult access to related data. Using a novel dataset, the analysis produces a variety of quantitative results. One estimate is that one percent more land use in greenspace in a 500 by 500 meters grid attributes to an increase of RMB6,600 in property value. Similarly, having one percent more land use in shophouse and shopping center in such a grid also elevates property values, by RMB5,900 and RMB7,900 respectively. The results drawn from Shanghai can serve as a good starting point to understand other cities in Yangtze River Delta economic zone – China’s most vibrant economic agglomeration. The empirical and methodological framework developed in this study can be generalized in future research and applied to other cities.
• Behind the Scenes: Pregnancy Portrait
  The pregnancy portrait underlines the position of female reproductive bodies within a cultural moment, creating identity, agency, and capital. Social and cinematic mediums animate the pregnancy portrait, showing the pregnant body as both a dynamic state and a moment frozen in time. Public figures—from celebrities to local influencers—receive payment from advertisers by monetizing their pregnant bodies. These branded posts reinforce the concept of motherhood as defined by consumption and spending. Celebrities, influencers, and mommy bloggers provide a model of how ordinary people should live and spend. The sponsored pregnancy portrait blends the format of ad and personal announcement, creating a new model of pregnancy that is both private and public, seemingly organic yet also highly choreographed, and most importantly, highly profitable. The social media pregnancy requires new flexible spaces that allow for the broadcasting of the pregnant body, a broadcasting that is inhibited by the inward-facing nature of existing clinics. Filmic space organizes and reorganizes itself around the camera’s view and can contract and expand to frame or exclude subjects from the scene. The public pregnancy requires new spaces to accommodate new subjects and new forms of viewership. By combining the programs of sound stage and clinic, I want to arrive at a new typology that allows for the broadcasting and publicization of the production of family and home, inverting the assumed privacy of motherhood. The resulting clinic becomes an anatomical theater and a space for the production of media.
• Sympoietic City: a Forest of Plant/Human Kinship
  With the financialization of ecosystem services and putting forests to work, our relationship to the trees continues to be rooted in the design legacies of the botanic gardens, herbaria, and gridded property systems. Operating within these legacies perpetuates a land ethic that fosters inequality within our cities. The thesis proposes a reorientation of Americans’ relationships with trees. Situated within the complex palimpsest of political, colonial, and activist histories within the nation’s capital, Washington D.C., this process begins with a constitutional amendment that defines the spatial, visual, and political rights of trees. Moving through spaces inhabited by D.C.’s emblematic trees - the Japanese Cherry, American Elm, and Scarlet Oak, these rights are manifested throughout the District. By eschewing notions of ownership over nature and cultivating spaces that embody plant/ human kinship, Sympoietic City renegotiates Washington D.C. as a landscape held in tandem by humans and trees.
• BODIES OF EARTH: Abduction - Death - Grief - Rebirth
  In the Acropolis, the past and the future converge. The marble that produced the citadel monuments altered our future and drained the mountain stone. Here, our cultural artifacts are evidence of our destructive relations with the Earth. Life starts and ends in the soil that gives birth to all sorts of bodies. In today's complex world bodies blur with other bodies, machines, and networks. The Bodies of Earth is a catalog, a collection of snapshots, recent memories of cultural and visual consumption of artworks and design projects that are placed together to help us re-examine our relationships with plants, animals, and machines. It aims to explore the body's agency in establishing a partnership with Earth in the era of climate destruction and recognizing that our kinship with the soil is intrinsic to establishing an ethics of eco-responsibility. How can a shift in human consciousness lead to a collective restoration of the environment? Right now, humans dominate the planet without responsibility. Carbon dioxide emissions, global warming, and over-extraction of natural resources are only some evidence of the problems they cause. The structure of this catalog deploys Greek mythology to talk about the circle of life and death. The first chapter, “Abduction”, investigates the body under surveillance and extraction mechanisms. The second chapter, “Death”, explores the material and the digital transformations of a dead body. The third chapter, “Grief”, talks about the shifting landscapes of ecological destruction and memories from the past. The last chapter, “Rebirth”, presents a post-anthropocentric ethical thinking and provides design alternatives for a regenerative future.
• Aggregation of Allegories
  In our lives, certain geometric spaces hold profound meaning. For instance, a room with a sloped floor instantly evokes cinematic or theatrical connotations. We instinctively adjust our orientation, distinguishing between the viewing area and the observed end. Another example is the familiar gabled house shape, synonymous with the concept of home. These geometric spaces act as signs, inherently laden with meaning and associations. In contrast to traditional postmodernist and deconstructionist abstracting signs as sculptural objects, which are interpreted externally, what if spatial signs could also be multiplied and abstracted as well? This thesis seeks to put a common set of programs into two aggregations of shapes in two contexts. The programs will include both living and screening, corresponding to the gable and the trapezoid shape. Yet all the programs are crammed into the trapezoids when they are in the city, and into the gables when they are in the rural. The programs are warped by contextual situations, and the geometries are then warped by the programs. The thesis endeavors to develop a design methodology that is geometrically both multiplicative and divisional, which ensures architectural signs remain consistently intelligible from both external and internal perspectives. By using this pair of buildings as a foundation, the thesis aspires to propose a method for infusing programs with significance and redefining programmatic relationships through the spatial sign.
• Landscapes of Repulsion: Hidden in Plain Site
  This thesis interrogates landscape architecture’s participation in the cleaning and concealing of repugnant sites of industry through the creation of fabricated mountains constructed from the wastes of Iowa’s booming commercial hog industry. The constructed mountains, dubbed the De Sotos, are proposed to be located just north of the town of Manson in northwest Iowa. These constructed megaforms are in constant negotiation between industry and nature, always changing and never complete, to reimagine the landscape’s relationship to active industry. The De Sotos are constructed over time as waste material is collected, processed, shaped, and, in some cases, planted. The mountain range is both a force of its own, shaped by the by-products of its natural and artificial processes, as well as being a product of consumption and construction. The mountains make visible the repulsions of this industry as an immeasurable force altering the land of Iowa and its value as a site of production.
• Not Quite Uncertain & Likely Imprecise
  Empress Market was inaugurated in 1889 on top of a former British mass execution ground: a calculated obfuscation of colonial violence. In post-British Karachi, the market spontaneously burst and haphazardly expanded, subconsciously becoming reclaimed by the locals. In 2018, local authorities weaponized the unsanctioned mode of this growth to demolish all encroachments, evict all vendors, and reinstate the colonial building as a monument-in-the-round. A second massacre at Empress Market. At a distance, Empress Market’s re-instantiation presents the idealized image of its colonial legacy. But the true register of Empress Market’s complicated past becomes visible on closer inspection: scars—of gradual weathering and of sudden demolition, of authoritarian violence and of popular life—are inscribed on the building’s surfaces. Empress market today is paralyzed: an uncanny void in a dense city: a “public” space without a public, plagued by congestion and trash. This literal and infrastructural gap in the city is further deepened by the double ecological crises of heat and rainwater, which materialize in unpredictable but severe concentrated surges. Hinging on the urgency for urban shade and rainwater control, this thesis improvises a roof to accommodate a return to the site’s mercantile past. A set of instructional documents produce an accumulation of imprecision in the improvisational construction they incite. Gaps in the groundscape hold excess rainwater, rifts within slabs produce a punctuated ceiling, cracks between roofs draw in light and air. The incremental and imprecise outcome rejects the precise and tyrannical colonial instigator.
• The Ecological Pulse of Electric Flows: Enriching Georgia’s Solar Landscape
  This thesis explores the dissonance between the creation of solar landscapes and the disconnected conditions they produce. In the United States, tech corporations are the largest purchasers of renewable energy - they buy energy credits generated by remote solar sites in order to claim their data centers are ‘powered by 100% renewable energy.’ The companies morally and monetarily benefit from these claims while the solar sites’ conditions are anything but ecological. The project proposes new logics, practices, and metrics that can be used to equitably transform post-agricultural landscapes into grounded photovoltaic solar sites. It rejects the current standard of surrounding the space with screenings and the sacrificial paradigm associated with infrastructural landscapes. Instead, this thesis imagines a reality where landscape architects design solar sites to be visible manifestations of corporate accountability, community connection, and ecological restoration. This new design standard ensures that both human and nonhuman stakeholders benefit from the space.
• A Comparative Framework for Building Life Cycle Embodied Carbon Emissions Databases and Its Application for Public Databases
  Data availability and accuracy are some of the main obstacles to calculating the life-cycle embodied carbon emissions in buildings. There have been several studies to assess life cycle assessment (LCA) databases in the past. These database studies often rely heavily on commercial databases, and most studies only evaluate a single data point for each material in the building life cycle inventory. Comparing databases in this manner can be potentially biased, not representative as a whole, and lacking a systematic approach. This study proposes a systematic comparative framework as an addition to existing methods to aid the comparison of construction-material embodied carbon¬ databases, which comprise a part of LCA. The framework identifies the underlying issues and difficulties in comparing embodied carbon databases. It then provides a fair method for data comparison across the databases. Finally, it assists the understanding of data availability and data homogeneity within and across the databases. The framework's applicability is demonstrated by comparing three publicly available databases: EC3, the ICE Database, and the ÖKOBAUDAT Database. Life cycle embodied carbon assessments (LCECA) on a single-family house are performed using the aggregate data from the three public databases and the commercial database Gabi Database within the LCA tool Tally. The embodied carbon study suggests that the materials' median embodied carbon factors value from the aggregated public database provides a reasonable embodied carbon assessment compared to the commercial data. However, the heterogeneity of possible results from the public dataset highlights the potential errors and consequences of single material data selection.
• The Oculomotor Correlates of Exploratory Model Making: A Mixed-Methods Eye Tracking Study
  In this thesis, I take a post-cognitivist view of design and use eye-tracking to study the oculomotor behavior of architects during different exploratory model-making activities. My interest is to determine to what extent eye movements may yield a useful low-level, fine-grained understanding of design cognition in exploratory model making. I do this by designing and conducting a mixed-methods, observational exploratory eye-tracking study. The study consists of a series of block assembly tasks that are increasingly complex from a design standpoint. I develop a multi-tier coding scheme and propose original metrics that link eye movements, hand motoric action, and design operations together. By doing so, I show the unique opportunities that eye-tracking methods offer to the understanding of design cognition in exploratory model making ;furthermore, I outline a set of preliminary hypotheses about the role of eye movements in exploratory model making to inform future research in this topic.
• Nonlinear Fabrication: A Data-Driven Framework for Evaluating and Calibrating the Toolpath Design of 3D Printing Cementitious Materials
  Clay, just like other natural, paste-like materials, offers a potential reduction in the embodied CO2 that the production of buildings using conventional materials emits, yet its large tolerances during printing remain an obstacle. In paste-based 3D printing, the material dries and shrinks at unpredictable rates while new layers continue to be deposited, causing increased self-weight onto the lower layers that are subjected to variable displacement. The ability to anticipate and correct the complex material behavior during the extrusion process is important in the effort to achieve accurate building components and assembly. While a possible approach is highly specialized models or workflows guiding designers to understand and model material and process variances, comprehensive models or workflows dealing with the nonlinearity of paste-based 3D printing processes are still lacking. Nonetheless, these processes promise efficient, waste-free, and sustainable production workflows at the architectural and building scale. This dissertation investigates how computational techniques based on machine learning models can enable rapid assessment and calibration of design solutions before fabrication, allowing for the prediction and simulation of final geometrical outcomes for accurate printing. The research contributes to digital fabrication by connecting digital design processes with material outcomes through a data-centered framework that leverages machine learning in novel ways. The framework offers: 1) a scanning method for a real-time calibration workflow that corrects the printing trajectories of the design object and serves as a rapid data-collection technique for machine learning applications; 2) a method for building an optimized dataset to evaluate the printability of design solutions; and 3) a method for training neural network models to calibrate the printing trajectories before fabrication. Tested in the context of clay lattice printing, an unorthodox extrusion scenario characterized by a large feature space and high material uncertainty, the framework demonstrated the ability to evaluate and calibrate the toolpath geometry of clay lattices with sufficient accuracy for manufacturing while using minimal resources, presenting an important step toward next-generation solutions for sustainable 3D printing.
• Aggregate, Aggregation + Geotechnical Urbanism
  Within the architectural engineering and construction industry we have developed diagrammatic representations and software translations of cultural patterns, extruded 2D cities, and built architecture of processed materials palettes. We are not yet able to diagrammatically compute the translation (intent to manifestation) of wild contexts and materials systems. This thesis seeks a hybrid software approach to the bulk manipulations of aggregate, somewhere between that of a wild randomization and a refined aesthetic.   By developing new software tools toward the aggregation of “wild” (i.e. rock, soils and organic matter) rather than “cultured” (cast-in-place concrete, steel beams, and pre-fabricated urbanism), we may not only achieve new opportunities in the ecological landscape definition of the terms, but also provide tooling for new forms of urban aggregate across more dynamic, and less predictable cultural conditions, so called geo-technical urbanism(s). This experimentation is applied conceptually to sea-level rise and coastal urbanism surrounding the Boston harbor. The thesis was produced as a media-heavy thesis and presented through PPT and online Website. GeotechnicalUrbanism.com - the converted PDF is uploaded here.
• YE DEJI ABEBA NEGN: Sonic Floral Imaginaries in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
  Ye Deji Abeba Negn: Sonic Floral Imaginaries in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, illustrates and creates new sonics in Ethiopian floral imagination. Composed as a series of essays, graphic scores, and sound works, the thesis examines Ethiopia’s embodied relationships with flowers, synthesizing and transmuting existing floral discourse to create a new mode of floral discourse and creative practice in Addis Ababa’s shifting urban terrain. Situated at the intersection of indigenous Ethiopian epistemologies, soundscape, and landscape theory, Ye Deji Abeba Negn argues that if one wants to understand flowers in Ethiopia, one should listen. One might then ask, listen to what? The sonic world of flowers is tied to a series of constituent parts: Ethiopian time theory, music culture, urban development, industrialization, and gender relations. The thesis first illustrates two flower protagonists, Adey Abeba, the wild yellow daisies of Ethiopian New Year that grow in fallow land across the country, and the Rose, the most profitable flower of Ethiopia’s booming cut-flower industry. Next, examining the capital Addis Ababa’s formation and namesake, the ‘New Flower’, Ye Deji Abeba Negn, illustrates the city’s sprawling network of rose greenhouses rapidly replacing fallow and cultivated land of local farmers while bringing in foreign currency and employing hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians. From the flowers and Addis Ababa, we conclude with a series of graphic scores that synthesize and transmute existing modes of floral discourse in Ethiopia with a new mode of speculative flower pedagogy. Unfurled textually and graphically, these realms are then sonified using the Ethiopian New Year’s pentatonic music scale of the flowers. Through the documentation and excavation of sonic floral cultural artifacts, the thesis recomposes the constituent parts of Ethiopia’s embodied relationship with flowers, revealing the capacity of flowers as drivers of spatial and cultural production. The essays gathered here tell this story of Ethiopia’s embodied relationships with flowers. The central aspiration of this writing and its accompanying sonic works is to reflect back to Ethiopians the way we imagine our relationship with landscape, as embodied in our floral imaginaries.
• Socio-Spatial (In)Equality of Access to Urban Green Space: A Case in Beijing
  Green space, as an important component of urban system, deliver multiple benefits to urban residents. From an ecosystem service perspective, these benefits include: provisioning services, regulating services, supporting services, and cultural services. Unfortunately, studies have confirmed that green spaces are not equally accessible among different socio-economic groups in urban areas. Such unequal socio-spatial pattern of accessing green spaces lead to many other undesirable outcomes including social segregation, dislocation, and gentrification, and finally causes exclusive urban development benefiting a smaller portion of population. It is in this context that my dissertation explores how urban green spaces and their varying benefits accessible for different social groups intertwining with geo-morphological, historical, socio-economic, and political factors in complex urban circumstances by using Beijing as a case. Relying on multiple open source data sets and spatial statistical analyses, this dissertation addresses three major questions: 1) How are urban green spaces distributed among socio-economic groups (a cross sectional study in 2017)? 2) Are urban green spaces more often provided to advantaged socio-economic groups (a longitudinal study 2000-2010)? And 3) Does adding new green space gentrify the neighboring communities in Beijing, thus resulting in the dislocation of marginalized groups? In the cross-sectional study, the results indicate the public green spaces tend to serve marginalized groups more, while advantaged socio-economic groups are better served by internal vegetations in the gated communities in which they live. The results of longitudinal study did not identify significant associations between the changes of green spaces and the socio-economic statuses in Township (census tract unit), indicating afforestation process exerts little discrimination against marginalized groups. Finally, adding new green spaces can trigger gentrification by increasing the housing prices in the neighboring communities, although the capitalization scale of green spaces depends based on a variety of features. Distance to a property, area, vegetation quality, presence of water features, and types of green space all play different roles in affecting the housing price thus having divergent capacities of triggering gentrification.
• Pair of Dice, Para-Dice, Paradise: A Counter-Memorial to Victims of Police Brutality
  Recently, America was once again awoken by protests spurred on by the unjust murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and several others; but this phenomenon is nothing new. America has always had a healthy tolerance for violence against people of color. The very foundation of this country was rooted in the legal and violent policing of Black slaves, and although slavery in the traditional sense has long since been abolished, the unjust policing of people of color has continued on just the same. What’s more is that America has routinely exploited our profession by using architecture to pat itself on the back for no longer being a slave-owning nation when almost nothing is being done to address the many ways in which African Americans are still being persecuted today. More simply put, America (and architecture) is clearly more concerned with marking progress than making it, and one of the many ways the built environment helps do this is via self-important memorials. But what if architecture were to actually combat police brutality? The result would surely be counter to the neat and static memorial type: a confluence of Black aesthetics, Black narratives, and Black protest. It might even fashion itself as several lacerations into some 18,000 police stations—a constant reminder of America’s immoral past and unfolding future. It might even look like paradise.
• Beyond Artifact: Reframing the Chilean Desert
  This thesis explores design as a mode to challenge dominant cultural narratives of the Atacama Desert in Chile. The project reframes an understanding of life in the desert through alternate knowledge systems specific to this landscape and material actors plant, rock, and water. The proposed reframing is in response to a cultural imaginary that treats the Atacama as a desolate extractive zone, with a myopic focus on industrial artifacts and a legal policy framework that classifies all materials in the desert through a logic of mineral wealth and extraction. An observatory and garden program connect histories, living cultures, and ecologies while fostering submerged multi-species life to reframe living matter in the desert.
• Empowering Rural Communities: Bioenergy for Energy Democracy and Prosumer Engagement
  In preparation for the forthcoming climate crisis, cities have been understood as the rational scale of action. However, urban-driven political frameworks and social agendas to expand renewable energy generation can inadvertently disrupt the social and physical territoriality of the rural. Photovoltaics has emerged widely as a result, and its visceral expansion has displaced rural farmers, of which 50 percent are tenants. The thesis proposes a physical manifestation of an energy democracy where rural farmers are incorporated into the energy regime as “prosumers” by reshaping the socioeconomic structure of the rural. The project uses Yongji-myeon, South Korea, as a case owing to its vulnerability to photovoltaic intervention. The final product is an infrastructural landscape design that transforms rural farmers into bioenergy producers. It envisions reengineering the agriculturally monochrome economy into an energy landscape with a socioeconomic reconfiguration of marginalized populations who are critical participants in the renewable energy regime.
• Working in the Fun Palace: Revisiting Kinematics in the Smart Building
  Archigram’s playful experiments in kinematic structures were an early precedent to the smart building systems we find commonplace today. Driving techno-utopian visions of moveable spaces in projects like Fun Palace and Generator, Cedric Price, Archigram, and their contemporaries imagined cybernetic building intelligences that would “provoke, delight, and otherwise stimulate” their occupants. “Provoke; Delight; Stimulate;” the language Archigram used to describe their proto-smart-buildings in the 60’s is a far cry from the dry, efficiency-driven goals of today’s “smart” designs. Contemporary building systems are lifeless tools for optimizing space use + energy consumption, interfaced with through the dull 2d-screens of dashboard in lobbies, iPhone apps, and Outlook plugins. What might today’s smart building’s learn from Archigram? Working through the office building type, which has fervently adopted smart space optimization schemes, this thesis challenges the efficiency-driven smart building paradigm. Where smart offices typically focus on economizing space use, our project injects Archigrammatic attitudes towards computerized buildings to create more stimulating workspace experiences. We test new forms of human-building interaction on two tracks: On one hand, Archigram’s ideas of kinematic, programmatically fluid spaces are redeployed as a more responsive way of managing the “space-as-a-service” economy. On the other, their playful, moveable systems are tested as an alternative to screen-based interactions with the smart building, suggesting more humanistic forms of UX design for the built environment. This alternative attitude towards the smart building draws from fantastical visions of the 60’s to imagine more engaging interactions with our increasingly-ubiquitous digital building systems.
• After Water: The Infrastructure and Politics of Desalination in Kuwait
  This research examines the role of desalination in the process of urbanization. The focus of the investigation is Kuwait, a country situated within a region containing some of the highest levels of water stress and per capita consumption around the world. The aim is to reveal the spatialization of desalination infrastructure, its underlying ecological epistemology, and the historic urbanization patterns that it has generated and will continue to perpetuate into the future. In doing so, this research reveals a novel view of water politics that is less focused on crisis and scarcity to instead examine the spatial practices that inform water management and consumption from the extraction of salt water to the metabolism of potable water in everyday household use.
• Expo-nential Futures: How Mega-Events Continually Reshape Milan
  How have repeated mega-events in Milan changed the form and nature of the city? This thesis tracks threads between universal and particular conditions that influenced Milan’s decision to participate in Bureau International des Expositions (BIE) events. By analyzing urban development patterns and planning archives, I am interested in critically examining planning history to uncover the embeddedness of mega-event planning within notions of power, social imaginaries, and distinct stakeholder groups, and how this impacts urbanization processes. I argue that participation in the BIE is not an inescapable economic strategy – as records have suggested – but instead reflects the complicated entanglements between politics, economy, and civic input of planning in decision-making processes. Through the project, I find that BIE events have enabled a distinct set of space protagonists that shape the city's future development trajectories and social imaginaries, requiring planners to rethink long-term strategies for the short-term duration of BIE events.
• The Crossing: A Utopian Vision of Migration in the Central Mediterranean
  This thesis treats human migration as an essential human right– one which deserves durable, designed solutions. Sited in the Central Mediterranean, the project reframes the choreography of the harrowing journey from Tripoli to the shores of Lampedusa as a suspense of flight. By inviting people to stay, receive care and prepare for the landing in Europe, the Mediterranean becomes a watery grounds for agency and self-determination among those migrating. The design outcome of the thesis is the building of a nomadic, mission-based utopia among the discards of offshore oil technology: a collectively governed, stateless, and artificial island which resists the carceral qualities of state-run camps. The sea is no longer the final frontier in a long flight from home, but a stepping stone to self-actualizing one’s dreams.
• The Prairie Condition: The Frontier, Myth and Other Symptoms
  Meaning, aesthetics, and value are imbricated throughout history. The United States’ land ethic operates within an episteme of prominence, where the sublime, the biodiverse, the rare are protected. As the climate crisis unfurls and uncertainty continues, we carry assumptions that are not our own, positions that may be inherited. That is, what we protect and what we replicate are connected to what we value. This thesis traces through history the movement and meaning of specific figures and conditions in and on the American Prairie. As a complicated and contested landscape protagonist, the Prairie remains in aesthetic and conservation limbo. This thesis explores the aesthetic shifts, drifts of taste, and symptoms regarding the Prairie from the nineteenth century to the present. Through the interplay of texts, histories, and subjects, this thesis aims to untangle and expose the mutability of meaning and value of the Prairie.
• Exceedance Degree‐Hours: A new method for assessing long‐term thermal conditions
  Accepted Manuscript
• A Renter's Right to Return: Deprivatizing Resilience In The California Context
  Drawing from history, sociology, architecture, and disaster and housing planning and policy, this thesis seeks to address how disaster preparedness and recovery efforts in the United States have failed renter communities and what can be done to create more equitable risk mitigation strategies for non-homeowners with a focus on the case study city of West Hollywood, California. With rent control as one of the few remaining safeguards for housing affordability in U.S. cities, a scarcity of affordable rental housing, if combined with the potential for a damaging seismic event, would require much of California’s rent-controlled housing stock to be pulled off the market for repairs. This would create a ‘perfect storm’ of widespread evictions under the State-level legislation with no affordability guarantees should survivors seek to return to their homes and communities after a catastrophic event. As we have learned from previous crises and the ongoing pandemic, disasters amplify existing vulnerabilities and stress-test our systems for protecting citizens. If we don’t enshrine renter protections within our policy, planning, and development strategies at the city, state, and national levels, renters will continue to lose access to urban spaces. This period in time yields the potential for changes in renter protections at all levels of government by revealing the weaknesses in our existing emergency mitigation and response systems while also presenting a window to reevaluate biases and policies around housing provision and disaster recovery until recently, considered firmly entrenched. To strengthen a renter protections in a disaster context and to evaluate what should be the model of engagement to advance these protections, different stakeholders must work together with renters and tenant rights advocates to address biases around housing and continue to build on community-driven initiatives to protect a renter’s right to return. At this moment in time, where renter protections and rights are at the forefront of the political consciousness, could there be a new motivation from actors to protect renters and address their root vulnerabilities before the next disaster event?