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Between A Kid And Nature
Over the past several decades, Taiwan is undergoing the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Industrial pollution, excess consumption, and excessive belief and reliance on technology and construction are resulting in deterioration of the natural environment including the shortage of water resources, deterioration of water quality, damage to the ecosystem, loss of habitats of plants and wildlife, etc. Meanwhile, surrounded by booming digital technologies, kids growing up in urban areas are getting fewer connections with nature than ever before. While age three to six is the critical period kids form their value of the world and nature, it is essential to “explicitly educate children in both the ethics and practices of sustainability to promote a sustainable earth.”1 Pedagogically, the thesis studies the curriculum of project-based-learning methods rooted in the Reggio Emilia approach to understand the key features of kids’ learning process especially related to their appreciation of nature. Architecturally, the thesis is questioning: Framing the ordinary, enlarging the subtle, capturing the fleeting moment of nature . . . being an interface between a kid and nature, could architecture be a lens through which kids are observing, imagining, experiencing, and exploring nature? Could all seemingly ordinary natural elements be exceptional through the eyes of a kid with the interface? Instead of a traditional fixed kindergarten building, the project examines the possibility of a curriculum-shaped, calendar-year-based kindergarten—an infrastructure and setting system located in a wetland border—possessing rich natural elements with diverse sensory experiences and seasonal changes to uncover the questions proposed above. 1. Julia L. Ginsburg and Shannon Audley, “‘You don’t wanna teach little kids about climate change’: Beliefs and Barriers to Sustainability Education in Early Childhood,” International Journal of Early Childhood Environmental Education 7 (3): 42.
Grounding UPS: An Infrastructural Ethnography of a Logistics Corporation
United Parcel Service Inc., universally known as UPS, is the largest shipping company in the world. Holding one of the largest cargo airlines, continental ground networks, and oceanic freight forwarding systems across the globe, UPS is one of the key players in commercial and industrial logistics, globally. Crossing over two hundred countries and territories, and passing through all climate zones, UPS operations navigate terrestrial, oceanic, and fluvial spaces of the earth into a practically seamless and thickened landscape of logistical movements. Through an aggressively integrated process of incorporation and diversification of products, services, operations, and modes of transportation, UPS has become a vastly incorporated spatial system of adaptation, whose primary function is, as the company claims, “synchronizing the world of commerce.” In this sense, this incorporated state of logistics can be understood as a centralized organizational mechanism of contemporary global trade and internalized computational platform of a globalized supply chain of third-party agents, where geospatial arrangements and configurations follow temporal forces of an ever-expanding transnational trade space. Enabled by and engaged in a range of urban territories, regions, and spaces, UPS not only ships goods according to an ever-growing electronic market place, it actually responds to and shapes processes of urbanization through a calibrated process of mobilization of resources, systems, services, cargo, and labor. Building upon a range of empirical, analytical, and observed sources, this study purposely and necessarily engages multiple fields of expertise at the intersection of geography, landscape, and territorial studies, and the fields of political economy, science and technology. Through text, image, and mapping, this infrastructural ethnography thus depicts, and potentially redefines, the world according to UPS. Rethinking the conventions of corporate case studies, this dissertation formulates an understanding of urbanization through the infrastructural and ethnographic lens of UPS Inc. drawn by an emerging series of processes, including manifold processes of technological mobilization and the grounds they require for the largest logistics systems company in the world to operate, expand, and adapt. Avoiding the positivism of techno-logistical narratives, this dissertation seeks to establish a much-needed discourse on both the nascent territorial agencies and spatial limits of logistical states of incorporation beyond the flattened fiscal, financial, and legal space of corporate and industrial entities. Exposing the intensively-material grounds of these logistics systems, this dissertation seeks to untangle the messiness of movements and flows of goods in an otherwise globalized supply chain by revealing the deep and multi-layered organizational intelligence of geographic, spatial, and biophysical interdependencies that is often masked by the simplicity of synchronized, apparently smooth, and so-called seamless systems of commodity circulation. Proposed as a set of large, integrated infrastructural systems, the organizational ecology of UPS can therefore be understood far beyond its economic calculus of balance sheets and minute signals of barcodes, but through its realization and manifestation as territorial agent and political force whose forces are simultaneously planetary as much as they are bodily—a countermap to metropolitanization. How then can corporate systems be understood as spatial and geographic? How do technical demands invoke new and existing territories? How do market pressures and logistical demands transform urban space? Adopting an ethnographic approach to studies in industrial planning and scientific management, this dissertation is therefore organized in three case studies to address these questions by analyzing three different dimensions and layers of this complex of logistical incorporations—sites, systems, and standards—through the lens of the world’s largest shipping company. Titled UPS Worldport: from Port to Plot, the first chapter delineates the geospatial and geohistorical extents of UPS logistics bases that originate from its central operating headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky. Beyond and between these sites, the second chapter titled UPS Freight: from Fleet to Fuel traces the geopolitical and biotechnological interdependencies that support and secure its operational fleet and attendant mobile infrastructures in response to market demands, globally. And finally, the third chapter titled UPS Supply Chain Solutions: from Box to Barcode reveals how UPS system of standards—from containerized packaging to controlled spaces to monitored environments—not only regulate environmental conditions of logistical movements but also shape consumer demand through attendant infrastructural imperatives. Taken together, these case studies not only break down the complex footprints of port-hub-outpost that characterize this corporate logistics complex but redraw their territorial imprints that have been adapted and re-adapted over the past century. Seen across time, these case studies delineate and decode the intricate temporalities that are registered, inscribed, and embedded within these ecologies of operational and organizational logistics. Working in between and across the space of nation-states, the lens through which UPS operates can then be understood as an emergent spatial strategy, a state of territorial adaptation, whose sustainability uniquely and exceptionally depends on perpetual techniques, technologies, and methods of adaptive, minute-by-minute management and large scale, systemic synchronization. In other words, UPS not only manages time but it also draws and designs time, as its contingent, operational territories continually transform, move, and change.
Relate, Relate, Relate: In the Age of Machine Learning
Recognizing the impact of image-generating machine learning models on architectural discourse, this thesis offers a fresh perspective on the role of machine learning in conceptual relationships within architecture. The thesis explores ML's capacity to interrelate architecture beyond tradition lineage framework or categorization framework. Structured into three chapters, the first correlates projects from the "five on five" lecture series with large language and image-based models, forming a cloud of relationships. The second chapter delves into machine learning-aided design by relating projects and generating conceptual text. The final chapter investigates the challenge posed to museum design as the traditional architectural history framework is also challenged, proposing a museum embedded within a material reuse center. Through these explorations, the thesis uncovers ML's potential to contextualize and interconnect architecture, highlighting its significance beyond its prowess in generating realistic images and text.
An Intrinsic Model for a Non-neutral, Plural National School
When Malaysia gained independence from the British in 1957, it took on a national architectural identity that was rooted in the language and neutrality of tropical modernism, which was deemed appropriate for the multi-ethnic Malaysian society. At the turn of the century, the government of Malaysia built a new capital city, Putrajaya: a singular ethnocentric construction, modeled after architectural forms of the Arab nations, that elevates Malay-Muslim identity above others in the plural nation. As opposed to the homogeneous, imposed ethnocentrism of Putrajaya, the former capital city of Kuala Lumpur embodies a hybridized, heterogeneous accumulation of multiple identities and differences. If Putrajaya represents an extrinsic model that outwardly exhibits a Malay-Muslim identity by reproducing the architectural forms of Arab nations and turning them into consumable artifacts, Kuala Lumpur represents an intrinsic model of a contested city where confrontations and accumulation of differences produce new hybridized conditions in a constant state of flux. In its search for a national identity, the Malaysian state has oscillated between two extremes: a singular ethnocentric iconography on the one hand and a flattening neutral modernism on the other. This thesis asserts the relevance of iconography in producing an architectural identity in the context of a plural society. It draws on the found conditions of Kuala Lumpur to propose the intrinsic model as a technique which calls upon culturally diverse referents to produce an inclusive and plural national architectural identity. This technique is investigated against the program of the Malaysian national school: a pervasive and relentlessly banal modernist typology that serves an ethnically diverse populace but is neutralized by prescriptive government pre-approved plans and generic facades. This thesis proposes an intrinsic model for a non-neutral, plural national school.
Real-time Architecture: Quantifying the Spatial Performance of Workplaces
The shift from traditional 9:00 am to 5:00 pm work hours to more flexible work arrangements in white-collar knowledge-based private companies has increased the emphasis on minimizing workplace spatial footprint. While emerging evidence-based methods rely on real-time spatial technologies and utilization rate analysis to determine workplace spatial optimization strategies, existing methods frequently overlook daily, weekly, and monthly variations in occupancy. Consequently, there is a lack of effective methods for reducing spatial footprint that balance benefits for the company, employees, and environment. The Real-Time Architecture dissertation presents a method through two studies for evaluating workplace utilization rates in real-time, using hourly peak measurements and accounting for employee interactions. This method shows significant improvements in estimating potential spatial downsizing. The first study analyzed 162,778 spaces across 115 companies. The results revealed the crucial significance of a detailed analysis of utilization rates in determining the potential for spatial reduction. The data indicated that individual spaces exhibit a higher frequency of use than collaboration spaces, contradicting the prevailing viewpoint among practitioners advocating for a greater emphasis on collaborative spaces. Furthermore, the findings challenge the assumption that adaptive designs are necessary. The second study, which was conducted at the Panasonic headquarters in Japan, aimed to investigate the impact of workspace reduction on employee interpersonal interactions and meeting behavior in a controlled setting. Specifically, the study tested a reduction in formal meeting spaces by 79.3%, resulting in an overall decrease of 26.7% in the total workspace area. The utilization rate methodology, which was established in the first study, was utilized to evaluate the effects of workspace reduction. The study's results revealed that while the occupancy of social spaces increased significantly, the hourly utilization rate of the remaining formal meeting spaces in the open-plan environment remained the same. In other words, the formal meeting spaces were used for the same time per day as before the workspace reduction. Additionally, the duration of meetings held in the formal meeting spaces decreased, with a rise in the proportion of short meetings (30 minutes or less) and a decrease in the number of lengthy meetings (1.5 hours or more). Furthermore, teams were more inclined to utilize the meeting rooms for collaborative purposes rather than individual use. The two studies above provide valuable insights into optimizing workplace spaces by utilizing occupancy and employee interaction data. The conclusions of these studies offer a comprehensive framework for architects and corporate real estate professionals to evaluate workplace performance and identify redundant spaces. Furthermore, to advance the understanding of the effects of spatial reduction on employee interaction behavior, a comprehensive set of de-identified datasets, including 456,451 records of interactions and the building information model of the space, extracted from the second study, has been made available for use by other researchers.
On Vision: The Science and Cultural History of Spatial Perception and Imagination
This thesis investigates the relationship between evolving modes of visual perception and the space of architecture. The design of architecture is intimately linked to the way space is imagined to be seen, and thus to the scientific and cultural understanding of vision. And yet, the scopic regime of retinal projection as embodied by the camera obscura has dominated architectural imagination, even as empirical understanding of vision drastically changed. The monocular observer is accurate only when the observed object is far enough that the two eyes’ horizontal separation—parallax—can be neglected. Whereas the space of retinal projection is single, continuous, and homogenous, the space of binocular vision is split, ambiguous, and haptic. A more recent but definitive shift in the understanding of human vision came with the discovery of orientation-selective cells in the primary visual cortex of cats. The algorithmically assembled image-space is pixelated, fragmented, and noisy. In contrast to the model of retinal projection, which assumes that we passively perceive objects through their image in the retina, vision has come to be understood as the active extraction of relevant information in hierarchical stages: from edges to textures to patterns to objects. How architectural space can engage with each and all these spatial schemas is the central question underlying my project. I think it is urgent and necessary for architects to understand and engage with the biology of seeing. Only then can the design of space become relevant, just, and humane. This project is conceived as an effort in that direction.
Architectural Hybrids Shaped by the Times: Moments of Public Housing in the US
This dissertation questioned the tendency toward varied architectural forms in US housing projects, given that the function of the public housing program evolved over time. This work contributed to existing studies on public housing by driving at the heterogeneity in the architecture hit by the forces at play—ideological, political, racial, and economic—echoing certain norms prevalent in the nation’s urban centers. In other words, beneath the story of variation in US housing project designs, the architecture reflected and expressed ‘cultural moments,’ defined here as the temporary alignment of beliefs about society, politics, the economy, and architecture that prevailed at periods of time. The investigative lens used in this study—the concept of cultural moments—extended conceptual frameworks on historical progressions to the architecture of public housing—notably, geographer Peter Taylor’s (1999) ‘prime modernities’, and, alternatively, ‘modernity’ in the work of historian Miriam Levin et al (2010). The methodology employed was case study-based, a qualitative research design which combined historical, cultural, and architectural analyses. The dissertation’s core methods relied on archival research, architectural precedent study, the generation of interpretive drawings, census data, and four in-depth interviews. To answer the research question, the study investigated three housing projects illustrative of their milieux—subdivided into three chapters. These projects were Langston Terrace in Washington, DC, Schuylkill Falls in Philadelphia, and Centennial Place in Atlanta. The three projects were chosen because they reflected housing project design’s evolution, representing critical periods of intensification in the history of public housing—the 1930s, 1950s and 1990s. The methodology interrogated the key reasons why, in each period, abrupt shifts in American’s attitudes toward low-income housing provision followed a pattern of breaking with the past. Our findings showed that political forces lie beneath the variation in US housing project designs in nearly every aspect of their creation. The findings also revealed that integral to each cultural moment were change agents and their motivations—political, social, and economic—shaping the architecture. Third and most important, our findings underscored that hybrids in style and form, embodying their cultural moments, were indispensable to America’s housing officials in achieving social good when little consensus existed. Architectural hybrids defined in this dissertation—the combination of any historical style in a single project—resulted from the necessary convergence of competing claims about location, projects’ financing, construction, and tenantry, spread across a wide range of stakeholders' opinions. Taken together, our findings show that housing project design, by nature, was an iterative process shaped by the times.
The Late Capitalist Skyscraper Theoretically Considered
This dissertation outlines a portrait of the skyscraper within the context of the contemporary urban world, undertaking an analysis that spans the period contained between 1973 and the present. Through a critique of key theoretical texts from the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the project traces the building’s manifold relations with logics of financial abstraction and urbanization, as well as its complex symbolic and spatial roles amid a period characterized by global crises and the deployment of capital at a planetary scale. Assembled as a multilayered narrative in which architectural theory intersects with a constellation of critical discourses and a mosaic of visual materials, The Late Capitalist Skyscraper reads the ongoing metamorphoses of the type as intrinsically connected to emerging modalities of capital accumulation and its associated socio-spatial implications across a wide range of vertical urban landscapes and territorial formations.
Kreat.Kreat...Taktak-Toktok: Between the Gaps of Conservation
We often hear the question, what is conservation?, but rarely do we ask, when is conservation? This subtle shift redefines conservation as a series of experiences through space and time. It moves it away from the typical natural reserve scale of 1:50 000 towards more grounded ones looking at crafts through ever-changing relationships between the living and built environment. In her book Friction (2004, 175), Anna L. Tsing defines gaps as “conceptual spaces and real places into which powerful demarcations do not travel well.” This thesis looks between the gaps of conservation through the materiality of unbuilding and building practices in Bali, a complex island of Indonesia. Through the story of streets in Ubud and the edge of the forest, the work reflects on the transition from global to local material realities in public spaces for Anak Bali, people from Bali. In other words, I am asking when is conservation for Bali in relation to its inhabitants, humans and their fellow-beings.
LA LUCHA CONTINUA: CONFLICTING CONSTITUTIONALISM AND TERRITORIALITIES OF COMPETING SOVEREIGNTIES IN THE CARIBBEAN
Today, academic frameworks regarding classical notions of sovereignty are being challenged by empirical perspectives emerging from different parts across America. Ongoing debates are currently focusing on illiberal forms of hybrid governance arrangements assuming that sovereignty is not a claim which is exclusively expressed by state actors alone, but rather involves diverse arrangements with non-state actors, suggesting a questioning of the legitimacy of the state’s claim to represent citizens’ rights. My contribution to this conversation is to add new understandings of the notion of Sovereignty by focusing on the socio-political relationship of Puerto Rico-United States. Searching locations for naval training range bases during the 1940s, the U.S. Navy expropriated lands in Vieques-Culebra. After uprisings against bombing target practice in the 90s, military operations ended in 2001, with the Navy completely leaving the area in 2003. Eighteen years later, the aftermath of that occupation is still present. The territory that was owned by the Navy was ceded to the National Fish and Wildlife Reserve System, setting a precedent for competing sovereignties over contested land in the United States territories. My thesis is looking at the role of urban development patterns of the federal occupation in Vieques-Culebra because there’s an ongoing exertion towards land in the sense of how is being preserved, bought, sold, and exploited through regulations that benefit the more advantaged demographic, in order to make visible resistance efforts by non-state actors that currently exist against the tensions over land sovereignty, the inefficiency of the state and its social infrastructure.
Early Phase Performance Driven Design Assistance Using Generative Models
Form-finding in the current performance-driven design methodology of architectural design is typically formulated as a design optimization problem. Although effective in engineering or late-stage design problems, optimization is not suitable for the exploratory design phase due to the time intensity and cognitive load associated with the processes involved in the formulation and solution of optimization problems. The iterative, diverging nature of early-phase design is incompatible with the i) cognitive load of parametric modeling and its limited affordances for conceptual changes, ii) time and resource intensity of simulations, iii) interpretability of optimization results. This thesis suggests a framework for generating optimal performance geometries within an intuitive and interactive modeling environment in real-time. The framework includes the preparation of a synthetic dataset, modeling its probability distribution using generative models, and sampling the learned distribution under given constraints. The several components are elaborated through a case study of building form optimization for passive solar gain in Boston, MA, for a wide range of plot shapes and surroundings. Apart from the overall framework, this thesis contributes a series of methods that enable its implementation. A geometric system of orientable cuboids is introduced as a generalizable, granular modeling vocabulary. A method for efficient boundary condition sampling is suggested for the dataset preparation. A Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is extended for performance-aware geometry generation using performance-related loss functions. A series of techniques inspired by the data-imputation literature is introduced to generate optimal geometries under constraints. Last, a prototype is presented that demonstrates the abilities of a system based on the suggested framework.
Hudson Phloem | Shoreline Xylem
This thesis zooms in microscopically to expose the moral distancing between the construction and material metamorphosis of concrete shorelines. As Calvert Vaux’s prevailing Riverside Park in New York City extended the Hudson River Valley southward, this thesis extends Hudson water ecologies inward and upward. Concrete constantly undergoes processes that consume sulfates and carbon, which leach out into surrounding soils and attached larvae. Pinpointing areas of increased compound leaching, a series of capillary gardens carve into the concrete of Riverside Park to create an emerging network of cracks and abrupt ecotones at the West Side’s doorstep. The garden network splinters the abiotic to help healthier biotic shoreline communities reemerge from beneath, creating a precedent for future shorelines to consider the microscopic before seeking concrete as an ecological solution. Furthermore, the design dismantles the distinction between park as the pleasurable picturesque, and park as an instrument that enhances emotional adaptability to rising seas.
Fringe: Negotiating the Ground beyond Conservation in Hong Kong
This thesis challenges the boundary condition of the broad and diverse canon of nature conservation that emphasizes the binaries between human and nature. Situated in Hong Kong, a highly populated yet forest enveloped city, the situation is amplified as the boundaries of its ‘Country Park’ conservation areas are continuously challenged by expanding urbanization and aggressive capitalism. Hence, this design research reconsiders the boundary, not as linear edge, but a fringe, that has thickness, in terms of geography, culture, economics, and politics, to develop its own resiliency. In response to this enquiry, the design proposal consists of a series of ‘Nursery Parks’, that begin and expand beyond the deteriorating boundaries. Through the production of trees, the design prepares the ground for the occupation of its citizens through temporal events. In the act of production of trees and place, these fringe spaces are engendered with value, not only ecological but also through its cultural identity to the city.
The Third Typology: Architecture on the Bank of the Bengawan Solo
Indonesia has a wide range of vernacular architectural styles known as rumah adat. However, the passage of time and colonialism has caused a decline in the traditional rumah adat. The architectural landscape of the post-1940s embraced the international style. Although these designs are pragmatically efficient and relatively simpler to construct, they are ill-suited for Indonesia's tropical climate. The rumah adat, on the other hand, can integrate seamlessly with the Indonesian climate. Nonetheless, it faces challenges of scalability and constructability. While the international style addresses these issues, it often fails to harmonize with the local climate. This situation prompts a pivotal question: How can architectural solutions be climatically appropriate, contextual, and scalable? This thesis explores the 'third typology,' bridging the gap between the vernacular and contemporary architectural typologies. Embracing Indonesia's cultural regionalism, the work leverages principles of sublimeness, intricate plays of light and shadow, climatic responsiveness, and contextual design.
THE FARM IN THE FOREST: Recoding Agrosilvoecological Practices in Coffee Production in El Salvador
Coffee plays an essential part in shaping the economy, landscape, and culture of El Salvador. Over the past 100 years, social and economic shifts across the country have profoundly altered the maintenance and production of coffee. For this legacy to be updated to the 21st century, there is a need to design landscapes that are constantly adapting to environmental and socioeconomic volatility. Buena Vista, a 155-hectare coffee farm situated between the edge of the Apaneca-Ilamatepec Biosphere Reserve and a chain of towns, serves as a testing ground for a new design of an agroecological coffee landscape. The two primary interventions include the development of a matrix of planting strategies with different maintenance levels and the creation of a visitor route through the farm that illustrates the ecological, the productive and the social importance of coffee. By connecting and diversifying the vegetation and the economic activities at the site, the overall landscape becomes more robust and resilient to economic, environmental, and cultural changes now and into the future.
Metropolitan Governance in the Argentinian Context: The case of the CEAMSE
The Área Metropolitana de Buenos Aires is the largest metropolitan area of Argentina and one of the biggest in the world. In this urban setting, the Coordinación Ecológica Área Metropolitana Sociedad del Estado (CEAMSE) provides services of final waste disposal at a regional scale, emerging as one of the few examples of metropolitan governance in the AMBA. Nevertheless, although this public company is consolidated, it has experienced periods of conflict and crisis, affecting its current capability to expand its operations. This article aims to review and analyze the issue of Solid Waste Management (SWM) in the AMBA and analyze CEAMSE's history and challenges in order to understand its current situation better and identify lessons that could contribute to enhancing the company’s model of waste management.
Orange Trees & Oil Wells: Imagining a Decarbonized California
California is the most valuable state in the United States, with its real estate valued at more than $10 trillion or 20% of the US real estate market. Supporting this real estate market California has become the largest exporter of agriculture in the nation, valued at $55.8 million. California is also the third largest oil refiner in the country, refining 1.8 million barrels per day. California today is facing extreme climate stress expecting a 40% decline in crop yields by 2050. Industrialized agriculture relies on fossil fuels to support the world’s food supply. Starting in 2030 demand for oil is expected to drop from 93 million barrels to 25 million barrels a day by 2050. Based on these predictions oil prices are going to rise drastically creating global food instability. In addition to the phased decommissioning of 629 oil refineries by 2050. California’s AB1757 leads the nation as the most aggressive climate policy. This phased decarbonization strategy will transform the worlds 4th largest economy into a carbon free economy. The city affected the most by these policies is Los Angeles, a city defined by its infrastructure. LA has used these tools for the past century to extract resources and bring value to the barren Los Angeles Basin. What happens when the price of carbon is no longer the determining factor for development but instead development is guided by the impact of carbon on the environment? Los Angeles currently has five refineries within the county limits. Current pressure at the state and local level has banned oil extraction and is making it increasingly difficult to refine oil in the city, with Chevron the states largest refiner withdrawing future investment in the state. The Chevron El Segundo refinery is 1,200 acres of prime coastal property that productes 40% of the jet fuel and 20% of the gasoline in Southern California. The withdrawal of the oil industry is inevitable, but can we imagine a new use for these sites that assist in our transition to a more sustainable future? As the world is facing this trifecta of a climate crisis, energy crisis, and food crisis solutions need to be looking at their capacity to create change. the adaptation of oil refineries provides an opportunity in the midst of a crisis to rethink the value of heavy industrial land use types as a way to provide more resilience and stability to urban centers.
A New Interoperability Framework for Data-Driven Building Performance Simulation
Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) have become more prominent in the building, architecture, and construction industries. One area ideally suited to exploit this powerful new technology is building performance simulation (BPS) for sustainable building design. Physics-based models have traditionally been used to estimate the energy flow, air movement, and heat balance of buildings. The algorithms behind physics-based models, however, involve solving complex differential equations that require many assumptions, significant computational power, and a considerable amount of time to output predictions. With the advent of DL, which can handle large amounts of computation in a short period of time, data-driven models for predicting the physical properties of buildings are becoming increasingly popular due to their simplicity and efficiency. As such, artificial neural networks (ANNs) with measured or simulated data for environmental analysis are likely to be a more feasible option for designers during the early design phase. To train ANN models, 3D data is an asset to computer vision because they provide rich information about the geometry and the related environment. Depending on the 3D data representation considered, different challenges may emerge when using trained ANN models. Hence, an interoperability framework is required for converting building geometries and environment-related information into relevant 3D matrices for model training and utilization. However, to date there has been no research on this topic in the BPS field; thus, this research proposes a new data interoperability framework for ANN models with 3D buildings serving as inputs. The framework has been subjected to a trial investigation using several ANN modeling studies on radiation and airflow simulation. The result is a comprehensive process map that includes the BPS requirement for ANN modeling, related subprocesses (i.e., building geometry and environmental levels), specific rules and methods for modeling, and processing of input and output data. To accomplish this, data exchangers for the ANN models, geometry representation tool (GRT), and BIM specification tool (BST) were introduced and developed as computational tools. The comprehensive framework has been validated using the developed case studies, demonstrating its applicability for different Computer-aided design tools (i.e., Rhinoceros and Revit) and ANN models (i.e., radiation and airflow) and illustrating the future capacity of integrated ANNs to serve as a tool for use in BPS and early-stage modeling.
Japan Post World War II Development Turning Point
World War II defeat was one of many calamities that affected Japan’s economic and spatial development. Japan had to rebuild from this calamity to move forward. It implemented various economic and spatial policies that made it one of the largest global economies and influenced its current spatial framework. The question I ask for my thesis is: How was the post-World War II era a turning point in Japan’s economic and spatial development? I investigated various practices (events, policies, concepts) and post-World War II urban development projects in Japan, focusing on the period of high economic growth but also recent developments. I drew the following conclusion: while entities in Japan implemented economic and spatial development policies that they felt would make it modern, often following Western or nationalistic “one size fits all” spatial approaches, other entities tended to reflect back toward Japan’s typical and indigenous spatial directions in community, spontaneity, and image. This framework can be applied to other contexts of the world.
Formerly a Stranger's House: Reflections on Shophouse Typology
This thesis brings forth the Southeast Asian vernacular shophouse as a resilient type loaded with memory, and reads its variations over time alongside local socio-political histories as fodder to question future possibilities of an otherwise abject typology. As its name suggests, the shophouse traditionally consists of a commercial program on the ground level open to the street, and a domestic residence above. Highly sensitive to the urban life that surrounds it, in the Indonesian context it has lived multiple lives, shifting in attitudes of negotiation between the public and private. Once serving as homes as well as open points of exchange, their subjection to modernization and a series of turbulent events has transformed them into either purely commodified spaces for storage and consumption, or closed but empty containers devoid of spirit. While the shophouse has a fate which is overwhelmingly driven by its public perceptions and outside forces, the thesis, with some naivete, takes on the position of rejecting this tendency of the urban context to overpower inhabitations of the interior. As a project it proposes the possibility of reviving dead instances of the shophouse through strategic reinsertions of elements which might embody its essence as a means to generate new forms of a lost domesticity, and perhaps form reconfigurations of memory.
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.
Extensive Welcome: Three-way Threshold at Chinatown’s Gate
Benevolent Associations have helped Chinese immigrants settle in America for more than a century. Not only do they harness Chinese American collectivity for a voice in local governments, but they also offer classes and social services to new arrivals. Yet unlike missionaries intent on conversion, Benevolent Associations operate without the need to shed existing identities and beliefs. These Associations service immigrants' liminal state and teeter to fulfill Chinese and American expectations. In other words, Benevolent Associations see thresholds as hospitable conditions unto themselves. This thesis considers a new space for Boston's Benevolent Association through thresholds under urban, programmatic, and tectonic conditions. Straddling Chinatown's border, the structure frames and reinforces the iconic Chinatown gate. Meanwhile, by moving what is typically at the center of Chinatown to its periphery, the Association opens itself up for a reciprocal relationship between insiders and outsiders. Just as new immigrants learn English to venture beyond Chinatown, others can learn Chinese for opportunities in Chinatown. The softened border manifests as parallel walls with spaces in between. Meandering circulation punctures these walls to produce spatial depth in the oblique, which concludes at a roof garden vis-à-vis the Greenway. Conceived as CLT blanks, cross-stacked, the structure accommodates varying bays that house the Association's diverse programming. The resulting spaces push back on the open plan's promise of a melting pot - that belonging is best produced by smoothing over difference - to retain and contrast each space's character through a staccato of thresholds.
A Cultural Approach to Conserving Water: A Case Study on the Azraq Oasis
My dissertation aims to design a proposed solution by studying and better understanding the specific cultural related issues of water conservation. Water, a valuable element of life, has had and continues to have a significant impact on communities; culturally, socially, ecologically, politically, and on places globally. Conserving water is today’s imperative need, and can more likely be implemented with a more specific culturally thoughtful policy design to help change the societal behavior, attitude, feeling, and awareness toward the water crisis. Specifically, for this dissertation, I use the Azraq Oasis in Jordan as a case study. I define and investigate the cultural component of water scarcity and its role in implementing effective water conservation practices using Laureano’s four cultural dimensions – cognitive (knowledge), attitude, active (behavior) and effective (feeling) parameters. I accomplished this by observing daily practices of the five sub cultural groups, the Druze, Chechens, Refugees, Minority, and Bedouins residing in Azraq. These parameters were collected through surveys, quantified and statistical models were created in order to help design a better resolution for this specific population. The results indicated that the knowledge and behavior models are more significant than the attitude and feeling models. Survey results for daily practices for conserving water had variations in terms of awareness (knowledge) of water conservation. All of the five sub cultural groups display positive behavior and attitudes towards willingness to conserve water. However, the one disparity is that the refugees, as much as they agreed that water conservation is needed, disagree that it is their responsibility to conserve water, but indicated that they save water wherever they can. In sum, all five cultural groups share similar feelings about water shortage and water quality seems to be their primary concern. This dissertation makes a contribution in the water use and conservation literature and provides quantifiable data of the role of the culture on water conservation for policy designers. The policy designers can then potentially implement or learn from this dissertation in their own country to design culturally sensitive policies that would potentially help eradicate water scarcity.
Industrious Neighborhood: A Model for Equitable Growth in the Age of Industrial Evolution
In rapidly densifying cities with evolving economies, housing instability and labor market mismatch are fundamental socioeconomic challenges. Contemporary urban growth needs to increase housing affordability and create new means to activate the under-skilled workforce. At the confluence of these issues lie dormant lands full of potential. Light-industrial zones, serviced by robust infrastructure, have the capacity to harness emerging industries and forge new synergies for mixed-income housing and middle-skill job training. Rejuvenating derelict industrial buildings into adaptable urban models can stimulate economic growth and create a new precedent for upward mobility. By zooming in on the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, a rapidly gentrifying community surrounded by light-industrial land across the Los Angeles River and downtown L.A., this thesis challenges market-driven development through strategic urban design intervention. This proposal for the Industrious Neighborhood gives new agency to forgotten lands and offers policymakers an actionable pathway for socioeconomic growth and equitable development on prime land.
How the West Was (Really) Won: Water and the Emergence of Los Angeles
The outsized role of infrastructure in shaping urban landscapes is ever-present in American cities, most exaggerated in a place like Los Angeles. Desert, floodplain, dry scrublands, and mountains—LA’s menu of inhospitable terrains, once seemingly tamed by the infrastructures of the past, have undone our best efforts to control them. Southern California, currently experiencing yet another multiyear drought, is completely reliant on aging infrastructures to support the region’s unsustainable land use patterns. In Los Angeles, the development of water infrastructure and urbanization are inextricably linked. Understanding one requires an understanding of the other. Completely dependent on distant sources, Los Angeles must reimagine its relationship to water as it increasingly becomes a scarce resource. Through a critical analysis of the aridification crippling the city today, this thesis develops design strategies for new urban infrastructures which sustainably provide for local water resource management, relinquishing the city’s extractive reliance on its hinterlands.