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Building a Digital Gallery
This project works toward building a technology platform, community, and database for designers and design enthusiasts. The subject matter is furniture, both innovative (new) designer works and iconic (vintage) classics of 20th century design. The platform seeks to engage 3D scanning, videography, and high-resolu- tion photography to challenge the current standards for viewing furniture and designed objects online today. Creating an immersive digital gallery experi- ence is a notable objective. To initiate this, a collection of iconic furniture was 3D-scanned and hosted digitally, allowing for an intimate experience of the object’s details and imperfections. To build community and trust, the project engages an editorial voice and robust historical dialogue. This includes short essays on important designers and iconic furniture pieces. It also intertwines opinion pieces and critical viewpoints within the online experience. Curation and the subject of authenticity both play crucial roles. Curation requires explicit knowledge of the relationships between varying design pieces in their date of production, material, and design ethos. Showcasing the criteria for authenticity and verifying them builds trust and value for users. Lastly, the project places considerable emphasis on researching the state-of- the-art in e-commerce, web development, advertising, visualization technol- ogies, online surveying, and 3D scanning hardware. These fields and their complex networks become interdependent for this buildout of a digital platform intended for community-use. The project works alongside the thesis trajectory of Jeremy Bilotti, SMArchS Computation & MS in Computer Science candidate, MIT. Jeremy has been a collaborator in producing much of the work contained in this dissertation.
Atlantic: the space between two coasts
This thesis creates a portal that connects two coasts of the Atlantic Ocean, expressed through the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Luanda. The Atlantic Ocean is both the bridge and the barrier that marries both sites, once geologically connected. The portal emerges as two paths that move from mountain to sea in a ritual that proposes gazing into the horizon and seeing the missing piece on the other side. Or rather, feeling it through longing and separation. Angola and Brazil, both former Portuguese colonies, are tied by more than a common language and colonial heritage. As two of the largest slavery ports in the 19th century, about three million people were shipped from Luanda to Rio de Janeiro. This transatlantic connection is Diasporic and immeasurable, present in their cultural weaving and their capacity of being recognized as a synecdoche for the space between two coasts.
TEOTWAWKI: A Designer's Guide to Prepping
Preparing, colloquially known as “prepping,” is a political act that can be read through the medium of landscape, extending from the colonization of the United States to the present. While mainstream media portrays preppers as eccentrics living in hardened architectures on the fringes of society, fully one percent of the American population identifies as preppers, and they increasingly shape our shared built environment. Preppers perform acts of landscape-making in anticipation of their particular visions of TEOTWAWKI, or "the end of the world as we know it.” In this way, prepping challenges societal reliance on just-in-time production and market security by rejecting ornamental garden culture and decorative landscape consumption in favor of productive practices of self-reliance, and future-looking present action. This thesis is delivered in two parts: first, a long-form essay that interrogates the myth of the American prepper and investigates the futures we are preparing for; and second, an illustrated guide to three prototypical prepping landscapes, or prepperscapes, sited in the northeast. These prepperscapes are works of speculative fiction that draw on canonical projects and texts across landscape architecture, survivalist blogs and other media. Through these reference materials and provocations, this thesis situates prepping in the American landscape across time and the political spectrum, and casts the designed elements of preparedness campaigns as social artifacts with a historical provenance beyond the movement’s present conservative ideological affiliation. TEOTWAWKI argues that prepping activities fall along a broader spectrum of beliefs and practices than conventionally assumed, and these activities can expand our idea of an adaptive landscape.
Monuments of Context: New Tube for London
Deep in the heart of Zone 4 North London, “Monuments of Context: New Tube for London” proposes a new train line for the London Underground, the Cosmopolitan line, which is comprised of three new stations: the Three Hammers, Arrandene, and Apex Corner. These three new stations radically reflect the multicultural suburban context in which they are embedded, honoring immediate local context undoing centuries of typical British imperialism and their architectural demonstrations of state power. By experimentally incrementing a popular pub, a raving roundabout, and a public park, the critical distinction between station and place is phenomenally blurred, letting Londoners alight at a sensationalized crescendo of the borough beyond the barriers. The inherent nationalistic design lineage that flows within the bloodline of the city’s existing station portfolio is dismantled in this thesis to create a new design language that appropriately reflects the city's progressive DNA.
Making Mobility: Shifting the Urban Milieu of Oklahoma City
Bus rapid transit is a key component of many of the world’s largest municipalities, and is at the limit of what smaller cities like Oklahoma City can realistically achieve. OKC’s development as a thriving urban center is full of unique and complex challenges which separate it from any other city in the country, and make the addition of a bus rapid transit system especially difficult. This project takes that method of public transportation, well known internationally but facing little domestic interest, due to our continued devotion to the automobile, and uses it to reshape the future urban development of Oklahoma’s capital. BRT at a system level is explored and reimagined, then used to redefine specific points of future importance for the city – sites that suggest a polycentric network of vibrant spaces.
Labored Form: Domestic Fold
Las Vegas is a city of duplicates; it appears at first only complicated. Buildings on The Strip duplicate neighboring buildings, implicate antecedent versions of themselves, and replicate other cities. The multiplication of duplicate forms can be explicated (unfolded) to reveal apparently similar but separately applied interests. This thesis posits the plication (the fold) as a device capable of uniting near duplicates such as the new high speed rail and existing low speed rail, the city of Las Vegas proper and unincorporated Clark County (the Strip), the service worker and the tourist, modes of transportation for the tourist and those for the resident, and high density housing with a civic building. The history of plication can be traced as both a product of domestic labor and a subject of intellectual inquiry. The lineage of the fold includes its appearance in Jacques Ozanam’s Récréations mathématiques et physiques (1694) employed as a teaching device, as a method of decorating tables with folded napkins in early contemporary cookbooks such as Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861), as a topic of study disseminated through the history of home economics, and as a theoretical framework in Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988). The Las Vegas Transportation Center is a multi-plied form which employs the continuous nature of the fold to bring together the tourist and the work force, and the train station with housing, and speculates on the possibility of the discontinuous fold to choreograph their division.
“¡Azúcar!”: Fragments from a Land of Sugar
The sugarcane-processing factory, or central, has long played a pivotal role in Cuba’s history. For the Cuban people, the production of sugar is more than just an export commodity. Sugar, and by proxy the central—its spatial manifestation—are multifaceted cultural artifacts. Through a series of anecdotes, I tell a story from a land of sugar. I piece together this narrative from visual, textual, and oral archives. These seemingly disjointed, scattered, asynchronous, and erroneously nostalgic voices construct a manifold view of Cuba from its colonization to the present. As such, this project is an interpolation, or an oscillation of fragments of a story that remains incomplete and littered with gaps. This is a story about territory, race and ultimately catastrophe—reflecting a world that continues to be plunged into crisis. A crisis that is, as Eva Horn describes in Future as Catastrophe, “no longer an event, but a prolonged present.” But this project is also a tale of resilience, illustrating how in more ways than one, our personal geographies are inherently linked to the legacies of colonial-economic processes.
Islands of Elegy: Dispersing the Urban Cemetery
Islands of Elegy proposes a new kind of cemetery, one that brings death closer to us and resists the stagnation of memory. This new cemetery—the “microcemetery”— manifests as several small sanctuary spaces embedded in highly urban environments: on street corners, in plazas, etc. These spaces have the capacity to build upward rather than outward, resisting the spatial imposition of the contemporary cemetery. The dispersal of these microcemeteries across Boston creates a landscape that reflects the true metabolism of grief, a process which may never come to completion, which may linger or be lost to time, and which often permeates the everyday.
Collected Memory
This is a project of the present, projecting the past. Cities grow, adapt, die and resurge. Over the course of their evolution, they become possessors of juxtaposing narratives — those stemming from privileged voices against other, softer, less audible tales. What have we forgotten in the years — decades, centuries — of inhabiting these cities? Where are the sites of near-forgotten narratives or of memories willfully repressed? My thesis seeks to present the totality of a city through its paradoxical and contested histories. This project dedicates a space to remember and memorialize those subjugated narratives that linger imperceptibly along the periphery of our collective memory.
From Hinterland to Hinterglobe
From Hinterland to Hinterglobe investigates urbanization as a mode of generalized geographical organization in which agglomerations, although covering no more than 3% of the total land surface, are connected to the reconfiguration of most of the 70% of the planetary terrain currently used. Urbanization has always been characterized by a condition of biogeographical interdependency between areas of concentration of population and economic activity, and extensive areas of primary production, circulation and waste disposal. Historically confined at the regional scale, what has been conceptualized as a relationship between cities and their hinterlands, is becoming increasingly elusive to define under conditions of globalized urbanization: On the one hand, agglomerations densify, diffuse and expand into unprecedented, increasingly continuous zones. On the other hand, through a thickening web of transport infrastructures, they become increasingly interwoven with the operationalization of multiscalar, increasingly discontinuous and specialized agricultural, forestry, grazing, energy and mineral extraction zones. The later constitute the majority of the used part of the earth’s surface; yet they remain a ‘terra incognita’ to the study of urbanization. Although various strands of scholarship have highlighted the multiscalar impact of urbanization on shaping global patterns of socio-economic development and environmental transformation, the question of the hinterland has remained deeply inscribed within a set of persistent dichotomies: From a demographic perspective, the dichotomy between densely populated ‘urban’ agglomerations and low density ‘rural’ hinterlands; from a land-use perspective, between densely built-up ‘hardscapes’ of agglomerations and thinly equipped ‘softscapes’ of hinterlands; from an economic perspective, between agglomerations as economic generators, and hinterlands as void of economic performance; and from an ecological perspective, between agglomerations as ‘entropic black holes’, and hinterlands as producers of ecological surplus. Building upon the agenda of Planetary Urbanization, I critically revisit and deconstruct the concept of the hinterland aiming to transcend its associated dichotomies and limitations. I introduce the meta-categories of agglomeration landscapes and operational landscapes as landscapes of possible externalities associated with particular operations: Agglomeration landscapes are characterized by the presence of ‘urban’ and ‘clustering’ externalities; operational landscapes are mostly connected with ‘locational’ externalities. I investigate how these externalities emerge out of, or are prohibited by, particular compositions of asymmetrically distributed, but largely continuous, elements of geographical organization (elements of the natural environment, elements of infrastructural equipment, demographic factors, institutional and regulatory frameworks). Instead of trying to delineate the particular hinterlands of cities, or chart the flows that connect them, I suggest that all processes of urbanization include the activation of a multitude of both agglomeration landscapes and operational landscapes. These are brought together through complex webs of commodity chains, reflecting the advanced division of labor that characterizes industrial and postindustrial societies. According to this framework, agglomeration landscapes are presented as the main locations for operations of the secondary and tertiary sectors of the economy, while operational landscapes for operations of the primary sector of the economy. In this way, I claim that, while urban economies have been only associated with the former, the economies of urbanization should be also stretched to include the latter. In addition to introducing these novel categories, I also explore how they could be cartographically defined through the composite charting of the various geographical elements that constitute them. As a result, my research blends a theoretical apparatus, building upon theories of the social and ecological production of space under capitalism; with a cartographic and geostatistical apparatus, building upon a critical engagement with selected global geospatial datasets. Finally, as a means of exploring the capacities of these novel concepts, I attempt a historical overview of the development of urbanization as geographical organization over the past two centuries: I claim that as urbanization generalizes a condition of biogeographical interdependency, operational landscapes expand and specialize constructing a globalized shared assembly. Instrumentalized through global commodity chains, this planetary operational totality signals the shift from the universe of fragmented hinterlands, to the totality of the Hinterglobe: an alternative interpretation of the complete urbanization of the world.
Public Water Works, or, Staying Cool at the Pool
This project seeks to reimagine the municipal pool; reinforcing it as a vital urban space, and reprioritizing it in the climate crisis. As New England anticipates extreme heat, Boston must respond with creative infrastructures of cool outdoor spaces for its residents. Public Water Works projects a city / community approach to the public pool as a landscape. The pilot project, OUR POOL, is proposed in the Grove Hall neighborhood. With water levels reinterpreting tidal flows, OUR POOL encourages an active relationship between bodies of people and bodies of water. These basins work within a system of water that mists, falls, flows, drains, and pools. Through smaller modular pools, dynamic water movement, filtering vegetation, and seasonal rotation, Public Water Works demands participation in infrastructures of joy and of cooling to create new typologies of public space in our ever-warming city.
Omnipresence: Machine Vision in the Adversarial City
This work follows the trail of Omnipresence, a mobile program of public safety lighting in New York City. Unpacking its historical and design precedents, it argues that Omnipresence is just the latest component of an urban dispositive as old as the modern city itself: one that illustrates the connections between public lighting, organized policing, racial hierarchies, and bureaucracies for collecting spatial data about the city and its inhabitants. Part of a massive network of AI-driven surveillance technologies called the Domain Awareness System; this work fuses the digital tools of landscape architecture with machine learning models to reverse engineer Omnipresence, visualize how the Domain Awareness system sees and crafts the urban landscape, and propose design interventions that neutralize their harms and craft "Dark Commons." Finally, it strives to make all of the research, AI tools, and design interventions available to the public for use, development, and collaboration.
Citing the Native Genius
For over 120 years Americanization has tried to demean and erase Hawaiian language, culture, and architecture. In contemporary discourse, the vernacular architecture of Hawai'i is mostly referred to as ancient and vague. As with many indigenous cultures, western perspectives tend to fetishize or patronize the Hawaiian design aesthetic. Within the western hierarchy of knowledge is a systemic assumption that Hawaiian vernacular architecture cannot effectively serve as a precedent resource for contemporary architects. Those who do reference the original vernacular will often classify it as utilitarian or resourceful. Regardless of intent, this narrative takes design agency away from the people involved. As a corrective, a respectful use of vernacular domestic form would benefit designers that are struggling to connect with Hawai'i’s cultural and architectural traditions. Fluent communication through form requires analysis and classification. Mining the European gaze and influence out of revivalist publications, archeological surveys and historic images reveal unique characteristics of Hawaiian domestic space. Geometric quotation and symbolic referencing are the foundational instruments in applying the discrete components, form and organizational logic of the vernacular. The result is a design process that creates an amalgamation of decolonized form and contemporary technique. This residential project intends to revive Hawaii’s erased domestic experience by revisiting the precolonial vernacular style. The outcome suggests that when designers look to the original vernacular as a primary source to solve architectural problems, a culturally unique and deeply symbolic space can emerge from the process.
Surviving Survival: Landscape Futures for Climate Catastrophe
This thesis advocates for landscape architecture to mitigate risk and plan for adaptation to catastrophic climate events. It develops an adaptive response and critique of Tacloban, the Philippines, as it responded to Typhoon Yolanda in 2013. As government authorities displaced populations from places of risk, the relocation burden heavily fell on informal coastal settlers. The process of relocating inland reinforced injustice by stripping them of their identity and livelihood. This design thesis proposes landscape interventions to enable a more culturally relevant and ecologically informed path toward adaptation. The project explores landscape approaches to embed income-generating agriculture and fishing activities in green infrastructure systems that alleviate calamity. The design of social spaces within productive communal landscapes strengthens the community's identity despite the chaotic resettlement histories. Furthermore, the proposed flexible spatial usage of the existing engineered solutions honors the local population's agency. After surviving a natural disaster, people are facing considerable difficulties to survive the post-disaster conditions. Landscape architecture is responsible for serving as a tool for long-term recovery and reconstruction from natural disasters, both physically and psychologically.
Designing Green Walls: An Early-Design Framework to Estimate the Cooling Impact of Indirect Green Walls on Buildings in Six Different Climates
Green walls are a component of urban green infrastructure and if designed properly, require only moderate human intervention and maintenance during their lifespans (Cameron, Taylor, & Emmett, 2014). The benefits of green walls are numerous for both building and urban scales. Green walls reduce building heat gain by providing shade (Ip, Lam, & Miller, 2010) and increasing surface albedo (Holm, 1989). They offer thermal insulation for buildings by acting as wind screens and cavity walls (Susorova, Azimi, & Stephens, 2014) and improve indoor air quality by trapping airborne pollutants (Ottelé, van Bohemen, & Fraaij, 2010). Furthermore, they negate the urban heat island effect through solar radiation interception and transpiration (McPherson, Nowak, & Rowntree, 1994). Green walls are also an effective solution for storm water management, provide ecosystem services, and improve the quality of human life (Meier, 1990). A literature review from this field highlighted three major problems: (a) lack of an effective method for making research findings useful to practitioners, (b) limited understanding of the morphological and biophysical characteristics of vines, and (c) lack of a standardized research methodology across the field. The objective of this research is to provide practitioners with a series of matrices to easily and quickly evaluate the cooling efficacy of indirect green walls during the early phase of a project. These matrices account for the biophysical traits of the plants used, canopy geometry, and environmental variables for six climatic scenarios. The climate scenarios are based on summer conditions (e.g., ambient temperatures, precipitation, and relative humidity) and are broken down into the following climates: cool and humid, cool and dry, warm and humid, warm and dry, hot and humid, and hot and dry. Special attention is given to plant biophysics and performance evaluation methods used in fields such as biophysical ecology and agronomy. The cooling effect of green walls is broken down into two major components: transpiration (W/m^2) and solar radiation interception, or shading (W/m^2). A modified version of the FAO 56 method was used to evaluate the cooling power produced. FAO 56 is a method developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to estimate the transpiration rate of crop fields. Additionally, a library of stomatal resistances for 97 vine species expanding through 13 countries was created from measurements from existing field studies. Variables impacting the transpiration rate were reviewed and possible green wall designs corresponding with the maximum cooling power for each climate condition were investigated. The results show that canopies with a resistance of lower than 100 s/m, a height of 3 to 6 m, and Leaf Area Index (LAI) of 3 or larger produce the maximum possible cooling power. Taking into account the aforementioned design considerations (LAI and height), and average stomatal resistance, it is estimated that the largest cooling power (300 W/m^2) corresponds with the hot and dry climate. The smallest cooling power (50 W/m^2) corresponds with the cool and dry climate. Similarly, variables impacting the shading effect of indirect green walls are reviewed. A technique for estimating the extinction coefficient of a canopy by combing empirical and statistical methods is introduced. The predicted solar interception calculations show good agreement with field study measurements, with only ±10% margins of error. Three sets of matrices for designers are introduced. The first two sets provide designers with the cooling power values (W/m^2) of various green wall designs in six climatic scenarios through transpiration and solar radiation reduction. These values show good agreement with the findings of other studies. The results show an average summer cooling power of 42 W/m^2 for the cool and dry climate and 176 W/m^2 for the hot and dry climate. These two sets of matrices are intended to provide designers with back-of-the-envelope estimations of the cooling power of green walls during the early design phase of a project. The last set of matrices provides designers with the cooling effects of green walls through transpiration and solar radiation interception as a percentage of total incident solar radiation received by the canopy in each climatic scenario. The cooling power from transpiration accounts for 20% to 30% of the cooling effect of green walls for cool and dry, cool and humid, and warm and humid climates. The contribution from transpiration increases to 48% for warm and dry climates, and 52% for hot and humid climates. The largest contribution from transpiration occurs in hot and dry climates (99%) due to the oasis effect. For almost all climates, the cooling effect of solar radiation interception was approximately 70%, 80%, and 90% for Leaf Area Indices of 3, 4, and 5, respectively. The results show that the total cooling power of green walls exceeds 100% for all climates. The canopy not only provides shading, but also acts as a heat sink by storing solar radiation energy in water and releasing it to the environment as vapor via latent heat transfer. The largest cooling power values correspond with the hot climate, followed by the warm and cool climates. The percentage of cooling power from transpiration in dry climates is larger than that in humid climates. The exception is the cool and dry climate. This exception is due to the high canopy resistance associated with the cool and dry climate.
Plantation Futures: Foregrounding Lost Narratives
Oak Alley Plantation, located in Louisiana, is preserved as a master narrative: a cultural heritage landscape reflecting the values and cultures of the Antebellum era. Reconstructed cabins in the rear of the property stand as the only recognition and acknowledgment of the forged Black landscapes used for refuge, joy, and resistance. The thesis critically engages in the plantation as a landscape system of white supremacy that linked the exploitation of racialized bodies and fertile lands to commodities. Moments for accountability and reparations are conceived, such as the Citizen Assembly, which holds industry and systems of dispossession to account through new forms of democratic processes and landscape-based evidence collection. Through the layering of archival narratives, poetry, literature, and drawing, Black ecologies emerge on site, foregrounding lost narratives within the plantation. These narratives envision radically different futures, where interspecies kinship and empathy surface as new ecologies that point to new Black futurities.
Between Historicism and Modernization: Co-operative Village for Future-proof Printing District in Seoul
This study begins with an awareness of the dilemmas encountered during rapid social changes in Seoul, South Korea from the 20th century to the present. The question is why the methods of “urban improvement” in Korean cities, especially Seoul, have become entrenched in the dichotomy of Historicism and Modernization. This question can be answered by examining the direction in which urban structures have been renovated from existing medieval city structures during the Japanese colonial period, the Korean War, and the military regime era, and what that signifies. This study argues that the conventional development approach, seeing improvement and development as synonymous, has led to the creation of urban redevelopment methods accompanied by complete demolition. However, issues such as immigration problems and the deprivation of the right to survival caused by demolition have been presented as solutions centered around the keyword “preservation” since the 2010s. This dichotomy between development and preservation has been a major obstacle to arriving at design proposals for how cities can be truly regenerated. Furthermore, this study extends its focus to the Euljiro and Sewoon District, which have been subject to continuous and varied discussions over the past two decades, particularly from the first half of the 21st century to the present. The reason for concentrating on this area is that it succinctly demonstrates the dichotomous debate on “improvement” of Korean cities discussed earlier. Therefore, by considering this area as a test bed, it is believed that a powerful alternative beyond the dichotomous approach of Historicism and Modernization can be proposed. This study examines how the morphology of the city has been structured through overlapping urban fabrics from different periods and identifies what architectural typologies have taken place in the city through this process. The spatial information obtained from this investigation serves as a basis for proposing alternative urban improvement methods beyond the dichotomy of Historicism and Modernization. Furthermore, the spatial scope of applying design is determined based on the research, and among these sectors, two are selected to propose urban, institutional, and architectural solutions. Finally, as Euljiro and Sewoon Districts typify the framework of historical changes experienced not only by Seoul but also by different cities in South Korea, this study aims to argue that the design framework can be applied to other areas of Seoul with similar characteristics as well.
The Artist-Developer: A case study of impact through art-centered community development in neighborhoods of color.
In this dissertation, I explore the community development work of three prominent African American artists who have used arts-based real estate development to create positive change in their neighborhoods. Through a multiple case study approach, I investigate the real estate, design, and artistic actions that led to the creation of these projects and if there were social benefits that followed. These benefits include social cohesion, adherence to social health determinants, minimization of displacement, and the perception of a strong cultural identity for each neighborhood. By comparing the work of all three artists, I gain insights from community partners, residents, and those within the organizations. The first chapter of my dissertation highlights the importance of arts in city and neighborhood development and government policies to aid vulnerable communities. The second chapter reviews scholarly literature on the relationship between artists, neighborhood change, and development. In the third chapter, I discuss my research methods and evaluate the benefits and limitations of the case study approach. Chapter four investigates each artist and their organization, exploring their creative practices, the motivations behind their projects, and the real estate actions that made them possible. I examine neighborhood dynamics and the perceived impacts of these projects, discussing the opportunities and challenges they present. In the fifth chapter, I critically analyze the effects of these projects. In the final chapter, I draw conclusions and highlight areas for further research. While these arts-based development projects have positively impacted their neighborhoods, it is essential to note the challenges of maintaining an arts-led community organization. Ultimately, these projects cannot please everyone, but their benefits are far reaching including improved social cohesion and cultural preservation.
Mobility Oriented Design: The Case for Miami’s Metrorail
Mostafavi, M., Waldheim, C. & Keenan, J.M. (2018). Mobility Oriented Design: The Case for Miami’s Metrorail. Cambridge, MA.: Office for Urbanization, Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Suburban Exaptation: Densification Without Demolition
Wood framing, widely available and easy to assemble, has come to embody the ideal of a modular architectural system but not the image. Despite this inherent ability to enable change, its rigid implementation through the single family type has created an urban monoculture which encompasses two thirds of the Canadian population. As zoning rules are loosened to promote the creation of “missing middle” density housing, the greatest barrier to accommodating this need has become the suburban house itself. Whether through lot splitting, infills, or property aggregation, these single family communities can be densified, but only at the expense of premature demolition. Their replacements, constructed using the same techniques as the homes they replace, call into question the misappropriation of wood framing’s flexibility. By viewing these existing homes not as barriers to densification but as the means for its rapid implementation, this thesis approaches wood framing as a modular system in place of its current use as a disposable commodity, embedding the opportunity for density within the single family house. Leveraging the similarities between low and high density housing types in Calgary, one of Canada’s most suburban and fastest growing cities, the proposal seeks to enable the densification of the Calgarian suburbs without demolition, subverting existing zoning and visual approaches in individually subtle but exponentially impactful ways.
Naming Expeditor: Reimagining Institutional Naming System at Harvard
The "Naming Expeditor" project aims to demystify the institutional process and principles of naming, including denaming and renaming, at Harvard University. Through research on historical archives and contemporary testimonies, the project seeks to understand the meaning-constructive nature of naming as a dynamic and iterative device in the public realm. By integrating theories and practices from the realms of art and activism, the project explores alternative channels, forms, and tools to reimagine a collective naming process and system that amplifies community voices with increased awareness, democracy, and participation. The project's final deliverable contains an image essay analyzing the current institutional naming system at Harvard and proposing the niche and strategies of an agency named "Naming Expeditor", as well as a live performance, aiming to display the power behind the texts in the existing institutional naming system, and evoke public discussion and actions in the broader community.
The Trojan Cinema: A Confabulation of AlKhayam
In 1956, the premier of the film, Helen of Troy, took place in the newly finished building complex of Al Khayam; a 1,500 seat cinema engulfed by a hotel located in Baghdad, Iraq. The opening of the cinema happened to fall at a time where the tale based film had just recently come out, it was perhaps an innocent choice that fortuitously predicted the trojan horse-like quality of the architectural vessel. The theater’s witnessing of and adaptation to political events has revealed its double consciousness; it at once houses a spectacle and is one itself. “To be afflicted with confabulation is to be of two minds, to be in two places at once, to experience, counterfactually, simultaneous irreconcilable truths.” Paul Emmons and Luc Phinney in Confabulation: Storytelling and Architecture. The Trojan Cinema inverts the use of architecture as a weapon or a trope in an attempt to create a confabulated place of positive suspension. Architecture … The Trojan Cinema, was simultaneously weaponized and destroyed. And in both cases, through the gift of giving, or a given gift. By examining and utilizing the relationship between storytelling/myth and the sustainment of place/architecture, this project attempts to create a cinema of convalescence; a space of celebration of the abject through incantation. The oscillating confabulated space is presented through analogical layering, creating and engendering an epic of sailing shadows.
Identities of Past and Present: Conservation and its Consequences
This thesis explores the concept of “Radical Indigenism,” outlined by Julia Watson, as a critique of traditional notions of cultural heritage and preservation in landscape architecture. To investigate this concept, the project is situated in a reflooded area within the Mesopotamian Marshes called Chibayish. It creates an agricultural network that designs an interconnected cultural system enabling productive practices to support the native Marsh Arab community known as the Ma’dan. The project imagines an alternative retooling of flows in the landscape, where it participates in the conception of a new community network. It advocates for the projective potentials of bottom-up productive technologies positioning indigenous Ma’dan philosophies within new, hybridized infrastructures. The sites act as infrastructural prototypes that can meaningfully shape the ground for water and soil remediation, plant distribution, and knowledge production. More broadly, the project explores the dichotomies of preserving cultural landscapes and identities with present social and climatic pressures.
Extracting Reparative Power: redistributing power in post-mining transition
This thesis explores landscape as a medium for ecological reparation in the energy transition by pairing renewable energy infrastructure with regenerative agriculture. The project's goal is to visualize the reorganization of energy infrastructure through Just Transition, with an emphasis on agroecology, the welfare of vulnerable communities, and post-mining intervention. It is an inquiry into the efficacy of landscape architects in the contemporary challenges of the energy transition. First, the project explores how Thailand’s fossil fuel ‘empire’ is depleting, triggering geopolitical issues, and contributing to climate change. Second, it models Thailand’s fundamental infrastructure shift to renewable energy, exploring the potential placements, connections, and storage capabilities. Third, it deploys bottom-up, decentralization, and permaculture strategies to redistribute electrical and socioeconomic power. Finally, it imagines how Mae Moh Lignite Mine in Lampang, Thailand, could terraform into Pump Storage Hydropwer (PSH) through lignite extraction and serve as the region’s battery, critical to the intermittent renewable system.
Interlacing Latent Features: Synthesis of Past and Present in Architectural Design through Artificial Intelligence in a Case Study of Japanese Houses
Machine Learning (ML) algorithms have shown great promise for expanding the conventional limits of human perception, thereby augmenting the architect's imagination and design agency. This thesis extrapolates global implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in architecture that challenge the trends of globalization and standardization. Through case studies, an ML-enhanced approach is demonstrated, integrating contemporary Japanese houses with elements of historical context and cultural heritage. Initially, datasets of their plan and façade images are scraped from the internet, curated, and annotated with Japan's six latest historical periods. These datasets are employed to train an image classification model. This model quantitatively predicts the likelihood of the dataset houses belonging to each historical period. Subsequently, these datasets are utilized to fine-tune Stable Diffusion with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), synthesizing past and present styles in response to specific period prompts. Images generated by the fine-tuned model, which offer design suggestions, are dissected into layers representing different architectural elements. These elements, interpreted by me, are restructured into a three-dimensional model to construct novel residential typologies learned from both historical and contemporary styles. This case-study intervention suggests the potential of AI application in architectural design to promote cultural diversity, sustainability, and the continuity and enrichment of design heritage.