Graduate School of Design

This thesis proposes a weird, giant, and cycling memorial spectacle with the introduction of a new sort of labor in the format of a 100-day exhibition. The robotic machines replaced the enslaved persons to run a closed system of deconstruction and reconstruction: a constant displacement of architectural productions. The whole island is a museum. The exhibition is a constantly work-in-progress construction.

LABORS Hashima Island was a self-sufficient company town run by Mitsubishi. While being approved as a World Heritage Site as part of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution, it is also a site of forced labor before and during World War II. In 1974, the mines were closed, the island became a ghost town.

ROBOTS Compared to human labor, robotic labor is highly efficient, emotionless, and precise. It is good at copy & paste and making mistakes perfectly without knowing it. To make a contrast between human labor’s logic and the programmed robots’ logic, asking the robots to repeat the perfect flaws to build the structural modules is the core constructive method for this exhibition.

CORRIDORS The corridor is not only circulation and servant space. It should be considered as an organizational device for facilitating public interaction while maintaining a divider for separating the private and public at the same time. The corridor wants to be a room as well. In this thesis, the “new” serves as the XL corridor filled in the interstitial spaces between the existing residential buildings. The cluster of buildings becomes a single building with a matrix of connected modules and non-typical corridors.

“Social value posters + folly” is to Beijing what “Duck” is to Las Vegas.

In the role-shifting era in Beijing, cultural revival creates a new focus on citizens’ mentality and engagement in everyday civic life. Public space marked out by social value posters, a national concept promoted by the government since 2006, becomes the non-consuming stage. It is both for the middle-ground communication between citizens and government and as the projection of individual’s pleasurable imagination. In the city where miniature and craftsmanship are long-term tradition, folly is introduced as commentary. It stands as a Trojan Horse but in the metaphoric pleasure garden.

In this graphic novel, it is an anecdote documenting the real-time; it is an encyclopedia for urban toys; it is an amusement guidebook for all people.

Hart Island, located in the Bronx, New York City, is the only place to bury the bodies of the unclaimed or unidentified in the city. The next of kin of some individuals buried on Hart Island opted for public burial. Others may have a next of kin who is unknown or unreachable. Some are unidentified or do not have a next of kin. Many others were also buried during the AIDS epidemic and COVID-19 pandemic, in 1980 and 2020 respectively. The burial process is simple: Department of Correction staff and incarcerated individuals serving time on nearby Rikers Island travel by ferry to Hart Island. The bodies of the deceased are transported and placed in pine boxes. The boxes are stacked three deep in a 36-inch trench below the surface, burying the remains of 150 to 162 adults and 1,000 infants and fetuses per trench. This burial method and its spatial efficiency seem to be democratic, while consequently removing the association of the person to their body. Those forgotten deaths are the consequences of poverty, apathy, loneliness, and isolation in New York City. Through reflection on the deaths of many minorities, the thesis will celebrate and appreciate their invisible existences, dismantling the conventional spatial characteristics of a “cenotaph”—an empty tomb for one prominent person. What if a cenotaph can be for many minor individuals? This attitude will lead toward a new understanding of death and a shift in perception of a typical memorial space in terms of its form, materiality, and spatial experience.

The U.S.-Mexico border is governed as a fixed line, yet the myriad water systems sustaining its cities and ecosystems are continuous, connected, and institutionally invisible. Despite or because of these conditions, in over a century of treaties governing the Rio Grande-Bravo, none address groundwater. This thesis asks how the border would transform if hydrological interdependence structured its organizing logic. Through critical cartography, volumetric analysis, and three regional case studies (El Paso/Ciudad Juárez, Del Rio/Ciudad Acuña, Brownsville/Matamoros), the project develops spatial and institutional tools for recharge, risk management, and stewardship. It reframes the border as a hydroterritorial system shaped by conjunctive flows, treating water as an agent in the production of territory. By designing from the subsurface, embedding it within policy mechanisms, and activating residual land in contested zones through existing infrastructure, the thesis demonstrates how urban design can reorganize borders around shared resources, advancing new territorial configurations, governance models, and binational cohabitation.

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 unprecedented crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic has brought into the limelight what many have unfortunately already known to be true, that times of extreme change, urgency, and tension too often correlate to a rise in domestic violence.1 This thesis attempts to address this recent amplification of cruelty, and how it has manifested in the largest public housing agency in North America, NYCHA (The New York City Housing Authority), to advocate for an interdisciplinary reform of both policy and design of shelters that use care to encourage nonviolent, inclusive environments and access to care and healing.

In many ways, the Covid-19 pandemic has intensified conditions that already exist within the realm of domestic violence, including but not limited to isolation, economic insecurity, and trauma. Through an exploration of these connections, as well as a critique of the existing conditions of housing and emergency sheltering in New York City which allow domestic violence to thrive, this thesis provides way to address the current crisis while also both prevent future instances of violence. By doing so, its aim is to aid in the long-term health and healing of survivors and their families.

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.

At Camp Doikayt, the landscape is a vehicle for remembering histories of diaspora and reimagining Jewishness beyond Zionism. Summer camps proliferated in the United States after the Shoah, using the Zionist invention of the “muscular” Jew, to cultivate Jewish continuity. Camp Doikayt proposes an alternative modeled after the Jewish Labor Bund’s concept of “hereness.” In the form of a guidebook, the camp's design unfolds through a set of rules that ritualizes a land ethic of solidarity and participation. As camp wanders year to year to different abandoned Jewish sites in the Catskills, we reconfigure the materials, adapt ecological remnants, and reinterpret Jewish cultural memory.

At Camp Doikayt, the landscape is a vehicle for remembering histories of diaspora and reimagining Jewishness beyond Zionism. Summer camps proliferated in the United States after the Shoah, using the Zionist invention of the “muscular” Jew, to cultivate Jewish continuity. Camp Doikayt proposes an alternative modeled after the Jewish Labor Bund’s concept of “hereness.” In the form of a guidebook, the camp's design unfolds through a set of rules that ritualizes a land ethic of solidarity and participation. As camp wanders year to year to different abandoned Jewish sites in the Catskills, we reconfigure the materials, adapt ecological remnants, and reinterpret Jewish cultural memory.

Architectural imagery has come to possess a certain duality within contemporary discourse. As the mode of the image as a digital output – the computer-generated visualization of an architectural response – is increasingly overwhelmed by technical availability and outsourced labor, its productive role is seemingly diminishing. But concurrently, as a second, less tangible mode of imagery – the physical form and appearance of an architectural response – is increasingly pressured to address various external priorities, its civic responsibility is seemingly expanding. This conflict of necessity between the “architectural image” and the “image of architecture” raises the question: can imagery and form more critically interact to produce a civic effect?

This thesis proposes a reciprocal method in which both the image and form of a new civic building are designed and developed recursively. It foregrounds the computer-generated visualization as a constructive instrument that rationalizes an architectural response and projects its resultant metaphysical effects – conceptually generating a civic image and form simultaneously. The proposal subverts a conventional workflow by absolving the visualization from a predetermined artifice and leveraging its productive potential instead. It considers the park district fieldhouse, once a grand symbol of pride and equality among Chicago’s culturally diverse neighborhoods, a test case for the proposed method. Here, the project challenges the presumed form and democratizes the realized image of a new, prototypical civic typology. Ultimately, the thesis seeks to re-legitimize the architectural image as a vital medium to expand architecture’s communicative agency and capacity in the public domain.

While the complexities of contemporary life have many considering a rural relocation, the current American imagination of a desirable rural life has contributed to uninformed urbanite settlement and a lack of population growth in agricultural rural communities. The thesis seeks to write promise and adventure back into these agricultural communities by proposing a contemporary re-pioneering of current farmland. In Clinton, Iowa, a new farmhouse typology and site strategy will aid in the incremental establishment of the former Iowa prairie and a pioneering family; this will become the foundation of a new rural narrative based on the resources of rural America: ecology, tradition, and the transcendent. In this reformed rural narrative, the transcendent value of stewardship will guide the design and is made manifest through the hidden abundance of the native prairie and a contemporary reimagining of traditional building and agricultural practices.

The Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (1915 - 1942) was a short-lived but significant experiment in architectural education. Over its 27-year lifespan, it produced over 800 graduates, more than 250 women-led firms, and was one of the larger schools at the time. It was also the first US architecture school to offer women master’s degrees and the first school to combine the teaching of architecture and landscape architecture. It redefined architectural pedagogy, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and academia’s relationship to practice. Today, its history is hardly known.

This thesis unearths the Cambridge School’s rich but forgotten history by reappraising its past and envisioning a new future:

How, in 1928, the Cambridge School started in a living room, later moved to a house, and eventually transformed into a school.

How, in between two world wars, the Cambridge School became a home, and a home front, to women who wanted to access architectural education.

How, then, in 2028, the Cambridge School reopens as an institute: a living archive remembering the school’s past and facilitating its future.

This institute is housed in the school’s old site of an 1827 colonial-revival house and its 1928 alumni-designed extension in Harvard Square. Through architectural interventions, the thesis reignites the school’s legacy of resistance. These interventions turn the building into an institute that resists institutionalization: an architecture as a living archive. Through built form, the new Cambridge School reframes history and acts as a tool to reinform architectural pedagogy and practice today.

This thesis imagines an American evangelical church architecture for the twenty-first century. Church architecture has long played an important role in the discipline as a type which ordered Christian worship and acted as a civic monument within the urban fabric. However, as Christianity’s cultural power in the United States waned, the civic and architectural role of church buildings declined. This has emerged in two trends in American evangelical church architecture: the construction of banal, warehouse-like structures for suburban megachurches and the appropriation of non-sacred spaces such theaters, gymnasia, and schools for small urban congregations. In both cases, architecture is reduced to a shell for a privately consumed performance, rather than a formative space of social and sacred community.

This thesis proposes a new American evangelical church architecture to recover and reassert the importance of Christian sacred space as both formative for worship and civic engagement. By incorporating both liturgical and public gathering spaces, the church is an architectural citizen of the city that welcomes worshippers and non-worshippers alike. Drawing upon Christian theological principles, the church simultaneously embodies its faith identity and engages openly in the civic realm, committed to the social generosity embodied within the core principles of evangelical faith. The thesis blends the sacred and social, liturgy and community, worship and welcome. The new evangelical church is a space of Christian formation and public gathering, embodying both the commitments of the evangelical faith and a generous engagement with the civic realm.

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.

Twenty-five years after Koolhaas characterized Walden as a “parallel junkspace”—and 172 years since Thoreau’s sojourn into its woods— the Pond is brought into the present, by way of a new DMV.

Though Koolhaas and Thoreau’s conclusions seem diametrically opposed, their cosmologies, cited from everyday encounters, are much alike. Walden is the speculum they share: for Koolhaas, reflecting the junked-up virtual at high speed; for Thoreau, the hyperlocal, slow, and transcendent. Walden’s exceptional status has become its own existential liability: perfectly cast in amber under conservation-minded pretenses, the little pond has been denatured of the politics that so charged either text.

Like an amble with a huckleberry party, going to the DMV should be a routine respite; an anomaly in one’s workaday schedule. The DMV, after all, is where we await the formation of our IDs, where our very means of navigating the world are tested. Why should it stay the punchline for all of society’s bureaucratic ills? Could a building that sees a full cross-section of society, every day, not stoke optimism between a civically-minded person, her peers, and her state? This thesis reimagines the civic building for the 21st-century as a horizontal datum that mixes function with pleasure: call it Civic+. A constellation of landscape pierces universal space, remaking some of what is air, solid. Spaces of waiting and of being-in-motion are formalized through receptacles and paths for man and car. Afloat in the tonic of wildness, the DMV expands the woods from an extended backyard for elite suburbia, to a public utility for all Massachusetts residents. In the driver’s seat, from hasty, rearward glances, we might find in the civic mundane, the sublime.

White Point projects off a peninsula that was once part of the Channel Island Archipelago. Descending from hill to sea within the San Andreas Rift, its 140 acres hold seemingly irreconcilable landscapes and uses. Traces of the Native Kizh people, Japanese farmers and fishermen, Spanish Rancheros, the US Military, and our world’s rarest butterfly species overlap in layered entanglements. These multiple legacies are all but indistinguishable, however, in the site’s current condition where fenced-off military infrastructure fragments nature preserve. This dominant, reductive reading of White Point is a product of our tendency to rely upon linear narratives to explain place. Such narratives invariably prioritize “culminations,” therefore burying manifold spatial histories. My thesis asks how architects might engage and reveal the complex interdependence of cultural, agricultural, ecological, and geological histories often culled from contemporary spatial narratives. By replacing linear history with polyphonic tableau, this project at White Point delivers the physical means by which the public may hold multiple timescales, voices, and truths in concert through a public landscape. A matrix of pathways ties together the archipelago of architectural interventions, offering explicit entanglements across several registers–from small scale tactility to overall site choreography. Existing built histories are harmonized with another spatial voice. In one instance a Cold War era artillery shed transforms into a band stand where habitat for the Palos Verdes Blue butterfly encircles the dance floor. In another, one gazes across coastal landslides while simultaneously watching a high school baseball game. In short, separate, incomplete histories overlap to form a constantly evolving, tentative “whole” for communal history.

American municipal pools exist in cities, often surrounded by car-centric spaces such as freeways, parking lots, big-box stores, and industrial sites. They have traditionally employed a typology of “maximum building, minimal boundary.” This typology concentrates the bulk of design and construction in one building (with essential amenities such as changing rooms), whereas the boundary, required by law for safety purposes, is lightly built and often realized in the form of chain wire fencing. Careless boundaries like chain wire fencing not only exposes swimming pools to their industrial, car-centric sites, but it also heightens an image of exclusion that has long plagued American municipal pools. This thesis proposes a typology of “maximum boundary, minimal building” for the American municipal pool. Through a study of materials, lighting, proportions, tectonics, and local construction practices, this new swimming pool seeks to revive the American municipal pool as an active public space by altering the way swimmers relate to their surroundings and the way the public relate to the pool.

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?

The thesis is an exploration of what is experienced in the learning sphere from a queer perspective.

Traditional schools in Japan have followed a very regimented plan, with linear corridors leading into highly standardized classrooms – here, “straightness” is literally engineered into the architecture of the school building. This thesis explores a school that leaves room for queerness, fluidity and ambiguity.

The proposed school is on Nakanoshima, Osaka, where commercial mega buildings live as discrete objects on the island in the center of the city – an antithesis to the dense, intimate gay districts in Japan.

Studying queer spaces in Japan is especially relevant today because the social climate on LGBT acceptance is shifting. Queer spaces like the gay district in Shinjuku Ni-chome are becoming more “normalized” and even transforming into tourist destinations. However, because “queerness” is still not legally accepted nor protected, there is still a need for safe queer spaces to exist. Queer spaces have typically occupied residual spaces, many of them hidden. This includes gay and lesbian bars which are considered spaces for adults and are in some cases sexualized. This thesis is not about gay bars and other queer spaces that we may typically think of. Rather, it explores queer architecture for youth who are still in their adolescence and beginning to explore their identities, especially in a country like Japan where an outdated legal system largely ignores the existence of the queer population and where the pressure to conform is high.

Oysters play a crucial role in maintaining healthy marine ecosystems through their ability to filter water and provide habitat for various species. The Billion Oyster Project, a New York-based initiative, has been working tirelessly to educate the public about the importance of oysters and restore their populations in the waters around the city. This project combines education and restoration efforts, with a mission to engage both marine life and people in a symbiotic relationship. The central inquiry of this architectural thesis is: How do we design spaces that harmoniously coexist with marine life and serve as recreational and educational resources for the public? In the context of contemporary discourse, this research question addresses critical issues of marine conservation, urban environmental reclamation, and flood protection, as well as modular design and fabrication. The rapid depletion of oyster populations, the reclamation of post-industrial waste sites, and the need for resilient coastal infrastructure have become pressing concerns. By exploring a novel approach that integrates oyster restoration, public engagement, and architectural design, this thesis aims to bridge the existing gaps in these crucial domains. This thesis envisions the creation of an educational and recreational park for the Billion Oyster Project using modular forms inspired by existing wave dissipation blocks. While providing oysters with a habitat to thrive and filter the surrounding water of what was historically an industrial waste dumping site, the modularity also considers replicability and fabrication, as issues of marine conservation and coastal resilience are not endemic to only New York City. The park not only contributes to oyster restoration but also offers a unique platform for public education and recreation. The project postulates that architecture can be a catalyst for the synergy between human and marine life. The outcomes of this research project provide a conceptual framework for future urban waterfront development that can balance the needs of marine ecosystems and human communities.