Digital Commons Network^™

Rhythm Of Space, Brian Carrillo

Masters Theses

This project innovates architectural representation by exploring the rhythm and flow of spaces, focusing on staircases in the Bayard Ewing Building, the RISD Museum courtyard, the Waterman Building, and Woods-Gerry. It captures the body’s dynamic sequence in these spaces, using drawings or animations to challenge traditional techniques. Emphasizing kinesthetic perception, it offers a fresh perspective on architectural experience. Ultimately, this work enriches our understanding of how architectural elements shape movement and perception, enhancing architectural representation and experience.

Folding (And Unfolding): A Site-Responsive Strategy For Reusing Construction And Demolition Waste, Jennifer Ansley

Masters Theses

Discarding—in its most reductive formulation— is a sorting operation that makes distinctions between materials (as well as objects, people, communities, and landscapes) based on perceived value. In her book Waste of the World, Nicky Gregson, therefore, argues for a more careful collection-curation strategy that revalues and re-signifies “waste” to make it available for repair and reuse. Gregson, however, points to limited space and infrastructural capacity as a potential barrier to the development of new material handling strategies. My design responds by proposing a network of walls and paths that operate in each of the sites I’ve identified as an …

Building The Body, Jasmine Flowers

Masters Theses

Bodies and space co-produce each other and the process of co-production originates racializing and gendering work.

The concept, thesis, and subsequent design are informed by the historical context around the House for Josephine Baker by Adolf Loos. Presented here is the culmination of research which grounds itself in the relationship between Primitivism and Modernism, theory on the body and flesh, architectural graphic standards, spectacle, gaze, surveillance, hypervisibility, invisibility, implications of privacy versus publicity, expressions of Blackness and its place in femmehood (a neologism that expands “womanhood” to be trans-inclusive), all of which directly engage in co-production.

This co-production changes how …

Unconditioning Air, Weijia Deng

Masters Theses

Unconditioning Air rethinks the boundaries contrived through environmental control. For more than a century, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) defined the boundaries of interior air. The regime and tools of mechanical conditioning promise stability and manageability of indoor air quality at the expense of external phenomena, and by extension, any complexity or fluctuation in the environment. As a result, air conditioning premises that ideal interior comfort is “bubble-like”, requiring increasingly standardized and highly regimented regulatory tools. The plethora of patent drawings, duct specifications, and ASHRAE comfort codes produce an oppressively tightening grip over indoor air and comfort, rendering both …

Dreampool, Xia Li

Masters Theses

DREAMPOOL is a spatial experience of virtual architecture based on the public bathhouses of northern China during the 00s - 10s. It focuses on the significance of nostalgia and the connection between architectural space and the spiritual world. The dreampool began with my interest in Bathhouse and Dreamcore videos that were popularized on the Chinese internet during the pandemic.

Like every nostalgia trend emerging, such as steampunk, some young Chinese people are starting to miss their childhood life around the year 2000 at a time when they are losing their public space and socialization. Public bathhouses, as a collective memory …

The Runis: How Can Social Remidation And Environmental Remeidation Be Linked Throguh Architecture?, Tayu Ting

Masters Theses

This thesis delves into the integration of social and environmental remediation through innovative architectural strategies, focusing on the adaptive reuse of an abandoned copper smelter plant in New Taipei City, Taiwan. The project confronts the site’s industrial legacy by deploying contemporary programs that cultivate a productive, sustainable, and community-oriented environment. A pivotal aspect of the redevelopment is a phytoremediation system utilizing wetlands to purify toxic metal-contaminated water, thus restoring ecological integrity and providing clean water to the community.

At the heart of this transformation is the artistic integration of glassmaking, where flowers and plants that have absorbed metals through phytoremediation …

Design With Decay, Charlotte Wyman

Masters Theses

The following project is an exploration and argument for greater acceptance of material change. The argument finds its narrative through the story of five historic coastal properties in Rhode Island that have become increasingly threatened by rising sea levels.

Despite undergoing foundation upheaval, relocation and leveling onto stilts, all but two homes remain intact. This project is a proposal for an alternative past in which the homes are not moved or raised, but instead ushered into states of decay that challenge our notions around sub-natures and their viability.

Frontier: Land, Architecture, And Abstraction, Jacob Boatman

Masters Theses

The abstraction of land is a colonial process by which physical land is transformed into a conceptual or symbolic entity. This transformation occurs through various economic, architectural, and cultural practices that imbue land with abstract values, meanings, and functions beyond its physicality. This includes the division of land into parcels for economic transactions, the design and construction of built environments that shape human interactions with the land, and the cultural narratives and representations that ascribe significance to particular landscapes. Through abstraction, colonial powers devalue indigenous perspectives and relationships to the land, reducing them to mere obstacles in the path of …

Searching For The Hyperobject: Crystals As Transscalar Vehicles, Jay Costello

Masters Theses

When I touch the street outside my house, I'm touching Los Angeles—a contiguous vector of material bisecting a continent. A slab, a stone, dust and oil, a googolplex of tightly packed anisotropic particles... At nightfall, I sneak to the edge of the highway and break off a piece. 'What does it mean for a worm to be aware of the scale of the planet?' Bruno Latour's evocative questioning of scalar jumps prompts an existentialism that places me somewhere between the hyperlocal and the massively distributed. Like a cosmic traveler floating through the universe, I feel adrift. I look around, grasping …

Beyond The Idle Machine: Spatio-Subjective Architecture, Andrew Schnurr

Masters Theses

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Icons Of Solitude: Peace, Quiet, And The Urban Condition, Jack Schildge

Masters Theses

The urban environment lacks sufficient public places to be alone, where individuals can feel free to seek respite from the intensity of city life. While solitude is easily achievable in the vast landscape of the natural world, it is something that must be carefully and deliberately carved out within the confines of the city and remains inaccessible to many. We’ve all heard of follies in the landscape, both sitting in remote places and dispersed throughout public parks in either case taking advantage of open space, but why couldn’t we carve room for follies in denser environments? What can be extracted …

Living Surfaces, Ryan R. Sotelo

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the role of architectural surfaces as a staging ground for personal objects that carry with them aspects of memory, narrative, and personal histories. The lived experience within architecture is often dismissed with the architect’s role in a building’s life ending at its physical conception. Architectural representations are often devoid of time, motion and personal histories in sake for spatial clarities. With precedent representations such as period room drawings, motion studies, and photographic guns, there was an interest in developing a representation to better examine the lived experience within our architecture.

By incorporating personal testimonies, accurate bedroom documentations …

The Dollhouse, Kristina Miesel

Masters Theses

Dollhouses, while rooted in architectural representation, have historically been excluded from architectural discourse, relegated to the devalued realm of the frivolous and feminine. With a complex history, connected to craft, education, and play dollhouses have commonly been perceived as mere reflections of existing social hierarchies. However, this perception tends to overlook the creative agency wielded by people, particularly girls, as they engage with dollhouses, reinterpreting their functions and challenging norms. Crafted traditionally at a scale of 1:12, these miniature homes intricately capture different aspects of our domestic environment. Within the walls of a dollhouse, architectural elements often assume a secondary …

House Calls, Gregory Goldstone

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the unique architectural challenges and opportunities present in rural communities, with a focus on addressing the crisis of affordable housing. Grounding the discussion in the author's personal experiences growing up in the rural town of Cambridge, New York, the thesis illuminates the diversity of identities, needs, and values that coexist within the rural context.

The thesis critically examines the architectural academy and its urban-centric biases, which have led to a neglect of rural design issues. It highlights the shortcomings of standard affordable housing approaches, such as public housing and mobile homes, in meeting the independent spirit and …

A Dispatch From The Site Office, Adrian Pelliccia

Masters Theses

In the middle of the 20th century, a rare confluence of political, economic, and cultural forces aligned to produce a slate of highly progressive policy and design agendas for social housing in the United Kingdom. A widely shared utopian ambition to house all people with dignity was made real by a motivated government and its well-resourced planning and architecture offices, tasked with bringing this vision to bear in the built environment. In London, the London County Council Architect’s Office and later local council-led architecture and planning offices were at the forefront of designing and delivering high quality, formally ambitious housing …

Liberdade Para Quem? - Layered Histories, Vanessa Shimada

Masters Theses

Uncovering the spaces of Indigenous and Black stories, and creating spaces for dialogue in the Japanese neighborhood of Liberdade, São Paulo

The Design Of Consequences, Yuqi Tang

Masters Theses

Young professionals entering the architecture industry face an imminent and abrupt realization of the disparity between their academic training and the reality of what a career in practice entails.

The architectural industry has long been susceptible to criticism for unpaid internships and overtime. The issue stems from an ambiguity of architectural practice as neither a service or an outcome product, isolating the perception of our work from constructors, lawyers, doctors and even artists, and making it difficult for design labor to be commodified, or for the value of design labor to be asserted, consolidated and fiscalized1. This thesis aims to …

Adding Subtraction: Wasting Time In Space, Daeun Kim

Masters Theses

Architecture is designed to increase our productivity – think of features like uniform workspaces, straight pathways, or purely functional rooms arranged to optimize tasks. When forced into constant productivity, we gain efficiency, but we end up exhausted and disconnected from one another. We need to design subtraction spaces in our workspaces and everyday life, spaces that accommodate the feelings and dreams of the occupant: spaces where we can wander, wonder, feel, connect, relax, restore, and reset. By challenging the perception that time just moves on and cannot be controlled, people can shift time: they can start, reverse, break, accumulate, prolong, …

From Vault To Platform （Democratizing Museums Through The Lens Of The Metaverse））, Zhaoyang Cui

Masters Theses

The modern history of art viewing moves from private collections to public museums, and the modern museum arises with an intention to encourage a broad range of visitors. However, if we look at the reality of museum access, especially in the digital era, when the methods of attaining knowledge and information have grown ever stronger, it is easy to notice the single-direction circuit of information in the operation of museums from curators to the public, which seems outdated in the times of social media, AI and metaverse. Even if a broad range of visitors enter the museum, the information they …

Water Relations, Understanding Our Relationship To Water: Through Research, Diagrams, And Glass, Tian Li

Masters Theses

As I observe the different ways human civilization interacts with water, I reflect on how I have interacted with it personally, in Califronia and Hawai’i. I also learn about the largest water-controlling infrastructure in China and its effects on the land and people. In Providence, I notice the infrastructure around the canal that keeps the water in. This relationship to water is unique to a post-colonial world where water is a commodity in which we spectate. What relationships did people have with water before we polluted the waters and created all this concrete infrastructure around it?

Through listening to Lorén …

You're Making Me Sentimental, Chris Geng

Masters Theses

My project is a personal search for a different way to see the footprint we have left on the landscape. A way of seeing that finds potential in existing buildings without placing the building in the background, that instead engages sentiments in order to approach reuse as an act of layering that retains the memories of before. I went about uncovering the memories of a site through film photography, a process equally rooted in nostalgia and sentimentality. These images attempt to capture the beauty of melancholy and in turn, ask the architect and audience to slow down and contemplate as …

Illusion Of Consumption, Architectural Rebellion: Unraveling The Maze Of Consumption, Xinjie Xiang

Masters Theses

Consumerism was born in the industrial age, and has been criticized since that time, but it still exists and flourishes in new forms with the information age. Consumption affects values and life, spurring economic growth and causing ecological crises. Therefore, a critical discussion of consumerism must continue.

This thesis proposes a space within an existing mall that raises people's awareness to be vigilant against the control of consumerism by exposing how marketing packages goods and manipulates people's psychology to guide consumption. An ideal mall to host this program is the Changsha International Finance Square, a large mixed-use building in the …

Uncovering Emotional Contamination: Five Sites Of Trauma, Abigail Zola

Masters Theses

“Emotional contamination,” describes residual feelings associated with a space where a negative or tragic event occurred to an individual or group either personally, historically, or politically. Emotional contamination affects people’s associations with place and informs their willingness to spend time in them. This project considers a set of design principles rooted in uncovering and acknowledging the lifespan of a site, and considers how this acknowledgment can exist as an urban system rather than an individual architectural artifact. My thesis work analyzes five case studies in Berlin where political and economic factors determined the result of intervention, and how these sites …

Decolonial Perspective On Fashion And Sustainability, Haisum Basharat

Masters Theses

The fashion industry has long been criticized for its exploitative practices, cultural appropriation, and detrimental impact on the environment. To address these challenges, there is a growing need to adopt a decolonial approach that acknowledges the historical injustices perpetuated by colonial systems and centers the voices, practices, and traditions of marginalized communities. This abstract presents a model that integrates decolonial principles into the fashion industry while incorporating traditional textile practices to promote local autonomy, cultural sustainability, and mitigate climate change.

Landscape De/Re-Construction Through Art, Manuel Gonzalez

Masters Theses

Contemporary landscape architecture practice and education primarily focus on ecological and technical interventions. The climate crisis we find ourselves in demands scientifically informed decisions and well-engineered execution of projects, but, more importantly, creativity and innovation.

The fine arts, which were once integral and foundational to design, are today largely unappreciated and appropriated. The spiritual power of Art, Aesthetics, and Beauty, explored at length through art history and theory, are often viewed as indulgent or secondary to execution. The gap between Art & Design has widened. As a result, designers face challenges in fostering in individuals the kind of care and …

An Architect's Toolkit For Color Theory, Ella Knight

Masters Theses

There's a trend for American architects to wear all black, build all white models, and design buildings all in shades of gray and beige. One of many factors that contributes to an increasingly achromatic discipline is that in American architectural education, color theory is not a required aspect of the design curriculum. In response, this thesis proposes a toolkit for architects with the intent to shed light on biases against color within the discipline, educate designers on color theory and application, and provide tools and frameworks to encourage more intentional use of color throughout a contemporary design process. The toolkit …

The De-Centering Of Architecture, Uthman Olowa

Masters Theses

Housing insecurity is arguably the most pressing issue in our society. In the United States, home/land ownership has been the primary source to generate wealth. Yet, so many people are disproportionately affected and denied access due to this system. Historically, it has also been difficult for people of color to own their own property and receive adequate housing in viable neighborhoods. A person’s ability to obtain quality housing affects other areas of their lives; it affects their ability to attend school in a certain district, and their proximity to work, healthcare, and entertainment. Interventions from both the public and private …

Translational Placemaking: The Diasporic Archive, Alia Varawalla

Masters Theses

Globalization and mass migration has propelled a hybrid existence, as individuals that occupy multiple geographies we live in a constant state of translation. Our museums and cultural institutions are in opposition to this; static, preserved and de-contextualized. At the intersection of printmaking and architecture, this thesis proposes a living archive to document the collective migratory journey across sites, materials, and hybrid identities. A network of centers for knowledge sharing and production centered on India and its diaspora. As art practices and people migrate, cultural production evolves with its context, gaining new meaning as it changes hands generationally and globally.

Myths, Legends, And Landscapes, Oromia Jula

Masters Theses

The concept of myth-making in architecture involves the use of narratives, symbolism, and cultural references to shape the meaning and experience of built spaces. These myths hold significance beyond the distinction between fiction and reality; they exist to provide explanations and hold great influence over our lives. Understanding a place and its identity requires an exploration of the narratives and beliefs associated with it, as they directly shape the physical environment. By embracing and incorporating these mythologies, designers and planners can create meaningful and authentic spaces that resonate deeply with people.

Communities, being socially constructed, rely on unifying narratives that …

We Have A (Home) - Co-Operative Homes For Sunset Park, Lisa Qiu

Masters Theses

The thesis believes that the speculative nature of land as property is at the root of the rising cost of quality living space. The combination of profit-driven market force and policies has produced inequality in the accessibility of property ownership.This reality is entangled with a culture that perceives exclusive rights and private ownership as superior to sharing for almost everything, especially the home.

This project believes affordable urban density can be achieved in a city like New York by pushing forward a sense of possibility and desirability in collaborative efforts to create and manage homes. These homes will not be …