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Community Healthcare Clinic - Adaptation System To The Pandemic And Post Pandemic Periods, Nhu Le

Masters Theses

Due to COVID-19, uncertainties and significant changes have been occurring around the world, especially in the U.S. The future is always ambiguous but it will lead to breakthroughs. Emerging issues are the vulnerability of previous conventional design solutions, especially of the healthcare-related architecture and urban planning.

This thesis focuses on helping construct a new healthcare system, which could be used during either a pandemic or post-pandemic era, by designing a local community clinic. In fact, public health clinics are always needed and expected to be more flexibly adjustable and up-gradable. Those new clinics play a very important role since the …

Responsive Markets: Structures Supporting Economic Activity In Postcolonial Mumbai, Bilal Ismail Ahmed

Masters Theses

This project aims to envision a market that engages activity and brings in life from surrounding markets – connecting better into its environment. The project fits into a larger discussion on how architecture left behind by a colonial regime might be addressed formally and conceptually.

An Interplay: Biomimetic Exploration Of Systems In Architecture, Sanjana Masurkar

Masters Theses

How can we use nature’s way of building and designing and apply this knowledge in a progressive, and innovative way? Can scouring the biosystem be an effective way of finding inspiration?

Art, in the broader sense, is anything produced by humans rather than nature. Through nature, the ultimate source of knowledge and wisdom, is where we eventually draw inspiration from. By manifesting the environment, humans are able to respect and look into nature in a new light. Interaction with nature helps better understand and value the natural themes. The relationship between design and the built environment opens up the politics …

Live-Work Autonomy System On Mars: China's Collective Living Onto Mars, Lishunxiang Luo

Masters Theses

Our Earth is in big trouble; Our Mother Nature is in big trouble; We humanity are in even bigger trouble. The resource shortage is not an unfamiliar word to most people in the era of social media. As many ecologists and environmentalists have shouted out, we are in a time when some of the significant resources are getting consumed and wasted quickly and it will eventually being used up and lead us to nowhere if no replaceable resource has been found. Simply saying, there are just never enough resources to meet all our needs and desires and this condition is …

Dead Space: The Changing Discourse Of Death: How To Design A Contemporary And Enduring Funeral Practice, Xin Wang

Masters Theses

My thesis seeks to design my grandfather’s cemetery to regain a piece of my personal memory. It also seeks to situate this issue in the contemporary context of the pandemic, which helped inspire my topic. I started my thesis in a very turbulent year. I found myself missing family members far away on the other side of the earth.

How are they doing now?

I suddenly missed my Grandfather’s village, which I had only visited once a year prior to the great pandemic. My Grandfather passed away when I was very young. I get along well with my Grandmother, but …

Translated Architecture, Ruiqi Zhang

Masters Theses

“Translated Architecture” is an unique psychological implication space that is translated from the spatiality camera language. Its significance lies in the ability to better approach and understand the psychological condition brought by the living environment.

To better understand what the camera language could lead us to, this thesis chooses to take phobias as an entry point to analyze the subtle changes in human psychology under different camera views.phobias like social phobia, Claustrophobia, Agoraphobia on a certain level is a form of mental illness that is related to architectural space. Take Claustrophobia as an example, Claustrophobia is a situational phobia triggered …

Design For The Past, Zexi Wang

Masters Theses

The thesis project started off with an investigation of the Coal Gas Factory in Datong City, and an interview of a former factory employee. All relevent information is covered in the Report.

This thesis project proposes for an alternative factory design solution for the past (1980s), acknowledging its inevitable failure in its future (2000s).

The design acknowledges architecture’s nature of temporality, and is focused on making architecture transformative--creating space and environment for architecture to be transformed in order to accommodate updated programs and activities when its no longer able to serve its original purpose.

Transforming Islands: A Living Memorial For The Marshall Islands, Chengwen Jiang

Masters Theses

Does Utopia exist? If so, I believe it is a state of mind, a way of thinking. This thesis speculates on future uncertainties. As such, my work punctures an illusion, examining history to reveal underlying tensions and, finally, conceive a brighter future for the Marshallese. Using the Marshall Islands as a case study, this thesis examines how a population might face traumas, both historical and climactic, and demonstrate how new infrastructures can build resiliency to support minorities and create new memories. My proposal introduces two potential “visitors:” Marshallese people ( future generations as well as indigenous) and the rest of …

Rewilding Seattle: A Green Network For Both Humans And Non-Humans, Zhouqian Guo

Masters Theses

More than three hundred years ago, Seattle City was a place of wilderness, occupied by non-humans and the Duwamish Tibe and Suquamish. After the continuous human habitation of the village site, the dominance of Seattle has eventually shifted from non-humans to humans. While non-humans have been lived in the city all the time and seek a better living space.

The project proposes a multi-functional green network operating at different scales to cohabitate and reconnect between humans and non-humans. It restores natural habitat patches in existing locations of urban green spaces in Seattle City and connects them with co-habitation corridors in …

Synthetic Undulation: Improving The Marine Life Quality On The Indonesian Island Of Seleyar, Shreeyaa Shah

Masters Theses

Beginning with a study on the properties and properties of plastic, this thesis examines perspectives and experiences of coastal communities forced to deal with overwhelming quantities of plastic pollution in their waters. With a focus on Indonesia, the second largest plastic polluter in the world, the study examines Selayar island’s vernacular ways of being and making as a possible way to understand and deal with the problems affecting their local marine health. Through different research methods, a complex set of factors are identified besides plastic pollution, including the decline in farming and practices that contribute to overfishing.

Through design investigation, …

Fluid Ground: Imagining A Floating Future For Tuvalu, Yuxi Liu

Masters Theses

Climate change is posing great challenges to Tuvalu, a small archipelago in the center of the Pacific Ocean. With low elevations above sea level, poor soil, and limited land resources, Tuvalu is considered to be one of the smallest countries in the world, as well as the most vulnerable nation under climate change. About 2000 years ago the seafaring Pacific Islanders inhabited the archipelago and developed its unique culture following the fluid geographies of atoll islands––a culture that was once associated with the notion of paradise, and which gradually faded away with the arrival of western colonizers in the 19th …

Negative Carbon Growth In The Atmosphere: To Reverse The Growth Of Carbon In The Atmosphere Through Urban Reforestation, Hanchao Zhang

Masters Theses

Since the industrial revolution, with the expansion of cities, the global climate problem has become increasingly serious. The world is paying more and more attention to carbon emissions, and many landscape projects also take emission reduction and carbon sequestration as concepts. But there seems to be a lack of quantitative research in the field of landscape architecture. According to the global goal of net-zero by 2050 and emission reduction plan of Providence, RI, this project started with calculating how much carbon dioxide needed to be removed by biomass in order to achieve net-zero. It puts forward the requirement for urban …

Eco-Corridor For Wildlife: Reclamation Of Wildlife Habitat In Rhode Island, Xiaodong Yang

Masters Theses

This thesis aims to reclaim the fragmented habitats of wildlife and natural environments under the current human-dominating world. Through a series of landscape interventions, an ecological wildlife corridor will be proposed to not only help wildlife migrate without being impacted by the constructed infrastructure but also arouse humans to rethink and revalue the relationship between humans and wildlife.

The researches focus on the infrastructure’s negative impacts on wildlife, Interstate 95, and coyotes in specific in Rhode Island and ecological approaches that could potentially remedy this issue. Human infrastructure, like highway systems, has caused great fragmentation in the original wildlife habitat …

The Second Identity: The Human-Otters Ha-Ha - Utopia For Urban Animals, Yuxin Zhang

Masters Theses

The question of proportion between humans and urban animals is always existed but had been ignored for a while. Through COVID19,the early balance, which human as a dominant sign in the urban area seems been slightly broken and many “invisible” animals start to show up. This makes me think that is there another living mode between humans and animals.

The thesis project locates in Singapore. Asa country around by water, Singapore has countless river canal, with some of the rivers are more residential and quieter, some are famous hot tourism point. However, some of the rivers are similar, which because …

The Slow Violence Of Business As Usual Planning: Racial Injustice In Public Health Crises, Monika Sharma

Masters Theses

This thesis is a critical analysis of the normative planning practice in relation to the aspirational principles of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) (especially Section A, Part 1: Overall Responsibility to the Public). By exploring several dimensions of typical, or Business As Usual, planning practices in a local planning department in Springfield, Massachusetts and contextualized within larger planning concerns in the United States, I illustrate that socio-spatial, racialized oppression is deeply embedded in these common practices. Through a multimethod approach that includes historical survey, archival research, interviews, and direct observation, I argue that most professional planning operates from …

Border Town: Preserving A 'Living' Cultural Landscape In Harlingen, Texas, Shelby Parrish

Masters Theses

The preservation of cultural landscapes takes an understanding of a region’s shared history, their sense of place, and the sensory and spatial behavior of their appropriated spaces. That being said preserving cultural landscapes in urban areas can be especially challenging. They are constantly growing and evolving which requires special considerations to avoid suffocation of the space and the inhabitants’ spatial behavior. The practice of preserving cultural landscapes on an urban scale has been relatively lacking in the United States. The same preservation strategies are used for various types of cultural landscapes that have their own characteristics and stories. Different tactics …

Student-Centered Learning Spaces During A Pandemic, Rebeccah J. Maley

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study is to examine the experience second year, live on students study habits in outside academic spaces during a pandemic from 2020-2021 academic year. Through gathered testimonies of residents it was found students value their communities, appreciate localized spaces for collaboration, and acknowledged various influences that can enhance or inhibit their ability to study. Additionally, they shared the impact COVID-19 had on their personal lives, academics, and how they interacted with others. It was found that holistic measures are needed for students to be successful in outside academic spaces. This study brought attention to these measures …