Architecture Commons^™

Domestic Exotic: Dispossession And Desire In South Florida 20th C Tourism, Emily Nelms

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

Domestic Exotic, considers the conditions that led to the rise of cultural tourism in Florida and examines Yale University’s involvement in this economic phenomenon. Cultural tourism is defined as site-seeing attractions where performers interact with visitors under fabricated conditions. At these sites, ‘the spectacle of the other’ was demarcated onto specific bodies, creating a collective imaginary that helped to shape the infrastructure and public thought of Florida as a travel destination for Euro-American audiences. This document supports an exhibition at the Yale Peabody Museum titled, The Resonance of Things Unseen: Indigenous Sovereignty, Institutional Accession, and Private Correspondence (March 26 - …

Authorizing Violence: Spatial Techniques Of Citizenship Politics In Northeast India, Samarth Vachhrajani

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

Authorizing Violence: Spatial Techniques of Citizenship Politics in Northeast India studies the spatial and legal instruments through which Hindu Nationalism and its political front, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), operates in Northeast India. I document the means through which authoritarian power has been introduced into a democratic structure of governance. Emphasizing the role of architecture and spatial knowledge, I attend to how the violence of disenfranchisement and dispossession is legitimized under the force of law.

For this, Chapter 1, entitled 'Legislating Containment,' turns to the legal instrument of citizenship and studies the Goalpara detention center and multi-purpose criminal …

To Open A Clearing: Cultivating Spaces Of Endurance In The Upper Amazon, Brunno De Melo Meirelles Douat

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

To effectively challenge the policies of extraction implemented by late liberal regimes, the Waorani communities from Upper Amazon have devised spatial strategies to defend their traditional territory. By re-examining the concept of the contact zone and unfolding settler and Indigenous literature, spatialities, and worldviews, this thesis suggests the concept of forest Clearings as a means to explore spatial forms of endurance.

Clearings emerge within the Amazon in sites where encounters between divergent worldviews embody otherwise modes of existence. Through a series of fieldwork reflections, these Clearings are perceived as spaces where ontological negotiations are more likely to occur, strategies of …

Beside Yingzao: An Index Of Chinese Building Traditions, Tianyi Hang

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

Yingzao referred to the Chinese architectural practice prior to the nineteenth-century introduction of the term jianzhu, the translation of “architecture.” The earliest preserved illustrated government-issued building standard was titled Yingzao fashi. Published by the Southern Song government in 1103, Yingzao fashi defined and regulated technical terms used to describe imperial construction as well as specified the labor costs of certain building techniques. These terms inform our understanding of the traditional Chinese way of categorization and knowledge system of architecture and architectural elements.

Titled “Beside Yingzao,” this study takes the technical terms from Yingzao fashi to guide the reader in investigating …

Continuous Extremes: Architecture Of Uncertainty In Poland, 1945—, Cayce Davis

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

In this thesis, architecture situates between extremes. The dichotomies of destruction and construction, mobility and fixity, performance and reality, inside and outside, and form and time frame architecture and the processes through which it is made. The context is Poland in the fallout of the year 1945, when Warsaw’s unique, nearly total destruction and the ascendance of a new communist regime raised the political stakes of architecture. The thesis focuses on a cast of characters in architecture and related artistic disciplines—individuals haunted by the traumas of their own pasts, negotiating a Polish state that created oppressive limitations through artistic mandates …

Space-Praxis: Towards A Feminist Politics Of Design, Mary C. Overholt

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

Outside of the academy and professionalized practice, design has long been central to the production of feminist, political projects. Taking what I have termed space-praxis as its central analytic, this project explores a suite of feminist interventions into the built environment—ranging from the late 1960s to present day.

Formulated in response to Michel de Certeau’s theory of spatial practices, space-praxis collapses formerly bifurcated definitions of ‘tactic’/‘strategy’ and ‘theory’/‘practice.’ It gestures towards those unruly, situated undertakings that are embedded in an ever-evolving, liberative politics. In turning outwards, away from the so-called masters of architecture, this thesis orients itself toward everyday practitioners …