Architecture Commons^™

Nature As Material, Time As Tool, Chuchu Chen

Masters Theses

No building stands forever. Over time, the natural environment acts upon the outer surface of the building, leading to the failure of materials and the final dissolution of the structure itself, leading to ruin. In order to prevent this or retard its occurrence, we constantly maintain and renew the things we build. Nature seems to stand in opposition to architecture. The passage of time is constantly subtracting from the building. However, what differentiates nature from architecture? This thesis questions whether these two are not opposed, but on a continuous spectrum. Approaching the building as part of the overall environment that …

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.

Tracing As Process, Lesley Su

Masters Theses

Tracing is a way to observe, document and translate, to be anchored in the physical working, to find personal occupancy in the built environment.

By establishing one-to-one relationships with the physical context, tracing enables us to comprehend objects in multiple dimensions. Through tracing, we can explore how two-dimensional drawings can be transformed into three-dimensional objects, and vice versa, objects can be documented through drawing to capture the essence of reality.

Based on materials and motion, research on tracing techniques guides me into how tracing could act as a process of art and architecture practice.

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 …

Liquid Border, Yingfan Jia

Masters Theses

A River is a mighty and constantly-evolving force, leaving behind an intricately designed and constantly changing system. Not just a river, the Rio Grande stretches all the way from Colorado before intersecting with the US-Mexico Border in southern Texas - a point where the powerful forces of nature now merge with a clearly-defined political boundary. The outcome of this is a unique ecological niche, which may often go unnoticed despite its distinctiveness.

Texas is famous for its farms and ranches, and the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas was once an agricultural hub. However, urbanization and the depletion of water …

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 …

Ritual As Design Gesture: Reimagining The Spring Festival In Downtown Providence, Wenjie Wang

Masters Theses

Rooted in the belief that architecture should transcend mere functionality and embrace the realms of emotional profundity, experiential richness, spiritual resonance, and poetic expression, this thesis aims to evoke potent emotional and spiritual connections within the human psyche. My thesis, taking advantage of ritual practice, employs an architectural perspective to examine the temporal and spatial aspects, utilizing ritual practice as a design gesture to generate a platform for social relationships outside the existing community.

Focusing on the Chinese diaspora communities in Providence, my thesis reimages the long-lost Chinatown of Providence and design both ephemeral and enduring architecture with scenes of …

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.

Garden Etiquette, Kai Wasikowski

Masters Theses

Garden Etiquette is an ongoing project concerned with landscape photography, environmental conservation, and the way they have both served the settler colonialist agenda. I focus specifically on the conservation ideologies shaped in New South Wales (NSW) Australia and New England, United States of America (USA) in the late nineteenth century and the settler visualities that underwrote them. Both countries’ histories were marked by photography and conservation’s common function of mythologising land as empty space—to be invaded, extracted and occupied, and wilderness—to be territorialized and protected, albeit, in distinct ways.

With British, German and Polish settler ancestry, born and raised on …

[De]Composition: Grounding Architecture, Skylar Perez

Masters Theses

This thesis forages through a multitude of entangled scales that utilizes geologic time, water bodies, farming systems and fungal networks to reorient how we as humans herald the vital connecting force that is SOIL.

Reimagining how approaches to soil care could alter visions of innovation and land management in the arid region of Llano Estacado (Lubbock, TX).

The research embraces soil a place full of life and microbial activity that systematically contributes to local ecosystems and planetary health.

How do we build soil?

A Day Stood Still, Yuting Sun

Masters Theses

The Brooklyn Navy Yard is an important industrial historic site in New York City. It was established in the 1810s as a private shipyard and became a military property in the late nineteenth century. It provided significant production capacity for the Pacific battlefield during World War II. After the war, the entire campus closed in the 1960s as military orders declined and transportation changed. The Brooklyn Navy Yard was later sold to New York City and repurposed.

After the city government took over the park, unlike other industrial sites that were developed as real estate, manufacturing is still the main …

The Steel Yard, Architecture Department, Sculpture Department, Bruner Foundation

Rudy Bruner Award | 30 Years of Urban Excellence

The Steel Yard redeveloped a historic steel fabrication facility into a campus for arts education, job training, and small-scale manufacturing in Providence, Rhode Island. The 3.5-acre property in the city’s Industrial Valley required extensive environmental remediation to meet regulatory requirements while retaining the industrial urban character of the site. The Steel Yard offers classes, workforce training, and fabrication space for local artists, creating an industrial arts incubator where they can share ideas, materials, and space. It has become a center for creative activity, bridging the gap between the traditional arts community on the affluent east side of Providence with manufacturing …

The Providence River Relocation Project, Architecture Department, Bruner Foundation

Rudy Bruner Award | 30 Years of Urban Excellence

The Providence River Relocation project in Rhode Island’s capital city redirected rivers, overhauled transit infrastructure, and created a new riverfront downtown. Thirty years in the making, the relocation of the Woonasquatucket and Moshassuck rivers, construction of a new rail station, highway interchanges, and twelve bridges restored historical links among Providence’s Capital Center, College Hill, and downtown. The project improved traffic flow in and through downtown and added pedestrian-friendly spaces, including 1.5 miles of river walks, along with a new urban park including a restaurant, amphitheater, fountain, and boat landing.

Redirecting the rivers created new, marketable commercial land without demolishing …