Architecture Commons^™

Postindustrial Playbook++, Maxwell Fertik

Masters Theses

There is no such thing as an undisrupted ecosystem. Every inch of the planet is impacted by industrial development and its chemical legacy has mutated the soil and water. As a response, this thesis is designed to promote abundant over extractive resources and visualize a post-industrial reality. It consists of a series of objects, writing and design research on the relationship of industry and ecosystem.

In many ways it is a playbook++, laying out possible strategies or “plays’’ for making do with what exists around us amid collapse.

Japanese knotweed (Reynoutria japonica)(ي'ڑ*), a plant that grows in the most degraded …

Manifesto Of Poor Images: Re-Imagine Guggenheim In The Post-Digital Age, Mengning He

Masters Theses

What is the role and value of low-resolution digital images, or "poor images," in a culture dominated by high-resolution and hyper-realistic digital media? This thesis investigates poor images from several perspectives: their technical characteristics, viewer’s experience, creative process, and artistic content.

With low-resolution as the defining characteristic of poor images, these pictures challenge the unceasing longing for ever-higher image resolution. While they seem unstable and untrustworthy, they challenge the obsession with higher resolution, offer an ambiguous visual experience, and provoke nostalgia. Poor images are open to appropriation, allowing users to become editors and co-authors. In the process of image-making, poor …

Interactive Architecture - Intervention Of Virtual Business On Commercial Space, Yihao George Xu

Masters Theses

Traditional mall-based restaurants, such as P.F. Chang’s in the Providence Place Mall, have primarily focused on site-based dining and bar services. However, the food provided by this chain restaurant often lacks depth, and customers seldom learn the story behind the dishes. This thesis explores the integration of mixed reality technology within the physical environment of P.F. Chang’s, an American Chinese restaurant chain with over 300 locations, aiming to transform it into an authentic Shanghai food culture experience. This experience combines virtual and physical stimuli to evoke various periods of Chinese history, providing a unique encounter for customers.

The proposed transformation …

Orchestration Of Experience, Jingyi Shen

Masters Theses

The sensory experience shaped by the landscape unconsciously influences people’s emotional and mental states. Contemporary urban landscape designers prioritized the functionality of the landscape, sometimes ignoring the spiritual impact of the atmosphere created by imperceptible environmental sonic factors. Orchestration of Experience explores the connections between sound and vision in shaping people’s sensory experience of the landscape. Drawing from soundscape ecology, environmental psychology, and dynamic visualization, this study demonstrates how they are closely intertwined. Motivated by the idea that white noise can unconsciously affect people’s mental health by Michael Rutter, we question how physical and sound landscapes shape each other, how …

Celebrate Scarcity: Water Harvesting As Cultural Keystone, Jiajun Ni

Masters Theses

As Phoenix, Arizona’s population has been increasing intensely in recent years, the city is facing a potential water crisis because of the over-extraction of underground water and a gradual decrease in water supply from the Colorado River. To solve the crisis, Phoenix has promoted water-saving lifestyles for citizens and built aquifers to capture stormwater and floods. However, these decisions are not inherently sustainable since they are too costly and centralized without enough consideration of different community contexts. Therefore, we need to rethink the water-efficiency system that is zoomed into the community level.

This thesis explores a water-collection model that is …

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 …

Beyond Burial - Transforming Death: A New Ritual Of Farewell And The Ecological Return Of The Body To Nature, Chang Xie

Masters Theses

Burial and funeral culture have been shaped by human self-awareness and reflect an anthropocentric worldview. The modern funeral industry's multi-billion-dollar enterprise is based on the principle of protecting, sanitizing, and beautifying the corpse to promote the idea of human exceptionalism. However, this practice overlooks the natural process of decay and the potential beauty in returning the body to the earth, with which the body shares the same chemical basis as the earth itself. Modern science has provided Eco-friendly green burial methods, such as soil modification, ice burial, and water burial, making it suitable to contribute to natural ecology using human …

Overlooked Modi Vivendi, Natalia Silva

Masters Theses

Traditional gender roles, performance of heterosexuality, marriage, parenthood, and a large variety of other societal expectations manifest themselves in the domestic realm, both intangibly and spatially. The design of domestic spaces has historically catered towards heteronormative living stereotypes, marginalizing people whose way of living challenges the norm. Even in the present day, designers with non-user clients — developers, investors, real estate firms, etc. — will design with heteronormative households in mind. The rise in feminist and LGBTQ+ rights movements has allowed for non-heteronormative modi vivendi (ways of living) to be more vocally and visibly present in the sociopolitical and cultural …

Old And New: Intervention In Space And Material, Yoonji Kang

Masters Theses

Hanok is a traditional Korean architecture built with Korea’s unique technology and style. Most Korean people have a positive impression of the Hanok but Hanok is acknowledged as an obsolete form of living these days. The reasons why the Hanok is not widely used are an inconvenience in living due to facilities, difficulty in maintenance, the high cost required for renovation, and its prone to coldness. Therefore, it is essential to modernize the design and construction of the Hanok by reflecting modern needs in a new Hanok. This study investigates the characteristics of the Hanok, the typologies, and how it …

The Mobile Senior University, Youshurui Li

Masters Theses

With the rapid development of technology, social networking is no longer just a face-to-face connection between people and traditional methods of contact are becoming less and less dominant. During the COVID-19 pandemic, isolation pushed us further apart, but connection through new media has also brought us closer together. Compared with the young, the elderly are generally less familiar with how to use this connection to strengthen each other's social interaction and enjoy the convenience of contact over space. This thesis proposes an architectural approach to bridge this gap and design a mobile university for seniors, focusing on new media and …

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 …

Glowing Under The Bridge—A Healing Space For Wounded Souls, Ruier Zhao

Masters Theses

The suicide rate among Chinese adolescents is significantly higher than the world average, with academic stress and family relationships being the major causes. This thesis focuses on building a place for Chinese students from upper elementary school to high school, where they can regulate their psychology, relax, and ideally reduce the rate of impulsive suicides.

In Chongqing, the percentage of students who attempt or commit suicide is close to 25%. The proposed site for this place of rest is under the bridge of one of Chongqing’s most crowded monorail stations, which is a semi-abandoned park with a beautiful view of …

Chinese Tea Ceremony Spirit Revival, Hongli Song

Masters Theses

The history of tea dates back to ancient China, almost 5,000 years ago, though at this point tea is well-integrated into the history and civilization of various countries throughout the world. However, China, as the birthplace of the tea ceremony, has lost widespread understanding of the traditions they innovated.

For example, the Sencha method that once flourished in the Tang Dynasty (618-907), and the whisked tea method in the Song Dynasty (960-1279) has already been entirely lost. Today the brewing tea methods passed down from the Ming and Qing Dynasties are nearly lost. The Chinese traditional tea ceremony is facing …

Making Pla(Y)Ces: Softening The City Through Play, Shivani Pinapotu

Masters Theses

Cities that grow naturally over time integrate spaces of gathering that allow for serendipitous happenstance. However, the cities we design today instruct and codify through intentional planning and design; they assign use, hardening specific function to place. Such strategies lead to spaces devoid of spirit, inculcating in city-dwellers to a sense of disconnect from the city.

In contrast to this, the places we make as children, express our intuitive, direct, and unselfconscious relationships with space and one other. These spaces embody softness through their malleability and adaptability, borrowing from the world around them and imbuing the ordinary with imagination. …

Thingle Things: An Exploration Of The Imperfect, Jesse G. Groom

Masters Theses

I am fascinated by the “imperfect” and ask: What are these so-called flaws? Might they just be misalignments with the plane of expectations which coat our visual processing? The relationship between object and human has grown ever more assuming since the advent of industrial production methods. I posit that the efficiency and profit driven decisions which underly this scale and mode of making have subsequently forced matter into the molds of our whims with little allowance for evidence of disobedience. During the opportunity of my own fabrication practice, however, I can discover new possibilities for the typologies of the things …

[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?

Green Paths - On The Space In-Between Buildings, Hongru Zhang

Masters Theses

This project focuses on the “leftovers” of our urban space after carving out what was required for buildings and transportation, and reintegrating them into a network that can be the habitat and paths for pollinators and small animals.

This network overlaps and interacts with our existing urban structures. Integrating it into our life will undermine the hierarchy of space and commodification of land intensified by the existing grid systems of the city, and introduce a different understanding of coexistence with nature.

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 …

Reintroducing Hemp (Rongony) In The Material Palette Of Madagascar: A Study On The Potential Of Hemp Clay Components And Its Impact On Social And Ecological Communities., Henintsoa Thierry Andrianambinina

Masters Theses

When mentioning the word hemp, especially in the local language of Madagascar, the literal translation does not set it apart from marijuana, as they are both called “rongony” - creating the stigma around hemp as the negative stereotype of marijuana. However, the material has been used by the ancestors of Madagascar, as well as across cultures, in its fibrous form to produce fabrication like textile goods and packaging. During colonization, the prohibition of hemp intensified, and since then, any activity related to either of these plants is prohibited and will end in severe punitive measures. This thesis explores the strengths …

A.R. Futuristic Scenario In Seun, Yookyung Lee

Masters Theses

Due to social distancing policies during the coronavirus pandemic, people have increasingly turned to digital platforms to fulfill what they previously enjoyed in face-to-face interactions. The high demand for virtual world services, called “metaverses,” has sparked discussions about the possibility of completely replacing the real world, which has raised questions about the role of architects in dealing with physical spaces. However, it is widely believed that digital elements will merge into the real world instead of completely replacing it, which makes augmented reality (AR) a key technology to study in the context of architecture.

In “Learning from Las Vegas,” Robert …