Architecture Commons^™

Post Occupation Amnesia, Zainah Alwuhaib

Masters Theses

On August 2nd, 1990, Iraqi forces invaded and occupied Kuwait in an attempt to expand borders and acquire resources. The occupation lasted for seven months. Even after liberation on February 26, 1991, many prisoners of war had not been found or returned, oil wells were still on fire, and buildings were left damaged or destroyed. The immediate recovery period focused on restoring what was lost and reclaiming a sense of cultural and national identity. Different buildings received different treatment, and analyzing what remains now, 35 years later, is essential in understanding the impacts of occupation on a nation.

To gain …

A Seat At The Table: Expanding The Narrative Of Period Rooms, Jade Mcpike

Masters Theses

A period room represents the interior design and decorative art of a particular historical social setting, typically found in museums. Unlike the white cube gallery, period rooms offer immersive spaces that provide visitors a glimpse into domestic life and the experiences of those who lived in that moment. Stepping into a period room is like traveling back in time, where every piece of furniture and decoration tells us something about the past.

However, despite their immersive qualities, these rooms often lack broader historical context, misrepresenting socio-economic, political, and cultural dynamics of the periods they attempt to depict. They often glorify …

Looped Logic & Wild Lines, Shuting Shao

Masters Theses

What if an exhibition didn’t just present objects but actively pulled visitors into their world? This thesis explores that possibility by reimagining how furniture can be exhibited, using Misha Kahn’s All Tied Up Chair and Michael Thonet’s No. 14 Bentwood Chair as case studies. These two works sit at opposite ends of the design spectrum—Kahn’s chair is an explosion of color, texture, and playful chaos, while Thonet’s is an icon of industrial efficiency and graceful simplicity. Through spatial design, this exhibition translates their contrasting philosophies into immersive environments that extend beyond mere observation. The conventional use of neutral “White Cube” …

Post Salt: Adaptive Architecture For An Uncertain Climate, Mallorie Beckner

Masters Theses

Climate change is rapidly altering seasonal patterns, particularly in the Northeastern U.S., where winter temperatures have risen by approximately 3°F over the past century. As a result, infrastructure designed to support communities during winter conditions, such as road salt storage facilities, faces obsolescence. New York State, the largest consumer of road salt in North America, has 40 salt storage facilities in New York City alone, all of which are sited along interconnected waterways. Though often overlooked, this network of structures forms a critical part of the city’s response to winter weather. As these structures face a paradigm shift, their future …

Can You Hear A Pen Drop? A Study Of Classroom Acoustics And Aural Experience, Henry P. Moe

Honors Projects

This study investigates the relationship between classroom acoustics and perceived listening ease at Seattle Pacific University. Five classrooms were analyzed using objective measurements of reverberation time and background noise, and student and faculty perceptions were collected via surveys. While prior research and acoustic standards establish that poor acoustics hinder learning, findings revealed reverberation time and noise levels alone did not fully explain subjective listening experiences. Factors such as class size, seating arrangement, and external noise sources significantly shaped perceptions. The results underscore the importance of considering pedagogical goals and classroom usage when designing or evaluating learning environments.

Fire Fossils: Biomineral Infrastructures In Untangling Climates, Tanmayee More

Masters Theses

Diatoms drift, sediments sink, wildfires generate their own weather. Lightning strikes can blast sand into glass, and microscopic organisms do the same in the cold recesses of the ocean. What alchemies and metabolisms catalyze space, time, and energy? What are the thermodynamics of infrastructure in Climate Change?

Places, materials, and beings are afterimages. Through alchemical experiments, and multi-scalar imaging, I develop simulations of wildfires, and their profound, reverberating effects. In this thesis, a glass-meets-landscape experimental process enters these obscured conditions and renders new material relations for the built environment.

Re-Imagining As Re-Empowering, Zheyun Chen

Masters Theses

While landscapes designed have been shown to effectively promote healing, foster community, and facilitate social empowerment, the landscapes of domestic violence shelters are woefully understudied.

This thesis explores the potential of integrating and combining existing design elements into the landscape to create a system that fosters a “safe place” within an urban context.

In this thesis, I developed a series of typologies based on existing landscape elements that are not necessarily connected with trauma-informed care or a healing landscape. I examined these in an urban context, specifically at Casa Myrna, a domestic violence shelter in Roxbury, Boston, MA.

Through the …

What [Could] Happen[Ed] In Oak Cliff: Reimagining Gentrification Without Displacement, Samantha E. Hernandez

Masters Theses

Neighborhoods help create our world view, define our relationships and goals, and inspire local change. They can evolve naturally throughout decades, though sometimes in waves of growth and displacement. Often these disproportionately affect those of lower economic classes or underrepresented communities. This thesis provides alternative possibilities of equitable community growth. What if neighborhoods could be strengthened in the face of change? This thesis will delve into the suburb of Dallas, Texas called Oak Cliff. By studying key moments in its history from the 1980s to 2020s, such as zoning changes or implementation of urban plans, it is possible to reimagine …

Delusional Motel: An Architecture Evoking Negative Symptoms And Disorders, Zesha Xie

Masters Theses

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Echoes Of Scent: Redefining Museum Accessibility, Jiongyi Tang

Masters Theses

Museums and art galleries have traditionally been visually dominant, relying on sight as the primary means of experiencing art and presenting information. However, for blind and visually impaired visitors, these spaces can feel alienating or exclusionary. Museums and galleries must move beyond visually dominant exhibits to create inclusive, multisensory experiences, especially for blind and visually impaired visitors. This thesis challenges conventional, sight-reliant exhibition design and advocates for a shift toward approaches that fully engage the human sensory spectrum. Rooted in empathy and inspired by the lived experiences of visually impaired individuals, this work explores how museums can become more inclusive …

Reimagining The Arcade, Yichen Liao

Masters Theses

Sustainable urban regeneration refers to the revitalization of underused architectural spaces to promote environmental responsibility, social equity, and cultural continuity within the urban fabric. This thesis explores how spatial design can act as a catalyst for such regeneration by reactivating The Arcade Providence—the oldest indoor shopping mall in the U.S.—as a dynamic, interdisciplinary platform for artistic production and academic exchange. Although Providence’s urban growth has slowed in recent decades, its historic downtown still reflects the fragmentation of post-industrial decline. The Arcade, while architecturally significant, remains underutilized and disconnected from the evolving spatial and infrastructural needs of artists, educators, and cultural …

Site-Specific Nurseries: Reconnecting Nurseries To Time And Place Through Ecotypic Bare-Root Production, Tryn Collins

Masters Theses

We surround ourselves with empty landscapes, landscapes that are stagnant and decorative. Lawns edged with cultivated non-native species are inert spaces, devoid of complexity and serve little function beyond their appearances. These spaces that symbolize wealth through controlling nature are in fact the end of nature. Most of us are completely unaware of the intricate webs of life, the ecologies, that are our real habitat, hidden under the concrete and turf, pushed to the edges of our developments. They are relationships established over thousands of years between plants, insects, animals, weather and soil. This kind of complexity scares us, it …

Building Ecologies: Maintaining Land, Working With Wood, Taylor Jais

Masters Theses

This thesis critiques contemporary architecture and building practices for their fundamentally unsustainable and place-less assemblies that rely on extracting finite resources that generate significant emissions while simultaneously neglecting to consider the needs and existence of humans and non-human species with in the built environment. Through experimental material research that diverts “wood” waste streams and integrates land and multispecies care, this work demonstrates how maintenance-based approaches to construction can transform built assemblies into ecological systems. By deconstructing wood to its cellular components and recombining these elements in novel ways, this research reveals possibilities for collaborative, materials-driven, place-based building practices. This thesis …

The Sixth Interface: The Integration Of Drone Infrastructure With Low-Altitude Landscape, Shicheng Tang

Masters Theses

This project focuses on the design of outdoor vertical space in Hong Kong in response to the development of China’s Low-Altitude Economy. It explores the integration of these spaces with drones. Through site design and planning, the project uses existing rooftops, parks, and public plazas to create multi-functional drone infrastructure. These spaces enable low-altitude logistics while providing additional social benefits such as public recreation facilities. These landscape enhancements create a harmonious synergy between technology and ecology.

Central to this work is the concept of “The Sixth Interface”, a new spatial layer between the ground and the sky where drone-driven flows …

Eco-Posthumanism — A Utopian Transformation Of Modernist Residence, Shuli Wu

Masters Theses

The Eco-Posthuman Manifesto, in this thesis, serves as a framework for spatial transformation within the context of the Anthropocene. As of 2020, the weight of human-made matter has surpassed all living biomass. This shift is both material and symbolic. It exposes the consequences of human-centered development and calls for a rethinking of architecture’s relationship with life, time, and ecology. Taking the Barbican Estate as a case study, the thesis proposes a 100-year transformation, shifting the site from a concrete, human-optimized housing complex to a living biome shared by humans, non-humans, and embedded technologies. Through design strategies such as Miyawaki afforestation, …

Space, Life And Capital: The Metabolic Rift, Zhongsu Cheng

Masters Theses

The recent avian influenza crisis exposes the fundamental contradictions of capitalist spatial production. By compressing life into optimized enclosures, industrialized poultry farming has effectively transformed these spaces into "laboratories of viral evolution" breeding grounds for zoonotic diseases in the pursuit of maximum efficiency. This crisis is not an isolated event but rather a spatialized metabolic rift: the logic of capital disrupts natural cycles, accelerating ecological and systemic collapse. At the heart of this crisis lies a critical architectural question: If capitalism organizes and encloses life within space to maximize value, can architecture be reimagined not merely as an instrument of …

Restoring Qi In Urbanism: Restoring Spatial Connectivity And Energy Dynamics Through Landscape Intervention, Jiaqi Pan

Masters Theses

This thesis explores how Taoist “Qi”, a dynamic energy flow, can provide a productive lens for approaching contemporary landscape architecture.

Taking the ancient city of Tai’an in China as a case study, I analyze the historical changes made to its Qi network at the urban scale. This draws a carrier theory that Qi could be examined by water connectivity and spatial porosity. Thereby, I further establish the dynamic network relationship between landscape factors and Qi.

Blending ancient philosophy with modern ecological thinking, I proposed Qi carrier theory for healing Qi ruptures in urban landscapes. Through design in White Horse Village, …

Exploring Al Balad, Danah Alqunfuzi

Masters Theses

Al Balad is a well-known destination for Jeddah’s visitors. With its inclusion in UNESCO World Heritage, the site has been transforming to fit the standards and become a more tourist destination. The reason the site is included in UNESCO is due to its diversity and unique architecture and sense of place. Preservation of this type is problematic because it threatens to suppress the dynamics that gave rise to Al Balad, freezing it in time. This thesis asks: How can landscape representation capture agents of change, the present moment, and the past so that the forces that breathe life in historically …

Pulped Landscapes, Allison P. Abrams

Masters Theses

Large corporations control intensive and extractive industrial land use practices through acts of dumping, capping, and neglect. The abandonment of industrial sites is increasing as well as the environmental consequences of such actions. How can impacted communities proactively engage in remediation processes while post-industrial sites sit in limbo?

With the former Foley Cellulose Plant in Perry, Florida (closed in 2023) as a case study, this thesis researches and speculates on potentials of phytoremediation experimentation and harvesting of plant fibers on contaminated soils. The site is a pulped landscape: land directly impacted by intensive, large corporation-led pulp production practices that is …

Mass To Mineral: Edge Complexity For An Urbanized Floodplain, Maya Sosland

Masters Theses

In the context of channelized rivers, urbanized floodplains, and sea level rise that this project situates itself within- we may look back with disdain for the decisions that have dramatically altered the dynamic, singular landscapes of our riparian systems. Burying the Providence River under a highway, squeezing it into a thread of its former floodplain, dredging, damming, and hardening the Woonasquatucket, Moshassuck, and Seekonk that merge their flows into the Narragansett Bay. But a river is, despite it all, still a river. Today, flooding follows the glacial outwash formation, or the original floodplain that carved these rivers far before our …