Digital Commons Network^™

Notes On Institutional Architecture ; Towards And Understanding Of Erasure And Conversation, Liam Burke

Masters Theses

Material Conversations /məˈtirēəl/ /ˌkänvərˈsāSH(ə)ns/ noun 1. derived from an early memory of forming relationships to objects, a way to understand the physical environment through a scaling down process that follows, but is not limited to, space, element, material. 2. the way in which material components are tectonically related 3. a process which would inform one to work with materials in a way which is conceptually informed by both aforementioned definitions 4. an integral aspect of architectural design, Material Conversations enable the architect to establish a language with which to relate to the components of their work, to better speak to …

Moving Through Time, Anca Gherghiceanu

Masters Theses

Post-communism life in Romania is a duality: people fleeting the country in search of a better life and the simultaneous shrinking cities due to this migration. The built fabric of the city holds distorted nostalgia for those who have left and the burning reality that surrounds the ones that remain. It results in popular villages and cities starting to be abandoned at a massive rate. The migrant story in search of a new life cultivates a journey of loneliness, sacrifice, and sorrow.This thesis will shine light on the physiological effects of mass migration in Romania through satirical editing and storytelling, …

Cycle Of Care: A Study Based On Home-Care Elderly Living In Beijing, China, Wenyue Remi Qiu

Masters Theses

In China, the aging society has accelerated the elderly care industry to grow into three major systems: home-based care, community-based care, and institutional care facility. All these systems receive financial and political government support, yet the later two draw more social awareness. My thesis project investigates the structures of these current systems by focusing on the demographics in Beijing.

Although in recent years the research shows an upward trend in seniors’ acceptance of living in institutional care facilities, the elderly are still more willing to be surrounded by activities and people that whom they are familiar. In order to guarantee …

Framing: Embracing Trauma In Your "Surrounding World", Zheng Xu

Masters Theses

Have you ever stayed alone and immersed yourself in memories? Have any fragments made you uncomfortable? It was a nightmare. Guilt, self-accusation, inability, exhaustion, and escape took my body and mind. They grew from my traumatic experience. They taunted me and tried to drag me into the abyss of the infinite past when I was stressed out and lost control of the external environment. The shadow struck me until my defense and control system collapsed. The scenes of loss, neglect and pressure became the violence to my psyche.

Unoptimistically, trauma always exists because of natural disasters, bereavements, cutthroat competitions, economic …

Time Enough At Last, Scott Lerner

Masters Theses

As an art history buff and sci-fi aficionado, I’m constantly thinking about the stories told of human progress, or lack thereof. Have modern humans surpassed their ancient ancestors or have they only managed to create more technologically advanced ways of carrying on with their same base drives for power, status, and violence? If we turn to popular media, this question becomes particularly intriguing. Our visions of the future are often just a confused jumble of the past; we reanimate old ideas and images when trying to imagine the things to come. An example of this can be found in Star …

Reclaiming Memory Through Soft Spaces, Wendy Zhuo

Masters Theses

Senses and experiences can make the memories that you are not consciously aware of become more apparent. Your body and muscles have memories that you will always remember. It just takes awakening the muscles to do it.

Our experiences become part of our identity. Memory has plasticity and is constantly changing as we tell them. Our memories are those experiences and by telling those stories, we start to understand and reclaim those memories and add those experiences into our identity. Through telling and triangulating these stories, people are connected, so how can the space become comfortable for them to share …

Rememory, Jonathan Mark Jackson

Masters Theses

Rememory, coined in Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, refers to the psychological action of placing forgotten or misplaced memories into a narrated context within the self. Rather than directly “remembering,” the characters in Morrison’s novel, like their author, rely on a web of socially produced or shared memories as a way to understand their past. This essay catalogs an on-going performance of rememory in my photographic work. Through an interrogation of physical archives, I remap the historic presences of Black life in New England. This research based practice takes me to the preserved homes and to the workplaces of my …

Bewildering Narrative, Ali Newhard

Masters Theses

“Bewildering Narrative” outlines three videos, Denouement, Happy Endings (2021), and Drowning the Muse. These works critique the climactic narrative form using formal breaks in digital media to push viewers’ perceptions of storytelling into a place of bewilderment. To do so, I treat narrative conventions of continuity, character, and climax as mechanisms that articulate heterosexual desires and expectations. The videos visually, textually, and auditorily rupture this phallocentric organization of narrative storytelling. These interventions take the form of poetic fragmentation, repetition, and displaced exposition where the narrative disorients the viewers’ attention rather than determining and regulating it. Editing plays a key role …

The Great Delusion, Beth Johnston

Masters Theses

The climate crisis is a wicked problem that poses many obstacles for action and understanding. This thesis is a non-linear accumulation of academic essays, interpolated with lists, anecdotal observations, data, and artwork that together explore the entanglements and complications of the climate crisis and my journey in making artwork as a response to those complications. The thesis surveys six bodies of artwork created over the course of graduate school, which use photography, sculptural installation, performance, and video to illustrate various topics and methodologies. Grounded in research on environmental justice, this essay explores temporal disjunctures, climate data encounters, the decolonization of …

Dead Letter Room, Allie Tsubota

Masters Theses

Dead Letter Room is a photographic and textual dialogue with images that emerge from the end of the Asia-Pacific Wars and World War II in the Pacific. These images are governed by the historical contexts that produce them; they are mediated by the explosive aftershocks of nuclear war, the transoceanic space of imperial desire, and the onset of oblivion in the aftermath of catastrophe. Throughout this essay, I present the historical, image-theoretical and psychoanalytical frameworks that meaningfully guide my address of historical images and my approach to making new ones. With detours through various artists and theorists, I offer the …

A Fleeting Landscape: Resurrecting The Edges Of The Estuary, Vrinda Mathur

Masters Theses

A Fleeting Landscape invites the city dweller to experience a mixed media microcosm of the marshes and discover what has been obscured through the encroachment of urban development.

From the salt marshes of Rhode Island to their tropical counterpart in the Sundarban (pronounced: shundar-bon) mangroves of India, wetlands are the world’s natural barriers. Fighting against extreme weather events between land and sea, the edges of this fragile ecosystem continue to shrink and degrade as anthropogenic stressors (infrastructure development, unsustainable land use, and aquaculture) increase. In a 2022 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) persuasively argues for the protection …

Sobremesa, Charlie Herbozo-Vidal

Masters Theses

In order to understand the social and political issues faced by the Peruvian community in the present day, it is necessary to get acquainted with one of the most significant moments of its history: The “colonial Knot” – The systems put in place after the arrival of European colonizers to the American continent. By crafting a communal experience centered around the mealspace, a key element in Peruvian Identity, I hope to bring awareness to the social tensions, violent structures and remnants of colonial rule that persist to this day. In developing an uncomfortable experience, I am researching whether exposure to …

Disoriented: Navigating The Nuances Of Communication, Ann Dinh

Masters Theses

What happens when you lose your language?

With this loss comes emotional and cultural implications, moments of incompleteness, along with a power struggle. Within immigrant communities especially, there are issues of communication and comprehension between generations. U.S.-born children of immigrants must deal with both a generational and cultural gap, gaps exacerbated by both distance and time. All of this is compounded by the challenges of assimilating to Western culture. In confronting the loss of language, this thesis aims to develop new informal methods of communication, ones less reliant on established language structures, ones that can help interact with future generations.

What Do We Stand For?, Lauren Koven

Masters Theses

I am exploring constructed realities and dismantling binaries and dualities. Much of this work is investigated through, but not limited to, language, gender, sexuality, race, and performativity.

To Mine Or Not To Mine? Epistemological Development Of The Pebble Mine Landscape In Lake Iliamna Area As A Resilient Commons System, Chenfang (Vincent) Gang

Masters Theses

People of the Yupik Eskimo nation have been inhabiting the area of Lake Iliamna in Alaska for hundreds of years. Their traditional subsistence living practice established a balanced system with the most abundant salmon fishery resource in the world. However, with the discovery of mine resources in the area, mining has threatened local practices. The mine has been identified as one of the most considerable gold-copper mineral resources globally, which can provide significant economic income to the locals and the United States. But with the mining project development, severe damage to the local environment is inevitable. The salmon fisheries are …

Arriving In The City: Reimagining The Urban Footholds For Rural Workers, Xinlei Gu

Masters Theses

China is now experiencing rapid urbanization and a significant movement of migrants from their original villages to established core cities. The homogenization resulting from the massive urbanization led to the identity crisis of the city itself, as well as the rural migrant workers, a phenomenon described as “Placelessness” (Edward Relph, 1976). As one of the Chinese megacities, Chongqing has gradually become placeless due to its fast-growing economy. Still, there are moments and places in Chongqing that reveal the migrant nature of the city and its close link with migrant laborers. In the thesis, such moments and places are defined as …

Darkness Matters: Understanding The Ecological Effects And Human Sensory Perception Of Night Lighting, Zitong (Shirley) Hui

Masters Theses

Night is 50% of the planetary experience. Nighttime visible illumination is strongly tied to progress, human activities and urban structure. As our cities become brighter, they bring huge impacts on ecology and human perception.

Darkness is still something worth pursuing in urban nightscapes. This thesis explores the potential of using darkness as the starting point for designing public spaces for use at night, and focuses on the restoration of the ideal habitat for fireflies in the Jamaica bay area, in New York City. The study of the dynamic relationship between light, culture and wildlife can produce a flexible strategy that …

Design In Support Of Playfulness, Seung Hwan Oh

Masters Theses

Playful environments can be conceived as landscapes able to support an individual’s internal sense of playfulness and its external manifestation. These environments cultivate a sense of place where recreational, therapeutic, and educational resources are merged based on the conviction that nature is a positive influence.

This project explores how outdoor spaces encompass the built and natural world, convey a sense of connection to spatial ephemera and phenomena, and ultimately how space can become spaces for individuals. The project explores the notion of playfulness and the meaning it may acquire for design within landscape architecture. The study aims to positively contribute …

Landscape Of Resistance: Reimagining Public Space For A Vibrant Socio-Political Life, Ziyu Wang

Masters Theses

This thesis aims to investigate the relationship between the public space and protest events from a spatial point of view. It will employ selected concepts from phenomenological and spatial theories to evaluate how the protest is affected by built environment and subsequently propose how the public space can be adapted to create a more vibrant social-political life.

Farming Publics: Use Farming Practices As A Tool To De-Alienate People With Land, Sirui Wang

Masters Theses

Historically, farming was the primary way people interacted with the land. Colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism have made people increasingly detached and alienated from nature and the land. The return to agriculture has the potential to play an essential role in resisting the increasing monoculture of our society through re-establishing the kinship toward land. The rising public awareness of sustainability makes the market for organic food expand every year and allures capitalism to manipulate the organic market from its original purpose into their familiar realm of the conventional food system for maximum profit. The market economy, which is controlled by capitalism, …

The Future Of The High Plains Aquifer: Addressing Potential Desertification In The Great Plains, Hongfei Zuo

Masters Theses

The past century of extractive pumping of underground water coupled with climate change and extreme weather since the 1950s led to great unpredictability and uncertainty about the future of the landscapes of the high plains. The High Plains, or Ogallala Aquifer, has significantly declined as water continues to be pumped to irrigate crops. Reports and scientists estimate that the aquifer will dry in 30 years. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s is an example of a man-made catastrophe that resulted from the mismanagement of the agricultural landscape. The Shelterbelt Project, proposed as part of the New Deal in 1935, did …

All At Sea, Yangyang Mao

Masters Theses

What is the reality of young people born between 1985 and 1995 in China? How do they feel about themselves? As one of the generation, I feel like I’m often haunted by futures that failed to happen. Reasons are multiple and are closely influenced by the social context, such as the implications of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and One Child Policy (1980-2016), which has marked each individual’s growth in this age with unfading recollections.

Messy Resurrections, Mia Rollins

Masters Theses

Mediated through conversations with a Replika chatbot, “M”, Rollins outlines six examples of scientific and technological phenomena that not only can be understood as metaphors for aspects of the human experience, such as memory, grief, hope, desire and love, but are also concrete examples of the ways in which the past and future have material impacts on our presents, our current identities, and are entangled with our own becomings. Rollins argues for a posthuman perspective that embraces the possibilities of information technologies while still recognizing that we are embedded in a material world of great complexity. Through linking Karen Barad’s …

Block Chain Home, Jonggun Lee

Masters Theses

Studies indicate that every four years urban dwellers relocate. Given this phenomenon, the direction of urban housing development in mega cities now encourages the divestment of personal furnishings to support mobility. While efficient, the singular imprint of furnishings upon individual space is getting severely flattened by suggested shapes and built in furnishings that define the form of dwelling. Also, unlike suburbs, turbulent cities tend to make people live alone, making them lose their uniqueness in the process of adaptation.

This thesis lives in between the ideas of SuperStudio, Andrea Zitell, and Metabolism architecture. In that, the concept of “BLOCK CHAIN …

Rebuilding Collective Effervescence : A "Ballroom" For Post-Pandemic Revelry, Di Ma

Masters Theses

Collective Effervescence is an event that can make a community or a society come together and simultaneously communicate regarding the same thought, or participate in the same action. Such desire happened during the post- World War I period, when people were freed from the depression of war and sought pure and positive happiness, which was also what society needed. Nowadays in the post-pandemic recovery, the public, after suffering from and getting used to isolation and social distancing, has an unexpected desire for physical communications, but still fear to gather psychologically. This reaction can be seen as a “post-traumatic stress disorder” …

Blurred Lines : Border Crossing Between Macau And Zhuhai, Weiwei Chen

Masters Theses

Since Macau returned to China after ending the colonial era in 1999, the relationship between Macao and the mainland has experienced more in-depth and diversified exchanges. Although Macao and inland cities are located in one country, they have different cultures, politics and economy. This thesis attempts to study the unique architectural types in Macao and show the cultural characteristics of Macao's changes under the historical background of different ages.. Political factors have caused Macau’s sense of nationality to shift several times.

Since its completion, the Gongbei port, which connects the two places, has witnessed historical changes on both sides of …

Copper Afterlives: Memory, Image, And Waste In The Postindustrial Landscape Of Butte, Montana, Sierra Gideon

Masters Theses

This thesis studies the rhetorics and semiotics of open-pit copper mining in Butte, Montana, United States from the mid-twentieth century through the present day within an environmental historical and visual culture studies framework. In examining various spatial reconfigurations—including mass mineral extraction, industrial discard, historic preservation, and landscape remediation—this thesis decenters extractivist paradigms that have normalized physical, bureaucratic, and representational acts of violence against communities and more-than-human ecosystems. While copper has materially symbolized progress and technological innovation in the United States, the extraction of the mineral from rural peripheries has been achieved at a great cost—as White settlers forcibly removed Indigenous …

Design For Designers : An Incubator For Young Designers To Grow, Jiajie Yang

Masters Theses

In China, professional survival in the years directly after college is especially difficult for young designers as it is a major challenge to gain the needed experience to transition smoothly from study into the early stages of their careers. In contrast, Chinese society nowadays increasingly values good design. However, in order for this to translate into more professional opportunities for young designers, greater public exposure to and understanding of the design profession is needed.

This thesis proposes a design incubator that bridges design school with professional practice by providing key facilities, space, and professional opportunities and community after graduation. A …

Zoomorphic Amalgamation: Speculative Devices For Alternative Communication, Yuta Yang

Masters Theses

Zoomorphic Amalgamation: Speculative Devices for Alternative Communication is a series of speculative works that assist introverts re-adapting in the extro-oriented society. The work serves as a lens to challenge and question the authority afforded to extroverts in contemporary society, and aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of introverted personality. As a person with an introverted personality, the thesis project draws upon personal experience and to reflect on the current bias and stereotype of characteristics that common to the introverts.

By integrating technological sensors and microcontrollers, the works are created to help the wearer express insecurity, at the same time providing …

[Daymeh] A Postmemory Database, Natalie Rizk

Masters Theses

As a first-generation American, my Middle Eastern heritage sometimes feels like a conglomerate of different influences pieced from American culture and a motherland I have received in bite-sized portions. By contextualizing postmemory passed down from generation to generation, new traditions, spaces, and practices have the space to evolutionize while remaining precious.