Digital Commons Network^™

Remnants, Sarah Chriss

Masters Theses

Remnants is a revision of our interaction with land extraction through reimagining processes of representation and image-making. By altering perspective and focus, the visual effects of commodity culture shift toward the consequences that occur before and after our consumption. Dependably lost in translation, spatial and temporal information of material exchanges across the globe uphold and preserve the synergy of our commodity transactions. In a field constantly playing with and pushing against the boundaries of representation, remnants aim to redraw lost connections of material transformations through a granite quarry in Rhode Island. Representation is a tool to revise visual narratives that …

Caregivers As Worldbuilders, Caitlin Dippo

Masters Theses

Caregivers as Worldbuilders explores architecture as the relationship between people and the space that surrounds them, looking to memorials, quilts, and forms of gathering to understand how communities use care to shape their built environment. A table was built to host gatherings over the course of the spring semester. Each week new prompts, props, and prosthetics transform the table to meet the needs of those who gather. With the table as a proxy, this thesis considers the in-between spaces that relate and separate us and speculates on how architects can work with communities to gain trust, listen to what is …

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, …

Food For An Island : On The Relationships Between Agriculture, Architecture And Land, Melinda Groenewegen

Masters Theses

Hawai‘i is in a food crisis relying on 85-90% of food to be imported to the islands while 41% of its agricultural lands are unfarmed. My thesis focuses on O‘ahu's broken food system and restoring the community’s identity and relationship to their food and land. On an urban scale, the project maps out the agricultural lands of O‘ahu that are being underutilized and owned by large corporations. Then, the project zooms into a town as an example of how to reinterpret the land. The chosen site was a sugar plantation and is still currently owned by Castle and Cooke. Next, …

Immortal/ Ephemeral/ Versatile, Zhenhong (Brad) Lei

Masters Theses

Imagine 150-year-old building components coming together to form a summertime fruit market. The building is ephemeral, but the parts are here to stay, as well as the building/unbuilding cycle. The immortal ephemerality paradigm embraces the precarious lifespans of buildings and urban environments, alongside the infinite craving for new buildings and urban renewals.

Immaterial Realities, Tyler Lovejoy

Masters Theses

Architects primarily work at a digital desktop, alienated from the spatial byproducts of their collaborative work. Therefore, software is the most influential mediator between these immaterial laborers and projects. Despite architectural production methods evolving, much of the same pernicious labor relations have subsisted. Building Information Modeling has become synonymous with architectural work, yet presents a missed opportunity in addressing and re-imagining labor conditions and power relations between workers.

Today, architects are proposing improved labor structures utilizing cooperatives and unions. Alongside these endeavors, might we reimagine our digital tools as allies? Delivered as a visual essay that is both critical and …

System As A Living Organism, Xinyi Liu

Masters Theses

This is cross-disciplinary research in urban systems, architecture, bio-systems, agriculture, energy supplies, circular economy, and sustainability.

Unnoticeable City Corners, Yuchen Liu

Masters Theses

Walking on the city streets every day, how many times have you noticed the corners between buildings? Do you feel comfortable stopping over that squeezed space? As the urban population increases, the cities seek either outward expansion or vertical development. The taller and denser skyscrapers that emerge from the city gives rise to the small corners which are seemingly useless. Besides, cities growth is problematic because the elimination of the feeling of belonging may harm individuals mental health.

The corner is an intimate space, it is a space for everyone in the city. It could be a bookstore, tea house, …

Scaffolding: Medium, Mediator, Mediated, Mono Yingyi Mo

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates, analyzes, and fictionalizes scaffolds, seeing scaffolds as a medium (that which is being neglected and unquestioned), a mediator (that which is actively executing shaping powers), and a to-be-mediated being (that which requires to be reimagined). Scaffolds in this thesis is registered as a polydimensional group of frameworks, tools, and agreements, ranging from scaffolds in the built environment, architectural drawing convention, CAD program interfaces and interaction modalities, and codes and scripts behind the digital programs. Together, these scaffolds simultaneously enable and prescribe architectural design processes. The project aims to make the scaffolds seen, de-familiarized, and rediscovered. The current …

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 …

Flexing Boundaries : Tectonic Strategies For The Multi-Generational Home, Elise Young

Masters Theses

In the near future, a large percentage of the human population will have to relocate due to an ever changing climate. This will create both short-term and long-term housing needs. To support this shift, our cities will be forced to modify their current use of spaces so that they may accommodate an increasing population and their ever-changing needs. So, is there a way to design homes specifically to make increased population density not only bearable, but enjoyable? This project seeks to design non-load bearing modules that provide both partitions and furniture. The modules should be easy to manipulate so occupants …

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 …

Space Of Ambience : Learning The Relationship Between Environment, Emotion, And Behavior, Xueyun Zou

Masters Theses

I feel like I live life as two different people: one at school, and another at home, and I’m constantly trying to figure out why I feel this way. One of my undergraduate instructors said that he feels I am hiding myself in school, which I hadn’t thought about until he said this to me. I am more social in life, but act introverted in school. I don't want to be attentioned in some context but I want to understand the meaning behind it. This project is a design process for mirroring people in spaces. Mirrors are bridges to connect …

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 …

Mason & Dixon: History And Identity In The Borderlands, Drew Leventhal

Masters Theses

My project, Mason & Dixon, traces the footsteps of the original surveyors of the Mason-Dixon Line and their search for purpose in the borderlands between Pennsylvania and Maryland. For the past 250 years, the Line has inscribed a violent and painful scar on the land, filled with memories and (re)written histories. Holding the legacies of slavery and colonial expansion deep in its soil, the region is now a visceral example of the ongoing divisions and conflicts around the past, the present, and the future of the United States. The friction is in the air, it is in the monuments, and …

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 …

Domestic Disturbance: Cleaning, Labor And Maintenance Of Architecture, Valeria Portillo

Masters Theses

From a very young age, I saw my mother and father clean houses as well as my Grandmother and Grandfather clean Elementary School as janitors. I began this project as a way to understand how a certain habits could be passed down culturally and socially.

As I reflect, I appreciate the daily cleaning habits that were instilled within me. Moving away from home to go to college, I am always reminded of the ordinary and mundane moments within cleaning my home. These practices became part of my daily life and something that I hope to pass down to my children …

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 …

Houston, Tx Walkable Circuit Interventions To Aid Houston’S Safe/Accessible Walk-Ability, Isabel Manahl

Masters Theses

This thesis started out as an investigation to my hometown, Houston Texas. With that inquisition, comes the underlying historic infrastructure developments coming to light. After extensive research, I concurred that Houston’s lack of safe walk-ability and car-centric mentality within the urban context segregates many communities within the metro expanse.

Despite Houston’s reputation for ever-widening roads and an unwavering devotion to the vehicle, many of the city’s neighborhoods have considerable populations without access to a car.

I plan to institute a cheaper alternative of a change over time interventions being implemented within the context to aid the cyclist/pedestrian/metro rider in a …

Scalability System: A Tool For Bioregional Navigation, Lulu Hou

Masters Theses

The thesis studies methods for bioregional navigation based on raising awareness and creating an understanding of the existing landscape across scale – from global to local. It examines how the concept of the bioregion can be incorporated into a lifestyle and its daily experiences by allowing a more meaningful recontextualization of daily-used products through the natural resources that sustain them. The thesis takes native bogs for cranberry production in South-Eastern Massachusetts as an example and provides a field guide for different types of users – consumers, workers, and constituents – to experience, test and explore the landscape. In tracing the …

Systemic Design: Experiments To Trigger Pedestrian Empathy In The Urban System, Yu Chen

Masters Theses

It is inconvenient for people with different physical abilities – such as visual or physical impairment – to wander around public spaces. Issues of accessibility deficiency are not caused by single disciplines, like design. They arise from natural, cultural, social, and political dynamics, which in turn cause a lack of empathy in society and an insufficient inclusion of people with different abilities. They are systemic problems that require systemic solutions.

Systemic thinking is an alternative way of thinking about relationships and patterns in systems. When thinking about and with systems, triggers outside the system can play an essential role in …

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 …