Architecture Commons^™

Art Inquiries, Vol. 21, Oct. 15, 2026 - Full Issue, Kris K. Belden-Adams

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Art Inquiries, Kris K. Belden-Adams

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Gustave Courbet: Realist And Rebel, Leopold Museum Vienna, Austria, Joyce Polistena

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

On Loss And Absence: Textiles Of Mourning And Survival, Art Institute Of Chicago, Chicago, Il, Elizabeth S. Hawley

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Floating World: A.A. Murakami, Museum Of Fine Arts, Houston, Tx, Yumi Park

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Encoded, The Metropolitan Museum, New York, Ny, Tamara Smithers

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Alison Place, Ed., Feminist Designer: On The Personal And The Political In Design, Anmol Shrivastava

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Harry Boone: From Entropy To Renewal, Gertrude Herbert Institute Of Art, Augusta, Ga, Mysoon Rizk

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Robert Indiana, Love, Biblical Authority, And American Art In The 1960s, David Mccarthy

Art Inquiries

Years before Robert Indiana suggested that his canonical LOVE paintings and sculptures carried erotic connotations, he was explicit in indicating that the series was to be understood as spiritual. In 1973, as the United States Postal Service issued some three hundred and thirty million stamps with his design, he specifically explained that the genesis of LOVE should be traced to his childhood training in Christian Science. Although scholars have certainly acknowledged this background, none, so far, have sufficiently addressed the actual foundational text of the faith, nor have they adequately addressed the evidence of Christian references found in the artist’s …

Curated Spaces: Cognition By Design, Sydney Harvey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Curated Spaces: Cognition by Design” is a dissertation that considers the connection between designed spaces and cognition. This work combines philosophy of mind and aesthetics. The dissertation introduces the term “Curated Cognition”, which builds on the concept of situated cognition ( Brooks, 1991; Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman,  2003;  Sterelny, 2010; Krueger, 2015; Colombetti, 2020 ). The dissertation argues that the environment is essential to cognition, and all environments are curated; therefore, the way we think, feel, and act is curated as well. Some non-human animals may inhabit worlds that are not curated. For example, an octopus may find shelter in …

From Centralized To Decentralized Care: Assessing The Role Of Design In Cardiovascular Unit Performance, Lindsey Fay

Interiors Faculty Publications

This report presents a comprehensive pre- and post-occupancy evaluation of the University of Kentucky HealthCare Cardiovascular Unit, conducted through a collaborative effort between the College of Design, College of Communication and Information, UK HealthCare, and GBBN Architects. The study examines the transition from a centralized to a decentralized care delivery model within a newly constructed hospital environment, with the goal of understanding how spatial design influences healthcare delivery, staff performance, and patient experience.

Using a mixed-methods approach, the research integrates quantitative and qualitative data collection techniques, including behavioral mapping, communication tracking, pedometer data, acoustic measurements, and staff and user feedback. …

Unscripted Urban Interior, Paramita Atmodiwirjo, Yandi Andri Yatmo

Interiority

The urban interior has emerged as a site of unscripted performance. The unscripted urban interior can be understood as a dynamic field where spatial conditions, social practices, and temporal change interact to produce emergent and contingent spatial realities beyond the original script. Through unscripted performance, the urban interior becomes a site of transformative potential, where various forms of practices emerge to transform, appropriate, and mediate the situations. The articles in this Interiority issue highlight the indeterminate characters of the urban interior and the possible transformation practices emerging from such urban contexts through various techniques and media that create distinctive values …

Performing Disobedience: Critical Spatial Heritage, Counter-Memory, And The Rewriting Of Medellín’S Public Space, Laura Balán

Interiority

This article examines the radical street performance practice of Bernardo Ángel Saldarriaga in Medellín, Colombia, as a site of political and epistemological transformation. Through ethnographic engagement with Saldarriaga—an ascetic artist who stages trance-based interventions in public space—the study analyses how his performances disrupt dominant narratives of history, identity, and citizenship. Drawing on political ontology, decolonial thought, and critical heritage studies, the article argues that Saldarriaga's work functions as a hybrid forum for negotiating plural knowledges and social imaginaries. His refusal of institutional funding, his embodied critique of state power, and his use of trance and possession rituals generate both affective …

Space As Experienced: Rendering Urban Interiority Through Research-By-Drawing, Sarah Javed Shah, Giulia Setti

Interiority

Architectural discourse has long privileged space as formally constituted—defined through geometry, enclosure, and typological classification—while its experiential and relational dimensions remain insufficiently examined. This article addresses that gap by proposing a methodological claim: the sequential and cumulative use of analytical drawing enables the investigation of spatial experience in ways that formal analysis and phenomenological description alone cannot achieve. Positioned as an epistemic framework, the research employs drawing not as representation but as a structured mode of inquiry. Five analytical lenses—liminality, permeability, intermingling, ephemerality, and complex interiority—are operationalised through a sequence of drawings that isolate and reconstruct the relational conditions through …

Villa Verde As A Quasi-Object: The Renegotiation Of Spatial Boundaries And Interiority, Tugba Cestel, Senem Kaymaz

Interiority

An architectural object interacts with its user through its functional and formal qualities. However, when stripped of these attributes, it discloses the potential to transform the phenomenal system it inhabits alongside the subject. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s hammer analysis and Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, this study explores the relationship between a user and an architectural object that lacks a predefined form or function. It examines how the subject’s intervention can reconfigure such an object into a quasi-object. This relationship establishes a conceptual bridge that can be read through both phenomenological and relational frameworks. In this domain, where spatial boundaries and …

Meanwhile Interiors, Interiority, And Becoming Exterior, Cathy Smith

Interiority

This paper explores the resonances between stakeholder conceptions of 'meanwhile' or transient urban interiors and the notion of interiority as a mobile construct intertwined with wider social and material forces. The focus is on the positioning of these interiors in relation to broader community and neighbourhood agendas, invoking what Jill Stoner describes as a becoming exterior. Although the so-called 'meanwhile use' of vacant or sub-market-condition buildings is an increasingly common tool for activating and managing underused property assets in global cities, much of the existing discourse focuses on policy and placemaking implications rather than design dimensions. Drawing on interviews with …

Soft Korsi: An Embodied Spatial Interior System For Communal Warmth, Faezeh Panahandeh

Graduate Final Projects

ABSTRACT

Soft Korsi: An Embodied Spatial Interior System for Communal Warmth reconceptualizes the historic Iranian Korsi as an innovative textile-based interior system. Traditionally, the Korsi functioned not only as a heating device but also as a spatial, material, cultural, and embodied system, which brought people together around a shared warm focal point. The integration of a heat source, textile coverings, floor seating arrangements, closeness of bodies, and domestic traditions related to warmth made possible a collective experience, rather than an individual or environmental one.

This design project seeks to address the disappearance of the Korsi from contemporary domestic environments as …

Advertisement Recognition And Recall In Urban Environments, Carson L. Ambrose

Graphic Communication

Why is it that certain advertisements are so much easier to remember than others? And how can places like Times Square actually be communicating effectivly through the dense amount of different ads? This project aims to get closer to finding out how design and environmental ad density effect advertisement recognition and recall. To capture the real-world feeling of a dense city, a 3D printed one was created to allow for custom testing and various locations meant for displaying custom advertisements. These ads would be created using a variety of design characteristics such as color, hierarchy, composition, typography, and over all …

Del Miedo A La Ternura: Deconstrucción De Imaginarios Constitutivos De La Iag Para Imaginarla Como Una Tecnología Futura, Elizabeth Rodríguez Rendon

GDI. Revista de investigación de Género, Diseño e Innovación

El artículo propone una reflexión crítica a modo de ensayo sobre los imaginarios sociotécnicos que han configurado históricamente el desarrollo de la tecnología y, particularmente, de la Inteligencia Artificial Generativa (IAG). Se sostiene que la ciencia moderna occidental se estructuró a partir del miedo como afecto dominante, heredado de las tradiciones prometeica y fáustica, las cuales promovieron una relación con la técnica basada en el control, la dominación de la naturaleza y el rechazo de la finitud humana. Desde esta lógica, la tecnología ha sido imaginada como instrumento de poder, defensa y superioridad, reforzando narrativas de fascinación y temor frente …

Where My Memory Settles, Rachel Kobb

Masters Theses

My memory is blurry but ever present in an atmospheric state. Through my investigations of memory and sensorial experience, this thesis is an attempt to understand how the body recalls the spaces I have spent the most time: my various homes through life.

The output of this thesis is a paper installation that layers and translates spatial qualities of my past homes. The home is not a neutral container, but instead a space that should support a sense of retreat and security. Drawing upon Gaston Bachelard’s zones of experience, I explore how a domestic space is moved through distinct zones. …

Jadughar: The House Of Magic, Dhruvi A. Shah

Masters Theses

Jadughar or the House of Magic is what people call a 'museum' in parts of South Asia. The practice of museum making, at its origin, is the act of collecting, preserving, interpreting and representing a culture’s tangible and intangible heritage to make it accessible to diverse audiences. Since the early 19th century such practices have been performed at various kala bhandars (art centers) in India, without the need of a formal or institutional organisation. The British introduced the model of a ‘museum’ in South Asia, with the aim of not only preserving ethnographic collections, but also showcasing their power and …

The Birdwatching Pause: Reframing Campus Life Through Everyday Bird Encounters, Katherine Zeng

Masters Theses

Birdwatching, typically framed as a leisure pursuit removed from everyday life, becomes here the organizing logic for a three-site campus route of restorative pause. The thesis departs from the assumption that nature must be sought out and instead asks what happens when the birds already present in urban space are made legible through design.

Three existing RISD buildings anchor the project, each organized around a distinct mode of encounter. At Carr Haus Café, a furniture-scaled insertion creates conditions for attentional reset through passive listening rather than active looking. At North Hall, a semi-open balcony garden introduces incidental, distanced contact with …

Strata: Portraits Of The Alvarado & The Southwest, Kayla R. Duncan

Masters Theses

History isn't the past; it is a continuing unfolding of the moment, yet we cannot feel time. We see traces of age through patina on copper, the wrinkles on a face from decades of laughter, or the holes in your favorite shirt. Similarly within architecture, what remains: ruins and fragments serve as layers that indicate the passage of time. In what ways are these layers exposed? Hidden? Erased? How do we determine what layers are worthy to be erased, maintained, or glorified as use of a structure or place continues to evolve through time?

The history of Albuquerque spans the …

Care Ecologies Between Knots, Eliza R. Marris

Masters Theses

Discarded fibers like raw wool behave the way harm reduction does. Harm reduction resists stigma and works to move beyond assumptions and oversimplifications of substance use and addiction. Wool is irregular, complicated, and emotionally charged. It resists compression and maintains its own being even when pulled apart. Working with raw wool is in relationship with complexity, as is harm reduction.

At its core, harm reduction is grounded in thoughtfulness and empathy towards people, their lived experience, and its nuances. It is a witness to lives, memories, and imprints, acknowledging the entangled realities of addiction. Our detachment from fiber remainders, materials …

Lace Memory Lab, Xinyu Han

Masters Theses

Lace, originally developed from European religious garments, has long been treated as a decorative and secondary textile craft. With its delicate hand-weaving, intricate patterns, and lightweight quality, lace has been widely used in clothing and furniture, it has always remained at the edge of spatial design. This thesis focuses on lace as a material memory, exploring how its characteristics can be translated into architectural language and integrated into the spatial practice of adaptive reuse of old buildings. When I think of lace, I notice the similar nature of its craftsmanship and spatial concepts.

What happens when lace is no longer …

Fallen Leaves:The Unseen, Forgotten, Presences That Live In Us, Juhee Cho

Masters Theses

The fallen leaf is a material figure of the unseen, forgotten moments that have made us and holds us still while remaining outside our sight. In urban environments, fallen leaves are managed as seasonal waste, collected and quickly separated from everyday encounter. Yet within ecological systems, they continue to participate in cycles of regeneration, becoming the soil that sustains new life. This quiet continuation is unavailable to the eye, yet known by the body. As a proof of this, the leaf’s transformation reveals itself not to the mind, but to the hand. The curling fiber wears out, the deepening brown, …

The Marathon Without Running: Experiencing A Runner's Sensorial Journey, Harin Kim

Masters Theses

The marathon is defined not by motion alone, but by the changing conditions a body moves through—and remains within—over time. Breath, cadence, heat, sound, crowd compression and attention fluctuate, producing phases that structure the race from within. These interior states are difficult to access by spectators from the sidelines, yet they are precisely what shape the runner’s experience.

This thesis begins with a simple but unconventional question: How can an exhibition translate the runner’s physical sensations and emotions into a multidimensional experience for spectators who do not run? Through a sequence of pop-up exhibitions placed along the New York City …

Household Hegemon: Domestic And Affective Traces Of Us Influence In Mexico In The 1950s And 1990s, Edgar Solórzano

Masters Theses

“Household Hegemon: Domestic and Affective Traces of US Influence in Mexico in the 1950s and 1990s” is a collection of personal essays, historical research, and fictional texts that examine the impact of US-American soft power on Mexican society. This project expands and deepens the research and work developed during my two-year MFA in Sculpture at RISD, evolving material investigations into a comprehensive written and visual record of the 1950s post-WWII boom and the 1990s post-NAFTA transition. These two decades not only represent the most significant in terms of American influence but also the years in which my parents and I …

Productive Armature, Gabriel Ofem Peter

Masters Theses

What if water was all you had, what if your only source of survival was a body of water? I shudder to think that some people get to be put in this situation in the world we live in. As I understand the importance of water to survival, it is obvious that water can be the only lifeline of survival for a community. This is the experience for residents of Makoko, Lagos. Their survival depends on the Lagos Lagoon, a large body of water flowing in from the Atlantic Ocean. This research looks beyond the surface of what this community …

Watershed Amendments: Assembling New Pervious Ground From Landscape Waste, Sophie Kaplan-Bucciarelli

Masters Theses

In Providence, Rhode Island, much of the downtown area is built over a vast historic tidal estuary. Though we no longer see the salt marshes, wooded bluffs, or meadows that once characterized this landscape, we recognize their absence in contemporary crises of urban heat, flooding, polluted soils and stormwater runoff, and habitat loss. These conditions are particularly acute along the city’s industrialized river corridors, where vacant lots and parking areas sit idle, their history paved over and potential constrained by limited imagination and resources.

These lots - already experiments in fill and land building after centuries of disturbance - can …