Architecture Commons^™

The Everyday Monument: Architectural And Spatial Transformations Of Rome's Nasoni, 1874–Present, Sandra L. Santos

McNair Summer Research Program

Rome's nasoni are small public drinking fountains that have provided free water throughout the city since 1874. There are approximately 2,500–2,800 nasoni in Rome, actively supplying people with free drinking water. Although they are usually understood as ordinary and mundane hydraulic infrastructure, their persistence across different political periods makes them useful objects for examining the relationship between architecture, public service, and political meaning. This research asks how the forms, materials, and spatial contexts of late-nineteenth-century nasoni differed from fountains constructed or modified during the Fascist era.

Over my three weeks of fieldwork in Rome, I documented seventy-five public drinking fountains …

Waterfront Ecologies: Coastal Resilience And Urbanization In Cali-Baja Region, Agniya Seliuzhytskaya

McNair Summer Research Program

This research contributes to “Waterfront Ecologies,” a binational initiative addressing urbanization and climate change along the San Diego-Tijuana coastal area and watershed systems. By examining the threshold between land and water, this paper investigates the impacts of sea-level rise, coastal erosion, watershed contamination, and rapid urban development. The study employs a case-study methodology focused on coastal conditions within the Cali-Baja region. Through this framework, it reviews planning history, environmental reports, and past precedent studies. Methodologically, the project produces analytical drawings and comprehensive base maps that synthesize regional environmental systems, urban patterns, topography, hydrology, and infrastructure.

Preliminary findings reveal that post-colonial …

Effective Locations And Landscape Design For Ev Charging Sites In The Intermountain West, Eli Woodward

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

The rapid growth of electric vehicle (EV) adoption in the United States, particularly in the Intermountain West, has created an increasing demand for accessible and well-distributed charging infrastructure, yet limited attention has been given to how site selection and landscape design influence the effectiveness and user experience of these locations. This thesis explores how EV charging stations can be strategically located and designed to improve usability, encourage engagement, and support local economic development through a multi-criteria site selection process that considers major transportation corridors, regional demographics, Opportunity Zones, and proximity to recreational and public lands. Using geographic information systems (GIS), …

Developing A Resilient Park For Palisade State Park: A Model For Intermountain West State Parks, Hirone T. Warner

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

Palisade State Park in central Utah is a cherished natural resource, offering diverse recreational opportunities and serving as an important ecological habitat. However, the park faces increasing challenges due to increasing visitation and the impacts of climate change. This thesis presents a strategic master plan for Palisade State Park, designed to guide its development over the next 20 years.

Recognizing the need for a sustainable approach, this project adopts a participatory method, involving park users, residents, and environmental experts in the planning process. The goal is to create a master plan that not only addresses the park’s immediate needs but …

The Development Of A Plant Database For Waterwise Plants Along The Intermountain West, Tyler G. Peterson

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

This thesis presents the rationale behind the importance of accurate 3D plant models. The research conducted provides logical explanations for why we should accurately represent plants in our 3D models, not only as landscape architects but as designers in general. In addition to this research, a database of waterwise plants was produced to provide designers with a resource to better represent landscapes. During the creation of this database, detailed process records were maintained to enable others to continue to add to and build on the work done within this thesis. It is hoped that this database, begun in this thesis, …

Reintegrating Contaminated Sites Into The Urban Fabric: Redevelopment In Pocatello, Idaho, Hadley Ocheltree

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

Brownfield sites represent some of the most environmentally compromised landscapes in the United States and are frequently concentrated within economically disadvantaged communities, raising important environmental justice concerns. Redeveloping these sites requires integrated approaches that address contamination, urban form, ecological restoration, and long term community needs. This thesis examines the 143 acre former Union Pacific Railroad site in Pocatello, Idaho and proposes a comprehensive redevelopment framework that reconnects a historically significant industrial landscape to the surrounding city.

The project draws from an analysis of eight precedent brownfield redevelopment projects and applies key planning and landscape architecture principles, including New Urbanism, pedestrian …

Retrofitting Chapel Lawns: Shifting The Landscaping Paradigm In Utah, Jessica Snider

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

Utah is facing a water crisis. The state’s aggressive rate of population growth combined with its dry climate makes it difficult to meet water demands and has pushed the Great Salt Lake to the verge of collapse. Utah residents can save water by installing waterwise landscapes instead of lawns. As one of Utah's most prominent organizations and a strong advocate for earth stewardship, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is well positioned to lead a cultural shift toward more sustainable landscaping practices by showcasing well-designed, well-maintained waterwise landscapes at its chapels. The purpose of this project is to …

A Design Guide For Extreme Heat In Play Environments: Exploring Landscape Architecture Strategies, Amy Elise Guenther

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

Urban heat is a rising concern and is affecting vulnerable populations such as our youth. A particular concern is exposure to extremely high temperatures on playgrounds – an environment that is meant to be safe for children even in extreme weather conditions. There has been an increase in many impervious surfaces such as concrete and asphalt in urban areas. These surfaces absorb solar radiation, which contributes to the heat island effect. These same surfaces are in and around playground areas, which are contributing to the extreme heat felt within these play environments. Therefore, requiring intervention to help mitigate the effects …

The Role Of Public Spaces In Facilitating Social Interactions On Summer Weekends, Sierra R. Murray

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Public spaces such as parks, plazas, and pedestrian areas are important places where people meet, relax, and interact with others. While these spaces are intended to bring communities together, their design does not always support social interaction. This study explored how everyday design features influence how people use public spaces and engage with one another. Features such as seating, trees and plants, shade, water elements, and the way spaces are shaped were examined. The goal was to better understand how design choices affect social life in shared outdoor environments. 

The research involved observing how people naturally behaved in different public …

The Impact Of Ai On The Landscape Design Process, Jacob Owen Huff

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more common in design fields, including landscape architecture. For example, AI has been used to visually analyze park aesthetics and generate landscape design concepts (Jahani et al., 2022; Senem et al., 2023; Ploennigs & Berger, 2023). This study explores how AI, specifically an image-generation tool called Midjourney, affects the design process for landscape architecture students.

Students completed two design projects—one using AI-generated images and one using traditional, non-AI precedent images. Their final designs were evaluated by professional landscape architects who did not know which designs had been influenced by AI. Students also completed surveys about …

Visibility Assessment In Urban Areas: Exploring Measures And Approaches For Viewing Green Space, Doo Hong Lee

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Urban greenery is often used to understand the quality of living conditions in cities. However, measuring greenery is not always simple. Some methods show how much vegetation exists from above, while others try to show what people actually see while walking or moving through streets. These are different ways of understanding green space. This dissertation focuses on visible greenness, or the greenery that people can see from eye level in everyday urban environments.

This research addresses a practical problem. Many existing methods for measuring visible greenness require large image datasets, advanced computing, or commercial street-view images. These requirements can make …

Modern Instructional Science, Ai Integrated Pedagogy & Innovation In Higher Education, Yasmeen Ahmed

Presentations and Posters

The rapid evolution of digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping teaching, learning, and knowledge production across higher education. This one-day faculty development workshop, Modern Instructional Science, AI-Integrated Pedagogy & Innovation in Higher Education, explores contemporary approaches to designing, delivering, and enhancing student-centered learning experiences in both face-to-face and online environments. The workshop introduces key principles of instructional science, course design, active learning, formative assessment, and learner engagement, supported by established educational theories and evidence-based best practices. Participants examine strategies for developing well-organized, outcome-aligned courses; fostering collaboration and meaningful interaction; and enhancing student success through effective instructional planning …

Sheep Pen Improvements At City Farm Slo, Rylan Joseph Hickman

Construction Management

This project took place on a non-profit community farming space called City Farm SLO which provides opportunities for local small scale independent farmers to farm and provide crops to the community. Our project provided improvements to the livestock pen that they have on the farm which is home to chickens and a flock of sheep. The main goal of this project was to provide a better living environment for the sheep including a 50 cubic yard sheep hill, a vehicle access gate, a side gate, a front catch pen, a back corral, and protective fencing for a guava tree. Within …

Landscape Repositories: Mapping Post-Mining Narratives In Asbestos, Qc Val-Des-Sources, Qc, Rasha Lama

Masters Theses

Landscape Repositories: Mapping Social Narratives in Asbestos, QC Val-des-Sources, QC proposes the ‘landscape repository’ as a tool for landscape literacy and cultural legitimacy that integrates histories, geographies, and social narratives to inform grounded and place-based post-mining futures.

Val-des-Sources, Québec (formerly Asbestos, QC) is a place whose extraction legacies and material histories are deeply interwoven into its contemporary economy and cultural landscape. The centre of town is the Jeffrey Mine, once the world’s largest open-pit asbestos mine that is deep enough to hide the Eiffel Tower entirely. Ceased in 2012, the 130-year-old Jeffrey Mine and sixty-one other Québec asbestos sites once …

Rooted Retreat: Integrating Community Land Stewardship And Gardening Into Managed Retreat For Generational Connection To Place, Brooke E. Dutton

Masters Theses

Retreat from vulnerable floodplain landscapes is inevitable, and will only become a more pressing issue as climate change exacerbates flood risk. Unfortunately, it is a process that results in displacement of a community; people are uprooted from a place, and from each other. Post-retreat landscapes are largely converted to conservation land, re-naturalized floodplains, abandoned, ghostly neighborhoods, or public parks.

But this thesis wants to challenge the status quo retreat process, and consider the possibility of retreat not being destructive, but generative. Retreat can instead be an opportunity for reconciliation, stewardship, cooperation, and community building.

How can gardening and long-term community …

Social Soils: Reclaiming The Urban Pedosphere, Manal Dar

Masters Theses

Soil is in crisis. A third of the world’s soils are already degraded, and by 2050 that number may reach 90%, threatening biodiversity, climate stability, and food security. Urban soils, in particular, carry the layered records of industrial residue and environmental mistakes, disproportionately impacting immigrant and racialized communities.

The thesis asks what happens when landscape architecture begins from the root up, taking soil as both problem and possibility. Social Soils takes on the case study of Greenpoint, where both organic and inorganic contaminants in the soil such as lead, arsenic, PAHs and VOCs pose serious health risks to the inhabitants. …

Framing The Slow Landscape, Beiqi Feng

Masters Theses

Chinese classical gardens embed a set of spatial framing principles that shape how landscapes are seen, moved through, and experienced over time. Through framing, concealment, and pathway-guided movement, these gardens create layered spatial experiences that gradually unfold rather than reveal themselves all at once. Drawing from The Craft of Gardens by Ji Cheng, Scholar Gardens of China by R. Stewart Johnston, and The Classical Gardens of China by Yang Hongxun, this thesis identifies and synthesizes key spatial framing strategies embedded within Chinese classical gardens.

The thesis then critiques contemporary American urban landscapes, focusing on Higginson Circle in Boston, where openness …

Where The Walls Came Down: Reimagining The Disaster-Induced Modern Ruin, Zhenmi Tang

Masters Theses

In contemporary society, large-scale destructive events are continuously generating a new architectural condition: the modern ruin. Unlike historical ruins shaped and legitimized through time, the remnants left by war, wildfires, and other natural disasters remain embedded in lived reality and collective memory. These environments are not distant artifacts of the past, but recently inhabited spaces whose material presence and social meaning remain active. However, prevailing reconstruction practices tend to prioritize complete demolition and site clearance, followed by rebuilding on restored empty ground. While this approach provides reliability in terms of safety, engineering, and regulation, it often interrupts the material and …

After Yellow Horse: From Passive Shelter To A Self-Sustaining Cycle, Xinyuan Liu

Masters Theses

Spatial flexibility—specifically, the ability of a single building to shift between therapeutic and productive use—offers a critical alternative to the institutional passivity of conventional care facilities, repositioning architecture as an active agent in both the financial sustainability of nonprofit organizations and the social recovery of their patients.

During my time volunteering at Yellow Horse Equine Therapy Center in Ashaway, Rhode Island, the core contradictions of the traditional equine therapy model became visible firsthand. Yellow Horse had operated for years on goodwill and volunteers. The daily reality of the facility was one of persistent understaffing: barn chores, groundskeeping, and routine maintenance …

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 …

Edge Of Shade, Zhengguang (Lancelot) Li

Masters Theses

Shadow is usually treated as a by-product of architecture. In public space, however, it quietly shapes comfort, orientation, movement, and the willingness to pause or stay. This thesis asks how shadow can become a spatial material that is designed, assembled, and occupied.

Drawing from East Asian architectural and garden traditions, the project studies shade as a condition between exposure and protection. Field research in Providence serves as a testing ground, where three sites represent typical urban gap conditions: a linear passage, an open civic ground, and a neighborhood lot. These sites reveal how existing shadows, circulation, and public use are …

The Disappearing Shore, Marguerite Kreuzkamp

Masters Theses

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Weaving Grounds: Connecting Canyons And Empowering Borderland Communities, Maria D. Lopez Vazquez

Masters Theses

National policies materialize in the United States-Mexico political divide, also known as the borderlands. Willow Canyon is a dissected land form inextricably linked to the Tijuana River watershed, forming with the adjacent landforms on both sides of the border one landscape. The Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty¹, signed in 1848 by the US and Mexican governments, traced an arbitrary line across these landscapes, disregarding their relationship. The consequences of these actions are visible in the physical deterioration of the landscape and ecology, as the hydrological cycle has been modified. In the 1940’s, the picturesque flow of Willow Canyon was dissected by urbanization, …

Unleashing Material Agencies, Yahui Chen

Masters Theses

Contemporary architectural practice has come to rely on a narrow repertoire of high-energy industrial materials, giving rise to what might be called a material "hegemonic structure" in which certain substances and construction logics dominate at the expense of others. This dominance suppresses material diversity and limits architecture's capacity to align with ecological processes, producing a systemic metabolic imbalance within the built environment. At its root, this imbalance reflects a structural absence: the persistent treatment of architecture as a closed, controllable system that imposes human will upon matter while suppressing its inherent agency.

Engaging with what Jane Bennett terms "vital materialism," …

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 …

Carve, Release, Expand: A Spatial Exploration Of The Clandestine Music Spaces Of Chicago, Katie Lesh

Masters Theses

The architectural disciplines, and particularly that of landscape architecture and urban design, have shifted into focusing on “revival” of public and urban spaces but what does this truly mean? On the surface it can look like taking warehouse districts in a city and creating a master plan to turn them into artist villages or taking space underneath a highway to turn into a linear park. But what is lost in the process of doing so? The question is much bigger than myself but in the case of Chicago, the city has been home to vibrant music and art communities that …

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 …

Learning From The Remains: Meditations On Sustainability, Julae Tan

Masters Theses

What remains when a person or material assemblage is stripped of its

component parts?

What is left is the remainder, an irreductible core.

Purely cerebral learning can be fleeting. A hybrid approach of cerebral and

visceral, “perverse” learning grounded in a familial understanding of the

remainder yields a more resilient pedagogy that endures long after leaving the

site of formal education.

This research was completed under the aegis of the 2025/26 Sustainability

Design Lab and features the subject of making with paper discards as the

primary mode of interrogation.

Via a collection of essays, a literature review, as well as …

Embodied River: Deliberate Unbuilding In Post-Dam Landscapes, Travis Kelley

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the possibilities and challenges that legacy hydro-powered dams and mill complexes offer. Through historical and contemporary analysis of New England’s 14,000 dams and of a particular site in Maynard, Massachusetts, the research delves into the factors that make these interventions so challenging. It begins from an assumption rooted in the ethical and environmental imperative to remove or modify legacy dams, which are those built for a purpose that is no longer being utilized, and rejects the existing binary of “remove” vs “preserve,” which is the dominant narrative in the dam removal conversation as it exists in 2026. …

How Did A Pandemic Impact Park Usage Among The Older Adult Populations In Memphis, Tn?, Katherine Barlow

Theses and Dissertations

During COVID-19 older adults’ populations were a vulnerable demographic, and through a review of existing literature it was determined that there is limited research about park and outdoor space use during COVID-19 by older adults. This research seeks to address these gaps by examining how a pandemic impacted park usage among the older adult population (age 60+) in Memphis, TN at Shelby Farms Park. This study examines the comparison of park use during (2020-2023) and after (2023-present) COVID-19. A mixed methods approach was employed. Wilcoxon Signed Rank test was run to analyze the survey data and a significant statistical difference. …