Architecture Commons^™

The Second Horizon, Roger Labib

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the obsolescence of heavy industry as a spatial and infrastructural condition through which the contemporary metropolis can be reimagined. In Chicago, the grain, lumber, steel, and meat industries, along with the railways, rivers, and logistical systems that connected them, produced a first horizon: a metropolitan landscape organized by material production, labor, extraction, and the movement of goods. These industries did not only shape the city physically; they generated forms of collective life through their excesses; heat, smoke, water, neighborhoods, union halls, taverns, and labor communities.

Today, a new industrial force is emerging through data infrastructure. Computation, artificial …

Stinkin' Lincoln, Carrie Anderson

Masters Theses

Stinkin’ Lincoln is a study of the different modes of architectural preservation in the town of Lincoln, Maine, and how historical precedents of building reuse can inform new strategies for workforce housing as the town revitalizes its mill. After an explosion at the Lincoln Pulp and Paper Mill in 2015 left the town of Lincoln devoid of its signature scent and created millions in environmental damage and job loss, Lincoln is finally taking steps to reintroduce industry into the space of the mill with a new biofuels refinery. This influx of economy requires additional workforce housing, something the town is …

Another Palace For The People, Kate Holbrook

Masters Theses

Coined the “Palace for the People,” the American public library was established as a free, democratic haven for the public’s literary and educational needs. Adapting to the changing needs of its patrons, the public library’s services have extended beyond book access to provided services ranging from tool rentals to warming centers, postal services, and more. As both an essential landmark of the physical city through its exterior and provider of social infrastructure on its interior, public libraries seek sustainable avenues to continue their tradition of gathering, idea exchange, and provision. Expanding upon the identity of the public library as a …

Growing Pains Inc., Abigail B. Jarvis

Masters Theses

In Mierle Laderman Ukeles' "Manifesto for Maintenance Art”, Ukeles describes an art practice that reveals the invisible labor of daily upkeep and care, describing development as “pure individual creation; progress; advance,” and maintenance as “keep the dust off the pure individual creation, preserve the new; sustain the change”.

Growing Pains Inc. is embodied in a collection of patterns that dresses and addresses the changes buildings of New Bedford Massachusetts have experienced. It is driven by an attention to stewardship and care for our buildings that have been with us through generations. This thesis is about Growing Pains Incorporated. It speculates …

The Disappearing Shore, Marguerite Kreuzkamp

Masters Theses

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Ark-Ipelago: Or, The Voluntary Prisoners Of Archaeology, Michel Song

Masters Theses

By the end of 2200, Venice becomes a submerged archaeological specimen. Ark-ipelago rejects defensive preservation, weaponizing heritage into an offensive spatial regime. An elevated macro-grid re-contains urban life within climate-controlled tubes, transforming catastrophic climate exile into a total voluntary exodus of planetary survival.

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 …

A Charging Station As Part Of The Island's Energy Metabolism, Kaya Lee

Masters Theses

In an age of energy scarcity, Jeju Island faces an opposite condition. It produces more renewable electricity than it can absorb during the day. This thesis explores how architecture can respond to that surplus.

As Jeju moves toward its Carbon Free Island vision, electric vehicles become more than transportation. They act as mobile batteries, absorbing electricity by day and returning it at night. Through this rhythm, the charging station becomes part of the island’s energy metabolism.

The project reimagines the EV charging station as living infrastructure. It is not only a technical device, but a place of rest, food, and …

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, …

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 …

Textile Tectonics: Weaving Memory, Body, And Belonging, Jennifer Stageberg

Masters Theses

This work delves into the idea of home as a sensory experience. Separating the feeling of home from the physical space of the house I aim to create new spaces that give the occupant autonomy and foster intimate connections with the material of the architecture. This is done with the hope of creating homes more attuned to the human body that provide a sense of belonging.

I propose repositioning the home as an intermediary space between our bodies and our surroundings. Approaching it through the lens of textiles to explore the sensory experience a home could provide. A series of …

One: The Body, Architecture, And The Environment, Anna Crookston

Masters Theses

Perception alters action, and action alters reality. My work explores architecture as a means of reconnecting the body to the environment. Rather than acting as a barrier from the natural world, architecture becomes a frame through which the body can perceive its relationship to place. Raised in Eden, Utah, near the Wasatch Mountains and Pineview Reservoir, I developed an awareness of environmental stewardship through observing the neglect and rezoning of a local wildlife corridor by governing bodies. I view environmental crises not as isolated political problems, but as symptoms of a culture that sees itself as separate from nature. My …

American Paradise, Virginia Hanusik

Masters Theses

The following is a collection of stories and ideas about the making of our physical and emotional worlds, along with their fracturing, deconstruction, and degradation within the American industrial landscape.  It suggests the value of the unknown and the grace of mistakes, emotional and material friction, and the hiccups that come with learning.

For American Paradise, I’m bringing my interest in landscape extraction, and the people and families within them, to my own autobiography. In this work I turn to where I grew up, the people that brought me there, my connection to manual labor, and the use of specific …

The Wall As Commons, Raveena Deshpande

Masters Theses

Collective infrastructures for informal domesticity 

As urban populations grow, access to affordable housing declines, pushing certain sections of the population to build informal settlements outside legal and formal construction systems. These settlements often lack access to basic living infrastructures - water, sanitation, and electricity- even as they house a large share of the population in developing countries.

Current models of designing for informality exist as top down planning approaches, that ignore lived realities at the scale of the home. These design models are incongruent with informal lifestyles, and undermine the sense of belonging that comes with rituals of self-authorship in …

Somatic Prosthetics For Planetary Resonance, Disha Dharesh Kumar R

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates how industrial design can transcend extractive technological paradigms in favor of relational interfaces that foster planetary attunement. Framing the climate crisis as a 'crisis of imagination', the research challenges the Western bifurcation of nature and culture by drawing on Indic cosmologies- which recognize stones, plants, and ecosystems as conscious at different levels and participants in a shared cosmic field. By synthesizing research in Biosemiotics, Quantum Information Pansycishm, and Neuroscience, the project redefines intelligence as a distributed, more-than-human phenomenon.

The research materializes as a speculative design artifact: a device that functions as a somatic prosthetic for planetary resonance. …

Knowledge_Scapes, Lauren F. Davis

Masters Theses

This landscape is embraced through a distributed network of low-impact research stations positioned along the river corridor. Inhabited by field scientists and accessible to river tourists, these stations act as infrastructural characters that connect ecological research with embodied experience. Lightweight and modular assemblies integrate environmental sensing technologies, water collection systems, and deployable fabric structures, softening the relationship between infrastructure and landscape while translating large-scale environmental processes into intimate encounters. The project imagines a new pilgrimage through Glen Canyon as a living landscape of entanglement where infrastructure, ecology, and human responsibility become inseparable.

Hidden Systems, Samuel Choi

Masters Theses

Across buildings and cities, moisture is managed, concealed, and discharged through convoluted systems of containment. Still, water ultimately resists this framework. It reveals itself as leaks, puddles, condensation—moments typically understood as technical failure. Hidden Systems reframes these conditions as architectural knowledge, one that becomes evidence of water’s material capacity, limits of infrastructure, and a record of time.

NYC is constructed on, powered by, and profiting from water. Although it hosts a robust network, seepages disrupt control, allowing systems to be traced across scales. As pipes expand, contract, and freeze, the project unfolds seasonally, moving through water’s three states: solid, liquid, …

Museum Of Fragments, Shuchang Fan

Masters Theses

What happens to architecture after it is no longer a building? In the drifting fragments of demolished courtyards, abandoned film sets, and forgotten timber joints, I trace the lingering pulse of history. Can they be stitched together to form a living encyclopedia? I began by looking at traditional Chinese architecture as living cultural archives, where ancient beliefs, living styles, religions, landscapes, typologies, and forms are represented in physical spaces. Through the principles of borrowed scenery, framed views, and sequential unfolding, natural and constructed elements turn into narrative devices. Today, these worlds scatter across construction sites and studio back-lots. In places …

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 …

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. …

Open Forms, Barbara Cutlak

Masters Theses

Open Forms

Architecture always exists in relation to the context in which it stands. There is no way, however, to anticipate how the constructed space will be inhabited, or transformed by the surroundings — and so, it remains open to discovery and change. Graphic design form can operate in a similar way: opening itself to a context by offering multiple ways of seeing, interacting and being performed.

Drawing from the contexts that have informed my practice — my training in architecture and the artistic movements of Brazil, my home country — Open Forms experiments with how to translate these spatial …

Billiards Cosmographies, Camilla Radoyce, Camilla Radoyce

Masters Theses

The world is full of systems too large to change. Climate catastrophe, extraction, infrastructure, and property organize everyday life while remaining largely invisible in their totality. We possess the tools to alter these conditions, yet the same arrangements continue to return. The same worlds are built again and again.

Billiards Cosmographies treats billiards as a way of thinking about how humans organize around inherited systems and enduring forms. This thesis proposes the billiards table not as a fixed object, but as a gizmo: a device for imagining how new social worlds might be assembled from a constellation of what already …

Fragments Of The Grassland, Zihan Liu

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates Tibetan nomadic pastoralism in the Himalayan region, where habitation is inseparable from seasonal migration and environmental conditions. Focusing on Ganzi County in Sichuan Province, where nomadic and settled lifestyles coexist.

The research positions "documentation" as both method and design driver, provides a possibility that architecture can mediate cultural continuity and coexistence between Tibetan nomadic pastoralism and its surrounding culture. By transforming documentation methodology into a design methodology, the mobility of architecture has become into a spatial strategy. Through a mobile marketplace, the project enables ongoing exchange between nomadic and settled lifestyles and among diverse cultural groups, positioning …

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," …

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 …

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. …

V.1 Fall 2025, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Fall 2025 issue contains articles on the intersection of the natural world and human experience, technology, identity, immigration, activism, divestment, institutional history, political resistance, decolonization, and the digital vs. physical realms. The issue contains experimental poetry, visual essays, and reflections on the "nature of publication".

The Arch And The Looking Glass: Umbli Cu Cioara Vopsitǎ, Ana Popescu

Masters Theses

The Arch and The Looking Glass: Umbli Cu Cioara Vopsită (You Are Walking Around with a Painted Crow)

A thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Fine Arts in Ceramics in the Department of Ceramics of the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island.

By Ana Popescu, 2025

Approved by Master’s Examination Committee:

Lesley Baker, Shoji Satake (Chair), Heather Bhandari, Tucker Houlihan

Date: May 17th, 2025

Location: Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island

To be opened for self-reflection in 10 years, on May 17th, 2035:

I’ve been mulling over how to make …

Untitled, Seung Ho Jeon

Masters Theses

We are, by our very own nature, confined within our own lived experiences. To transcend our inherent loneliness, we seek ways to fulfill a fundamental sense of belonging through symbolic interactions. The external world we navigate is a subjective framework constructed through repetitive, mundane interaction, and as actors, we participate in such monotonous performances as a means to create shared meaning.

Such performance manifests as a collective entity - an intangible force that is not bound by institutionalized systems, emerging organically from grassroots beliefs and practices. Throughout the performance, there are symbols - artifacts, space, and interactions. And these transformative …