Architecture Commons^™

Wetland Rehabilitation Through Interspecies Co-Design, Charanya Rajan Ms.

Masters Theses

This thesis challenges the notion of Human Exceptionalism by examining the agency of the North American Beaver (Castor canadensis) in rehabilitating a 50 acre parcel of land on the Woonasquatucket River watershed, Rhode Island, USA. By reimagining the site without its current commercial and industrial land uses, the project aims to contribute to the nationwide effort of creating and restoring wetlands degraded and damaged over the centuries by human activity. Finally, a pathway running through the site along the river connects to the Woonasquatucket Greenway further down south, with strategically placed look-out points, allowing humans to witness and, therefore, acknowledge …

Tree Story, Jia Hu

Masters Theses

What is Nature?

Nature is a system of intelligence. It means designing for efficiency—often by learning from strategies that have evolved over time. In my research, I use patterns to interpret and decode nature.

To explore nature, I began with the red cedar tree, aiming to simulate and predict its growth patterns—forms shaped by both internal biology and external forces. By analyzing its geometry, I sought to understand how trees embody the dynamic relationship between organism and environment. These patterns reveal the adaptive logic of life.

Patterns are central to understanding nature. While tree geometry may appear chaotic, it follows …

More Than Her Othering Narrative, Jiayi Zhang

Masters Theses

Following feminist theory and spatial critique, this thesis challenges the kitchen’s traditional function as an enclosed site of invisible domestic labor. It reclaims the kitchen as an open, public, and empowering space. In so doing, it reframes it as a critical site of collective resistance, care, and community building.

Fall River, MA is a post-industrial city marked by disinvestment and food insecurity. This thesis integrates existing food pantries and public landscapes into a network of community kitchens using repurposed vacant lots and an existing bike path. These multi-functional spaces where food is grown, cooked, and shared, become an infrastructure of …

Prosthesis, Alexander A. Grosek

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the hospital as a prosthetic—a structural and spatial support for the human body in moments of vulnerability. Like a crutch or cast, the hospital temporarily supports patients in their transition from horizontal (infirm) to vertical (mobile), yet its architecture often fails to contribute meaningfully to that healing process. While clinical treatment is prioritized, the spatial, emotional, and sensory dimensions of care are neglected. What supports what becomes a central question: the building holds the body, but the body also gives meaning to the building. Their relationship is reciprocal.

Rather than proving that good design improves health—an idea …

The (Im)Possibility Of Existing (Conditions), Emily Hesse

Masters Theses

The Impossibility of Existing challenges the prevailing cycle of demolition and new construction in the building industry, which contributes to an alarming 40% of total global solid waste, about 90% of which comes from demolition alone. This waste is due to perceived irrelevance of architectural style and spatial utility, rather than material degradation. In other words, buildings are often destroyed not because they fail functionally, but because they no longer conform to current aesthetic or cultural norms. For example, natural stone is useful and stable for one hundred years or more, but the speed of modern kitchen trends sees homeowners …

Revealing Watery Geologies: Softening The Mississippi River Bluffs In Saint Paul, Minnesota, Chloe Kahn

Masters Theses

How is a place shaped by the geologies beneath it? In Saint Paul, Minnesota, the geologic ground tells the story of the different forces and processes that shaped it through time, but in the most recent geologic period of the anthropocene, industrialization and urban development have covered up these stories. On the edge of downtown, where the city meets the Mississippi River, an eighty foot concrete wall replaces the natural form of the bluff shaped by glacial and riverine activity. This thesis peels back the anthropogenic materials we encounter every day and explores Saint Paul through deep time– exploring how …

Foundations Of Belonging, Yerim Jang

Masters Theses

In the early 1900s, hundreds of thousands of immigrants displaced by World War II sought refuge in the United States, drawn by the promise of a new life and the hope of finding community in an unfamiliar land. To navigate the challenges of a new country, these immigrants formed ethnic social clubs that provided essential support, including housing, employment, and spaces for social connection. Over time, as later generations assimilated and established new identities, these once-thriving social hubs diminished, barely operating their original functions and transitioned into bars, event halls, or restaurants. Since the early 2000s, a new wave of …

Immersive Stillness In Poetic Space: Textiles For An Uncertain World, Dora Hyunjung Kim

Masters Theses

In an era shaped by environmental crises, the erosion of seasonal rhythms, cultural uncertainty, and the accelerating pace of technological shifts, this thesis explores how textiles—through their tactility, atmosphere, and quiet presence—can serve as vessels for meditative and emotional spaces, which I refer to as "poetic spaces." In the midst of countless unpredictable variables and a rapidly evolving cultural landscape, there is a growing need for environments where silence and quiet reflection can unfold. Within this broader context, poetic space functions not merely as an aesthetic concept, but as a vital site for emotional grounding and inner restoration.

This research …

The House At The End Of Time, Gyles Jose Antonio Ferrao

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates the architectural potential of thresholds as spaces of psychological and metaphysical transformation, positioning the edge not as a boundary but as a generative spatial condition. Drawing upon Carl Jung’s conception of dream architecture as a symbolic map of the self, the project proposes a nonlinear exploration of architecture through layered references that operate across metaphysical scales. The house becomes a medium through which the liminal is made tangible, a temporal and spatial construct that blurs the binary oppositions of life and death, memory and forgetting, reason and absurdity, consciousness and the unconscious.

The project conceptualizes architecture as …

Terrashift, Mill Jignesh Shah, Mill Shah

Masters Theses

Keywords: Adaptive Reuse, Vernacular Craftsmanship, Food Security, Urban Agriculture, Community Revitalization, Heritage Preservation, Regenerative Design

In India’s rapidly urbanizing landscape, Tier-I cities continue to dominate as aspirational centers, leaving smaller towns to face depopulation, economic drift, and cultural amnesia. Terrashift challenges this imbalance by proposing a regenerative model that reclaims the vitality of Tier-II and Tier-III towns through the layered strategies of adaptive reuse, vernacular craftsmanship, and integrated food systems.

Centered in Sidhpur, Gujarat—a town rich with Bohra Muslim architectural heritage and centuries of Hindu-Muslim cultural synthesis—this project envisions the transformation of abandoned havelis into vibrant community anchors. These spaces, …

Almost Architecture, Almost [ Other ] : Examining Approximative Methods Of Design Through The Lens Of Hydrologic Structures, Pateton Gonzales

Masters Theses

This thesis is centered in Gallup, NM, a border town to the Navajo Nation Reservation. The town exists amidst a growing water crisis in the four corners region, with around 1/3rd of the reservation not having a reliable source of running water within their homes. The entirety of the area relies heavily on stored groundwater in subterranean sandstone aquifers, with little to no surface water sources to replenish the water that gets extracted. Gallup itself sits in a small pocket, landlocked by the reservations checkerboard of ownership. Amidst an overall increase in scarcity and misuse, this thesis proposes approximation as …

Living Heritage, Aysenur Cetin

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on urban interventions designed to enhance the functionality and public engagement of Istanbul’s historic Golden Horn walls, while restoring their cultural presence in the city’s collective memory. Although these walls represent centuries of historical and architectural significance, from their Byzantine foundations to their layered Ottoman adaptations, they remain largely overlooked by those who encounter them daily. Fragmented, hidden, or absorbed into informal urban development, the walls have become background elements in a rapidly evolving city.

Through a combination of lightweight, site-sensitive design strategies and educational initiatives, this project aims to reinterpret the Golden Horn walls as accessible, …

Built For Belonging: An Exploration Of The Mutual Adoption Between Human And Home, Jillian Edwards

Masters Theses

In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Halton’s book, The Meaning of Things, they bring to our attention that ‘few English words are filled with the emotional meaning of the word “home”,’ and that many other languages lack even one word with the same connotation. So as one of the unique cultures that has verbalized and contextualized this deep connection to the home, it feels like our responsibility to interrogate it further in order to understand why it exists and how we can design so everyone can experience it. This thesis explores the transformation of space into home and a human into …

New Water Order - The Leaky Vessel, Anand Upadhayay

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates the hydro-social entanglements between water, people, and architecture—reframing built form as an active participant in the negotiation of ecological flows and social life. Positioned within landscapes marked by the infrastructural neglect of water, the project explores how architecture can act as a hydro-social mediator—gathering, filtering, storing, and distributing not just water, but also cultural memory, communal rituals, and environmental knowledge. Through the symbolic and spatial construct of The Leaky Vessel, the thesis proposes a civic architecture rooted in indigenous water practices, seasonal rhythms, and collective care—where design becomes a vessel for both sustenance and transformation.

A Weathering Narrative: Architecture As A Living Archive Of Time And Change, Estephania Granados

Masters Theses

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The Blue Below Still Breathes, Yiyi Wang

Masters Theses

The Blue Below Still Breathes explores disappearance transformation rather than loss—a shift in visibility that reveals the pressures, absences, and structures shaping perception. Across interactive installations and print works, I examine how power operates through omission, fragility, and formal control. At the heart of this practice is printmaking, reimagined as a responsive, impermanent medium that challenges its historical association with fixedness.

The thesis installation features a 5x5 grid of thermochromic screenprints of a concrete wall, where viewer proximity activates a randomized sequence of heating panels. As heat raises the temperature of the surface, a field of blue gradually emerges, breaking …

Transplant Transplant(Ed) Transplant(Ing), So Jung Yoon

Masters Theses

Boundaries shape our lives and identities. The tangible presence of boundaries becomes a medium for engaging with the world—such as who occupies a space and how, or what tools are deemed valid in a design process. These boundaries aren’t always visible; they’re embedded in systems, habits, and assumptions that shape how we move, create, and are recognized. They extend far beyond fixed geographies and the specific positions we occupy within them.

Transplanting is the process by which things are moved or move across boundaries in hopes of being planted, finding a place to stay. Though it can be a search …

Site-Specific Nurseries: Reconnecting Nurseries To Time And Place Through Ecotypic Bare-Root Production, Tryn Collins

Masters Theses

We surround ourselves with empty landscapes, landscapes that are stagnant and decorative. Lawns edged with cultivated non-native species are inert spaces, devoid of complexity and serve little function beyond their appearances. These spaces that symbolize wealth through controlling nature are in fact the end of nature. Most of us are completely unaware of the intricate webs of life, the ecologies, that are our real habitat, hidden under the concrete and turf, pushed to the edges of our developments. They are relationships established over thousands of years between plants, insects, animals, weather and soil. This kind of complexity scares us, it …

Building Ecologies: Maintaining Land, Working With Wood, Taylor Jais

Masters Theses

This thesis critiques contemporary architecture and building practices for their fundamentally unsustainable and place-less assemblies that rely on extracting finite resources that generate significant emissions while simultaneously neglecting to consider the needs and existence of humans and non-human species with in the built environment. Through experimental material research that diverts “wood” waste streams and integrates land and multispecies care, this work demonstrates how maintenance-based approaches to construction can transform built assemblies into ecological systems. By deconstructing wood to its cellular components and recombining these elements in novel ways, this research reveals possibilities for collaborative, materials-driven, place-based building practices. This thesis …

The Sixth Interface: The Integration Of Drone Infrastructure With Low-Altitude Landscape, Shicheng Tang

Masters Theses

This project focuses on the design of outdoor vertical space in Hong Kong in response to the development of China’s Low-Altitude Economy. It explores the integration of these spaces with drones. Through site design and planning, the project uses existing rooftops, parks, and public plazas to create multi-functional drone infrastructure. These spaces enable low-altitude logistics while providing additional social benefits such as public recreation facilities. These landscape enhancements create a harmonious synergy between technology and ecology.

Central to this work is the concept of “The Sixth Interface”, a new spatial layer between the ground and the sky where drone-driven flows …

Eco-Posthumanism — A Utopian Transformation Of Modernist Residence, Shuli Wu

Masters Theses

The Eco-Posthuman Manifesto, in this thesis, serves as a framework for spatial transformation within the context of the Anthropocene. As of 2020, the weight of human-made matter has surpassed all living biomass. This shift is both material and symbolic. It exposes the consequences of human-centered development and calls for a rethinking of architecture’s relationship with life, time, and ecology. Taking the Barbican Estate as a case study, the thesis proposes a 100-year transformation, shifting the site from a concrete, human-optimized housing complex to a living biome shared by humans, non-humans, and embedded technologies. Through design strategies such as Miyawaki afforestation, …

Space, Life And Capital: The Metabolic Rift, Zhongsu Cheng

Masters Theses

The recent avian influenza crisis exposes the fundamental contradictions of capitalist spatial production. By compressing life into optimized enclosures, industrialized poultry farming has effectively transformed these spaces into "laboratories of viral evolution" breeding grounds for zoonotic diseases in the pursuit of maximum efficiency. This crisis is not an isolated event but rather a spatialized metabolic rift: the logic of capital disrupts natural cycles, accelerating ecological and systemic collapse. At the heart of this crisis lies a critical architectural question: If capitalism organizes and encloses life within space to maximize value, can architecture be reimagined not merely as an instrument of …

Restoring Qi In Urbanism: Restoring Spatial Connectivity And Energy Dynamics Through Landscape Intervention, Jiaqi Pan

Masters Theses

This thesis explores how Taoist “Qi”, a dynamic energy flow, can provide a productive lens for approaching contemporary landscape architecture.

Taking the ancient city of Tai’an in China as a case study, I analyze the historical changes made to its Qi network at the urban scale. This draws a carrier theory that Qi could be examined by water connectivity and spatial porosity. Thereby, I further establish the dynamic network relationship between landscape factors and Qi.

Blending ancient philosophy with modern ecological thinking, I proposed Qi carrier theory for healing Qi ruptures in urban landscapes. Through design in White Horse Village, …

Exploring Al Balad, Danah Alqunfuzi

Masters Theses

Al Balad is a well-known destination for Jeddah’s visitors. With its inclusion in UNESCO World Heritage, the site has been transforming to fit the standards and become a more tourist destination. The reason the site is included in UNESCO is due to its diversity and unique architecture and sense of place. Preservation of this type is problematic because it threatens to suppress the dynamics that gave rise to Al Balad, freezing it in time. This thesis asks: How can landscape representation capture agents of change, the present moment, and the past so that the forces that breathe life in historically …

Pulped Landscapes, Allison P. Abrams

Masters Theses

Large corporations control intensive and extractive industrial land use practices through acts of dumping, capping, and neglect. The abandonment of industrial sites is increasing as well as the environmental consequences of such actions. How can impacted communities proactively engage in remediation processes while post-industrial sites sit in limbo?

With the former Foley Cellulose Plant in Perry, Florida (closed in 2023) as a case study, this thesis researches and speculates on potentials of phytoremediation experimentation and harvesting of plant fibers on contaminated soils. The site is a pulped landscape: land directly impacted by intensive, large corporation-led pulp production practices that is …

Mass To Mineral: Edge Complexity For An Urbanized Floodplain, Maya Sosland

Masters Theses

In the context of channelized rivers, urbanized floodplains, and sea level rise that this project situates itself within- we may look back with disdain for the decisions that have dramatically altered the dynamic, singular landscapes of our riparian systems. Burying the Providence River under a highway, squeezing it into a thread of its former floodplain, dredging, damming, and hardening the Woonasquatucket, Moshassuck, and Seekonk that merge their flows into the Narragansett Bay. But a river is, despite it all, still a river. Today, flooding follows the glacial outwash formation, or the original floodplain that carved these rivers far before our …

V.1 Spring 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 Spring 2025 issue has the theme "Take It as a Sign" and features pieces on baby fever, spreadsheets and recording information, aura and technology, a trip to Horseshoe Bend, the new Art and Computation department at RISD, home and belonging, Illustration student projects related to sensitive experiences, red brick architecture in Providence, and technology and the English language, along with interviews of students in their studios, poetry, and other creative writing.

Shared Architecture Of The Sacred:Designing Sacred Spaces In Virtual Reality, Ian Gonsher, Sameerah Munshi

Scholarly Research

This project investigates how sacred spaces might be conceived and experienced within virtual reality (VR). Through interfaith dialogue, design research, and iterative prototyping, we explored affordances in virtual environments for prayer, contemplation, study, and communal gathering. Drawing on insights from Jewish and Islamic traditions in particular, we developed design principles that informed the creation of a pilot prototype for sacred space in VR. This paper presents the conceptual framework, design process, and architectural strategies embodied and expressed in that pilot prototype, with particular attention to the formal and symbolic elements of light, orientation, sound, and written text. Additionally, the project …

V.1 Fall 2024, 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 2024 issue contains articles on RISD Alumni Graciela Batista's Commencement speech on friendship and community, Britain's Royal Festival Hall, birds crashing into glass buildings, an Ojibwe student's reflecting on his native identity, RISD student interviews, an abandoned Bed Bath and Beyond store, Ai Weiwei's Kui Hua Zi, life in Banaras, a student's Yankee Swap experience, the 2024 RISD Grad Show, and indentations, along with student creative writing and a feature on images students saw out …

Settling Dust, Unsettling Ground, Olivia Newroz

Masters Theses

Understanding dust as a material system that blurs the line between ground and atmosphere, I developed a dust machine as a tool for making dust legible at the human scale. While the blurriness of ground is visualized at both particle and planetary scales, at the human scale, it becomes less evident. Drawing from Lisa’s Moffitt’s discussion of “environmental models”–that is, models that don’t merely simulate phenomena, in this case dust, but rather produce the underlying force itself––I produced visualizations of how dust, as both a grounded and atmospheric element, intertwines ground and weather across scales, through a cyclical process of …