Architecture Commons^™

The Right To Withdraw: Soft Boundaries And Material Refuge In The Workplace, Zhihao (Sky) Xing

Masters Theses

Traditionally, architecture has provided physical protection through solid structures and defined boundaries, while modern interior spaces have evolved further to serve function, efficiency, and the operational needs of society. These include open-plan offices, art school studios, and other public spaces like libraries. Although physical rigidity and operational efficiency have been well served by the modern built environment, the psychological experiences of those within it remain largely overlooked - a lack of privacy, emotional support, and space for emotional withdrawal.

This research explores why contemporary workplaces often expose individuals to sensory overload and why people often retreat to stairwells, restrooms, or …

The Found Stone Game, Magnolia Moskun

Masters Theses

This is not about masonry. This is stone architecture in constant motion.

I work with found stone in states of precarity, extracting discrete and sometimes surprising functions from each individual rock. Construction relies on physical forces while avoiding standardized building materials and methods.

Uncertainty is inherent. The builder is a perpetual novice, open to unexpected outcomes. Working with irregular stone takes incredible precision: it can’t be entirely planned or designed. The process is an inquiry into the deep physical understanding that can only be gained through hands-on work. This architecture rebels against the apathy in contemporary practice by deviating from …

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 …

Salt Tailings, Evan Friedman

Masters Theses

In April 2023, a brushfire erupted at the Queen’s River Preserve, a tract of open land in Exeter, Rhode Island. It spread quickly, to the level of a firestorm, driven by gusty winds and dry conditions. The preserve is a pine barren, a landscape of sandy soil and pitch pine trees, along the Queen’s River. It also abuts the residential and agricultural corridors of Exeter, creating a vulnerable threshold between open land resources and human habitation, known as the wildland urban interface. It required an unprecedented wildfire response for New England, including the region’s first human and livestock evacuation protocol. …

Breathing Structures: Hygroscopicity Of Fibers., Nawal Urooj

Masters Theses

Cities like Singapore, Mumbai, Karachi, and regions of Ghana experience persistently hot and humid climates. In these regions, humidity in built environments significantly affects both human comfort and the durability of building materials. Yet traditional mechanical dehumidification strategies are energy-intensive, environmentally taxing, and socially uneven in their accessibility. We must challenge the existing systems for thermal comfort, the inefficient role Architecture plays in it, and the socio-economic politics associated with thermal comfort in developing countries.

Karachi, a coastal city in the south of Pakistan, has extremely high relative humidity and high temperatures throughout most of the year. In this region, …

2'X2' : Situating Cohabitation, Liz B. Shepherd

Masters Theses

2’ x 2’ : Situating Cohabitation explores how we might approach conversion by examining the relationship between content and container. In the wake of technological innovation and remote work, many office buildings have become vacant, leaving spacious, unresolved shells available for alternative forms of habitation. This thesis considers how existing spatial conditions and inherited narratives can be reassembled to reconfigure social norms, while also offering occupants agency in shaping how they live. Ultimately, the program examines our relation to living and how we contend with our belongings.

Crowd Control, Dalia Sadeq

Masters Theses

The relentless and inevitable expansion of the Masjid Al Haram is the premise of my thesis. Hajj and pilgrim growth are constants, demanding continuous growth of tawaf grounds. The centrifugal power of the Kaaba has always posed an existential threat to the buildings in its radius. The Al Saud monarchy has shepherded both demolition of nearby buildings and construction of the Masjid Al Haram. The monarchy aims for 30 million pilgrims annually, a Vision 2030 initiative.

My thesis visualises the inevitable expansion of the tawaf paths of Masjid Al Haram. The paths are horizontal, radial, and stretch over the landscape …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Feeling Through Space:Designing Emotion In Space Through Alice In Wonderland, Xuanyu Yang

Masters Theses

Emotion is the most direct bridge between human experience and architectural space, but design often treats feelings as a side product. This thesis challenges that idea by asking a specific question: can a designer intentionally use spatial qualities to move a person through a defined emotional sequence? And if so, can that process be documented clearly enough to become a repeatable method?

To test this, the project designs a spatial version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland as an immersive theater experience. The narrative is not told through text, performance, or screen, but entirely through the physical qualities of a …

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 …

Providence Puzzle:Exhibition Design As Urban Spatial Practice, Ye Chen

Masters Theses

Providence is a city shaped by past industrial production, immigrant communities, artistic practice, waterfront renewal, and urban redevelopment. Its identity exists not only in historical remnants, but also in the cultural atmosphere created through the ongoing interaction between past and present. Former factories, river infrastructure, neighborhood streets, public parks and scenes of everyday life together form an urban narrative that continues to evolve. Yet existing methods of presenting Providence’s history and culture remain limited to informational signage, commemorative markers, or one-directional communication, offering little incentive for people to stop, read, explore, or actively engage. As a city rich in both …

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, …

Domesticating Duration, Xiaoyu Lan

Masters Theses

Inspired by the novel Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman, this thesis explores the subjective human perception of time. To break away from the monotonous product display model of traditional retail, the design transforms a four-story building into a novel experiential showroom infused with avant-garde exhibition qualities. Using the "home" as a narrative thread, the design guides visitors through everyday domestic scenes—the bedroom, living room, bathroom, and dining room. These spaces are deconstructed into four distinct experiences of temporal flow: Pause, Fast-Forward, Slow-Motion, and Rewind. Guided by Peter Zumthor's Atmospheres and referencing relevant artworks, the design translates the abstract concept of …

The Amplifier: Small Spaces, Loud Futures, Szewai Hong

Masters Theses

Once nicknamed “Rock City,” Allston, MA has long been a creative hub known for its grassroots music culture. Historically the neighborhood has been home to many independent music spaces, nurturing generations of musicians. Relentless real estate development, the expansion of nearby institutions and ongoing inflation, has made the neighborhood increasingly unaffordable for the creatives and forced many to leave, diluting the once vibrant music community. Simultaneously, the shift toward digital music consumption has contributed to the disappearance of physical spaces where people once gathered to discover, discuss, and experience music collectively.

This thesis responds to these circumstances through an intervention …

Healing In The Flow: Reimagining Public Well-Being Through The Adaptive Reuse Of The Heritage Park Visitor Center, Yaqi Zhang

Masters Theses

This thesis proposes the adaptive reuse of the Heritage Park Visitor Center in Fall River, Massachusetts, as a community oriented environment for rest, care, and social connection along the Taunton River waterfront. Although the park provides public access to nature, the existing building does not support everyday forms of well being such as pause, reflection, quiet recovery, or informal gathering. In many public spaces across New England, wellness remains separated from civic life and is often treated as private, specialized, or secondary.

In response, the project rethinks self care not as a private luxury, but as a shared spatial condition …

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 …

Aer, Qiyi Cai

Masters Theses

I began this project from a recurring perception: that simple, everyday elements carry distinct and often unexpected qualities. For me, the number six is green and tastes like grapes; the number two feels deep blue. Even bottled water from different brands seems to possess specific forms of character, some sharp, some rounded, some soft like cotton. I first encountered the word synesthesia in elementary school writing classes, where it was introduced as a literary device frequently used in classical poetry and prose. For instance, a gentle rain might be described as “soft as pastry,” translating a visual phenomenon into tactile …

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 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 …