test

dp

Degree Project

Division of Architecture & Design Degree Project Reviews, May 2009 Rhode Island School of Design

Thursday, May 14th Northwest Gallery Enrique Martinez – Advisor Olga Mesa – Panelist Guest Critics: Andrea Adams Adrienne Benz Frank Chen José Fernando Vázquez Frank Lupo Daniela Sandler Toby Snyder

Martinez

Roger Williams University Architect,Truthbox, Providence Architect, Bernard Tschumi Architects, NYC Architect, Urbana, San Juan de Puerto Rico Senior Architect, FX Fowle, NYC Rhode Island School of Design Architect, FX Fowle, NYC

Southwest Gallery Lynnette Widder, Advisor Andy Tower, Panelist Guest Critics: Brian Callahan Daniel Gallagher Chris Grimley Laura Miller Alberto Perez-Gomez Pari Riahi

Widder Goldberg

Architect, NYC Architect and Office d’A, NYC Over,Under and Northeastern University Harvard University Graduate School of Design McGill University Rhode Island School of Design

Southeast Gallery Brian Goldberg, Advisor Anastasia Congdon, Panelist Guest Critics: Tulay Atak Luis Carranza Dan Gallager Gokce Kinayoglu Annie Kwon Alberto Perez-Gomez Ipek Tureli

Rhode Island School of Design Roger Williams University Architect, Office dA, NYC University of California Berkeley Serge Studio, NYC McGill University Brown University

Friday, May 15th Northwest Gallery Thomas Gardner and Matt Miller, Advisors Jonathan Knowles, Panelist Guest Critics: Jessica Frelinghuysen Alexis Kraft Bill Massie Joel Sanders

University of Michigan Parsons the New School for Design Cranbrook Academy Yale University

Southwest Gallery

Gardner

Kyna Leski – Advisor Jason Wood – Panelist Guest Critics: Christopher Bardt Richard Fishman David Gersten Daniel Peltz Christopher Rose Jonsara Ruth

Leski Tagiuri

Rhode Island School of Design Brown University The Cooper Union Rhode Island School of Design Rhode Island School of Design Parsons the New School for Design

Southwest Gallery Peter Tagiuri, Advisor Pari Riahi, Panelist Guest Critics: Allison Coley Lauren Crahan Duks Koschitz Jonathan Smith Peter Stempel

4

AOI (Association of Ideas) Freecell Massachusetts Institute of Technology NYC Stempel Form

Saturday, May 16th Northwest Gallery

Rosamond Fletcher – Advisor Hansy Better Barraza – Panelist

Guest Critics: Dan Craven Mathew Ford Granger Moorhead Robert Moorhead Jason Van Nest

Pei Cobb Freed Skidmore Owings and Merrill Moorhead & Moorhead Moorhead & Moorhead H3

Southwest Gallery

Fletcher

Maria Guest – Advisor Elizabeth Dean Hermann – Panelist

Guest Critics: Tulay Atak David Gersten Gavin Keeney Andre Schmidt Mohamed Sharif

Rhode Island School of Design The Cooper Union Editor, Log Journal Rhode Island School of Design Otis College of Art and Design

Guest Hartmann

Southeast Gallery John Hartmann – Advisor Daniela Sandler – Panelist

Guest Critics: Lauren Crahan Karen Franck, Lawrence Sassi Michael Webb Candida Wigan

Freecell Professor, New Jersey Institute of Technology Visiting Professor, NJ Institute of Technology The Cooper Union Adjaye Associates

5

Thursday, May 14th Northwest Gallery Enrique Martinez – Advisor Olga Mesa – Panelist

Martinez

Guest Critics: Andrea Adams Adrienne Benz Frank Chen José Fernando Vázquez Frank Lupo Daniela Sandler Toby Snyder Students: Nathan Behling Maria Emilia Escudero Iris Ledesma Andrew Liebchen Kevin Schrack Teresa H. Wan Mateo Yang

6

Roger Williams University Architect,Truthbox, Providence Architect, Bernard Tschumi Architects, NYC Architect, Urbana, San Juan de Puerto Rico Senior Architect, FX Fowle, NYC Rhode Island School of Design Architect, FX Fowle, NYC

Nathan Behling

Maria Emilia Escudero The Urban Catalyst

Circulation tends to be an afterthought in the design of buildings. It is only considered because of building codes, which require quick and efficient egress. The manner in which people circulate between spaces is often a means to an end; allowing for more space to be dedicated to the primary function of the building. With this in mind, circulation between spaces is not an experience; rather it is simply a method of moving between them.

This project, located in a district called Miramar in San Juan Puerto Rico, intends to reconnect the neighborhood to its industrial waterfront. Currently separated by a highway, this programmatic bridge is an attempt at introducing an urban object that could create a new, linear and concentrated urban growth, beginning to overlap existing communities, and introducing one another in a new elevated city space.

Circulation between spaces needs to be more than just moving from one to another. The act of moving is constant. Movement can have multiple speeds as well as various methods. Each one of these methods or speeds creates a unique experience. Translating these experiences from motion into a static environment provides circulation with more prevalence as a method of defining the space between spaces.

Urban objects can be seen from an infinite amount of lenses, regenerating themselves every time we look deeper in. They have the potential to generate growth and provide a series of environments, and they are able to address a multitude of scales from the urban, to the everyday human.

7

Iris Ledesma

Degrees of Extension Through my eyes, the composition and structure of the human body itself is analogous to architecture: the joints, skin, bones, our range of motion. I see the principles of architecture easily applied to a variety of objects. We begin with the most crucial, building shelter and continue with creating accessories for living.

My interest in this stems from my personal and cultural background. I come from a place full of makers and have always enjoyed the detail, tangibility and assembly of the work.

My investigation began by studying the movement of the body as a way to start thinking about joints and catalytic pieces. The objects in this collection are about a second skin that serves a purpose and interacts with the user. The second skin becomes an extension at different degrees of proximity to the body, to allow for different functions.

8

Andrew Liebchen

An orbital détente was staged on July 17, 1975 when spacecraft from two nations rendezvous and docked for the first time. The American Apollo is a fat conjunction: cone stacked on cylinder, gleaming silver in the pure sunlight. The Soviet Soyuz is a stack of discrete units, an orbiting Bolshevik bug. The craft kiss and trade saliva, teeming with astronauts.

Wheel charts are performative ephemera. Their stacked discs suggest dynamism, even when the chart’s information is fixed and predictable. In spite of infinite symmetry, the wheel chart requires a certain amount of asymmetry in order to function. The wheel chart’s information may be rigorous and expansive; the junction of kitsch and tactility make the information digestible and portable.

Spacecraft and wheel charts are mementos from collapse of uncertainty of the Cartesian world, be it the mastery of orbital flight or a heifer’s menstrual cycle. While the objects themselves may be immutable, the ephemeral life they lead is not.

Kevin Schrack

This project creates an urban intervention on a site that is currently isolated and depressed – both physically and emotionally. Using the process of reductive (Western tradition) woodblock printing as a catalyst, the project organizes itself through layers and extrusions.

While the project contains multiple programs, the main program is that of transient housing. “Transient” is used rather than “homeless” because of the tendency to stereotype the image of the homeless, while failing to realize that nearly anyone can become homeless given the current economic and political climate. This particular program’s spatial organization seeks to facilitate rhizomic movement while considering economies of production within the project as a whole.

Ultimately, all programs work together to activate the street and elevate the occupant within the framework of the city.

Teresa H. Wan City of Refuge

“Migrancy means not only changing places, it also means the changing nature of places.” – Akbar Abbas When one leave’s home and enters a new surrounding, he or she is faced with physical unfamiliarity and a series of questions. This questioning challenges one’s sense of belonging and initiates the alteration of spaces and its activities. From tourists to asylum seekers, displaced individuals congregate in observance of homeland nostalgia.

Despite their cultural differences, incoming immigrants and visitors are dependant upon those of permanent status to aid their adaptation to the new setting.

To embracing these social spaces is to acknowledge the need to provide a place for customizing one’s own space. The creation of infill spaces within a housing complex allows changeable social activities throughout the building. Networks and neighborhood clusters sustain the interchangeable co-dependant reliance of the incoming visitors and the existing immigrant communities.

9

Mateo Yang

The remnants of the highway i195 in Providence can be retroffited into a new type of infrastructure that fosters more human scaled activities. The barrier that the highway creates between Downtown and Jewelry District can be reclaimed into a healthy green boarder that attracts pedestrian activity.

The construction of a new type of flexible and adaptable water cleansing infrastructure is an exposition of the postive impact that existing and future city infrastructures can make if they are planned to react to the changing nature of the city.

10

Thursday, May 14th Southwest Gallery Lynnette Widder, Advisor Andy Tower, Panelist Guest Critics: Brian Callahan Daniel Gallagher Chris Grimley Laura Miller Alberto Perez-Gomez Pari Riahi

Widder

Architect, NYC Architect and Office d’A, NYC Over,Under and Northeastern University Harvard University Graduate School of Design McGill University Rhode Island School of Design

Students: Jason Atkins Chelsea Limbird William McLoughlin Elizabeth Snow Brian Tong Benjamin Wolk-Weiss

11

Jason Atkins

Chelsea Limbird

§ 34‐7‐11

The Space of Correspondence

The majority of architectural practice relies on the designer’s linear flow of process from initial vision to final implementation, a top‐down approach. This method has no presence in the growing population of informal settlements, where the designer‐client relationship has never been established. Therefore, the architectural process must be redefined to allow the demarcation of space to be relinquished to the squatter occupant.

12

I wrote you, said I would not, sent the letter.

The space of correspondence lacks balance. Sending assumes a burden of lightness, empathy and trust. Receipt carries the weight of memory, translation and interpretation. The space of middle ground suspends a confluence of anticipation and calm.

William McLoughlin

This work is a civic intervention, which has developed from an interest in the production of cultural residues.

Seizing upon the artificial and regulated nature of the Providence River, a floating public pool registers the interaction of tidal flow and provides redefinition of the civic realm.

Elizabeth Snow

Boundaries become horizons; horizons shift into boundaries.

In desolate natural landscapes the horizon is a shifting limit of perception that bounds the momentary space of occupation. It generates enclosure by defining the edge, yet the sense of orientation it imparts is scaleless.

The immeasurability of urban landscape is due not to its physical immensity, but rather its boundlessness. It has no perceived, articulated limit; therefore its boundaries, its indices of location and orientation are internally defined. The city choreographs its interstitial spaces between old and new, public and private, natural and social landscapes; the city’s horizon lies in the confrontation of these entities elucidated by the actions of its inhabitants.

13

Brian Tong

Benjamin Wolk-Weiss

A Dialogue Between Chance and Plan As designers and inhabitants we require buildings to respond to a wide variety of complex and changing conditions. Since many of these conditions are dynamic and ever changing, why should our buildings remain static? In a world where we are becoming increasingly more concerned with the performative aspects of a building, architects need to step back and ask themselves, “How can my building inherently adapt to issues such as climate change, usage requirements, habitation schedules, energy efficiency, etc.?”

After a series of investigations into the structure of a human’s knee joint and the mechanics involved in such an astounding biological construct, I began to ask myself how can I apply the principles that I discovered in the knee to a building and more specifically to its structure. This question evolved into an investigation of jointed movable structures. Allowing a structure to move uncovers different methods of dealing with issues such as environmental factors, heating/ cooling, and usage/habitation requirements. Designing a movable structure also brings up questions of enclosure, spatial planning, and how does the properties of the building’s skin affect its interaction with the structure.

This house in the desert is one iteration in the investigation of a movable architecture. It is a test bed, which allows possibilities to be investigated, problems to be worked out, an examination of the potential of a system consisting of movable structural elements and its respective skin. This house is not a final solution to the problem; it is one application of the principle allowing the groundwork to be laid for further investigations into this idea.

14

Thursday, May 14th Southeast Gallery Brian Goldberg, Advisor Anastasia Congdon, Panelist Guest Critics: Tulay Atak Luis Carranza Dan Gallager Gokce Kinayoglu Annie Kwon Alberto Perez-Gomez Ipek Tureli

Goldberg

Rhode Island School of Design Roger Williams University Architect, Office dA, NYC University of California Berkeley Serge Studio, NYC McGill University Brown University

Students: Helen Cheuk Claire Davenport Jenny Yi-Yun Kuo Jessica Martin Jeremiah Potter Christine Tan

15

Claire Davenport

Helen Cheuk Space for Error The Greek roots of archive, which stands for both “commencement” and “commandment”, describes archiving as an act that is both attempting to preserve something to be remembered and leaving out something to be forgotten. This intervention to remember – to retain by classifying, identifying and organizing – is analogous to the act of architecture that constructs order within our entropic world, in which complexities of natural forces are distilled into singular imperatives where the unperceivable and the chaotic are ordered into actuated systems of understanding. A resistance to the instabilities that perceive its origin, our authority against threat is to be at as much stake as the origin.

Tuvalu, a small atoll and island nation on the Pacific, is the first country to disappear beneath our earth’s surface due to the rising sea levels. Facing the immense loss of territories, inhabitants and existence, the crisis of climate change reveals the futility of national boundaries while the anxiety also provokes a need to construct permanence for the future. How do we begin to commence and command preservation for the existence of Tuvalu before it vanishes?

In a world calibrated increasingly by a temporal understanding of daily life, it is easy to forget that the networked flows that move through a site, be they operating at the hyper speed of capital or the natural and constructed rates of shifts in a landscape, have very real and physical consequences at the human scale. It follows that there are physical, spatial, architectural solutions to problems that originate at a scale much larger and faster than their own.

In order for architecture to respond to the multiplying and shifting links between groups and individuals in our intensely, if abstractly, connected society, it must foster a more intimate interdependence at the scale of 1:1. Architecture has the ability to create conditions for vital collaboration. How do we intervene in a context that is fraught with both the residue and ongoing pressures of these nebulous flows, one in which people trade not only in architecture, but also in human subsistence? The conditions are messy, unstable and incomplete; responses follow suit if they are to successfully adapt to the eccentric and changing needs of a community. They must allow for a materialized connectivity. The activation of a space through labor and maintenance can collectively unite individuals just as a more physical act of building might. Ultimately, a recognition of culture and an embrace of shared experience creates collectivity at multiple scales that architecture must construct, defend and celebrate.

Rhythms of shared inhabitation join those of the movement of capital, water and development. They create a pulsing back and forth between drawing in and growing outward.

16

This is a place for collection and gathering.

This is a place to negotiate a shared resource.

This is a point of infrastructure to which an individual can plug in, a cooperative core.

This is a safety net.

This is a first step.

This is housing.

Jenny Yi-Yun Kuo

Jessica Martin

Central Park Train Station

Subversion of Language, A Thickening of Space

As a place - The station as a waiting room Station has always been built as a connecting dot between lines of transitional infrastructure. As time and efficiency are becoming the driving factor of the design in modern society, the space is usually recognized as a point of entry from the static zone (city) to transitional zone (railways) or vice versa. However, the notion of freedom imbedded in such space between static zone and transitional zone makes a station more than a connector from city to train. While in this threshold condition, people are mentally free being detached from the obligation of their daily routine. People are willingly giving themselves up to waiting at such a time and moment.

Within language, distortions occur, and the space of the conversation thickens. People give words to one another as ethical, ideological and imaginative vessels. This exchange demands that we participate in a convention of language while simultaneously speaking our individual words and thoughts. As these small gestures and glances are reciprocated, opacities build, but the manipulation of these seemingly insignificant indications is imperative to empathy and exchange both within language and within the physical realm. The employment of the ostensibly trivial expressions enhance, change and imagine, at varying instances, in varying moments throughout encounters. Can architecture attain a level of flexibility, transparency and elasticity that the fleeting minutia we share have in our lives?

As for time - The station as a moment of freedom The station is built to amplify this moment of freedom; to extenuate this threshold for the traveler both mentally and physically through introducing different speeds in terms of space and program. So that waiting time is filled with freedom rather than boredom with these coexisting differences. The travelers’ attention is not simply focused on the elapsing time while waiting, but diverted to all these different events and movements in their surroundings.

As an interface - The site as part of the program The station does not play the role as a connecting dot, rather it is an interface; an interface between different speeds, different paces of life, and different forms of movement. The site for the station is thus located on the periphery of central park where city meets the park.

Using the existing conditions as the program of the waiting room for the travelers, the new intervention also serves the urban dwellers as a space for them to rest and to pause.

17

Jeremiah Potter

Christine Tan More Than Prescribed

Architectural intentions, whether developed autonomously and then applied to a site, or conceived of as arising through a careful understanding of site conditions, have a contentious relationship with the found orders of the site. As intentions and site collide, one inevitably alters the other. If drawing accepts this relationship it can begin to construct space where distortions caused by this collision are not simply repressed and ignored but rather become understood as present and as a means of evaluating actions in the built environment.

Space, as constructed by drawing, projects into the world. A line in plan projects as a plane. As the plane meets the physical world, a new line is formed. In that moment, the new line can either be repressed through the distortion of the site and erasure of an underlying order, or accepted as a willful pressure against intention, the negotiation of which produces a meaningful intervention. Drawing moves from the realm of abstraction to one of the real.

18

Rituals can be defined as a set of repeated actions. They are often followed, like a set of instructions, over and over until the motions are second nature to those performing it. Despite the prescription of rituals, there are spaces within that allow for those unfamiliar to enter.

This excessive space provides the stranger with liberty to navigate within the unfamiliar ritual and negotiate their involvement. It becomes the place of outside perspective.

Architecturally, programs function in the same way as ritual. The excessive spaces allowed within the program provide potentials beyond the necessary means of a project. Although rooms can be specified for particular needs, utilization of these excessive spaces enriches the specified inhabitation.

Something more than the prescribed can then happen.

Friday, May 15th Northwest Gallery Thomas Gardner and Matt Miller, Advisors Jonathan Knowles, Panelist

Gardner

Guest Critics: Jessica Frelinghuysen Alexis Kraft Bill Massie Joel Sanders

University of Michigan Parsons the New School for Design Cranbrook Academy Yale University

Students: Joshua Ayares Er-Ti Chen Jung Chen Raymond Gabriele Jonathan Mort Seth Wiseman

19

Joshua Ayares

Er-Ti Chen

A Pedagogy of Resilience. An Architecture of Resilience

Conceal/Reveal

Communities of low socio-economic status are at risk of trauma, of immobility, of depression. Resilience can be considered as a psychological buffer to these risk factors, promoting agency, selfefficacy, and connectedness. In this way, a community organism can be healthier and more viable in its larger context. The architecture of resilience is opportunistic, autodidactic, and symbiotic with the assets of the community, designed to capitalize on innate abilities and strengths. By acknowledging the barriers to social mobility in an impoverished community, I have proposed a framework whereby people can be better connected to the assets of their neighborhood, and to each other.

20

Olfactory space is invisible, but it is not a void. The residue of the past and the remnant for the future stays present in the air we breathe, evoking possibilities and cues of changes in space. The invisible boundary, the olfactory space, becomes a void rather than a barrier. Like the narrow spaces that exist between body tissues, the surface or boundary might be considered as a site of exchange, a membrane, porous, alluding to osmosis that delimits what transmits and what is withheld.

In a close system of production, consumption and waste, the exchanges of farmers, markets and sludge have been deliberately separated and hidden in the urban-space to conceal the unwanted senses brought by industry. A proposal for a chicken farm and a biomass recycling plant on Manhattan’s highline, this project begins to question the sprawl of divulging elements that prevented the function of intimately drawing from and simultaneously feeding back into the city. Can architecture play a role in dynamically revealing this system of limited adjacencies and spatial boundaries through active thresholds?

Jung Chen

Raymond Gabriele

A Pop Hotel We are now living in a fast paced world in which information is updated by seconds. The advance in technology enables us to massproduce objects to sustain our material world. For architecture, those advancements fulfill most of the dreams for architects. The fantasy models are no longer just models on their desks but the real objects standing on the ground.

The desire to build is increasing but the resources, land and energy, are decreasing. How does architecture accommodate the situation when there’s less to build? A monument is worth to be kept permanent because of it recorded a glorious human act. For a building, if we were asked to build less, what part of it can be said to be permanent?

Operating under the basic premise that appropriate development builds off of the collective wisdom of existing peoples and organizations on the ground, this study has attempted to reconceptualize the practice of community development by giving formal dimension to existing, local activities within derelict urban neighborhoods through the deployment of actionable, modestly scaled urban interventions designed to help cultivate new, more palpable ideals of community, self-reliance and participation. By appropriating existing community activities in the built environment, a new urban presence is introduced in ways that expand the boundaries of our common understanding of the ordinary and routine, and that make the ordinary more recognizable and accessible by disturbing the customary order of these activities in the interest of more enduring change.

Pick up a hostel as a program to further investigate the idea since the permanent existence of the building and the temporal staying of travelers already fit with the subject. In the pop hotel, the existence of the rooms in hotel is depended upon the staying of each traveler.

Each room will be popped out when a guest is checked into the room.

When the room is not in use, the thin membrane will be deflated and be stored within the façade. The deflated core structure will be the most permanent element in the building.

21

Jonathan Mort

Seth Wiseman

An Architecture of Solitude

Unknown to Known: Rethinking the Factory in the Developing World, Cap Haitien, Haiti

here are two principles, competing sensibilities that define the human relationship to the built environment: The desire to be protected, and the desire to be free. Architecture is the resolution of the intersection of these two intentions. The context of the built environment for this project embodies these two intentions. This small island is an environment that can be occupied by a single person, offering both freedom and protection. The architecture on the site reflects this experience. The built system here not only underscores the specificity of the place, but enhances the experiential quality of the site, offering through its occupation both solitude and connectivity.

Architecture is a means of engaging the physicality of the world by challenging, changing, and re-imaging the realized. Although the unrealized may provide perceived architectural freedom, it is only through the realized that we as architects can be freed.

Haiti, a young, vibrant culture burdened by generations of political depravity, social complacency, economic instability, and environmental neglect, is a land of tremendous potential. Formalized through the perimeter wall, the burdens of the past must initiate the change necessary to draw Haiti out of the developing and into the developed, from survival to civil.

Confronted by the physical, social and intellectual boundaries embedded in the perimeter wall this project attempts to challenge the conventional perception and utilization of wall, by deploying these ideas in a manner that engages architecture and Haiti at large.

22

Friday, May 15th Southwest Gallery Kyna Leski – Advisor Jason Wood – Panelist Guest Critics: Christopher Bardt Richard Fishman David Gersten Daniel Peltz Christopher Rose Jonsara Ruth

Leski

Rhode Island School of Design Brown University The Cooper Union Rhode Island School of Design Rhode Island School of Design Parsons the New School for Design

Students: Ian Armitage Joshua Fiedler Elliott Olson Nicholas Simpson Jae Hun Choi Ryo Tsutsui Damir Vikovljak

23

Ian Armitage

Joshua Fiedler

Fossil Geometry The radiometric age of Earth is estimated to be 4.54 billion years– seemingly too large a scale for any one to conceive. Yet material processes that have shaped the crust from which we gather geological knowledge of our planet happen over time periods that partially coincide with our lifetime. For example, sea-floor spreading at the Atlantic mid-ocean ridge occurs at twenty-five millimeters each year, or the approximate rate of growth of the average human fingernail. It is at the spatial and temporal convergence between geological process and human experience that an architectural proposal may emerge.

Does there exist a geo-logic capable of organizing the geometric expression of earth-derived material? What relationship between time and place does a geo-logic establish? At what scale can these geologically derived formal geometries become architecturally manifest?

Ultimately, can the integration of geo-logic into the creative process offer new perspectives to generate architectural space?

24

under exposure the field of perceptions

as we wander within our physical environment, the unconscious navigates the non-physical field of our perception existing within our imagination, constantly changing and adapting, it affects the way we move through, interact with and understand our reality the field remains non-physical until like the poet in the making of the “textus” or cloth we become the weaver of words, creating a cover or ground on which to build the physical creation enters the field of the collective reality like the textus, this field takes on a flexibility that moves with our own perceptions how does one describe this elusive field

Elliott Olson

Nicholas Simpson

Wrapping

Through an examination of the body and its movement, the principles of rhythm, speed, and pulse were addressed and a continuous thread, with a specific starting point and infinite conclusions, was developed. A sinuous rotation, oscillating along a path of reorientation and progression leads to meaning and purpose. With the relationship between apparel and architecture being defined as an extension of the body; the freedom and control of our physical form to act out our own song and dance, the two disciplines can overlap and merge into a more expressive language of fabrication.

Along the way, we will pause to gather, we will stop to rest and linger, we will stay, to define space.

We will leave, and take that definition with us.

25

Jae Hun Choi Threading Coexistence As time goes by the historic center of Seoul admitted modern highrise buildings within its historic housing blocks. The site in this area has been layered by a geological, historical and a new urban grid by modern city planning. Between different values and contradictory ideas in philosophy, they need to find a way of coexistence in this context.

This complex urban situation can be understood as a phenomena of time, cultural artifacts and human behavior. This study is addresses the redevelopment of Jong-Ro district in Seoul including three high rise buildings. The proposal is focused on urban design along Pimat street with studying the relationship of urban threads as urban phenomena.

26

Ryo Tsutsui Roofscape Neighborhood

He heard from someone that in this town there are tearooms that are scattered above the roof. The rooms inhabit the roofscape, each with its own hearth for boiling water, a cabinet to house the vessels for the tea. He climbs the ladder up to the roof with his favorite tea in his pocket. As the sky opens up he finds out that there were many people like him on the surrounding tearooms as they were gathering and enjoying the sip of tea.

Damir Vikovljak Collecting Selves the Collective Self

We are nestled within our selves. The sound uttered, and the gesture made, the content that leaves us, is someone else. A cast of actors play our character. ((To himself: We should always say I)) I discussed an experiment, to have my words, re-enacted, re-acted by different sets of people, a script handed over, displaced into the actions, the actors of others.

For a long time I have tested, the tool of conversations means of creation and path of the imagination, never a map, but a journey, a series of tangents and at once an accumulation.

I began recording these conversations, deliberation, and arguments between us.

An architect talks about a person as a thinking actor in this network, rather then a user.

Being conscious that we are involved in construction of a story.

That its not just something we a subject to. That you are a thinking participant in the construction of a story. And relating that to our extension of architectural space. This is a stage.

This project is stage, devoid of preconceived notions.

It is the entry into a conversation, of exterior dialogue between actors and an interior conversation.

I believe that we are made up of actors and of stories.

Designing interiors, that make up a persona or a mask to the world. Through the lens of the stage, I am proposing questions to the creative process. A project in the realm of spontaneity and exposed through speech, through actors who are at once directed and autonomous personalities.

27

Friday, May 15th Southwest Gallery Peter Tagiuri, Advisor Pari Riahi, Panelist Guest Critics: Allison Coley Lauren Crahan Duks Koschitz Jonathan Smith Peter Stempel

Tagiuri

28

Students: Kate Cho Youngha Cho Katherine Detmer Courtney Haviland Cezar Nicolescu Andrew Simes Walter Zesk

AOI (Association of Ideas) Freecell Massachusetts Institute of Technology NYC Stempel Form

Kate Cho

Boston as a city may be understood as a system of strata seen through the city’s expansion horizontally by landfill and vertically via the city’s transportation infrastructure, each leaving their mark in the urban fabric. Historically infrastructure such as MBTA, Central Artery, and most recently the Big Dig Tunnel have brought about monolithic gestures within the city leaving vestiges of their presence.

The loss of the Central Artery has left a scar on the city disrupting this stratum, and has resulted in another underground layer added to the city. In response, this project proposes instead of eliminating the entire structure to take advantage of this lost armature of the freeway as an opportunity to create a new linear Alba of the city. The project explores a process of splitting to transform the space akin to linkage within the existing infrastructure. What already exists is seen as catalyst for change and generator of the future architecture in the area.

Programmatically the space recalls distant memories of the city such as the central artery structure through an Archaeological museum, a skating rink outlining the original coastline, and also includes the current green space. These new striated layers occur within the existing structure of the central artery and trace the memory of the city in time to better bring the city back together.

Katherine Detmer

Architecture is a mediator between people and their environment.

My thesis explores how this mediation can encourage and enhance the relationship between humans and specific aspects of the natural world.

This exploration requires a strong contextual understanding, on the levels of visual and physical interaction through spatial development, history and site specificity.

Because of my participation in the equestrian world for the past 20 years, I have developed an architecture that explores the relationship of man and horse through the built environment.

Despite my knowledge of the horse, I chose a program that tests this knowledge and requires me to view the man to horse relationship from new perspectives; that of the mounted police officer as well as the public eye in the urban setting of New York City.

29

Courtney Haviland

We live in a world where there will always be a population in need. Those needs vary widely person-to-person, community-tocommunity, country-to-country, but there are fundamental issues, which can be seen throughout. When reconsidered, our world of networks, infrastructure, and civil services, can provide the framework for solutions to those needs. Whether it be a small bit of ‘wasted’, ‘forgotten,’ or ‘undesirable’ space, or the face of a structure that gets dismissed as the underbelly, there are opportunities to make these moments function at a higher level, with dual purpose – the one it was initially conceived for, and the one that was found.

My work has focused on methodologies of mapping, immersion, analysis, and proposal. With the issue of homelessness at the core, I have studied and considered those who are homeless for a variety of reasons, including, but not limited to poverty, drug addiction, mental disability, and natural disaster.

30

Cezar Nicolescu

Quarry, Subway, Market. I chose these three programs to correlate with these three realms of urban identity: Geology, Geography, and Gastronomy.

What will their juxtaposition yield?

Andrew Simes Merging and Emergent Networks: Light Rail for Detroit Detroit is a city enigmatic in its demise. Once a mighty industrial giant that helped spur the freedom of mobility through the creation of the automobile, Detroit has seen its population dwindle and built environment crumble through a tragic process of suburban sprawl and neglect. The recent collapse of the automotive market in Detroit has caused new questions to arise concerning how to best address physical and social mobility that have always had strong undercurrents in the built environment of the city and its surroundings. It is in response to these questions that this project proposes to build upon current grass roots efforts to create a network of light rail transit stations around the city. Through the design of merging and emergent networks of transit stations, farmers markets, and landscapes, this project investigates the relationship between path, perception, and the future of transportation in Detroit.

Youngha (Heidi) Cho

This thesis project researched the work of Louis Kahn and proposes an extensive program to the Salk Institute, which was designed by Kahn in the 1963. Much of the development to Louis Kahn’s architectural language and theory can be attributed to one of Rome’s greatest imaginations from the 19th century, Giovanni Battista Piranesi.

Piranesi’s reconstructed plan of the Campus Marius district is one of the most influential drawings of his lifetime. Louis Kahn was inspired by his ability to model the spatial depths of antiquity and borrowed these ideas into designing the Salk Institute.

It is understood that Louis Kahn has two types of spaces: gathering space that is filled with light and dim space for the individual. To inform my own architectural language, I have borrowed these ideas as well as his sense of geometry into the design of my proposal.

Dim alleyways of light lead the occupant to a large gathering space, or toward the ocean. Important to the program has been the development of zones, as to inform an urban strategy to the site; zones of education, laboratory, community and living are identified.

Walter Zesk

In its representation, architecture is frozen. Proposed buildings are still and lifeless on the page, captured to be measured. In the continuous processes of building and inhabitation, however, they are alive -extensions of our own self-construction.

Can we conceive a living architecture as we conceive ourselves? An expanding set of digital tools allows architects to formalize some of the rules by which a building responds to its environment rather than explicitly instructing each response. Is it enough to inscribe a code, guide a building though it’s first steps and release it to mature on its own? Is that architecture? How can we bear the burden of authorship when proposing structures designed to grow beyond our prescription?

In this project, architecture is thought of as a process that is constructive, narrative and historical. It is a set of instructions, a network of connections and a series of repetitive operations. The particular process presented occurs in Boston. It is a response to global economic and environmental conditions, the specific challenge of its neighborhood in Roxbury and the unique history of its site.

The very earth under Boston was shaped to fuel the mills driving its economic growth. A new type of mill is proposed for this site. It is a living grove storing the site’s energy from the sun and the ground. It is also an incubator, leveraging the site’s connection to surrounding systems to nurture the fragile conception of a living architecture growing within.

31

Saturday, May 16th Northwest Gallery Rosamond Fletcher – Advisor Hansy Better Barraza – Panelist

Fletcher

Guest Critics: Dan Craven Mathew Ford Granger Moorhead Robert Moorhead Jason Van Nest

Students: Hye-Vin Kim Sara Kudra Katelyn Mayfield Ben Peterson

32

Pei Cobb Freed Skidmore Owings and Merrill Moorhead & Moorhead Moorhead & Moorhead H3

Hye-Vin Kim

Sara Kudra

In-Out

Ad Hoc Habitats: Sustainability Through Exchange

“The Grid claims the superiority of mental construction over reality”—Rem Koolhaas.

Over time, as buildings become modified and added on to, the grid is reinforced. However, not all buildings adhere to the urban block, and instead set back, distorting the grid. The spaces formed by the offset of a building allow for expansion in the tight urban environment, and create potential for social interactions to occur not on the open public streets, but in a gap sheltered by vertical setbacks and changing ground planes.

The lack of voids in New York City’s financial district induces negative and impersonal qualities—cold, superficial, dark, and fast. Small gaps in the densification offer opportunities for trans-encounters and new types of social gatherings that can make the city more intimate. These gaps create shared territories between adjacent building users and the wider public.

Currently ideas regarding sustainable design tend in two disparate directions; sacrifice versus abundance. Neither of these models alone can produce the most impact. It is necessary to redefine green building as a flexible, ad hoc system in order to create a more economical, higher quality, and communal model of housing for the inhabitants, and the environment.

The model of sacrifice is driven by the limited quantity of material goods; we need to be thrifty and save what we have, looking into local forms of community exchange. The model of abundance perpetuates the typical method of construction consumerism. Ecofriendly materials replace standard building products yet are still seen as disposable.

New sheets are cut into. Scraps are thrown out. There is little sense of community or local responsibility at the store where these materials are bought, or in the way they are disposed of.

The Financial District has been in a state of transformation—from a major office neighborhood to family oriented condominiums. These family oriented amenities, tourism initiatives, in addition to the office neighborhood increase its complex multi-dimensional character.

Therefore, in order to become a successful neighborhood it needs to address flexible spaces of social connections.

These methods need to be employed with opposite tactics. Free materials should be used more generously, taking advantage of the community and industry network where they come from. Alternately, we should be more sparing and efficient with new materials; they should be treated as rigid pre-existing dimensions in order to reduce waste.

My intervention proposes to develop these residual spaces prior to the adjacent buildings and give value to the typically negative space as a positive, filled with temporal communal programs. Nonhierarchical cues, both visual and spatial, filter people through the site; visual gestures draw people in to the site from a distance, physical proximity allow users to acknowledge the surrounding activities and finally bring people to be part of the activities. Reinterpretation of walls and ground are equally important elements of creating intimacy, making open space feel interior.

The non-profit organization Habitat for Humanity builds, “decent, affordable houses with low-income families” to be purchased at cost.

These structures are built in the model of abundance; all new materials ground up. The typical Habitat house in RI costs the family $120k, about 70% of the market price; approximately one-fifth of the cost is for the land, one-third for contracts; leaving half the cost of the house in the materials. They are targeted to people living at 25- 50% of the country’s mean income, but that low end is rapidly rising. If scrap materials could be utilized for these projects then the base line could 33

Katelyn Mayfield A Layered Sponge be drastically reduced, becoming more affordable to a broader range of people in need.

How can architecture define space for inhabitation while embracing the effects of environmental processes?

The Habitat method of construction can be re-worked in order to become a new model of community building by incorporating recycled, post-industrial, and salvaged materials. It would drastically reduce costs, allow quality to increase, and become more eco-friendly; and it would create a sense of belonging in a neighborhood through industry partnerships and local networking.

When water interacts with surfaces in the built environment it is either channeled or absorbed. Impervious materials have the capacity to channel water, registering the traces of canal tides and flood lines – while porous materials absorb water, adapting their form and performance.

Time causes registered traces and effected forms to accumulate and layer.

New Orleans lies within water: the Mississippi River to the south, Lake Pontchartrain to the north, the connecting canal and endless bayous. When experiencing the city, water is almost constantly visible and when not visible, then certainly a presence.

An existing canal once had a flanking boardwalk and connected Bayou St. John to the “back of the city� providing drainage and transportation of goods from the lake to downtown. Currently, the canal acts as an impenetrable boundary between two neighborhoods. The reactivation of the walk creates a destination while forming connections.

Surfaces composed of layered absorbent materials pave the site, beckoning to users within and around. The absorbent walk provides a sustainable strategy for daily storm water management, returning water back to the water table, while the canal accepts overflow from the adjacent bayou during the frequent above average rainfall.

An educational zone physically engages water, a rest zone acknowledges the presence of water and a play zone masks water to focus on the interaction between people and their safety in recreation.

34

Ben Peterson Un-packaged Urbanism As the design of cities becomes increasingly tangled in the strategies of bypass urbanism, the idea of the package deal rears its uglier head.

In urban mega-projects that masquerade as all-for-one deals, new highways link airports to shopping districts, new toll roads alleviate traffic and congestion for riders who can pay a fee, and parks or greenways—packaged to include benches, statues, and fountains— are offered to adjacent communities as the parting gift of a city’s renewal. Urban enclaves become zoned and remain bundled as discrete areas of use.

At Bremen Street in East Boston, a site of contested ownership and contradictory understandings of place, an urban park attempts to materialize the spatial and temporal systems that predicate its existence. Billboards and highway infrastructure become the scaffolding for new space. Arriving trains, departing planes, joggers, and lingerers become the metronome for daily and seasonal rhythms of occupation and activity.

The design appropriates collisions and disconnects in both space and time. A simultaneity of experiences and a multiplicity of interpretations override that which has been bundled, packaged, or prescripted. Systems of spatial organization become not only legible, but also become an armature for events of exchange and interaction.

35

Saturday, May 16th Southwest Gallery Maria Guest – Advisor Elizabeth Dean Hermann – Panelist Guest Critics: Tulay Atak David Gersten Gavin Keeney Andre Schmidt Mohamed Sharif

Guest

36

Students: Roselle Curwen Louise Girling Anastasia Laurenzi Elizabeth McCormick Ariel Ortiz Brian Rubenstein

Rhode Island School of Design The Cooper Union Editor, Log Journal Rhode Island School of Design Otis College of Art and Design

Roselle Curwen

Louise Girling

A New Empathetic Landscape

Borders as Passages, Not Walls

I am drawn to the vast landscape of the Californian desert particularly to sites marked by the emphatic presence of large-scale technological infrastructure. At the mouth of a mountain pass is a place where wind is harnessed for energy at a majestic scale. From the freeway, landscape and infrastructure enter into scalar exchanges that make one newly aware of foreground and background.

Understood as interruptions, these were thought of as moments in which the organizing system was affected by site specific conditions including topography, hydrology, and meandering street patterns.

In turn they came to be appreciated as ‘productive collisions’ or generative overlaps, where intersection and commingling intensifies the possibility for systemic syntheses.

The aim of this thesis is to produce a system in concert with existing systems in order to produce a synthetic and empathic sublime.

We tend to look at borders as edges, separations to be watched over and in many cases guarded by force or the physical barriers of fences and walls. The thesis explores an alternative view, where borders can be thought of more as frames where two different worlds of human economy, politics, and culture meet. Borders become porous thresholds and passages, commercial and cultural interchanges, and pockets in which to build productive coexistences.

Architecture and landform strategies are brought together to create an alternative condition, addressing the rational and practical constraints that necessitate a border’s opacity, but making the movement of people one of real ebb and flow and understanding – humanizing an inhuman exchange through long weaving lines of people and vehicles. The border is where architecture, land and people converge- where the emergence of a new imagined place, synthesizing both landscape and architecture, erodes the boundary between cultures. The thesis builds one such place making possible the transformation of a nomans land to an everymans land. It is here where a renewed relationship with the river’s edge is celebrated.

37

Anastasia Laurenzi

Elizabeth McCormick

Constructive Slippages

Of a City in Motion Scholars can predict the size of cities by their water supply. The Roman aqueducts were the greatest engineering feats of the ancient world, creating massive marks across the landscape. The highway is our urban cathedral. If our culture was to fall as the Romans did, the highway would be what is left behind. This project is about creating a strange landscape through an alternative guerilla urbanism to allow for the creation of unconventional cultural activities within this space and develop against an architectural system of ephemera, flux, and hyperconnectivity.

Approximately 30 acres (23 football fields) of unused space lies dormant beneath a raised interchange. The highway acts as a barrier within the city. Infiltrating its voids allows the city to redeem an existing architecture and frame relationships between divergent urban fabrics. The project is about acknowledging edges and invading them, shifting the perception of an edge so that it becomes permeable and inhabitable. Architectural intervention can be small, piggybacking on the ready-made space, but enough to break misconceptions and glorify the infrastructure as a space-making device.

A subversive architecture and urbanism that is not just invasive, but traitorous to an existing conception of the life underneath a highway offers an alternative approach to thinking about cities and how they function. The space is not residual, but is in fact a place to provoke a strange urbanism to see the city differently.

38

Ariel Ortiz

Brian Rubenstein

Subverting Surveillance

Virtual Dematerialization: Reframing the ‘Real’ as a Fragmented Urban node

Historically many significant cultural critics have commented on the insidiousness of Panoptic surveillance structures throughout society. Recently the invasive nature of armatures like close circuit TVs to Facebook infringements of privacy, have brought invisible Orwellian networks to light. And further structures have been revealed historically, in critiques like that of Foucault of Bentham’s Panopticon, where an all too real precursor of our contemporary virtualized ones was brilliantly unmasked. Architecture whether ethereally networked or physically manifest contains deep pathological tendencies towards institutionalized control and the production of rigid institutions.

While simultaneously fascinated and repelled by these phenomena I am ultimately drawn to dismantling their de-limiting instrumentalities.

It is my desire to subvert them, turn them back on themselves to produce more benign and productive spaces of exchange and growth.

To this end the project is a radical transformation of an abandoned prison, in San Juan in Puerto Rico, into a performing arts center and place for collective, progressive living.

Once a place of incarceration the prison is reinvented as a place of exchange and celebration. The top down all seeing eyes’ cones of vision, releases space into the city and creates passages, windows and thresholds to a new cultural site. Transparency subverts Panoptic order to produce spaces that instigate the formation of new relationships between spaces and people.

By doubly inverting the Panopticon to produce a blind spot at the heart of the old prison the project releases space and opportunity and centers new community. The architectural delineation of the space of the privileged, disembodied eye is exaggerated and multiplied to privilege the body and its meander.

We understand the virtual as an immaterial reality and we revel in its supposed capacity for connectivity and simultaneity in everyday experience. We must also acknowledge, and therefore confront, its contribution to the dematerialization of the tangible, the unraveling of the real and its diminishment of our civic spaces. As the fabric of our society becomes further intertwined within a digital framework, individuals are increasingly disengaged from the physical reality around them. Perhaps in an attempt to comprehend and navigate the construct of virtual networks we choose to contextualize it with language or imagery that is reminiscent of physical networks and infrastructure. Thus the concepts of portals, domains, windows, addresses and networks take on new disembodied meanings as they materialize only when accessed through a decentralized network in a digital environment. In the face of this phenomenon this thesis project asks: what if the modernist notions of linear flow and movement notations that we know and associate with dematerialization in their abstract sense are co-opted and imagined to materialize a real that frames a new social and urban condition?

By looking closely at a specific urban site which currently exists as an atomized cityscape disrupted by networks of speed and tension, the project seeks to produce a systemic clarity through a prominent and aesthetically charged infrastructure grounded by the idea of a contemporary notion of the civic. As a means of ameliorating the current city of archipelagic bits and bytes, the project proposes to provide a tangible connector; a bridge framing and hovering over an intense yet fragile urbanity, and a structure that becomes legible at the scale of a civic monument. Ultimately the project is a memorable marker and gateway in a significant part of the city. Here a circumstance is elevated to a place at an infrastructural scale. Within the structure a new urban stage is manifested. It becomes both a real portal and space for the collective emerges.

39

Saturday, May 16th Southeast Gallery John Hartmann – Advisor Daniela Sandler – Panelist Guest Critics: Lauren Crahan Karen Franck, Lawrence Sassi, Michael Webb Candida Wigan

Hartmann

40

Students: Amy Arguedas Cassandra D’Alessandro Matt Elson Yar Laakso Cortne Lanier Elizabeth Usnick

Freecell Professor, New Jersey Institute of Technology Visiting Professor, NJ Institute of Technology The Cooper Union Adjaye Associates

Amy Arguedas Identity, Material and Space: Multi-Dimenstional Modes of Coverage What fibers comprise the contents of your clothing? Are the colors, patterns and textures of its covering important? How do these expressions identify you to the space they operate and occupy in?

Tell me about the image displayed on your personal laptop; is it the same on your home computer? What’s the color of your car, or brand of bike helmet you wear, or the age of your luggage? Does it matter the type of shoe you wear? Are they chosen for beauty, comfort, warmth or necessity?

This thesis investigates an association of identity that is expressed in the surfaces and materials we hold, store, and are protected in or by.

The work questions if a form of covering our bodies can be resurfaced to hold volume. The semester focused on fundamental principles of design and construction of soft materials from two-dimensional surfaces to three-dimensional space.

Cassandra D’Alessandro Discovering Boundaries Through Ritual The church, courthouse, and theater all frame opportunities for complex relationships between seemingly disparate groups. Complex and dynamic edge conditions and their adjacencies create moments of architectural intrigue.

Boundaries within these rituals are social, physical, and psychological.

These boundaries are enlivened through the human dimension of occupancy. A division of path, systematic reveal, and framing of views all speak to one’s conscious occupation within the ritualized place.

A layering of time, space, and program enhances complexity and opportunity for illumination, interaction, and hierarchy.

An exploration of these boundary conditions has stimulated architectural tools for creating dynamic communal place.

41

Matt Elson Architectural Gymnastics Both architecture and our bodies are governed by gravity. We sculpt the spaces in which we exist to reflect our preferences and anatomy while resisting this downward pull. So why is the body important to architecture? The space claimed by our bodies can become the measure of the physical environment.

With a unique understanding of the relationship of one’s body to space, the gymnast expands and rewrites the rules of spatial engagement. The gymnast’s awareness of his own physical properties of mass, inertia, and velocity allow for an artful embrace of the pull of gravity. Each gymnastic apparatus is distinct in its spatial extents and prescribed human interaction.

This project seeks to re-establish a link between the body and architecture using the dynamic spatial situations inherent to gymnastics as program.

The space of our body is the space of architecture.

Yar Laakso Involuntary Spaces an Architectural Proposal The objective is to create an architecture that will enable a response to our retrieval of memory. I believe that architectural spaces have the capacity to evoke personal implicit memories in its occupants and users. Our personal memories of events, people or places are hard to recall without voluntary effort and sometimes difficult to articulate.

Memories that are consciously recalled or activated are intentional recollections of some previous episodes in our autobiographical memory and this form of memory is called explicit. Memories that are not direct recollections of people places or events but take the form of feelings rather then words are termed implicit memories.

Cues encountered in everyday life that evoke recollections of the past without conscious effort are thought to be a conception of human memory that is involuntary and is the opposite of voluntary memory, a deliberate effort to recall the past. Involuntary Autobiographical memories occur frequently in daily life and are triggered by cues in one’s environment but how this takes place is not thoroughly understood. The “Proustian” view of memory is a concept of involuntary memory in which personal autobiographical memories are cued by perceptual phenomenon and do not require conscious effort.

Currently some cognitive psychologists believe involuntary memories are highly dependent on abstract cuing such as thought and language and less on basic sensory experiences. This somewhat disagrees with notion that involuntary memories are most commonly triggered by basic sensory experiences.

Creating spaces that heighten both abstract cues and sensory experiences to evoke involuntary memory is the projects original conceptual basis. My work so far is an attempt to create a lexicon of architectural elements both real and imagined that can become cues to

42

activate involuntary memory. Involuntary memory cues have variety of basic features and experiences e.g. mood states thoughts, other memories, percepts etc‌ The video project is a survey of existing architectural spaces and elements in locations around Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The video considers perceptual cuing of memory with a variety of implied associations such as sound, time, light, water, movement, materiality, color, nature and atmosphere.

Involuntary spaces were an attempt to compare and examine spaces that may provoke sensory perception and imagination as it relates to dream and memory. Several of these spaces may portray the universal in architectural departure and arrival, thresholds, corridors, stairs, light, natural scenes and view while others are meant to provoke the imagination and the bizarre.

Graphite drawings are architectural spaces and natural scenes that I can voluntarily retrieve from my own autobiographical memory and actively represent in the form of drawing.

Cortne Lanier Architectural Forensics istory is to duplicate as Fiction is to an Authentic (By admitting its break with alleged reality, fiction becomes inherently true.)

When constructed, spaces are assigned needs and functions; however, latent programs are trapped within existing structures. The DP examines a series of buildings that are re-imagined using urban ruins as evidence.

Program, structure and use is projected onto the {true} history of the building. This creation will be an original history. It is something familiar that simultaneously cannot be.

To prevent shifting viewpoints, a truth based on residual clues is constructed to hold the three projects in time and place. In this suspension of belief and other worldly-ness the buildings will exist.

Architectural Proposal: A series of buildings that interpret the elements and features present in my drawings of voluntary memories. The buildings were not designed for a particular program but one can be implied. Material, light, relationship to water, movement, landscape, atmosphere and view are realized within the architectural spaces and are inherent in all of the graphite drawings. Some spaces and moments are a direct representation of drawings while others embody the sensibility present in drawings. The site located in Vermont was picked for its natural setting that reflects the site and landscape conditions dormant within many of my memories.

43

Elizabeth Usnick

Streetcar suburbs, once termed ‘zones of emergence’ as they provided an escape from tenement life in the center city, suffered great losses of population and vitality once automobiles allowed middle-income families to move to the suburbs.

Today, the West End of Providence, like many of these types of developments across the country, suffers from dilapidated houses, a segregation of low-income residents, decaying infrastructure, and escalated crime rates.

In retrospect, however, in terms of the natural environment, we can all concede that an automobile-based, sprawling model of development was not the most ideal way for this country to grow. Additionally, demographic and census information indicates a recent trend in the move back to urban centers, as gasoline prices, long commutes, and lifestyle changes make more dense and convenient living arrangements ideal for many Americans.

Several historic neighborhoods in Providence have experienced a revitalization in recent years, as historic tax credits facilitate the repair and restoration of protected properties. The West End, however, is not considered a historic district, and is therefore not subject to financial incentives or regulations concerning its future development.

How, then, can the existing framework of primarily multi-family houses, mostly built between the years of 1900 and 1920, be reexamined and re-imagined to accommodate the future of housing in America?

44

45