REVIEW
M.ARCH THESIS 2015
MIT Department of Architecture
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Architecture 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 7-337 Cambridge, MA USA 02139 617 253 7791 / arch@mit.edu architecture.mit.edu
The MArch Thesis The MArch program at MIT culminates in a thesis project. Under the guidance of their thesis advisors MArch students conduct independent research and architectural design over the course of the Thesis Prep and Thesis semesters. Launched through an intense and often obsessive consideration of disciplinary concerns and the consideration of architecture’s effects in the contemporary world, each MArch thesis ultimately delimits an area of architectural thinking and practice. By their final presentation most projects strike a specific conversation between these two poles of architectural discourse: disciplinary history on one end and the contemporary world on the other, producing a highly varied collection of inquiries, proposals, and even genres of project. The primary objective of all MIT MArch thesis projects is to refine and expand the fields of architectural discourse and practice, and to seed, or at a minimum, to test, a possible trajectory both for architecture and for a generation of young architects who with their theses projects cross over into their professional careers as architects.
Master of Architecture Tyler Crain
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Ulises Reyes
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Jasmine Kwak
02
Laura R. Schmitz
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Beomki Lee
03
Tyler Stevermer
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Suk Lee
04
Maya Taketani
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Chris Landrum Martin
05
Evelyn Ting
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David Miranowski
06
Trygve Wastvedt
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David Moses
07
Shiyu Wei
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Julian Ocampo Salazar
08
Robert White
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Sayjel Vijay Patel
09
Rena Yang
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Susanna W. Pho
10
Jie Zhang
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See rear flap for advisors, readers, and credits.
Disturbance Grounds: An Inquiry into Non-Equilibrium Architectural States Tyler Crain Advisor: Skylar Tibbits, Readers: Matthew Bunza, Geoff Manaugh
This project asks how destructive forces can be used for constructive purposes. It seeks out latent potentials in aggregate materials and forces, situating itself within a dialogue of new landscape methodologies, aggregate material formations, and alternative development strategies. From a geological perspective, mass material movements are a method of simultaneous deconstruction and reformation. They are a continuous phase-changing process. While we might view landslides as hazards,
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this project sees them as opportunities for actuation of a hillside, forming a field or scattering of spatial instruments. Drawing from many professional disciplines to synthesize a mulit-purpose geoprosthetic architecture, this thesis investigates a geo-technical solution in the form of an architectural strategy and the potentials of aggregate materials in the context of environmental turmoil. Field studies
Living Large: An Alternative Model for Urban Living Jasmine Kwak Advisor: Ana Miljacki, Readers: Rafi Segal, William O’Brien Jr.
There once was an American dream called the house. Frequently clustered in tight rows and cul-de-sacs, the single-family dwelling represented not only financial success, but also stability and hope for the future. However, more recent generations have been forced to question the desire to own a home. Facing more and more economic difficulties, a house has, for many, become more of a liability than a dream.
In New York City, lack of home ownership has reached an extreme: more than 75% of residents rent rather than own. In light of this trend, this thesis seeks to imagine, through architecture, a new kind of American dream: housing for nomads where no one owns anything and people are free to roam around the city. This proposal suggests that rather than continuing to downsize the microhouses that constitute today’s solution to the home ownership problem, Americans can once again live large—together. 2
[ME]morial Beomki Lee Advisor: Antón García-Abril, Readers: Renée Green, Caitlin Mueller
“MEmorial” presents a new concept in memorial architecture. Based on Freud and Bergson’s ideas of memory, “MEmorial” emphasizes the relationship between individual memory and the individual to offer a new way of experiencing memorial space. Contemporary architecture’s focus on communal memory has led to the primacy of a single image or rendering. Thus memorial architecture tends to miss opportunities for deeper exploration and individualized experiences beyond simplistic representations of memorialized events or figures.
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This thesis project proposes a memorial architecture for victims of the 3.11 earthquake and tsunami in Sendai, Japan. Three spatially different MEmorials are the starting point for this open-ended project. The goal of the project is to create a new relationship between individual memory and the individuals, such that each individual will have personalized experiences in each MEmorial. MEmorial will serve as a space not only for soothing victims’ wounded hearts, but also for letting people memorialize their individual memories. The project seeks to challenge and extend traditional architectural definitions of memorial architecture.
MIT i2: idea incubator Suk Lee Advisor: Ant贸n Garc铆a-Abril, Readers: Simon Frommenwiler, John A. Ochsendorf
The rapid growth of online learning raises many questions about the future of the physical university campus. Yet, despite various opinions on the future campus, physically interacting remains a primary method of incubating ideas. In light of these trends in higher education, this thesis (MIT i2) proposes a flexible public space for both the MIT community and the city of Boston. MIT i2 posits a new type of campus through architectural
modification of the Charles River waterfront. This project ultimately changes the Charles River from a barrier to a new urban destination where various social and intellectual activities can occur. Two radical interventions address completely different relationships with the water: spaces above and below the water. The project creates different spatial opportunities for different programs while remaining flexible for the unknown future. 4
In Pursuit of Sound Chris Landrum Martin Advisor: Ant贸n Garc铆a-Abril, Readers: Marc Downie, Paul Steenhuisen
In this thesis, sound is used as a generative device to investigate space and architecture as collections of experiences. Inspired by the temporality of sound, the architecture of this project is understood as a physical trace of an invisible energy. The propagation of sound in three dimensions produces a feedback loop in which architecture further distorts sound
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waves to explore how the energy travelling through space can lead to more control over its production. Composite Render: Sound as a vibration of particles in air was reimagined as particles in three dimensional space.
un/common ground David Miranowski Advisor: Rafi Segal, Readers: Ana Miljacki, William O’Brien Jr.
Brooklyn’s urban fabric is a redundant array of perimeter residential blocks built over the last 200 years as a layered accretion. Within each block is a core that is spatially unified yet distinct from the public front of the street. These spaces are defined by their enclosure, yet this barrier is not entirely impenetrable. Each block possesses a few unique moments of slippage in which the perimeter mass opens up to reveal a slivered view into the depths, and potentials, of this internalized world. To the vast majority, including residents, these slivers and cores remain a visual phenomenon. The near-universal practice of extruding backyard parcel lines has created an architecture of division, namely the fence,
closing off the yard from the block and the block from the neighborhood. This thesis proposes an alternative scenario, in which rear fences are removed and a thin line of public space is inserted into the mosaic of existing yards. The line, activated through a set of calibrated relationships with the ground and floating infrastructure, stitches together people within the open core and works against the detritus of old divisions. Through this intervention, a new grain emerges which connects Brooklyn’s blocks and transforms the residual slivers into a network of spaces that open to an engaging, and unexpected, rendering of the pre-existing. 6
The Williston Time Capsule David Moses Advisor: Miho Mazereeuw, Readers: Arindam Dutta, Cristina ParreĂąo Alonso
This thesis is a time capsule of the oil economy, created by preserving everyday totems made from petroleum in a landscape that spatially recreates the processes of drilling and fracking a contemporary oil well. The site is an existing two square mile drill spacing unit on the edge of Williston, North Dakota, currently the site of one of the largest shale oil booms in the world. The project consists of two interrelated landscape systems. The first is an above ground landform made by pushing around dirt. The second is a labyrinth of subterranean chambers carved out of rock with precision excavation. The project is a counter monument to the otherwise hidden processes that create massive change on a vast territorial scale. By placing the products of oil back in their place of origin, they become future sites of meditation on the ways that everyday consumption
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drives economies of extraction. This preservation would take place over a long period of time: as objects and processes of the oil economy become obsolete, they would be entombed one by one, a century long slow motion fracking of the site. Like John Soane’s Bank of England project, this counter monument is designed for a future public, hopefully one that wonders at the strangeness of our contemporary ways of living, and our economies of seemingly mindless extraction and consumption. The thesis is a way of saying that we as a culture at least contended with fracking in a way that was more substantial than worrying about the price of gas at the pump. Underground chamber perspectives
Scale: Architecture in Five Jumps Julian Ocampo Salazar Advisor: Ant贸n Garc铆a-Abril, Readers: Joel Lamere, Jeremy Alain Siegel
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3-DJ: Sampling as Design Sayjel Vijay Patel Advisor: Skylar Tibbits, Readers: Marc Downie, Mark Goulthorpe, Terry Knight
This thesis is a part of a revolution in architectural sensibilities. Within arm’s reach, hand-held 3D scanning technologies, such as photogrammetry, enable anyone with a smart-phone to digitally capture physical objects from the real world as point cloud data. For architects, 3D scanning is an exciting new medium which allows us to sample and appropriate the geometry and properties of any object. Presently, designers work from the bottom-up: from a space of abstraction to one that becomes gradually more concrete. The rules of computer modeling software precede, and constrain, the form of the objects they will create. However, 3D scans offer an
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opportunity to reverse this methodology, allowing designers to begin with highly detailed digital replicas of physical objects. Akin to how sampling is applied in electronic music, I develop a design process which enables a designer to evaluate, remix, and use the best features from real world samples to generate architectural features that would otherwise not be possible given conventional computer modeling methods. 3D printed model of an oyster shell from Cloudy Bay, Tasmania, captured using photogrammetry on July 5th, 2014.
Kipple Kaboodle: Reincarnating Suburban Stock Susanna W. Pho Advisor: Arindam Dutta, Readers: William O’Brien Jr., Rafi Segal
“No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot.” —Phillip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
California City is a gradually suffocating master-planned community in the Mojave Desert plagued by suburban blight, low occupancy, high foreclosure rates, and descending property values. To alleviate the pain of their suburb’s certain and agonizing death, the residents of California City have banned together to orchestrate its suicide and facilitate its subsequent reincarnation. This thesis documents California City’s demise as a rite of passage for both the
individual and the collective. As the town grapples with death on a suburban scale, it encounters deeply personal questions as an entire community. What does it mean when a city dies? How do those who must remain grieve, come to terms with their loss, and move on? What becomes of the corpse? What is its afterlife? The stuff of the suburb is examined in depth as the psyche of California City is destroyed, reconstituted and birthed anew. As the suburb is abandoned, salvaged, catalogued, and transformed, its remainders slowly transform into a reincarnated city that functions as an archival catalog of its previous existence. 10
New NORC City Ulises Reyes Advisor: Anne Whiston Spirn, Readers: Andrew Scott, Ryan Chin
People in the industrialized world are experiencing a new phenomenon: declining birth rates due to increased economic success, which in turn, can cause economic decline. This trend can be seen in much of Europe, among other places, where decreases in fertility and mortality rates have resulted in people of ages 65 and older to comprise
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of at least 15 percent of the population of over half of its countries, potentially rising to 35 percent in 2050. Through New NORC City, this thesis explores how co-housing can serve as a typology that takes advantage of mixed age groups in a way that benefits our increasingly aging world.
The Reconsidered River: Strategies for Connection in Post-Industrial Buffalo Laura R. Schmitz Advisor: Rafi Segal, Readers: Anne Spirn, Brent Ryan
This thesis sets out to connect two isolated neighborhoods in the post-industrial city of Buffalo, NY. Specifically, the project unites Silo City, a neighborhood of abandoned grain elevators that attracts intermittent visitors through seasonal events, and the Old First Ward, a river-side residential neighborhood once home to laborers for the grain facilities. The two are separated by the Buffalo River, a barrier that once linked the two economically. The master plan for the area consists of three plans at a smaller scale: River, Rail Spine, and Ward Plan, each of could be
developed and work together simultaneously. This thesis develops the River Plan in detail. Each new element within the plan either repurposes, preserves, or reconstructs existing features along the river. For example, the Ice Boom Room constructs a new building by using the seasonal and industrial process of controlled melting of Lake Erie’s ice as an opportunity to connect two neighborhoods year-round. This thesis asks how post-industrial cities like Buffalo can harness existing industrial and natural processes to promote growth and change. 12
Preposthuman: An Architectural Propaedeutic for the Digitally-Enhanced Tyler Stevermer Advisors: Brandon Clifford, Caroline A. Jones, Readers: Ariane Lourie Harrison, Mark Jarzombek
Developing into a posthuman will require training from your built environment. Architecture will start soft. Operating your environment will mean engaging with your sensorium—connecting you to others, yourself, and your environment both digitally and corporeally. While your posthuman body’s enhancements might bring it closer to architecture, your posthuman architecture’s enhancements might bring it closer to being a body. Like any body, your architecture must breath—responding and adjusting its spatialities. As a posthuman, you recognize
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that you have a right to spatial inhabitation, but you also recognize that you have no right to space you don’t need. Your neighbors and you push and pull. When you are part of the network, you acknowledge that digital automation is not an antonym to personal autonomy. To be posthuman means to hold contradictory viewpoints simultaneously. You can have your own, but share with all. Your space is there, but it disappears. Your body can be architecture and your architecture can be body.
Playtime in the Manipulated Landscape Maya Taketani Advisor: Joel Lamere, Readers: Mark Jarzombek, Miho Mazereeuw
Many contend that in the twenty-first century, we have entered a new geological era of the Anthropocene in which human intervention has taken over the entire globe. Yet for children, we often portray only the pristine and positive side of nature, shielding away anything we believe to be dangerous or polluted. Children are left disengaged from the realities of their environment. This thesis proposes to bring the realities of our world -- its manufactured and manipulated landscapes – into view, and to accept this as the environment that we have to face in the future. This landscape is not a marginalized region in the outskirts of the city that we cannot see, but is a new type of infrastructure with which people are forced to engage.
This infrastructure, although it seems dangerous and uncomfortable, brings people together through its playful character and spontaneity. Children are the ones who initially find the place as a space for play, then the adults follow. This project faces the realities of our environment today, but at the same time is optimistic about our future. Collage of various manipulated landscapes that we have created
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Plain Objects Evelyn Ting Advisor: William O’Brien Jr., Readers: Arindam Dutta, Gediminas Urbonas
The knowledge economy has replaced industry in driving the socioeconomic and urban development of 21st century cities. Universities, an important actor, must grow to stay competitive. In response to the desire to strengthen institutional identity, this thesis considers the possibilities—or consequences —of a growing institution turning its back on the city, quite literally, by creating a new frontage that faces inward on a city block. Plain Objects applies the concept of two-facedness to create singular architectural objects in the city that can combine to produce urban scale 15
effects. These objects dramatize binary conditions that are already inherent in the urban fabric in which they are inserted—blank vs. exuberant, mute plane vs. pure signage, stasis vs. variability—but in this case are heightened in the context of an added programmatic dichotomy, that between the expanding university campus and the city. The thesis argues for the renewed status of the object within the discipline of architecture and its potential to participate both in semiotics and abstract field conditions.
Heliocentric Architecture: Materializing Solar Cadences Trygve Wastvedt Advisor: Joel Lamere, Readers: Christoph Reinhart, Andrzej Zarzycki
There is a long tradition of architecture creating atmospheric, awe-inspiring experiences by shaping and making visible natural light. Another approach to daylighting optimizes lighting conditions through the use of computational tools which provide precise numerical and geometric models of solar rhythms to create even, optimal lighting.
This thesis applies the quantitative control of computational methods to the creation of atmospherically daylit architecture, making possible spaces whose form, tuned to the rhythms of changing daylight, reveals latent celestial cycles. 3/23 16:05 Solar Time
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Let’s Meet at the Civic Center Shiyu Wei Advisor: Brandon Clifford, Readers: Mark Jarzombek, John Ochsendorf
The architectural typology of the town hall has become so prevalent that the term is used to describe the activities that go on inside - namely, social gatherings of the public for purposes of discussion, question, and feedback to the governing body. The archetypes of the town hall, whether in 12th century Italy or 17th century New England, have functioned not only as the municipal headquarters with offices and courts, but also in some cases included markets, church, warehouse, museum, pub, and so forth. Most importantly, town halls function as meeting 17
places for the public. However, the town hall typology does not scale as the municipality expands. The administrative parts of the town hall can expand or multiply proportionally with the population, but the public functions that were originally embedded in the architecture have been either displaced into the large plaza outside of the city hall, or have disappeared entirely. This thesis project seeks to re-establish the town hall in New York City’s Civic Center through creating small spaces for social discourse.
Courtroom Characters, Architectural Drama: A Play in Several Acts Robert White Advisor: William O’Brien Jr., Readers: Mark Jarzombek, Jesal Kapadia
Engaging with the notion that architecture can serve as a mask, this thesis recasts the courthouse type as a stage upon which a particular performance is carried out. For the characters typically found in a court –judge, jury, attorney, and accused – each facade of the building becomes their mask, a formal identity to fit a narrative personality. This project attempts to develop complexity from the canonical instruments of architecture: hierarchies, sequence, and narrative. By using these tools to work through the conception of
a building, the project facilitates the social construction of an architectural object at several different levels. The labyrinthine nature of the interior is a result of the negotiations between the characters and the hierarchies they represent while the transparent facade blurs the reading of frame and framed, hidden and revealed. The incarcerated listens in: architectural form both constructs and negates social hierarchies.
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Atmospheric Intervention Rena Yang Advisor: Brandon Clifford, Readers: John Fernández, Kazys Varnelis
It’s a 25-degree winter day, 12 degrees with windchill in Boston and the sun is not bringing the usual relief to the numbing of your exposed face and hands. Another second on the steps of 77 Massachusetts Avenue makes you feel you’re moments from frostbite. The sensors on the building acknowledge your presence and a thick warm air grazes your cheeks. You are overcome with a joyful tingling sensation. Relief. You slow your steps as your eyes adjust from the outside while hoping no one plows into you. The loud buzzing sounds from the wind in your ears have faded into multiple footsteps around you. Your eyes adjust to find people zipping by, but you stand your ground in front of the warm vent to regain full feeling in your body.
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This thesis asks how architecture can interact with hostile climate conditions to create new atmospheric conditions. Architecture and the machinery of climate control have created spaces that are perpetually 70 degrees, regardless of the weather outside, desensitizing the body, and diminishing our experiences of space. The thesis project aims to stimulate, provoke, and challenge the body by sequencing architectural effects to accentuate, attenuate, appease, and amplify existing hostile climate conditions, creating a consciousness of body and space. Sequence of two types of spaces
Diplomatic: Letter from the Architectural Enclave Jie Zhang Advisor: Arindam Dutta, Readers: Ant贸n Garc铆a-Abril, Miho Mazereeuw, Gediminas Urbonas
This thesis concerns itself with boundaries: those of regimes, of culture, of law, and of social strata. At a time when privatized enclaves are proliferating, and simultaneously, architecture claims to innocently create public space without acknowledgement of these hidden, private compounds, the thesis questions if boundaries between absolute public and absolute private spaces can be re-configured, if not erased? How can architecture both make manifest and orchestrate these boundaries? What is architectural agency beyond the pursuit of public-ness? To examine these questions, this thesis engages with the program of an
embassy, a pseudo-extraterritorial space and the epitome of an enclave. The project collapses the distance between the embassy and its sponsored network of commercial and cultural establishments that, explicitly or implicitly, enclose their own boundaries of privilege. It proposes a seemingly open, new US embassy in Beijing as an eroded fragment of a boundary to examine the innocence of public space and to seek an architectural porosity as a diplomatic response to the persistence of spatial enclaves and the ideological enclave of positivism. Combinatory Border 20
Notes
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Notes
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Advisors & Readers
Matthew Bunza Ryan Chin Brandon Clifford Marc Downie Arindam Dutta John Fernández Simon Frommenwiler Antón García-Abril Mark Goulthorpe Renée Green Ariane Lourie Harrison Mark Jarzombek Caroline A. Jones Jesal Kapadia Terry Knight Joel Lamere Geoff Manaugh Miho Mazereeuw
Ana Miljacki Caitlin Mueller William O’Brien Jr. John Ochsendorf Cristina Parreño Alonso Christoph Reinhart Brent D. Ryan Andrew Scott Rafi Segal Jeremy Alain Siegel Anne Whiston Spirn Paul Steenhuisen Nader Tehrani Skylar Tibbits Gediminas Urbonas Kazys Varnelis Andrzej Zarzycki
Credits Layout and editing: Zachary Angles, Irina Chernyakova, Stephanie Tuerk Design: Kyle Barker Printed by Puritan Press; Hollis, NH Printed on Recycled Paper Set in AG Book & Minion Pro Special thanks to: J. Meejin Yoon Ana Miljacki Hannah Loomis Anne Simunovic Cynthia Stewart The 2015 M.Arch Graduates All Rights Reserved; Copyright of the texts and works within belong to the author unless otherwise stated.