2017 M.Arch Thesis Reviews by MIT Architecture

REVIEW M.ARCH THESIS FALL 2017

MIT Department of Architecture

Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture & Planning Department of Architecture 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 7-337 Cambridge, MA 02139 617 253 7791 / arch@mit.edu architecture.mit.edu © 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Individual contributions are copyright their respective authors. Images are copyright their respective creators, unless otherwise noted.

Advisors & Readers: Alex Anmahian Azra Akšamija Roi Salgueiro Barrio Pierre Bélanger Yung Ho Chang Yolande Daniels Sonia Dümpelmann Arindam Dutta Rania Ghosn Lorena Bello Gomez Mark Goulthorpe Timothy Hyde Mariana Ibañez Mark Jarzombek Sheila Kennedy Terry Knight

Joel Lamere Ana Miljacki Caitlin Mueller Mark Mulligan William O’Brien Jr. Hashim Sarkis Andrew Scott Rafi Segal Kristel Smentek Anne Spirn Justin Steil Skylar Tibbits Gediminas Urbonas James Wescoat J. Meejin Yoon

MIT Master of Architecture Thesis Projects Fall 2017 — 02

James Addison and Olivia Huang Spaces of Justice

Zachary Angles Narrative Tactics for Making Other Worlds Possible

Hugh Magee Soggy Sovereignty on the Irish Border

MyDung Nguyen Settle in the Bare Desert and Cause It to Bloom

Christina Chen The Almost Empty That is Full: A Patient Search in Nature

Robert Panossian The World is a Window

Bumsuk Cho Urban Figure

Sean Phillips Forest Futures

Martin Elliott Our City, What Ruins

Alaa Quraishi Palmnameh: The Epic of the Palm Tree in Los Angeles

Anna Ryan Material Matters: Process of Intuitive Design

Jorge Silén Transforming the Waterfront

Danniely Staback The Food Assembly: Architecture of Sustenance for the New Industrial City

Tyler Swingle Picturesque Prairies: Productive Preservation on a Petroleum Planet

12 Jonathan Fidalgo Prototypes for Public Infrastructures 14

Sergio Galaz-García Five Things

Zain Karsan Taking Stock

Jae Yong Lee Renaissance of the Ramp: Reconceptualizing the National Assembly’s Architectural Symbolism and Accessibility

Soyeon Lim Urban Detox

Mary Lynch-Lloyd, Ching Ying Ngan, and Maya Shopova Collective Home Office

Spaces of Justice James Addison and Olivia Huang Advisor: Arindam Dutta; Readers: Yolande Daniels, Justin Steil, J. Meejin Yoon

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world by far. Premised on punishment and isolation, incarceration most heavily affects vulnerable neighborhoods and individuals, and creates a system of disenfranchised citizens. Incarceration makes it difficult for these individuals to earn jobs and income, receive necessary healthcare, and maintain social ties. In a move towards reform, the Massachusetts state legislature is currently proposing bills for the implementation of restorative justice and justice reinvestment practices. Restorative justice offers an opportunity for the offender, victim, and other affected parties to engage in a mediated discussion to understand and agree on how the harm done can be repaired. It promotes a healing rather than punitive response to crime. Justice reinvestment reassesses how funds spent on incarceration can be diverted to help vulnerable individuals and neighborhoods, through beneficial programs such as youth crime prevention and education. This thesis, Spaces of Justice, adopts these strategies of reform to propose a new place of community corrections that offers vocational training and restorative justice practices

for minor offenders and returning citizens. Community corrections is where convicted individuals serve their sentence in society, such as probation, rather than locked in a facility. However, a report in Massachusetts found that, because judges lack faith in current community corrections programs, they choose to incarcerate people 85% of the time, even when community corrections would be a more appropriate sentence. Indeed, in Boston, the current facility that provides services to probationers is located across from the city prison, in an inaccessible area near the highway. As an inhospitable place, it discourages use by both judges and probationers, and thus detracts from the potential that community corrections has in decreasing incarceration and lifting neighborhoods out of the incarceration cycle. This thesis proposes an alternative model that, first and foremost, is actually located within the community it serves. In doing so, it reduces isolation and stigma associated with those involved in the criminal justice system by creating new relationships among spaces of justice, public space, and the neighborhood.

Narrative Tactics for Making Other Worlds Possible Zachary Angles Advisors: William O'Brien Jr., Kristel Smentek; Reader: Hashim Sarkis

Be they childhood games of make-believe, sophisticated literary projects, or political inventions (a “Great America”) authors have taken advantage of a world-building imagination, "creating their own worlds, and theorizing what they were doing”.1 From the 1960s onwards, fictional worlds were studied from a philosophical point of view, using “possible worlds” theory and modal logic, which consider the ontological status of fictional worlds, the nature of their functioning, and their relationship with the actual world. These ideas have been combined with literary theory, setting the foundation for the study of imaginary worlds. Architects and Urbanists have used facets of world-building arguably for as long as the disciplines have existed. Though modernity launched a highly conscious tradition of imagining worlds in literature and creative culture, it also stained imagination and dreaming with a connotation of frivolity and a wastefulness that was antithetical to modern projects of utility and rationality. In the later half of the twentieth century there was an increase in number of architects exploring the irrational and imaginative in defiance of the reign of rationalism. A chasm tore

through the discipline: grounded and rational practitioners on one side and imaginative inventors of form, indulgently entrapped in their fantasies, on the other. World-builders have developed robust methods for producing visions for futures, pasts, and other worlds. A study of world-building and narrative methods and their possible application to architectural and urban design has remained largely unaddressed. This thesis proposes methods for design and tests these methods through a case study. The case study is the city of Boston in the year 2100 being changed by many factors not least of which are the effects of sea level rise. A story has been authored, the world surrounding that story has been structured, and designs within that world have been represented. This thesis seeks to combine methods from storytelling, world-building, and scenario planning in order to allow imaginative explorations of, and design for, speculative environments in response to, and preparation for, challenging situations. 1: Mark Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds: the Theory and History of Subcreation. (London: Routledge, 2014).

The Almost Empty That is Full: A Patient Search in Nature Christina Chen Advisor: Jim Wescoat; Readers: Yung Ho Chang, Lorena Bello Gomez, Mark Mulligan

Humans live with nature, live in nature, and build within nature. We can find ideologies from ancient Oriental philosophies to some of the exemplary architectural practitioners and theorists of our own time that find validity in integrating the human living space with nature. Frugality, simplicity and synchronization of the environment heightens human experiences and purges excess energy. However, the contemporary trend of thinking has been one that views nature as a source of extraction, either scenically or for resources. The reverence to mountains and rivers has largely been lost in the shifting of historical paradigms. The appearance of certain cultural and religious institutions means

something. And the disappearance of them also denotes something equally profound. The specific area of focus is a small piece of an abandoned temple ground located on a mountain adjacent to the midâ&#x20AC;?section of Yangâ&#x20AC;?tze River called Lushan. Located in a relatively remote but accessible part of the mountain, a retreat complex that can host up to thirty people has been given a great amount of consideration. The project calls for an effort to look into ways of reuniting modern beings with a landscape that is as large as a mountain, as small as a piece of stone brick, and as old as the human history records. To take a step back in order to make two steps forward, and to empty itself so it can be full again.

Urban Figure Bumsuk Cho Advisor: Andrew Scott; Readers: Lorena Bello Gomez, Rafi Segal

“One hundred years ago, a generation of conceptual breakthroughs and supporting technologies unleashed a structure taller, deeper, and bigger than ever before conceived, with a parallel potential for the reorganization of the social world.” —Rem Koolhaas

This thesis investigates a mega-form in Seoul, South Korea constructed in 1967. The mega urban form occupies the Jongno area of Seoul; as a significant and dominant urban figure it registers at the larger scale of the city and yet divides the multiple industrial neighborhoods. It is likely that in the near future This thesis examines the role of the megathis area will be subject to major redevelopscale urban figure, specifically its appropriment together with many of the surrounding ateness within contemporary cities. Since smaller working communities. Rem Koolhaas’ 1993 essay, “Bigness: or the The main body of this thesis, then, will Problem of Large,” the concept of the megabe a design study into the appropriate urban scale urban intervention has been a promifigure that can propose a new idea and idennent issue both in architectural theory and tity. The goal of this practice is to formulate practice. The newly created urban figures, a new urban form that can operate as an physically dominant in the city, not only beinfrastructure that provides enhanced concame catalytic but also became immortalized nectivity, generates new ideas about urban within an urban fabric. And while such urban space and the public realm, and performs as figures remain intact, our contemporary cities an ecological system that fuels sustainable are experiencing unprecedented speeds of community revitalization. In rethinking the change and complexity. This trend raises a existing mega project, this thesis will conquestion: is the mega-form still a relevant ur- sider how to integrate the layers of the past ban figure to respond to the needs of cities? If into a new relationship with the reality of not, what are the causes and effects of urban contemporary Seoul through the medium of figures, and how can the concept be revised architecture and urban transformation. to be more responsive to the aspirations of contemporary cities?

Our City, What Ruins Martin Elliott Advisor: Joel Lamere; Readers: Azra AkĹĄamija, Hashim Sarkis

Leaks, demolitions, vacancy and ruins. Our City, What Ruins is a double entendre we use to describe the conditions of urban life at the peak time of our practice. On the one hand, one third of the land lay vacant, transforming into blight, and targeted for demolition. The city was the world's flagship destination for wonders of the modern day ruin. We declared the largest federal bankruptcy in the nation's history, and our democratically elected officials were on their way to prison. It was clear the ruin landscape was an allegory for a failing system from the top down. On the other hand, Our City, What Ruins willfully drops the connotations associated with the ruins and the blight that surrounds them, and the bodies who still call the neighborhoods home. Our practice was born out of a necessity we saw to fill a void in society; a collectively led spatial justice practice that was willing to

work both nefariously and legally, on the psyche and on the land, on damaged histories and invented futures. We advocate for an expanded agency of the architect; especially in landscapes of divestment and subtraction. This curation explores spatial and socio-economic tactics relating to rebranding of the body, community wealth building and emancipatory infrastructures in the form of drawings, models, slides, legal documents, literature, and various other materials and documentation from the time of our practice. All of this presented in the very bureaus we discovered and rescued from a school tainted for demolition. Just as our practice worked to unravel the failed bureaucracy that helped produce Our City, we dive into our bureaus to question What Ruins? ANATOPIA

Prototypes for Public Infrastructures Jonathan Fidalgo Advisor: WIlliam O'Brien Jr.; Readers: Andrew Scott, Rafi Segal

It is understood that infrastructure is needed in order to support the occupation of dense urban centers. Cities are filled with technical structures that handle transportation, water, air, and power amongst other necessities. Expanding infrastructural systems require larger swaths of land to accommodate increasingly specific and singular functions. With increased urban density and the rising value of land a new architectural approach is needed to realize the full potential of these infrastructural projects, and while we have observed many large scale transformations there is a potential for small scale projects to serve as a catalyst for urban renewal. In New York City the newest addition to the subway system, the Second Avenue Subway, has required the construction of a number of ancillary structures that house mechanical equipment, ventilation shafts, and

egress. These buildings have been criticized for their failure to contribute to street life along Second Avenue, a matter made worse by the fact that the land the buildings occupy was taken through eminent domain. This thesis proposes an alternative to the existing attitude toward ancillary structures by introducing a series of micro scale public spaces that allow these infrastructures to be reclaimed by the community. These programmatically â&#x20AC;&#x153;thickâ&#x20AC;? infrastructures create opportunities for unpredictable and variable uses to emerge in the city. The dense urban environment demands a layered public realm and by extension multifunctional and programmatically varied infrastructures. Through the introduction of new programs, these once hidden and inaccessible spaces can transform into a public utility for the city.

Five Things Sergio Galaz-García Advisor: Joel Lamere, Readers: Timothy Hyde, Roi Salgueiro Barrio

A plague upon the democratic city: the plague six sociopolitical conditions that speak about of liberal space! the dearth of public representation in the spatial register, and its concatenation with equal A space of sharp limits and discrete elements, crisis of representation in the formal political of exodus and nomadism, of property lines dimension. and junkspace. A space that in its relentless Just like its etymologic ancester–the drive for profiteering has sacrificed what ding, an open-ended gathering exploring itnursed it when it was still a fragile possibility: self around themes of common concern, these public places for open sociability. The square, things aspire to highlight the link between the the classic architectural canvas for the public formal politics, and the more subtle but more sphere in the west, has been kidnapped and pervasive register of the political, the inherent fattened up, to the extent that it can no longer power dynamics that are latent in the everyperform any role but becoming an empty day experience of humans. Equally important, space helping to glorify the nests of power these things are not objects, nor do they that it has been forced to house inside it. In aspire to be. Like regular tools, their identity exchange, liberal reality offers little: shards is not pre-established but relational, finished of spaces that are just as accessible as they through the friction of their physicality with are socially barren, or consumption zones the subjects that choose to appear in them, that flirt with diversity only to the extent that be them political activists, teenage lovers, or it can reproduce cultural hierarchies reproMormon preachers. ducing existing forms of cultural, social and Jointly, these exercises are not intended political privilege. to become brand-name typologies of social Premised a world where public areas are assemblage, but rather experimentations on devoid of otherness and squares are impaired, image, scale, visibility, presence, and memory, the present thesis engages in the design all important themes for the reconstitution of of places for public sociability in five sites a space of public sphere in our cities. located in different coordinates of the liberal Architecture may not be able to cure the democratic world: São Paulo, in Brazil; Tixtla, disease sapping democracy out of our cities, in Mexico; Hénin-Beaumont, in France, but it can direct its potent imagination to genMadrid, in Spain, and Sanford, in the United erate projects about how to overcome it. This States. These experimentations receive the thesis hopes to be a voice in this direction. working name of things, and are anchored in

Taking Stock Zain Karsan Advisor: Sheila Kennedy; Readers: Mark Jarzombek, Skylar Tibbits

This thesis is sited in a near and uncertain future in the Rust Belt of America. The title of this thesis refers to three interrelated conditions: industrial technology, material culture, and architectural agency. ‘Taking’ refers to the act of taking control and reclaiming agency. ‘Stock’ describes the vast potential of industrial sites as materially, technologically, and architecturally fertile ground. An expanded notion of stock prompts the emergence of new figures in the city of industrial abandonment and decline. This is the story of the material monks, who, garbed in the protective cloaks of their foundry, take back their material agency to mine cities of rust, combing through the dross around them. They come from a world of quotidian obsolescence, but they bring with them a new assessment of

stock. Their resistance materializes in a set of machine hacks, and by taking stock of the tools of their foundry and the materials that surround them, the monks construct their monastery. And with each hack they devise, the monks transform a form of waste into a form of building material. But they are troubled by the scale of the undertaking, and the impossibility of completely taking stock, for nothing can escape the scrutiny of their attention or the scope of their salvages. They must accept that their work will never finish, and like Sisyphus, must hack and re-hack, endlessly recycling material and technology. They can never escape the furnace that will melt down their machine parts, or the hopper that takes and redistributes their crushed and dismantled assemblies.

Renaissance of the Ramp: Reconceptualizing the National Assemblyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Architectural Symbolism and Accessibility Jae Yong Lee Advisor: William O'Brien Jr.; Readers: Mark Jarzombek, Caitlin Mueller

Today, the perception of the National Assembly in Seoul, Korea is as an authoritarian and inaccessible space. The large plaza in front of the building is only accessible if one passes through the security check; as a result, citizens rarely use the area. The building is only 30 years old; rebuilding an entirely new structure is neither feasible nor plausible. Considering this situation and the history, what kind of architectural transformation could be made to change perception of the National Assembly Building and its surrounding area? What architectural language or device could be used to enhance the accessibility and symbolism of the space? This thesis examines the potential of an architectural intervention to change perception of the site. This thesis argues that creating a space of ramps will heighten perceptions of accessibility to the National Assembly. The plaza becomes the place of communication as it establishes a new relationship between the space of the ramp and the National Assembly.

The space of the ramp symbolizes equal accessibility and facilitates a political dialogue between citizens and the government. Instead of being a mere vertical circulation device from floor to floor, the ramp is designed in diverse ways to acquire a more meaningful status, both functionally and symbolically. Unlike the columns which were used merely as ornamentation in the National Assembly, columns in the new architecture structurally support the ramp as well as symbolically support people coming to this new space to see the National Assembly from different perspectives. The monumentality of the authoritative architecture becomes diluted through a transparent and approachable public space that generates a new image of Koreaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s political architecture. This architectural intervention hopefully results in changing the perception towards the National Assembly from an authoritarian and inaccessible space to an open and accessible space.

Urban Detox Soyeon Lim Advisor: Rafi Segal; Advisors: Alex Anmahian, Timothy Hyde

Seoul is a busy metropolitan city and provides opportunities and excitements for its dwellers. However, its dwellers are also more vulnerable to detrimental stress. Combined with social isolation, it is a significant mortality factorâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; as serious as heavy smoking or obesity. In Seoul, the social support network level ranked the lowest among OECD countries. Historically, spaces for treatment have been more than just â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;curing machinesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; within the city. These spaces have been pilgrimage destinations or retreats. More recent approaches include redefining treatment spaces as the core of local communities or as a platform for larger communities to share common concerns and provide support. Learning from such precedents, I propose a prescription for the current situation to expose city dwellers to alternative modes of living, to nature, and to significantly engage in communities. The destination of this getaway is Jeju Island, an agriculture-based scenic island located between South Korea, Japan. and China.

This program will provide a platform for the participants to stay at host houses for four weeks to experience an alternative to urban life. Accommodations and food are provided in exchange for cooperating with local agricultural industries. Due to the geology of the island, its settlements are distributed around its perimeter in clusters. These villages will be the seed for a community-building architecture, enabling participants to engage in the social network both with locals and other transplants. These villages are connected by an existing walking trail; this trail will be a key element to facilitate community building at a larger scale. The activated and transformed trail will provide the backdrop for shared activities such as concerts, lectures, or flea markets for the city. This thesis explores the creation of a backdrop that can facilitate community building among the villages by taking advantage of an existing path through architectural interventions.

Collective Home Office Mary Lynch-Lloyd, Ching Ying Ngan, and Maya Shopova Advisor: Ana Miljacki; Readers: Timothy Hyde, Rafi Segal

Collective Home Office is a collaborative practice of three members whose working process is self-designed to test the propositions it makes through architecture. As a group of friends, a consortium of willing test subjects, a union of producers, a jury, a family, a band, a team, or an army, CHO explores the frictions and benefits of collectivity in both method and content. The three words that form its name provide a framework through which the practice engages with its context, inviting it to question how the meanings of collective, home and office have been shaped by a particular historical lineage. Targeting the agents who are most implicated in defining the current moment, namely the proto-state corporations, platforms and institutions that constitute and feed Big Tech, CHO pitches a series of unsolicited projects to clients who are radically changing how we live and relate to one another. CHO believes that not only should these agents be held responsible for the drastic social and urban impacts they exert, but that they may become willing partners in designing new ways of living that respond to the social estrangement, imminent technological unemployment, and chronic housing crisis that have resulted from their unregulated conquest of market share—if spoken in their language.

Far from neglecting the notion of collectivity, the tech world has appropriated its surplus value and replaced sharing with a sharing economy and then with a gig economy. The “capitalist collective” fails to recognize its misuse of the word; collectives differ greatly from memberships of independent contractors. CHO believes that collectivity is a shared motivation towards a common goal. Fundamentally ideological, it is accrued over time through social intimacy built on shared experiences, both positive and negative. Spatially, this notion of the collective requires a new organizational strategy that expands the architectural condition of the front door as the threshold between private and public. Modeled on both the city and the home, forms of domestic urbanism are fostered by intimate encounters occurring in non-concentric, overlapping scales of interaction, redefining the notion of household. CHO focuses its architectural practice on how this unlikely partnership can be used as an opportunity to rewire the collective with new priorities—priorities that do not necessitate defining oneself by one’s profession. Using the home office as a device, Collective Home Office emphasizes the increasing importance of care work and social grooming as means of learning to cope with a transitional lifestyle no longer based on the binary of home and work.

Soggy Sovereignty on the Irish Border Hugh Magee Advisor: Ana Miljacki; Readers: Alex Anmahian, William O'Brien Jr.

BREXIT has caused an existential crisis in Northern Ireland; by March 2019 the Irish border, between Northern Ireland (part of the UK) and the Republic of Ireland, will become the European Union’s only land frontier with another union. Considering more than double the number of land crossings (275) exist on the Irish border than the entire eastern block of the EU, coupled with Northern Ireland’s conflicted history, how this new border should function has caused a political deadlock, and stalled UK/EU negotiations on their formal divorce. Following the 2015 migrant crisis in Europe, the BREXIT slogan “take back our borders” promoted the xenophobic vilification of a particular kind of outsider. This is particularly significant given 2016 saw a record number of visitors to Ireland in the island’s history. At the same moment that the idea of national sovereignty is intensifying, so too is the need for open borders. BREXIT revives the Irish border, which had all but disappeared, threatening the recovery of the region’s towns, which suffered decades of militarized violence, customs checks, and the general friction of the geopolitical abstraction of a border. Given this history of conflict, the UK has vowed for a “frictionless” and “invisible” border, while no proposals have been made for how this could be achieved. The only consensus between Bel-

fast, Dublin, London and Brussels is that no “hard infrastructure” should be proposed— a non-solution based on the violent image of the Irish border’s past, and wishful thinking given the administrative imperative of border management. This thesis instead argues that if construction is going to happen, it should be an architecture that takes the border town as its subject, and serves local life while attracting visitors. Indeed the majority of the border is made up of waterways that already act as anchors for an array of local and visitor activities. Having historically bore the brunt of the border’s imposition, border towns have developed numerous cross-community initiatives to attract EU and tourism investment. The thesis proposes to leverage these sources of funding for grassroots community initiatives and proposes locally tuned architectural interventions along the waterways of border towns. In a context that is anything but stable, this thesis aims to produce a space for architectural stability, bringing people together at a point of division to float, drink and otherwise not care about the border. Soggy Sovereignty offers a space to soak in the jurisdictional ambiguity and ultimately challenge the Irish Border.

Photo (top): Golf Five Zero Sangar Watch Tower, Crossmaglen village on the Irish Border 25

Settle in the Bare Desert and Cause It to Bloom MyDung Nguyen Advisor: Mark Jarzombek; Readers: Azra Akšamija, Rania Ghosn

So we went there, the Saltbush Collectives, or “SB Collects” for short. It was mid-November and the fire season hadn’t begun yet, so the weather was perfect. Only the first two towers were up and pumping water then: the Salty Test Kitchen and the Salty Sauna, or “Wheaty Thins” and “Corn Flakes” as I like to call them. We booked a private room at a family’s home in town and just did it. I can’t tell you why; we’re nowhere near the California Central Valley and we’re definitely not the spontaneous type who would just pack their bags for a 14-hour drive to bake some scones and exfoliate ourselves with saltbush soap in-um- a couple of water towers. Call it… a “weekend getaway”. So we went and it was, it was, well… it was just like that. I remember standing at the steps of the Hindmans General Store in the state park and seeing the tower in the distance, piercing the flat horizon in all of its wheaty glory. At first it just looked a little funny standing like a giant next to the pomegranate trees. Then, I started imagining those rolling fields of golden wheat and something in my stomach turned…the pomegranates were dying.

When we were walking back from the Salty Kitchen that first day, Sal was picking the flowers straight from the saltbushes in the crop field, snacking on them like granola. Bits fell and added to this yellow-shelled road that we were following to town. The path was a gradient of new and aged nut shells from orchards throughout the county. It crunched beneath our feet for a stretch of time. Rows gave away to more rows, from saltbushes to some haggard pomegranates, and then every quarter mile we came across these large, extruded outlines of wheat grains that we would sit in. Steps, stay, see, steps, stay, see…the distant horizon outside of the fields…steps… until it opened up… stay… at the interstate and… see… the sky come down all around like a butter dish. Steps, stay, see, steps, stay, see… the path led us along a string of gardens between homes. Steps, stay, see, steps, stay, see, steps… pass the border, a “Wall” made of young saltbushes surrounding the community center. In a few years, this will be a filled frame, the ground full of saltbushes the color of gold during mid-November… we pass from the outside in.

The World is a Window Robert Panossian Advisor: William O'Brien Jr.; Readers: Alex Anmahian, Joel Lamere

"We were searching for ourselves in each other." —Sergei Parajanov

Perhaps the answer could be found in the poetry and songs of Sayat Nova, an eighteenth-century Armenian ashough who Straddling the border between the continents wrote in the three major languages of the of Europe and Asia, the South Caucasus, the Caucasus: Armenian, Georgian and Azerbainame referring to the geographical region that jani. The poet provides us with the realization stretches from the Black Sea to the Caspian that the cultures of the Caucasus were once has played an important role in connecting intertwined to an extent that is virtually a peoples. Traversed by a great chain of moun- distant memory today. Sayat Nova would later tains rising to a height of 18,000 feet, it was become the central character in filmmaker used by merchants as the only way to reach Sergei Parajanov’s 1968 masterpiece ‘The the Middle East from Europe by land. Today, Color of Pomegranates,’ a film which attempts we know the South Caucasus as a collecto depict the poet’s life through a sequence tion of three nations: Georgia, Armenia, and of active tableaux. This thesis attempts to Azerbaijan. Former Soviet socialist republics, analyze and employ the formal techniques the three neighbors have been engrossed in used by Parajanov, in order to create an conflict since the 1990s thereby ushering architecture framing and framed around perpetual instability in the region. the poems and songs written by the famous ashough. Sited at the tripoint where the three But was there a time of mutual understanding? countries meet, it aspires to serve as a point of convergence between the three neighboring nations of the South Caucasus. A place of retreat, contemplation, and celebration. To remember what once was and dream of what again could be.

Forest Futures Sean Phillips Advisor: Rania Ghosn; Readers: Sonja Dümpelmann, Sheila Kennedy

Forest. With recent interest in carbon emissions, wood has returned as a fashionable building material. Renewable, flexible, and a carbon sink, wood is increasingly seen as a material that responds to concerns of climate change. However, an acceptance of the Anthropocene demands a re-thinking of how humans relate to natural systems, and this thesis argues that with a return to wood, architecture must also return to its source—the forest—for inspiration and sites of intervention. This thesis sites itself within Mendocino National Forest in northern California. As sites of both extraction and conservation, National Forests are messy landscapes often overlooked in favor of their more manicured cousins, National Parks. Many things are hidden here. National Forests are also under threat. Political hostility towards public land, drought, and wildfire threaten northern Californian forests more than ever before. 2017—like 2015, 2012, 2006, and 2002— has been the worst year on record for

wildfire in California. National Forest budgets are increasingly consumed by fire suppression and—fueled by a changing climate and poor management —dangerous wildfires are the new normal for California. Futures. Fire, the great destroyer, is also a valuable ecosystem actor. Forest (and Californian) futures will depend on looking beyond the crisis of fire for opportunities within the fire cycle. This project proposes ‘forest futures’ in three chapters, each located at a point within the northern Californian mixed-conifer fire cycle: fighting fire, after the burn, and working with fire. Mendocino National Forest, even as the least visited in California, is filled with overlapping human and non-human worlds. Each chapter proposes an architectural intervention that engages the world of a forest dweller and their forest: the Conservation Tower, Burnout Lodge, and the Yule Tree Farm.

Palmnameh: The Epic of the Palm Tree in Los Angeles Alaa Quraishi Advisor: Azra Akšamija; Readers: Rania Ghosn, Mark Jarzombek

The Palm Tree of Los Angeles is its own entity. It is spelled with a capital P and T. It is also inherently contranymic. (A contranym is defined as a word with two opposite meanings.) Although referred to as “tree,” it biologically is not. It is a monocot, similar to grass. Although it is completely embedded into the making of Los Angeles, it is not native to the city at all. Different palm trees from around the world, along with their stories, have participated in constructing myths continuously perpetuated in and by Los Angeles. Current myth making, however, perpetuates a flat, simple narrative. This thesis brings multiple dimensions of positive and negative narratives forward in one continual experience, collapsing these into an alternative mythology. The proposal moves from a flat representation to a collapsed representation. Flat representation is when the myth references only a single story, whereas collapsed representation allows the myth to reference multiple stories. This shift is a new approach on reading the city’s history, creating an alternative mythology.

By using an aesthetic of Persian miniatures, the thesis re-orientalizes representations of the palm tree. I use the term re-orientalize intentionally, also calling to a re-orienting of the interpreter. This thesis uses a flat aesthetic, but tells a collapsed mythology. The proposal is architecturalized through a series of interventions in the city that can be approached either on their own, or as a constructed loop. The series of interventions are put together as a “nameh,” which is a book from a Persian tradition that tells a type of history through painting and verse. This is the Palmnameh: The Epic of The Palm. This thesis is produced through three things: First, a book, which is the manuscript of the Palmnameh, holding drawings of the interventions and the myths they recall. Second, a map that combines these interventions, stringing together the alternative urban reading of the city, and third, a bookstand that acts as the stage for the mythology to be told. This object’s ornament acts as an index to the Palmnameh.

Material Matters: Process of Intuitive Design Anna Ryan Advisors: Joel Lamere, Caitlin Mueller; Reader: Terry Knight

Steady. Tighten. Splice. Bend. Fold. Weave. Elongate. Stiffen. Break.

The pieces are held together with friction alone. With no boundary conditions and no permanent fixatives, they are endThis is the vocabulary of an undertaking of lessly malleable, repeatedly remade into new craft, designing-while-making, improvising, forms, each time producing new lessons learning-while-doing. for the maker. This thesis is an exploration of design as Drawings are created after making, in craft. Woven plywood models are created in order to map these undevelopable forms. improvisational moves, benefitting from the The result is a series of drawings that are not embodied knowing that comes with extended representative of form, but instead a method material play. The making of these pieces is an to unravel the story of making. active process, where methods are tested and The resultant family of tensile structures discovered by hand. The body is the driver in advocate for a designer to engage with matethis way of making, and decisions are made rial in order to make discoveries of forms and based on the possibilities and limitations of methods that would not have arisen using the material. the hylomorphic model of design. Working by hand allows the material to assert its own logic, principles, and exciting possibilities.

Transforming the Waterfront Jorge SilĂŠn Advisor: Mark Jarzombek; Readers: Hashim Sarkis, Gediminas Urbonas

Our relation with nature develops from an early age. The built environment, the food we eat and the pictures we see nurture and influence our ways of inhabiting the landscape and how that landscape inhabits our imagination and our conception of place. How we experience nature during the course of our lives inevitably shapes our understanding of it. In the Caribbean, the overall colonial history reveals patterns of settlement around the waterfront which function as physical formulations for social segregation and reclusiveness, disregarding public access and mixing. Whether for military purposes, or as a result of an economy heavily based on tourism, the urban conditions showcase a deliberate and consistent public inaccessibility to the waterfront as a consequence of a politically imposed order. The urban logics of San Juan, Puerto Rico display the immense distances between the majority of local inhabitants and the privileged few that coexist with the waterfront. The key word here is isolation. An island within an island. The context disappears. An old colonial fortress, a large highway, huge apartment complexes, hotels and environmental pollution estrange the inhabitant from her immediate context. A social and cultural understanding of the waterfront emerges and

with it a particular subject. In this scheme, the sea is for an outsider, a tourist or anyone who is willing to play or pay for such a role, even as a local. Far from reality, a paradise materializes: the Island of Enchantment where everything else disappears. With new coastal challenges brought by climate change proposing an alternate scheme which renders the waterfront accessible imposes paradoxical challenges. There is a tension between the accessibility to resources and defense, between ecological rehabilitation and existing communities, between cancelling out a threatening global phenomena and the definition of a world without exteriority. The project takes advantage of the local particularities of the existing ecological system and utilizes the mangrove forest as a locally-produced defense system and a spacemaking opportunity with which to negotiate these tensions. The project aims to make visible and accessible a new epistemological space by incorporating a research center and scenarios in which accessibility to resources, in this case fishing, can trigger a new possible relationship between the concreteness of the built environment and the construction of an alternative political order.

The Food Assembly: Architecture of Sustenance for the New Industrial City Danniely Staback Advisor: Mark Goulthorpe; Readers: Caitlin Mueller, Mariana Ibañez

Looking at Detroit is looking into the future. As the quintessential post-industrial shrinking city, it faces a myriad of problems, which include: a declining tax base, urban blight, inaccessible transportation, a waning workforce, lower educational attainment, and food insecurity. Through this conglomeration of factors, the city will inevitably witness the rise of a new-agrarian society. These new agrarians will come from all ages and trades, and shift from a dependency on manufacturing to an organized production of food, harnessing the conditions of place into a new productivity and a way of life that revolves around production itself. This thesis proposes an architecture for the new-agrarians that challenges the culture of production for production’s sake, and responds to the outlook of human obsolescence and poverty brought upon by “progress.” It proposes an alternate future, in which the basis for sustenance is redefined. The newagrarians will need to feel productive and be creative. They will need an engaging public

space. And they will need intellectual stimulus, even in the most automated and mechanized of environments. The entry point for this thesis was to interrogate contemporary spaces of production and our relationship with these spaces, technologies, and products. We become our spaces of production, idle and disenfranchised, unless we can re-claim these spaces, along with their vitality. Born from the remains of the General Motors assembly plant, my proposal, The Detroit-Hamtramck Food Assembly, seeks to embody these precise needs. In the Assembly, agriculture is openly sourced by a hybrid system of manual and automated labor that enables the creation of an urban enclave of production, allowed for by surplus space, surplus technology, surplus infrastructure, and surplus labor. This food bastion is simultaneously park, garden, and workplace, a food Gigafactory—to feed their city and free their city—and hopefully, in this process, becomes a new driver for culture.

Picturesque Prairies: Productive Preservation on a Post-Petroleum Planet Tyler Swingle Advisor: Joel Lamere; Readers: Roi Salgueiro Barrio, Pierre Bélanger

Fires burn bright atop the flare stacks in the distance as bison watch from behind the two meter high fence of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. In this modern scene, complex geographic formations in North Dakota’s badlands have established a unique shared topography between an assemblage of seemingly disparate actors: engines, bison and humans. The Bakken formation six kilometers below the surface of the earth provides enough resources to encourage rhizomatic deployment of oil and gas wells while the sedimentary surface, eroded from melting snow, provides ‘scenic’ lands for tourists and prairie ecosystems for bison. The socio-political distinction between actors has produced abstract borders and delineations in the form of habitats and land-use policies. Materialized through fences, these policies have created autonomous operating systems like fracture drilling and wildlife

conservation that are specified for a single or hierarchical order of actors. This not only facilitates settler practices of separation and domination, but encourages unaccountable externalities outside of the operating system. Located between two [and a half] National Park units, this project embraces the multiple identities of the subterranean region by proposing a design strategy that engages the three actors as equal shareholders. Acknowledging the actors as an assemblage reveals material kinships and commitments to the geography that offer design considerations for shared spaces and memories. The project is composed of three archetypes, each weaving and entangling the actors within each other’s programs and seasonal patterns. Through this built environment, the archetypes frame a physical and conceptual shared geography as a construction of landscape.

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MIT Master of Architecture Thesis Projects Fall 2017