REVIEW FALL 2019
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 Š 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Individual contributions are copyright their respective authors. Images are copyright their respective creators, unless otherwise noted.
MIT Master of Architecture Thesis Projects Fall 2019 — 02
Alexandre Beaudouin-Mackay and Sarah Wagner A New way of Play: The Forms and Functions of Participatory Design and Critical Pedagogies
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Carlos Casalduc Terminal Idiom: A Public Archive for Habana
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Stratton Coffman Bagging
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Boliang Du Architecture and Atmosphere: Re-inventing transportation infrastructure of the "Fog Capital"
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Jaya Alba Eyzaguirre Objects of Home
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Marlena Fauer Under Observation: A Site of Totality in Uncertain Futures
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Dalma FĂśldesi and Jung In Seo More or Less Exact
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Gabrielle Heffernan Responses to the Everyday : Reliefs from the Private
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Taeseop Shin and Stephan Hernandez Kinship: Recollecting Memories in DMZ
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Trevor Herman Hilker Other Stories
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Angeline C. Jacques Mission 2066: A National Park for the Anthropocene
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Thuy Le Falsework: Staging Construction
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Hyerin Lee Suburban Typology for Flood Resilience: A Case Study on Winthrop, MA
28 Kevin Marblestone and Emily Whitbeck Pedagogy of the Fourth Wall: Toward a Time-Based Architecture 30 Aaron Powers Stimulation, Spectulaton, Simulation 32
Valeria Rivera Deneke One Degree Removed: The Last Carnival of Venice
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Cristina Solis Tremulous Lines: The Alternative History of a Site of Exception
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Cheyenne Vandevoorde Into the Abstract: An inquiry into abstraction as method and its manifestations
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Chaoyun Wu Machine Learning in Housing Design: Exploration of Generative Adversarial Network in Site Plan/ Floorplan Generation
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Shane Zhang Value in Design? Features, Pricing, and Design Strategiess
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Stella Zhujing Zhang Komorebi: Tree Filter Sun
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A New way of Play: The Forms and Functions of Participatory Design and Critical Alexandre Beaudouin-Mackay and Sarah Wagner Advisor: Brandon Clifford; Readers: Garnette Cadogan, Caroline Jones
“We need play precisely because we need occasional freedom and distance from our conventional understanding of the moral fabric of society.” - Miguel Sicart The education of the architect exists in the realm of the political imaginary. The hypothetical world of the university studio suggests both the potential power of built work in the city and the real and immediate value of the unrealized design in architectural discourse. The playful distancing of academic work allows for freedom and innovation, yet architects have consistently overlooked the expansive opportunities inherent in a more political understanding of play. Like the imaginaries we engage, the design of play has always been intrinsically tied to the politics of its era.
Play is not aimless but productive; it is the way in which we learn to exist in the world. Today, “play” is controlled by a neo-capitalist economy obsessed with risk aversion. Architects avoid working with communities as fears of losing authorship threatens a society controlled by patents and publications, as community engagement meetings are chastised for being nothing more than a means of addressing liabilities. If architects want to reengage the world of politics, in the midst of a global call for a new and equitable era, they must return again to play, not just as a subject but as a method. In a world of increasing tensions and isolationism, the academic can no longer be siloed but must be immersed in the world around it. Architects must find methods of working with others, of engaging the moral fabric of society. Architects haven’t just forgotten about play--they’ve forgotten how to design with people.
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Terminal Idiom: A Public Archive for Habana Carlos Casalduc Advisor: Sheila Kennedy; Reader: Mark Jarzombek
While most architecture projects are invested in exploring different and novel processes to produce architecture, few works have attempted to speculate on architecture’s subsequent endings. The academic and professional discussions of architecture have focused on its “natalist” ambitions and a general indifference towards the ultimate death of buildings has pervaded architectural production. While we may think of buildings as enduring cultural artifacts, in reality, they decay and perish at far shorter intervals than often expected.
Therefore, paradoxically an architect’s relationship to his own work ends when its life begins. As designers, we are unable to escape the tendency of imagining our buildings in a fixed/final state. Disregarding the effects of the elements on the buildings we produce and we opt to represent them in a state of material timelessness. This thesis inquiry proposes a public general archive in the port of Havana, Cuba as a vehicle to explore the implications and consequences of time in the physical materiality of architecture. The general public archive proposed is framed between an analogous and digital data center. The public data speculated here as existing exclusively in an analogous form of storage is meant to be held in the building for processing into their digital counterparts. The processing of this backed up data will render parts of the buildings programs subsequently obsolete allowing us the opportunity to speculate on its bodies possible future’s.
The average lifespan of conventional structures before the modern movement was around 120 years. Modern materials and assemblies radically changed the way buildings aged, averaging half the former construction’s life expectancy. This thesis proposes to challenge conventional practice and thought structures, which reinforce this separation between architecture and time. As architects our relationship to the buildings that we produce begins at the stage of conception and culminates at the moment of construction. If buildings must die, what are the possibilities for architecture’s subsequent futures? How can we find productive outcomes if we deploy material pathos in place of a modern material timelessness?
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Bagging Stratton Coffman Advisor: Ana Miljački; Reader: Lisa Haber-Thomson
The projective gesture of architecture, its forward reach as an offering, anticipates a recipient. Through a systematized catcall, it interpellates a subject as the beneficiary of its offering. As Mabel Wilson has reminded us, the professionalization of this effort has helped produce the humanist subject to “consolidate a European worldview.” Bagging provides a wrinkle in the lines of this orthographic regime, of architecture’s iterative inscription of this liberal subject. It is an attempt at a partial unravelling of architecture’s straightening devices that orient the body toward designed ends (and align it with systems of power) and that “make certain things, and not others, available.” It does so not to seek abolition of the line but to open design to new (deviant) subjects, like cows, crowds, and sodomites.
As a set of role-playing moves at bodyish scale, bagging gathers a multiplicity of contents within soft parameters, working with textile to deny the conventional fixity of position, dimensioning, scale. Bagging invites a deviation from the orthographic view, turning our attention to that “field of unreachable objects” constituted by following lines of inscription, turning sideways to caress the warm side of the cow, to dwell within a mess of bodies, to seek pleasure beyond the straight.
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Architecture and Atmosphere: Re-inventing transportation infrastructure of the “Fog Capital” Boliang Du Advisors: Anton Garcia-Abril, Mark Jarzombek; Readers: Rosalyne Shieh, Christoph Reinhart
The atmosphere is an amorphous building material. Clouds floating in the sky scatter direct sunshine into diffused ambient light, canceling hard shadow, softening building volumes and erasing architectural details. Fog lying near the ground further diffuse and absorb light, redefining people's spatial experience by adding smell, influencing sensation and manipulating visibility. This thesis is sited in Chongqing city, the “Fog Capital” of China. Surrounded by the nearby mountains of the Sichuan Basin, Chongqing experiences year-long cloudiness as a result of temperature inversion caused by the basin's convective layer being capped by a layer of air moving east across the Tibet Plateau. On the other hand, located at the confluence of Yangzte River and Jialing River, the city is enshrouded with fog for over 100 days per year result from an abundant amount of moisture trapped by the valley and nearby parallel mountain ridges. Apart from the climatic features, Chongqing is also famous for its geography and topography, which makes it famous as a “Mountain
City”. Near halfway up the hill, a band-like area with dramatic altitude change naturally divides the city into “upper town” and “lower town”, which leads to two urban phenomena. First, the low-lying fog generated from the water body would arrive at the “lower town” in the early morning and wait a while on the cliff before it ascends into the “upper town”. Secondly, thousands of citizens would travel up and down around this area to get to the other side of the city. In history, such busy traffic is made possible by 17 city gates, and nowadays, a series of transportation infrastructures. By re-inventing these facilities, this thesis researches the nature of the atmosphere from micro to macro, synchronizes the traveling of people and air, celebrates the ephemerality of effect and experience, proposes a rushhour experience of fog and cloud. To speak to atmosphere, three individual projects are created, which are “Cloud Bridge”, “Air Gate” and “Fog Tunnel”.
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Objects of Home Jaya Alba Eyzaguirre Advisor: Rosalyne Shieh; Readers: Caroline Jones, Jennifer Leung, Lisa Haber-Thomson
Objects of Home re-imagines a home without walls, without roofs without doors, scattered throughout Rome–connected by patterns of use and coincidence. Immersed in a city that is not so anonymous to those who know it, these settlements upturn the tropes of the family and the private realm as the only site of intimate and fulfilling relationships. It seeks out the marginal, un-portentous, hidden and symbolic spaces of the city and waits for the different imaginaries of often forgotten subjects to animate and re-form these anonymous spaces through their very difference. Focused on the homemaking practices of the urban street dwellers, five familiar home-making practices are traced to reveal the inconspicuous relationships formed between public space and its inhabitants.
These moments of encounter produce places of social renegotiation, contestation, and collaboration that reshape the margins of a public space and through their recurrence and begin to transform the territory beyond a single ephemeral interaction. Repeated behaviors become ritualized, familiar encounters become community, and private possessions, gifted to the street, begin to organize new territories of individual personality. In the old but unrecognized processes of homemaking within the roman city, the body and living space become mutually constitutive– coexisting within the boundaries of private and public property.
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Under Observation: A Site of Totality in Uncertain Futures Marlena Fauer Advisors: Sheila Kennedy; Readers: Axel Kilian, Cristina ParreĂąo
This thesis asks how we can integrate ourselves into the unforgiving yet susceptible cosmology of our universe, a feat we have repeatedly failed to do in recent history. Through technological advancement, we have abstracted, pixelated, consumed, and mined our world to irreversible measures, as well as distanced ourselves from what used to be a crucial symbiotic relationship between land and people. Therefore, it is necessary for us as humans to reestablish our relationship to our planet and beyond. It does so by tracking three recurrences of one event in one site over the course of one millennium, narrating changing conditions in landscape, climate, culture, and production while reclaiming the landscape for unaccounted voices in the western histories through representation and intervention. The event, the viewing of the future total solar eclipse, brings together land and space within its path of totality, and draws mass-touristic migrations to its remote yet ideal sighting-location. Throughout history, eclipses have been pivotal tipping points, for better or for worse. In the presence of total eclipses, armies have dropped their weapons and declared truces, empire boundaries have been determined and marked, and indigenous populations have even been duped by colonizing powers. In an increasingly uncertain future, these are important moments of pause, reflection, and perhaps even optimism.
And now, the viewing of the total solar eclipse exists as a highly-anticipated and -attended celestial-cultural event that requires a form of architectural-event intervention to support this particular experience. While several eclipses happen around the world each decade, making them somewhat ubiquitous phenomenon in our global age, it typically takes about 360 years for a total eclipse path to re-land in the same location. Therefore, the viewing of the total solar eclipse becomes the framework for selecting a specific place and tracking it over long time spans, one wrought with years of violence to both the land (an abandoned pit mine in Northern Nevada) and its people (the Shoshone tribe). It becomes the place where time and space collide, where event-site and production-site become one and the same, where maybe things can change.
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More or Less Exact Dalma Földesi and Jung In Seo Advisor: Mariana Ibañez, Readers: Axel Kilian, Mark Jarzombek
More or Less Exact tests the fidelity of mate- The other model locates the ‘exact’ in the firial control by hands, by machines, and by delity of actions that control material. This the interaction of the two. model incorporates a notion of continuous maintenance to the point of rebuilding, as To bring forth an object today means to the outcome no longer needs to approximate discretize it: to render it more or less the a geometric a priori. Setting these two modsame as its mathematical, geometric defini- els in dialogue, More or Less Exact opens up tion—its Husserlian ‘limit-shape’ or Kantian design opportunities that may otherwise— schema. Architects, engineers, and designers under either model—be overlooked. Rather ceaselessly labor to minimize the friction be- than optimizing for the more and more extween the digital and the material world by act, the project navigates this liminal space perfecting mechatronic and optical systems dynamically. of design and production. Learning from techniques of shaping This thesis overlaps two models of exacti- clay—manual and mechanized—, we opertude within the discipline of architecture to ate in the space between the two ‘exacts’ by expose a design space at their intersection. compounding actions that control material. One model, underlying Western practice We relocate precision to the design of tools, since modernism, is based on specifica- and we conceive of building as continual tions provided by the architect. Distancing process: a sequence of actions performed designer and builder, this model locates the collaboratively between human and nonhu‘exact’ in dimensional stability. The built man agents, ceaselessly transforming matter. outcome always approaches, though never reaches, the geometric ideal through correction and repair in an attempt to deny any material transformations due to the process of construction and the passing of time.
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Responses to the Everyday : Reliefs from the Private Gabrielle Heffernan Advisor: Rosalyne Shieh; Readers: Hans Tursack, Lisa Haber-Thomson
In pursuit of an architecture of the everyday, this investigation applies fascinations with and imaginations of the ordinary to architecture’s possibilities for relief in today’s increasingly privatized notion of the public. Our neoliberal reality dictates an incessant change in urban landscapes - from enclaves of difference to havens of increasing homogeneity ruled by the holders of capital. Transitioning urban ethnographies often occur in pursuit of accessible economies and shelter as resources become inaccessible. Though the cycle is inevitable, there remain opportunities for relief in the form of de-commercialized public space and public architectures for commerce. East Boston has historically served as an enclave to consistent influxes of foreign-born populations in Boston. The co-existence between various populations is both intermingled and separate - coded in our urban environments which host multiple worlds. "Responses to the Everyday" posits the roles of body-scaled to small-buildingscaled architectures in mobilizing existing and incoming populations with shared resources for continued participation in East Boston’s largely service-industry economy.
Rather than mobilizing profit-agenda-pushing development, smaller interventions on existing sites of public space offer potential sites of relief to a cycle of forced displacement due to increasing privatization. "Responses to the Everyday" seeks to maintain difference in the neighborhoods surrounding Maverick Square by reinstating public ownership - to provide alternatives to the glossy, singularlyowned, and homogeneous. This range of potential built structures operates within and between three existing sites to support the continuation of difference through architectures of access. Access is architecturally provided through structures of shared capital, knowledge, and space, which inform programs such as collective commercial kitchens, market stalls, kiosks for shared information, and evolving memorials. Its architecture arises from accessible materials and labor to imagine achievable structures - potentially altered and replicated by various. Each acts as a container for resources in response to today’s landscape of everyday activities and economic exchange in East Boston.
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Kinship: Recollecting Memories in DMZ Taeseop Shin and Stephan Hernandez Advisor: Ana MiljaÄ?ki; Readers: Cristina ParreĂąo, Jonah Susskind
This thesis proposal examines the nature of territories in the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) of Korea where is a border strip between North and South Korea, as a new possibility for kinship between the two, which gradually disappears.
The thesis starts with collecting memories through traveling west to east of the DMZ during the summer. We conducted interviews with separated families who had been home or stay in the DMZ and collect the samples along the DMZ based on their memories. And this research reveals that the nature of the DMZ has recovered their memories and still retained the memories of their last pre-war lives over 70 years. Moreover, we could learn that their memories about the DMZ are based on geography, materials and senses.
Seventy years have passed since the Korean War divided the two Koreas. In the meantime, the number of survivors waiting for separated families has gradually decreased, leaving only about 16 percent of those aged 80 or younger. After the last memory of their family is gone in the next decade, blood ties between South and North Korea may re- The thesis proposes architectural prototypes main a word that exists only in the past. in different sites along the DMZ based on their memories related to the landscape, Meanwhile, in April 2019, a new sea-change material and sensory experience and exin politics opened the last chance. The gov- amines how the proposals could propose a ernments of North and South Korea and the dynamic relationship for the disappearing U.S. have agreed to implement a new proto- kinship between the two. col that aims to ease the tension by requiring both to destroy all military outposts across the DMZ, and it allowed the public to visit several places within the DMZ for the first time.
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Other Stories Trevor Herman Hilker Advisors: Ana MiljaÄ?ki, Brandon Clifford; Reader: Antonio Furgiuele
We have indulged, for far too long, in a Mythology of troubling stories—those, the agents of an Architectural Modernity, perpetuating into, and by, our Canon. Those that are undercurrents and overstories in a trajectory of domesticity and dwelling; that perpetuate through championed narratives and championed work, inscribing themselves, while our forgetfulness buries their alternatives. We can name a few with which we linger that are Myths of our Modern age: of Progress, that faith in Forward and Up; of the Centricity of Man, who tames, frames, conquers, and abstracts; of Family, or at least, that western ideal: nuclear, and heteronormative, and patriarchichal. They are the stories for which we have cared, but not those that will care for us. Other Stories returns to the scene of the crime to disarm the Myths of Modernity with a conjecture of something else. The Farnsworth House, for its embedded and complicit Canonic persistence, becomes a site for de- and re-composition; for the exhumation of stories for which we have neglected to care, and the supplanting of those that have become cautionary tales. It offers
the space of other stories as seeds toward alternative Myth, occupying, for a moment, a triptych of Other three: foils for Family, Anthropocentricity, and Progress. The first, we could call Entropy, which acts in cycles of growth a decay. Which might progress, but will inevitably expire, obsolesce, rot, and be born again; which is optimistic toward demise, and extends care toward it. The second, the Rhizome, which refutes the Anthropocene in favor of something less heroic. Which is vegetal, and fungal, and animalian, and human. Which must reconcile a nature that is untamable and sublime with one that is finite, if not terminal. The third, Kin, which is a bondage somehow other than Family—more agile, and configurable, and open. Which is born from an ethos of extending care through the synaptic connection of the Rhizome. Which has space for the critters, and the beasts, and the monsters, and the specters, and the enemies, and the deviants, and friends.
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Mission 2066: A National Park for the Anthropocene Angeline C Jacques Advisor: Rania Ghosn; Readers: Sheila Kennedy, Jonah Susskind
In 2020, facing the incontrovertible evidence that American protected lands are experiencing rapid climate change well above the national average, the National Park Service releases Mission 2066. The master plan acts as a critical foil to its centennial predecessor, Mission 66, which introduced a modernized highway system and architecture to match the automobile age of the mid-20th century. While M66 employed the viewing station, visitor center, and postcard to render protected landscapes as a visitable object of American identity/heritage, M2066 seeks new strategies that react to and augment ecological systems and actors. It accepts the Anthropocenic assumption that truly untouched wilderness is an obsolete concept and is rooted, in the United States, in American expansionism and nationalism.
The site of this thesis is Glacier National Park in Montana, paradoxically named as one of the last bastions of pristine wilderness in the United States as well as the poster child for cataclysmic climate change. Its namesake glaciers have dwindled from 150 a century ago to only 26 today, all of which are predicted to go extinct this century. In M2066, park stewards take a more active role in maintaining the glacier population in the park, as they have historically chosen to do to avoid extinction with Gray Wolf and American Bison populations. They adapt, test, and deploy a series of interventions that augment and artificialize melting glaciers. These interventions not only assist in easing the speed of change to ecologies and economies reliant on the glaciers but also provide new inhabitations of the park.
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Falsework: Staging Construction Thuy Le Advisor: Rosalyne Shieh; Readers: Axel Kilian, Mark Jarzombek
In a reality at once distant and imminent, the Lost Languages and Other Voices exhibit features stories of stone, tree, and jig. Suspended between a zero-waste utopia where out-of-commission buildings are efficiently stripped for parts, pulverized, and recast into new buildings and a preserved world where the size of climate-controlled wunderkammers get ever larger, these material narratives pull one into perspectives vastly distinct from one’s own. At times longerlived, other times more slowly developed, and oftentimes involving subtle sensibilities, the tales of these matter characters enumerate the point that mass can neither be created nor destroyed, although it may be rearranged in space, or its associations may be changed in form.
to unfurling than demolishing. Designed as a process governed by both material and notional instructions, falsework selectively subtracts and reconfigures parts of built form to reveal indeterminate spaces that had always been (possible) there, thereby enabling reflective, mournful, or prospective activities. “Staging” refers to both the performance itself and the act of setting the stage for what comes next, prioritizing the procedure of construction over or adjacent to its resulting artifacts. This expanded notion of “construction” challenges the supremacy of architectural objects as well as the obsession with their creation and relative indifference towards their life and ultimate demise.
In a world filled with perpetually moving matters, falsework sustains possibilities This thesis proposes falsework as a support open, for things to collapse or for an evenstructure for architectural transformations tual ‘repair’. that renders un-building a lot more kindred
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Suburban Typology for Flood Resilience: A Case Study on Winthrop, MA Hyerin Lee Advisors: Miho Mazereeuw, Kairos Shen; Reader: Garnette Cadogan
Climate change is intensifying natural events like hurricanes resulting in more frequent coastal flooding. While there are many physical flood mitigation strategies, heavyhanded interventions result in concomitant problems like erosion which worsens flood vulnerability. Looking at Winthrop, MA, as a case study, the thesis explores architectural means to incentivize people living in riskprone suburban areas to densify and move to higher elevations. Lower left image: Harvard Geospatial Library.
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Pedagogy of The Fourth Wall: Toward a Time-Based Architecture Kevin Marblestone, Emily Whitbeck Advisor: Brandon Clifford; Readers: Antonio Furgiuele, Caroline Jones
The Fourth Wall is a first-year architecture design studio at MIT, co-taught by Kevin Marblestone and Emily Whitbeck. The course was created in recognition of the failure of contemporary design pedagogy to produce architects that can operate effectively within time-based global crises. In their attempts to address issues of sustainability and resiliency, architects have trapped themselves in a false binary of temporality and permanence, which considers only time-span. This shallow understanding of time has stifled the work produced by students and professionals today and reinforces the use of static conventions and mediums of orthography.
This studio is a pedagogical experiment that establishes a working methodology focused on time and perception, rather than program and form. In this course, time is considered the most malleable material at an architect’s disposal. In order to engage the time-based urgencies of the Anthropocene, architecture needs a new generation of practitioners that can think differently about time. The curriculum of this course engages a new critical eye on time, one that folds linear understandings of time in on themselves and acknowledges its cyclical, recursive nature. This new framework around time mandates the use of timebased media at the very beginning of the design process.
The failure of architecture’s reliance on ‘sustainability’ organizations such as LEED demonstrates the need to rely on the profession itself to produce new structures of thought. This course, therefore, was created with a focus on the true beginning of the design profession, the moment of inception, the first-year design studio.
The Fourth Wall is a first year, foundations level course. However, the impact of propagating this pedagogy through an entire architectural education could produce a fleet of architects that are capable of addressing architecture through time. How could this then redirect the course of the profession?
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Image credit: Aaron Powers
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Stimulation, Spectulaton, Simulation Aaron Powers Advisors: Axel Kilian, Jennifer Leung; Reader: Antonio Furgiuele
Surveilling the recorded past is the basis of From the documents, it can be speculated future prediction models. that companies like Google perfected pattern-seeking algorithms with bottomless As these models propagate, they increas- State Department funding. Increased data ingly influence meaningful decision-making collection led to higher specificity in patacross scales and domains. Corporations like tern recognition, where pattern-seeking Royal-Dutch Shell and RAND Corporation algorithms would quickly turn to futurehave relied on future prediction models as predicting algorithms. Google now offers fua means to make decisions towards futures ture prediction as a service, one that makes predicted favorable to the corporation. In up more than 70% of the company’s revenue, 2002 Donald Rumsfeld justified the surveil- increasing each year. ling of every online user’s behavior based on speculative unknown unknowns, and while There is a new place now, built as a so-called alleging weapons of mass destruction. How “digi-terre.” Within this space are speculative might we speculate on ways future predic- urbanisms and speculative architectures. It tion models will be used in decision-mak- has built itself from the surveilled city and its ing, when a small amount of people have users, funded by their taxes – monetary and enormous amounts of information on the privacy. How might speculating on the needs remaining? of the surveilled city render the unknown unknowns of a proto-world continually beIn 2013, documents showcasing the sur- ing updated with new records of all aspects veillance by the United States of Internet of our lives? user communications were released in files by Edward Snowden to The Guardian.
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One Degree Removed – The Last Carnival of Venice Valeria Rivera Deneke Advisor: Ana Miljački; Readers: Jonah Susskind, Rania Ghosn
Our general understanding of progress is one aimed at economic and technological growth, which essentially, has been leaving waste in its wake. Evidently becoming the subjects of culture in the 21st century. Our daily life is supported by products that are nonetheless waste on life-support, with expiration dates and packaging material that ensure a lengthy and repulsive death, leaving behind durable synthetic corpses. Products of our consumption tend to pile out of sight, contributing to cities and architectures of their own. The binary condition of masking our waste is essentially our embedded cultural flaw, masking consciousness and ownership as well – our current unsustainable paradigm of growth. Venice will be the first major city to drown because of climate change. It is a city in which experiences of culture, history and architecture are obsessively consumed by a population that vastly surpasses its own citizenry. I intervene in three scales, responding to this binary condition by manifesting
its physicality publicly – through choreography, through celebration, and through building. Each related in this city where, tourism drives the economy, and too, leaves waste in its wake. 1) The choreography of trash renders visible the geographical scale that comes with the displacement of waste through technological instruments and human labor. 2) The Carnival sets up a platform to reclaim the public ground, an orchestration of rising sea levels, time, and ownership. It recreates some of the city’s most celebrated architecture as ephemera in an event that includes trash in all its inconvenient and uncomfortable presence overtime acclimates citizens to climate change. 3) Venice now, in the early 21st century produces waste above all else, and in conversation with the theories of formal abstraction and historical propagation by the Venice School of Architecture, the third intervention updates the architectural “monument” to function as a beacon of our Anthropocene.
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Tremulous Lines: The Alternative History of a Site of Exception Cristina Solis Advisor: Hans Tursack; Readers: Sheila Kennedy, Rania Ghosn, Mark Jarzombek
By the end of World War II there were 7 standing border walls in the world. By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, there were another 15 walls. Since its destruction, another 20,000km of walls have been erected to divide the world. Today, fathomless quantities of wire, concrete, steel, sand, stone, and mesh now shape the 77 barriers that currently define the otherwise imaginary lines that fracture the world1. Their construction breaks the continuity of time, creating a rupture in the landscape and a series of unnatural asymmetries that affect both nature and society. What might be envisioned by political actors as a fixed “line on the ground” is anything but. These lines are of tremulous nature, stones may be moved, glaciers will melt, and walls will likely be breached or simply removed.
The project explores the global epidemic of border wall-building by zooming into a specific condition found at the origin point of the border between the US and Mexico, a site that lies astride both nations but it belongs to neither. An obelisk on the site marks the origin of the 1,954-mile-long border between the two nations. In 1971, the site was inaugurated as an international park by Pat Nixon where she famously said “May there never be a wall between these two great nations.” This thesis takes us back to 1971, to argue for the inadequacy of the obelisk as a monument able to hold the power and freedom promised by the site. The project is a speculation on an alternative history that imagines a different outcome produced by the site, arguing for contemporary monumentality as an architectural expression to resist the provisionality and marginality of the people who exist here. The monuments expand their impenetrable form to something that can hold a civic program and are a catalyst for a quasi urban condition on the borderline. 1 Deutinger, Theo. 2018. The Handbook of Tyranny. Lars
Muller Publishers Image Credit: First lady Pat Nixon visits Friendship Park in 1971. National Archives and Records Administration.
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Into the Abstract: An inquiry into abstraction as method and its manifestations Cheyenne Vandevoorde Advisor: Mariana Ibañez; Readers: Hans Tursack, Mark Jarzombek
"Must we not then renounce the object altogether, throw it to the winds and instead lay bare the purely abstract?" - Vasily Kandinsky, 1911 Abstraction is a form of contemplation. It is a means to produce new, while honoring the essential. It advocates for expression and the non-determined. It is about opportunity. As such, abstraction has a prolific history that infiltrates most, if not all, forms of creative expression. The act of abstraction has grappled with the issues of representation, the objective and the narrative for the sake of something new. Either in Malevich’s Black Square, Cage’s 4’33" or Man Ray’s Tears, abstraction has been used as a way to engage the zeitgeist and to radicalize our perception, thus propelling us forward. Through abstraction, form has an opportunity to produce a range of effects and emotional responses freed from semantics. Abstraction, instead of controlling the narrative, provides the chance to harness the power of the most essential aspects of a thing in order to prompt new readings and new expectations from our experience with the created world.
Abstraction subverts the conventional method of arriving at the truth in an effort to perceive the truth through new perspectives. Into the Abstract questions the potential of abstraction as a method and its role in architecture. It seeks out to understand what an abstract method might be, how it can be used and what may be produced. This thesis is not about purism, minimalism, or reductivism. It is not about reduction or removal, but rather about "essentializing." This inquiry will take place on the sites of four distinct houses. Each will attempt its own approach to abstraction with results to be determined.
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Machine Learning in Housing Design: Exploration of Generative Adversarial Network in Site Plans/Floorplans Generation Chaoyun Wu Advisor: Takehiko Nagakura; Readers: Caitlin Mueller, Christoph Reinhart
Machine Learning is one of the technologies that is reshaping our time. Many industries have witnessed the change it brings. In 2017, AlphaGo, a Machine Learning system, beat the best human player in the game Go. Later, OpenAI developed a system that defeated campion human team in DOTA, a highly competitive computer game. Machine Learning has shown promises in solving very complex problems based on Big Data, including some that are too complex for human to process in limited amount of time.
Machine Learning algorithm named Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to investigate which architectural problems can a computer learn to solve through Machine Learning and evaluate the meaning of Machine Learning to architects.
On the basis of this, it concludes that a computer is able to learn about any architectural relationship that can be shown physically in a drawing or a model, but it is not able to understand the meaning behind the drawings. Therefore, Machine Learning is a powerful tool to generate On the other hand, there has been a con- conventional solutions to conventional cern that Machine Learning would replace problems, but it is never a tool of creativity. human workers. It is happening in many industries. Shop assistants, drivers, factory On the basis of this, this thesis proposes a workers‌ many are losing their job because protype pipeline of a possible application of of this new technology. Although architects Machine Learning in Architecture: a system are not yet been threatened by this new that generates houses based on user prefertechnology due to the complexity of Ar- ence and site conditions. This system might chitecture problems, there are designers al- be useful when designers are not available ready making the claim that ‘Architects are or affordable, which is a case in countries doomed’ in faced with Machine Learning. Is like China and India. It is a tool to bring deMachine Learning going to replace human sign expertise to the masses. architects? Is the technology able to do so? This thesis seeks to explore a specific type of
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Value in Design? Features, Pricing, and Design Strategies Shane Zhang Advisors: Andrea Chegut, Takehiko Nagakura; Reader: Dennis Frenchman
Where is the value of design? Clients who are using buildings to solve societal economic needs rely heavily on real estate asset valuation models to guide their decision making process; however, these asset valuation models often oversimplifies the asset and only attempts to capture the crudest elements of the building (in most cases, only the square footage of the building is represented). Such crude abstraction of the asset results in the client’s over-emphasis on elements that are represented within the valuation model as key value drivers for a project (e.g. the square footage). As a result, architects are often confronted with the challenge of mediating between their design interventions and the value drivers of the client.
The result of this miscommunication is suboptimal design and economic outcomes. As an attempt to address this misalignment, I’ve investigated twenty internal and external architectural features such as external materiality, internal materiality, column spacing, and percentage of interior to exterior view. What I’ve found is that a large number of these architectural features are statistically significant in contributing to the pricing differential relative to their building peers. These results suggest that there is a significant impact of architectural design interventions that helps to create relative value differential for the building.
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Komorebi
Stella Zhujing Zhang Advisor: Takehiko Nagakura; Reader: Terry Knight, Christoph Reinhart
Humans are increasingly disconnected from nature. Urbanization, resource overexploitation, and changes in styles of living have diminished people’s access to nature. In fact, exposure to nature is beneficial to human beings in many aspects. Researches in environmental psychology and public health have shown the positive impacts of nature connections for people’s happiness, concentration, and restoration. In creating the living environment with connections to nature, various researches have been invested, such as the study of urban green space, the application of virtual nature in psychiatric and medical care, the creation of personal controllable augmented reality nature. However, the idea of creating connections to nature in the built environment via building systems has not been explored yet.
This thesis aims to provide people perception of connectedness to nature in the built environment through the design of a tangible building system. In order to do so, this study proposes embedding the sensory experiences from nature, Komorebi, in the building system. Komorebi meaning dappled light filters through tree leaves. With the concept of this sensory experience, a dynamic interactive daylight modulating system is developed. Wind, sun and the shading particles working together produces moving dappled light for the built environment. The aim of this thesis is to 1) create a port for people who have limited access to nature, due to work demand or mobility limitation; (2) reinvoke people's memories in nature and encourage exposure to nature.
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MIT Master of Architecture Thesis Projects Fall 2019
Alexandre Beaudouin-Mackay and Sarah Wagner A New way of Play: The Forms and Functions of Participatory Design and Critical Pedagogies Carlos Casalduc Terminal Idiom: A Public Archive for Habana Stratton Coffman Bagging Boliang Du Architecture and Atmosphere: Re-inventing transportation infrastructure of the “Fog Capital” Jaya Alba Eyzaguirre Objects of Home Marlena Fauer Under Observation: A Site of Totality in Uncertain Futures Dalma Földesi and Jung In Seo More or Less Exact Gabrielle Heffernan Responses to the Everyday : Reliefs from the Private Taeseop Shin and Stephan Hernandez Kinship: Recollecting Memories in DMZ Trevor Herman Hilker Other Stories Angeline C. Jacques Mission 2066: A National Park for the Anthropocene
Thuy Le Falsework: Staging Construction Hyerin Lee Suburban Typology for Flood Resilience: A Case Study on Winthrop, MA Kevin Marblestone and Emily Whitbeck Pedagogy of the Fourth Wall: Toward a Time-Based Architecture Aaron Powers Stimulation, Spectulaton, Simulation Valeria Rivera Deneke One Degree Removed: The Last Carnival of Venice Cristina Solis Tremulous Lines: The Alternative History of a Site of Exception Cheyenne Vandevoorde Into the Abstract: An inquiry into abstraction as method and its manifestations Chaoyun Wu Machine Learning in Housing Design: Exploration of Generative Adversarial Network in Site Plan/ Floorplan Generation Shane Zhang Value in Design? Features, Pricing, and Design Strategiess Stella Zhujing Zhang Komorebi: Tree Filter Sun
Advisors and Readers Garnette Cadogan Andrea Chegut Brandon Clifford Dennis Frenchman Antonio Furgiuele Anton Garcia-Abril Rania Ghosn Lisa HaberThomson Mariana Ibañez Mark Jarzombek Caroline Jones Terry Knight
Axel Kilian Sheila Kennedy Jennifer Leung Miho Mazereeuw Ana Miljački Caitlin Mueller Takehiko Nagakura Cristina Parreño Christoph Reinhart Kairos Shen Rosalyne Shieh Jonah Susskind Hans Tursack
Special Thanks Department of Architecture Students, Faculty, and Staff Eleni Aktypi Jose Luis Arguello Darren Bennett Kathaleen Brearley Renee Caso Stacy Clemons Chris Dewert Gina Halabi Jim Harrington Christopher Jenkins Duncan Kincaid Doug Le Vie
Inala Locke Ana Miljački Tonya Miller Amanda Moore Jen O’Brien Andreea O’Connell Bryan O’Keefe Paul Pettigrew Alan Reyes Andrew Scott Cynthia Stewart Russell Webster Angie Door April Gao Jayson Kim Carol-Anne Rodrigues Wendy Wu