Sydney Cinalli

Reclaiming the Estranged: Imagining an Architecture of Excess

Sydney Cinalli Advisors: Brandon Clifford, Deborah Garcia Reader: Cristina Parreño

A consumer’s contact with plastic is typically a brief affair, while plastic’s intimacy with the earth is immortal. Our initial fondness fades into estrangement - much like a tragic love story. We essentially ghost our waste by disassociating from it entirely and in result, we force it beyond our immediate cone of vision. Our waste streams then veil plastic’s journey into landscapes around the world, drawing it further out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Humans have become experts in using, abusing, and discarding earth’s natural resources. Our pricking and prodding of the earth coupled with the habitual estrangement of our waste has induced “slow violence” on our landscapes at large (Nixon 2).

This estrangement also occurs at the scale of our built environment. Architects are habitually situated downstream of material production; this ultimately confines design to values held by the construction industry. Blanketing their concerns for capital in false claims of sustainable building practices, the construction industry deliberately fetishizes material optimization. However, when these building materials reach their expiration date, a collective admiration once again fades into disaffection.

This thesis reframes plastic waste as a resource rather than a contentious collection of artifacts. By speculating on its life beyond estrangement, this perversion is explored by conflating plastic’s lifespan with socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental conditions unique to the Hawaiian Islands. These speculations actively consider site conditions that influence the built environment long after the architect leaves the table by acknowledging plastic as a material that operates across deep time scales. These themes

are explored within three parafictions; each follows an oral history of an architectural intervention.

In the case of waste, more is more. With that said, we have the opportunity to do what we, as humans, do best. We can use more - not less - around this collective resource of plastic.

What if our deliberate estrangement from plastic waste was replaced with a newfound intimacy? What new forms of cultural value could these interventions engender?

Both images are courtesy of the author.

Ferrous Futures: Scenario Planning for Global Steel (joint thesis)

Charlotte D'Acierno, Clarence Lee, Jaehun Woo Advisor: Mariana Ibañez Readers: John Ochsendorf, Mark Jarzombek

2 trillion kilograms of steel are produced around the world on an annual basis, enough to construct 17,000 Birds Nest Stadiums, 31,000 Empire State Buildings, or 480,000 Guggenheim Bilbao skeletons. If all of this steel were to fill Central Park, this single ingot would be nearly 10 meters tall. If this steel were to wrap around the earth, it would circle the equator more than 3 times. But this steel is much more intimately connected to the earth from which its base elements are extracted.

Examining the hidden connections of the steel ‘machine’ is at the heart of this thesis. The ultimate goal of this project is not the impossibility of exposing every single detail of these tangled histories, but to question steel’s ascension to the top of the architectural material pyramid. This thesis combines methods from scientific research and scenario planning to develop a series of speculative futures as a response to an everchanging and challenging environment.

As populations grow and urban centers densify, so too will our material dependence. These three Scenarios

provide plausible futures that operate within the confines of the current capitalist system; they highlight the absurdity of our current practice without becoming absurdly unrelatable. The goal of scenario design is not to produce an alternative material but to question the consequences of our current practice, which so often takes steel at face value. In imagining the effects of these scenarios, we reconstruct our material culture and the effects that these speculations might have in the complex networks in which this material is embedded.

Image 1 (Left): Steel Storage Warehouse at Pier 53, viewed from the HighlineS.

Image 2 (Right):: Demolition of W.R. Grace Building viewed from 6th Ave. Both images are courtesy of the authors.

Seven Ways of Reading The House of the Seven Gables

Isadora Dannin Advisor: Mark Jarzombek Readers: Azra Aksamija, Rosalyne Shieh

The House of the Seven Gables is the name given to a house in Salem, MA, constructed in 1668, that now, arguably, has seven gables. It would seem logical to assume that the book written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1851, titled with the same name, would be about this house. However, the timeline of these namings is backwards, and the writer strictly denies the relation, instead likening the house of the story to a “castle in the air”: a fantastical construction and metaphorical container for the moments of crisis where history repeats itself. In other words, it shouldn’t be read into as a real thing. Of course, this denial can’t be taken too literally. The property on Turner Street was indeed once owned by a cousin of Hawthorne’s, and his time spent playing cards in the parlor is well documented.

As it stands, the house in Salem is a historic landmark, revered both as a figment of literary mythology, and as one of the oldest and largest intact examples of colonial architecture in the Massachusetts Bay. As such, the house stands obliquely for over 350 years of American history and national identity.

This thesis designs a set of ways of apprehending the house as a living document, which like a text, can be read to hold a multiplicity of associated social and political meaning in its constructive details, its structural syntax, its contents and their stylings, and its siting. The method is in the repetitive act of representation in order to depict the house for what it is and continually reenact its intimations. Seven books, which each refocus the lens that images the house, set out to make visible the intersecting narratives latent in its architecture. The aim, thus, is not to resolve complexities, redundancies, or the stubbornness of the present architectural articulation, but to elucidate their sources and implications: the vestigial ghosts of an alternate set of hauntings.

Both images are courtesy of the author.

Gardens of Resistance

Nynika Jhaveri Advisor: Azra Aksamija Readers: Lawrence Vale, James Wescoat

Over the last few millennia, the city that today is the seat to the world’s largest “democracy” has served as the nerve centre for generations of empires and emperors, political paradigms and intersecting identities. As for most capital cities such as New Delhi, alongside entrenched political regimes come the evolution of a parallel legacy of fighting against, opposing and obstructing, and resisting. Whether manifesting as the rallying cries at mass protests, as the purposeful strokes on canvas in practices of critical art, or as the defiant lyrics and rhythms in musical compositions, resistance is instrumental in the vocabulary of any effective political vision.

Considering the Central Vista Complex in Lutyens’ New Delhi specifical-

ly, we look at a political urban fabric that has embodied these simultane-

ous histories for the past century, as a site of power and of resistance to that same power, as belonging to the governing and to the governed. Built as a monumental colonial project in opposition to Delhi’s existing Mughal city centre in 1911, appropriated as a symbol of a new nation’s power as a postcolonial inversion in 1947, serving as a site for rallies, protests, and parades engaging the growing pains of independence and modernisation in 60s and 70s, and finally as part of a repressive, autocratic rebranding resisting due process and dialogue in 2020, the site’s spatial politics have also witnessed a plethora of resistances.

This thesis questions the role of architecture in envisioning and engaging the tools of resistance in the context of such political sites. It narrates the stories of three actors as they reclaim the Complex’s Mughal Gardens - landscapes historically seen as spaces of utopic experimentation and speculation - as spaces of their own resistance. Considering the architectural tools of process, scale, materiality, and temporality, the actors strive to reinscribe an entirely new set of contemporary cultural and civic values into an otherwise charged landscape, a form of socio-spatial resistance in response to their own historical moments.

Both images are courtesy of the author.