Master of Science in Architecture Studies Pre-Thesis Reviews, December 11, 2020
SMARCHS
DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE MIT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING SA+P
Master of Science in Architecture Studies Pre-Thesis Reviews, December 11, 2020
Jeremy Bilotti
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Computation & SM in EECS
Dries Carmeliet
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Architecture & Urbanism
Reza Daftarian
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Aga Khan Program
Katherine Dubbs 10 History, Theory & Criticism
Aidan Flynn 12 History, Theory & Criticism
Eduardo Gascรณn Alvarez 14 Building Technology
Marianna Gonzalez-Cervantes 16 Architecture Design
Eakapob Huangthanapan 18 Architecture & Urbanism
Ryuhei Ichikura 20 Architecture & Urbanism
Rania Sameh Kaadan 22 Computation
Wonki Kang 24 Computation
SMARCHS
Wuyahuang Li 26 Architecture & Urbanism Bowen Lu 28 Computation
Luis Alberto Meouchi Velez 30 Architecture & Urbanism Amanda Merzaban 32 Aga Khan Program
Mohamad Nahleh 34 Architecture Design
Yesufu O'Iadipo 36 Building Technology
Elina Oikonomaki 38 Computation Olivia Serra 40 Architecture & Urbanism Siyuan Sheng 42 Architecture & Urbanism Alexandra Waller 44 Computation Qianqian Wan 46 Architecture & Urbanism Xiaoyun Zhang 48 Computation Ziyuan Zhu 50 Architecture & Urbanism
DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE MIT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING SA+P 3
Predicting Design Effectiveness: A Computational Approach to Understanding Functionality Jeremy Bilotti Computation SM Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Advisor: Terry Knight Reader: Stefanie Mueller for each potential user. Additionally, designers of physical artefacts are not informed as to what they should produce because they are not able to access and interpret relevant user data.
Designers of physical artefacts invest energy into representing buildings, modeling functional objects, or crafting furniture. Design education has enforced the practice of design in intuitive and subjective ways that enable creative thought and potential novelty in process. At the same time, designers also strive to create artefacts that will perform functions that end users actually value. Unfortunately, most designers’ processes lack rigor because it is challenging to optimize a design’s functionality
Although the challenge of predicting how an artefact will be valued by its users is great, data science has demonstrated an aptitude in revealing comparably complex emergent patterns. Moreover, machine learning and probabilistic inference algorithms, often called “recommenda-
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research uses designed furniture as a case study.
tion systems”, have achieved true ubiquity in allowing users to retrieve content precisely relevant to their goals. Yet, these types of algorithms have not found their expression in the context of design.
This software works to recommend existing designs to users more accurately than algorithms which are currently in use for similar purposes. It also has the potential to inform design generation, providing a novel framework for integrating data science into design practice.
To enable a more rigorous investigation of functionality and user goals, this research demonstrates an algorithmic framework for collecting data about end users, and subsequently translating nuanced user-goal information into actionable insights for designers and users. Differentiating this framework from existing precedent, a more flexible definition of the “function” of a designed artefact is integral to the software, allowing designers to retain an open, creative process. This
Image 1 (Left): Schematic diagram of a computational model for predicting user goals and design effectiveness. Image 2 (Below): Nathan Crilly’s enumeration of the classes of functionality in designed artefacts; an expanded understanding of function in design. Crilly, N. (2010). The roles that artefacts play: technical, social and aesthetic functions. Design Studies, 31(4), 311–344. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2010.04.002.
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Community Power: Overcoming Barriers to Climate Action Dries Carmeliet Architecture & Urbanism Advisor: Rania Ghosn
The global energy sector accounts for over 60% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Over the last decades, many studies from various perspectives have been conducted on its decarbonization, yielding a range of strategies and policy proposals. Putting these theories into practice however, has proven more difficult. The field is littered with failure, stalled projects and public uprising to the top-down implementation of renewable energy policies. The aim of this research is to investigate the agency of bottom-up approaches and local initiatives towards the creation of 6
renewable energy landscapes. Therefore, renewable energy projects are not just considered as technological challenges, but as complex political, sociological, spatial and financial constructs that face barriers in each of these sectors. The question thus shifts from “what” we can do about Climate Change, to “how” these technologies can be deployed and “why” various stakeholders would support them. To answer these questions, the research methodology consists of three phases: (1) First, identifying the existing barriers through a series of case studies. Some of the most challenging barriers involve the enormous spatial requirements of renewables, as well as their visibility, often evoking public opposition. (2) Second, a conceptual framework of the “Missing Middle” in Climate Action is devised. Key questions that will be addressed are at what scale (state, county or municipality) the barriers can be most effectively overcome, and what methods can be used. Some of the methods considered are tax credits, buy-in programs, zoning law reform, land concessions, jobs programs and monitoring systems. (3) Third, the framework is tested and applied to the State of Massachusetts and several selected municipalities. Image 1 (Left): Spatial requirements of renewables Image 2 (Below): Barriers blocking the implementation of renewables
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Fractured and Dissolved, Architecture Ablaze: Toward an Understanding of Ayeneh-Kari Reza Daftarian Aga Khan Program Advisor: Nasser Rabbat Ayeneh-kari (lit. ‘mirror-work), a term that refers to a surface encrusted with fragmented mirrored glass, is a form of architectural ornament found in myriad historic monuments across Greater Iran. This decorative medium first emerged in the celebrated palatial structures of the Safavids (r. 1501–1722) and culminated in the intricate geometric mosaics that became the preferred decorative schema for both palaces and sacred complexes, namely mosques and imamzadehs, under the Qajars (r. 1789–1925). Despite this preeminence, at its zenith ayeneh-kari was largely denigrated by foreign visitors to Iran as garish and a feeble emulation of European ‘culture,’ an attitude which has unfortunately permeated a preponderance of the scant scholarly literature into the subject both in English and Persian. Unlike any previous empires of the Islamic world, the dynastic legitimacy of the Safavids, and eventually the Qajars, was contingent upon the coalescence of a purported magnetism attributed to the Shah vis-à-vis his descent from Imam Ali, as well as his aura of farr, or imperial grandeur, a key construct in the pre-Islamic Iranian ethos of kingship. In response to the cursory inquires dealing with the ornamental form, this thesis contends that on account of both its material and symbolic qualities, ayeneh-kari was self-consciously availed in the architectural programs of the Safavids, and especially the Qajars, to convey a uniquely PersoShi’i idiom of kingship.
Image 1 (Opposite top): Detail of façade ayvan of Chehel Sotun, Isfahan. Source: Daniel C. Waugh Archive, Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (Photo, 2010); Image 2 (Opposite bottom): Tomb chamber of Shah Cheragh, Shiraz. Source: Ali-Asghar Pourshiravi (Photo, 2019)
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Architecture as an American Art: William Robert Ware and the Cultivation of Architecture in Postbellum Massachusetts Katherine Dubbs History, Theory & Criticism Advisor: Arindam Dutta Reader: Mark Jarzombek as historian Lawrence Levine wrote, as “both relief from impending disorder and an avenue to cultural legitimacy.� This prescription coincided with the mid-century emergence of architectural education in American universities. In 1865, architectural educator William Robert Ware was hired to create the architecture department at MIT, the first architecture department in a university and the oldest architecture progaram in the country. For the duration of his tenure, Ware was part of a powerful network of arts patrons and professionals in Massachusetts
In the decades following the American Civil War, business elites centered in Boston sought to steer the American economy away from cotton production and towards the industrialization of the expanding American landscape. These individuals espoused nationalist visions of unifying a divided country, and part of the perceived antidote was the dissemination of cultural values. Transatlantic culture was wielded as an elite instrument against the perceived chaos of modernization. Bolstered by the rise in disposable wealth, Boston elites considered the promotion of art,
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who sought to define and ascribe a moral apurpose to American art, an idealized category which included architecture. This thesis investigates the cultivation of architecture in postbellum Massachusetts from 1865 through 1881, when architectural education was formally developed in universities. My research will focus on Ware and his tenure as head of the architecture department at MIT. An examination of Ware’s work illustrates that the development of early architectural education in the United States intersected with a localized art movement that included the fostering of drawing education,
the professionalization of architecture, and the creation of architectural publications. This study will examine how Ware’s approach to architectural education reflected contemporaneous American ideals to reform and classify the nation through art. Image 1 (Left): William R. Ware, “Part IV. Alternative Designs for a Small House. Elevations and Details for Wood, Brick and Stone.” In Examples of Building Construction. Boston: L. Prang and Company, 1876. Image 2 (Above): Karl F. Heinzen. “Greek.” In Parallel of Historic Ornament. Prepared Under the Supervision of William R. Ware. Boston: L. Prang and Company, 1875.
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Real and Represented: The Spaces of Sodomy in Early Modern Italy Aidan Flynn History, Theory & Criticism Advisors: Kristel Smentek, Jodi Cranston Reader: Caroline Jones
Image 1: Domenico Cresti (1559 – 1638) Bathers at San Niccolò (1600). Private collection, London, England.
In 1552 the Florentine bureaucrat Giovanni Conti banned males from accessing both the holy interior and public perimeter of the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral during certain daylight hours “in order to obviate the obscenities and wrongs that are committed daily in that sacred place.” His legislation was a direct response to concerns related to sodomy—those blasphemous “obscenities” that had transpired within or up against the cathedral. Defined as any non-procreative sex act but most commonly used to refer to male-male sexual relations, sodomy generated anxiety throughout early modern Europe. In Florence and other Italian city-states, where the church reigned supreme, authorities sought to legislate sex acts in an effort to restrict and police the boundaries between licit and illicit intimacies. 12
In the premodern mind, sodomites could provoke divine wrath, leading to urban destruction, civic and religious dishonor, and chaos, as had transpired in the biblical city of Sodom. Homosexual rendezvous were ubiquitous, and although Conti’s legislation worked to police one particular building, it also illuminates larger spatial concerns related to sodomitical transgressions beyond church walls. As spatialized sins (all of Sodom had been condemned), male-male encounters were difficult to contain. The great Florentine cathedral could be surveilled rather easily, while other spaces across the peninsula could not be controlled with the same level of legal and moral zeal. Taverns, inns, cloisters, workshops, and homes were among these not-so-easily policed arenas in which the potential for sexual deviance could and did occur.
accounts (legal, religious, literary) of clandestine sexual encounters within specific architectures—and vice versa? Looking at and beyond the figures in these pictures, this project will investigate the represented backdrops in which sodomitical activities were depicted in an effort to better understand the real, urban locales in which same-sex relations occurred—or position these acts in a fantasized domain of illicit urbanity. In so doing, this project also engages with larger historiographical issues, namely the ways in which premodern sex and gender have been mobilized in the works of postmodern theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Eve Sedgwick. My thesis aims to use art objects as revelatory materials to examine and challenge the ways in which sex and space have been dealt with in scholarship on the premodern.
This thesis seeks to excavate these spaces of transgression by studying their depictions in art. Examining a visual archive of majolica plates, frescoes, and paintings depicting homosexually suggestive scenes in contemporaneous settings—a significant departure from various all’antica homoerotic images rendered in mythical, pastoral, or celestial landscapes—the project asks: what can depicted spaces in homoerotic art tell us about the lived spaces in which transgressive sexual encounters occurred? How might these visual representations allow the historian to check written
Image 2: Master C.I., Monk and Boy (ca. 1510¬–20), majolica plate. Musée national de la Renaissance, Écouen, France.
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Mass Balance. Dynamic Thermal Performance of Structurally Optimized Floor Systems Eduardo GascĂłn Alvarez Building Technology Advisors: Caitlin Mueller, Leslie Norford Previous research conducted at MIT has shown that shaping floor slabs through structural optimization can lead to substantial embodied energy reductions compared to typical flat slabs, resulting in ribbed structures that efficiently distribute the carbon-intensive material. The work presented here offers new methodologies and results related to the dynamic thermal behavior of such shaped slabs, and specifically considers the ability of the thermal mass and geometric shape of
As decarbonizing the building sector becomes increasingly urgent in the context of the global climate crisis, opportunities for considering the integration of design strategies and systems are emerging as an important area of research. This thesis specifically looks at the interaction of concrete floor systems in buildings as both structural elements with embodied energy and thermal systems with the potential to reduce operational energy consumption.
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slabs. The former allows having a detailed understanding of the solid-fluid interactions between the concrete slab and the room air, while the latter is used to quantify the impact of thermal mass on the energy consumption of the building throughout a whole year. In both cases, comfort metrics such as the Universal Thermal Comfort Index – UTCI – are used to measure the thermal sensation of the users that occupy the studied spaces. Once a thermal metric is obtained, interactive multi-objective optimization tools allow to analyze the tradeoffs between the structural and thermal performances as well as exploring new and unexpected geometries.
the slab to store heat during the day time and offset energy demands related to cooling. This is particularly urgent in those countries where heat waves are becoming more and more common and the implementation of passive strategies to mitigate their effects becomes a key issue. At the same time, activating these floor systems by embedding water pipes is yet another opportunity of integrating functions that opens the possibility of envisioning the concrete slabs as part of a larger and more complex building system. Computer fluid dynamic – CFD – as well as whole-building simulations become equally necessary to assess the thermal performance of these shaped
Image 1 (Left): Integration of structural and thermal functions on a pre-cast floor system Image 2 (Below): Multi-objective design exploration of shaped concrete slabs
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The Solitary Production of Architecture: A Self-Sufficient / Self-Contained Architecture Marianna Gonzalez-Cervantes Architecture Design Advisor: William O'Brien Jr. Readers: Rosalyne Shieh, Hans Tursack I've recently realized that my work is only partially designed by myself: Significant aspects of the work I’ve produced throughout my education have been entirely designed by the framework within which they were made, rather than myself. As a whole, the nature of my academic work has been representationallybased while simultaneously prioritizing a strictly architectural audience - as evidenced by the performative final review. While none of these qualities are inherently problematic, I didn’t consciously design them - the default parameters of conventional architecture pedagogy did. The repercussions have been two-fold: All of my work is unbuilt, and in its unbuilt manifestation, my work is inaccessible to non-architectural audiences - more specifically, my family. This thesis calls for an explicit designing of all the parameters in which architecture is produced - from the spaces in which I work, to the ways in which I format it. In doing so, this thesis attempts to bridge the gap between conventional pedagogy and practice as well as the gap between architects and non-architects. In both cases, this thesis suggests collaboration as a means to answer questions of both 1:1 construction and accessibility. This thesis investigates multidisciplinary architecture practices, with a specific interest in architects who make the things they design - from Mexico-based Studio Tezontle’s work, which often exists between art and architecture, to Pezo von Ellrichshausen’s collaboratively made Exterior painting series, which defines all of our representation as explicit constructions. Because architects don’t typically make 1:1 work, this thesis delves into mediums outside of architecture, where sculpture provides new methods of construction, and film begins to offer new accessibility to outside audiences. This thesis will collaboratively produce two separate versions of one single work : 1. A series of 1:1 constructed objects, and 2. A short film that documents the process of making them. Both manifestations will be intimately made with and for my family as a way of questioning my objective interest in architecture as made by the self while simultaneously tending to my subjective need to refuse architecture’s abstraction to continue to distance me from my own family. 16
Physically Constructed Work :
: Digitally Formatted Work
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Mediating Contested Coasts: Towards Novel Ecologies for Chana, Thailand Eakapob Huangthanapan Architecture & Urbanism Advisor: Miho Mazereeuw
In 2019, the national government of Thailand put forward a 6,000-acre plan to build an industrial metropolis and deep seaports in Chana district on the southern coast of Thailand. If realized, this project will transform pristine coastal beaches populated by self-sustaining fishing communities into special economic zones under the name of “progressive industrial model of the future�. The centralized government has framed the project as a way to promote economic growth through progressive global trade. The plan is also driven by a national-security agenda aimed at quelling a separatist insurgency along the southern borders to Malaysia. The necessary planning and land-use changes were proceeding through top-down process in which local interests are unheard. Rejecting the intrasparent process that will favor large-scale corporations, local uprisings mobilized in resistance, driven by the goals of protecting their homes, culture, and the natural environment central to their livelihood. 18
Coastal zones, like those in Chana district, are often defined as transition areas between land and sea. Given their natural abundance and geopolitical characteristics, these frontiers are increasingly subject to the tensions between human-nature activities of extraction and conservation. Coastal areas are also increasingly exposed to climate risks, namely sea level rises, storm surge and coastal erosions. Urbanization and industrialization often exacerbate not only these environmental
vulnerabilities, but existing social inequalities, and often, as in the case of Chana, political contestation in the regions. The study will contribute to the understanding of the contested coast of Chana in two ways: first, it seeks to understand and critique the political ecology in the hegemonic planning practice and explores instrumentality to engage local participation and incentivize civic dialogue. Second, the study speculates, based on the site’s potential, on design directions for Chana. It explores possibilities for mediated coexistence of selected industrial and cultural ecologies towards a socio-ecological imaginary beyond the dichotomies of industrialization and conservation.
Image 1 (Left): Illustration by author. Image 2 (Above): Baan Suan Kong, Chana, Songkhla, Thailand. Image taken by author.
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Mokumitsu Districts in Tokyo: Joint Rebuilding in Urban Renewal for Disaster Mitigation Ryuhei Ichikura Architecture & Urbanism Advisor: Miho Mazereeuw Mokumitsu is a feature of urban districts in Japan and means “densely built-up with wooden structured buildings�. Many of these buildings are categorized as substandard housing because they were built legally in the last century but no longer fulfill the latest building and zoning codes. Mokumitsu districts are considered severely unsafe in case of an earthquake because the houses are structurally weak, combustible, and built very close each other. Especially since the disastrous
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Kobe Earthquake in 1995, Tokyo’s Mokumitsu districts in particular become the focus of national and municipal renewal policies, due to the districts’ large area and the high probability of earthquake. Urban renewal—or the demolition and reconstruction of so-called susbstandard housing— has been considered one of the fundamental measures for disaster mitigation in Mokumitsu districts since the mid twentieth century. The top-down governmental urban renewal measures in 1960s and 1970s were largely unsuccessful due to excessive fiscal burden, protest by residents, and dissolution of existing communities. Current policies therefore attempt to incentivize substandard properties by financially supporting the independent actions of the residents in conjunction with private-sector. However, joint rebuilding which would provide more open space and better living environment has been hardly seen when the land use is designated as low density where private developers have little or no incentive to lead projects. On the other hands, the residents who have been marginalized by private incentive have not achieved joint rebuilding even by themselves as housing cooperative which has been prevalent in Japan as residentsdriven planning method since 1970s. This thesis aims to understand why residents of Tokyo’s Mokumitsu districts have hardly been able to achieve joint rebuilding by housing cooperative. I hypothesize that the residents do not have access to the necessary resources during the planning process. Through literature and practice reviews; interviews with residents, practitioners of housing cooperative, and city officials; as well as data mapping, I will seek to understand the current planning process and its mechanisms of accessibility and inaccessibility. Based on these findings, I will develop a new process of housing cooperative and tools or software to support it. Image1(Opposite): Original Condition of Mokumitsu Districts - Image 2 (Above): Mapping of Mokumitsu Districts in Tokyo. Both images by the author.
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The Untold Narratives Rania Sameh Kaadan Computation Advisors: Terry Knight, Nicholas de Monchaux Reader: Lorena Bello Gomez
This thesis investigates narratives - a medium of visual and written accounts as a design tool for students to gain greater autonomy and as an analytic tool for instructors to understand their pedagogy. Recognizing that students' design identities are often shaped and determined by academic settings and instructors' agendas, which I refer to as institutional determinism, this thesis uses narrative as a means to negotiate between students' design intentions and teachers' design objectives. Offered as a complement to design studio curricula, the proposal introduces a new experimental methodology, one that gives agency to students' unfiltered intentions, advocates for the inclusion of their continuously shifting identities while improving their communication skills – to tell their 'untold' narratives. 22
Through a strategy of reflection on action1, the pedagogical intervention explores a process of autoethnography, or self-ethnography, as a means of self-reflexivity to help design students become aware of the socio-cultural practices and ideologies, they find themselves in and to simultaneously question them. It consists of two related sets of delivered practice: a class that runs in tandem with core studios and a workshop that follows. The class offers both skills and theoretical literature on anthropology, narrative, worldbuilding, vignettes and digital visualization methods. During the studio, students document daily visual and written narratives, coming together as their self-embodied collection of artifacts. Then, during a subsequent workshop, students qualitatively analyze those narratives, create conceptual inferences, and develop critical and creative repertoires. In parallel, a designed digital visualization interface is introduced to assist students in both the documentation process and the qualitative analysis. Through this process, students recreate their projects through iterative feedback-loops, experimenting mindfully through experiences gathered from previous internalized experiences, thereby challenging institutional determinism. Hence, engaging the diverse narratives in students' previous and current experiences to emphasize their purposeful self-embodied narratives. With a core aspiration to engage the design community, "The Untold Narratives" hopes to contribute to long-term pedagogical reform in design.
1 Donald A. Schรถn, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (Aldershot [England]: Arena, 1991).
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Sonic Others: Constructing Metaphors for Collective Events Wonki Kang Computation Advisor: Axel Kilian
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The year 2020 has brought many long-running global crises into light. The climate crisis has become more tangible than ever, and the pressures of the global pandemic further escalated racial injustice. Trying to make sense of such phenomena is overwhelming, and the efforts of journalists to explain them in words or visual representations have repeatedly failed to evoke empathy from people. The reason is likely that global crises are hyperobjects, as defined by an ecological theorist Timothy Morton, the otherly objects that are vastly distributed in time and space beyond human’s perceptive capability. Central to the thesis is the questioning of how the hyperobjects can be made experienceable. I suggest a new way of engaging with the others by bringing forward listening that has been considered as a mere backdrop of our experience. To accomplish this, I propose a structural framework to construct sonic metaphors of a set of events that constitutes the hyperobject. The sonic metaphor is a conceptual metaphor, a compressed experience constructed through the conceptual blending of the sounds we are already familiar with. I describe collective events through the structure of meaning making, which is deeply ingrained in how humans learn abstract concepts based on their prior knowledge. The thesis is delivered threefold. First, I map an open-source audio dataset to a continuous two-dimensional semiotic space. It sets a basis for semantic units, a glossary that is used for the further study of meaning construction. Second, I de-construct a set of field recordings on how they evoke certain affective meanings by breaking them down into multiple layers of semiotic spaces. Finally, as a reverse process of deconstructing a real event, I demonstrate the construction of an imaginary event through the proposed system, an experience in between fictional and factual, virtual and real. The approach proposed in the thesis presents a new formal way of meaning construction through sound, which can be used to describe the high-level concept of a hyperobject. The system suggests an alternative to a journalistic practice that relies on fact-listing or data visualization, offering an evocative experience of others.. Image (Left): The structure of meaning making. The affective layer emerges from the merge between semantic units.
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Hygging, the Play Wuyahuang Li Architecture & Urbanism Advisor: Mark Jarzombek Readers: Rosalyne Shieh, Henriette Steiner
An egalitarian utopia and the happiest nation on Earth, Denmark bears the political dream for the world's most progressive leaders. Hygge, roughly meaning "a sense of comfort, togetherness, and well-being," embodies this self-identity of Danish society: it lends Danes an identity and social code to live by. Danish scholarship tends to posit the aesthetics of hygge in domestic and social life as a seemingly natural condition; architecture, furniture, and household objects become props to signify hygge. Anthropologists also serve to understand cultural homogeneity as a priori for the welfare state. In doing so, this scholarship eliminates a reflection of the "others," those not included in the realm of hygge. This thesis, in contrast, argues that hygge is an explicitly racializing technique of governance, which takes hold through language, architecture, and aesthetics. Drawing on feminist philosopher Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology, this thesis suggests a queer relationship between hygge and uhygge (or the antithesis of hygge) in the making of normative/nonnormative identities and social codes. Part 1 references a broad range of cultural studies to argue for political imperatives of studying uhygge as a spatial form of resisting assimilation into the hygge 26
normative. It studies the period spanning from the 1990s, when an increase in immigration caused the so-called crisis of Danishness, to its canonization by the State as a way to integrate non-EU migrants in the early 2000s, to the global spread of hygge as a lifestyle technique in the late 2010s. The study centers on the political others (i.e., minority ethnic Danes), who are often typecast as the figure of uhygge and accused of causing societal insecurity amidst a collapsing welfare system.
The imagination and narrative of migrants' homes in mainstream media and scholarship hardly go further than that of the "ghetto," distinct urban territories characterized by social dysfunction and crime. This thesis aims to complicate and provide nuance to this narrative of migrants' relation to and construction of home in Denmark. In Part 2, I will assemble an archive of missing Danish homes through crowdsourcing images and stories of migrants' domestic and social life. I will recover uhygge's nested semiotics by performing a close reading of these images, spaces, and social narratives. In so doing, I intend to investigate how they transform hygge and uhygge for their own cultural purposes. Finally, following queer theorists Judith Butler and JosĂŠ MuĂąoz's work on social, racial, and cultural assignments as performative, Part 3 reads the city through a play written based on collected stories. The play deploys a series of props and sets designed to disorient the aesthetics of hygge in modern culture towards not the grotesque nor uncanny, but the uhyggelig. Image 1 (Opposite): Casting Call. - Image 2 (Above): Play Demo. Both images by the author.
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Design Knowledge Representation and Interaction: A Knowledge Network and An Instrumental System of Learning Bowen Lu Computation Advisor: George Stiny Reader: Paul Keel
Knowledge is a particularly valuable resource for designers who learn broadly across disciplines, requiring considerable time and effort to acquire. The amount of knowledge can easily go beyond our mnemonic capacity, then how can a designer retain and manage to use more knowledge to deliver better design? Historically, we have developed the writing system to externalize learned knowledge for future reference. This externalization, as known as
hypomnema or note-taking, enables us to utilize more knowledge with extended memory and leads to deep thinking and innovation through constant communication with thoughts. Most of our tools, physical or electronic, are based on the logic of note-taking, which contain heterogeneous information scatters all over the place. Their hierarchical structure and tagging system become inadequate for management given the increasing amount of knowl28
mation as nodes, and a set of intuitive relationships as connections between nodes. Based on this representation, I develop a software tool with engaging interface that makes the construction of ontological network as easy as daily note-taking. I complete a productive workflow of input, storage and retrieval as the foundation of knowledge accumulation, as well as different interactive functions, such as displaying multiple nodes on screen as an extension of working memory, made possible by the responsive and ambient interface. I also propose mechanisms that keep learned knowledge active by constantly pulling relevant knowledge to us. Other approaches to trigger memory and inspire us to understand knowledge differently and creatively will also be investigated. This knowledge interacting system contributes to an attempt towards augmented intelligence that values a complementary integration of human and machine.
edge to acquire. They also pivot heavily on our own memory as the primary way to retrieve knowledge, which can be particularly unreliable. Originated from written language, semantic network or ontology is a powerful method to represent common sense knowledge as well as our semantic memory. As a network of concepts, it is adopted by many public projects and design systems for knowledge sharing and reuse. However, an ontology can be difficult to construct at personal level. It is also too rigorous and explicit to define for general knowledge acquisition. Most of its applications focus on reasoning tasks over public knowledge, and few contribute to personal growth of knowledge. Taking advantages of both methods, I propose a novel representation of hybrid ontology that includes both conceptual knowledge and episodic infor-
Image 1 (Left): Develop human oriented knowledge representation and tool. Image 2 (above): Workflow of user input, ontology storage, knowledge retrieval, and intuitive interaction with interface.
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El Ejido: A Policy and Urban Design Approach for Collectively Owned Land in Mexico Luis Alberto Meouchi Velez Architecture & Urbanism Advisors: Nicholas de Monchaux, Lorena Bello Gomez Land in Mexico has historically been subject to contestation, ever since the Spanish colony but increasingly after a mayor land reform 28 years ago. This research will study the Ejidos, a collective model of tenure, management and governance of agricultural land implemented in 1917, after the Mexican Revolution. Ejidal policy was designed by the Revolutionists to redistribute large portions of land from single ownership to indigenous populations. During the twentieth century, ejidos were, in the eyes of the government and corporations, underperforming in terms of economic development and agricultural efficiency, resulting in a land reform proposed by President Carlos Salinas. This reform permitted the privatization of ejidos, turning the Mexican peri-urban and rural land to object of speculation, overexploitation, undermanagement and, to a certain degree, abandonment. I will study the social, environmental and urban outcomes of the land privatization in Mexico. Rather than accept privatization as an inevitability, the project seeks to develop a policy and urban design methodology which enables common, non-speculative tenure as model to resist capital-driven development by adapting to climate crisis and mitigating social inequality. This is particularly relevant given that as of today more than half of the land in Mexico is still ejidal. Ejidos have been studied mostly in their historic development, agricultural per-
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formance and land policy. However, less research has been developed on the outcomes of privatization in terms of urban growth, resource extraction and social development. I frame the relevance of ejidos in the national context by assessing its policy reforms and their evident appearance in four impactful land uses of the entire Mexican territory, followed by positioning the potential which collectiveness presents as an alternative to overcome contemporary social issues such as the climate crisis and socioeconomic inequality. I conceptualize ejidos through the lens of the commons and collectiveness, as an alternative to the mostly exclusive private and profit-oriented use of land. I will draw on and combine methods prevalent in the fields of policy design and urban design. First, the policy design approach serves as a mean to understand, address and communicate the complexity of stakeholders and laws which are relevant to ejidal development. Second, the urban design methodology will create a range of spatial scenarios to reveal new forms of collectivedriven urbanization. The goal is to envision a historically situated collective tenure system for the future, one able to develop social, economic and infrastructural systems of the peri-urban Mexican cities, in a more efficient, inclusive and egalitarian manner. The region of the Mexico City-Pachuca Sub-Basin will serve as a case study and site to apply this methodology. Spanning from most of Mexico City, to the northeast, ending in the state of Hidalgo, this sub-basin populates almost 30 million people and cities have drastically sprawled in the past years due the land availability stress, settlement of industrial corridors and its groundwater reserves. AM01 (Left) Common Pool Resources. Collectively owned land in Mexico is constantly subject of speculation for its use and exploitation. One portion of land could be potentially used for agricultural production, industrial practices, extraction and urbanization. AM02 (Above) Ejidos are embedded in a complex system of private speculation, corruption, multilevel governance structures and climate crisis challenges. Keywords: Ejidos, collective ownership of land, commons, enclosure, Common Pool Resources, policy design, urban design.
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Walid Raad aka Suha Traboulsi: On Feminist Methodologies and the Discourse of Modern Arab Art Amanda Merzaban Aga Khan Program Advisor: Renée Green
Image 1: Raad, Walid. “Appendix 153.” Scratching on things I could disavow, 2019. https://www.scratcingonthings.org.
This thesis considers a recent series of artwork contained in Lebanese-American conceptual artist Walid Raad’s major on-going project Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World (2007-). One of the key premises of this vast, multi-iterative project is to inspect, tease out and critique the ways art institutions are codifying the artistic output of the Arab region into distinct categories of modern and contemporary Arab art. Categories taken up by global museums, regional auction houses, art publishing and academia. Underlying this critique is a concern with what he considers a violence inflicted on cultural objects being codified, particularly as they circulate within these spheres. Considerable attention in Scratching... has pivoted on Western satellite museums and displays of regional art collections that have proliferated in the Arabian peninsula since the early 2000s. Through lecture-performance and installation, Raad’s complex displays often construct a meta-narrative critique of the various facets of transnational art world poli32
tics and its entangled infrastructures and actors. A network that includes museums, collectors, directors, scholars, artists, curators and numerous other interlocutors both real and fictive. The weaving in of the fictive is a key operation throughout the artist’s oeuvre that at times takes the form of an imagined encounter, incident or the invention of a person. The invention of persons sometimes serve as proxies for the artist, and they come and go as companions, stand-ins, collaborators, who corroborate his research and anecdotes. In 2014, a female avatar by the name of Suha Traboulsi emerged; an avant-garde Palestinian modernist artist working in
Image 2: Raad, Walid. “Yet more letters to the reader.” Scratching on things I could disavow, 2015. https:// www.scratchingonthings.org
painting and performance that has seemingly eluded historicization. As Raad tells us, Traboulsi greatly influences his practice and was once considered “the witch of contemporary art.” The specs of this artist are particularly pointed, referring directly to the emergence of “modern Arab art” as a Western academic category in the past twenty years and the inscribing of women artists into this history. A process of inscribing women artists also arising in recent global museum exhibitions, particularly in the past decade. Traboulsi as both an invented stand-in and collaborator of Raad presents a provocation for a feminist inquiry. How does the artist both represent and occlude female subjectivity and feminine labour in this entangled gendered relation? As much critical attention around his work has focused on the finesse of his meticulously researched critique of institutional frames, the maneuvering of Traboulsi as a simulacrum of an Arab woman artist within the economy of his own artistic frames, requires further inspection and unpacking. 33
Nightrise Mohamad Nahleh Architecture Design Advisor: Sheila Kennedy Readers: Mark Jarzombek, Rafi Segal
The contemporary urban night, in its Drawing 1 (Above): State of the Field as a Spatial seemingly unyielding stillness, under- Allegory: The Majestic Firefly and its double ingestion. went violent constructions that have Drawing 2 (Opposite page): Nights five and six on the eliminated, relocated, criminalized, and walk: Nocturnal encounters on the moonlit territory, demonized darkness. Understood only Both drawings by Author. in its clear negation of light, the night survives as a failed day that needs prolonging, as an absence of space that requires immediate domestication. This thesis rejects the construction of the night as an opposition and favors instead a more nuanced 34
representation that foregrounds the agency of darkness, the complexity of its social and territorial expansions. It searches for those whose nocturnal cohabitations undermine the compulsive repression of the night. Strangely blended with unknown traditions, these unrecorded alliances and practices, mostly extinct in urban areas, survive in the landscapes that were harder to police, in the rural areas that managed to protect their nights against colonization. Testaments to a previously undivided nocturnal territory, these traces remain embedded in the daily lives of those whose impressions of the world seldom exist in writing. It is in their seemingly mundane practices that the genesis of the night, its earlier and diverse subcultures, remain hidden. As such, on a 26-night-walk across the Lebanese territory, from south to north, across towns, villages, and the landscapes in between, this thesis collects tales of darkness that trace the material and immaterial transformations of the night. They are the stories of the shepherds, the migrant workers, farmers, refugees, children, night workers, and others, whose various traditions subvert the language of light that has persecuted darkness for centuries. In its first part, Tales at Nightrise, the thesis works to deconstruct, spatialize, and then recount the encounters along the walk, by emphasizing the reading of darkness from the territory to the body, and vice versa; from the agricultural lands watered at night to avoid evaporation to the carrot ingested to heighten eyesight, and from the gatherings of African workers avoiding surveillance to the divinely blessed water re-
pelling evil spirits. Juxtaposed with the larger conversations they reinforce or challenge, these stories inhabit the nuances of light and darkness, of the urban and the rural, and of space and time, while recognizing the biased language we often use to describe the night (and hence, tales at Nightrise, not nightfall). In its second part, Spaces for Nightrise, the thesis examines the potential of this
reading within the frameworks of urban and architectural design. At stake is a lens of observation specific to the night, one that builds on the stories that only darkness uncovers. But the lens of intervention it provokes is not necessarily night centric. Its products are not restricted to the order of the night but privilege instead the shades of power and counterpower that the falling sun enables, and often triggers. 35
Mixed-Mode Systems in Residential Buildings: Evaluating Occupant Interventions to Provide Thermal Comfort Yesufu O'Iadipo Building Technology Advisor: Leslie Norford Well-designed spaces can promote occupant interventions that intuitively prioritize the best means of individual thermal comfort creation. Inhabitants of conditioned homes have a variety of options to choose from when seeking comfortable indoor air temperatures. Every individual has the opportunity to choose the most energy-efficient means of controlling indoor air temperature. However, some strategies reduce anthropogenic GHG emissions more than others. For instance, one can capitalize on diurnal temperature swings to allow internal heat loads generated within a building to ventilate out of the building through the use of buoyant airflows and indoor-outdoor air temperature differentials. A strategy such as this can precool a space for the following day. Additionally, an individual can capitalize on thermally comfortable outdoor air conditions by maximizing the amount of outdoor air introduced within a building. Natural ventilation strategies such as night flush and buoyant airflows in combination with mechanical systems are called mixed-mode strategies. Mixed-mode strategies used during the most applicable hours of the day and seasons of the year can generate significant reductions in the amount of energy required to cool a building.
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This research provides an assessment of potential mixed-mode strategies in a residential building to optimize the amount of energy consumed for each occupant and the overall building. It will attempt to provide an evaluation of optimal occupant interventions as a basis for automated mixed-mode control systems to supplement occupant behaviors and schedules. The Passive House Institute U.S. (PHIUS) certification standard will be the basis for the design of the buildings evaluated in this research. Two aspects of the building envelope in which PHIUS has placed emphasis are air-tightness and super insulation. Each can significantly reduce annual heating loads but have the potential to overheat buildings. To reduce cooling loads and minimize overheating PHIUS also promotes heat recovery ventilation. In order to appropriately utilize these strategies effectively PHIUS has taken significant measures to create climate-specific building standards. An evaluation of the most optimal mixed-mode strategy scenarios may supplement these efforts as well as promote the introduction of fresh air into buildings. The locations selected for this research are the three climate zones that contain the largest specific space cooling demand and peak cooling loads listed within NREL’s Climate Specific Building Standards. Each mixed-mode strategy will be evaluated concerning thermal comfort, heating load, cooling load, and source energy total. 37
Sonic and Spatial Temporal Urban Transformations: A Computational Model to Represent Temporal Changes in the Urban Experience Elina Oikonomaki Computation Advisor: Terry Knight Readers: Andres Sevtsuk, George Stiny Cities are dynamically changing, complex environments, especially during unpredictable events like the global pandemic where parking lots and sidewalks evolve to become restaurants at certain times of the day. Yet, the current urban models include only static representations of the city, such as maps and images, which are incapable of capturing, representing, and accounting for the changing condition of cities and peoples’ lives. Thus, urban design and planning decisions remain insensitive to the social and spatial conditions that are in constant flux. As a result, they do not currently consider that the actual forms of urban spaces are ephemeral, temporal, and ambiguous in their nature and that they are best perceived in motion and through time. The thesis, I propose, forms a computational approach to understanding and representing the temporal changes in the urban experience through sound. I argue that urban soundscapes can play a major role in understanding the rhythm, intensity, and frequency of these changes. Sounds emanate from places, every38
day social life, and community and express aspects of their social and cultural identity. A specific walking route around Harvard Square is used as a case study to capture how the different phases of the pandemic have changed the walking experience at street-level and the spatial conditions over time. By collecting 360-video and 360-sound recordings, captured over a three-month period in the afternoons and evenings, I will be able to construct an analytic methodology that can identify changing patterns of everyday life to inform the design process and make it more adaptive to the evolving conditions. With this work, I also hope to demonstrate that the urban soundscape will convey the temporality of spatial and experiential conditions and contribute to developing a more fluid model of city life that actually represents the way people use and experience space and can account for temporal representations of urban space.
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COMPULSORY LAND PARCELING, BUILDING AND USE OF URBAN LAND: Data Driven Design and Its Opportunities for Rio de Janeiro Olivia Serra Architecture & Urbanism Advisors: Rafi Segal, Nicholas de Monchaux Readers: Andres Sevtsuk, Roi Salgueiro Barrio This work will be a discussion around the potential of COMPULSORY LAND PARCELING, BUILDING AND USE OF URBAN LAND (or CPBU) in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The law exists under the umbrella of THE CITY STATUTE, the set of laws was implemented in Brazil in 2001 and it enables municipalities to regulate land use and land management towards a more socially inclusive and just environment, acknowledging that a city's social function and the urban property is at the core of civic rights. CPBU is a way to promote the use of unused and underused land by pressuring the owner of these properties through increase of property taxation and eventual seizing of the areas. Some of the measures proposed by THE CITY STATUTE were widely accepted and are employed in several cities. The controversy regarding its application,
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however, revolves around the fact that in many places it was used to benefit PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS, favoring the market logic; while excessively bureaucratizing the legislations that render land ownership flexible. This work will deal with the current use of this set of laws juxtaposed to the broader theme of Urban Redevelopment in its multiple forms, highlighting the phenomenon of City Marketing and how its shaped urbanism in Rio for the last decades. In 2007 it was decided Brazil would host the World Cup in 2014, and in June 2008, Rio de Janeiro was officially announced as the city that would host the Olympic games in 2016. These events have been the focus of significant investments made in Rio. Planning new infrastructure and facilities for these events mobilized public and private agents in different partnership models, most of them were based on THE CITY STATUE. But the process had great financial, environmental, and social costs, including the expropriation of more than 600 families just in the Olympic Villa area. The main legacy of these spectacularized works is a more expensive, exclusive, and fragmented city. The law was used in the exact opposite way of what it was created for. In this thesis I argue that to overcome this dynamic, which limits the supply and quality of public services and infrastructure, cities like Rio need to invest in more democratic cities. The urban redevelopment of socially unproductive lands by drawing on the CPBU law could render them profitable for the resident population, not by focusing on tourism, but improving the existing urban performance considering the current needs. This work develops guidelines for an alternative scenario for applying CPBU in the city of Rio de Janeiro.
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Made in Rural-Town: Sustainable Development of “Cities� in Rural China Area in the Context of E-commerce Influence Siyuan Sheng Architecture & Urbanism Advisor: Brent Ryan
quickly in these ten years. In this way, e-commercial villages formed rapidly since 2008 in rural China area and gradually spread to other Asia countries.
With the development of online shopping in the context of globalization, import and export of goods has become more common currently. While the need keeps growing with the improvement of quality of people’s life, rural China has gradually become an important part of supply chain in this laborintensive industry. Having the competitive advantage of low labor cost, people in the rural areas are pursuing a better life. The mode of e-commercial village spontaneously at the very beginning with the boom of e-economy and copied
The formation and development of e-commercial village is a process of comprehensive reconstruction of the material space and social system of rural areas by e-commerce era. This is a way that villagers living in the rural area can promote their economic status. However, since the formation of the e-commercial villages is 42
a “bottom to top” process, while the economy of the villages booms rapidly, the space in the village is disorganized. Consisted of home by home “workshops”, under the C2C business mode, the “workshops” are connected directly to the customers. In this way everyone cares more about their own business which lead them live in a worse environment although they are getting richer. Currently, the government found that the spreading of the e-commercial village mode is a great way to solve the poverty problem.
the city form of the villages still rural, villagers are separated by clusters and educational or medical resources are still scarce, the economy of the villages are developing rapidly. In order to meet the production of products and sell them all around the world, the villagers are actually living an urban pace of life. The gap caused problems and unsatisfaction on people’s life. The study is trying to make the city adapt to local living methods without huge changes in different scales of consideration. The urban scale will be the city scale studying the layout of the city, the layout of the infrastructures and the facilities. The second scale will be community scale, focusing on the social network and everyday life of locals. The third scale will be building scale focusing on adapting housing layout to local’s life style.
In the context of development of e-commerce, the economic growth in rural China based on the production of e-commerce products brought new changes to rural China area. Started from several young man backed to their village from city, started a new form of rural area and a new kind of economic organizational form. While
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Monstrous Space: Domestic Interiority in an Age of Algorithms Alexandra Waller Computation Advisor: Lawrence Sass Reader: Terry Knight As digital technology becomes ubiquitous and fully embedded in the material world, new spatial paradigms are emerging. Defined by their hybridized nature, these arising conditions are multiperspectival, multidimensional, and multiscalar reconstructions; spatial chimeras algorithmically assembled from fragments of embodied space, place and time, and unbound to continuous ordering. Nowhere are the effects of these emergent conditions more evident than in our domestic spaces, which have, in the past, gained their definition through a series of clear spatial and socio-cultural dualities: Home is interior, not exterior; it is private, not public; home is the realm of the feminine—society, the realm of the masculine; it is the most elemental of human architectural undertakings—not the construction of machines. As the digital world continues to press its full weight on our physical realities, it has corroded these boundaries, collapsing long-existing structures of space, and ushering in the formation of a new digital society within the realm of the domestic.
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Distinctions between physical and digital experience become lost as we conform and contort to fit within the demands of computational space. Platform to platform, standardized infrastructures for the digital society have been established, and new voyeuristic spatial conditions have emerged. Algorithms collect and compress our private domestic spaces, universally miniaturizing and arranging them for public display and consumption. Surveillance becomes the expected social condition, as lengthy and continuous streaming of video and audio from the once private interior are broadcast
to the digital society in order to sustain its cohesion. The dramatic reconstruction of domestic interiority calls for a critical analysis of the cultural and architectural ramifications of these emergent spatial hybrids.
!mage 1 (Below): Collage: Draughtsman Making a Perspective Drawing of a Reclining Woman, (Albrecht Dürer, ca 1600) Image source: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/366555?searchField=All&sortBy=Relevance&a mp;ft=Albrecht+Dürer&offset=360&rpp=20&pos=376 Image 2 (Above): The Chimera (La Chimère de Monsieur Desprez) (Louis Jean Desprez, ca. 1777–84) Image Source: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/336133
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Projective Design Loop: Alternative Workflow on Mobility Inspired Street Block Design Qianqian Wan Architecture & Urbanism Advisor: Caitlin Mueller
The reality of urban design practice today is characterized by a problematic and profound to the conceptual discontinuity inherent between urban studies and urban design practice. One area of urban studies is largely based on quantitative research, and focuses disproportionally in relation to network studies and modeling, such as traffic modeling and land use modeling, to consolidate quantifiable data and ensure a degree of rationality, presumed to exist when rules are clearly defined. Another area of spatial urban studies, to the polar contrast, relies largely on social-economic evidence and takes analytical case studies as its mainstream methodology. While the audience are different, though, both streams rarely provide tangible guidance toward the logic of form finding in urban design practice, such lack of connection results in an urban design process that can be characterized as a case-by-case graphical and aesthetical evaluation and subject to unlimited degree of freedom, disconnected from the research generated in urban studies. 46
With this thesis I aim to bridge the gap between urban research and design by building on the promise of projective design loops. A projective design loop is to suggest the workflows or platforms that could adaptively synthesize the modeling (simulation) of design performance, the evaluation of outcome, and the informative comparison of different parametrization, thus enabling the iterative form-finding, both progressive and inverse. This idea is widely pursued in parametrized design on an architectural and installation scale while not widely assessed on larger ones – district scale or urban scale. Partially, it is because of the difficulty to parametrize the urban environment and satisfy the adaptivity of existing policy and other more intangible factors that are contributing to the from-finding of urban design. It’s also because the rules of a general urban environment are loosely defined by regulations, administrations, culture and other customs that are hard to quantify. In this study I will define, compare and utilize different ways of parametrizing the urban environment; research and test out the computational and responsive design process, its adaptivity to urban design; and apply my findings to a specific scenario. The research would be meaningful to both designers and policy makers in providing real-time evaluation on urban performance for design proposals and thus facilitating decision making by avoiding arbitrariness. Keywords: Parametrization, Urban Simulation, Interactive Optimization, Design Prototyping
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Components and Compositions: Machines’ Observation and Reasoning of Architectural Design Intention Represented through Vision and Selective Abstraction Xiaoyun Zhang Computation Advisor: Takehiko Nagakura and “reasoning on paper”. How would computers perform a similar “mental process” by “observing” or “reasoning”, and thus be able to reach a highlevel understanding of the design?
In the age of increasing collaborations between human and machine designers, how to communicate between the two sides more effectively and intuitively has been one of the challenges in both Artificial Intelligence and Architectural Design. Unlike human architects, machines have rarely been able to perform high-level exchange with architects on topics of aesthetics and experiences. The ability to perform “semantic categorization” behind a design and therefore find intentions that are embedded in representations has been underexplored in the machine learning realm.
This thesis will investigate this form of a consolidated abstraction and composition of architectural design intentions, which are to be further associated with evolving shapes that emerge from designers’ minds. In order to expand machines’ repertoire of abstracting visual features and composting tåhem at a level of “understanding intentions”, three hypotheses are therefore proposed to be investigated through analyses of exemplary design drawings and “intentions” from master architects. To test the hypotheses, this thesis will analyze the compositional elements and procedures in finding “intentions” through the design sketches of Michelangelo, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn and several others. These analyses will be focused on answering “how” and “why” the recognized labels of objects and spatial relationships are interpreted into highlevel semantic features, or intentions. Then, this paper will identify potential
Human designers, on the other hand, are rather well-known for their performance to go far beyond just thinking about functionality. Adept at abstracting design intentions and materializing them in tangible forms and designing by visual and recollective association, architects reflect upon meanings of their work and see various potentials even from a single form. One of the most long-standing and convincing examples are design sketches. It is perceived by many great architects as a mental process of “searching for innovation”
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tional process of semantic categorization. Finally, this paper will train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) under the framework and evaluate its performance in the task of seeking and identifying “intentions� of a given, intermediate design sketch.
shareable and unshareable computational representation methods that facilitate the formation and recognition of intentions. Following the three hypotheses and discovered methods, this thesis will propose a new model of extracting and navigating the composi-
Top image credit: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Hubbe House Project (Perspective sketch), 1934. MoMA Collection.
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Design for Interact-able: Implement Social Intelligence Design in the Urban Space Ziyuan Zhu Architecture & Urbanism Advisor: Miho Mazereeuw Reader: Stefanie Mueller civic actions rely on apps, our everyday behavior is under the specter of cameras by government and private companies alike. How might we give the right back to people to interact with their city and take action to engage in public life with an awareness of where their data goes and what kind of data they shared can make the “collective memory” for the city? How might we trace back to what Aldo Ross called “collective memory of the city” with the inevita-
Recent decades have witnessed the quick development and implementation of data collection, IoT(internet of things), facial recognition as well as applications of countless sensors in our urban space. Every day, more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are collected, delivered, processed, and interpreted for accelerating the operation of the “real-taime” cities through countless sensors, cameras, and “smart devices”. In this technology-centric smart city, citizens and
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urban life and space. The last phase is a proposal for the tangible interaction toolkit, which can be applied to small-scale urban infrastructure to motivate citizens to interact with urban public space and share their “collective memory of city” (data) for better urban interaction.
ble development of technology and application of novel tools? This thesis aims at exploring the critical relationship between ambient intelligence and human behavior, as well as the possibility of creating more tangible interaction for citizen’s engagement in public space through the lens of social intelligence design (SID). There are three phases in this thesis. In the first, I will survey several cases of recent projects, innovations, and products focusing on harnessing social intelligence design to empower the interaction between people and the physical space and study their intention, framework, and continuing development. The purpose is to distill the interactive solutions and manuals for the future of collective innovation. In the second phase, I will conduct expert and ethnographic studies to better understand professionals’, users’, and citizens’, perspectives towards the concept and the cases from the aspects of ethics, acceptance, experience with 51
Master of Science in Architecture Studies Pre-Thesis Reviews, December 11, 2020 SPECIAL THANKS Architecture Faculty and Staff Eleni Aktypi José Luis Argüello Darren Bennett Kathaleen Brearley Renée Caso Stacy Clemons Nicolas de Moncheaux Chris Dewart
Eduardo Gonzalez Gina Halabi Matthew Harrington Chris Jenkins Sheila Kennedy Terry Knight Doug Le Vie Inala Locke
Tonya Miller Amanda Moore Andreea O’Connell Paul Pettigrew Alan Reyes Cynthia Stewart
Advisors and Readers (MIT and External) Lorena Bello Gomez Jodi Cranston Nicholas de Monchaux Arindam Dutta Rania Ghosn Renée Green Mark Jarzombek Caroline Jones Paul Keel Sheila Kennedy
Axel Kilian Terry Knight Miho Mazereeuw Caitlin Mueller Stefanie Mueller Takehiko Nagakura Leslie Norford William O'Brien Jr. Nasser Rabbat Brent Ryan
Roi Salgueiro Barrio Lawrence Sass Rafi Segal Andres Sevtsuk Rosalyne Shieh Kristel Smentek Henriette Steiner George Stiny Hans Tursack
SMARCHS Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture & Planning Department of Architecture 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 7-337 Cambridge, MA USA 02139 617 253 7791 / arch@mit.edu architecture.mit.edu
© 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Individual contributions are copyright their respective authors. Images are copyright their respective creators, unless otherwise noted. Booklet design by José Luis Argüello. DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE MIT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING SA+P