May 2022 Thesis Reviews

MIT Architecture Final Thesis Reviews, May 11 and 12, 2022

MARCH SMBT SMARCHS

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE MIT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING SA+P

MIT Architecture Final Thesis Reviews, May 11 and 12, 2022

MARCH SMBT SMARCHS

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE MIT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING SA+P 1

MIT Architecture Final Thesis Reviews, May 11 and 12, 2022 May 11 Master of Architecture (MArch) Jonathon Brearley 6 MArch and SMBT Jiye Ha 8 MArch and MSRED Katharine Kettner 10 MArch and MCP Thaddeus Lee 12 MArch Chris Moyer 14 MArch and MCP

May 12 Master of Science in Building Technology (SMBT) Jonathon Brearley 18 SMBT and MArch Stella Zhujing Zhang 20 SMBT

Master of Science in Architecture Studies (SMArchS) Maryam Aljomairi 24 Computation Dimitrios Chatzinikolis 26 Computation Joel Cunningham 28 Architecture Design Gabriela Degetau 30 Architecture & Urbanism Mariam Elnozahy 32 Aga Khan Program Kiley Feickert 34 Building Technology Laura Maria Gonzalez 36 Architecture Design James Heard 38 History, Theory & Criticism 2

Kimball Kaiser 40 Architecture Design Katerina Labrou 42 Computation Xuan Lan 44 Architecture Design Yuxuan Lei 46 Architecture Design and EECS Randy Lo 48 Architecture & Urbanism Muhammad Hasan Nisar 50 Aga Khan Program Jari Prachasartta 48 Architecture & Urbanism Lasse Rau 52 Architecture & Urbanism Myles Sampson 54 Computation Meriam Soltan 56 Aga Khan Program Mona Vijaykumar 58 Architecture & Urbanism Rui Wang 60 Computation and EECS Ngai Hang Wu 62 Computation Qianyue Xu 64 History, Theory & Criticism

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE MIT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING SA+P 3

MIT Architecture Final Thesis Reviews, May 11, 2022 Master of Architecture (MArch) Jonathon Brearley 6 MArch and SMBT Jiye Ha 8 MArch and MSRED Katharine Kettner 10 MArch and MCP Thaddeus Lee 12 MArch Chris Moyer 14 MArch and MCP

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE MIT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING SA+P 5

Taming Torridity: Strategies for Heat Resilience in Future Climates Jonathon Brearley MArch & SMBT

Advisors: Miho Mazereeuw & Leslie Norford Reader: Caitlin Mueller Intervening on the contemporary US housing typology of the single-family home, this work imagines new building forms that foster resilience to extreme heat and through social proximity, housing heterogeneity, and novel space cooling strategies. As we move into a new climate paradigm of increased weather variation and higher temperatures, extreme heat events will become more frequent and extreme. Increased cooling demand during such heat events contributes to electrical grid instability and, in some cases, causes blackouts or rolling brownouts. An established pathway to addressing this problem is more efficient envelopes and building systems, a strategy captured by the Passive House standard. While it is demonstrated that the Passive House standard is a viable strategy for increasing heat resilience, this thesis pursues an alternative pathway to heat resilience in US homes by emphasizing building form and architecture that is designed for flexible, resilient functions by first exploring three fundamental strategies. Earlier findings on the significant impacts on ground coupling in heat resilience are translated into an architectural and operational strategy that reduce cooling energy and improve passive survivability by leveraging the ground as a heat sink. The second strategy uses zone nesting and thermal buffers conceptualized as layered thermal spaces. The last strategy, with an intention of fostering social resilience, uses party walls to reduce exposure and cooling loads homes. The sum of these approaches is presented in a housing proposal that recognizes the forces at play in the desire for lowdensity, low-rise housing while attempting to subtly undermine kernels of the low-rise, single-family typology such as its resource intensity and homogeneity.

Image (opposite) by the author.

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Co-Working in Seoul: Integrating Public Infrastructure into the Metaverse Jiye Ha

MArch and MSRED Advisors: Arindam Dutta & Siqi Zheng Reader: Takehiko Nagakura Hybrid working has now become the new normal. Besides working from home, there is an increasing demand for a space that is neither home nor the traditional office.While the home office offers many benefits such as flexibility, worklike balance, and reduced transportation costs, employees still need a space that is detached from household chores and noise. Such demand is being met by various forms of working environment such as co-working office, dispersed office, satellite office and metaverse office. This societal demand for a new remote workspace is also happening in conjunction with digitization, rise of the metaverse, and the changing ways people engage with public infrastructure.

This project looks at Seoul, South Korea as an example of this societal shift, and finds opportunities in two types of public infrastructure: Post office and the welfare and administrative centers located at every administrative district in Seoul. With digitization, the number of post offices in Seoul is decreasing every year, and in some cases extra spaces are being leased to the private sector. With Seoul Metropolitan Government releasing a five-year plan to build in intricate metaverse platform, it is expected that more and more physical infrastructure within Seoul will be made available for an alternative use starting from year 2026 and beyond.

Matching societal demand for flexible remote working environment with a growing supply of public space for alternative use, this thesis explores ways of reappropriating portions of the existing public infrastructure in Seoul as remote work space. The proposed designs seek to provide public good that cater to the needs of the locals, at the same time creating a new revenue stream for the public sector.

Image (opposite) by the author.

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Inheritance Geographies: Black Presence and the Making of London Katharine Kettner MArch and MCP

Advisors: Yolande Daniels & Delia Wendel Reader: Garnette Cadogan Blackness has been fundamental in the making of Western cities.This thesis takes London as a case study through which to explore Black spatial practices. All too often, the disciplines of architecture and planning attempt to adopt apolitical, ahistorical approaches to physical space – the reality, however, is that no such space exists. Traditional pedagogies struggle to accept built interventions which occur outside strict disciplinary boundaries. By extension, these fields devalue, trivialize, or refuse to acknowledge the influence of racialized Others in shaping the built environment. This omission has serious ramifications for how architects and planners see space and the people who inhabit it. Although Black people have lived and worked in Western cities for centuries, within the dominant discourse Black people are hardly ever recognized as active agents of spatial transformation and creation. This is exacerbated by visual and discursive norms which fixate on representing space in particular ways — which are not necessarily representative of the ways through which racialized groups exist, use, and make space. Denying Black contributions renders architecture and planning complicit in the perpetuation of white supremacy. Erasure severely impairs the capacity for these fields to work as forces for equity and justice, even when many designers espouse that as a goal.

This thesis rejects the minimization of Blackness in the Western canon. It calls on the disciplines of architecture and planning to expand their pedagogical horizons and to challenge normative ways of reading and understanding the built environment. A celebration and exploration of the richness of Black contributions in London allow us to engage the city as an ever-evolving historical, political, and social archive. The project considers some of the ways in which Black people — those departed, those present, and those future — have transformed London, which for centuries sat at the heart of a global empire, and which today remains a site of contestation. Ultimately, the soul of the project is simple: London is what it is because of Black presence.

Image (opposite): A fragment of London. Image by the author.

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2.5D: An Exploration of Hybrid 3D Printing on Fabric Thaddeus Lee MArch

Advisor: Skylar Tibbits Readers: Marcelo Coelho, Nicholas de Monchaux & Caitlin Mueller Much of the design for architecture and objects we encounter today are built around the paradigms for manufacturing either two dimensional, sheet and roll goods, or three dimensional volumes and forms. We achieve an astounding proficiency in producing paper, film, fabric or sheet goods, whilst often encountering the familiar problem of logistics or assembly in creating anything in three dimensions. What if we were to combine the proficiency we have with the former, to produce volume, form and structure?

2.5D is a proposal for a hybrid approach that applies 3D printing onto textiles and film material. The resultant method hopes to apply the design vocabularies of both 2D and 3D design whilst presenting new possibilities with existing materials and technologies. Building on preceding research in 4.154 Interactive Intelligent Skins, the thesis takes the body as the most immediate context for architecture to present three objects as case studies for 2.5D. The first is a remoldable bag that suggests how fabric behavior might be modified with 3D printing. The second, a therapeutic garment that explores new materialities for variable flexibility, rigidity and structure. And last, a shoe concept that addresses possibilities of mass customization and distributed manufacturing.

Responding to the challenges faced in the design of these case studies, this thesis also puts forth a prototype design for a wide-format 3D printer capable of working with novel flexible filaments in the context of roll-to-roll textile and film manufacturing.

Image (opposite): 2.5D Garment Detail, Photograph by the author.

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Expanding Architectures of Sharing: Public Housing Authority-Supported Middle-Income Limited Equity Cooperatives Chris Moyer

MArch and MCP Advisors: Susanne Schindler & Lawrence Vale Reader: Tim Smith Amid soaring home prices caused by rampant speculation in high-cost cities like Cambridge, middle-income households are being squeezed harder than ever.

Faced with a housing market structured around binaries between renting/owning and market-rate/affordable housing (income- and price-restricted), middleincome households are left with increasingly few options. Neither private developers nor public-sector entities currently serve their needs.

Limited-equity cooperatives (LECs) move beyond these binaries. LECs provide a form of self-governed housing incorporating elements of renting and owning, designed for permanent affordability with limited wealth building via economic sharing. But LECs also facilitate social and spatial sharing through practices (collective decision making, shared meals, childcare help) enabled by architecture (open space, common kitchen, play facilities). LECs thus endow residents with the benefits of collective control, affordability, and social support through the combination of decommodification and architectural design. LECs have existed in the United States for over a century. Apart from a few local exceptions, however, the model has never been scaled for a middle-income clientele, due to a lack of both financial and institutional support.

Building on a literature review of US housing history and interviews with residents, policy makers, and developers, “Expanding Architectures of Sharing” ar-

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gues that LECs can again serve middle-income households if institutions with the financial means and development expertise collaborate. Specifically, this thesis focuses on the healthcare industry and public housing authorities and imagines the following scenario: Members of the Massachusetts Nurses Association union petition the Cambridge Health Alliance, which has been hard pressed to hire staff due to exorbitant housing prices, to offer its surface level parking lot on Line Street for development; The Cambridge Housing Authority is focused on low-income rental housing, but is driven by an entrepreneurial spirit to broaden its impact; A joint venture between the two CHAs provides the financial and institutional support necessary to build a new mixed-use LEC, developed and managed by the Housing Authority.

By embracing the interrelated tenets of economic, social and spatial sharing, the LEC provides a living environment not possible in either market-rate or traditional affordable development. Organized around four distinct open spaces, the project combines a rental building for hospital interns and a cooperative building for an array of household sizes and incomes. A daycare, retail spaces, and below-grade parking offer public uses. The proposal reveals the untapped opportunity of institutions and housing authorities to expand architectures of sharing through middle-income LECs. Image 1 (opposite); Diagram of sharing. Image 2 (above): Unit plans of cooperative, Images by the author..

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MIT Architecture Final Thesis Reviews, May 12, 2022 Master of Science in Building Technology (SMBT) Jonathon Brearley 20 SMBT and MArch Stella Zhujing Zhang 22 SMBT

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE MIT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING SA+P 17

Taming Torridity: New Housing Forms for Heat Resilience Jonathon Brearley MArch & SMBT

Advisors: Miho Mazereeuw & Leslie Norford Reader: Caitlin Mueller Intervening on the contemporary US housing typology of the single-family home, this work imagines new building forms that foster resilience to extreme heat and through social proximity, housing heterogeneity, and novel space cooling strategies. As we move into a new climate paradigm of increased weather variation and higher temperatures, extreme heat events will become more frequent and extreme. Increased cooling demand during such heat events contributes to electrical grid instability and, in some cases, causes blackouts or rolling brownouts. An established pathway to addressing this problem is more efficient envelopes and building systems, a strategy captured by the Passive House standard. While it is demonstrated that the Passive House standard is a viable strategy for increasing heat resilience, this thesis pursues an alternative pathway to heat resilience in US homes by emphasizing building form and architecture that is designed for flexible, resilient functions by first exploring three fundamental strategies. Earlier findings on the significant impacts on ground coupling in heat resilience are translated into an architectural and operational strategy that reduce cooling energy and improve passive survivability by leveraging the ground as a heat sink. The second strategy uses zone nesting and thermal buffers conceptualized as layered thermal spaces. The last strategy, with an intention of fostering social resilience, uses party walls to reduce exposure and cooling loads homes. The sum of these approaches is presented in a housing proposal that recognizes the forces at play in the desire for lowdensity, low-rise housing while attempting to subtly undermine kernels of the low-rise, single-family typology such as its resource intensity and homogeneity.

Image (opposite) by the author.

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Mitigating Peak Load and Heat Stress under Heat Waves by Scheduling Cooling and Energy Storage Systems Stella Zhujing Zhang SMBT

Advisor: Leslie Norford As the climate changes, heat waves are becoming more frequent and severe.

Heat waves intensify cooling demand and reduce air conditioner efficiencies.

This causes peaks in electricity demand that pose operational challenges to the power grid. This thesis provides methods to mitigate peak load and heat stress under heat waves by adjusting the schedules of the cooling and energy storage systems in buildings.The cooling system scheduling methods involve (1) generating baseline and training data with EnergyPlus (EP) simulations, (2) fitting linear models or machine learning models that relate cooling system adjustments to perturbations in power purchased from the grid and Standard Effective Temperature (SET, a comprehensive measure of thermal comfort), and (3) embedding the EP data and trained models in optimizer to schedule cooling system adjustments. The methods provide closely predicted optimized solutions with less computation cost than solving the problem by brute-force EP simulations.

The energy storage system scheduling methods involve baseline grid purchased power simulation with EP, and energy storage discharge scheduling based on the baseline and average value. Case studies of the cooling system scheduling, energy storage system scheduling, and the combination of two methods on a single building and a six-building neighborhood in the climate of Miami and Kuwait are offered. In these case studies, the methods reduce peak load significantly while maintaining SET within comfortable ranges.

Image (opposite): Left: photo of cooling systems on the facade of Westgate Apartment at MIT. Right: Reduced peak

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MIT Architecture Final Thesis Reviews, May 12, 2022 Master of Science in Architecture Studies (SMArchS) Maryam Aljomairi 24 Computation Dimitrios Chatzinikolis 26 Computation Joel Cunningham 28 Architecture Design Gabriela Degetau 30 Architecture & Urbanism Mariam Elnozahy 32 Aga Khan Program Kiley Feickert 34 Building Technology Laura Maria Gonzalez 36 Architecture Design James Heard 38 History, Theory & Criticism Kimball Kaiser 40 Architecture Design Katerina Labrou 42 Computation Xuan Lan 44 Architecture Design Yuxuan Lei 46 Architecture Design and EECS Randy Lo 48 Architecture & Urbanism Muhammad Hasan Nisar 50 Aga Khan Program Jari Prachasartta 48 Architecture & Urbanism Lasse Rau 52 Architecture & Urbanism Myles Sampson 54 Computation Meriam Soltan 56 Aga Khan Program Mona Vijaykumar 58 Architecture & Urbanism Rui Wang 60 Computation and EECS Ngai Hang Wu 62 Computation Qianyue Xu 64 History, Theory & Criticism

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE MIT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING SA+P 23

Adaptive Self-Shaping Mechanisms: Prototyping of PneuKnit Systems Maryam Aljomairi Computation

Advisors: Caitlin Mueller & Skylar Tibbits Readers: Ozgun Afsar & Svetlana Boriskina Our surroundings are constantly in flux, whether it is changes in the environment or changes in those who inhabit it. However, most of our spaces and building components are designed for permanence and durability without acknowledging the nuanced fluctuations of the user’s behavior, lifestyle, or changes in the natural environment. The strive for building permanence, designed to resist change, contributes to the 100 million tons of wasted materials annually due to recurring renovations and remodeling that inevitably addresses these fluctuations. What if our parts were active and could sense, react, respond, adapt, and co-evolve with its inhabitants and surrounding context? Rather than building with static dormant components, this alternative presents us with opportunities to advance the built environment and rethink its interrelations with its users and its context, resulting in spaces that are performative and attuned to user needs.

This thesis seeks to develop a typology of lightweight adaptable systems that are rapid and affordable to manufacture. It investigates the fabrication of responsive self-actuating mechanisms; specifically, hybrid pneumatic-knitted (pneu-knit) systems that are autonomous and adaptable to changes within the environment through embedded sensors. The integrated sensors detect the input stimuli–in this particular case study user proximity–transmitting the data to a signal processor and interpreter, which then generates output values for the air pressure settings. This acts as a direct informer and physical shaper of the pneu-knit system, whereby the differentiated shaping generates through the structure and the design of the pneumatic component. The contributions of this work include developing a fabrication framework and method to integrate the knitted, pneumatic, and sensing components for the assembly of affordable, adaptable, lightweight material systems that are attuned to their surroundings.

Image 1 (top): Knitting on double bed machine. Image 2 (center): Integration of pneumatic component into knit Image 3 (bottom): actuated responsive knit. All images by the author.

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Of Shape and Touch Dimitrios Chatzinikolis Computation

Advisor: Terry Knight Readers: Axel Kilian & George Stiny Philosophers of perception often refer to touch as the primary sense. The French sensationalist Étienne Bonnot de Condillac expressed the following idea; it is exactly through the sense of touch that humans acquire the concept of a ""self."" Recent studies from early childhood development confirm Condillac's claim. However crucial touch is for us humans, it seems that machines are still lagging behind, especially in the domain of architecture and design.

am going to model with the Bayesian Framework.

The computational framework presented here calls for a richer integration of the sense of touch,and its implications, into design thinking.

Rather than abandoning touch for our machines once and for all, I aim to bring touch back into the design discourse. We can infuse creativity into contemporary digital making by responding to our inherent need of communicating with a more physically based language, towards an embodied computation, and towards a physical space as a computational medium.

There is widespread research of teaching robots to look at something and predict what it feels like. This thesis presents a similar investigation, only this time in reverse order, that is teaching a machine to touch a thing, and predict what kind of geometric property it has, e.g. flatness,curvature, edge, corner, etc.

Image (Opposite): 1. Icthyomorph, André LeroiGouhran, from Gesture and Speech, MIT Press, 2. Amphibomorph, André Leroi-Gouhran, from Gesture and Speech, MIT Press, 3. Sauromorph, André Leroi-Gouhran, from Gesture and Speech, MIT Press, 4. Theromorph, André Leroi-Gouhran, from Gesture and Speech, MIT Press, 5. Pithecomorph, André Leroi-Gouhran, from Gesture and Speech, MIT Press, 6. Anthropomorph, André Leroi-Gouhran, from Gesture and Speech, MIT Press, 7. Line drawing of the Vesion III Utah/M.I.T. Dextrous Hand, S. C. Jacobsen et al, Design of the Utah/M.I.T. Dextrous Hand, 8. Configuration of the Dextrous Hand, S. C. Jacobsen et al, Design of the Utah/M.I.T. Dextrous Hand.

Human perception is constantly modeling the world, in the sense of capturing data to infer what is out there, and what is going to happen after a certain action is made. In the context of this thesis, I propose a simple perception system, which consists of a data capturing setup, and a Bayesian framework for inference. The data capturing setup allows to capture the way that humans perform Exploratory Procedures with their hands, which then I 26

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As the Curtain Falls Joel Cunningham Architecture Design

Advisor: Marc Simmons Reader: Sheila Kennedy For the last century, architects have embraced the efficiencies of the curtain wall.

As a technological solution that mediates between our interior desires and the realities of the outside world, these envelope systems have been liberally applied to buildings across the globe. Regardless of longitude and latitude, minimal vitreous enclosures have grown to represent progress and modernisation - the triumph of capitalist logic over all else.

Today, however, as concerns surrounding climate change are pulled to the forefront of contemporary culture, the myopic tendencies with which these enclosures were designed is starting to become apparent. With use-lives rarely exceeding 50 years, many curtain walls are now struggling to keep pace with contemporary change, not only falling short of ever-more stringent performance standards, but also rapidly evolving cultural demands. With a vast number of these envelopes set to fail in the not-so-distant future, it is simply a matter of time until the world’s first generation of cristiline skylines are either erased or replaced.

When considering the sheer quantity of curtain walls the world has assembled over the last fifty years, in urban centers as diverse as New York and New Delhi, the true magnitude of this issue starts to become apparent. As a generation of young architects, we are set to inherit an inventory of large buildings possessing perfectly sound structures, but fundamentally flawed envelopes. Concurrently sitting in the midst of what we now call a “climate crisis”, it seems an appropriate time to question our current paradigm of enclosure design. Do we really need more short-term solutions, or a fundamental shift in the way we perceive and produce the outer inches of our architecture?

Image (opposite): Structural model-Natwest Tower, the United Kingdom's first modern skyscraper.

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The Afterlife of Wells, from Oil to Soil in the Amazonia Gabriela Degetau

Architecture & Urbanism Advisor: Rania Ghosn Readers: Lorena Bello, Gabriella Carolini & Santiago del Hierro Fifty years ago, the Ecuadorian State celebrated the beginning of a new economic era for the country as the first barrel of oil was extracted from the Amazon.

Nevertheless, resource extraction has not resulted in sustainable economic prosperity, nor has it reduced the inequality affecting local and indigenous communities.

Eventually, all oil wells will go dry, and their economic value will be gone. Nevertheless, the territory, the people, and the effects remain. After Fifty years of extraction, the end of the hydrocarbon era has begun.

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The thesis aims to investigate the afterlife of abandoned wells in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

The research starts by understanding the territory and the socio-environmental effects oil has brought to the country. The project focuses on the Sucumbios province, which condenses many of the pressures and disputes that the Ecuadorian Amazon is facing today.

Abandoned oil wells are a significant source of air, soil and groundwater pollution. They continue to leak substances such as arsenic and methane even after they are no longer operational. It is essential to take action and responsibility for the affected people, nature, and territory. Eventually, all oil wells will go dry, and after that, their economic value is gone, but the territory, its people, and the effects remain. This research uses case studies, policy, and urban design as a methodology to produce a pilot project that creates a range of spatial scenarios and conceptualizes alternative futures. The research provides tools for remediation strategies working on a transitional timeline and different degrees of intervention. Together they demonstrate the possibility of the space in the after-oil condition.

The scope of the research does not aim to find a solution. It looks to open up a dialogue to think about the implications of the afterlife of the well in biodiverse rich and cultural territories, as an objective to advocate for territorial reparation, coexistence, and ecological conservation.

Image 1 (opposite): The end of the well, alternative futures, Image 2 (above): Fragmentary map of control. Both images by the author.

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Visualizing Oil in Aramco World Magazine Mariam Elnozahy Aga Khan Program

Advisor: Nasser Rabbat Readers: Huma Gupta & Caroline Jones In 1949, almost fifteen years after the first oil well was discovered by a group of American wildcatters on the Eastern Peninsula, the Arabian American Oil Company decided to ramp up its public relations campaign by launching a company house magazine.The publication, Aramco World Magazine, was initially produced out of the company’s New York office as a way to communicate company activities to employees. Throughout the decade of the 50s, the magazine’s audience grew and it expanded its scope to cover trivia about the Middle East, world events, lifestyle tips, and, most importantly, oil operations.

This thesis examines the history of Aramco World, and uncovers how the magazine’s editors and photographers worked towards the company’s public relations aim of creating a “favorable business climate” in the United States. In the 1950s, amidst a slew of threats and criticisms directed at the company, the magazine aimed to aestheticize oil operations while making life afield in Saudi Arabia seem palatable for Aramco employees, their families, and opinion leaders in the

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United States. To achieve this, the magazine relied most heavily on a cadre of staff photographers hired to capture all aspects of oil operations and company activities. The industrial photography printed in the magazine conveyed the marvel of extractive engineering through portrayals of abstract oil pipes, aestheticized rigs, towering derricks, and heroic managers, all of which created a mystical impression of the world of oil, one defined by the technological sublime and experiences of petromagic. These images conjured a fantasy of oil, one that could appeal to expat employees and their families, and secure the company’s role as a leading global enterprise jointly ruled by the United States and Saudi Arabia.

Images 1 & 2 (opposite and above): Aramco World Magazine Archive.

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Thin Shell Foundations: Embodied Carbon Reduction through Materially Efficient Geometry Kiley Feickert

Building Technology Advisor: Caitlin Mueller Reader: Sigrid Adriaenssens Due to increasing global population, floor area is expected to double by 2060.

At the same time, the building sector contributes 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions annually as a result of current construction processes. Therefore, if global warming is to be limited to 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels, reducing embodied carbon will play a key role and business-as usual construction processes must be reconsidered.This research aims to reduce carbon emissions associated with reinforced concrete structural elements while addressing the need for a significant increase in adequate housing due to rapid urbanization.

The structural frame and foundations represent the systems with the most potential to limit emissions, as they are the biggest contributors to embodied carbon in a building. In contexts where labor costs drive construction costs, particularly in the Global North, material is consumed excessively at the expense of time. This research proposes shell foundations in lieu of spread foundations, drawing from historical applications such as Félix Candela’s Customs Warehouse, built in 1953. Shells distribute loads more efficiently through their cross-section, reducing the quantity of material required structurally which ultimately reduces their embodied carbon.

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In this research, existing analytical equations are applied in a parametric design workflow to evaluate the environmental impact of conventional prismatic foundations and shell foundations for the same design load. For a 2MN column load on clay soil, shells reduce embodied carbon in foundations by 64%. By applying this approach systematically, insights are gained regarding their applicability to various building typologies and site conditions [1]. For high applied loads, and soils with low bearing capacity, shells significantly outperform their prismatic counterparts. Foundations are then considered within the context of a whole building to determine the potential downstream savings when multiple systems are shape optimized. When floor slabs are shape-optimized in addition to using shell foundations, the embodied carbon of a building can be reduced by 76%.

Digital fabrication offers a pathway to economically build materially efficient foundations while addressing the additional time and labor often associated with more complex geometry. For example, advances in 3D printing earth suggest local soil can act as formwork if printed in the required shape to receive the shell geometry. Additionally, subtractive methods are explored, where earth is compacted and milled to create formwork for a shell foundation [2].

Image 1 (opposite): Impact of soil bearing capacity and column load on embodied carbon for spread and shell footings. Image 2 (above): Robotic milling of adobe as formwork for shells. Both images by the author.

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Beyond the Brick: Collaborations with a Sensing Microbial System in the Built Environment Laura Maria Gonzalez Architecture Design

Advisors: Skylar Tibbits & David Sun Kong Reader: Sheila Kennedy The environmental cost of buildings has become clear over the past two decades. Their construction and operation significantly contribute to the climate crisis through sizeable annual CO2 emissions. As a result, designers are striving to integrate biomaterials into buildings as an approach to reduce the dependency on carbon-intensive resources. However, difficulties maintaining organisms alive have limited their implementation beyond a fabrication tool. Emerging synthetic biology techniques present an opportunity to integrate living systems into the built environment through engineered living materials. Engineered living materials retain self-assembly, self-healing, and adaptive response capabilities by maintaining the embedded microbes alive. The design process focuses on shaping the conditions for their prosperity through the simultaneous design of matter, geometry, and organism. Thus, the process exemplifies an organismcentric approach.

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In this thesis, I propose that living materials offer a path to address the environmental repercussions of the built environment while also transforming how we inhabit and interact with buildings over their lifespan through a collaboration with microscopic living organisms. To do so, I explore the design and fabrication of a biomineralized engineered living material through in silico and in vitro methods. I propose a design methodology driven by wet lab experimentation and define design constraints for macro-scale applications. I then fabricate biomineralized brick modules and demonstrate their ability to bind into larger assemblies. Lastly, I evaluate the microbial viability of the designed living material and demonstrate sensing and reporting capabilities on the biomineralized surface.

Image 1 (opposite): Biomineralized Brick Modules: Samples made with sand and microbes.

Image 2 (above): Sensing Brick Color Matrix: Bricks of various colors that correspond to the presence of pollutants in the environment. Image 3 (below): Morphology Study: Module designs with increased surface area to ensure distributed access to oxygen and promote microbial growth. Images by the author.

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“Professionals in a Soviet America”: Federal Housing Policy, the Popular Front, and Architects in Los Angeles James Heard

History, Theory & Criticism Advisor: Arindam Dutta Readers: Ana Miljački & Mark Jarzombek In the wake of the first Red Scare, Mrs. William Brown Meloney, editor of the women's magazine “The Delineator,” founded Better Homes in America, a national organization to promote the ideal American home through publications, model homes, and local events.

Herbert Hoover, the then-Secretary of Commerce, served as the organiza-

tion’s first president, operated it as the propaganda wing of the United States’ Commerce Department, and relied on it to rhetorically hitch “American values” to detached, single-family dwellings. After becoming President in 1929, Hoover began to intervene in housing through increasingly direct measures. The complementary trajec-

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tories of propaganda and policy coincided at the President's Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership in 1931, out of which the Federal Home Loan Bank Act was drafted, legislatively establishing the national framework for mortgage lending and normalizing the detached single-family dwelling. This conjunction of form and finance reverberated through congressional discourse and eventually influenced housing restrictions established through the Federal Housing Administration—particularly racial, formal, and stylistic controls.

By the mid-1930s, galvanized by the Great Depression, the Communist Party USA had started organizing a left-liberal Popular Front with architects figured as a vanguard of the professional class. Over the following decade, this network challenged the increasingly hegemonic suburban model of housing. This included labor unions like the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians union, which agitated for public works provisions in New Deal policy and the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, a cultural organization that incited architects—alongside other professionals—to protest for an alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union, global nuclear disarmament, and modern housing throughout California. As the second Red Scare accelerated in the

postwar period, institutions like the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles intervened to provide meeting spaces for embattled organizations.While the Popular Front coalition in Los Angeles unravelled by the mid-1950s under the burden of state and federal surveillance, it left behind a built legacy of politically motivated developments throughout the city.

Image 1 (opposite): Iowa Day at Bixby Park.

August 11, 1945. Photographic print. M0003.

Long Beach Fireman’s Historical Museum Photographs Collection, California State University Dominguez Hills Archives.Image 2 (above): Magnus, Edward. Professionals in a Soviet America. In a Soviet America. New York City: Workers Library Publishers, 1935.

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Parts-In-Progress Kimball Kaiser

Architecture Design Advisor: Skylar Tibbits Readers: Michael Jefferson, J. Jih & Caitlin Mueller, Construction and demolition materials contribute significantly to the waste stream in the United States with the EPA noting in 2018 that 600 million tons of construction and demolition debris were generated. In the future of climate change and an increase in demand for new and renovated buildings in the context of continued urbanization and population growth, architects are faced with a daunting responsibility in the design and consideration of material usage in architecture. Therefore, many architectural projects have been developed with a reconsideration for material waste, attempting to recoup construction waste streams turning cast aside materials into useful building materials.

However, Parts-In-Progress is an argument for a different consideration on the other side of this issue, instead starting from the other end of the material stream, designing for the planned disassembly of architecture and accepting that buildings are designed and built with life cycles. Parts-In-Progress is a design methodology arranged around assembly using standard dimensional lumber in their given form in conjunction with custom digitally fabricated parts to create multiple assemblies at the scale of architectural components and furniture that can be disassembled. These digitally fabricated parts are used as smart jigs that allow for the fabrication of said assemblies, but also require minimal amount of manipulations to stock materials, in order to preserve them for maximum reassembly possibilities or alternative reuse. Finally, as an alternative to standardization in a kit of parts, these assembly strategies are designed around specific geometrical constraints in way to produce a range of possible unpredictable outcomes.

Image (opposite) by the author.

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The Shape of Music: A Grammar of Piano Hand Gestures Katerina Labrou Computation

Advisors: Randall Davis & Terry Knight Reader: Sotirios Kotsopoulos Essential parts of human communication, expression, and productive action rely on gestures. Examining these gestures is central to design and understanding creativity. However, techniques and skills manifested in human hand gestures are hard to capture in computational terms. This research investigates how skilled hand gestures can be apprehended visually as shapes and explores how they can be represented computationally in a way that a machine can learn.

A case study is carried out on a high-skill activity, namely piano performance.

In piano performance, hand gestures can be defined as identifiable movements that produce a particular sound, a hand shift, or an expression. A piano performance comprises a unique sequence of hand gestures that 'make music' from a given score. Nonetheless, making music is not that different from other types of making. Acquiring the ability to play the piano is a long learning process that makes one capable of executing appropriate hand gestures on the keyboard.

Some are targeted, and some are improvised. Rule descriptions of gesturing in piano are like other domains of making requiring motor dexterity, such as weaving or pottery.

A novel methodology for studying skilled gestures of piano performance is proposed. Piano players participate in a performance experiment. The music score is considered the basis for producing different music performances. The pianists are first invited to perform three music pieces and then express verbally how the score is executed. Motion capture technology tracks their hand gestures, and graphical representations of the pianists’ movements are created from the data to reveal the structure of musical gestures.

A grammar of piano hand gestures is determined to encode piano playing's performative aspects. In the grammar, technical and stylistic elements of piano performance are captured by shapes: hand gesture sequences on the keyboard.

The score is executed as a series of shapes as grammatical rules apply.

Image (opposite): Tracking the pianist's hands using markers. Photo taken by Katerina Labrou.

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China's Community Riders: Digital Labor, Delivery Logistics and Spaces Xuan Lan

Architecture Design Advisor: Rafi Segal Readers: Roi Salgueiro Barrio & Zheng Tan With the rise of digital platforms, delivery workers using motor scooters have gained new prominence through providing essential mobility in urban geographies. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, food delivery riders have become a fixture of China’s streets by forming an instant, all-weather, community-based logistic network. In early 2021, more than 7 million riders delivered 65% of daily essentials and served 430 million customers, which constitutes 30% of China's population. As both capital and labor flowed into this booming e-commerce industry, tech giants fiercely competed to offer the most cost-effective food delivery platforms by implementing algorithmic control of the riders. The majority of riders are young migrant workers, struggling to make a living by taking delivery as their entry job in cities. Even though China is moving to protect riders from digital exploitation, conflicts are arising in both social and spatial aspects.

This thesis undertakes a critical investigation into China's delivery riders by analyzing their mobility services in community-based logistics. It anatomizes the actors and corresponding forces involved in reshaping the instant flows. By examining the delivery network and the digital exploitation behind it, the thesis reveals the mechanism of the system's gamified control over the labor conditions. It reviews the plight of China’s food delivery riders, laboring under digital exploitation conditions mirroring those of workers worldwide in the new gig economy. This thesis also demonstrates that urban spaces in cities are incompatible with this booming rider group, resulting in a slew of unsolvable issues like street crowding, disorderly parking, traffic congestion, and vehicle-pedestrian collisions. By uncovering these challenges, this thesis calls for an intersectional perspective to address the riders' digital and physical conditions. It seeks to develop potential interventions in urban geographies to reduce spatial and social inequalities. Prototype proposals are shown that could create equitable and comfortable spaces for riders by improving the working conditions, platform adaptation, and delivery facilities.

Image (opposite): Rider's spaces and community delivery logistics. Image by the author.

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Muscle VR: An EIT-based Input Sensing System that Monitors and Visualizes Motion and Muscle Engagement in VR Environments Yuxuan Lei

Architecture Design and EECS Advisor: Takehiko Nagakura Reader: Stefanie Mueller We hypothesized that designing a virtual experience with enhanced sensing techniques, interaction methods, and virtual display interfaces will set up an effective paradigm to improve unsupervised physical rehabilitation. The thesis discussed whether muscle monitoring, visualization, and analysis based on Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) sensing technology can improve the accuracy of exercise completion and the quality of therapist assessment during unsupervised rehabilitation therapy. For that purpose, the thesis developed MuscleVR, a VR rehabilitation system that employs a combination of motion capture and muscle engagement imaging based on EIT technology. It is a three-in-one system that includes a high-precision, low-latency optical motion capture system, a wearable EIT device for the thigh, and a virtual rehabilitation environment that allows real-time interaction and visualization of related physiological information. The paper implemented two user study experiments. Study 1 evaluates how the setup helps participants improve therapeutic exercise completion accuracy, while study 2 measures how the system empowers remote physical therapist evaluation quality without In-clinic Diagnosis. In Study 1, 10 participants were invited to experience MuscleVR. They were asked to complete a lower extremity exercise rehabilitation program for total joint arthroplasty (TKA) in a visualized and non-visualized environment. The muscle engagement and movement trajectory data measured in this experiment will be used in the Study 2, and six physical therapists will further evaluate the effectiveness of each user's performance based on the parsed data. The experimental results show that muscle engagement visualization does substantially improve the accuracy of therapeutic exercise (~15%) and facilitates the quality of remote assessment by the therapists. Finally, this paper also discusses the potential of MuscleVR as an at-home rehabilitation training tool, a range of alternative low-cost technologies, and future research directions are further discussed.

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Image (above): VR Interface example.

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Duality of Ground: Re-envisioning Space of Death in New York City Randy Lo

Architecture & Urbanism

Jari Prachasartta

Architecture & Urbanism Advisors: Miho Mazereeuw & Brent Ryan Readers: Roi Salgueiro Barrio & Travis Bunt The territory of death spans a wide range of space and time scales. New York City has, for centuries, been developed around and above the remains of the dead. Cemeteries, therefore, serve as a constant reminder of the mutability of urban ground and its profound notion of impermanence and perpetuity. Cemeteries, nonetheless, reveal as much about the living as they do about the dead.

Today, their relevance has been challenged by the spatial constraints and the ever-changing perception of cultural and religious discourses and practices surrounding the place and space of death.

New Yorkers, religious and not, have started to favor cremations over burials for various reasons. This signifies that the spatial and socio-cultural relationship towards the cemetery environs will evolve as societal norms have diversified.

Existing cemeteries, anachronistic and stagnant, mark a separation between ac-

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tivities of the living and places of the dead resulting in them transitioning into a monofunctional ground.

Individual death, although personal and intimate, makes up the discursive territory that enfolds identities, stories, and connections to the public whole. Therefore, the problems call for the need for communities to respond collectively.

By taking the Cemetery Belt, a conglomeration of cemeteries at the border of Brooklyn and Queens, as a site of investigation, the thesis aims to re-envision the space of death and its role. The thesis proposes a design that mediates the balance and dynamism between conventional burial sites and new forms of engagement to create an urban experience that serves the journey of the dead and the living.

Image 1 (opposite): The Cemeter y Belt. Image 2 (above): Isolated Ground. Both images by the authors.

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An Experiment in Piety: The Three Domed Suhrawardy Tombs at Uchch Sharif Muhammad Hasan Nisar Aga Khan Program

Advisor: Nasser Rabbat Readers: Hakim Sameer Hamdani & Kristel Smentek, Although reduced to a small city today, the intact historic urban fabric of Uch in present day Pakistan still recalls its spiritual and economic hey-day in the medieval period: a stronghold of the Suhrawardy Sufi order, a central site on trade routes linking India to Central Asia and Iran, and a popular refuge for the Sufis, saints, princes, artisans, and poets either escaping the onslaught of the Mongols in Central Asia during 13th century or seeking new patronage.

This thesis will look at the three 14th-15th century monumental tombs of Baha al-Halim, Bibi Jawindi, and Ustaad Nuriya at Uchch. Though enigmatic in their own right, these three monuments have not been the subject of any dedicated study and generally been ignored in scholarship. This thesis will enlighten the Suhrawardy order’s attempt to entrench themselves at Uchch and establish it as the new capital of Suhrawardy learning and pilgrimage through a program of monumentality. I will demonstrate that this attempted acculturation or entrenchment can be read in the architecture of these three tombs and make corollary connections to the switch in the religious attitudes of the leadership from orthodoxy to asceticism to explain the idiosyncrasies in this building program.

Therefore, this acculturation can be noted both in religious aspects and in architecture of these tombs signaling the overall attempt to herald Uchch as the new center of gravity for Suhrawardy learning. Though formally this corpus operates within the Central Asian traditions of Islamic mausolea, drawing inspiration from Seljuq and Samanid monuments, this research will demonstrate that it is localized through its materiality, structural differences, and program of ornamentation which anchors it in the traditions of commemorative architecture of the Indus Valley.

Image 1 (opposite top): Tomb of Bibi Jawindi seen through interior of the tomb of Baha al-Halim. Image 2 (oppoiste below): (left to right) Tomb of Baha al-Halim, Bibi Jawindi, and Ustad Nuriya . Both photos by the author.

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On Viscous Grounds: Planning Environment, Comfort, and Indigeneity through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, 1968-1981 Lasse Rau

Architecture & Urbanism Advisor: Arindam Dutta Reader: Timothy Hyde This thesis interrogates the planning and mediation processes of environmental protection, temporary worker accommodation, and indigenous land claims prior to, during, and after the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in the mid-1970s. Unraveling at the height of cultural shifts around gender, indigenous identity, and conservation, the planning of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline represents a shift in the negotiation of infrastructures from a regulating process of approval to a calibrating process of expertise, coercion, and predisposition. Revealing the pipeline as a paradigmatic infrastructure valued in terms of the viscosity of oil, the thesis argues that it provided the solid grounds to negotiate the far more fluid externalities of environment, comfort, and cultures.

Its process of mediation thus brought different types of mobility to clash: The fixity of the pipeline, the fluctuating uncertainties of boom-and-bust cycles, the shifting grounds of environmental protection, the temporariness of workers and their accommodations, and the relationship of indigenous Alaskans to land.

Situated amidst these regimes of temporality and tenure, this thesis analyzes three discourses that protruded from their clash: (1) The management of the environment and its crisis through economic models, new legal systems, and corporate publicity, (2) The urban and architectural control of culture within workers’ housing owing to the biopolitics of comfort, and (3) The trading-off of indigenous knowledge through anthropological mapping of native land use. By studying three different evidentiary regimes, this thesis posits that the viscous grounds of these economic, architectural, and cultural terms were modeled to be included as frictions in a predisposed system of planning.

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Image 1 (above): “Supermodules” of BP Alaska/Sohio's North Slope Operarions Center on their way from Seattle to Prudhoe Bay, AK. Source: Dudley, Hardin & Yang, Inc., Seattle. The Composite Building's four modules in barge transit. In “The Northern Engineer, Vol. 06, no. 3.” Fairbanks: Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska, Fall 1974, 28. Image 2 (below): Photograph of Berger Inquiry hearings at Kakisa. Source: Michael Jackson, Kakisa: Jim Thom Explains the Land Use Maps, circa. 1975-1977, Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre.

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Discrete-to-Complete Myles Sampson Computation

Advisor: Larry Sass Reader: Tim Smith It is evident that the architecture, engineering, and construction industry must adopt new approaches to building construction to create safer working conditions, accelerate the assembly process, and reduce excess building materials. If real change is to occur, the construction industry needs to develop new automation processes that leverage established manufacturing processes. Leveraging architecture’s, engineering’s, and construction’s reliance on digital design, Discreteto-Complete presents an accessible, adaptive, equitable framework for robotic fabrication. As a emerging design process, robotic fabrication contains immense untapped creative power for designers, architects, and artists. Current research in robotic fabrication demonstrates the integration of discrete assembly into automated building processes. However, the stochastic nature of discrete assembly, discrete voxel-based approaches, and restrictive assembly rules removes the autonomy of the designer from the building processes. Additionally, contemporary robot fabrication approaches rely on computationally intensive sensorial tech-

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nology, highly complex hardware, and custom workflows. For non-expert users in the AEC industry, in particular designers, fabricators, and contractors, these tools are complex and challenging to implement in their established workflows for design production. In short, a comprehensive approach is needed to produce customized designs. In response, Discrete-to-Complete outlines a new method of robotic construction that combines architectural design, discrete assembly, and shape grammars for a design-driven method of robotic construction. In a series of robotic fabrication experiments, this research presents a fundamental approach to robotic fabrication, demonstrates the advantages of rule-based assembly processes, and introduces a workflow to robotically fabricate architectural structures.

Image 1 (opposite): Outline of the Discrete-to-Complete Assembly workflow. Image 2 (above): Robotic assembly of the self-correcting customized architectural bricks. Both images by the author.

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Motivated Fictionality: Worldbuilding and The Thousand and One Nights Meriam Soltan

Aga Khan Program Advisor: Nasser Rabbat Readers: Huma Gupta & Margaret Litvin This thesis posits Edward Lane’s 19th century illustrated and annotated edition of The Thousand and One Nights as key to having made legible the telling and picturing of the tales as a worldbuilding practice. To do so, it frames Lane’s translation—one of the earliest and the most profusely illustrated Nights of that period—as a carrier of disparate social, political, and cultural histories by investigating the contemporaneous trends in Victorian-era knowledge production

that informed the realization of the edition. Characterized by a commitment to ethnographic realism, Lane’s copious explanatory notes as well as the 574 woodcut prints designed by British illustrator William Harvey for the text are understood as having together built into the tales colonial-era research and representation meant to offer an authentic vision of the Orient for unfamiliar readers. Explorations of how and why that representation of the Orient through the Nights could

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become, for many, the Orient itself

Image 1 (opposite): An illustration of Shahrazad storytelling featured alongside the first page of the “Table of Contents”. William Harvey, Illuminated Title and Headpiece to Table of Contents, Woodcut Prints engraved by Anonymous and Ebenezer Landells respectively, 1839, in Edward William Lane, The Thousand and One Nights vol. 1, (London: Charles Knight) iii. Image 2 I(below): Spread from Lane’s Nights showing end of “List of Illustrations” and beginning of the frame story. William Harvey, Shahriar going out to hunt, and Ornamental Border, Woodcut Print engraved by John Jackson, 1839, in Edward William Lane, The Thousand and One Nights vol. 1, (London: Charles Knight) 1.

are in turn channeled to propose Lane’s Nights as both a product and producer of its time. By foregrounding this reciprocity, one that recognizes instances wherein our world has been shaped with and through the Nights in tandem, this thesis invites an understanding of the stories not as a finite collection, but as a living fiction consistently animated by exchanges between the real and the imaginary.

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Ery as a Unit of Urban Ecology: An Ecological Framework for Chennai’s Growth and Resilience Mona Vijaykumar

Architecture & Urbanism Advisor: Rania Ghosn Readers: Arindam Dutta & Rafi Segal Chennai’s urban history has evolved and flourished around an elaborate cascading system of water tanks, locally known as ‘Erys’. Traditionally, as an agrarian society these erys were ecological commons that engendered biodiversity, and community building. They served as essential water reservoirs and flood control systems that were collectively managed by the communities.

expansion of Chennai’s territory by 2026 and lack of guidelines to conserve and manage the water bodies, the survival of these erys and livelihood around them are highly challenged.

The thesis proposes a series of ecological frameworks that shift the paradigm of ery as a unit of urban ecology in contrast to the current model of urbanizing the erys. By unfolding the patterns of current and future impacts of unplanned urbanization on erys, the thesis leverages erys to adapt to changing climate vulnerabilities, strengthen local socio-cultural assets, and negotiate the existing and impending urban development. The project envisions a resilient water future for Chennai that seeds synergies between the ecologies of ery and urban development.

Over the last two decades, Chennai’s built-up area increased by 71% by indiscriminately expanding over these erys, transforming a largely wet and permeable land into impervious concrete. As a result, this has not only degraded the natural ecology of the city but also increased the flooding risks of the communities that currently live around water bodies.

With the proposed eight fold urban

Image 1 and 2 (opposite top, left and right): Seasonal variations in Chembarambakkam Ery, Google Earth. Image 3 (oppoosite bottom): Chennai's disappearing Erys. Image by the author.

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City Lens: A New Perspective of the City Image Rui Wang

Computation and EECS Advisor: Takehiko Nagakura Readers: Song Han & Carlos Sandoval Olascoaga

How do people perceive cities? What forms an impressive city? Over half a century ago, Kevin Lynch innovatively offered an answer through mapping city image, a common mental picture of the city that can be perceived and interpreted by the public. Based on social surveys and interviews, he drew up maps of how frequently different elements of the city were mentioned and summarized through five physical categories— path, edge, district, node, and landmark—that are referable in urban design practice. Decades have passed, the rise of social media and machine learning technology has opened up new opportunities for understanding the city image via quantitative large-scale evaluation, and many further studies to some extent confirmed the stability of Lynch’s theory. This thesis addresses these questions within this context by combining digital methods and social analyses to suggest a new way of understanding public perceptions of urban landscapes.

However, there are unanswered phenomena in prior works of the city image. For example, they focused mostly on the categorization of the city elements, whereby they are perceived as physical forms that ignore the subjective perceptions of individuals and the connections they build towards these elements. Additionally, city images are dynamically changing, although impressive at night, they may be unidentifiable during the day, and vice versa. Yet the discourse is dominated by a static daytime

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city image, leading to the neglect of temporal factors. To tackle these questions, this thesis suggests a comprehensive perspective by complementing categorized physicality with subjectivity and temporality, which could align with Lynch’s work.

With the application of computer vision and natural language processing in geo-tagged data, the thesis proposes a novel computational model that identifies the way cities are experienced and perceived by the public through physical terms, subjective associations, and temporal factors.An experiment conducted in this thesis will scrape and process data from Flickr, whose photos are used for physical categorization, comments for subjective evaluation, and timestamps for temporal analysis. The end product will be an interactive data visualization platform revealing how the public perceives the city and what impressions guide urban development and travel routes.

Image 1 (opposite): Framework of the 'City Lens' model. Image 2 (top): Research workflow. Image 3 (above): Interactive data visualization platform as the end product. Images by the author.

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Patterns of Moments - Reasoning about Space Video via Pattern Language of Human Behavior

by Extracting Multi-Action Activities via Machine Learning Video Ngai Hang Wu Computation

Advisor: Takehiko Nagakura Readers: Axel Kilian & Terry Knight Architecture is designed for people to live in. In our everyday world, human experiences occur within architectural spaces. Understanding the relationship between the built environment and human behavior is essential to architectural design. However, “human-centered design” is usually a top-down approach that is highly dependent on architects’ subjective experiences of space and the users’ demands. The ability to more thoroughly understand human activities in space is lacking.

In this thesis I focus on developing computational perception of user experience in space to foster human-centered design. The research method is to quantify high-level human events and in what types of spaces they are happening and compare the behavioral difference within various spatial settings through short clips/videos. Data was collected by observing and recording human behavior in public. Data-driven Computer Vision techniques are adopted, such as event recognition, scene attribute extraction, and dynamic analysis to study low-level features of human activities in space. This low-level understanding discovers behavioral patterns in different spaces, providing insights on high-level human-centered spatial design. Eventually, as we have a deeper understanding of human behavior in space with the help of data-driven machine learning models, we could potentially build a human-centered design system that designs by experience.

Image (opposite): Dynamic Images of Human Behavior. Image by the aurhor.

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“Scraping and Bloodletting”: Xiamen Dada and the Self-Renewing System of Reform-Era Art Qianyue Xu

History, Theory & Criticism Advisor: Caroline Jones Readers: Arindam Dutta & Eugene Wang In 1986, Dada rhetoric would surface in the coastal city of Xiamen in southeast China to be taken up by the art collective Xiamen Dada, whose activities targeted agents in the institutional framework of art. The collective’s conceptual output includes a burning event where they disassembled their previously exhibited artworks and set them on fire in front of the museum (image 1), a “surprise attack” in the form of a ready-made exhibition where they moved found objects around the museum building into the exhibition hall and called that an “event exhibition,” and a blueprint for pulling the National Art Museum of China with 4,000 meters of hemp ropes (image 2).

My thesis strives to present a granular analysis of this particular slice of reformera history. It refuses to perpetuate the grand narrative of the radical Chinese avant-garde by examining the conflicts between theory and reality that negated Xiamen Dada’s self-aware critique. I deconstruct Xiamen Dada’s much-heralded radicality as exchanges, negotiations, and engineered equilibrium between control and calculated freedom in a self-renewing system that was reform-era art in China. Zooming in on the discourse of tolerance, I examine the extent to which the art establishment’s selective, dynamic canonization of emerging trends and the collective’s subversive interventions were mutually informative. Through inperson interviews with former members of the collective and extensive archival research on previously overlooked materials, I investigate the enabling socioeconomic networks behind Xiamen Dada’s conceptual gambit, and argue that collectivity was adopted not so much as a rosy ideal as a surviving tactic based on strategic collectivism.

Image 1 (opposite above): Wu Yiming 吴艺明, photo documentation of the “Dismantling—Destruction—Burning” event, staged by Xiamen Dada in front of Xiamen People’s Art Museum on November 23, 1986. Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. Image 2 (opposite below): Xiamen Dada, Project Plan for “The Art Museum Pulled by Hemp Ropes,” 1988, ink on color photographs on paper. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, https://walkerart.org/collections/artworks/drawing-away-thenational-art-gallery.

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Notes

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Notes

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MIT Architecture Final Thesis Reviews, May 11 and 12, 2022 SPECIAL THANKS Architecture Faculty and Staff Eleni Aktypi José Luis Argüello Darren Bennett Kateri Bertin Kathaleen Brearley Stacy Clemons Nicholas de Moncheaux Chris Dewart

Aidan Flynn Eduardo Gonzalez Gina Halabi Tessa Haynes Matthew Harrington Oliver Herman Chris Jenkins Sheila Kennedy

Doug Le Vie Inala Locke Tonya Miller Amanda Moore Nina Palisano Paul Pettigrew Alan Reyes

Advisors and Readers (MIT and External) Sigrid Adriaenssens Ozgun Afsar Lorena Bello Svetlana Boriskina Travis Bunt Garnette Cadogan Gabriella Carolini Marcelo Coelho Yolande Daniels Randall Davis Nicholas de Monchaux Santiago del Hierro Arindam Dutta Rania Ghosn Huma Gupta Hakim Sameer Hamdani Song Han

Timothy Hyde Mark Jarzombek Michael Jefferson J. Jih Caroline Jones Sheila Kennedy Axel Kilian Terry Knight Sotirios Kotsopoulos Margaret Litvin Miho Mazereeuw Ana Miljački Caitlin Mueller Stefanie Mueller Takehiko Nagakura Leslie Norford Nasser Rabbat

Brent Ryan Roi Salgueiro Barrio Carlos Sandoval Olascoaga Larry Sass Susanne Schindler Rafi Segal Marc Simmons Kristel Smentek Tim Smith George Stiny David Sun Kong Zheng Tan Skylar Tibbits Lawrence Vale Eugene Wang Delia Wendel Siqi Zheng

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

© 2022 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 68

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