May 2023 Thesis Reviews (MArch and SMArchS AD, Urb, AKPIA)

MIT Architecture

Final Thesis Reviews, May 16, 2023

MARCH SMARCHS AD SMARCHS URB SMARCHS AKPIA

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE

MIT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING

MIT Architecture

Final Thesis Reviews, May 16, 2023

MARCH SMARCHS AD

SMARCHS URB

SMARCHS AKPIA

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE

MIT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING

MIT Architecture

Final Thesis Reviews, May 16, 2023

Master of Architecture (MArch)

Zachariah DeGiulio 4 MArch

Jola Idowu 6 MArch and MCP

Mariana Medrano 8 MArch

Ous Abou Ras 10 MArch

Tristan Searight 12 MArch

Master of Science in Architecture Studies

Architecture & Urbanism (SMArchS)

and Architectural Design

Subu Bhandari 14 Architecture & Urbanism

Luna BuGhanem 16 Architectural Design

Kecheng Huang 18 Architecture & Urbanism

Kim, Il Hwan 20 Architectural Design

Pramada Jagtap 22 Architecture & Urbanism

Jensen Johnson 24 Architectural Design

Mark A Hernandez Motaghy 26 Architectural Design

Tamar Ofer 28 Architecture & Urbanism and MSRED

Pimpakarn 'Prim' Rattanathumawat 30 Architecture & Urbanism Selin Sahin 32 Architecture & Urbanism

Zachary Schumacher 34 Architectural Design

Master of Science in Architecture Studies

Aga Khan Progam AKPIA (SMArchS)

Boshra Moossavi 42 Aga Khan Program

Khushi Nansi 44 Aga Khan Program

Jehanzeb Shoaib 46 Aga Khan Program

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE

MIT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING

Zanzibar Pizza Hut: Stone Town's Duckorated Sheds

Zachariah DeGiulio MArch

Advisor: Ana Miljački

Readers: Suzanne Preston Blier (Harvard) & Garnette Cadogan

Zanzibar Pizza Hut: Stone Town's Duckorated Sheds examines three cultural artifacts produced in Zanzibar’s Stone Town—Christ Church at the Old Slave Market, the kanga cloth, and the Zanzibar Pizza. These artifacts, which emerged in 1897, the early twentieth century, and the late 1980s, respectively, demonstrate a similar set of contradictions between what these objects’ suggested meaning is and what the conventions of naming imply, contradictions that produce what I’m calling Duckorated Sheds. Ultimately, the symbolic forms of these architectures have meanings that are obfuscated by the descriptions around them.

The shared salience of these cultural artifacts lies in the way they exist in and amplify multiple temporalities—knotting together the supposedly rupturing moments of the end of slavery, the inauguration of colonial power, and the late-millennium embrace of corporate multinational capitalism. The logics of Duckorated Sheds suggest less a rupturing event than a continuation of existing modes of thinking, being, and non-being— a continuation of slavery and of colonization in all its metastasized recapitulations. These objects ultimately lubricate the semiotic friction that occurs when a restructuring event alters the modes by which meaning is rendered.

Zanzibar Pizza Hut takes these specific Duckorated Sheds and applies their logics to the design of a pavilion in Stone Town’s Forodhani Gardens, a colonial vestige that sits underutilized during the day but serves as the site for a food market in the evening, mainly geared towards tourists. Zanzibar Pizza Hut attempts to design for a variety of actors, all the while maintaining the awareness of the underlying continuities produced by the logic of the Duckorated Shed.

Author's own drawing

Tabu. Tabbi. Tabique. Tabú.

Jola Idowu MArch and MCP

Advisors: Garnette Cadogan & Sheila Kennedy

Reader: John Oschendorf

The uniqueness of tabby concrete is based in its process of collecting local materials and producing concrete through reuse. The origin of tabby as either North African, tabbi, or the Spanish, tapia, has been debated, and no conclusive evidence exists that points towards either place. This clouded absence of origin displays the roots of tabbi’s history as both rooted and rootless; fluid and based in an intercultural exchange that removes tabby from a linear timeline of a beginning, middle, or end. In tabby’s move to the Western Hemisphere, its existence is blurred across socio-cultural divides as a symbol of militaristic power, the plantation economy, and the homes of the slaves who built both. In the United States, tabby was composed of oyster shells sourced from Native American middens, the remnants and discarded materials collected by Native Americans years prior, holding a record of indigenous practices and colonial erasure. The end of slavery completely changed the prevalence of tabby for to produce tabby, particularly tabby quicklime, required days of labor which could only be afforded as a result of slave labor.

However, despite its importance in American building culture, tabby is a material that has faded historically and materially. If one were to happen across a tabby structure today, its former marble like finish has deteriorated due to weather damage and neglect, and the broken walls and floors reveal the oyster shells beneath. In response, tabby structures across the country are undergoing many different types of preservationist practices, whether that is archaeological digs and recordkeeping, the physical preservation of tabby structures, or the continued use of oysters as a construction material in the American South. The current process of tabby preservation does not acknowledge the diasporic and network character of tabby, and focuses on specific sites or landscapes that do not highlight the labor and historical absences of the material. This project proposes a new approach to tabby preservation based on its connection to reuse and its subversion of cycles of capital by the enslaved and indigenous peoples associated with its labor.

Tabby Timeline by Jola Idowu.

A Mural for a Clinic

Mariana Medrano MArch

Advisor: Deborah Garcia

Readers: Alia Farid & Oana Stǎ nescu

This project emerges from the desire of making a mural for the interior space of an abortion clinic. In 2023, in the United States, reproductive agency is a threatened right, which makes abortion clinics spaces of resistance, alternative narratives, and radical care. The history of the care provided in clinics is older than capitalism itself, older than what we may ever trace, because reproductive agency is a practice aided not only by contemporary medical professionals but also by the natural world itself.

There is a historic plethora of herbs, roots, flowers, et cetera, that have been employed as abortifacients: Plants that when consumed cause the uterus to contract, thus inducing a miscarriage, or abortion. This practice, which unfortunately today is largely lost as a collective social knowledge, intersects with murals in that plants also provide us with pigments. A mural for an abortion clinic holds the ambition of elevating this historic narrative of reproductive care and agency by encoding knowledge in pigments, a lost history in images. For this project, a catalog of abortifacient plants and their corresponding pigments was created to inform the making of a mural. The pigments themselves were extracted and synthesized from organic matter, and each plant was considered as rooted in intersectional histories of medicine, power, gender, colonialism, divinity, and color.

Block print by Mariana Medrano

Images of the Sun on Earth

Ous Abou Ras

MArch

Advisor: Caitlin Mueller

Readers: Brandon Clifford & Mohamad Nahleh

We are solar societies, engaging in diverse relationships with the Sun across cultures and geographies. However, as we began to spend more time indoors in thermally controlled environments, we started grappling with rising energy demands and climate change. Gradually, our connection to the Sun’s energy shifted towards a utilitarian perspective with a paradoxical duality: both as a valuable source of energy to be maximized, and an accomplice in planetary warming to be minimized. Dealing with this conundrum, architecture has divided sunlight into two experiential components. The aesthetic qualities of light are reserved for its visual phenomenon, while its thermal characteristic is either portrayed as a renewable energy source to be utilized, or as a nuisance to be shaded from.

Rather than viewing our star’s energy as a utility, this thesis pushes forward the century-old physics theory of energy as mass. In 1905, Einstein demonstrated that an object’s mass is simply a measure of its energy content. As such, sunlight, as an electromagnetic wave, becomes the medium that carries the Sun’s weight. Converging the radiation back to the point from which it diverged offers a way to recreate the physical surface of the Sun on Earth with all its heat and mass.

Building off the architectural and landscape practices that engaged sunlight to design a diverse range of micro-climates, this thesis proposes a series of analogue machines that embed solar capturing techniques borrowed from scientific literature. These analogue machines redistribute the field of sunlight on Lafyette Square into a landscape of concentrated pockets of energy, creating hot – and perhaps even burning - surfaces to provide warm moments in an otherwise cold, empty park in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With recent advancements in computer graphics, a ray-tracing tool is developed to estimate the output energy for a solar collector across varying solar positions and visualize

how different geometries concentrate direct and indirect radiation. By repurposing solar technologies to heat small volumes for short periods of time rather than heating an entire house for a prolonged time, this thesis re-imagines our relationship to the Sun’s energy – from utility to a thermal phenomenon – where we can feel the sun, even if for a moment, a cold cloudy day.

Image (above) by the author.

Eating On and Beyond the Infinite Corridor

Tristan Searight

MArch

Advisor: Christoph Reinhart

Readers: Brandon Mohamad Nahleh & Jinhua Zhao

Infinite Stops are part of a design strategy for MIT’s Campus that aims to make eating well effortless and enticing. Approaches to improving wellbeing and community, in addition to reducing carbon emissions and resource use at MIT must account for the benefits of social, plant-based meals.

In combination with MIT’s geographic isolation from food places, time constraints make the spatial and cultural setting of the Infinite Corridor a key ingredient to people’s eating habits social opportunities. Infinite Stops are built structures that intervene on the corridor; punctuating its “corridic” setting with plant-based food linked with a variety of “staying” spaces. The Stops provide fast and slow meals which help connect and mediate the densely populated corridor space with the underutilised outdoor spaces. Infinite Stops presents a vision for MIT to leverage design—graphic, architectural and urban—to achieve its health, community and sustainability goals. Though they butt up against systemic socioeconomic challenges, they hint at how over the course of a university program, teaching or staffing role, the occasional meal can create meaningful and positive behaviour change. The underlying approach and findings can empower planning departments to study their respective time-famished, work-driven foodscapes and find opportunities to support eating well across different mealtime needs.

Image (above): Credit Tristan Searight

Unsettling Roads: Ethnographies of Dust Across Rural Nepal

Subu Bhandari

SMArchS

Architecture & Urbanism

Advisors: Huma Gupta & Mohamad Nahleh

Reader: Dane Carlson

Although the three of us traveled on the same path, our intimacy with the land will always be different.This thesis is a conversation between my grandfather, my father and myself. It is a conversation between the mountains, rivers, footpaths, In Hatiya, Nepal that find themselves entangled with deployed methods of Road Building. Roads precede with expectations of stability and acceleration. In Nepal, and specifically Hatiya, they unsettle physically, atmospherically and metaphorically. The intrusion of the Mid-hill highway along the valley has lured the desires of connectivity. Feder roads sit still, frozen and fragmented in a state of construction, exposed to the phase-shifts of climate.

This thesis looks at the evolving physicality of transportation networks in rural Nepal and its implications to the state of the village, or ga’um. As the foot-paths we walked are encroached by larger operations of excavation and erasure, the ga’um has responded accordingly. What was once a landscape abundant with cultivation and agrarian livelihood is slowly integrating into economical hubs catering to schedules of tourism and commerce. The slow intrusion of national highways being the main artery facilitating these forces.

Road building in Nepal is linked to decades of national promise of forthcoming economic prosperity. The reality is a contested network of material confluence. Over the last three generations, government involvement in rural road expansion has challenged existing notions of time, acceleration, and mobility, resulting in different waves of sociocultural shifts in rural regions of Nepal. How can roads be deconstructed, redesigned, diverted, and striated, to initiate new types of intimacy with the land.

How can roads be deconstructed, redesigned, diverted, and striated to invite new intimacies with the land. How can geological speeds and collisions of earth and life be visualized and their conflicts rendered? A intimacy and rendering that allows for containment of some operations and the spilling of others. One that welcomes my grandfather's history, my fathers translations and my fragmented understanding and experiences of our hometown.

Image (above); Hatiya, Galkot, January 2023, Road-side, by author

Min Bʻīd la-Bʻīd (from Far to Far): On Homemaking under Diasporic Conditions

Luna BuGhanem

SMArchS Architectural Design

Advisor: Ana Miljački

Reader: Huma Gupta

In the villages of Mount-Lebanon, homes are realized through years of immigrants’ remittances, messages, objects, and visits. This thesis offers an expanded understanding of the homes and homemaking of diasporic families, through which they manage separation and fragmentation and adapt to personal and regional political change.

To reveal how diasporic subjects build their homes while and from abroad or back and forth between locales, I extract from and analyze my conversations with owners of remittance-funded houses in ’Aley and Shūf. In videos reconstructing the homes-in-progress, I juxtapose first-hand accounts, concurrent global events, and the material traces of migration to make apparent the relationships between distance, its mediations, and the built form.

In doing so, this thesis re-imagines several signature architectural concepts. In the first chapter, “site” is no longer understood to simply be location, where the building is bound by coordinates or where owners have to be physically present. Instead, the site, as captured through WhatsApp images, becomes dispersed. Each following chapter similarly re-imagines and expands our use of architectural concepts such as “budget,” “program,” “phases,” “finishes,” “furniture, fixtures,” and “contracts” to suggest how we may appropriate this new understanding as a design tool.

Ultimately, this thesis establishes the human experience of immigrantbuilders as central, not ancillary to the discipline of architecture.

Image (opposite): "Site" under Diasporic Conditions, by Luna BuGhanem

City as The Infrastructure of Innovation:

Insights and Proposals for Shaping Shenzhen's Innovation District and Knowledge-based Industry

Kecheng Huang

SMArchS Architecture & Urbanism

Advisors: J. Yolande Daniels & Siqi Zheng

Innovation district has become a popular concept in urban planning and design application in recent years. Proposed by city planning departments around the world, they aim to adopt this methodology to promote the growth of knowledge-based industries and, at the same time, improve the interaction and collaboration between the innovation industry and the city. In this paper, the author explores the relationship between cities and innovation districts across multiple scales, taking Shenzhen and its typical innovation districts as the research subject. Through site investigation and comparative analysis with the innovation districts in San Francisco, the author identifies the key issues and challenges in designing innovation districts in China’s context. In addition, the author also proposes design strategies at both the urban design level and architectural design level to improve the functionality and adaptability of them. The findings provide insights for addressing the challenges faced by innovation districts in Shenzhen, China.

Image (opposite): The Development of Innovation Industry in the Pearl River Delta since 1979, drawn by the author, Kecheng Huang

Geomorphic Concrete

Kim, Il Hwan

SMArchS Architectural Design

Advisor: Skylar Tibbits

Readers: Mohamed Ismail & Sheila Kennedy

Given evidence of climate change and the global supply chain crisis, it is no longer viable to continually exploit nature and expect that the global industrial system will remain perpetually dependable. We have to prepare for a world that is not entirely controllable or measurable, which is an inevitable architectural condition of the future. This thesis introduces Geomorphic Concrete, an alternative aesthetic and design approach more closely aligned with nature, with technical advancements in concrete construction. Incorporating natural forces as collaborators in concrete fabrication, Geomorphic Concrete is also less labor-intensive and wasteful.

Geomorphic Concrete is an alternate paradigm of sustainable concrete construction achieved by exploiting variation in material properties responding to elemental forces. Nature shapes geological formations through a diverse array of materials and forces. For example, sedimentary rock’s stratified planes have varied grain, strength, and other characteristics, resulting in unique shapes and patterns through natural

processes such as weathering, erosion, and sedimentation. A series of experiments in this thesis demonstrates how to design and construct concrete structures by mimicking the natural geological formation process, instead of relying solely on modernistic geometry-driven design. This methodology utilizes injection-printing technology, inserting reinforcement and suspension materials in liquid concrete to produce cast objects with varying material properties that erode, break, reconfigure, and recover through engagement with natural agents.

The thesis showcases three designs that exemplify Geomorphic Concrete: a high-performance heterogeneous concrete structure with injected reinforcement materials; a concrete structure printed into granular formwork that erodes due to gravity; and a concrete object that evolves over time by dissolving the injected suspension material.

Images opposite and below: Geomorphic Concrete, photo by author and Daisy Zhang

Humanizing Urban Waters: Civilian led Water Corps to Strengthen Decentralized Water Systems in Western India

Pramada Jagtap

SMArchS Architecture & Urbanism

Advisor: Brent Ryan

Readers: Geeta Mehta & Lisbeth Shepherd

Over the past century, we have witnessed global water-based displacement owing to the climate crisis, and displacement caused by large scale water infrastructure such as dams, long-distance pipelines, promenades and river fronts. Urban waters have infamously been presented as disruptors within community and ecology, often perceived as a violent threat or unpredictable “hazard” to urbanism. This thesis uses policy, design, public dialogue and sensory engagement to redefine our experience of water as a ubiquitous fluid, intrinsic to settlement and the very ground on which urbanism dwells.

Pune city in Western India is fertile for this exploration since beneath its dense urban settlement is a ground of flowing waters both surface and subsurface, a culture rich in indigenous techniques, historical waterfronts, stepped wells, aqueducts and water collection tanks. The Peshwa of the Maratha empire dominated a large portion of the Indian subcontinent from 1674 to 1818. During this time, they constructed numerous small scale water systems, such as canals, step wells and temple tanks in Western India, particularly in Pune, Maharashtra. While water infrastructure built in this era has been widely subjected to scrutiny of gender and caste based discrimination, one cannot ignore its close

attention to community and geomorphology. India’s changing climate continues to have a significant impact on its water resources, which includes rainwater, groundwater, and surface waters. This thesis proposes the revival and re-adoption of existing resources through a civilian led water corps to design for long term resilience. I use a multi-pronged approach that includes a) grassroots organization creating water stewardship, b) conservation of traditional techniques and structures, using c) multimedia representation of water and the d) adoption of new experiments in nature based technologies.

Beyond its portrayal of urban landscapes, the medium of film has not been drawn upon in architecture as a tool for advocacy and social change.

This thesis adds to the field by using filmmaking as a method of inquiry, tapping into its potential to represent a diverse set of voices. Based on evidence collected through this community sourced videography, the thesis proposes the creation of a water corps, a catalyzing force at the intersection of community and water. The corps will train and employ young adults to develop learning tools, and lead the movement to long term resilience building with communities and ecology in the forefront of urbanism. This creation of a civilian water corps in Pune can accelerate a growing need to implement nature-based-solutions that enable equitable access and supply of water, while reviving traditional water systems. By taking proactive steps now, India can work towards a more sustainable and resilient water future by supporting the socio-ecological design of urban waters.

Image (Opposite): 1. Photograph taken at Alandi, a temple town in Pune district, still from the film written and directed by Author, 2. Landscape of Pune drawn as varying degrees of 'wetness' by Author

The (a)rchitectural Lexicon of (B)lack Hair: A Production of Knowledge

Jensen Johnson

SMArchS

Architectural Design

Advisor: J. Yolande

Daniels

Readers: Garnette Cadogan & Mpho Matsipa

The field of architecture is severely insular regarding evidence of general knowledge amongst those outside of the field. Today, Black people make up 2% of licensed architects in America, and a part of this research speculates the exclusionary nature inherent in the study and practice of architecture that perpetuates such an issue. This work generates data (i.e. individual oral histories and potential futures) through dialogue which can further be utilized as a catalyst for visualizing and spatializing new possibilities for a more equitable profession.

The conversation at large brings Blackness to the center of focus and kindly asks it, “who do you want be?”, “what is your meaning?”, “how do you want to take form?”, etc. The following components serve as foundational roots from which the language necessary to hold this conversation will grow. Each meaning is categorized into these roots which further serve as substance formulas for architectural figurations.

Material

Furthermore, this work will identify trajectories of progression for marginalized communities to thrive in the field – both in academia and practice. This thesis makes a point to situate itself in the current state of the field regarding pedagogical practices centering Blackness and other marginalized cultures. Critical points of view include – culture, socioeconomic backgrounds and accessibility. This thesis predicts that strong and clearly identifiable cultural markings within architectural language, pedagogy, and practice will dismantle the inherently Eurocentric and non-inclusive narratives still serving as barriers for equity within the overall construct of architecture.

The following (developing) body of work takes the form of a lexicon and contains original definitions and illustrations by Jensen Johnson, unless

Image (opposite): Untitled by Jensen Johnson

stated otherwise. The project described herein leverages knowledge of Black hair practices and techniques and situates it within the context of architecture as it stands today. The design goal is to clearly convey Black hair and its constituents as a domain for architectural comprehension.

Vernacular Clouds

Mark A Hernandez Motaghy

SMArchS Architectural Design

Advisor: Mark Jarzombek

Readers:

Renée Green & Chakanetsa Mavhunga

This thesis is concerned with DIY "off-the-cloud" networks as sociotechnical models that can refigure a community's organizational processes, identity, and culture. It questions how these networks can break away from corporate and extractive services of "the cloud" in order to achieve digital sovereignty as well as resist the hegemonic understanding of Western universal technology. Rather than grafting an outside network onto a community, how might the nodes of a network emerge from the cultural ontologies and local knowledge systems, creating a "vernacular cloud," with political, epistemic, and ontological implications?

The social practice of what I call 'net/work' involves the facilitation of local digital territories that create a grassroots politics of "organic internets." In Chapter One, recent attempts to break from monopolized services like Google and Facebook are examined, providing insight into why these networks are formed and how they "de-link" from "the cloud."

Drawing from Walter Mignolo's understanding of "de-linking," the thesis argues that this process is a political project that is also epistemologically and economically non-western.

Chapter Two examines the notion of 'community' in community networks through the lens of grassroots organizing, such as mutual aid, delving into the care and maintenance required for system administration. Part Two builds on Geri Augusto's understanding of "re/trans" as a project that has developed new assemblages of knowledge and integrated them into different landscapes. In addition, it examines community networks from the Global South, where network nodes have the potential to be cosmo-ontological. Chapter Three provides examples of the principles outlined in Chapters One and Two from my work pursuing technical autonomy within my art and organizing practice.

Image

1 (opposite): Serv/ir, Mark A Hernandez Motaghy

Real Estates Collectives

Designing Transitions: The Bronx-wide Coalition

Tamar Ofer

SMArchS Architecture & Urbanism and MSRED

Advisors: Albert Saiz & Rafi Segal Reader: Roi Salgueiro Barrio

In 2016, a collaboration between New York City and an international real estate firm skillfully redirected a staggering $1.6 billion from Harlem's most impoverished neighborhoods to Hudson Yards - the costliest private development in US history, exemplifying a tour de force of "innovative financial ‘design’". Exploiting spatial gaps in the federal EB-5 Investor Program, this specific instrument is just one of many that constitute a dominant state-sponsored urban speculative investment model. By scrutinizing its codified protocols, laid-bare fissures unveil a fractured social contract, as urban speculation seizes control over significant portions of New York City's growth amid the city's escalating inequality crisis.

This thesis presents a set of practice-based models that explore alternative ways of doing real estate. In doing so, it posits that urban design must not only strategically confront current forms of real estate, but must consider real estate speculation as a design project in and of itself.

Drawing from local cross-sector stakeholder collaboration, a strategic transition design is proposed in response to the ongoing Bronx-wide Coalition’s Plan and Platform. To achieve this, an expanding repository of components is compiled into a series of action plans, exemplified throughout the neighborhods of South Bronx’s Harlem Yards. The repository capitalizes on the collective capacities of all stakeholders, diverting dominant speculation towards scalable and sustainable pathways for investing in the commons.

Image opposite: Excerpts from the Landlord Archives: Hudson Yards to Harlem Yards. (Author)

The Monkey Cheeks Toolkit: Design Strategies for Mitigating Flood Impacts in the Bangkok Metropolitan Area

Pimpakarn 'Prim' Rattanathumawat SMArchS Architecture & Urbanism

Advisor: Miho Mazereeuw

Reader: Roi Salguerio Barrio

Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, has been facing frequent and destructive floods due to the recent decades of urban expansion and inadequate public drainage infrastructure. Although the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) has actively improved the flood drainage network as the city expanded, its developed capacity and configuration have not kept pace with its population growth and rapid urbanization.

Rather than solely depending on flood protection via large-scale infrastructure, this thesis proposes a decentralized approach to stormwater management, in which rain is captured where it falls through a local flood control measure called “Monkey Cheeks.” Although the concept is commonly associated with large water retention areas, the thesis focuses on applying the core concept of Monkey Cheeks to an ultra-urban environment like the Bangkok Metropolitan Area, where the availability of land is limited. The main objective is to embrace water as a valuable resource and seize the opportunity to incorporate it into the fabric of the city. The outcome of this research is presented in the form of a Design Toolkit, which contains a set of strategies for implementing Monkey Cheeks across various scales of urban conditions, ranging from small individual property-level to large-scale publicly owned spaces.

The Toolkit concludes with case studies illustrating how these strategies can be applied to existing conditions of Bangkok’s urban fabric and how they can be combined to impact the city at large. Together, a network of Monkey Cheeks within the city can play a critical role in mitigating flood risk by slowing down runoff that could otherwise overwhelm public sewage systems, storing rainwater to tackle water supply challenges, and restoring the hydrologic function of the urban landscape by releasing water back to the aquifer.

Image opposite: The Monkey Cheeks Toolkit. Image by the author

Non-Peripheral: Re-Thinking the Organized Industrial Zone

Selin Sahin

SMArchS Architecture & Urbanism

Advisor:

Roi Salgueiro Barrio

Reader: Eran Ben-Joseph

The Organized Industrial Zone (OIZ) in Turkey emerged in the 1960s as a primary model for industrial development. Combining base infrastructure, specific land use rules, financial incentives such as tax exemptions, and partial self-governance, the OIZ is essentially a cluster of light to medium industries. It was meant to facilitate capital flows and later became seen as a tool to drive urbanization. This thesis examines the development, consequences, and future prospects of OIZs. It traces their origins from a Checci and Company report, based on the industrial estates, commissioned through an agreement between the governments of Turkey and the United States, to their rapid proliferation in the 21st century.

Today, there are over three hundred individual sites scattered across the country. Varying in size and complexity, these zones are born from policies and regulations that have barely changed since the late 1960s. As the OIZ model stands today, both at the policy level and in prac-

tice, there is a multitude of issues related to their internal organization, urban planning, impacts on the environment, regional disparities, and social equity. In exploring the evolving relationships between OIZs and the urban texture, sped up by expanding boundaries and changing paradigms in the industry, I submit that the design of OIZs should not be peripheral in our thinking.

Selecting a particular site that is exemplary of the spatial conditions of many OIZs, I propose design interventions to address current problems and speculate the future of these zones. The components of the proposal factor in the city, within a material ecologies awareness. Through these proposals, this thesis aims to spatialize some of the hopes and narratives about these zones in the political consciousness and offer new urban visions.

Image 1 (opposite): "Message" Photo taken by the author (Selin Sahin) Image 2 (below): "Industrial District Development Model" Rep. Industrial Districts for Turkey: Proposed Plans for a Pilot Project at Bursa. Washington, D.C.: Checci and Company, 1962.

Between the Lines: Encoding Relations Through Body, Tool, and Algorithm

Zachary Schumacher

SMArchS Architectural Design

Advisor: Brandon Clifford

Readers: Jaffer Kolb & Curtis A Roth

The tools architects use orchestrate the discipline in seen and unseen ways. In recent decades, we have swapped early forms of mechanical drawing instruments for digital tools with unimaginable computing power. While this increased level of computational literacy allows us to script and code architectural forms more efficiently, it has also created incongruities between the computationally described object and material constructions. At times the digital tools we depend on today go as far as defining the aesthetic of our buildings. To complicate this further, the digital tools most often solicited by the architectural practice are non-native imports adapted for their visual potential and practical uses. Meaning embedded within the programming of tools that shape our buildings are residual values of other disciplines. For example, we can even trace the origins of the CAD software back to engineers and mathematicians at Boeing and here at MIT, who sought to mechanize the construction of splines and irregular curved surfaces for the production of slipstream automobiles, toothbrushes, and even letterforms. And much like the hidden algorithms in the background of our digital tools, there is an apparatus of choreography surrounding our physical tools that encode instructions on how the body engages with the object. In other words, the machines we use produce not only drawings but gestures as well, keying us into the always-present yet rarely discussed embodied dimensions of tools.

To expand upon the embodied dimensions of our tools today, we need to reconsider the machine as the site of intervention. Motion data and performance envelopes surrounding our tools extend beyond the projective reenactment of the machine and offer us a means to measure the derivative of what it takes to produce a drawing, a surface, or a construction. One way to do this is to dislocate the spline from its formal geometry associated with slipstream construction and recast it as a way to record the tumble-type inscriptions surrounding an object’s performance — a tactic to mutually mark and negotiate the activity between humans and machines.

Image (above): Image by the Author

Yaku Cosmo-Infrastructures: Designing with Water Across the Andes

Kevin Malca Vargas SMArchS Architectural Design

Advisor: Cristina Parreño Alonso

Readers: Sheila Kennedy & Mohamad Nahleh

Water in the Andes is a dual entity, substance, and Cosmos. This thesis is a provocation to reimagine water infrastructures across the Andes as a collaboration of ancestral and modern practices of relating with Water.

As an Andean descendant, my mother taught me that Water is a living being. A series of walks during the summer of 2022, visiting ancestral places, learning from Water nurturers, and participating in the water festival in the South of Peru allowed me to reconnect with my family knowledge. Marcela Machaca, Water Nurturer, taught me that the Andean cosmology considers Yaku (Water in Qechua) to be a person. Yaku Mama (Mother Water) creates life in the Andes through a reciprocal nurturing relationship with the communities.

In contrast, modern epistemologies frame Water as a resource

managed through infrastructures that extract, store, and distribute it across places. This approach disregards the Andean communities' ancestral practices, causing a disruption in the local ecological cycles. In the Quispillacta community, the duality of Water is evident, as they are both a resource managed by a dam and a living entity nurtured through ancestral practices.

The incoming infrastructure planned by the government in Quispillacta raises an opportunity to embrace this duality by asking, how can we address the need for water access while also embracing the ancestral practices of living with Water?

An infrastructural turn is necessary. This thesis argues for an alternative way to represent, design, and live with Water in the Andes. It proposes Cosmo-infrastructures as a new architectural

paradigm that embraces the collaboration of ancestral and modern ways of interacting with Water. By proposing the design of a seasonal learning path in Quispillacta, this thesis articulates stations that mediate, interchange, and regen-

erate Water in collaboration with the local ecology. This project invites us to rethink the inherited colonial binary divisions between Water and land, architecture, and landscape, and, most importantly, humans and nature.

Image above: by the author

Looking for Pirdoudan

The Past, Present, and Future of Mining in Armenia

Sarine Vosgueritchian

SMArchS Architecture & Urbanism

Advisors: Roi Salgueiro Barrio & Huma Gupta

Reader: Mohamad Nahleh

In our anthropogenic age, data and memory accumulate and decay faster than we can recall. Depiction of history is usually political and hierarchical, emphasizing chosen moments to build narratives, but time has shown us how that can lead to inaccurate accounts of the past. Historians and researchers constantly undo these narratives by consulting different forms of memory from collective to individual, using physical and virtual artifacts. With the accelerating global climate crisis, it is imperative to project further into the future while remaining deeply rooted in the histories and futures of the past. To do so, we need to understand the processes of change that have led to the construction of our current reality. But what happens if the archive is constantly deteriorating?

Set in what is known today as the mining town of Kajaran, Looking for Pirdoudan uses the medium of film and textual essay to piece together and reinterpret the processes of change which have led to the disappearance of mount Pirdoudan after large deposits of copper and molybdenum were discovered in the 19th century. The extraction of the geological layers of Pirdoudan has effectively erased millennials of memory retained by the earth. While geological studies have allowed us to date these layers and put meaning to the accumulations, scattered archival records and media are today’s most readily available material that allow us to piece together the narratives of our past and present moment. That said, archives and data don’t tell a story on their own. A seeker from 2086 takes on the task of weaving an alternative history of Pirdoudan. Critical fabulation is employed, not only to visualize the gaps in our knowledge, but also to project a post-mine future of Kajaran based on a deep understanding and interpretation of the past. Kajaran is rebranded as an ideal ecological city attempting to repair its extractive legacy, but even with the best intentions, driven by technological advancements which are meant to reverse the anthropogenic footprint on the land, a new cycle of destruction begins.

Image above: “A view of the city of Kajaran.” Image showing the mine, processing plant, infrastructure, and city of Kajaran. 1980. Photographer Ghalfayan. Image 1-36158, courtesy of the Kino Photo Archive branch of the National Archives of Armenia.

Figuring the Middle Ground: A Search for Authorship in Perceiving China's COVID-19 Lockdowns

San Zhang

SMArchS Architecture & Urbanism

Advisors: Brent Ryan & Rosalyne Shieh

Reader: Mark Jarzombek

Witnessing and attempting to comprehend China's controversial response to COVID-19 over the past three years from a geographically distant yet culturally and emotionally intimate standpoint, I have grappled with multiple perspectives, sometimes as an insider, sometimes as an outsider, and most of the time as an impostor to both. As I continually query the incoherence of my positionality, I find myself in an obscure middle ground where my voice is filtered as inauthentic and unheeded. I ask myself: What should I do? What can I do?

This project is an effort to give myself a voice in the process of figuring out the "middle ground"— a gradient of unsettled propositions stretching between cultural identities, negotiating with constructed collective memories, and discursively evolving over a three-year-long uncanny journey trying to perceive the COVID-19 lockdowns in China. By accepting the "middle ground" as a valid stance, I was able to devise a set of methods for navigating the complexity of materials gathered at various times and locations. In addition, utilizing architectural

representation tools, I curated a collection of works that reproduce the research process and exhibit the processed information.

This endeavor is not intended to rationalize pandemic control. Rather, it cultivates a ground for reflection that deconstructs a dichotomous perception of good and evil, drawing attention to individual lived experiences that provide a nuanced interpretation of the COVID-19 pandemic as an international health emergency that affected everyone. Although

somewhat fuzzy and uneasy, the "middle ground" position indicates the possibility that a personal desire to develop one's authorship can lead to a means of making sense of a global crisis.

Image 1 (opposite): In the midst of the lockdowns in 2022, a line of residents waited at the gate of their community for the distribution of groceries. By Author. Image 2 (below): An image archive of the COVID-19 lockdowns. By Author.

The Idea of Heritage in Nineteenth-Century Iran: Nādir Mīrzā’s Account on Tabriz

Boshra Moossavi

SMArchS Aga Khan Program

Advisors: Arindam Dutta & David Roxburgh

Readers: Pamela Karimi

This thesis focuses on the concept of heritage and its preservation in nineteenth-century Iran through the perspective of Prince Nādir Mīrzā Qājār (1827-1887/8). While heritage and preservation have been extensively studied in the Euro-American context, little attention has been given to their meanings in the non-Western discourses, particularly in Iran. The few studies on Iran focus on the institutionalization of heritage and the Western influences on it. This research seeks to provide a fresh perspective on the idea of heritage for non-reformist groups of people. To this end, Nādir Mīrzā’s The History and Geography of Tabriz, which reflects traditional Iranian patterns of thought, was selected. By an in-depth investigation of the book, I shed light on the difference between Nādir Mīrzā’s understanding of architecture and what later was promoted as heritage by the Society for National Heritage (SNH) in the twentieth century. The manuscript belongs to the antiquarian category of texts that focus on history and geography in tribute to rulers and princes. However, unlike other works of this genre that mainly consist of chronicles,

I would contend that, this book offers insight into a broader era of the traditional built environment in Qajar Iran. Moreover, Tabriz itself, situated near the Ottoman Empire and inhabited predominantly by Azari speakers, is significant from a strategic and ethnic point of view.

The first chapter of this thesis examines Nādir Mīrzā's background, including his family lineage, education, and writing style, to understand how his understanding of heritage was shaped. This chapter suggests that Nādir Mīrzā’s understanding of heritage was rooted in the traditional way of thinking in Iran rather than being influenced by Europe.

The second chapter explores how Nādir Mīrzā's writing is a form of heritage as it attempts to preserve certain aspects of history. The chapter, then, investigates how various identifications, such as religion, class, linguistic, and ethnic identities, influenced Nādir Mīrzā's choice for heritagization of the past.

The third chapter investigates Mīrzā's values by analyzing his accounts of buildings. It concludes that Nādir Mīrzā conferred specif-

ic values on buildings, including religious and religious functionality; age, history, and antiquity; architecture, art, and craft; material; function; excursion; and nationalistic value, which were more encompassing than the later values established by SNH.

The fourth chapter investigates the role of those values in preser-

vation and maintenance of buildings through extracting the reasons for construction, repair, and destruction from Nādir Mīrzā's accounts. The conclusion proposes further investigation into other sources to complete the narrative of non-European understanding of heritage in nineteenth-century Iran.

Image 1 (Top): Shāh Gulī Garden, Tabriz, Iran, Wikipedia common; Image 2 (bottom) The Blue (Kabūd) Mosque of Tabriz, Iran, Wikipedia common

Her Playing Eye: Courtesans at Chess in the Book of Games (c. 1283/84)

Khushi Nansi

SMArchS Aga Khan Program

Advisor: Huma Gupta

Readers: Lerna Ekmekçioğlu & Pamela Patton

In a thirteenth century educational codex of the Iberian Peninsula, with some hundred chess problems, another hundred board and dice games, there feature a hundred and fifty miniatures depicting games at play. Women and men sit across the board from each other, women and women, men and men, young and old, of different faiths and backgrounds. Enclosed, frozen on the frame in the illustrations of the Book of Games: Chess, Dice, and Tables (Libro de los Juegos, c. 1283/84), there is more than what meets the eye.

This thesis speculates upon the complexity of women’s relationships in the thirteenth-century through their representations at games of chess in the Castilian court of Alfonso X, el Sabio (122184). Chess in the medieval imaginary was a game not only strategic, but one also laden with sexual connotations. It mirrored the site of battle and the court—the composite of a series of moves—it replicated the advance of courtship and seduced the mind. Medieval epics and material culture visualize this phenomenon: when a

man and a woman are represented at chess, it is read as a game between lovers. In the Book of Games, what is going on between women—for whom the archive always limited and fragmentary— what have our eyes missed? This thesis is a necessary exercise in speculation. It begins with a review of the state of the discussion upon the manuscript in question, and then examines the various threads of movement encapsulated within, to query the notion of autonomy in making.

Through a close reading of key illustrations bearing a trace of personal reception, it explores the central methodological question of seeking to see, theorizing gaze and nazar in sites of potential encounter. Understanding the encounter, and alternate forms of intimacy made possible through play, I observe the women looking at each over the chessboard in a moment of mutual regard. This thesis argues the Book of Games possesses an already existing unseen complexity, lying latent, that we must learn to seek to see, looking otherwise.

Image 1 (above, Left): Libro de los Juegos: açedrex dados e tablas. Folio 18r & 38v;

Image 2 (above, Right). MS T.I.6. Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial. Completed 1283/84, Seville.

Pixelated Territoriality

Critical Cartographies of Transnational Infrastructure-led Urbanization

Jehanzeb Shoaib

SMArchS Aga Khan Program

Advisors: Azra Aksamija & Mohamad Nahleh

Oceans are governed by new nomos, dictated by global economies which exploit the territorial ambiguities. Transnational infrastructure projects over international waters are sculpting existing nation-based territorial geographies into new geo-political striations. Situated in the Indian Ocean, this thesis exposes the politics of transnational infrastructure-led urbanization in the port of Gwadar, Pakistan. Gwadar is an amalgamation of two Balochi words: Guad means wind and dar means gateway, aggregating to mean the gateway of winds. This port city in the southern coastal region of Baluchistan acts as a gateway to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, lauded as an important segment of the wider Belt and Road Initiative. Within the status quo, this gateway is being subjected to the winds of transnational infrastructure development, impacting the local fishing community. Through critical cartographic methods of ethnography, archival research, photography, and mapping, I study the under-researched fishing community in the region of Gwadar. Moreover, I focus on the amorphous interaction of nomadic and sedentary spatial boundaries. Thereby, I argue that the interaction of transnational sedentary boundaries on existing nomadic boundaries creates pixelated territoriality, generating conflicting sovereignty, which is exploited by different state and non-state actors. Hence, the thesis proposes a participatory design manifesto for the local fishing community to rethink territoriality through the framework of collective commons.

Image 1 (opposite): by Author

MIT Architecture

Final Thesis Reviews, May 16, 2023

SPECIAL THANKS

Taariq Alasa

José Luis Argüello

Darren Bennett

Kateri Bertin

Kathaleen Brearley

Joél Carela

Chris Dewart

Architecture Faculty and Staff

Jackie Dufault

Michael Gallino

Eduardo Gonzalez

Tessa Haynes

John Hoder

Alejandra Huete

Sheila Kennedy

Doug Le Vie

Inala Locke

Tonya Miller

Nicholas de Monchaux

Claudine Monique

Amanda Moore

Paul Pettigrew

Alan Reyes

Jennifer Roesch

Lauren Schuller

Venecia Siders

Advisors and Readers (MIT and External)

Hal Abelson

Azra Aksamija

Eran Ben-Joseph

Suzanne Preston Blier

Garnette Cadogan

Dane Carlson

Brandon Clifford

J. Yolande Daniels

Felecia Davis

Randall Davis

Nicholas de Monchaux

Arindam Dutta

Lerna Ekmekcioglu

Alia Farud

Ben Fry

Deborah Garcia

Renee Green

Svafa Gronfeldt

Huma Gupta

Anette Peko Hosoi

Mohamed Ismail

Phillip Isola

Mikael Jakobsson

Mark Jarzombek

Caroline Jones

Pamela Karimi

Sheila Kennedy

Randolph Kirchain

Eric Klopfer

Terry W. Knight

Jaffer Kolb

Mpho Matsipa

Miho Mazereeuw

Geeta Mehta

Ana Miljački

Caitlin Mueller

Hiromu Nagahara

Takehiko Nagakura

Mohamad Nahleh

Les Norford

John Oschendorf

Athina Papadopoulou

Cristina Parreño

Alonso

Pamela Patton

Tobias Putrih

Christoph Reinhart

Brent D. Ryan

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

School of Architecture & Planning Department of Architecture

Ellen Roche

Curtis A Roth

Roi Salgueiro Barrio

Rafi Segal

Lisbeth Shepherd

Vincent Sitzmann

Kristel Smentek

Oana Stǎnescu

George N. Stiny

Skylar Tibbits

Sarah Williams

Cagri Zaman

Jinhua Zhao

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