May 2023 Thesis Reviews (SMArchS BT, COMP, HTC, SMBT)

MIT Architecture

Final Thesis Reviews, May 17, 2023

SMARCHS BT, COMP & HTC SMBT

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE

MIT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING

BSAD

SMARCHS BT, COMP & HTC SMBT

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE

MIT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING

MIT Architecture Final Thesis Reviews, May 17, 2023

Master of Science in Architecture Studies

HTC (SMArchS)

Nanase Shirokawa 4 History, Theory & Criticism

Master of Science in Architecture Studies

Design and Computation (SMArchS)

Dimitrios Chatzinikolis 6 Computation and EECS

Ganit Goldstein 8 Computation

Zain Karsan 10 Computation and SMMEng

Demircan Tas 12 Computation and SM EECS

Deborah Tsogbe 14 Computation

Han Tu 16 Computation and SM EECS

Rohit Priyadarshi Sanatani 18 Computation and SM EECS

Master of Science in Architecture Studies

Building Technology (SMArchS)

Yiwei Lyu 20 Building Technology

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE

MIT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING

Master of Science in Building Technology (SMBT)

Juliana Berglund-Brown 22 Building Technology

Leïlah Sory 24 Building Technology

Bachelor of Science in

Art and Design (BSAD)

Sophia Chen 26 BSAD

Audrey Gatta 28 BSAD and SB Mathematical Economics

Juliana C Green 30 BSAD

Katherine Q. Caol Guo 32 BSAD

Felix Li 34 BSAD

Karyn Nakamura 36 BSAD

Jenny

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE

MIT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING

When War Becomes Peace: Ruination and Transvaluation in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Peace Memorial Parks

Nanase Shirokawa

SMArchS HTC

Advisor: Caroline Jones

Readers: Mark Jarzombek & Hiromu Nagahara

In postwar Japan, “peace” has become the memorial scaffolding that structures the collective national orientation towards the legacy of the Asia-Pacific War, in large part owing to the devastating bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet the atomic catastrophes endured by the two cities have become subsumed into what Anne McClintock terms the “administration of forgetting.” The traumas associated with the bombs have been construed in Japan as an

experience of national victimhood and a moral lesson for humanity, in the process obfuscating histories of imperial terror that I argue are carried forward in significant formal continuities, transvalued in a discourse of peace. Peace, in this regard, becomes a mode for asserting a clean rupture and justifying political amnesia. Peace is the directive of the memorial landscapes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and peacemaking was the process by which

Image 1 (above): Tange Kenzō, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, 1955. Credit: Nanase Shirokawa. Image 2 (opposite): Kitamura Seibō, Peace Statue, Nagasaki Peace Memorial Park, Credit: Nanase Shirokawa

ruination became the pretext for social, political, and urban reinvention. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki Peace Memorial Parks, both unveiled in 1955, manifest the ways in which dominant public discourses of peace-making and nuclear remembrance were actualized through the reconstruction of the post-atomic cities.

The processes behind the making of the two parks and their approaches to remembering atomic violence trouble the perception that the memorials are shaped solely by the circumstances of the bomb and the postwar milieu of liberal democracy. These sites, I argue, are intimately informed by a constellation of transwar aspirations. wartime representational practices, bureaucratic tensions, as well as urban and regional his-

tories that span beyond the moment of 1945. In its dual focus on the spatial narratives of Tange Kenzō’s plan for Hiroshima and the material and bodily politics of Kitamura Seibō’s Peace Statue in Nagasaki, this study also addresses the persistent marginalization of Nagasaki in the discourse of nuclear disaster. A close study of these two sites makes evident the need to take seriously the transmutation and transvaluation of representational modes across shifting regimes. The threat of historical forgetting emerges not only in the absences and forced silences, but also in the adoption of a passive gaze towards our extant memorial infrastructure.

Making Hands: Neural Implicit Manifold Learning of Hand Gestures

Dimitrios Chatzinikolis

SMArchS Computation and EECS

Advisors: Terry W. Knight & Vincent Sitzmann

Reader: George N. Stiny

The human hand is a complex and sophisticated biological machine. Hand gesturing is key to our understanding of and interacting with the world around us. Hand gesturing is also instrumental in design and making. I argue that understanding the geometry of the space of hand gestures leads to an intuitive human computer interaction. I decompose the gesture into its constituent parts, i.e., the hand motion – global coordinate system – and the hand pose – local coordinate system. I propose modeling the configuration space of hands as a high-dimensional manifold via neural unsigned distance fields, and I define plausible hand poses as points on the manifold. Next, I apply a distance metric to their configuration space. A trajectory in that space is a finite or infinite sequence of hand poses. These trajectories represent the different ways that the hand gestures. To demonstrate my approach, I restrict my study to a dataset of hands grasping everyday objects, and I evaluate my model on unknown grasps. Extending the model, the learned manifold acts as a prior for hand pose denoising, hand pose interpolation, and hand pose synthesis. Constraining that space can be interpreted as excluding impossible hand poses while constraining the manifold can be interpreted as defining a set of desirable hand poses. The former emphasizes the importance of bridging deep learning with existing mathematical structures, while the latter underlines future directions for the fields of design and computational making.

Image (opposite): The Manifold of a Hand Gesture, Dimitrios Chatzinikolis

Data-Driven 3D Printed Textiles for Customized Garment Manufacturing

Ganit Goldstein

SMArchS Computation

Advisor: Skylar Tibbits

Readers: Nicholas de Monchaux & Cagri Zaman

This thesis investigates the potential for clothing to serve as an adaptable 'second skin' that can conform to the unique anatomical characteristics and movements of our bodies. Drawing inspiration from the unique qualities of our skin as a dynamic and responsive material, this thesis seeks to explore how we can gain insights from the skin's dynamic properties and intelligent capabilities to create Data-Driven Textiles. While 3D scanners and motion tracking technologies can build a true-toscale model of the body in seconds by combining actual measurements and Computer Aided Design modeling, there is still a gap between the collection of body data and its application to production processes. Therefore, utilizing this 3D body data for textile production in terms of shape, material choice, and assembly operations is not yet possible.

To address this gap, this thesis proposes a new methodology that directly manufactures garments based on personalized body form. Using the example of space suit design, this thesis proposes the use of personalized 3D body data to directly manufacture garments that respond to individual body silhouettes and movement patterns. The proposed pipeline includes three projects: robotic 3D printing, 2D mapped patterns with varying material properties, and conductive embroidery with a feedback system, all of which contribute to the creation of DataDriven Textiles. Thus, the methodology demonstrates dynamic material properties within fabric construction that are uniquely designed for an individual body.

By enhancing the wearer's experience of fit, performance, and mobility, the aim of this thesis is to unlock material agency in high-performance clothing by harmonizing the fabric and skin duality. Overall, This thesis introduces a novel method of computational design that creates a more dynamic relationship between material composition and the functional performance of the body in motion.

Image (above): Detail of digital Patterns with diverse material characteristics that have been mapped onto a 2D surface, derived from a 3D body scan and motion analysis. Ganit Goldstein

Liquid Metal Printing

Zain

Karsan

SMArchS Computation and SMMEng

Advisors: Anette Peko Hosoi & Skylar Tibbits

Reader: Caitlin Mueller

The pace of worldwide material production and its deleterious effect on the climate motivate the need for materially efficient and sustainable methods of manufacture.

Additive manufacturing (AM), commonly referred to as 3D Printing, presents one approach to sustainable manufacturing, affording complexity at high resolution with minimal scrap. For example, polymer, ceramic, and metal materials have been employed in AM to produce parts across industries as varied as aerospace to construction.

Nevertheless, metal AM remains a high-cost process with slow process rates and build environments that are challenging to scale up, impeding the application of these manufacturing techniques but for products for which the cost per volume is significant.

Liquid Metal Printing (LMP) is a novel approach to AM that is fast, scalable, and low cost, invented by the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT in 2020. However, this technique is nascent, and has only been developed to print with low melting point alloys that are unsuitable for any realistic use. Notwithstanding, LMP offers a new way of thinking about additive manufacturing by printing large scale, low resolution parts extremely quickly.

Therefore, this thesis explores the redesign of several of the LMP components to print aluminum, describes a set of design rules and toolpath strategies for printing 2.5D multi-layer structures, and proposes several theoretical models for characterizing the print output. Finally, through a selection of case studies, this thesis assesses the applicability of LMP as a coarse resolution, but extremely fast, additive manufacturing process in mechanical and product design.

Image1 (opposite, top): Aluminum Chair Frame, by author. Image 2 (opposite, bottom): Furnace, by author

Design Vision: Artificial Intelligence with Sight for Imagination

Demircan Tas

SMArchS Computation and SM EECS

Advisors: Phillip Isola & George N. Stiny

Reader: Caitlin Mueller

Visual design relies on seeing things in different ways, acting on them, and seeing results to act again without constraints imposed by a single representation or topology. Design spaces defined for parametric models are often exceeded when designers ideate with sketch overlays, requiring a redefinition of the underlying structure. We propose a sketch to 3d workflow as an experiment medium for evaluating neural networks with many parameters as a generous representation that is open to changes defined via overlay sketching. Using pre-trained models to compute semantic, depth, and style loss for ours, we create a pipeline for shifting between sketches, photographs, and neural radiance fields.

Images (above): Synthetic sketches acquired using Stanford Cars Dataset (R), Hand drawn sketches by Demircan Tas (L)

Limits of Expression: On Touch, Emotion, and Communication

Deborah Tsogbe SMArchS Computation

Advisor: Terry W. Knight

Readers: Felecia Davis & Athina Papadopoulou

Touch, being the first sense to develop in the womb, is fundamental to the human experience. The tactile sense allows us to investigate the world by providing a framework for understanding it through its relationship to our body. Tactile methods are capable of expressing concepts beyond language. The most effective and meaningful of these expressions are often emotionally charged. They often

concern the unspeakable sentiment behind many of our social interactions, the interpretation of which lends a certain depth to our relationships, but beyond this, we often employ self-touch gestures unconsciously or consciously. Through these gestures, we communicate with ourselves – to selfsoothe, as a nervous habit, a mindless fidget. Touch expressions can be deployed in countless ways,

Image 1 (above): tactical jacket, front view (Credit: Deborah T.) Image 2 (opposite): tactical jacket, close up (Credit: Myles Sampson)

and we have only begun to understand them. In parallel, we have developed countless methods of expressing ourselves through digital means which subtract some sensory experience from communication. Perhaps the perpetual digital togetherness afforded by the networks we find ourselves living in has dulled our sensitivities to the physical realm of human experience and all that it embodies. As we continue to move further away from physical togetherness, we may lose an understanding of this emotional depth, or lose touch with ourselves. The intention of

this research is to marry physical and digital means of communication to understand the unspoken ways in which we are attuned to our inner emotional states and the physical behaviors we use to then express and regulate those states. By crafting a garment embedded with computational means, we might develop a methodology for observing how the body understands and expresses itself through touch, and in turn how it communicates with other bodies.

Analyzing Affective Responses to Virtual Spaces Using Physiological Sensors and Verbal Descriptions

Han Tu

SMArchS Computation and EECS

Advisor: Randall Davis & Takehiko Nagakura

Reader: Sarah Williams

During the past two years, the COVID-19 pandemic introduced the pulse oximeter as a new must-have household product for survival in many cities. This small, non-invasive device clips onto the finger and measures the oxygen saturation level of blood, and often, heart rate. Likewise, recent developments in healthcare technology have brought similarly affordable wearable sensors for monitoring the state of our body, including electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrodermal activity (EDA). This paper discusses whether, and if so, how these wearable sensors are useful for design research, especially within the context of AI applications, in terms of analyzing and generating human-centered spatial designs.

Design science using AI for architecture has made advances in various generative algorithms and optimization techniques over the past decade. Numerous architectural studies predating the age of computers, as well as emerging psychological research, take advantage of contemporary sensors. However, it is challenging to provide a data-driven evaluation of humans’ senses in generated spaces, as well as their feelings when occupying them.

How do people actually feel in a particular architectural environment, and what features of its design cause these feelings? Such a question is important and timely because architects select a design that appeals to the human senses, regardless of whether the feelings are generated synthetically. Eminent architects have always imagined and chosen wisely, unlike machines, which still cannot. This paper surveys relevant research practices with wearable sensors in cognitive psychology

Image (opposite): created and drawn by Author, credit to Takehiko Nagakura, Guzden Varinlioglu, and Han Tu.

and affecting computing about architecture and urban design. It demonstrates a pipeline that uses selected measurement devices with a virtual reality (VR) headset to identify patterns among physiological metrics and spatial design through machine learning. First, we created VR environments for four experiments where all the participants follow the same route of spatial experiences. The VR environments includes rendered abstract spatial design of geometrics, combinations of these abstract geometrics to simulate real-world spatial sequences, and 3D scanned real world spaces. These different environments are designed to explore step by step the effects of space shape, spatial sequence, spatial material and spatial sound on subjects’ physiological data. Second, we recorded the physiological data, including EEG, EDA, and heart rate, and interviewed the participants to obtain their responses and feelings to the VR environments (Figure 1). Third, we visualized the physiological and spatial data to align the physiological pattern to the participants’ visual target of the spaces in VR environments. Finally, we proposed a potential application by which a machine could not only generate but also evaluate the generated design spaces as humans do.

PLACEIFY:

A data-driven framework for evaluation-by-analogy in early-stage urban analysis and design

Rohit Priyadarshi Sanatani

SMArchS Computation and SM EECS

Advisor: Takehiko Nagakura

Readers: Randall Davis & Sarah Williams

Within the field of urban design and planning, the explicit parameterization of many aspects of urban environments becomes a challenge. Specifically, the parameterization of the intangible experiential and affective qualities of such environments becomes a daunting task, and the quantitative evaluation of such qualities becomes extremely difficult. Owing to these challenges, representation through reference has long remained an essential component in urban design processes. Through case studies of existing environments, designers often attempt to represent, convey and evaluate specific qualities of their own designed outcomes. However, there exist very few frameworks for systematic and data-driven referencing in contemporary urban design workflows.

Building upon advances in urban-informatics and computer vision, this body of research aims to demonstrate a data-driven design referencing and benchmarking framework that will allow urban designers and analysts to systematically reference existing urban environments based upon similarities with their designs along specific high-level urban parameters. A data collection pipeline is created for the extraction of selected visual, morphological, configurational and demographic features from user-generated photographs, street-view imagery, Point of Interest (POI) data, Geographic Information System (GIS) data, and census data. For design referencing and benchmarking, the high-level features of the designed/test environment are extracted and nearest-neighbor algorithms are used to identify relevant

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.

samples in the database, based on similarities along specific sets of urban attributes as chosen by the designer. This allows for referencebased scenario building through the modification of specific urban parameters based on imagined environments, and also through direct database queries along such attributes. The research culminates in a web-based tool for location-based design referencing and evaluation. Such a framework has the potential to serve as a valuable decision support system, by providing relevant data at each iteration of the imagination-modification-evaluation cycle.

Early Stage Embodied and Operational Analysis for Guiding Sustainable Architectural Design Decisions

Yiwei Lyu

SMArchS Building Technology

Advisors: Randolph E. Kirchain & Leslie K. Norford

Reader: Caitlin T. Mueller

Buildings account for a significant portion of global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Simulating building performance in the early design stage allows architects and engineers to adjust design decisions to reduce embodied carbon and energy consumption. Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is one of the most comprehensive methodologies to evaluate the environmental impact of architectural production and operation. This thesis aims to address the challenges involved in applying LCA to architectural design in the early design stage. After identifying the gaps in existing research and tools, this project continues to develop a novel workflow in Grasshopper that calculates greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and costs from both embodied and operational phases. The workflow addresses the early-stage uncertainty through random inputs with a Monte Carlo approach and implements surrogate

Image 1 (above): Machine Learning Probabilistic Workflow, Yiwei Lyu; Image 2 (opposite): Concrete Structure Simulation Setup, Yiwei Lyu

models to accelerate the process for each iteration. My contribution to the workflow includes improving its robustness and accuracy by redesigning the simulation model to generate more accurate training data and transitioning to a new machine-learning algorithm. With the enhanced workflow and upgraded surrogate models, the embodied and operational GHG emissions of buildings were analyzed to find the common features of low-carbon concrete structures: higher number of floors, lower primary and secondary span lengths, lower primary and secondary span ratios, and low concrete strengths for slabs, beams, and foundations. On the other hand, increasing the volume-tofacade ratios, decreasing the window-to-wall ratios, and incorporating concrete enclosures can help to lower operational emissions in the climate of Los Angeles. The parallel case study shows that although concrete has lower operational emissions in Los Angeles, the offset is not sufficient to match the difference in the embodied carbon of wood construction. Steel, among the three major construction materials, has the highest life cycle emissions with the limitations and assumptions of this research.

Structural Steel Reuse as a Cost-Effective Carbon Mitigation Strategy

Juliana Berglund-Brown SMBT

Advisor: John Ochsendorf

Steel building structures typically have the highest embodied carbon impacts when compared to masonry, wood, concrete, and reinforced concrete projects (De Wolf et al 2014). Designing with salvaged structural steel is a beneficial alternative for structural engineers to reduce embodied carbon in the built environment and implement life-cycle oriented and cost conscious design of steel structures. However, there are still many barriers that inhibit designing with reused gravity elements in buildings at scale.

This thesis establishes more certainty about the supply of steel elements, quantifies potential carbon and cost savings, and identifies the variables that most impact such savings to better enable designing steel frames. This work first provides the context and terminology to

Image 1 above): "Surplus steel destined for a scrap yard." Image 2 (opposite): "83 tons of salvaged steel (in red) used in a new facility (Posey and Hoeft 2013)

connect structural systems to circular economy and reuse, and then outlines why reusing gravity beams and columns is particularly advantageous via a state-of-the-art overview of the steel value-chain.

Next, a high-level material flow analysis is conducted for three of the largest steel producing markets globally, indicating that the quantity of the existing steel heavy section scrap covers 140% of the demand for imports of steel. A partial LCA utilizing a comparative cut-off method is then performed coupled with cost estimation, which demonstrates a potential for around an 87% reduction in carbon emissions from steel reuse instead of recycling. Based on the findings of the partial LCA, an exploratory data analysis is performed with both a stochastic sampling and nine real building projects to identify the variables most impacting carbon cost associated with reuse. Structural weight was found to have the largest impact on reuse emissions, followed by number of elements, and then transportation distance.

In short, this thesis presents the case for steel reuse, and the intrinsic carbon, cost, and structural value that has the potential to be captured.

Physics-based estimates of structural material quantities for urban-level embodied carbon assessment in buildings

Leïlah Sory SMBT

Advisors: Caitlin Mueller & Christoph Reinhart

Decarbonizing the built environment requires immediate actions to meet global climate targets. The world population growth and rapid urbanization rate add to the urgency of this challenge. In fact, buildings account for about 40% of all energy and carbon emissions from operations and materials’ production and construction processes.

More specifically, buildings’ structural systems are responsible for a significant share of the upfront embodied carbon emissions before construction. While designers have the greatest potential to reduce embodied carbon in buildings’ structures in early-stage design, most LCA tools focus on fully detailed material takeoffs from high-resolution Building Information Models (BIM) and are therefore incomplete during conceptual design.

Image 1 (above): Three-part methodology framework for urban-level embodied and operational carbon assessment.; Image 2 (opposite): Case study of embodied carbon and energy use intensities for seven archetypes in a neighborhood in Lisbon. Both images by the author.

Urban building energy modeling (UBEM) is a proven technique allowing cities to evaluate technology pathways to achieve their net-zero emissions goals. It involves simplified building archetypes to estimate operational energy on a large scale with reasonable accuracy. However, little attention has been paid to urban-level embodied carbon assessment.

Therefore, this thesis investigates the potential of implementing physics-based structural quantities estimation in early-stage design for embodied carbon quantification at the urban scale. This approach combines bottom-up engineering calculations with data-driven surrogate modeling to automatically predict embodied carbon from a high-fidelity model. Finally, structural parameters are defined into energy model archetypes to deploy this method into an existing urban scale modeling tool.

The feasibility of the proposed methodology is assessed through case studies to estimate embodied carbon and energy use intensities at the individual-building and urban scales. Results show the benefits of spatially mapping the distribution of embodied carbon in the building stock and obtaining more nuanced estimates of carbon emissions compared with existing benchmarking studies. The primary use case of this work is to better inform planning and policy decision-making for retrofitting strategies and future building design.

Design of an Adjustable Compression Glove for Hand Arthritis

Sophia Chen

BSAD

Advisor: Ellen Roche & Skylar Tibbits

Hand osteoarthritis (HOA) is one of the most common forms of arthritis, resulting in pain, aching, stiffness, and inflammation of the joints. One method of alleviating these symptoms is the use of compression gloves, which promote circulation in the hands. However, conventional compression gloves pose several user-based challenges: they are difficult to don/doff; only apply static pressure; and can be uncomfortable, thereby disincentivizing use. Introducing dynamic, shape changing behavior to compression gloves through the use of pneumatics can provide a promising alternative to these limited, conventional forms. Moreover, a pneumatic system allows for high levels of compression that are instantaneous and adjustable. This work explores the design of a pneumatically-actuated adjustable compression glove. The prototype is defined through user needs and is validated through compression testing, successfully and repeatedly producing pressure levels beyond the 3.73 kPa goal defined for HOA in the finger joints.

Images 1 (opposite): Final prototype of pneumatically-actuated adjustable compression glove, attached to manual pump system. Image Credits: Sophia Chen.

Leveling Out the Left Field: Toy Design for Left-Handed Children

Audrey Gatta BSAD and SB Mathematical Economics

Advisors:

Svafa Gronfeldt & Eric Klopfer

The world is designed for right-handers: starting from a young age, lefthanded children are being stimulated from a right-handed perspective, including through their interactions with toys, tools, interior design, sports, and more. While left-handers may be able to adapt to certain right-handed tools, it is important to design for left-handers in several realms, including toys, since children are developing fine motor skills as they play. Furthermore, a child’s environment influences hand preference, so it is viable to design in such a way that stimulates the use and development of their dominant hand. This thesis explores how and why handedness should be addressed in toy design, culminating with a prototype of a diagnostic toy that assists in identifying handedness preferences while also targeting play with a specific hand through environmental bias and bilateral coordination.

Images (opposite): Toy Prototype, Credit: Audrey Gatta

An Image Worth 1000 Words: Data Visualization in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Juliana C Green BSAD

Advisor: Ben Fry

The COVID-19 pandemic hit the US in early 2020, radically redefining the daily patterns of millions of people. This project investigates the impact of the pandemic on data graphics usage in reporting and its implications for data literacy. The survey comprises 226 data graphics appearing on the front page of The New York Times from 2019 through 2022. Graphics were collected, categorized along a number of metrics, and visualized along with pandemic caseload and death data from The New York Times. Analysis reveals that these graphics tended to be centrally located above the fold, brightly colored, and took on one of three graphical architectures––time series, bar graph, or map. Perhaps most notably, the average number of front page information graphics per month more than tripled (from 1.6 to 5.2) in the 4 years from 2019 to the end of 2022. However, the average size of graphics followed no consistent trend. Separately, the increase in data graphics coincides with a decrease in test scores indicative of data literacy rates among school children, in a context where data literacy was already poor across age groups. These results bring up concerns regarding critical reader engagement with news graphics.

Image (opposite): graphic courtesy Author

The Bengal School of Art and Nihonga (19021928): Art Toward a Modern Asian Identity

Katherine Q. Caol Guo BSAD

Advisor: Kristel Smentek

At the turn of the twentieth century, both India and Japan increasingly sought to create new modern identities separate from Western influence. These ambitions are reflected in the philosophies of two corresponding art movements, the Bengal School of Art and nihonga which are both considered to be pivotal to the development of modern Indian and Japanese art respectively. India had been ruled and colonized by Great Britain for almost two centuries with Britain establishing state-run art institutions that mandated the standards of Indian art as well as commodifying it for European consumption. Similarly, though Japan was never directly colonized by a European state in the same manner, it felt pressure to assert its growing power by adopting and mimicking Western aesthetics. In contrast, the Bengal School and nihonga both

actively rejected Euro-American art techniques. Instead, the artists of these movements were inspired by traditional Indian and Japanese forms. Initially, they developed their ideologies independently. However, in 1902, Okakura Kazuko, a Japanese art historian and vocal proponent of nihonga, visited Calcutta, India, staying with a prominent Bengali family, the Tagores, known for their contributions to Indian art, literature, music, and social reform. During this initial visit, as well as through subsequent travels to India and Japan by associated artists from the two groups, there was significant cross-pollination of ideologies, techniques, content, and aesthetics. For instance, the hazy ‘wash’ technique introduced by the nihonga artists, known as morotai, was adopted by the Bengal School of Art artists and became one of the movement’s defin-

Image 1 (opposite): ‘Bharat Mata’ is one of the most famous works coming out of the Bengal School of Art, painted by the movement’s founder, Abanindranath Tagore. Tagore incorporates the hazy ‘wash’ inspired by Japanese morotai, emphasizing the sanctity of Mother India and the noble and spiritual endeavors of the early Indian independence movement. Credit: Abanindranath Tagore, ‘Bharat Mata’ (watercolor, c. 1905). From the collections of the Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata.

ing features. Another key theme

these two groups of artists explored was the tension between nationalism and transnational Pan-Asianism, the idea that all of Asia should be united economically, culturally, and politically in opposition to European values. Through a detailed analysis of

how nihonga impacted the Bengal School of Art, this thesis aims to demonstrate how inter-Asian artistic exchange and dialogue can lead to the creation of new art forms and how this interchange and similar ones can shape the development of art, culture, and identity in both countries.

Wok Palace 88

Felix Li BSAD Advisor: Azra Aksamija

Wok Palace 88 is a fictional and defunct American Chinese restaurant brought back to life through the institutional process of excavating, archiving, and displaying. The artist performed “A Soft Grand Opening” for Wok Palace 88 based on shutdown Chinese restaurants in the greater Boston area, including Eldo Cake House and Joyce Chen’s restaurants. Prior to the grand opening of Wok Palace 88, the artist biked around Boston and Cambridge to deliver the menus to the defunct restaurants and to buildings and households along the way. “A Soft Grand Opening” featured a video installation using footage from the menu deliveries and informal archives along with a performance where the artist played an archivist, curator, historian, collector, and subject. The artist presented and archived fabricated artifacts from the restaurant, and he embodied the histories ingrained in the objects. The performance asked what it means to embed time, memory, and place into an object; and consequently how they’re valued and commodified. The performance was a provocation on what it means to archive and institutionalize cultural objects, and how histories connected to material bodies are told.

Images (opposite): Wok Palace 88 Menu (Felix Li)

BREAK MY BODY LIBERATE MY SOUL

Karyn Nakamura

BSAD

Advisor: Tobias Putrih

BREAK MY BODY LIBERATE MY SOUL is a 1 hour performance featuring a 20 channel Frankenstein video organism that has taken over the abandoned R&D Pub in the Stata Center at MIT. The majority of the technology used in the installation is Ewaste collected from the loading docks in the basement of Stata as well as other campus dumpsters or obsolete equipment borrowed from the Theater Arts tech closet.

The old, broken, discarded guts of MIT that have been abandoned in dumpsters and dusty closet corners amidst the rapid development of advanced technology are salvaged, stripped down, and sutured together into a delicate system. Glass tanks are suspended from 20ft above ground containing the insides of CRT TVs as well as liquids and wires, numerous digital monitors are scattered around the room, and a tangled network of cables, wires, and tubes circulate water, power, air, and signal throughout the space. The organism is sprawled across the pub, manifesting itself through the 20 screens that act as windows to its soul. There is one right way for a machine to work, but everything breaks in its own way. Each piece of hardware and every algorithm it runs has a character that is exposed in its flaws. In an error, a machine opens up an exclusive side of itself to you. It is an open wound out of which technology flows raw and free, no longer confined in its manufacturer’s definition of utility. Sometimes it drips like a leaky faucet. Other times it is an overflowing stream that gushes through the cracks and drowns you in the unexpected colors of its full potential. This work is my attempt to serve as an acolyte for the machine’s catharsis born out of failure.

Image (opposite): Installation view by Karyn Nakamura

Crowdsourcing Feedback for Gamified Participatory Planning Workshops

Jenny Zhang

BSAD

Advisors: Takehiko Nagakura & Brent D. Ryan

Crowdsourcing Feedback for Gamified Participatory Planning Workshops is an investigation into how games like Minecraft can be used to facilitate and enhance the participatory process.

This thesis focuses on the Block by Block playbook, a 16 step process curated by Mojang, the studio behind Minecraft, and UNHabitat. The methodology utilizes the simple voxel-based blocks in Minecraft as a “digital Lego” to empower anyone to learn to express their ideas in 3D in a matter of hours or days. The Block by

Block foundation funds and educates community organizers to run participatory workshops that use Minecraft to improve public spaces in more than 35 countries worldwide.

Using previous Block by Block workshop participant feedback as a pseudo-needs analysis, this thesis proposes a new external web tool, The Block by Block Expansion Pack, that augments the Minecraft Co-design Workshop Phase with a few logistical changes. The current Block by Block procedure separates the ideation

Image (opposite):

The Block by Block Expansion Pack Model Viewer; 3D Model based on Gaza Participant Model 4 by Block by Block licensed under CC BY 4.0.

and design stage from the feedback stage which leaves little room for design iteration. The Block by Block Expansion Pack aims to address the participants’ request for more opportunities to converse with the greater community throughout the workshop by creating a web platform that allows anyone to view, annotate, and comment on each group’s latest progress. This extension serves as a medium to incorporate ideas from a more diverse audience, improve understanding of proposed planning changes,

and increase sense of ownership of the public spaces created from the workshop.

In addition to the communication features mentioned above, the platform also keeps a record of the design progression and iterations through a version history system and provides an interface to easily compare two builds. This tool has the potential to be used throughout the workshop, from the initial brainstorm to post workshop data collection.

MIT Architecture

Final Thesis Reviews, May 17, 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

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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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