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 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