December 2023 Thesis Reviews (MArch) by MIT Architecture

MIT Architecture Final Thesis Reviews, December 21, 2023

MARCH

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

MIT Architecture Final Thesis Reviews, December 21, 2023

MARCH

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

MIT Architecture Final Thesis Reviews, December 21, 2023

Master of Architecture (MArch) 4

Christopher Allen

Caroline Amstutz

Justin Brazier

Bella Carmelita Carriker

Aleksy Dojnow

Inge Donovan & David Pankhurst

Lauren Gideonse

Adriana Giorgis

William Marshall

Sahil Mohan

Ellen Reinhard

Katie Rotman

Jenna Schnitzler

Amanda Ugorji

Yiqing Wang

Susan Williams

Calvin Zhong

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

A Souvenir for the Land of Pagodas Christopher Hassan Allen MArch Advisor: Rania Ghosn Reader: Huma Gupta In the present and previous capitals of Myanmar (Burma) stand five government-sponsored pagodas—five gold-plated stars linking two architectural constellations. The first of these constellations is comprised of the thousands of religious structures that dot the landscape of Myanmar (often called the “Land of Pagodas”), and the second of the monuments erected by the various regimes that have administered the country’s government since independence— each of which embodies its own formulation of national identity and history. Occupying this covalent position, these five pagodas are physical manifestations of an ongoing nationalist project of ethnic and religious homogenization that legitimates itself through historicist narratives, militaristic violence, and the conflation of religious authority with political power. They are artifacts of propaganda that function as physical-spiritual tools of the state. Taking these architectures as its site of departure, this thesis embarks on a journey of what Svetlana Boym might call “embarrassing monumentality”—objectifying, dissecting, remixing, and recontextualizing architectural forms saturated with symbolic significance to produce a series of vessels which operate as vehicles for storytelling and narrative exchange. This thesis is an exploration of how we confront architecture that is leveraged against us. It is a thesis about diasporic distance, about the inheritance of memory, and about the reinscription of counter-narratives into a history whose authority is predicated on their exclusion. The aim of this thesis is to consider historiography as a process of multiplicity rather than consensus, to approach memory as not only an archival but also an architectural act, and to embrace the subjective and the intangible as mechanisms for disrupting narrative regimes of power.

Image right: Vessel study - by Author.

Frictitious Matters Caroline Amstutz MArch Advisor: William O'Brien Jr. Readers: Carrie Norman & Rania Ghosn Wood arrives on site abstracted into rectangular studs; steel beams, once a mineral soup, are extrusions with patented silhouettes; and stone is severed from time, processed into thin shiny slabs. We’ve manipulated our terrestrial matter to conform to smooth expectations: building materials are homogenous, standard, orthogonal, drawable, and specifiable. We live in the modern fantasy of “frictionlessness,” where material becomes product and smoothness “lubricates the flow of capital.”1 Today architects don’t craft, but rather we specify. Granite, unlike processed ‘plastic’ materials, resists the abstraction of typical architectural production. It is too hard, too heavy, and too heterogeneous for specification. I argue that granite’s high-friction properties – if carefully understood and deliberately worked with – pose new design potentials. Granite’s microstructure causes it to cleave, or split, almost orthogonally. It's surface of crystals self-interlocks, allowing for jamming. And its high mass and friction cause it to pile with a 45-degree angle of repose. Yet, we would sooner expend immense energy to downgrade granite from a 230-newton piece of stone to a 40-newton piece of concrete than embrace the design potentials of

aplasticity.2,3 Abandoned for its “nuisance” properties, granite has been relegated to the realm of finish. Friction-intolerant and smoothness-obsessed, we are estranged from our materials. This thesis presents a methodology to reconsider architectural material culture through the embrace of aplastic material. Material properties are not incidental or inconvenient, but rather invitations for co-authorship. Working directly with Barre GrayTM granite through mock-ups, miniatures, and models, I offer a craft-optimized slowness, implanting the architect in streams of “waste,” rather than extraction, to co-design with a “difficult” material. ______ 1. Hutton, Jane. 2019. Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements (1st ed.) Ch. 2 “Range of Motions: Granite from Vinalhaven, Maine, to Broadway, 1892” Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315737102 2. Webb, Steve. 2020 "Stone as a Structural Material: Embodied Carbon & Sustainability" RIBA Journal. May 29, 2020. https://www.ribaj.com/intelligence/ stone-as-a-structural-material-embodied-carbon-sustainability 3. I define ‘aplastic’ as the opposite of plastic (adj.) ‘Aplastic’ materials are not easily malleable, they do not bend or flow, they are brittle, hard, and resist manipulation. Merriam Webster, s.v. “Plastic (adj),” https://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/plastic

Images by Author. (Left) Granite Studies: mockups, models, and miniatures. (Right) Stills from splitting the 800lb n51granite bollard.

The Garden & The Machine: Kits, Constraints & Opportunities Justin Brazier MArch Advisor: Rosalyne Shieh Readers: Xavi L. Aguirre & Garnette Cadogan Since the late 19th century, Urban Agriculture has played a multifaceted role beyond mere food production. The Urban farm has evolved into a focal point for community, functioning as an essential democratic space where individuals from diverse backgrounds come together to share stories, recipes, farming techniques, and resources. Addressing a fundamental aspect of people's basic needs, urban farms and the communal exchange of agricultural knowledge represent acts of selfreliance, self-preservation, and resistance. In the face of exponential population growth, the urgency for urban growing spaces has never been more pronounced. Moving beyond conventional urban agriculture methods, the integration of year-round growth has been proven to enhance the productivity of existing urban land, aimed at narrowing the gap between food production and consumption. While interior urban growth spaces are gaining popularity, they have often adhered to limited typologies, such as standard ready-made greenhouses or hyper-productive food labs. While the urban farm has begun to adopt the former in the form of the off-the-shelf kit, both of these approaches miss the essence of what distinguishes urban agriculture from its rural counterpart—the people. As we consider bringing greenhouses into the city, a crucial question arises: should their purpose extend beyond food production? Leveraging this new infrastructure, can we elevate the community farm to its full potential, a community center?

Image right: by Author and referenced from a photograph by Sonya Sellers

Fragments of Home: Domestic Businesswomen and Collective Motherhood Bella Carmelita Carriker MArch Advisors: Jaffer Kolb & Garnette Cadogan Reader: Rania Ghosn One in three children in the United States live in a single parent household; yet, the most likely demographic to experience eviction in the U.S. is low-income single mothers. This thesis proposes a framework for thinking about communal family structures, housing security, and intimate domestic space, through the lens of designing for single mother households in New York City. The housing crisis in cities across the country specifically affects single mothers and children, yet these identities are rarely explicitly designed for; economically, systemically and architecturally. Collections of oral histories— from single mothers in my life who have experienced housing insecurity— illustrate the fragments which make up the feeling of home, the ways that architectural detail can reflect motherhood, the need to inherently examine both domesticity and labor. These spatial fragments, in conjunction with research on existing zoning, planning, development, and affordable housing pathways, inform architectural possibilities for collective housing across three neighborhoods in New York City.

Images by Author Left: A Memory / Using Curtains as Walls Right: Fragments of Home / Oral Histories of Bedrooms, Kitchens, and Laundromats

Careful Design: Using multi-modal data and virtual reality to bridge the subjectivity gap in architectural space-making. Aleksy Dojnow MArch Advisor: William O'Brien Jr. Readers: Skylar Tibbits Architecture is a field that deals with the synthesis of many others. It is not just design and construction, but philosophy, art, technology, culture, user experience and all the intangible aspects of the human psyche. As such, architects, throughout their training and professional life, aim to build an intuitive sense of what makes any given space perform the way it is supposed to when experienced by the beholder. They support their decisionmaking with heuristics and rules of thumb that have been percolating since the beginning of human construction. This is usually a realm dictated by subjective experience and is, therefore, intrinsically imperfect in the way it reflects the architect’s desire and the user’s experience of the architecture. But does it have to be? Virtual Reality provides the unique affordance of rapidly testing and adapting virtual environments to the realtime biofeedback, eye-tracking and self-reports of the beholder. Something that brick-and-mortar architecture is unable to achieve at sufficient pace and scale. As a result, VR has the chance of lifting, if even ever so slightly, the veil that separates the objective reality from subjective experience. I want my thesis to attempt just that. I recognize that I may fail to do so entirely. Perhaps the gap between these two worlds is not meant to be bridged. But that shouldn’t be the reason why I shouldn’t try, as I believe that the path I will take may yield important and unexpected discoveries that, at the very least, may show where not look and perhaps point in the direction we should try to go next.

Images right: Experiments in Immersive Data Visualization - by Author

The Matter of the Hold: Housing Futures and the Paradigm of the Ship Inge Donovan & David Pankhurst MArch + SMBT & MArch Advisor: Roi Salgueiro Barrio Readers: Sheila Kennedy & Timothy Hyde Many of the port cities of North America are built upon ballast stones, discarded by ships after their transit across the Atlantic. Oftentimes, this material was sourced from waste, such as stone offcuts from quarrying, and was transported across space and time, slipping through value systems; from waste, to weight, to commodity. Structures across the continent boasted chimneys or foundations that had begun their life in the distant granite quarries of Cornwall, and from bricks that had rounded Cape Horn - their material transience obscured by a perceived stability of form. Buildings are usually seen as the endpoint of material flows, where they remain in intractable, fused assemblies until they reach obsolescence. This familiar pattern is currently playing out in the phased demolition of the Bunker Hill Public Housing Development, the largest affordable housing community on the East Coast. The BHHD can be seen in contrast to the Charlestown Navy Yard, an adjacent shipyard where centuries of investment have established a robust infrastructure of maintenance. We ask: how could the paradigm of the ship, and the creation of material strategies for large, complex assemblages funded by public spending be applied to housing in a resource constrained world? In The Matter of the Hold, the demolition waste from Bunker Hill is inherited as ballast and is transformed, a process made possible by the concept of the “building as hold.” In light of the increasing shift towards buildings as storehouses of material to be held for future reuse, and as vessels of carbon sequestration, our thesis explores how design for the uneven, yet cyclical ebbs and flows of renewable resources erodes architecture’s traditionally rigid temporal boundaries of planning, construction, and occupancy, and produces temporally dynamic regimes of figure and form. The collection, administration and reconfiguration of waste materials results in the creation of new, regenerative forms of collective living that challenge the boom-and-bust logic of investment in public infrastructures.

Bunker Hill Demolition model - by Authors

Material staging area - by Authors

LOVE IN THE FAST LANE Not-so-new Models for American Stewardship & Preservation Lauren Gideonse MArch Advisor: Carrie Norman Readers: Jacqueline Shaw & Jeffrey Landman This thesis begins with one hundred and fifty sites across the United States, domestic buildings that are particularly old for their context, documented through two road trips.1 The road trip as collection mechanism sets the terms: the road and the house are considered together. They inform and contextualize each other. The road is both a critical contemporary network of resources and people, and the historical agent of rationalizing, mobilizing, and capitalizing on the American landscape. The historic home is not considered in a vacuum but always in time, in relationship to the landscape and through its frontage. By looking carefully at these sites through tailored analytical tools, this thesis identifies tendencies, both at the time of construction and in the behavior of the buildings since, that reflect an alternate set of values from those that shape building and preservation practices today. From these sites the thesis composes, and in the process reevaluates, the history of a house and the road. The objects of this research form ulterior narratives – derivative and projective – that cast an ill-fated romance between forms of stewardship and systems of capital. The results, a collection of slow media, construct and reconstruct encounters with an altered landscape. Like the seedling miles from which the contemporary American highway system grew,2 this thesis utilizes the “object lesson” as a mechanism to prompt reconsideration. The thesis puts forward a new stretch of seedling road to manufacture a desire for not-so-new forms of stewardship and preservation that are both born-of and particular-to the American context. ______ [1] Road trips and primary documentation undertaken with collaborator A. Giorgis. [2] From 1914 to 1919 American Portland Cement funded the construction of eight mile-long stretches of paved road across the Midwest, seedling miles, as part of the campaign to garner support for the Lincoln Highway project. In internal memoranda, the company called these seedlings “object lessons.” The seedlings, by creating a physical encounter of the space between the status quo and what could be,

manufactured a desire in drivers. The success of the campaign shifted responsibility for the road system to the public domain and cemented the road as a site of civic investment.

Image by Author. Models studies: including the Van Ostrande Radcliffe House, Madame Johns Legacy and the Wycoff-Mason House

How old is now? Adriana Giorgis MArch Advisor: Ana Miljački Readers: Carrie Norman & Emily Wissemann L'Aquila is a city without new buildings. Founded in the early 13th century on a fault line, the city has been destroyed by earthquakes every three hundred years. Its buildings are repaired on the same cycle. In L’Aquila, acts of construction and maintenance are one and the same. Through centuries, buildings in L'Aquila have been reinforced with punctual, visible, acts of support. Tension ties, corner stones, and thickened walls are the language of architecture, producing both aesthetic and spatial implications. In this city, to maintain is to remake, to build is to preserve, to care is to create. When life and life-expectancy of structures is literally infinite, there can be no differentiation between repair and construction. This project dwells on L’Aquila’s architectural value systems. The absence of 'new' buildings in the city is made possible by a culture of collective acts of repair. In the long-now, kindnesses reinforce, prop-up, and adjust materials that have bore witness to historical events and familial genealogies. What might it mean for the discipline to center maintenance the way it has been centered in L'Aquila? What are the ways that the architect-maintainer conceives of originality? Of design? How, too, might they care for the ongoing present and future of L’Aquila?

Diagram on evolution of antiseismic building strategies - by Author.

XVth century facade. Archival photograph by Sandro Dilupi, 1974.

Land Material Geometry: Spline Construction with Invasive Species in a time of Water Crisis in the Southwestern US William Marshall Jr MArch Advisor: John Ochsendorf Readers: Huma Gupta & Wesam Al Asali Within the arid region of what is now the southwestern United States, the Colorado River Basin provides a thin ribbon of water to the otherwise dry region. This limited natural resource is strained by aridification, where drought conditions are the new norm. Additionally, the 1922 Colorado River Compact, a century old act of colonization, allows for industrial overuse of the river supply, effectively stealing water rights from the local ecology and indigenous communities, and delegating more water for desert agriculture than is currently available in the river basin. Exacerbating the severity of this water crisis, the tamarisk, an invasive tree species introduced by colonists in the mid 1800s, has infested more than 3.3 million acres in the western United States. This species attacks river systems and aquifers, crowding out native species, and depositing toxins in the soil. A single tamarisk can consume up to 200 gallons of water in a single day, collectively lowering the water table and resulting in water loss between 10% and 20% of the entire basin’s volume.

Despite this crisis, population growth in the southwest increases, putting strains on housing, which is limited due to construction material shortages and sourcing. This thesis speculates construction techniques in the southwest by seeking a dialog between indigenous, scientific, ecological, and geological knowledge. It seeks to develop a reciprocal and reparative relationship with the local land by using the problematic tamarisk as a material source that could effectively act as a mouth to eat and keep this pest in check, a species that otherwise has no natural predator. The project proposes methods for using the conventionally inadequate timber elements of the tamarisk in processes of bundling, bending, joining, and weaving the one dimensional elastic splines to create three dimensional approximations of high performance structures with low tech means and materials. These bent timber structures can provide formwork and reinforcement for making vaults from adobe, an earthen construction system indigenous to the southwest, but which presents difficulties in spanning without technical knowledge or precise formwork. This project investigates local material sourcing for low tech, sustainable construction typologies in a time of environmental crisis and material shortage in the southwest by attempting a relationship of repair rather than extraction.

Images - by Author. left: tension-bent truss gridshell & saddle vault made from tamarisk right: tamarisk harvested along Virgin River, Utah

BLEEDING DETAILS Sahil Mohan MArch Advisor: Adam Modesitt Readers: Christy Anderson & Chelsea Jno Baptiste This thesis begins at my Nani Ji’s house. Movies depicting Hindu mythology played in the background of our family gatherings—movies where Hanuman would grow to the size of a mountain or Shiva would morph between genders. These shifts between scale, gender, and material affirmed the queerness I had yet to find words for. They taught me that boundaries expand and contract. Everything was interconnected. I could be a mountain. This preoccupation with Hindu Gods led me to their home: Mount Meru. Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist cosmologies consider this sacred five-peaked mountain to be the center of all physical, metaphysical, and spiritual universes among other potential centers. Religious anecdotes imply that the HinduKush Himalayan Ice Sheet is this potential focal point. And the Ice Sheet sustains a complex history: a history of water in its many forms, a history of religious diversity and spiritual importance, a history of war and boundaries. Boundaries drawn like a line. And so too, architecture continues to occupy itself with the line. It considers and abstracts an ideal future by drawing precise lines that separate buildings from environment. This abstraction may be necessary for the field, but it leads to a fixation on strategies of centering segregation, precision, and predictability. Drawings have become a passive instrument of information. They imply an impossible neutrality which produces objects that endure, rather than bodies that engage their contexts. But a world assembled by determined moments and perfectly fitting parts could harbor no life. Nothing could move or become. What if the methods of architecture reflected the flow of water or the fluidity of human embodiment? This thesis is as much a question as it is an answer. Can architecture cross and blur boundaries and binaries: queer and heteronormative; land and water; human and nature? When and how would it all dissolve? What happens to architecture when the details bleed?

Image: Model, Photograph - by Author

Image: Sangam of Indus and Zanskar Rivers, Ladakh; Render - by Author

Changing the Course: Reimagining Switzerland's Aging Nuclear Infrastructure Ellen Marie Reinhard MArch Co-Advisors: Christoph Reinhart & Mohamad Nahleh Reader: Rosalyne Shieh Countries worldwide have been experiencing a rise in decommissioned nuclear power plants, due to the infrastructure’s finite lifespan, ranging from 20 to a maximum of 60 years. Consequently, nearly all of today’s global operating 411 nuclear power plants will soon reach their operating end life, with additional 32% already having ceased operations. Out of those, only a few have tried to repurpose with programs aimed at reintegrating the isolated site back into its existing context. Focusing on Switzerland (home to some of the world's oldest nuclear power plants), I investigate the BKW Mühleberg, since it's the only decommisisoned nuclear power plant to date. Its lengthy and costly $3.2Bn USD process is dedicated to the safe nuclear fuel removal and building demolition until 2034. Subsequently, the greenfield – currently surrounded by agricultural land – would be open for new purposes. This thesis aims to change the course by reimagining alternative ways of adaptively reusing the remaining infrastructural buildings on-site, to reintegrate it back into its rural context. The isolated power plant is transformed into an accessible hydro energy storage plant for alternative energy. Indoor hydroponics and outdoor agricultural land serve as extensions for the large and historically rooted farming community. Beyond economical uses, recreational spaces are dispersed throughout the plant for larger community engagement.

Image: Inside the command room of the nuclear power plant in Mühleberg, 1978 Image credits: Krebs, Hans. "Kernkraftwerk Mühleberg." ETH library Zurich, image archive, December 18 1978, http://doi.org/10.3932/ethz-a-001258030. Accessed August 12 2023.

Destroy Your School: Building with kids to reimagine learning Katie Rotman MArch Advisor: Carrie Norman Readers: Xavi Aguirre & Kim Yao Too often, our education is disconnected from the physical space in which we learn. Lesson plans and curricula disregard the spatial and physical spaces that define the educational experience. The disciplinary gap between architectural and educational discourse is in need of attention, and bridging this gap is at the heart of my thesis. I seek to discern methods to better equip our youth for the future. Questions of how and where we learn and share knowledge are crucial to the formation of values in the next generation. Our current moment necessitates extensive collective change and a thorough reconsideration of the values embedded in our systems of education. How does our built environment inform our learning experience? How does pedagogy shape our world, and how in turn is our world shaped by pedagogy? How can notions of care and stewardship be generated by pedagogy? How can a shift in pedagogy shape classrooms, schools, and neighborhoods? This thesis approaches these questions through the underconsidered and often-forgotten problem of middle school age education. The project puts forward a new pedagogy that aims

to instill architectural values of collaboration, community, mentorship, interdisciplinarity, and readaptation through education in order to shape the fabric of our society. The three years of middle school play an enormous role in shaping the next generation. Between the ages 1 and 5, brain pathways form at an alarming rate, and from 11-14 years old, those pathways become wired. Students enter middle school with one foot solidly in the play world of childhood, however the current American pedagogical systems abruptly pulls them out and lines them up in desks. At this critical point, students transition out of learning through play, inquiry, and experimentation to learning as adults in a results-based, structured and standardized fashion. Introducing a design-build pedagogy into the middle school curriculum becomes not only an opportunity to build a greater sense of autonomy for young learners by elevating students’ existing skills embedded in play and experimentation, but a chance to disrupt the general assumptions we grow up with about our built environment. The design pedagogy I propose gives young adolescents a new set of tools to participate and take action in shaping their education, classroom and community. At its core, this project aims to enable young learners to find agency and empowerment through their built environment. With the reimagined classroom as site, this thesis advocates for a porous community-wide system of learning and engagement.

Images by Author.

Tectonics of the semi-permanent: Reassembling fit-out architecture Jenna Schnitzler SMBT & MArch Advisor: Adam Modesitt Readers: Xavi Aguirre & Carrie Norman In New York, engineer Reginald Pelham Bolton’s 1911 obsolescence study “Building for Profit: Principles Governing the Economic Improvement of Real Estate”, he foretold a truth that remains today, that “the useful or economic existence of all classes of buildings, in the rapid march of modern conditions, is constantly shortening.” He details how the parts of buildings lose value at different rates—as they physically deteriorate, materials wear and things fall out of style, but even more quickly, he notes, do our structures become economically obsolete. Designers and developers recognize this gap between physical and economic obsolescence, and in response have called for a moratorium on new construction-opting instead to convert existing structures to meet changing programmatic demands. The uneven wearing that Bolton wrote about in 1911 appears again in the iconic shearing layers diagram from Frank Duffy and Stewart Brand in the 1990s, who make a very similar economic argument, demonstrating that the economically fastwearing interior layer accumulates the most investment over time, rebuilt on a relentless cycle every 5-10 years.

Image: Shearing layers diagram (Duffy and Brand, 1962)

We are facing a turning point in building; as of 2020, over 35% of total construction activity is renovation work, and we are making increasingly rapid changes to building function. This creates a paradigm of fit out architecture that obstinately answers unpredictability and shifting values with permanency, perpetuating this cycle of repetitive building. Conventionally, the retrofit or renovation process begins with the demolition of anything non-structural. As our buildings contend against obsolescence, this thesis asks instead, how do we re-value this usually sacrificial layer of architecture? This project takes the converted apartment building as its starting point, experimenting with disassembly, reassembly, and the boundaries between fit out and frame, sited within a larger material framework that expands the definition of “value” beyond the monetary.

Not Allowed: Practicing Process Amanda Ugorji MArch Advisor: Rosalyne Shieh Readers: Mariana Medrando & Oana Stănescu Dear Reader, Thank you for coming. Among the many theses you will encounter today, you will find Not Allowed: Practicing Process – an organized collection of thoughts starting in spring 2023. Many would describe the thesis to be one that challenges dominant pedagogies. While I am not particularly interested in how my thesis contributes to the architectural discipline, I have found it valuable to spend my thesis process grappling with and reflecting on issues central to the field such as co-authorship, the urgency of production, the erasure of identity in pedagogy and practice, and the systemic harm architecture perpetuates on both the personal and global scales. By shifting attention away from the architectural product and onto the process, I define the success of the project through encounters of learning, struggle, and uncomfortable ambiguity. While arming myself with tools like selfreflection, expectation of change, intentional conversation, and curiosity, I have been gently subverting the academicindustrial complex and the urgency of capitalist narratives. Within this thesis process, I have learned to respect the cumulative effort it takes to grow. Though the format of the thesis centers the individual author(s), I do not confuse myself to be the sole author of the project. The project embraces the idea that the work I have done is valuable because it builds off the work of others, not in spite of the overlap. While the thesis problematizes dominant narratives of architectural rigor by decentering product, architectural products were, in fact, produced. In order to translate my thoughts into conversation prompts, I have made objects and drawn drawings in the hope of enriching the collective imagination. In my review today, I am interested in inviting engagement, spurring self-reflection,

and framing conversations around structural critique not just in architecture, but in the systems that govern our society. This thesis acknowledges that it is being created on and benefits from the stolen land of the Wampanoag people and the capital benefits of the land grant provided to MIT in the Morrill Act. It recognizes that architecture has been used as a tool of colonization and displacement, and that our field has a responsibility to challenge and transform these systems. Warmly,

Amanda

Prints and image by Author.

Nothing Unwanted: Prototyping Matter out of Place Yiqing Wang MArch Advisor: Anton Garcia-Abril Ruiz Readers: John A Ochsendorf & Leslie Keith Norford What we discard never truly disappears. Accompanying the societal shift from post-war scarcity to a consumerist culture, the contemporary building industry relies on abundant virgin materials, machinery, and a global transportation network. Immersed in this culture of convenience, architecture has limited agency to engage responsibly and intimately with reclaimed materials. The design of waste, inevitably, often symbolizes the separation between society and its waste, marked by an intention to remove, reform, and re-standardize. Zero-waste systems and circular economy often inadvertently create hidden wastes, labor, and carbon footprints, leading to an uneven distribution of environmental harms. The thesis explores the unique materiality of municipal waste, linking human living with their unwanted with an architectural prototype. The new "unwanted" architecture integrates local waste into an adaptive inventory, avoiding over-precision, over-purification, and over-modularization. Based on the characteristics of US municipal waste, localsourced garbage, including e-waste, plastics, wood, paper, metal, dust, and food waste, is studied, calibrated, and assembled to create building components and rooms. The bottom-up approach offers a way to compute heterogeneous materials with digital methods and low-tech on-site operations to minimize environmental impact. The richness of space blurs the boundaries between domesticity and abjection and between the sublime and the disgusting. The prototypes aim to rebuild both the Functional and Emotional Unwanted and re-imagine a scalable and operable building system. The design contrasts the previously visible waste in architectural design with today's invisible waste stream due to sophisticated waste management. It demonstrates an intimate approach to the gigantic amount of urban waste, emphasizing its cultural, personal, and collective dimensions.

Image right: Calibrate the Collected Waste from MIT - by Author

Soft at the Joints Susan Williams MArch Advisor: J. Jih Readers: Adam Modesitt & Lavender Tessmer A building can be understood entirely through its joints. It can explain gravitational forces, interlacing moments of material application, and environmental conditions. Yet, this portion of the design is often relegated to the end of the design process, as a finishing touch. The walls, floors, and roof are meticulously considered, while the spaces between are left blank in order to accommodate the imperfections and unsolved complexities that occur when the idealism of design meets the reality of assembly. In 1851, Gottfried Semper proclaimed, “The beginning of building coincides with the beginning of textiles.” Over the past hundred and fifty years this statement has moved in and out of relevancy as manufacturing, digital tools, design trends and the role of designer and builder has changed. Today, architecture’s relationship with textiles is somewhat estranged. Like the joint, textiles appear at the completion of a project’s development, confined to fulfilling an aesthetic role. Textiles are materials with unique properties which allow for both high levels of strength and flexibility all at the same time. Unlike in architecture, in textiles, the interlacing of fabric is the starting point of both design and construction. This thesis re-envisions new methods of architectural design through the logics of textiles: by applying principles of aggregation, establishing a dependent relationship between material and structure, and designing through making at a one-to-one scale. As a result, this project acts as a catalyst for playful tectonic systems, eliminating the boundary between where the joint begins and where it ends.

FRONT :: ELEVATION FRONT :: ELEVATION

SIDE :: SECTION

AXO :: SECTION

SIDE :: SECTION

AXO :: SECTION

BUNGY CORD

AXO :: ELEVATION

BUNGY CORD

AXO :: ELEVATION

Images by Author.

A JAIL IS NOT SOCIAL HOUSING: Making New Grounds in Chinatown Calvin Zhong MArch & MCP Advisor: Garnette Cadogan & Ana Miljacki Reader: Rosalyne Shieh Long before Chinatown was Chinatown in New York City, there was a patch of land and a pond – both dubbed “The Commons” on the old Sanborn maps of lower Manhattan. Here, the stories and histories of the Lenape, and their connection to the site from time immemorial; the freed African community, and their role in colonial history; the various Hispanic, Irish, and Italian immigrants, displaced in the mid-1900s; and the current Chinese population in Chinatown are interwoven, rewritten, and disassembled. After four consecutive jails, four different versions of the Manhattan Detention Center, known infamously as the Tombs, have occupied that same patch of “Commons.” The Tombs in Chinatown are being doubled as part of a distributed alternative to the Rikers Island Jail. The new Tombs include space for detention, on-site services and programming, staff facilities, and publicly accessible commercial and community space on the ground floor. While some have advocated for the building’s adaptive reuse, we must think differently about this site. This thesis insists on rejecting the politics of a building that holds four hundred years of violent incarcerations, but acknowledges its history. The city, rather than invest in its communities, responds each time with a new jail. It reconsiders the public realm of Chinatown–new grounds–between proposals for housing, somewhere between the rigid lines between the necessity of minimal dwellings, the dream of private property, the reality of expensive New York real estate, and the bureaucracy of cohousing and social housing. Perhaps it relies on the Hong Kong Supermarket, the nail salon, the pharmacy, the park, the mahjong parlor–amenities that sustain Chinatown’s immigrants by serving a greater public, but more importantly, relieve what we demand from housing. A jail is not social housing, but really, a dim sum restaurant can be.

Image right: A stacked elevation of all iterations of the jail on the site. - by Author.

MIT Architecture Final Thesis Reviews, December 21, 2023

SPECIAL THANKS Architecture Faculty and Staff Eleni Aktypi Taariq Alasa Darren Bennett Kateri Bertin Kathaleen Brearley Joél Carela Nicholas de Monchaux Christopher Dewart Jackie Dufault

Mike Enos Michael Gallino Eduardo Gonzalez Jim Harrington Tessa Haynes John Hoder Alejandra (Alixe) Huete Douglas Le Vie Inala Locke

Tonya Miller Claudine Monique Amanda Moore Jennifer O'Brien Paul Pettigrew Alan Reyes Jennifer Roesch Diana Rooney Venecia Siders

Advisors and Readers (MIT and External) Wesam Al Asali Christy Anderson Xavi Aguirre Chelsea Jno Baptiste Garnette Cadogan Anton Garcia-Abril Ruiz Rania Ghosn Huma Gupta Timothy Hyde Sheila Kennedy

Jaffer Kolb Jeffrey Landman Jacqueline Shaw J. Jih Adam Modesitt Mariana Medrano Ana Miljački Mohamad Nahleh Les Norford John Ochsendorf

William O'Brien, Jr. Nicholas de Monchaux Roi Salgueiro Barrio Christoph Reinhart Lavender Tessmer Skylar Tibbits Oana Stănescu Emily Wissemann Carrie Norman Kim Yao

Invited Critics Daniel Abramson Ellie Abrons Sunil Bald Jenny French

Deborah Garcia Petra Kempf Marcelo Lopez-Dinardi Jacqueline Shaw

Kannan Thiruvengadam Hans Tursack Kim Yao

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