Princeton University School of Architecture
Workbook 2018
About the Work—Academic Year 2017–2018 The design and research included within this book reflect our pedagogical values: we believe in the importance of providing an interdisciplinary architectural education that balances design, technology, history and theory. The School intertwines these disciplines seamlessly, allowing faculty and students to fluidly work across them. We generate work which embodies ideas that have legs and thus can travel, so this workbook was designed to be taken apart and disseminated. Postcards, posters, and booklets are all up for the taking. We invite you to tear out your favorites and pin them to the walls in your workplaces, send them to friends, or take them along for a good read.
This workbook reflects our emphasis on design grounded in interdisciplinary collaboration. The small size of the School encourages close interaction and collaboration between students and faculty. Leaders in the field comprise our core faculty. All our design professors maintain thriving architectural practices while our history/theory faculty intensely disseminate their scholarship through publications and exhibitions, and our technology faculty are at the cutting edge of research. As a result, our undergraduates receive a well-rounded liberal arts education and a strong basis for additional studies in architecture while our graduate students gain a comprehensive understanding of the field, preparing them for a career in practice and/or academia. —Mónica Ponce de León, Dean
Workbook 2018
2 Graduate Studios 3 13 23 31 39 45 55 63
ARC 501—Michael Meredith and Ellie Abrons ARC 502—Mónica Ponce de León and Iman Fayyad ARC 503—Jesse Reiser and Dan Brodkin ARC 504—Frank Barkow and Regine Leibinger ARC 505a—Pascal Flammer ARC 505c—Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda ARC 506a—Stan Allen ARC 506b—Andrés Jaque
69 Professional Program Thesis Projects 87 Post-Professional Program Thesis Projects 107 Undergraduate Studios 109 119 129 137
ARC 204—Paul Lewis and Annie Barrett ARC 350—Gia Wolff ARC 351— Hayley Eber ARC 404—Annie Barrett
143 Undergraduate Thesis Projects 167 Ph.D. Program 173 Ph.D. Proseminars 179 Ph.D. Dissertation Abstracts
2018
1
Workbook
Graduate Studios
Master’s Program
2
ARC 501 Architecture Design Studio Associate Professor Michael Meredith and Visiting Lecturer Ellie Abrons with Assistant Instructors Mark Acciari and Leen Katrib
medium (technical support) + convention (genre, typology, history) + play (!@#?) = Architecture
This is the secret formula. We’re still calibrating the exact proportions before going public. Certainly, results may vary. Please bear in mind the following operational procedures as you begin your work. Medium is how we conceptualize and work through a project (“technical support” i.e. form, function, material, program, 2018
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Workbook
context, and so on). Convention is how we situate and evaluate the work within the discipline. Play is something else. This, of course, remains vague and imperfect but, as per usual, we will rely on you to make something of it anyway. History has proven these elements to be highly unstable. Every generation is tasked to rewrite them and each of these with their own specific outcome or emphasis in mind. While convention may insulate the anxieties generated by change, medium continually produces new enthusiasms and frictions, which exacerbate the improvisation of play. This introductory course presents the discipline of architecture through a series of interrelated discrete exercises. These problems are not meant to represent the synthetic totality of the discipline, but rather an overview of a few important aspects, points of architecture that help construct a self-conscious framework, allowing students to individually connect the dots, providing a foundation for further development.
Master’s Program
4
Alexandra Still ARC 501—Fall 2017 medium (technical support) + convention (genre, typology, history) + play (!@#?) = Architecture
6
Mariah Smith ARC 501—Fall 2017 medium (technical support) + convention (genre, typology, history) + play (!@#?) = Architecture
Second Level Plan 1/4” = 1’ 2’
4’
8’
8
ECOND FLOOR PLAN 16” = 1’-0”
”
1’-0”
2’-0”
THIRD FLOOR PLAN 3/16” = 1’-0” 6”
4’-0”
0” 1’-0”
Sharif Anous ARC 501—Fall 2017 medium (technical support) + convention (genre, typology, history) + play (!@#?) = Architecture
2’-0” 4’-0”
10
Carly Richman ARC 501—Fall 2017 medium (technical support) + convention (genre, typology, history) + play (!@#?) = Architecture
12
ARC 502 Architecture Design Studio Professor Mรณnica Ponce de Leรณn and Visiting Lecturer Iman Fayyad with Assistant Instructors Georgina Baronian, Kate Bilyk, and Oluwabunmi Fayiga
Architecture as Alternative Idea of the City
2018
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Workbook
This studio will examine the relationship between architecture and the city through a single building project. As a preamble to the studio, we will study specific historical case studies where the architect’s project has been to speculate about the city at large. Rather than respond to context, each student proposal will be expected to imagine and project new ideas of the city. The semester has been structured as a series of cumulative exercises that will lead to a building project in the city of Trenton, NJ. Our building program will be a K-12 public school in a low-density neighborhood. Often considered a microcosm of the city, schools are an assemblage of different room types whose size and scale is carefully choreographed. With a population of more than 1,000 students, the school will be of enough magnitude to project new ideas for the city at large. During the design process, you will be asked to simultaneously address the design of the spatial unit (room) and the fabric, which is part of (site). We will explore specific compositional techniques, aimed at developing formal dexterity. Master’s Program
14
Andrew Cornelis ARC 502—Spring 2018 Architecture as Alternative Idea of the City
16
Maura Chen ARC 502—Spring 2018 Architecture as Alternative Idea of the City
18
Jaime Lipson ARC 502—Spring 2018 Architecture as Alternative Idea of the City
20
Scale 1/32" = 1' 00"
Domenica Massamby ARC 502—Spring 2018 Architecture as Alternative Idea of the City
SCALE 1/8” = 1/ 00”
22
ARC 503 Integrated Building Studio Professor Jesse Reiser and Consulting Engineer Dan Brodkin, ARUP Principal with Assistant Instructor Juan Salazar
TOKYO 2020
2018
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Workbook
The studio sets up a retroactive scenario, designing an Olympic Park with respect to its post-Olympic inhabitation, the afterlife of a shortterm event with far-reaching consequences for the city. Forming a compelling notion of what the future Park could be, the project will investigate the potentials latent in the adaptation of Olympic programming, confronting the challenges of facilitating a transition from present to future uses in strict architectural terms. This transformation entails diverse issues of formal legibility, fitness, accommodation, and affordance in conjunction with concerns of materiality, ecological change, and infrastructural systems. Seizing the historical capacity of Olympic planning to reveal preexisting tendencies as well as the more recent bids’ efforts to enact deliberate urban agendas, the project suggests that the built form of the Park can prefigure future patterns of development. Overall, it hopes to exploit the concentration of difference inherent to an overprogrammed site, extending its various possibilities into a definite proposal. It remains invested in the initial Olympic role, but asks what this infrastructure can mean to the city, to the local inhabitants, and for the site after its symbolic appeal has worn off.
Master’s Program
24
Devin Dobrowolski ARC 503—Fall 2017 TOKYO 2020
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Katherine Leung ARC 503—Fall 2017 TOKYO 2020
28
Asylum hm Irregular Rhyt
ine oZ y k To
Sharon Xu ARC 503—Fall 2017 TOKYO 2020
ic
n Pic
mpic park
30 0
10
25
50
100 m
ARC 504 Integrated Building Studio Visiting Lecturers Frank Barkow and Regine Leibinger with Assistant Instructor Carson Chan
Wohncomplex/Living Complex Berlin: The New Communal, Megastructure/Superstructure
2018
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Workbook
The need for affordable housing is rising in Berlin where a yearly demand has increased to 10,000 units sharpened by the arrival of over 1.1 million refugees in the last two years. The post-reunification milieu where cheap rents, radically changing demographics, and a burgeoning art and music scene is now in transition. Berlin, a growing metropolis, needs housing after much commercial and cultural expansion. The opportunity lies in creating density in a diffuse multi-centered/layered city. What new sustainable typologies can give form to a new residential urban landscape?
Master’s Program
32
John Cooper ARC 504—Spring 2018 Wohncomplex/Living Complex
34
Rami Kanafani ARC 504—Spring 2018 Wohncomplex/Living Complex
36
Erik Tsurumaki ARC 504—Spring 2018 Wohncomplex/Living Complex
40m
38
ARC 505a Graduate Vertical Studio Visiting Lecturer Pascal Flammer with Assistant Instructor Kate Bilyk
Architectural Space as a Personal Message
2018
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Workbook
Architects typically respond to requests from others; they solve problems and fulfill wishes addressed to them. For once, in this studio we change the perspective, i.e., we start with our own visions, goals, or problems. Participants are invited to find out what they would like to see realized or changed in their personal or societal world. The aim of the semester is to produce an authentic personal concept of space that is nevertheless readable by others and has a certain universal relevance. To achieve this, we go through three phases: analysis, emergence of form, and inventing a coherent visible and tangible form.
Master’s Program
40
Ying Qi Chen ARC 505a—Fall 2017 Architectural Space as a Personal Message
42
Marc Acciari ARC 505a—Fall 2017 Architectural Space as a Personal Message
44
ARC 505c Graduate Vertical Studio Visiting Lecturers Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda with Assistant Instructor Isidoro Michan Guindi
After-POPS: Public Artefacts in Manhattan
2018
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Workbook
This studio investigates the tension and conflicts between the possibility of an architecture of the public in North America nowadays and the creation of compatible and critical architectural languages with the form in which technology and virtual networks have changed the way we socialize and create, consume, and spread cultural constructs. Taking New York—and more specifically Manhattan—as the site, the proposals will be based on an intense and profound analysis of the physical and expanded contexts and the local relationship between places of socialization, leisure, and consumption and the public sphere.
Master’s Program
46
Andrea Ng ARC 505c—Fall 2017 After-POPS: Public Artefacts in Manhattan
48
Jacob Comerci ARC 505c—Fall 2017 After-POPS: Public Artefacts in Manhattan
REC
REC
REC
50
You Wu ARC 505c—Fall 2017 After-POPS: Public Artefacts in Manhattan
52
Clara Syme ARC 505c—Fall 2017 After-POPS: Public Artefacts in Manhattan
ramp distance: 13 floors x 160 m /floor = ~2.1 km
infinite loop
chimney water cistern look out
treadmill
interval training sauna/bakery
66000 mm
showers
pool/bar seating pods
5500 mm
changeroom
washrooms
bakery kiosk
1600 mm
resistance training
fire pit
80000 mm
54
fountain
elevator
1600 mm
ARC 506a Graduate Vertical Studio Professor Stan Allen with Assistant Instructor Michaela Friedberg
The Introverted City: Archipelago Urbanism Revisited
2018
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Workbook
The studio will re-examine the idea of the city-in-the-city, first proposed by O.M. Ungers (with Rem Koolhaas) in 1977 as a tactical response to the urban condition of a divided and shrinking Berlin. Our working hypotheses is that this concept—the Archipelago City— has a particular relevance for the expansive, low-density field condition of the American city in the 21st century.
Master’s Program
56
Andrea Ng ARC 506a—Spring 2018 The Introverted City: Archipelago Urbanism Revisited
58
Kenny Chao ARC 506a—Spring 2018 The Introverted City: Archipelago Urbanism Revisited
60
Deborah Garcia ARC 506a—Spring 2018 The Introverted City: Archipelago Urbanism Revisited
62
ARC 506b Graduate Vertical Studio Visiting Lecturer AndrĂŠs Jaque with Assistant Instructor Bart-Jan Polman
THE PaPa PROJECT, an architectural mission to intervene the OFFSHORE techno-societal
The Panama and Paradise papers launched the maturity of a new model of existence: OFFSHOREcracy. A radical bio-societal delivery born in New Jersey in 1880, with Governor Leon Abbet, as a strategy to confront New York’s hegemonic economy, OFFSHOREcracy comprises currently no less than 38 countries engaged in 2018
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the daily production of a network of secrecy that helps investors (including Queen Elizabeth, Emma Watson, or the members of U2) and corporations—like Google, Starbucks, and Ikea—avoid taxes, which undermines welfare and democracy, ignores civil rights, and therefore prompts conflict with the onshored. Offshoring is an architectural invention. Departing the ground, becoming decontextualized, becoming airy, water-floating, navigating, disengaging, non-stopping, instantiating, becoming autonomous—all constitute a big part of architecture avant-gardeness, an architectural invention that has taken unexpected trajectories. This studio will look at the way past architectural practices can be interrogated through their current unexpected outcomes. Studio members will explore different ways for architecture to politically intervene in existing realities in what will constitute a repository of ways for architecture to act politically on its own (not as mere transmitter of political action previously drafted, but as a political actor performing specific forms of politics).
Master’s Program
64
Andrew MacMillan ARC 506b—Spring 2018 THE PaPa PROJECT
66
Ece Yetim ARC 506b—Spring 2018 THE PaPa PROJECT
68
The Professional Program Thesis
2018
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Workbook
Each semester, thesis students are challenged to make an architectural response to a general thematic question. The theme is explored in workshops, stated as a written proposition and elaborated as a design proposal during the students’ final semester. Thesis topics are agreed upon by the faculty that serve as a hinge point between architecture and questions of politics, culture, technology, or society. The thematic organization of the final semester’s independent design research creates a shared point of departure for students, faculty, and visiting critics. PROFESSIONAL PROGRAM THESIS PROJECTS Mark Acciari The Normal Hotel Georgina Baronian Confronting the Aesthetic and the Performative: Prototype for an Evaporative Cooling Roof Robert Becker Invisible Monolith Ying Qi Chen The Mongrel Kate Yeh Chiu Soft and Heavy Iván-Nicholas Cisneros 140-Mile Third Space of Social and Economic Re-order in-betwixing the Mexico/ Master’s Program
US Geopolitical Order of Things: The Disruptive Betweenity of the Betwixt Cannabis Menagerie Jacob Comerci Towards a repoliticization of the domestic or; An Urbanism of Stuff Oluwabunmi Fayiga Ekocentricity: Elevating Lagos’ IT Market Michaela Friedberg, Suburban Redux Tyler Suomala Haptic Instabilities Sharon Xu Learning Landscape
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Mark Acciari
Advisors: Sylvia Lavin and Andrés Jaque
The Normal Hotel Total design has been an essential part of modern architecture since the middle of the 19th century. Every era since has had its own definition of gesamtkunstwerk. And, with every era, the limit to totality has been pushed further and further. For Wagner, totality was confined to the stage. For the Bauhaus, total ranged from Gropius’ door handle to Hilberseimer’s High Rise City. For the Eamses, it encompassed everything between the single proton to galaxies years away. Today totality includes every image ever made, and every person ever captured in an image. Total design is now absolutely infinite (dun-dun-dun!). Over the past twenty years, social networking influencers, bloggers, and vloggers have proliferated. Worldwide, millions are composing contemporary still lifes from architecture and design objects, and then disseminating those images on free visual platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr. This vast mediascape supports the immeasurable totality of contemporary design practice. Now, more than ever, everything must exist not only as an object, but as an image in multiple forms that each belong to an indefinitely expanding space of total design. In this cycle, the modality of each image absorbs the previous—creating a new universe or space of design with every copy. New realities begin to emerge with the elision between lived experience and that photo we saw on Instagram.
72
9
Georgina Baronian Advisor: Forrest Meggers
Confronting the Aesthetic and the Performative: Prototype for an Evaporative Cooling Roof Confronting the aesthetic and the performative within the architectural discipline, this installation pursues a study of indirect evaporative cooling as a technology that can be enabled through both formal and technical development. The installation aims to challenge notions of how we understand the enclosure as it relates to the thermal performance of a building—the pavilion itself is entirely unclosed, consisting only of an elevated roof whereby the air underneath the roof is the same temperature as its ambient surroundings, yet cooling is possible through the principle of radiative heat exchange between the human body and a (cool) surface. This demonstrates a new paradigm through which to understand the production of thermal comfort, proposing a building-without-walls model for generating “interior� climate.
74
Robert Becker
Advisor: Mónica Ponce de León
Invisible Monolith This project is a proposition for a data center for the National Security Agency on the National Mall. While the structure itself is bounded by a rigid site condition, constantly expanding and invisible data produces an imperceptible monolith hidden from the immediate perception of the human. The publicly exposed edifice stands merely as a signifier for an endless stream of data. A small crown—a dated symbol, and a new public monument to the citizens of the United States—covers the mechanics for the virtually endless data below.
76
Ying Qi Chen
Advisor: Andrés Jaque
The Mongrel Contrary to rising interests in localized productions and non-tech startups, the streetscape of New York has become more homogenized with consumption spaces, supplanting local businesses and studios with retail chains and high-end galleries. Ironically, the burden of generating affordable spaces is left to developers, who construct twice as many luxury apartments than affordable units despite the recent enactment of The Mandatory Inclusionary Housing policy. Because the derivative of this systemic issue pertains to space, architects are presented with an opportunity to examine how profit accumulation can be disturbed by an alternative form of financing and designing buildings. By re-deploying existing financial conditions, can property become both a “monetary fixer of debt and its moral evaluator?” (Real Estates, Jack Self). The design case study addresses this challenge in three scales: at the macro level—an alternative business plan and construction sequence; at the meso scale—a self-liquidating programmatic model supported by appropriate building tectonics; at a micro scale—innovative re-detailing of standard materials. The strategies presented here do not render architects as developers, quite the contrary; it eliminates profit generation as its end goal, thereby nullifying the development profession. The thesis argues that although we have architectonic, programmatic and material design in our arsenal, if architecture is to become more than a sculptural resolution of programmatic demands, then it must identify a new form of spatial operation and ownership by leveraging the constraints of the market economy.
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2
0 U0
04 03 U0
U010
U009
1 01 U
13
U0
12 U0
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08 U0
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U0
06
U0
07
U0
U0
05
Building Materials
* All items are to be sourced from Home Depot unless otherwise listed.
T1
2 in. x 10 ft. 280-PSI Schedule 40 PVC DWV Plain End Pipe
B2
T2
Blackout Signature Amber Gold Blackout Velvet Curtain - 100 in. W x 84 in. L
B3
T3
1-piece 1.1 GPF/1.6 GPF High Efficiency Dual Flush All-in-One Toilet in White
K1
2 in. x 10 ft. 280-PSI Schedule 40 PVC DWV Plain End Pipe
K2
Pulley Mechanism 6 ft. with Remote Control
K3
4.5 cu. ft. High Efficiency Front Load Washer in White, ENERGY STAR
K4
PS1
5/8 in. Dia x 50 ft. Heavy Duty Water Hose
K5
PS2
2 in. x 10 ft. 280-PSI Schedule 40 PVC DWV Plain End Pipe
X1
S1
Drop-In Bathroom Sink in White
X2
S2
1/2 in. x 2 ft. Black Steel Schedule 40 Cut Pipe
X3
B1
2 in. x 10 ft. 280-PSI Schedule 40 PVC DWV Plain End Pipe
L1 L2
Model # VPCH-VET1211-84 Model # N2420
Model # 531137 Model # N/A
Model # WM3270CW Model # 8605 50 Model # 531137 Model # A
Model # 306 12X24
Blackout Signature Burgundy Doublewide Blackout Velvet Curtain
Model # HDDB332274LFR
5.8 ft. Terra Center Drain Bathtub in White
Model # 70
All-in-One Drop-In Double Bowl Kitchen Sink
Model # HDDB332274LFR
5.8 ft. Ultra-Compact Surface Countertop in Domoos
Model # DK-U0040
6.4 cu. ft. Electric Range Convection Oven in Stainless Steel Model # WFE540H0ES
24 in. W 5.6 cu. ft. Undercounter Refrigerator in Stainless Steel Model # WUR50X24HZ
Coventry Base Cabinets in Pacific White
Model # N/A
2 in. x 10 ft. 280-PSI Schedule 40 PVC DWV Plain End Pipe Model # 531137
1-Spray Outdoor Utility Shower Faucet in Chrome (Valve Included) Model # 3070-250-CH-BWS
10’-0”
Blackout Signature Velvet Curtain - 100 in. W x 108 in. L Model # VPCH-VET1220-108
Model # 531137
10’-0”
L3
Model # 531137
1’-1”
”
1’-8
S1
7’-1”
T1
S2
2’-2”
”
3’-1
1”
1’-1
”
4’-8
Serves 3-4 People
”
4’-6
1’-7
”
4’-8
”
B1
Communal Sink
7’-1”
1’-9
”
”
4’-6
2’-2”
6’-11”
T2
”
4’-8
9’-2
”
L1 L2
6’-11”
”
2’-2”
1’-0 4’-6
T3
9’-1
Serves 3-4 People
4’-6
2’-0
”
”
4’-6
”
”
2’-3
”
”
2’-0
9’-0
”
1’-10”
”
3’-0
L3
Communal Toilet 2’-3
B2
”
8’-5
0”
”
4’-5
”
1’-4
B3
” 1’-4
” 5’-8
”
2’-0
K1
”
9’-0
” ”
4’-6
2’-0
”
Communal Laundry
Communal Bath Serves 3-4 People
K2
Serves 6-8 People
PS1 PS2
3’-6
18’-
”
K3
7’-1”
7’-1”
5”
X1
2’-2
”
Communal Kitchen
K4
Serves 4-6 People
2’-9
K5
”
2’-10”
” 4’-3 2’-0
”
4’-8
”
2’-0
”
0” -1
”
4’-6
0”
3’
Serves 6-8 People
X3
-1
”
3’
1’-8
5’-9
”
X2
6’-2”
Plumbing / Structural Requirements
Communal Shower
3’-6
6’-11”
Wet Structural Core
3’
-1
0”
”
5’-9
”
5’-1
1”
Communal Shower 4’-6
”
”
4’-6
Serves 3-4 People
Jacob Comerci Advisor: Stan Allen
Towards a repoliticization of the domestic or; An Urbanism of Stuff This thesis begins with the belief that the shrinking public sphere and the depoliticization of the dwelling can be linked to domestic property ownership, which defines an ever-increasing boundary between civic and private space. In lieu of a communal living condition which presents the possibility for public dispute, debate, and exchange, prescriptive cellularized living conditions we are most familiar with—that is, compartmentalized rooms with explicitly designated program and hyper-private consumption of goods— sever bonds between people, thereby intensifying the notion of the other in relation to ourselves. The thesis, then, offers an alternative way to inhabit the American landscape through a redistribution and defamiliarization of familiar building parts aggregated in unfamiliar ways. Through the production of domestic equipment, an urbanism of stuff is assembled with at most a vague suggestion as to how one might use it, to accommodate the idiosyncratic rhythms of each occupant and a broad range of activities.
80
”
2’-1
Oluwabunmi Fayiga
Advisors: Paul Lewis and Samia Henni
Ekocentricity: Elevating Lagos’ IT Market How do we design for the future of dynamic market spaces based on culture and content? The primary challenge for today’s dynamic markets lies in how to design for future technology-centered spaces outside of the West, and especially in West Africa and elsewhere. An example of dynamism in the technology industry in Lagos is Computer Village in Ikeja, the largest technology “market” in West Africa. It is not a stereotypical “African” market, but one that houses a plethora of business strategies and technological development— it houses large companies such as Huawei in the same spaces as those selling second-hand phone accessories under an umbrella. Design analysis is crucial in this space because there are still systemic infrastructural issues in the market, namely power and technology. How can we enhance the productivity of the market by targeting these challenges head-on using cultural, structural and environmental techniques? I have designed what I believe will truly enhance and amplify the positive spatial aspects of the market, while addressing the issue of infrastructure and overall structural productivity in a way that can actually be built economically. There are still imperfections in the market, as this is not a plot to solve all of the problems, but rather elevate the spaces in a way that makes the most architectural sense while giving inhabitants what they need to be more productive. The entire project aims to reject materials like concrete and corrugated roofing while celebrating others such as steel, glass, and wood. The new normal of Lagos or Eko must be centered around Eko and its inhabitants to design a forward-thinking future for the market and for architecture.
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Tyler Suomala Advisor: Julian Rose
Haptic Instabilities In an attempt to reconnect architecture and body given today’s distracted subject, Haptic Instabilities borrows the sensory homunculus from neuroscientific studies and places it within the historical lineage of idealized architectural bodies. This investigation sets out to generate an architecture based on a haptic notion of the body opposed to the geometric, proportional, and compositional understandings of Vitruvius (Vitruvian Man) and Le Corbusier (Modulor Man). Through a concerted focus on hands and feet, a sequence of experiences manipulated and calibrated via the vestibular system enables variations within normal and familiar details to resonate with the entire body. In this particular case, handrail constructions respond to various unstable floor and stair conditions. Haptic Instabilities seeks to catalyze a new architectural experience that alters one’s state of mind and heightens the awareness of one’s body in space through the foreground of haptics.
84
Sharon Xu
Advisor: Stan Allen
60 min
Learning Landscape
15 min
15 min 30 min
60 min 45 min
15 min
30 min
30 min
The cells and bells spatial paradigm for educational architecture has failed to accommodate the shifting role of the student in urban society. For the modern urban high school student—a hyperactive learner empowered by digital access and mobility—the spatial realm of the school is an opportunity for social proximity through physical exposure, necessitating an architecture which enables transient and simultaneous engagement. In response to the lineage of educational architecture in the city from early 1900s classicist styles reflecting the Greek model of institutionalized education to the 1950s factory aesthetic of standardized and efficient learning to the 21st century hard architecture of the secure bunker, the new normal urban school poses a contemporary spatial alternative that amplifies the qualities of the most instrumental space in schools today: the unprogrammed, transitory, self-regulated space of the corridor. The new urban school offers secure transparency through an elevated open landscape of spatial attractors and distractors that allow for both dispersive and collective organizations. The school in the city becomes an autonomous realm for the teenage “anti-public,” designed to mobilize the teenage body and physicalize education through socratic and somatic learning.
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The Post-Professional Program Thesis
2018
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The Post-Professional program culminates in a thesis in which design itself is considered a form of research. In lieu of a studio presentation, students exhibit their work at a gallery in New York City during their final semester. Utilizing Princeton’s unique interdisciplinary potential as a research university, students are free to seek advisers from within and outside the faculty of architecture. This tradition draws on architecture’s history that has, since the Renaissance, incorporated a vast spectrum of disciplines from the humanities, arts, and sciences. POST-PROFESSIONAL PROGRAM THESIS PROJECTS Kate Bilyk House Number One Samuel Clovis Loose Fit: New Standards for Code and Comfort Leen Katrib Rubble Archive Yujun Mao Collective Architectural Imaging Isidoro Michan Guindi Hybrid Creatures
Master’s Program
Juan Salazar Misreading as a Model for Reconstruction Kyle Schumann After Regionalism: Constructing Mythos on the Appalachian Trail Gillian Shaffer House for an Ambassador Eda Yetim Muqarnas Spaces: A Constellated Organization System
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Kate Bilyk
Advisor: Michael Meredith
House Number One Rio Rancho, (Albuquerque), New Mexico. The house is an impression of its place and is a part of its land.
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Community Lectures
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Leen Katrib
Advisor: Stan Allen
Rubble Archive An informal village was dismantled during the 1929 French Mandate excavation of the Temple of Bel in Palmyra. While the site was restored to its Greco-Roman condition and its fragments preserved ex-situ, the rubble of the dismantled village was obliterated without documentation. In 1965, the outer layer of Tikal Temple 5D-33 in Guatemala was reduced to rubble then eradicated to publish the temple’s underlying layers. And more recently, after fourteen mausoleums were destroyed in a terrorist attack in Timbuktu, UNESCO launched efforts to reconstruct the mud brick structures and clean up the site from material remnants of the attack. These case studies highlight a pattern in the management of post-destruction rubble. Though archaeologists produced the rubble in Palmyra and Tikal, Timbuktu represents a contemporary attitude towards rubble that is increasingly produced by forces other than archaeology: terrorism, nature, economy, etc. International institutions continue to focus on the digital ex-situ preservation of destroyed heritage sites, all the while bypassing the question of what is to be done with what remains: rubble. Rubble Archive confronts the material afterlife of post-destruction heritage rubble that has been historically marginalized and silenced. While the archive was founded on order and systematic storage, and wielded by the state and hegemonic institutions, Rubble Archive is inevitably for entropy and new ways of managing formless piles of heritage rubble by diverse social agents. Rubble Archive is a dynamic structure that imports and exports heritage rubble in a global network of seaport terminals. The rubble circulates through an experts-only area to be cataloged, examined, and documented. Then, rubble is transported to a non-experts area, where anyone and everyone can engage with materials of the past to construct, document, demolish, reconstruct, and disseminate something new. Rubble Archive becomes at once a space for material storage and retrieval of the past, and an index of shifting cultural and social conditions that influence the ways in which visitors engage with its collections of rubble through constant and simultaneous constructions, demolitions, reconstructions, documentations, and exchanges of heritage materials.
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Yujun Mao
Advisor: Axel Kilian
Collective Architectural Imaging Images used to be made by people, for people. However, over the last decade or so, this situation is changing. There are now images made by machines, for other machines and the visual intervention of human in image production is less and less. With this technical succession, we are now actually in the presence of pseudorthography during the transition from orthography to postorthography. This thesis takes two steps to explore how computer vision technology could help to intensify creativity in architectural image production and bring forward the question of what the significance would be if collective imaging could construct a smooth pluralism that visualizes the tentative genealogies in the architectural world without resistance. First, the collective is articulated as an autonomous drawing robot, which fuses analog and digital modes of visual making. Programmed with a customized search engine, the interactive machine constructs a controlled system of architectural plan production that does not restrict the creative process but allows the architect’s unconscious mind to have great sway. Second, the collective is expressed as a deep learning model whose dataset includes thousands of plan-perspective samples of several architects’ work. And pre-trained with an algorithm that conditionally translates architectural plans to architectural perspectives, the model generates a series of images which bluntly expose the underlying visual relationship between different buildings.
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Isidoro Michan Guindi Advisor: Michael Meredith
Hybrid Creatures The thesis explores volumetric relationships between banal geometries—squares, circles, and triangles—to generate a glossary of creature-like forms that either estrange or re-mold the human body. These forms are then programed to become dwellings that are not in the service of human comfort, but rather intend to merge the inhabitant with the form. These small-scale dwellings and one large one (the uncomfortable house) are tight-fitting in relation to the inhabitants’ body, producing friction between the dwelling and the inhabitant and at the same time creating an illusion that the dwelling is the body and the body is the dwelling. In the uncomfortable house, the geometry is scaled so that in elevation it has the proportions of a dress, but in plan it could be inhabited by a family. Apertures are designed to enable the inhabitants to emerge and become juxtaposed with their house. The aesthetic effect estranges the human and the form so that together they become hybrid creatures: an architecture that is half human and half something else.
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Juan Salazar
Advisor: Stan Allen
Misreading as a Model for Reconstruction Located in the city of Berlin remains the ruin of a Gothic church— among the oldest remaining monuments of the city’s founding history. Constructed as the chosen burial church of Brandenburg’s nobility, it is the oldest tomb site for the ruling classes of Berlin and thus bore witness to the historical development of the city. Throughout the 13th century, the Franciscan monastery was extended in various stages including the addition of multiple buildings encompassing the church. Following the dissolution of the Franciscan convent during the 16th century, the building began a series of alternate lives as its ecclesiastical use shifted to a diversely utilized building. Today the remaining ruins of the church are left largely unused. As a result of the urban renewal planning implemented during the second half of the 20th century, the ruins remain in a largely disjointed urban-spatial context. The project proposes a working method, in which a reinterpretation of the site’s history and architecture is used as a model for its reconstruction. Central to the construction of the new is its relationship to history, in this instance, its engagement with the remaining fragment of the Gothic church. Through a reinterpretation of its history and the elements of Gothic architecture, the projects ask—how can the process of reinvention bring the status of the fragment to a coherent, albeit different, whole? How can the adaptation of the ruin refer to its intrinsic character—its elements, spatiality, and materials—and result in an announcement of a new architecture, as well as a faithful addition to its host? The proposal is a new campus that inserts itself as part of a continuous historical evolution, one which generates its own changing values. A reconstruction in a manner that produces new spaces, new programs, new sociality, and new relationships to history.
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Kyle Schumann
Advisors: Paul Lewis and Forrest Meggers
After Regionalism: Constructing Mythos on the Appalachian Trail After Regionalism foregrounds the mythos of place, embracing a vernacular that is not only spatial but also cultural and ritual. The site is the Appalachian Trail (AT), conceived by Benton MacKaye in 1921, a place both highly trafficked and eternally transient. The AT holds the same mysticism today as it has since its formation, boasting a rich history as a national treasure, the setting of storied leisure culture, and home to local variations in flora, fauna, and human culture and construction along its expansive run. The routine traversal of the landscape is punctuated by moments of sublime wonder, both natural and manufactured. In keeping with the scarcity of backpacking culture, new interventions along the trail are reduced to minimum elements—floor, roof, and hearth— that are both familiar and peculiar, assembled in relation to the surrounding landscape. For those who hike the Appalachian Trail, the search for renewal is marked daily by an early rise with the sun and the completion of the day’s mileage before sunset. Likewise an early riser, the shelters are clad in translucent skin reminiscent of a tent, infused with pastel hues as if to register this transformative ritual—an accumulation of sunrises past and present.
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Gillian Shaffer
Advisors: Mónica Ponce de León and Sylvia Lavin
House for an Ambassador Dating back to Vitruvius and De architectura, vision and technology have always been among the structuring topoi of architecture as a discipline. In an era of smartphone cameras, Google Earth, image recognition algorithms, and new spectral ranges of vision, digital technologies are disrupting the traditional circumstances of the built environment. New temporal and spatial relationships are created that do not correspond to human cognition; for architecture today, there is no ideal vantage point and the identification of vision with Truth no longer holds. The influence of technologies is also characterized by its ubiquity: we all live digitally‐mediated lives, feeding data—visual and otherwise—to the machines around us. The ambassador’s house embodies the idea of multiple representations, multiple locations, and multiple temporalities from within; a kind of limit condition to test the impacts of technology. Data breaches, surveillance and covert attacks (visible in the sound attacks on the American embassy in Cuba in November 2016) are concerns, but the house is foremost an exporter of culture abroad, as the ambassador seeks to give a positive, transparent image to the host country. Features such as screens and windows, which on the exterior are a part of the house’s camouflage, double as filters on the interior, allowing viewers to look out onto augmented views of the surrounding landscape.
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Eda Yetim
Advisor: Mónica Ponce de León
Muqarnas Spaces: A Constellated Organization System The Muqarnas, a distinctive ornamentation implemented in architectural elements such as the squinch, cupola, and corbel, have become extinct in the architectural ecosystem of today. Muqarnas’ three-dimensional interlocking system creates nonrepetitive patterns with standardized units using unit iteration over unit differentiation. Most of today’s fabrication methods for parametrically generated forms disregard unit logic, resulting in an excessive number of differentiating subdivisions which require an exhaustive level of custom production. Through a closer examination of muqarnas’ under-explored geometric complexity in the history of architecture, the project adapts Muqarnas’ aperiodic tiling system and its profile joints to the architectural scale, by redistributing the spatial hierarchy and interrupting its field condition.
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Undergraduate Studios
2018
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The undergraduate program provides a foundation for graduate professional study in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, historic preservation, and related fields of study. The program prepares students for further study at the graduate level in design and the history and theory of architecture or art.
Undergraduate Program
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ARC 204 Undergraduate Design Studio Professor Paul Lewis and Visiting Lecturer Annie Barrett with Assistant Instructors Kyle Schumann, Gillian Shaffer, Tyler Suomala, and Sharon Xu
Introduction to Architectural Design
2018
109
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This is an introductory studio course in an architectural design, examining the origins and conventions of representation in archiÂtecture. Spatial relationships, and the qualities of space itself, will be examined using photography, two-dimensional projections of sectional planes (plan and section), computer models, and three-dimensional physical models. The studio is comprised of a series of sequential projects that develop both technical skills and conceptual thinking. Abstract and inventive thinking will be developed through a series of projects that transform spatial relationships from three dimensions into two dimensions, and from two dimensions into three. Particular emphasis will be paid to how these abstract representations of physical space may be ordered in such a way to introduce notions of movement and time. Concepts of the scale of the body in relationship to space will be examined through the introduction of site and program. Attention to craft, in both the making of two-dimensional drawings and threedimensional models, will be emphasized as a way of developing precision and abstraction in both thinking and making.
Undergraduate Program
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Casey McAlpin Kemper ARC 204—Spring 2018 Introduction to Architectural Design
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Madison Paige Werthmann ARC 204—Spring 2018 Introduction to Architectural Design
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Elizabeth Ann Keim ARC 204—Spring 2018 Introduction to Architectural Design
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Anson Hyde Jones ARC 204—Spring 2018 Introduction to Architectural Design
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ARC 350 Junior Design Studio Visiting Lecturer Gia Wolff with Assistant Instructors Gillian Shaffer and Georgina Baronian
Primal Retreat: A space for two polemically opposite inhabitants
2018
119
Workbook
The dwelling is a space that provides the most intrinsic and primal needs for living. It is the most rudimentary and fundamental construction of architecture that bears the absolute essential elements necessary for creating habitable space. While primitive in its structural foundation, the dwelling is also a social, political, and economic vessel that participates in the construction of our cultural context. The course will be divided into two parts that both explore quantitative and qualitative aspects of a dwelling, from measurable objects and delineated functions, to performative and experiential sequencing of and within spaces. Students will be asked to visualize experience in order to rationalize its meaning as an architectural tool. In seeking to reduce the space of occupation to its most essential characteristics of habitation, the studio will expand its architectural landscape as means to exhaust the possibilities, and refine each project with a clear set of intentions that highlight the extreme personalities of their dwellers.
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ARC350: FALL 2017 :: NOSHIN KHAN
Noshin Khan and Olivia Rhodes ARC 350—Fall 2017 Primal Retreat
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Allison Glossinger and Angela Loescher Montal ARC 350—Fall 2017 Primal Retreat
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Rachel Coe-Scharff ARC 350—Fall 2017 Primal Retreat
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Susan Guo and Lauren Auyeung ARC 350—Fall 2017 Primal Retreat
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ARC 351 Junior Design Studio Visiting Lecturer Hayley Eber with Assistant Instructor Jacob Comerci
Social Space, Social Media, and the Future of the Eating Club
The Eating Club at Princeton is the quintessential social space for most undergraduates, serving as a dining hall and social center for its members. On campus, where more than 80 percent of juniors and seniors eat meals in one of eleven privately owned clubs on Prospect Avenue, known as ‘’the Street,’’ the Eating Clubs dominate social life. 2018
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Although to many students, the Clubs remain potent symbols of privilege, anachronistic, and out of place on an increasingly diverse campus. Through critically examining this antiquated model of the Eating Club, with its exclusive membership and unique “bickering” process, this studio will explore new forms, models, and typologies of social space today. Central to this investigation is the relationship of social media to social space. Digital photographs or videos, easy to take and easy to make, have become vehicles, the obligatory transport, for a status update. How do we account for the emergence of “made for Instagram” moments, or “selfie spots” as a prerequisite? What should we make of the evident popularity of crowdsourced categories and the excitement associated with discovery and collection? While it might be more or less clear what social media is doing for architects, what is it doing for, or to, architecture? How is the “social” assembled in or by social media, and in a school that has a “social contract,” how do we understand this mediated “social” in relation to architecture?
Undergraduate Program
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Noshin Kahn ARC 351—Spring 2018 Social Space, Social Media ARCH 351 : SPRING 2018 :: NOSHIN KHAN DINING ROOM
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Lauren Auyeng ARC 351—Spring 2018 Social Space, Social Media
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ARC 404 Senior Studio Visiting Lecturer Annie Barrett with Assistant Instructor Kyle Schumann
The Archive of Instigation
2018
137
Workbook
In this final design studio of the sequence, we will ask how architecture—the system that organizes people, program, and materials in space— participates in the production of social and political change. Working rigorously between concepts and iterative tangible 2D and 3D studies students will develop independently-driven proposals for a new cultural institution located in Brooklyn, New York. The Archive of Instigation will be a cultural resource that connects physical artifacts to collective action, re-framing the value of its tangible collection as a catalyst for civic engagement. Part archive, part meeting hall and part public forum, the Archive of Instigation will be home to a growing collection of cultural objects produced by social movements throughout history.
Undergraduate Program
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Alissa Lopez Serfozo ARC 404—Fall 2017 The Archive of Instigation
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Zoe Toledo ARC 404—Fall 2017 The Archive of Instigation
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Undergraduate Thesis Projects
2018
143
Workbook
The senior thesis is a detailed project, presenting a well-argued piece of research on a precise architectural theme and may include a substantial amount and variety of visual materials (including any of several forms of representation: architectural drawings, models, video, photographs, and computer-generated images). The relative proportion of written to visual material for each student is agreed upon with the adviser and thesis committee. The final presentation and oral defense of the senior thesis in the spring constitutes a section of the departmental examination. UNDERGRADUATE THESIS PROJECTS Jackson Forbes The New Workplace: An Evolution of the Office Marc Hedrick, II The Sprawl Cycle: Why Technological Advancements Continue to Promote Inefficient Horizontal Urban Growth Alissa Lopez Serfozo Architecture as Building, Object, and Curatorial Project: Retracing the History of Architecture Exhibitions at the Venice Biennale Arthur MacWaters 20th Century Urban Planning and Applications for Affordable Housing Matthew Maldonado The Revolving House: A Paradoxical Intersect of Kinetic Architecture and Kinetic Sculpture
Undergraduate Program
Kylee Pierce Tiny House on the Prairie: The American Pastoral’s Influence on the Image of the American Home Frances Steere Learning from South Africa: Contradicting the Myth of Core/ Periphery Knowledge of Production Zoe Toledo The Invention of Navajo Nature: Building, Heritage, and Land in the 1930s Clark Vaughn Architects of Accommodation: A Historical and Architectural Analysis of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown Sophia Williams The Powers of Ten, Directed by Ray and Charles Eames: Space Exploration, Communications Theory, and the Homogenization of Scale in the 1970s
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Jackson Forbes
Adviser: Andrew Laing
The New Workplace: An Evolution of the Office The office has experienced several major shifts throughout its history. These shifts are caused by breaks in what has become the office standard of the time. These breaks seem to coincide with major shifts in society, the economy, or scientific breakthroughs, such as the construction of the railroad. Regardless of what the root cause of the break is, the resulting shift pushes the office into a new era. Along with these major breaks there are constants frequently changing due to the study and demands of office performance. The questions I explore in this thesis are: Why is the office changing, what are the specific demands in a given era that must be met? What are the determining factors causing it to change, who are the designers and creators, and what exactly does the shape of the office take?
civil engineering background along with being a part of the design and construction
cess of over twenty buildings at Adler & Sullivan most definitely exposed him to
undations, steel framing, cladding, fenestration, roofing, heating, ventilation, lighting,
mbing,� and more.90
above: Reens, Louis, 1964. Herman Miller, Action Office. left: Buffalo, Courtesy and County Historical, Erie. Larkin Administration Building, light court.
Fig. 5. Reens, Louis, 1964. Herman Miller, Action Office. Reprodu
The Cubicle came about because of the Herman Miller Ac
ded to liberate the employee by making the necessities of the
desk more engaging. Yet, the cubicle style office plan is one o
g adults preparing to enter the workforce. Fig. 8. Buffalo, Courtesy and County Historical, Erie. Larkin Administration Building, light court. Reproduced in Full details of book.
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Marc Hedrick, II Adviser: Axel Kilian
The Sprawl Cycle: Why Technological Advancements Continue to Promote Inefficient Horizontal Urban Growth In preparation for a significantly growing population over the next 50 years, urban planners and developers have the task of designing and building cities that can efficiently and responsibly provide housing in a sustainable manner. Looming problems such as climate change and mobility throughout the city create difficult problems that need to be addressed in future planning. There are many influences that affect the urban fabric of a geographic area. But what is the key element to consider in future planning to best address anticipated substantial increases in urban population? To answer this, I examined two city models: (1) urban sprawl (horizontal growth) and (2) dense cities (vertical growth) and compared two crucial aspects of their sustainability: transit methods and environmental influences.
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Alissa Lopez Serfozo
Advisers: Spyros Papapetros and Mario Gandelsonas
Architecture as Building, Object, and Curatorial Project: Retracing the History of Architecture Exhibitions at the Venice Biennale Every two years, the Venice Architecture Biennale hosts a unique spectacle of architecture. Architectural designers, historians, and curators meet within a large-scale exhibition of architectural work from many different parts of the world. The discussions that arise provide a unique opportunity for architecture to interact within the discipline and with a public audience. The bi-annual repetition of the architecture sector of the Venice Biennale has made it difficult to focus its chronological scope: is it supposed to show the architecture of the future, the past, or the past two years? This remains a persistent question. While one might describe the history of the Architecture Biennale as a series of different themes and points of view, I am interested in a more subtle continuity. Each Biennale gives a different answer to the relationship between history and practice. I am interested in tracing these relationships at three scales: the curatorial project, the architectural objects, and the buildings of the Biennale.
LetterContents from Hans to the President of for thethe Biennale, enclosing of Hollein Hans Hollein’s submission S t ra d a N ovi s s i m a layouts for Strada Novissima, March 3, 1980, b.006, Faldone “Submisione”, Fondo Storico, ASAC Enclosing at Vega-Cygnus, Porto Marghera, Letter from Hans Hollein to President Layouts for Exhibit Space, March Venezia, Italia.
3, 1980, b.006, Faldone “Submisione”, Fondo Storico, ASAC at Vega-Cygnus, Porto Marghera, Venezia, Italia.
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Arthur MacWaters Adviser: Forrest Meggers
20th Century Urban Planning and Applications for Affordable Housing In this thesis, I endeavor to provide an overarching knowledge of the three most important urban models of the 20th century— Modernism, Suburbanism, and New Urbanism—through the lens of some of the most influential thinkers and writers in each field. This project was inspired by an invitation to consult the construction of a new, 300-unit, 13-acre Affordable Housing village in Arvada, Colorado. I realized that it would benefit myself and those involved to understand the history and theory behind this type of project, so I have striven to provide a work that discusses the merits and drawbacks of previous models. My hope is that this knowledge will benefit this project’s team, their mission, and the future inhabitants of the community they are building. Urbanist and activist Jane Jacobs once said, “We expect too much of new buildings, and too little of ourselves.” To me, that means that the best hope for creating a flourishing community is to take responsibility for the elements that make it possible and to educate, empower, and expect others to do the same.
every inch of the existing city under its two-square mile footprint.
ety, etc., but they also have maintained a degree of class and race
by factors such as density requirements.38 We will discuss this effect in
hapter 4, but suffice to say for the moment that by capping density in the
iscriminate against cheaper, denser housing stock such as apartments
ousing, suburbs have remained primarily white and upper-middle class
orbusier’s sketch for an avenue in La Ville Contemporaine, 1925
usier’s idea could not coexist with what stood there already. He proposed
was not given a name until two decades after
ing city and replace it. The space necessary for large parks would be freed
Jacobs. Though not an architect nor a planne
uildings and condensing all habitation into high rise towers, each of
dentical monolith logically gridded out in the parkland. Rising hundredsrespected of voice became
as an authority in the
est of Paris’ 3-4 story skyline, they would be like a collection of blocky
contrary to the Jeffersonian logic of Wright,
making cement golems to stand beside Gustave Eiffel’s famous tower.
because only Le Corbusier but also for many modernists, achieving bothof
the egality and vibrancy of its pra
ogic was the objective. Though this was no longer the age thatRecall fetishized the
reign of Robert Moses and
it was certainly that which worshipped the machine.6 With Paris, Le
village neighborhood to make way for the Lo
hat chaos ruled the narrow, convoluted streets, and a machine mentality
Greenwich village, from its plight. The “machine” could rescue man from his own mess. on the state of cities across Europe at the time, the unplanned, This, in more
as well as other neighbor
ways than one, is an instructive
ernacular, sprawling cities ofsketch the old he said, top left: Le Corbusier’s forworld, an avenue in “The lack of order to
the term “blight” by the modernists to justify
1925us; their degradation wounds our selfwhereLa inVille [theContemporaine, old cities] offends top right: Jane Jacobs above: In Levittown, de-facto segregation practices kept all inhabitants white to maintain “respectability.” This legacy haunts suburbia to this day.
cultural hotspot and a hub for artists and fam
it was diagnosed vittown, de-facto segregation practicesNonetheless kept all inhabitants white to as a ripe candi of impending doom. It may have see ctability.” This legacy haunts suburbiashadow to this day.
91
unexpectedly became the forge that created J practices such as redlining, and the152 commonplace prejudice of financial
minorities out of these suburbs for much of the 20th century before the
Matthew Maldonado Adviser: Paul Lewis
The Revolving House: A Paradoxical Intersect of Kinetic Architecture and Kinetic Sculpture Where does a structure that is designed for the specific purpose of movement and freedom from the constraints of the site, yet is also so rooted within that site by its own supporting mechanisms, fit into the spectrum of the kinetic, and what does this reveal about the very nature of houses and even architectural discourse as a whole? How is the kinetic spectrum defined? Or rather—how does the kinetic occupy a spectrum at all? The revolving house presents itself as a unique paradigm through which the answers to these questions, and indeed what they mean for the architectural discipline, can be explored. The revolving house also implicitly rebels against and challenges the traditional notion of residential architecture and the basic logic of buildings in general—that is, that buildings are expected to resist movement, be grounded in their foundations, exude stability, embed themselves within the context of their site, and otherwise serve as unchanging and immutable constants. Together, all of these factors combine within the underlying structures and foundation of the revolving house to give an outward appearance that portrays a radical break from the embedded and the stationary, but in fact implicitly relies upon those very same qualities to achieve this break. This inherent paradox of the revolving house is what makes it so integral to the discussion surrounding kinetic architecture and kinetic sculpture. This thesis will explore not only this paradoxical relationship between the revolving house and traditional stationary architecture, but use it as a specific focus to deconstruct the differences between and characteristics of kinetic architecture and kinetic sculpture.
154 Figure 12. Technical drawing of the structure of the Villa Girasole and interior pho the central shaft as they appeared in Galfetti et al.’s Villa Girasole: la casa rotante = th house.
Drawing and interior photograph of the central shaft of Villa Girasole as they appeared in Galfetti et al.’s Villa Girasole: la casa rotante = the revolving house.
Kylee Pierce
Adviser: Aaron Shkuda
Tiny House on the Prairie: The American Pastoral’s Influence on the Image of the American Home This thesis examines the influence of the American pastoral on American architecture and housing. The imagery of the American pastoral, as seen through nineteenth-century Hudson River School paintings, created ideals concerning mastery of the American landscape and a visual balance between home and landscape. However, the modern suburbs have degraded both the imagery and ideals of the pastoral. The McMansion, as the ideal suburban house, has inverted the pastoral scale of home and landscape, with the home as the primary figure, degrading the physical landscape in the process. On the other hand, the tiny house recovers this pastoral scale and merges the original intentions of the pastoral with the competing consumer culture of the American suburbs. This thesis argues that the myth of the American pastoral has created a strong connection between home and landscape that continues to influence the image of the American home.
e, Home in the Woods, Oil on canvas, 1847, Reynolda House Museum of Am
Cole, Home in the Woods, Oil on canvas, 1847, Reynolda House Museum of Ameri
Thomas Cole’s “Home in the Woods” (1847); “Boxcar” tiny house, Timbercraft Tiny Homes
ercraft Tiny Homes, 24’ Boxcar - $62,000. http://timbercrafttinyhomes.com/
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mbercraft Tiny Homes, 24’ Boxcar - $62,000. http://timbercrafttinyhomes.com/galle
Frances Steere
Adviser: Aaron Shkuda
Learning from South Africa: Contradicting the Myth of Core/ Periphery Knowledge of Production Kenneth Frampton’s theory of Critical Regionalism has generally been understood to have disseminated from the “West” to the rest of the world. This analytical trope is true of a previous study of Critical Regionalism (Eggener) which determined that it was a neocolonial theory. This study was limited in scope to Mexico, it did not engage localized discourses on decolonization and nationalism, and it did not address the primacy of Denise Scott-Brown, a South African, to the formulation of the theory. I analyze the origin and reception of Critical Regionalism relative to South Africa, to upset the trope that the theory originated in the United States and was passively received in the rest of the world. Moreover, I identify how popular agency is discursively undercut in the theory’s formulation by way of Kenneth Frampton’s preceding exchanges with Denise Scott-Brown. I look at two pieces of South African architecture, which were expressive of the “rainbow nation” narrative before and after the end of apartheid in 1994 and consider their connection to Critical Regionalism. I connect decolonial critiques of modernism, architectural elitism, and nationalism to this critique. It is arguably the ideal outcome of a theory intended to counteract homogenization and to foster “authentic dialogue” that critical insight should filter back from the “periphery” to the “core” regarding the colonial assumptions which stand in the way of undominated expression.
Figure 1 : Cover of Architecture SA October 1982
Ivor Prinsloo, 12 Towards Appropriate Architecture For South Africa (cover of Architecture SA), December 1982, Multimedia, 210 x 297 mm, December 1982, Victoria University of Wellington Library. The caption provided in the front leaf of the magazine reads: “A pencil drawing by Ivor Prinsloo after Laugier and others to symbolize Architecture directing the alter egos of young Southern Africa towards a reality that is concrete, based on the land, recognizing labour and production, paying homage to both European and African cultural heritages, and recognizing the architect’s propensity to measure almost anything.”
h African architecture, one built 20 years before the end of apartheid
10 years afterward, mark the initiation and the apex of the South Afr
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n’s expression of rainbow nationalism, that joined the stratified South
Zoe Toledo
Adviser: Lucia Allais
The Invention of Navajo Nature: Building, Heritage, and Land in the 1930s This thesis examines a period around the 1930s when the economic crisis of the United States provoked a profound reevaluation of the management of Native American tribes, their lands, and their participation in a process of modernization. Under the direction of Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, the Office of Indian Affairs sought to demonstrate “progressive” ideals and formulate a new methodology for the management of Native lands and Native people. Ideally, this new method would negotiate introducing a new kind of Native citizenship with the preservation of Native Heritage. At the center of this negotiation architecture and building became a tool for architectural transformation. Where architecture took on the dual role of signaling progress through control of the built environment and the incorporation of the new, and of being subject to the logic of heritage, and inheritance. I analyze this line of inquiry through three development projects, the demonstration station, the Tribal Council House, and the Day School typology. I demonstrate how idealist bureaucrats, political agents, architects, and scientists all engaged in the process of realizing these projects performed the modern gesture of designating what is tradition, drawing a line between the modern and the traditional, and constantly moving that line. This action, I argue took place in the three development projects at three different scales of development: the scale of territory, architecture, and program. The aim of the thesis is therefore to historically chronicle how architecture contributed to the story of three development projects whose role was to teach the Navajo people to “modernize’ but whose end result was the creation of a sub-par Navajo nationalism still beholden to federal paternalism.
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Figure 2.2 Navajo Capital in Window Rock, Arizona, American Architect and Architecture, (1977).
Figure Whereas the photograph of the Tribal Council House exemplified the material
Schools condition of the building, a description of “The First Tribal Capital” written by Collier in
American Indians at Work identifies different local conditions beyond the picturesque outline generated
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by the quasi-adobe presence of the building: The Capitol, or Council House, is Indian. It has the traditional octagonal shape of the Navajo Hogan. No doors or windows open on its north side, and the entrance door faces the east. Traditionally too it will be made of the materials, which the Navajos have always used – adobe, stone, sticks and logs. Natural stone from the surrounding cliffs and logs of native pine will make the main building. The roof will be adobe, with wood canals (hollowed tree logs) to
top: Navajo Capital in Window Rock, Arizona, American Architect and Architecture, (1977). above:carry “Hogan Schools” Shonto, Arizona, American Architect andfurniture Architecture. offDaythe rain. atThe Interior decoration and the will be
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Navajo;
Navajo artists will contribute their paintings and Navajo craftsmen their rugs
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and basketry. It will be built by all Indian Labor- 60,000 man-hours of it.82
Clark Vaughn Adviser: Julian Rose
Architects of Accommodation: A Historical and Architectural Analysis of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown are an architectural partnership and husband and wife duo whose influence and innovation in the fields of architecture and urbanism are difficult to both define and overstate. An enormous amount has been written regarding almost every individual element of Venturi and Scott Brown’s body of work. These critiques, analyses, and derivatives have paralleled the half-century duration of Venturi and Scott Brown’s productive years, and will most likely continue long into the future. The tremendous nature of this volume of work is perhaps largely due to Venturi and Scott Brown’s fundamental role in the emergence of Postmodernism. Learning from Las Vegas, a book written by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, originally published in 1972, showcases many of the views and theories which were then fairly unique, especially when considered in the context of a contemporaneous intellectual architectural establishment with a preexisting disposition towards Modernism. Expressed through writing, photography, and drawing, this work represented a mass-produced condensation of many of Venturi and Scott Brown’s almost counter-culture views. This specific moment, the foundation of Postmodernism, is of particular importance to much of the written work on Venturi and Scott Brown and more specifically, Learning from Las Vegas. It is though, for the aim of this thesis, of secondary importance. Its importance here lies merely in its status as a derived phenomenon associated with a work that will be thoroughly analyzed within the framework of the aims of this thesis. It is perhaps relevant to note that the pair did not necessarily consider themselves to be Postmodernists, much in the same way, according to Denise Scott Brown, that “Freud was not a Freudian.” This thesis will consider a timeline of Venturi and Scott Brown’s career that reaches beyond the watershed emergence of Postmodernism.
Lieb House, Long Beach, NJ (Relocated in 2009 to Glen Cove, NY)
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Moreover, this thesis will ultimately strive This beach house, pictured above and completed in 1969, is notable compared to to outline a core set of fundamental beliefs, the previous twotheories, projects inetc. thatWithout it is neither civic nor personal in nature. The building, philosophies, which, Learning from Las Vegas never and Judith Lieb as a weekend home on a “...was commissioned in 1967would by Nathaniel have been possible. Robert Venturi and beachfront site in the New Jersey town of Loveladies, Long Beach Island.”135 This is an Denise Scott Brown are legitimate archiinteresting project to consider because of its place as a part time home for a wealthy tectural revolutionaries. Their enduring influence and fame is Vanna well deserved, and and Fire Station No. 4. The sentiment of client, as opposed to the Venturi House comes directly from their expressed desire bringing together social and formal considerations in architecture136 would seemingly be to accommodate, uplift, and look to the more of a difficult task, if not an irrelevant one, in a commission such as this. common/popular. Nonetheless, it is still accomplished in some elements of this project. Venturi, Scott top: Lieb House, Long Beach, NJ (relocated
Brown, and Associates’ in 2009 to Glen Cove, NY) brief on this project described it as “...an ordinary little house right: “ironic column” within the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College
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Martino Stierli, “Preservation Parade: The Mediatization of the Lieb House into a Monument.” Future 148 Anterior 7, no. 1 (2010): 46. 135 Ibid, 46. 134
Sophia Williams
Adviser: M. Christine Boyer
The Powers of Ten, Directed by Ray and Charles Eames: Space Exploration, Communications Theory, and the Homogenization of Scale in the 1970s The thesis explores the short films of Charles and Ray Eames in the 1960s and 70s in the era of modernism in postwar America. Powers of Ten, grounded in the impulse to take sight of the extents of the universe that has pervaded through history, echoes the instinct to map the world in a holistic manner, and signifies the comprehension of the immense space as a singular visual representation. Powers of Ten, the final version of earlier drafts completed by the Eameses in 1977, narrated a smooth journey through the scales of the Earth made available by developments in satellite photography. Their assemblage of dimensions, new dimensions of technological access to space and new dimensions of the possible discoveries of information, in the film, reflected the scientific desire to synthesize fragments through a singular visual presentation. Theories about the anthropocentric experience, and the historical scientific drive to understand the world from a detached and objective perspective, also explained the context through which the Eameses advocated for a universal language, a universal language of communication through cybernetics, and a universal language through vision as a means of presenting ideas. The synthesis of information in Powers of Ten is indicative of their interest in technology, in the newly available techniques of representation and the production of satellite images, and the ideas of cosmological space exploration and novel scales that the film attempts to synthesize, make sense of, and resolve. Additionally, this interest and many of their short films were contextualized in partnerships with corporations such as IBM, who utilized the Eameses’ approach to assembling and resolving the complexities of the universe, and hired the Eameses to generate
visual representations to resolve issues around the threatening nature of the computer and make complex ideas about the how technology operated comprehensible to the public. Using Superpowers of Ten as a lens, an exhibition by Andrés Jaque that reinterprets the original film, and by studying Ray and Charles Eameses’ films in the context of new technological developments in the 1970s and the political climate of the Cold War, driving an impulse for unity in the face of 110 an unknown and precarious future, my thesis explores how the Eameses’ contextualized approach to mapping the world, as well as their investigation of communications theory and the universal language of vision at the moment of the computer, gave form to modern ideas about perceiving, representing, and understanding the role of the human in the space of the universe.
Superpowers of Ten, directed by Andrés for for Political Figure 34. Superpowers of Ten, Directed by Jaque Andrés and Jaquethe andOffice the Office Political Innovation, 2015. Architecture Chicago Architecture Biennial, Chicago. Innovation, 2015. Chicago Biennial, Chicago. 2015.chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/exhibition/participants/ http://2015.chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/exhibition/participants/andres-jaque-office-forandres-jaque-office-forpolitical-innovation/. political-innovation/.
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Princeton University School of Architecture Architecture Building Princeton NJ 08544-5264 Main Office 609–258–3741 Programs 609–258–3641 Fax 609–258–4740 E-Mail soa@princeton.edu Site soa.princeton.edu Design: Omnivore Printed in Iceland
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Doctoral Degree in Architecture
The Ph.D. Program
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The interdisciplinary nature of the doctoral (Ph.D.) program stresses the relationship of architecture, urbanism, landscape, and building technologies to their cultural, social, and political milieus. Supported by strong affiliations with other departments in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, the program offers a comprehensive approach to the study of the field. Students interact with their peers to sustain individual projects in a context of collective research.
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History and Theory Track The Ph.D. committee sets the course requirements for each student according to his or her previous experience, specialized interests, and progress through the program. For the first two years, each student engages in coursework and independent study and is required to complete a minimum of four classes each semester, including required language, audited courses, and independent reading courses, for a total of sixteen courses, at least nine of which must be taken for a grade and result in a paper. After their first year of doctoral study, students are encouraged to apply for assistantships in instruction, which are considered an intrinsic part of a scholar’s training. Technology Track Initiated in 2014, the technology track Ph.D. program develops research in the field of technology. Through associated faculty, it is linked to the School of Engineering and Applied Science, particularly with Computer Science and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. A proseminar for the Ph.D. track supports the initial methods and processes for this research. The applied research component is supported by infrastructure, including an industrial robotic arm located in the School of Architecture’s Embodied Computation Lab and research facilities in the Andlinger Center.
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Recently Completed Dissertations in History and Theory The wide range of possible research topics is illustrated by the following dissertations: Ignacio González Galán, Circulating Interiors: The Logics of Arredamento and the Furnishing of National Imaginaries in Italy 1922–1945 (2018); advisers: Lucia Allais and Beatriz Colomina Vanessa Grossman, A Concrete Alliance: Modernism, Communism, and the Design of Urban France, 1958–1981 (2018); advisers: Lucia Allais and Jean-Louis Cohen Masha Panteleyeva, Re-Forming the Socialist City: Form and Image in the Work of the Soviet Experimental Group NER, 1960–1970 (2018); adviser: Lucia Allais Joseph Bedford, Creativity’s Shadow: Dalibor Vesely, Phenomenology and Architectural Education (1968–89) (2017); adviser: Lucia Allais Daria Ricchi, From Storia to History (and Back): Fiction, Literature, and Historiography in Postwar Italian Architecture (2016); adviser: Spyros Papapetros Luis Aviles Rincon, Rhetoric Matters: Image, Textures, and the Discussion around Modern Ornamentation (1932–61) (2016); adviser: Beatriz Colomina Jasmine Benyamin, Towards a (New) Objectivity: Photography in German Architectural Discourse 1900–14 (2015); adviser: M. Christine Boyer Leonardo Diaz Borioli, Collective Autobiography Building Luis Barragán (2015); adviser: Beatriz Colomina Zvi Efrat, The Object of Zionism: Architecture of Statehood in Israel, 1948–73 (2014); adviser: Beatriz Colomina Alicia Imperiale, Alternate Organics: The Aesthetics of Experimentation in Art, Technology & Architecture in Postwar Italy (2014); adviser: M. Christine Boyer
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Molly W. Steenson, Architectures of Information: Christopher Alexander, Cedric Price, and Nicholas Negroponte & MIT’s Architecture Machine Group (2014); adviser: M. Christine Boyer Craig Buckley, Graphic Apparatuses: Architecture, Media, and the Reinvention of Assembly 1956–73 (2013); adviser: Beatriz Colomina Mark Campbell, A Beautiful Leisure: The Decadent Architectural Humanism of Geoffrey Scott, Bernard and Mary Berenson (2013); adviser: Beatriz Colomina Anthony Fontenot, Non-Design and the Non-Planned City (2013); adviser: M. Christine Boyer Lisa L. Hsieh, ArchiteXt: The Readable, Playable and Edible Architecture of Japanese New Wave (2013); adviser: Beatriz Colomina Lydia Kallipoliti, MISSION GALATIC HOUSEHOLD: The Resurgence of Cosmological Imagination in the Architecture of the 1960s and 1970s (2013); adviser: Beatriz Colomina Diana Kurkovsky West, CyberSovietica: Planning, Design, and the Cyber-netics of Soviet Space, 1954–86 (2013); adviser: M. Christine Boyer Daniel Lopez-Perez, SKYSCRAPEROLOGY: Tall Buildings in History and Building Practice (1975–84) (2013); adviser: Spyros Papapetros Enrique Ramirez, Airs of Modernity 1881–1914 (2013); adviser: M. Christine Boyer Irene Sunwoo, Between the ‘Well-Laid Table’ and the ‘Marketplace’: Alvin Boyarsky’s Experiments in Architectural Pedagogy (2013); adviser: Spyros Papapetros Els Verbakel, Of Voids, Networks and Platforms: Post-War Visions for a European Transnational City: 1952–58 (2013); adviser: M. Christine Boyer Paul B. Preciado, Gender, Sexuality, and the Biopolitics of Architecture from the Secret Museum to Playboy (2012); adviser: Beatriz Colomina
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ARC 571 Ph.D. Proseminar Professor Beatriz Colomina
The Illness of Modern Architecture Architecture and medicine have always been tightly interlinked. If classical theories of the Greek polis followed theories of the four humors, contemporary ideas of health organize design theories today. Architectural discourse weaves itself through theories of body and brain, constructing the architect as a kind of doctor and the client as patient. Vitruvius launched Western architectural theory in the first century BC by insisting that all architects needed to study medicine: “Healthfulness being their chief object.” As Renaissance schools of medicine used casts of body parts, design schools used cast fragments of historical buildings for teaching, and anatomical dissection was a central part of the training. As medical representations changed, so did architectural representations. In the twentieth century, the widespread use of X-rays made a new way of thinking about architecture possible. Modern buildings even started to look like medical images, with transparent glass walls revealing the inner secrets of the building. Indeed, modern architecture cannot be understood outside of tuberculosis. The symptoms, if not the principles, of modern architecture seem to have been taken straight out of a medical text on the disease. Every age has its signature afflictions and each affliction has its architecture. The age of bacterial diseases gave birth to modern architecture, to white buildings detached from the “humid ground where disease breeds,” as Le Corbusier put it. The discovery of
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Mies van der Rohe’s Tugendhat House (Brno, 1929), turned into a dance and rehabilitation center for children in the 1950s
antibiotics put an end to that age. In the postwar years, attention shifted to psychological problems. The architect was not seen just as a doctor but as a shrink, the house not just a medical device for the prevention of disease, but for providing psychological comfort, “nervous health.” The twenty-first century is the age of neurological disorders: depression, ADHD, borderline personality disorders, burnout syndrome, and allergies—the “environmentally hypersensitive” unable to live in the modern world. What is the architecture of these afflictions? What does it mean for design? After a series of three introductory sessions on the relationship between illnesses, architecture, and the city, each seminar will be dedicated to the architectural and urban consequences of a different illness, medical technology, or theory of health. Particular attention will be paid to the transcalar implications of illnesses from body, to furniture, to interior, to building, neighborhood, city, and globe. All students will be required to make a presentation during at least one of the sessions and write a term paper.
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Cincinnati Library (1874) J. W. McLaughlin, Architect Photographer Unknown
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ARC 572 Ph.D. Proseminar Professor M. Christine Boyer
Constituting an Archive “The idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity.” [Michel Foucault: “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” [French 1984], trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, 16/1 (1986), 26.] Nevertheless and despite the fantasy of achieving a total collection, an archive can never contain everything. It can amass a lot, but there will be gaps in the series collected, ruptures in the field surveyed, erasures, and silences of the non-archived. This class will explore issues surrounding the constitution of an archive. Focusing on the figure of the archive and archival practices, it will question the relationship between the system of accumulation and the politics of its use by critics, curators, historians, artists, architects and administrators. The course aims to contextualize the constitution of an archive at the time of its accumulation and exclusions. It will self-consciously reflect on and debate the contemporary archival impulse. “Going against the grain” of the archive means explaining the reasons behind what is actually retrieved and what perhaps is more relevant. It requires developing an external view of the archive.
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Ph.D. Dissertation Abstracts
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Joseph Thomas Bedford
Creativity’s Shadow: Dalibor Vesely, Phenomenology and Architectural Education During The Cold War (1968–89) The dissertation explores an episode in the history of architectural education surrounding the career of Czech architectural educator Dalibor Vesely. It follows the historical development of his career during the cold war (from the early 1960s to 1989). It begins with his life in Totalitarian Czechoslovakia and then moves to his new life as an émigré in London teaching at the Architectural Association where he was one of the first unit masters in Alvin Boyarsky’s new AA diploma unit system and Essex University where he taught in an innovative new history and theory teaching partnership with Joseph Rykwert. It ends with the mature phase of his career as a professor of architecture at Cambridge University, where he taught in close collaboration with Peter Carl. By examining the material, institutional, and discursive world of the teaching practices surrounding Vesely, the dissertation explores the interaction between his interpretation of phenomenology first formed in Czechoslovakia in the dissident culture of the artistic underground and the problems and issues common to higher education in general and architectural education in particular. It argues that the logic of the underground stayed with Vesely from one context to the next and had positive and problematic effects on the architectural education he created. And it did so in such a way that diverged from and contradicted the innovations of phenomenology.
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Daphne Beckett, sketch of Dalibor Vesely’s evening seminar, 1988–89
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Ignacio González Galán
Circulating Interiors: The Logics of Arredamento and the Furnishing of National Imaginaries in Italy 1922–1945 This dissertation examines a growing culture of interiors that unfolded in Italy in parallel to the development of modern architecture and its politicization throughout the fascist period. The discourse and practices of this culture were inflected by the use of the term “arredamento”—meaning both the furniture item and the ensemble of elements that furnishes a livable space. The emphases of the term signaled an investment in the material elements that construct an environment and reflected a shift in the understanding of the interior from a unified and enclosed realm toward an unstable arrangement of elements in motion. These arrangements were inseparable from other contemporary modes of circulation, including increasingly relevant market transfers, processes of information dissemination, and movements of people in migration displacements, colonial campaigns, and touristic endeavors. This dissertation traces the development of the architectural construct of arredamento and its mobilization in the collaboration of architects and designers such as Gio Ponti and Carlo Enrico Rava, together with an array of commercial and cultural agents and nation-reaching institutions such as the department store La Rinascente, newspaper Corriere della Sera, magazine Domus, film studios Cinecittà, and the state tourism agency ENITEA among others. The works resulting from these collaborations negotiated the increasingly characteristic hybrid nature of architectural interiors in search of a new form of cohesion. They simultaneously provided a privileged framework to mediate contemporaneous shifts shaking traditional social orders as a consequence of the country’s
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clockwise from top left: Gio Ponti, “Ambienti in trasformazione,” Corriere della Sera (21 November, 1933); collage in “Lumen,” Stile n.10 (Otober, 1941); Salvo d’Angelo, Portable Kitchen, “Exhibition of colonial equipment,” at the VII Milan Triennale (1940); Gio Ponti, sea house (ca. 1940), published as “Un nuovo tipo d’albergo progettato da Ponti e Rudofsky per le coste e le isole del Tirreno e che può essere ideale per la Dalmazia,” Stile n.8 (August, 1941).
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modernization and its characteristic operations of circulation. In response to those shifts, these works resorted to different scales of stabilization that ranged from the family to the nation. While the discourse and practices of arredamento did not directly depend on the fascist regime—different from the contemporary understanding of architecture as “Arte di Stato”—many of these actors and institutions were fundamental buttresses for the development of its program—as a paradigmatic response to those same shifts. This dissertation discusses how the design and circulation of arredamento provided an architectural referent for the management, articulation, and synchronization of Italian society in response to the perceived dissolution of its specificity and its fragmentation.
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Vanessa Grossman
A Concrete Alliance: Modernism, Communism, and the Design of Urban France, 1958–1981 This dissertation examines the long-lasting alliance established between a group of mid-century modern architects and elected officials of the French Communist Party (PCF) between 1958 and 1981. During this period, the PCF developed an idiosyncratic form of architectural patronage in which political agents wished to exert a centralized authority but were not the dominant political power. To manage the reduction in the Party’s prestige and influence and fulfill its desire to communicate a message rather than mobilize workers for revolution, the protagonists of this dissertation used architectural modernism not only to physically shape the urban environment in order to resist Gaullism and its aftermath, but also, and more importantly, to correlate with political discourse. Indeed, architecture was one of the primary mediums through which communist political leaders projected their political program. This dissertation traces how this metaphor evolved within the larger political narrative of the French postwar era. Its title, “A Concrete Alliance,” refers both to the concreteness of architecture as a political tool and to the role of concrete in architectural design, which resurfaced not only in communist-sponsored campaigns, debates, and publications such as La Nouvelle Critique (the Party’s intellectual monthly, 1948– 1980), but also in the buildings that this alliance produced in French cities. Focusing on four distinct cases, this dissertation follows the attempts of architects Paul Chemetov and Jean Deroche (members of the Atelier d’urbanisme et d’architecture, AUA, 1960–1985), Oscar Niemeyer, Jean Prouvé, Renée Gailhoustet, and Jean Renaudie to demonstrate that modern architecture mattered as much if not more in its iconographic, visual, and discursive aspects as it did in its functional ones. 2018
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above: Paul Chemetov, Jean Deroche, Jacques Simon, Valentin Fabre, Miroslav Kostanjevac, and Léon Coraini (Atelier d’urbanisme et d’architecture, AUA, 1960–1985), with Louis Ouhayoun, Briques rouges mixed-use housing complex, Vigneux-sur-Seine, 1960–1964, external view, 1967. Photo: Gérard Dufresne. Courtesy of Paul Chemetov. top right: Oscar Niemeyer’s first sketch for the national headquarters of the French Communist Party, Paris, 1965–1980, featured on the cover of La Nouvelle Critique, no. 1 (182), February 1967. All rights reserved. above right: Presentation to Party leaders of the model of Oscar Niemeyer’s headquarters for the French Communist Party, c. 1965. Courtesy of Mémoires d’Humanité/Archives départementales de la Seine-Saint-Denis. All rights reserved.
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top: Jean Renaudie, Jeanne Hachette mixed-use housing complex, Ivry-sur-Seine, 1970–1976, external view of the building under construction, undated. Courtesy of Archives municipales d’Ivry-sur-Seine. top: Inauguration of the second phase in the construction of the headquarters for the French Communist Party in the presence of its then general secretary Georges Marchais and architect Oscar Niemeyer, 1980. Photo: Joël Lumien. Courtesy of Mémoires d’Humanité/Archives départementales de la Seine-Saint-Denis. All rights reserved.
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Masha Panteleyeva
Re-Forming the Socialist City: Form and Image in the Work of the Soviet Experimental Group NER, 1960–1970 This dissertation explores the relationship between architectural form and social theory through a study of the work of the Soviet unofficial architectural group NER (New Element of Settlement) which was formed in an atmosphere of conflicting control and liberation during the period of the Thaw after Stalin’s death. The uninhibited use of architectural form in NER’s drawings undeniably reflects the creative freedom experienced in the 1960s, yet their work also reveals a complex layering of ideological, socio-political, and stylistic references to socialism as a state-sponsored political system. This dissertation addresses the paradoxical coexistence of the notion of creative freedom with more overtly politicized themes in this architecture, especially as designers were charged with addressing the needs of the state and national production. I hypothesize that this balance was possible due to NER’s methodological ability to experiment with form by creating legible images and by taking the idea of a socialist city as a design problem. While in most architectural histories the post-Stalin transition towards political openness is examined from techno-economic perspectives, its expression of social order through urban form and its representation has never been sufficiently investigated. I argue that through their idea of stratification of urban space aligned with a city’s function as a social organism (rather than an economic one) and with self-governing cultural life at its heart, NER outlined a new social function of architecture—and a neoformal paradigm of urban socialism at large.
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above: The NER Group. Scientific center along the transportation channel. Plasticine model created for the Milan Triennale, 1968. Courtesy of The NER Group Archives. below: The NER Group. The Ideal Communist City with a preface by G. de Carlo. George Braziller: New York, 1969. right: The NER Group members after their diploma defense at the Moscow Architectural Institute, 1960. Courtesy of The NER Group Archives.
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Princeton University School of Architecture Architecture Building Princeton NJ 08544-5264 Main Office 609–258–3741 Programs 609–258–3641 Fax 609–258–4740 E-Mail soa@princeton.edu Site soa.princeton.edu Design: Omnivore Printed in Iceland
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