Workbook 2019 by Princeton University School of Architecture

Princeton University School of Architecture

Workbook 2019

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 2019 2 Graduate Studios 3 15 25 35 43 53 59 69 77

ARC 501—Michael Meredith and Erin Besler ARC 502—Mónica Ponce de León and Cameron Wu ARC 503—Paul Lewis and Guy Nordenson ARC 504—Jesse Reiser ARC 504—Alejandro Zaera-Polo ARC 505b—Sandy Attia and Matteo Scagnol ARC 505c—Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda ARC 506a—Kunlé Adeyemi ARC 506b—Jackilin Hah Bloom and Florencia Pita

85 Professional Program Thesis Projects 97 Post-Professional Program Thesis Projects 111 Undergraduate Studios 113 123 131 141

ARC 350a—Hayley Eber ARC 350b—Gia Wolff ARC 351—Jesse Reiser and Stefana Parascho ARC 404—Marshall Brown

147 Ph.D. Program 153 Ph.D. Proseminars 159 Ph.D. Dissertation Abstracts

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Graduate Studios

Master’s Program

ARC 501 Architecture Design Studio Associate Professor Michael Meredith and Assistant Professor Erin Besler

medium (technical support) + convention (genre, typology, history) + play (!@#?) = Architecture

2019

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This is the secret formula. We’re still calibrating the exact proportions. Results may vary. Please bear in mind the following. Medium is how we conceptualize and work through a project (“technical support” i.e. form, function, material, program, 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. They are rewritten from time to time 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. Medium-specificity, as Clement Greenberg saw it, was a search for objective authenticity through material medium. Medium was Modern Art’s protagonist. (see: Avant-Garde and Kitsch ). In architecture, authenticity through medium is, by contrast, inherently problematic: rarely do we construct our work, but rather we represent it in an already mediated form. (We’re at the very least twice as self-conscious.) Inherently removed from its subject matter, architecture has been presented with the false choice between the humanist project of situated materiality (ie Life) and the post-humanist project of representation (ie Art). Recently, we’ve witnessed a kind of return to the “real“ in which the tangibility of the built triumphs over the speculation of the unbuilt, where discourse is trivial at best and where the representation of reality offers an irrefutable proof of concept, photographs and construction documents Master’s Program

being our weapons of choice. The advent of BIM is desirable insofar as it enables actual efficiency that can be evaluated objectively, coordinating an array of architectural contingencies and drafts specifications. Extra-disciplinary activism, which promises engagement with the world wins out over (all-too-familiar) formal navel-gazing experimentation. Recent generations of architects have focused on engaging the “real”, avoiding anxious cultural discourse in favor of technical manuals, privileging operative techniques over fictitious narratives and quantifiable data over qualitative rhetoric. Meaning is more relevant when it can be measured: it’s best when matter-of-fact. Statistics and polling data have taken over our judgment for a lack of any other available ethic. Architecture has become a kind of social science, embracing a facile mode of technological positivism in order to escape the uneasiness of cultural production. Post-postmodernism was characterized by a disciplinary exodus from the constraints of an indexical-semiotic model of architectural production and a way of working after language, after symbolism and after referents. During the 90s, architectural vocabulary was stripped down to its geometry and core diagrams in an attempt to avoid provisional imagery or pictorial composition. Architecture aspired to frustrate compositional models with the complexity and instability afforded by distortion, dismantling, twisting, looping, deleting, folding, repetition and transformation. Computation elevated the rational authority of systems, process, and binary code to the status of protagonist, an architecture that seemed to design itself, discarding the postmodern reliance on imagery and composition while avoiding the problematic nature of authorship and taste. This appropriation of computation allowed 2019

Workbook

architecture to find new modes of organization and composition, relinquishing control while simultaneously expanding our disciplinary techniques in ways that are still being defined. Today, the complexity project of the 90s lingers through the parametric, which permits ever-greater coordination of information and material and fosters additional models and methodologies. Over time, such digital procedures, rather than providing an escape from an architecture of semiotics have instead produced ever-cruder languages based upon tautological constructs now institutionalized, aesthetic symbols of sophistication and evidence of erudite prowess—the very thing they were trying to avoid. At the moment, we are operating within and against two competing positivist ideologies—Functionalism and Formalism— the enduring dialectical cliché that has bifurcated our discipline. The messiness of cultural value is besieged by an unrelenting battery of software, facts and figures. Today, the perception of infallibility surrounding scientific data, those inputs and outputs of systems both formal and functional, has become irrefutable beyond reason. Media at large has ensured that our world has become both irreparably saturated and increasingly diffuse and, as a result, the retreat towards this brand of medium-specificity has become untenable. We encounter flatness as a fundamental condition of cultural production. In any event, the parade of difference and pluralism might not be enough. We don’t know what to choose. Representational projects might not be enough. Activist projects might not be enough. Formalism might not be enough. Sustainability might not be enough, etc... Or maybe it’s all okay. We find ourselves in a moment after Architecture, after pedagogical ideologies. Now, let’s begin. Master’s Program

isometric sections 1/8” = 1’

Luis Munoz ARC 501—Fall 2018 medium (technical support) + convention (genre, typology, history) + play (!@#?) = Architecture

Sonia Ralston ARC 501—Fall 2018 medium (technical support) + convention (genre, typology, history) + play (!@#?) = Architecture

Tower Section

Naomi Steinhagen ARC 501—Fall 2018 medium (technical support) + convention (genre, typology, history) + play (!@#?) = Architecture

PERSPECTIVE DIAGRAM

AXONOMETRIC SCALE: NTS

Art Uribe ARC 501—Fall 2018 medium (technical support) + convention (genre, typology, history) + play (!@#?) = Architecture

PLAN SCALE: 1’-0” = 1/4”

SECTION A-A SCALE: 1’-0” = 1/4”

SECTION B-B SCALE: 1’-0” = 1/4”

SECTION C-C SCALE: 1’-0” = 1/4”

UNROLLED SPACE DIAGRAM

MODULE TYPE DIAGRAM

ARC 502 Architecture Design Studio Professor Mónica Ponce de León and Assistant Professor Cameron Wu with Assistant Instructors Maura Chen, Sheila Lin, and Alex Still

Reflexive Architecture and the City

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This studio will examine the relationship between Architecture and the city through a series of exercises and culminating in a single building project. As a preamble to the studio, we will look at specific historical case studies where the architect’s project has embodied various speculations about the city at large. Rather than merely respond to given context, each student proposal will be expected to imagine and articulate and project new ideas of the city. The semester has been structured as a series of sequential exercises that will lead to a building project in the city of Trenton, NJ. Our building program is a K-12 public school in a low-density neighborhood. Often considered a microcosm of the city, schools are an assemblage of heterogenous room types whose size and scale is carefully choreographed. With a student body of approximately 1900 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 it is part of (campus). We will explore and rehearse specific compositional techniques, aimed at developing formal dexterity, and a thorough understanding of organizational logics. Exercises that deal with module aggregation, systems of growth, and part-to-whole relationships will be driven by dialectics of figure/field, private/ public, interior/exterior, among others. Exercises will increase in degrees of abstraction throughout the course of the semester, culminating in a final composition that is highly specific in its programmatic desires and spatial complexity. Master’s Program

Maeliosa Barstow ARC 502—Spring 2019 Reflexive Architecture and the City

Jonah Coe-Scharff ARC 502—Spring 2019 Reflexive Architecture and the City

Landon Carpenter ARC 502—Spring 2019 Reflexive Architecture and the City

Ruta Misiunas ARC 502—Spring 2019 Reflexive Architecture and the City

Second Floor Plan 1/32”-1’

ARC 503 Integrated Building Studio Professor Paul Lewis and Professor Guy Nordenson with Assistant Instructor Ece Emanetoglu

Amphibious Hotel

2019

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Venice is inextricable from water. The relationship between the city and the lagoon has defined its evolution, its economy, its peculiar urbanism and its architecture. Rising water levels also presents its potential demise, prompting investment in a massive infrastructural project to control the amount of water that can access the Venetian Lagoon. Anticipated to be completed in 2022, the MOSE (Modulo Sperimentale Ettromeccanico) project involves extremely large submerged mobile gates, which can be raised to cut the Lagoon off from the Adriatic Sea to protect against high tides and flooding. However fascinating, the viability of this approach is problematic; expensive, irreversible, environmentally damaging and already potentially insufficient for sea level rise projections. As a counterpoint to this hard, engineering barrier, this studio will develop soft approaches to adaptation and will exploit the changing relationship between land and water as a catalyst for new building logics. The studio will develop new opportunistic architectural potentials from the dislocation of the building from the ground, and embrace the ground as part liquid and constantly in flux. Similarly, the program for the studio will be a type of hotel; a program defined by temporary inhabitation, and the migration of occupants. The studio will exploit the malleability of the hotel, as a collection of rooms connected to a range of more social programs, to allow for designs influenced by the relationship to ground. Although hotels in Venice will be a context for the studio, the site for the studio

Master’s Program

will be Torcello, a more remote island within the lagoon, which was the site of major settlements prior to the emergence of Venice itself. Where Venice’s relationship to water has shifted toward self preservation, Torcello presents the potential for new models of adapting architecture to a constantly changing liquid landscape. Moreover the site contains recent archaeological excavations, lead by Ca’Foscari University Venice, which are revealing new understandings of the role of water, wood and mud in the settlement of the Venetian Lagoon, and rethinking the myths of the origin of Venice. The role of section and structure will be driving forces in this integrated studio. The liberation of the building from the ground plane is a reoccurring obsession for architects, seeking to produce new models of built form based in part on desires for weightlessness and, in the process, more productive use of the ground plane. Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, El Lissitsky’s Horizontal Skyscrapers, Lina Bo Bardi’s Sao Paolo Museum, to Yona Friedman and Contant Nieuwenhuys’ elevated city infrastructures all exemplify this desire to free the building or the city from the ground. Global warming and sea level presents a distinctly different motivation forcing a reconsideration of the relationship between the building and ground. Here the detachment from the ground is driven less by utopian ideals but by fear. While revised codes address this lift from the standpoint of public safety and structural

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integrity, the focus for the studio will be rethinking the architectural and organizational implication of these transformations. This studio seeks to move beyond technical solutions for flood mitigation and ask how this fundamental change—disengaging the building from the ground—might sponsor the emergence of a new form of hotel—one accessed by boat, and configured toward the adjacent excavation sites. The program will be relatively small, to allow for detailed development and careful consideration of all aspects of the building and landscape.

Master’s Program

SITE PLAN.1 TORCELLO, VENETO, ITALY SCALE: 1’=1/16”

Ryan Gagnebin ARC 503—Fall 2018 Amphibious Hotel

70.30 m

66.30 m roof

63.30 m room 16

60.30 m room 15

room sequence B

57.30 m room 14

54.30 m room 13

51.30 m open floor 50.00 m basilica di santa maaria campanile

48.30 m room 12

45.30 m room 11

room sequence A

42.30 m room 10

39.30 m room 9

36.30 m open floor

33.30 m room 8

30.30 m room 7

room sequence B

27.30 m room 6

24.30 m room 5

21.30 m open floor

18.30 m room 4 basilica di santa maria

15.30 m room 3

room sequence A

12.30 m room 2

9.30 m room 1

5.65 m lobby

2.00 m dock and entry level 1.10 m

NORTH/SOUTH SECTION 1/4” = 1’

Sheila Lin ARC 503—Fall 2018 Amphibious Hotel

Alexandra Still ARC 503—Fall 2018 Amphibious Hotel

ARC 504 Integrated Building Studio Professor Jesse Reiser with Assistant Instructor Katherine Leung

TOKYO 2020

2019

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The Olympic hangover was a common fixture of 20th century urban history. It confronted new infrastructures, large-scale athletic venues, and public facilities suddenly drained off their economic and cultural value. With the development never going quite according to plan, it inevitably spawned periods of civic introspection and reevaluation. Reflecting on the Olympic Village as a new civic territory, on the future use of the Stadium, on scaling down transportation systems, or on kicking the tourism habit, these moments crystallized the cities’ urban futures. They paralleled existing patterns of growth, and revealed their infrastructural consequences. Sprawl in Mexico City, urban satellites in Atlanta, and internal development in Barcelona were accelerated and made apparent during the Olympics, only being reconsidered and evaluated after the fact. Over the last few Olympics, however, the question of the aftermath has assumed a central role in planning efforts. A notion of sustainable frameworks for urban regeneration has formed the basis of bids since Sydney’s, though the proposals have widely diverged in practice. Tokyo’s plan for the 2020 Olympics follows suit, calling to retrofit existing venues and integrate new construction with plans for the city at large. The bid aims to scale down the urban and economic footprint of the Games, describing strategies that suggest an overall compactness and adaptability.

Master’s Program

But despite the initial civic-minded rhetoric, a ballooning budget and controversy over the construction of new venues, most notably the National Stadium, have diverted the discussion away from urban considerations. As a result, the central organization of major event venues has been diffused into the periphery. The budgetary issue even spilt over to the water sports venue located in Tokyo Bay, suggesting alternative sites outside of the prefecture. As such, the original notion of urban regeneration has been largely compromised and become a perfunctory agenda that merely obscured their scope of post-Olympic planning. The studio speculates on an Olympics on the landfill in Tokyo Bay and retroactively the design of a constellation of fields with respect to its post-Olympic inhabitation—the afterlife of a short-term event with far-reaching consequences for the city. Forming a compelling notion of what the future of the site could be, the project will investigate the potentials latent in the adaptation of Olympic programming to the present landfill, confronting the challenge 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,

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the project suggests that the built form of the Olympic 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

Isla Xi Han ARC 504—Fall 2018 TOKYO 2020

0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0

Mahsa Malek ARC 504—Fall 2018 TOKYO 2020

ARC 504 Integrated Building Studio Professor Alejandro Zaera-Polo with Assistant Instructor Devin Dobrowolski

Emerging Urban Technologies: The City of the Near Future

2019

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In 1933, Le Corbusier and a few other members of the CIAM issued The Athens Charter, a document aimed at orchestrating contemporaneous urban technologies into a coherent proposal for the future of cities. A classification of human activities became the vertebral spine of this proposal. Defying the dictates of Academicism and the Beaux-Arts (the prevailing disciplinar discourse at the time), modern architects focused on creating iconographies, scenographies and typological inventions to fit these propositions, triggering one of the most prolific ages of architectural innovation, a veritable Cambrian explosion of the architectural phyllum. Fastforward to 2019. Cities have become the prevalent human habitat on earth and the main source of inequality and environmental degradation (in contempt not only of the demos, but also of all of the non-human urban constituencies), which are even threatening the very subsistence of the planet. Despite the fact that the crucial questions cities need to address —air pollution, rising water levels, draught, heat island effect, deforestation, biodiversity, food security, automatized work, pervasive computation— are primarily driven by non-human concerns, cities remain primarily designed around human functions. A new breed of Academicism has taken over the architectural debate and is keeping architects busy pondering over the history of the discipline, languages and styles, indifferent about

Master’s Program

energy consumption, global warming, biodiversity, pervasive computation and the emergence of new constituencies —like Nero fiddling while Rome burned. Meanwhile, we inhabit ecosystems which transcend our specific urban realms. In the Anthropocene, the primeval elements —air, water, energy and earth— have been politicized, and therefore, urbanized. In this imminent cosmopolitical regime, these natural elements are mediated by the technologies that feed us, transport us, condition our environments, recycle our refuse, manufacture goods or connect us to each other. An entirely new set of technologies with urban or architectural applications have emerged and radically transformed urban protocols and experiences: smartphones, GPS, artificial sensing, electromobility, biotechnology, etc, while still remaining largely outside the practices of urban planners and designers. Peer-to-peer organizations, shared economies, automatized work, big data, sustainable energy sources, carbon-neutral technologies have become the drivers of a new kind of urban politics. This casuistic has loaded urban technologies with an unprecedented political relevance. Cities have become now a crucial intersection between technology and politics where the equation between wealth, labor, resources and energy have to be reset. Technologies are the crucial components of the imminent urban commons. The pressing nature of ecological concerns and the

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scale of technological developments call for urbanization of both nature and technology. The purpose of the studio is to collectively investigate and explore the opportunities that exist for architecture in its engagement with these processes. Technology has become the primary driver of the imminent design space of architecture and urbanism.

Master’s Program

Steve Martinez ARC 504—Spring 2019 Emerging Urban Technologies: The City of the Near Future

Joon Ma ARC 504—Spring 2019 Emerging Urban Technologies: The City of the Near Future

Anna Renken ARC 504—Spring 2019 Emerging Urban Technologies: The City of the Near Future

wind

273.5’

111’

ROOF + PARK

N 41’ 12’

HOUSING + LIVE / WORK (6 FLOORS)

OFFICE / EDUCATION (2 FLOORS)

COMMERCIAL / COMMUNITY (GROUND + MEZZANINE)

COMMERCIAL / COMMUNITY + PARKING (BASEMENT)

ARC 505b Graduate Vertical Studio Visiting Lecturers Sandy Attia and Matteo Scagnol with Assistant Instructor José Ibarra

Inside–Out: A Civic Diptych for Camerino

2019

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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

SITE PLAN 1:1000

100

200

ELEVATION

ELEVATION 1:250 0

Andrew Cornelis ARC 505b—Fall 2018 Inside-Out: A Civic Diptych for Camerino

Catherine Ahn ARC 505b—Fall 2018 Inside-Out: A Civic Diptych for Camerino

ARC 505c Graduate Vertical Studio Visiting Lecturers Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda with Assistant Instructor Andrea Ng

A Civilization without Homes

2019

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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

Jamie Lipson ARC 505c—Fall 2018 A Civilization without Homes

SITE PLAN 1:100

Mariah Smith ARC 505c—Fall 2018 A Civilization without Homes

site section 1:125

longitudinal section 1:50

the expanded unit: choreography of synchronized views

Shin Chiu ARC 505c—Fall 2018 A Civilization without Homes

Daniel Maslan ARC 505c—Fall 2018 A Civilization without Homes

Legend: Awake NREM Stage 1 NREM Stage 2 NREM Stage 3

ARC 506a Graduate Vertical Studio Visiting Lecturer Kunlé Adeyemi with Assistant Instructor Erik Tsurumaki

Cultural Production in African Water Cities

2019

Workbook

Cultural Production in African Water Cities’ examines the role of architecture at the intersection of cultural developments and environmental conditions of Sao Vicente Island of Cape Verde, West Africa. ‘Cultural Production in African Water Cities’ will explore Sao Vicente to examine the challenges and opportunities presented by the impacts of urbanization in the social, physical and environmental context of the African continent. The aim is to build industries – to produce a series of new architectural, infrastructural and urban solutions learning from the local environment with a responsible infusion of relevant global values. Through documentation of international and regional practices, the studio will focus on Mindelo, Sao Vicente to investigate the city and its edge conditions, to understand its transformations and adaptations and sociopolitical and economic dynamics. The studio will develop models of small to medium scale infrastructure interventions, scalable through locally managed industrial processes and technologies. In an increasingly globalized world, and particularly in the African context, a pedagogical aim of the studio is to also critically analyze the role of architecture, the architect, and forms of practice that offer sustainable values that shape and stimulate development in African cities and communities.

Master’s Program

Domenica Massamby ARC 506a—Spring 2019 Cultural Production in African Water Cities

8m a. c.

7.5m

b. b.

5.5m

11.5m

b. b.

a. 1.5m

5.5m

c.3m c. c. c.3.75m c.

2m 2m 2m 2m 2m 2m

+2m +2m +2m

12.5m

Kyle Weeks ARC 506a—Spring 2019 Cultural Production in African Water Cities

12.5m

1:300

1:100

Prevailing Wind

FLOOR PLAN 0

2m 1m

2m 5m

2m 1m

Michelle Meng ARC 506a—Spring 2019 Cultural Production in African Water Cities

ARC 506b Graduate Vertical Studio Visiting Lecturers Jackilin Hah Bloom and Florencia Pita with Assistant Instructor Andrea Ng

House Manual

“The first place anyone looks to find the geometry in architecture is in the shape of buildings, then perhaps in the shape of the drawings of buildings. These are the locations where geometry has been, on the whole, stolid and dormant. But geometry has been active in the space between and the space at either end.” —Robin Evans in The Projective Cast

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In The Projective Cast, Robin Evans establishes a case for geometry in architecture by analyzing the history of architectural projection and visual geometry as pictorial methods of construction. He describes “quasi-projective, or pseudo-projective” spaces as places where geometry is actually perceived, not in the shape of buildings. Evans posits that geometry is a perceived medium that conveys the imaginative possibilities of form when there is room for interpretation of those geometries. The studio will consider the interpretive and projective geometries between 2D and 3D, or for a lack of a better term, 2.5D, to develop novel architectural forms. We’ll interrogate how oscillating instances between 2D and 3D could produce open ended and not so decipherable forms and ask, could a new syntax of forms be applied to a typology as inert as housing? Although low-income housing is one of the most excessively researched and designed building types, the forms of this type remain undisturbed and constrained to conventions of building economy. However, back in 1938, Frank Lloyd Wright submitted an application to the United States Patent Office for a “new, original, and ornamental Design for a Dwelling”. The plan drawing shows a pinwheel arrangement of four rooftops separated by crossing walls, and at the bottom of the page, Frank Lloyd Wright is indicated as “inventor”. The patent was granted and issued in April of 1939. It was known as “quadruple house” or the “quadruple home” and it was part of Wright’s ongoing ideas about affordable group dwellings, assembled around a central point. In the spirit of inventiveness, the studio will take on the enigma of translating drawings of novel geometries into a house or housing, and will look closely at the consequences of those geometries to the spatial and functional aspects of the dwelling. Master’s Program

Sharif Anous ARC 506b—Spring 2019 House Manual

Will Fu ARC 506b—Spring 2019 House Manual

Sarah Etaat ARC 506b—Spring 2019 House Manual

The Professional Program Thesis

2019

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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 Melanie Daguin Halite: Your Wellness Destination Jieun Doe Misdemeanorland: 9 Micro-courthouses for Petty Sessions

Kacper Lastowiecki Meatspace; Meetspace Sheila Lin Transient Residency: New Models for Living and Working for Deferred Domesticity

Isla Han Death, Dimension, and Everyday Monumentality Towards a Contemporary Urban Death Ritual

Master’s Program

0’

5’

10’

20’

50’

100’

Melanie Daguin

Advisor: Michael Meredith

Halite: Your Wellness Destination The contemporary wellness tourism industry has very recently experienced an economic boom due to overall globalization, anxiety regarding political turmoil, and an increasingly trendy fixation on the representation of health. Google searches for the term reached a five-year high immediately after the latest Presidential election. In the name of self-care, Americans have increasingly started to retreat to remote and foreign wellness destinations. Yet mindfulness has become increasingly anthropocentric, placing the human experience at its epicenter, and driven by the quest for picture-perfect, human-centric imagery. Acquiring these images have become the program for many touristic destinations. Through the repurposing of a New York underground Salt mine, the project forces the wellness tourist to occupy a crudely extracted, almost sublimely vast terrain while retaining a true form of wellness through its materiality. Salt has been established historically as an exceptional remedy for respiratory illnesses, reducing the effects of tuberculosis, asthma, adverse effects of smoking, and many other ailments. The room and pillar extraction process in which the mine was formed creates a man-made yet geological megastructure, which operates on a modernist 4-square grid rather than a renaissance 9-square grid; never allowing the human to be centered within the space. Placing he wellness tourist in such a space humbles the visitor into realizing the impact of resource extraction. In a few designed moments, the program centers the human once again, creating a new, controlled acquisition of wellness.

Jieun Doe

Advisors: Liz Diller, Parsa Khalili, Sylvia Lavin, Cameron Wu

Misdemeanorland: 9 Micro-courthouses for Petty Sessions Architects have been preoccupied with broadly two aspects of the institution of law: the representation of abstract democratic ideals into referential form, i.e., Greek temples and symbolic monuments, and the fulfillment of economical and utilitarian demands for increasing numbers. To reevaluate the architect’s role in failures of the legal institution, this thesis investigates petty crime’s contact with the law the least studied part of the American legal system, which nevertheless affects most lives. While lower courts in dense cities represent bureaucracy and hierarchy in their scale and form, behind their doors is a rapid, routine, and chaotic process within unquestioned architectural and procedural barriers. The shift towards standardized organizations has prioritized security and surveillance allotting public users less than third of the space of the building. Vaguely democratic aesthetics of impartiality and civility preclude targeting procedural needs of the institution. With less than .1% of misdemeanor crimes encouraged to reach a fair, speedy, and public trial, public circulatory spaces like the corridor and the elevator are more pertinent in usage than the courtroom specifically designed to hold trials. This thesis imagines an overhaul of the current model with a distributive network of smaller, closer, and faster courthouses stationed strategically at 9 city-owned vacant lots across the borough. The criminal procedure is translated into a diagrammatic prototype designed as streamlined public corridors. The vertical judiciary core plugs into different public procedural paths to provide swift delivery of justice. The result is a system of small and nimble public infrastructure planted amongst private residential areas increasing visibility of a rightfully rowdy society.

Isla Han

Advisor: Guy Nordenson

Death, Dimension, and Everyday Monumentality Towards a Contemporary Urban Death Ritual Death rituals play a significant role in civilizations. It directs community members through a grieving process to find a sense of closure and carries the monumental quality of memorizing and critical reasoning. However, due to population growth and rising real estate price, most American Metropolitans are facing conflicts between expanding needs for memorialization and shrinking urban cemetery space. This project collects the abandoned subway stations and platforms underneath Manhattan and transforms them into death-related programs like funeral auditoriums and crematoriums. A farewell car on a metro train links the sprinkled memorial spaces into a complete death ritual experience for the urban mourners. At the end of the journey, the physical ashes and the virtual memories get to be combined into a QR subway tile, which will slowly replace the numerous existing tiles in subway stations all over New York. The scannable QR subway tiles, the pavement lighting that connects underground mourning space with aboveground pedestrians, and other forms of spatial pop-ups from underneath all start to make death rituals civic and every day in the contemporary urban context.

Kacper Lastowiecki

Advisor: Mario Gandelsonas

Meatspace; Meetspace A vision for a new civic space for the twenty-first century this project is located in the micropolitan center of Muscatine, IA, a city of 30,000. Recognizing that robust community organizations are key to the success or failure of secondary and tertiary cities, this thesis examines how civil society can flourish in an increasingly fragmented public realm. With the rise of mass-customization and niche interests, it has become impossible to think of one, unified public. Furthermore, social media and the coming virtual/augmented reality future will mean social networks and connections are no longer geographically restricted as before, leading to an even greater specialization in civil society. This project aims to unify both the coming virtual space of civic life, with the already existing meatspace or real-world of community clubs, associations, and organizations to provide an urban intensity to life in Muscatine, bridging the gap between disparate individuals as well as closing the urban-rural divide.

Sheila Lin

Advisors: Liz Diller, Sylvia Lavin, Paul Lewis

Transient Residency: New Models for Living and Working for Deferred Domesticity In a moment of political turmoil, corporate colonialism, and shifting geopolitical borders, human displacement in urban centers is no longer an exception but the norm. For many, new forms of fluidity and mobility are celebrated as indicators of increased freedom and participation, but for most, mobility marks an ominous chapter in a longer story of violence and exclusion. While matters of informal living have historically resisted the consequences of architectural design, contemporary conditions of transient inhabitation demand a reexamination of architecture’s role; after all, as Lefebvre noted, [people] are not seizing an abstract right, they are taking an actual place. This thesis argues for a holistic model of living, working, and sharing for displaced populations that parallels growing trends of volunteer tourism and a desire for local experiences. In this residency that integrates tourists (millennials, families, volunteers), short-term (transient refugees, traveling workers, squatters) and long-term occupants (students, settled migrants, local families), the ecology of networks across domestic, social, and economical spheres challenges the notion of a traditional home. No longer restricted to a personal address nor the expectation of longevity, residency here is understood as the intersection of bodies, institutions, and social and economic transactions in transience.

The Post-Professional Program Thesis

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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 Jose Ibarra Uncertain Grounds: Rethinking Settlement in the Anthropocene Rami Kanafani This tower was reconstructed on the Green Line

Master’s Program

Erik Tsurumaki Visual Guide to A House Museum Zherui Wang Climate as a Medium Zhonghui Zhu Clip-on Urbanism: A Maker’ s Survival Guide to Shenzhen

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Jose Ibarra

Advisors: Hayley Eber + Spyros Papapetros

Uncertain Grounds: Rethinking Settlement in the Anthropocene By 2030, the arctic city of Kiruna, Sweden will have relocated some 8,000 of its 18,000 inhabitants, forcing people out of their neighborhoods to make room for the continuous excavations of a valuable iron ore vein that runs directly beneath their homes. Less than 100 years from now, the entire town will have disappeared, as the ground will have cracked and subsided several meters below its current level. Displaced by the same mining industry that led to its foundation, Kiruna is but one case in a world obsessed with consumption and resource exploitation. Architecture has become too quick to abandon landscapes and buildings, while the alarming and visible consequences of climate change are on the rise. As grounds and atmospheres have turned undependable, structures that disrupt other speciesliving (like biological organisms) or nonliving (like geological formations)are built in favor of only one constituency: humankind. These architectures tend to privilege normative notions of cities and buildings, simultaneously disavowing relationships to contexts, and traces of the past. Uncertain Grounds offers an alternative urban future for Kiruna in which unstable space is not renounced but embraced, introducing a series of processes that exalt those of the mine, cutting, filling, drifting, and stoping in order to produce an architecture that accepts the shifting ground, and which benefits humans, animals, plants, and geological strata alike. This project aims to reactivate architecture by shifting its gears from solidity, durability, and stasis, to instability, impermanence, and fluctuation. Only by virtue of revised notions of structural propriety can all these constituencies find common grounds. Presented as an essay film that makes evident the accelerated temporal scale of the project and the world todayas a product of the Anthropocene Uncertain Grounds appropriates found and original footage in order to offer a way in which the preservation of context and memory, remediation of trauma, and models of circular economy can yield an all-inclusive and hopeful future. Inevitably for entropy, Uncertain Grounds asks: once humans cease to position themselves as the owners of the planet, should architects not design with obsolescence and change in mind? With a future built on unstable grounds, literally and metaphorically, we can expect many Kirunas in the years to come, forced to move by the dominance of economics and by impending climate change.”

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Rami Kanafani

Advisor: Monica Ponce de Leon

This tower was reconstructed on the Green Line The original Murr Tower was used as a sniping post during the Civil War in Beirut. Its towering height was leveraged to define boundaries both horizontally through dividing the city into East and West Beirut along the Green Line and vertically by activating the surface of the city as a division line between human life and vegetal life. The reconstruction of the tower on its side engages these fault lines by existing at their intersection and mediating their differences. Pulled out of the reconstructed archive of the Murr Tower are representations and documentations of the reconstruction project. A fragment of the facade and ramp is reproduced to take you out of the space of the gallery and into the built work where a representation of the tower is displayed and archived. The project archives itself in itself and as a result operates at a speed that moves it instantly from a thesis into an archived built work.

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Erik Tsurumaki Advisor: Paul Lewis

Visual Guide to A House Museum Visual Guide to A House Museum explores the relationship of disciplines through the convention of the architect’s house museum, buildings which are seen as emblematic of an architect’s work and therefore subject to preservation and study. What makes these projects so useful for the discipline and so interesting for the public is the expectation that they provide the space for unbridled experimentation in the context of a given building culture. In other words, they provide the clearest possible cases of the moment when architecture ceases to be autonomous and is forced to confront the contingency of material. What enables us to see these buildings as emblematic years later is the result of the discursive histories and media that support the Work and its respective components: interesting anomalies, details and lifestyle choices embodied in building. However, concepts such as authorship and agency are historically constructed, perpetually renegotiated and therefore open to projection by new sets of methods and understandings. As a revision to codified historical narratives that draws out the complicated relationship of architecture to its primary interlocutors, an ostensibly introspective focus on the genre of the architect’s house museum presents interesting questions for the profession as a whole today: How do architects balance accommodation and comfort with experimentation and desire? How is attention economized relative to the part vs. the whole? When is a work considered to be complete by its author or a public? Through a fantasy of control (of display and construction tolerances) that leads to its opposite effect, the house museum disappears through overexposure, sliding between genres and modes of attention in an effort to make architecture move lithely with the present.”

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Zherui Wang

Advisors: Elizabeth Diller and Mahadev Raman

Climate as a Medium

Dress for Red Alert A X-ray drawing of the BaleenCoat revealing the intneral construc�on of the garment made for human survival.

Filtraࢼon Tubes

The Hollow Fiber Membrane embedded ltra�on tubes are sandwiched between layers at the hood.

Main Zipper

Climate as a medium: a trans-material guide for breathing forecasts a dystopian narrative in the face of atmospheric degradation in urban centers. Airborne pollution, the deadliest threat to human health worldwide, has been mediated with different degrees of consistencies and success in policy making. If public policies alone can’t resolve the crisis, it rests upon human capital to confront the environmental change through the agency of design to extend human survival. In working with Arup Engineering, and drawing from the latest development in material science, the proposed are three breathing artifacts at the scale of the body, facade, and the city to protect citizens from prolonged exposures. These artifacts trap PM10/2.5 particles and allude to new urban lifestyles in an era of environmental crisis.

A special air �ght zipper started at the waist line and wrap to the top of the hood. This allows the coat to enclose the body in diﬀerent degrees under various airborn par�cle levels.

Threaded Elbow Fi࣌ngs

The air�ght nylon �ngs connects ltra�on tubes with Baleencoat fabric layers

Mouth Piece

Alterna�vely, the ltra�on bladder can also be manually inated by blowing into the mouth piece equipted with an one way valve.

Re-arming Kit

The ltra�on bladder on the back vent can be ac�vated using a re-arming kit an autoina�on mechanism - that uses a carbon dioxide cylinder and inator bobbin. The bobbin disintegrates when ac�vated and ll the inatable bladder in about 3 seconds to ac�vate maximal ltra�on capacity.

Filtraࢼon Bladder

An inatable volume with ltra�on tubes emmbedded that extends the ltra�on capaci�es of human lung and nasal canula.

Welded Connecࢼon

Heat welded connec�on to ensure all parts of the coat are protected from par�cle leakages.

Flap

Front ap piece to project the zipper to everyday wear.

Elasࢼc Cable Retaints

Elas�c cable kept exible hip movement while minimising air loss.

Cable Ties

keeps the interior fo the coat from air seepage.

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Zhonghui Zhu

Advisor: Mario Gandelsonas

Clip-on Urbanism: A Maker’ s Survival Guide to Shenzhen Clip-on Urbanism examines the possibility of manufacturing, hacking, assembling and recycling readily available devices as a way of urban upgrade and tries to depict a near future urban scenario which reimagines the urban envelope as an adaptive and generative interface. With the emergence of new technologies as well as maker and hacker culture, the site of production has once again been introduced into the urban. The emerging urban Homo Faber in Shenzhen, whether low-tech or high-tech, produces distinctive forms of inhabiting and occupying urban space, and provides a potential solution to current urban problems outside the reach of traditional architecture and urban planning. Rather than a top-down approach of urban renewal which often involves destruction and forced relocation, this thesis begins at the scale of technical devices, produced, hacked and installed by local residences. In this way, making becomes a means of technical empowerment, an event of community building, and a strategy for urban upgrade and continuous evolvement. By developing an infrastructure which allows reassembled modular devices to be clipped on, plugged in and attached to existing urban fabrics, the built-up environment is mediated by a series of community plug and playevents in an urbanism of parts.”

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Undergraduate Studios

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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.

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ARC 350a Junior Design Studio Visiting Lecturer Hayley Eber

Clubhouse— Reconsidering 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. 2019

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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. We will tackle the origins and spatial mechanics of the Club constructed entirely out of elite bubbles, where students find safe havens in the spaces of clubs where only their kind are invited. Is it the ultimate consequence of chat rooms of contemporary media? Or, is it the spatial translation of our current identity politics? 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 crowd-sourced 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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Anna Marsh ARC 350a—Fall 2018 Clubhouse—Reconsidering the Eating Club

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McKayla Tyrrell ARC 350a—Fall 2018 Clubhouse—Reconsidering the Eating Club

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Yuanning Cai ARC 350a—Fall 2018 Clubhouse—Reconsidering the Eating Club

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1/4” = 1’0” 0

4’

Yunzi Shi ARC 350a—Fall 2018 Clubhouse—Reconsidering the Eating Club

1/4” = 1’0” 0

4’

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ARC 350b Junior Design Studio Visiting Lecturer Gia Wolff

Primal Retreat: A space for two polemically opposite inhabitants

2019

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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 dialogue between house and that which is being housed can never be disconnected from each other, nor from its environmental and contextual adjacencies. Both play a role in how we experience and describe space. What parameters define space? How many walls do we “need” in order to create a room? What are the thresholds between inside and outside? James Turell’s, Meeting Room, at MoMA PS1, questions if the ceiling is delineated by four walls, or instead if the four walls extend infinitely and eliminate the need for a ceiling at all. This piece exemplifies a set of spatial characters and physical characteristics intrinsic in how we perceive space.

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ARC350: FALL 2018: Allegra Martschenko

Allegra Martschenko ARC 350b—Fall 2018 Primal Retreat

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8 AM

Amelia Kenna ARC 350b—Fall 2018 Primal Retreat

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Genevieve Garlock and Marah Sakkal ARC 350b—Fall 2018 Primal Retreat

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ARC 351 Junior Design Studio Professor Jesse Reiser and Assistant Professor Stefana Parascho

Architecture 1:1

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Throughout the history of modern architecture, furniture has served as the most concise representation of an architect’s design principles. While these principles could be applied to projects at any scale, the social, material, geometric, and aesthetic forces underlying an architect’s disciplinary project here find their most poignant resolution. Given the relatively small scale of the endeavor, it is the intention of the studio that each architect will produce a piece of furniture at full scale. This does not imply an uncritical return to a craft ethos (though craft as a cognitive and technical procedure is very necessary) rather it suggests a form of ‘management’ that would marry techniques and materials derived in the computational environment with material practices. A virtuality is thus manifest in the partially manageable; the gap between our actions and their effects. This course will focus on a number of specific design techniques in a highly regimented manner. The theme of this semester will be the relationship between geometry and matter in the development of a piece of furniture. We will Undergraduate Program

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explore the nature of these complex surfaces and the effects of a limited but continuous enclosed environment on human functions. We will elaborate our skills in model-building, with particular emphasis placed on the value of accurate representation both by fostering craft and by exploring novel techniques of fashioning and representing precise geometries. Representation and material logics will not be seen as separate in this studio, instead we will seek to unify the two by learning to exploit precise techniques to extract 2D drawings from 3D surfaces, to deploy varied typological arrangements, and to manipulate models systematically. Unlike classical, modernist one-way hierarchies which move from the particular to the general or from the general to the particular as a simple, nested series, these structures communicate laterally. Here, another kind of continuum is possible, allowing for jumps across scales and the amplification of discrete effects. Assuming the middle scale corresponds to that of the body, the furniture will have to contend with a loose set of relations to conditions both below and above the scale. 2019

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For the past twenty years, the issue of the surface in architecture has received a sustained treatment within the discipline and has informed architecture from the scale of furniture through building scales all the way to the scale of regional planning. This semester we will explore a number of these models through the medium of furniture, specifically the design of a chaise longue. The surface and its relation to classical considerations of structure and support as well as a/non-structural considerations such as redundancy, semiotics, and optical & physical behaviors will be explored. Mirroring trends in the discipline, the issue of surface might be transcended, leading to designs that deal with conceptions of mass as well. Given this tendency, rather than beginning with a single or smooth surface, you will be asked to work with surfaces comprised of a modulated field of components inherently deep. Implicit in this field are optical, geometrical, and material relationships that can be modulated depending upon your interests, leading to a wide range of material outcomes. In contrast to the methods of the industrial designer, there is no difference between the design of a piece of furniture and a building— both will be informed by the same principles. Undergraduate Program

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Amelia Kenna ARC 351—Spring 2019 Architecture 1:1

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Genevieve Garlock ARC 351—Spring 2019 Architecture 1:1

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Marah Sakkal ARC 351—Spring 2019 Architecture 1:1

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ARC 404 Advanced Design Studio Associate Professor Marshall Brown

Sanctuary

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The Advanced Design Studio examines architecture as cultural production, taking into account its capacity to structure physical environments and reflect social organizations. The specific topic for this year is Sanctuary, defined broadly as a sacred place where pilgrims, fugitives, and others find asylum, immunity, or refuge. Political asylum granted by so-called sanctuary cities has become an important civic issue in the United States. The sanctuary is, first and foremost, a fundamentally architectural concept, rooted in the history and discourse of our field. This semester each student will design a sanctuary for a specific collective, yet to be identified. Studio work will include research and program definition. Students are expected to demonstrate a full range of proficiency in the use of design media, including collage, drawing, and model-making, and their facility with visual, written, and oral presentation.

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Noshin Khan ARC 404—Fall 2018 Sanctuary

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2 Reuben Zeiset

Reuben Zeiset ARC 404—Fall 2018 Sanctuary

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Doctoral Degree in Architecture

The Ph.D. Program

2019

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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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Ph.D. Proseminars

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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

2019

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Esther M. Choi

The Organization of Life: Architecture and the Life Sciences in Britain 1921–1951 In the decades between, and following, the two World Wars, a group of modern architects, biologists, artists, and writers were faced with the dilemma of how to redesign the conditions of life in Britain. Reconstruction, and planning in particular, adopted an acute sense of urgency, as the exigencies of the economic collapse and the prospect of another war intensified the degeneration of a “civilization in crisis.” For a nation in a state of fracture, remedying human depravity through the creation of a harmonious world order could not be decoupled from responding to the crisis of human nature itself. This dissertation explores the exchanges and collaborations that took place between these figures to reconstruct Britain as a scientifically-ordered world comprised of scientifically-designed subjects. Spanning thirty years, four case studies revisit schemes that championed the belief that the human body and behavior can be thoroughly shaped by a modernized environment. Examined through evolutionary themes, philosophies such as evolutionary humanism, and theories of cultural evolution, the episodes are characterized by an unflinching belief in biology and culture as “civilizing” tools for national rehabilitation, and the power of design to construct a “second nature.” The study begins with the history of biotechnics: an influential theory of cultural evolution devised by biologist, sociologist and town planner Patrick Geddes, and the theorist of technology Lewis Mumford, which transformed design into a “biotechnique” for evolutionary control based on principles of artificial, rather than natural, selection. The second chapter considers how the biologist Julian Huxley Ph.D. Program

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London Zoo’s Gorilla House, full caption to come

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and the architectural group Tecton viewed their geometric design for the London Zoo’s Gorilla House through the lens of environmental adaptation, and analyzes modern architecture’s effects on its resident apes trapped in domesticated and troubling circumstances of captivity. The third chapter unpacks parallel desires to design a national “common sense” by Design Research Unit members Marcus Brumwell and Herbert Read, and Innes Pearse and G.S. Williamson, the biologists behind “The Peckham Experiment”, which used architecture and design as sociobiological instruments to influence the biological and cultural heredity of human subjects. The dissertation closes with a new generation of artists and designers like Richard Hamilton of The Independent Group, who were drawn to the visionary speculation of epigenetics: C.H. Waddington’s theory of biological development, which suggested that transformation is always a relational interaction based on differentiation and unfolding. Together these case studies contribute to an historical ontology and epistemology of how modern architecture, art, and the life sciences worked in partnership to reorganize and recondition patterns of human activity as biopolitical schemes for social change. Although these scientific and cultural workers could never quite realize their utopian aspirations, their entanglements mark an important shift in concepts of nature and the human condition: from abstract and immovable, to constructs that could be radically engineered. Overall, they demonstrate that spatial schemes for social change based on a top-down experimental set up will always reveal the inherent biases of its designers.

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Matthew Mullane

World Observation: Itō Chūta and the Making of Architectural Knowledge in Modern Japan “World Observation: Itō Chūta and the Making of Architectural Knowledge in Modern Japan” historicizes the relationship between architecture (kenchiku) and observation (kansatsu) as both ideas were simultaneously imported, taught and critiqued in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Japan. I show how Western definitions of scientific observation were translated in such a way to allow for the integration of supplemental values from naturalism, art, Buddhism and folklore to support a new paradigm of architecture history, research and design that reflected the aims of the new Japanese nation. As a path through this complex cultural and intellectual history, I focus particularly on the work of Itō Chūta (1867–1954), Japan’s first world architecture historian, high-ranking designer for the Japanese Empire and vocal advocate for a Japanese style of observation. I trace his work with Buddhist priests, state bureaucrats, ecologists, naturalists, anthropologists, philosophers and artists as he developed a global theory of cultural exchange and designed a new architecture across the Japanese Empire to train others how to observe it. The dissertation offers a new theory of how epistemological values like observation were translated and critiqued outside of Europe and beyond the strict discursive realms of science. This contestation of observation was exercised through the development of not only new world histories, but new formats of art and architectural research, including novel textual collages, highly illustrated notebooks and new styles of building.

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The dissertation’s analysis is segmented into three different observational acts: translating, drawing and training. The chapters are respectively dedicated to theorizing how observation was translated to write the first world architecture history in Japanese, how drawing was used to visualize both the material and immaterial aspects of world historical change, and how new architecture was designed and implemented throughout the empire to train citizens and imperial subjects to learn about Japan’s role in world architecture history. Across each of these actions, I show how observation was actively shaped by the specific media conditions of language, images and buildings, and by the social and political expectation to verify the legitimacy of imperial expansion.

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Workbook

Hongshan Guo

Energy Re-Conditioned For Thermal Comfort Energy has been delivered to buildings and households to make sure rooms are comfortable for occupants. We currently think of this delivery in the isolation as it heats and cools individual spaces. The heating and cooling of buildings have consequently become more about hitting a setpoint instead of aligning the delivery of comfort to humans with the effective and readily available upstream sources. The thesis of this dissertation is finding the most effective pathway to supply comfort to people. The work begins with the examination of the fundamental assumptions of thermal comfort models using an exergetic approach to insert the occupants into the energy delivery chain. Second, the research examines how environmental parameters such as relative humidity and mean radiant temperatures are oversimplified in energy analyses. Finally, this is connected with the analysis of sourcing the supplied exergy accordingly was also investigated within the scope of this dissertation. The research is organised into three corresponding sections, each containing three projects. In the first section, a conceptual energy delivery framework was proposed, upon which the feasibility of using human body exergy model was investigated and a new analytical human body exergy model proposed. Varying certain inputs to the model, such as the relative humidity and the mean radiant temperature, can cause the results of the human body exergy model to vary significantly. Unlike relative humidity, mean radiant temperature is more challenging to measure and model. This radiant connection between the occupants and their surroundings is the focus of the second section. Beginning with a critique on the spatial limitations of conventional measurement techniques Ph.D. Program

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of mean radiant temperature, a comprehensive review of the complexity and challenges of modeling and measuring mean radiant temperature is presented. Its coupled relationship with air temperature was also investigated in a subsequent project. Finally, the third section begins by tracing back to the thermal sources such as geothermal for optimal temperatures. It then attempts to rearrange the energy delivery system by matching the supply and demand of energy concerning not only their amounts but usabilities—or exergy—to create a flow model from source to comfort.

2019

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Workbook

Kaicong Wu

Robotic Assembly: A Generative Architectural Design Strategy Through Component Arrangements in Highly-Constrained Design Spaces Architectural assembly has been a neglected research topic within the field of computational design. The problem with processing top-down controlled geometric models through passive fabrication and manual assembly processes lies in the difficulty of producing independent components from aggregated wholes. Moreover, an extensive amount of resources can be wasted when architectural components are manually assembled. However, what has yet to be determined is whether the applications of advanced assembly machines, especially architectural robots, can reduce resource use and create new design principles. How can robotic assembly become a generative strategy to design architectural forms through component arrangements? Three design models were developed to study the sequence, fitting, and configuration of robotic assembly. In relation to the model of robotic equilibrium assembly, scaffold-free constructions were examined through tooling innovations to recreate the design of compression-only arch structures. For the model of material outline assembly, a scanning procedure was carried out to fit foam fragments into a shell structure by flexibly approximating a human-designed surface geometry. For the model of stochastic assembly, deep learning was applied to autonomously achieve higher assembly goals of natural wood log structures. The three models were conceptualized and implemented using various computational and robotic approaches and tested in small-scale experiments. Ph.D. Program

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This research contributes to architectural design by redefining the role of assembly machines as generators of freeing design space from the constraints of existing knowledge regarding geometries, fabrications, and structures. The experiment results indicate that, even with unfamiliar design problems, potential solutions can be identified using robotic assembly to arrange architectural components. The design control shifts from top-down, human-centered geometric modeling to bottom-up, machine-centered component assembly. This can stimulate human designers to recognize and overcome their cognitive barriers, challenge existing architectural design criteria, and discover unknown design principles. Future work is outlined for autonomous assembly of raw materials, connecting the learning processes of virtual and physical assembly machines, and applications of large-scale robotic assembly in built environments. 2019

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Workbook

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Design: Omnivore

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