THE SIS 20 BERKELEY ARCHITECTURE
BERKELEY ARCHITECTURE THESIS REVIEW 2020
BERKELEY ARCHITECTURE THESIS REVIEW 2020
MATTER MATTERS MATTERING
The Church of Anything Goes (TCOAG)*
TOM BURESH “It is the great decision of ‘humankind’(ed.) to make a building into a cube, a pyramid or a sphere.” Hans Hollien and Walter Pichler 1963
Matter As we believe in materially-based practice the work of the seminar and studio will attend to matter. We will understand material properties and their potential. We will take note that the built environment repositions material. In that repositioning new spaces are created and formed. These spaces- imagined, abandoned and found are central to our work. The thesis will employ and deploy matter. Matters We will seek a deep and broad understandings of our current situation. We will be concerned with engaging and confronting large and/or small yet difficult issues of our time- the environment, energy, the economy, politics, health, ethnicity, housing, spirituality, immigration, diversity, equity, inclusion, artistic/architectural and planning practices, etc... That is, circumstances and events that are neither easily defined nor resolved. We do not seek perfection. Questions are as critical as proposals. We are as concerned with today as much as tomorrow and yesterday. Mattering We will labor to make connections between resources, matters of the day and human activity, perception and experience. We know these connections are contingent/slippery and we (sometimes) like that. We accept temporary truths but don’t cotton (have a liking for) fakes unless they’re real. While skeptical by nature we are not cynical. We believe architecture is consequential and makes a difference. That is a difference that matters. TCOAG is inspired by Barbara Stauffacher Solomon’s “academic adult comic book” ”UTOPIA MYOPIA: 36 PLAYS ON A PAGE” and will refer to it as a model. *The Church of Anything Goes (TCOAG) is a nondenominational, tax free, nonprofit, free range and free speech, organization dedicated to expanding our collective architectural imagination and guided by the Hejdukian maxim paraphrased here, “The first decision is arbitrary. Every decision after that is not arbitrary.” TCOAG holds weekly services at Wurster Hall, UC Berkeley.
ALMOST_(THERE) LISA IWAMOTO WITH THESIS PREP ADVISOR RAVEEVARN CHOKSOMBATCHAI A thesis means placing, a proposition. By its English definition, a thesis is a statement or theory that is put forward as a premise to be maintained or proved. An architectural thesis puts forward a question within the disciplinary discourse and provides a supportive argument through an architectural proposition. This thesis seminar is built upon the premise of the complex nature of contemporary architecture and design culture where we are highly aware of its heterogeneity as much as its diverse epistemological approaches. Therefore, a compelling architectural thesis is achieved through an iterative process of both identifying a line of discourse in which to place the thesis project, and also creating an inventive set of questions through acute observation and obsessive investigation within that lineage. It is important to note that percieved “originality” is less important than researched specificity. A thesis project should be firmly situated within and can therefore evolve - the discipline. The word almost is used to describe a moment of transition over a recognizable threshold of two opposing conditions. Consider the slightly unsettling light and shadow condition in Magritte, 1949, “L’Empire des Lumières”, or the nearly unrecognizable presence of Ed Ruscha 1973 “Vanish”, or Yayoi Kusama’s “The Obliteration Room” where the abstractly illusory flatness creates a disappearing effect of objects in a square room. We will look through the lens of these and other art practices to provoke questions in architectural design. This will be supplemented by relevant texts and readings. We will seek to address current issues of culture, socio-political contexts, environment and representation while contributing knowledge specific to architecture.
THESIS FRAMEWORK What > Hunch: Establishing a Question It is essential to begin your thesis work with a positive attitude and clear-eyed ambition. Within the context of a year-long architecture design thesis, this is the opportunity to develop your own design direction. While this can be daunting, remember that small ideas can lead to great investigations, and that the thesis research will take you onto new paths and trajectories. Don’t worry about being hit by lighting with a brilliant idea. Rather, like all great research, an educated and intuitive hunch later grounded in careful study and documentation will add to the discipline in profound and meaningful ways. The culmination of spring semester will mark an exciting beginning, not the end, of your exploration. It is essential to be impassioned with one’s question, be genuinely curious about the set of issues and have faith in the process, whether its polemic is cultural, sociological, political, technological, representational and/or aesthetic. How > Establishing Operational Logics: Means & Methods of Exploration & Representational Technique Inherent to positing a thesis inquiry is the testing and development of selected modes of architectural representation. These representations will form your operational methods and link your inquiry to the design process. As an architecture thesis, it is critical that the thesis be formed through exploration of the tools and techniques specific to the discipline, that is, scaled drawings and models. That said, invention in this realm is more than welcome. To aid you in this quest, a careful study of architectural allies and precedents will be critical to examining the means and methods of your exploration. It is our expectation that your operational logic will be established by the end of the semester. This will dramatically help you during the following thesis studio.
Why > Establishing a Thesis Preamble: Criteria for Critique & Evaluation To what extent does the thesis argument and proposition contribute to the discipline? How does one go about framing the architectural project? It is wise to be strategic and develop a thesis that can be explored specifically through an architectural inquiry. While this may sound obvious, many past theses have attempted to answer large societal questions where the architectural project itself has little to no chance of making a meaningful contribution. Deciding if the project is fundamentally intra-disciplinary (about form, space, representation, etc.), or extra-disciplinary (society, culture, environment, etc.) is a good starting point. Architecture is a wide field, and while your thesis project will inevitably address both intra and extra disciplinary questions, knowing which area is of primary interest to you will help you frame your project accordingly. It is anticipated that by the end of the Fall semester, each student will be able to clearly articulate the program, site, and a set of criteria to critique and evaluate whether their path of exploration is fulfilling the direction of the thesis question.
THESIS: MAKING A THING OF A THING DAVID ORKAND We will be making a thing of a thing because things already, intrinsically, occupy the space between abstraction and reality – they are at once general and specific. This is how a personal obsession, an idée fixe, can find collective form, through its discursive performance. It is what makes a thesis instrumental, how it may reach an audience beyond the confines of the academy, how it may find a shared love. By definition, a thesis, fundamentally, is an act of positioning. To put, to place, to position – these are willful acts, which speak to one’s agency as a positioner. What is being positioned? For a thing to be positioned it must be defined; it must be knowable, its limits articulated through the construction of language. Positioning requires the cultivation of an obsession; it brings a thing into focus and gives it resolution. Where is it being positioned? To take a thing and place it among other things establishes a relational structure in which new meanings and latencies present themselves. The potential effect of a thesis is a question of relation, a synthesis: the context rewritten, the text formed anew. How is it being positioned? The ideological framework that animates the act of placing, as an intentional act, is what gives a thesis its critical and discursive dimension. A thesis is projective in this regard, putting something forward with care and consideration; it speaks to a future in the making.
BERKELEY ARCHITECTURE THESIS REVIEW 2020
NUDGING VERNACULARS MARY-ANN RAY DESIGNING IN DIALECT, CROSS CONTAMINATING HIGH AND LOW, ARCHITECTURE WITH AND WITHOUT ARCHITECTS, LEARNING FROM BLAH BLAH BLAH, ETC.. “Vernacular architecture does not go through fashion cycles. It is nearly immutable, indeed, unimprovable, since it serves its purpose to perfection.”¹ As a starting point for the development of the Thesis, we will accept the first sentence of this statement, and challenge the second one. Vernacular architecture acquires a kind of genetic strength as it is developed over time and includes multiple design participants, but, as society, environment, economics, politics, etc., are rapidly changing in our world today, static environments and immutable architectural models might be considered unviable and unsustainable. This Thesis Studio proposes an alternative to the dominate model of architectural production and invention as arising from the unique visions of singular architects by beginning with an engagement with a “vernacular”, that is, with an architecture not produced by “specialists but by the spontaneous and continuing activity”² of a number of anonymous authors over time. Each thesis author has identified for a vernacular to engage, and a broad range of these emerged across the studio based on the interests and obsessions each thesis author.
¹ Rudofsky, Bernard. Architecture Without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture. (Preface) Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987. ² Rudofsky, Bernard. Architecture Without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture. (Introduction) Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
SLIGHTLY (UN)FAMILIAR NEYRAN TURAN Think of Lauren Marsolier’s slightly distorted realisms of everyday life that appear in her digital collages in her Transition Series, or of Roxy Paine’s reproduction of the banal in Carcass, his scaled diorama of a fast-food kitchen, produced entirely from birch and maple wood. What both of these works share is a small degree of abstraction that renders familiar objects or events a bit unfamiliar and offers a much deeper and nuanced kind of engagement with reality. Can we think of architecture’s engagement with the world through such an investigation on the (un) familiar? The relationship between the familiar and the unfamiliar merits closer attention when one considers its renewed significance within contemporary architecture and urbanism. It is in the constant redefinition of this relationship that we find the most provocative conflicts and the most promising reflections on the specificities of architecture as a discipline. On the one hand, one can speculate on the relevance of unfamiliar interpretations of what are considered to be familiar—i.e., ordinary, banal, quotidian—architectural attributes or conventions, such as typical plans, building codes, city ordinances, architectural material specifications, standards, contracts, details, material supply chains, maintenance, big-box architectures, and any other form of familiar architectural procedure that would be understood with a renewed rigor. On the other hand, in an attempt to expand our disciplinary imagination, one can contemplate the use of familiar architectural strategies on what is considered to be unfamiliar within the discipline of architecture and bring it into architectural consciousness. In both formulations of the (un)familiar, we are enabled to project renewed interpretations regarding architecture’s engagement with the world through its own specificity.
"Lauren Marsolier, Transition Series, 2009-2013."
This thesis seminar + studio sequence will focus on the architectural potentials of the (un) familiar as it offers unconventional relationships between realism and abstraction. Situated as an alternative to already exhausted positions in our field—such as hyper-realism (think: scenario planning or environmental engineering of data and performance in design), hyper-surrealism (think: architectural sci-fi), or hyper-abstraction (think: white noise)—this thesis sequence will investigate the possibilities of a slightly (un) familiar realism in architecture. This idea will be studied through the limits and potentials of architectural specificity and its speculative rigor. A thesis is a claim and proposition put forward. Each thesis project sets up an important question for architecture and provides one answer to that question. A compelling architectural thesis is motivated by the concurrence of a specific disciplinary lineage and a particular sociocultural investigation; unprecedented encounters between these attributes stimulates an original contribution to architectural knowledge. This thesis sequence is about situating, proposing and refining such encounters towards the development of a thesis project and cultivating a particular position that each student takes in the field.
STUDIO ONE RONALD RAEL LOGMAN ARJA, LECTURER SANDY CURTH (GSA) The intent of Studio One 2019-2020 is to critically examine the role of ceramics and earth-based materials in contemporary and future architectural practice, with a particular focus on building surfaces, skins, and structures that employ computational design. We will speculate on the roles that these materials, as well as the machines and software that drive them, play in design, particularly as they pertain to their use in developing countries in relation to traditional practices. We will be working with Malam Darfur Peace and Development (MDPD), is an organization that aims at establishing peace, reconciliation and erasing the aftermath of the War in Darfur, Sudan. We will work with MDPD to assist in their development of a comprehensive plan based on ceramic innovation around the themes of water, health, education, agriculture, livestock, renewable energy and technology. How technology and ceramic material in architecture play a role in these areas will be the thrust of this year-long studio, with software skills and materials techniques learned in the first semester, and further research and architectural applications occuring in the second semester.
Image by (by Sinae Jung)
A dedication to create physical objects and postulate on technologically informed ceramics as disruptive to the culture of building is paramount, which includes explorations in complex domes and vaults 3D printed using adobe (clay, sand, and straw). Among the various types of masonry vaults and domes are paraboloid structures that can be constructed without support and made only of mud brick. The Nubian vault, a vernacular construction method originating in what is today southern Egypt and northern Sudan, was adopted by the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy as a building technique to create housing for the poor. In addition, he also incorporated domes in the construction of many of his buildings. These simple domes also required no support and used a stringline emanating from a center point to guide the mason. These techniques employ very simple guidelines for construction that can be emulated by simple geometric operations. These algorithmic operations of the deposition of earthen material can be emulated by a large scale robot, thus opening up the possibility to generate walls and roofs using earthen materials. Explorations of vaults and domes through the development of non-planar toolpaths, that will be represented visually through animation, as well as through 3D printed clay models for the design of a 3D printed temporary shelter, that is protected by a trabeated roof structure made of wood, or bamboo, or fabric as a prototype for 3D printed construction in Sudan, Africa followed by the design of a temporary residence for a visiting scholar sited at the Berkeley Botanical Garden.
FRIDAY, MAY 8 THESIS REVIEW 2020 10AM 1:15PM
10:00AM
SESSION 1 Presiding: Mary-Ann Ray Critics: Dawn Finley, Perry Kulper, Sara Dean, Danelle Guthrie NEW PRODUCTION SPACE IN THE SPACE BETWEEN THE URBAN AND RURAL Qi Feng
10:30
A HISTORY OF THE FUTURE: WORKSPACE Siyu Liu
11:00
FIRE LINE Julie Anderson
11:30
BREAK
11:45
THE DYS-PLACEMENT MACHINE Yuxuan Tu
12:15 PM 12:45 1:15
10AM 1:15PM
10:00AM 10:30
SENSORIUM Shuang Yan FLAT REALITY Athena Do BREAK
SESSION 2 Presiding: David Orkand Critics: Jessica Reynolds, Jesus Vassallo, EB Min, Zoe Prillinger NEW BABEL Miao Luo INTERTWINED: LABORATORY FOR AUGMENTED REALITY Quihui Bao
11:00
INSTAGRAMMABLE Xinyi Chen
11:30
BREAK
11:45
TITLE Jie Chen
12:15 PM 12:45 1:15
10AM 1:15PM
10:00AM
[DE]CODING THE STANDARD Dylan Harmon SIMULACRUM OF CHINATOWN Xiuping Liu BREAK
SESSION 3 Presiding: Lisa Iwamoto Critics: Margaret Griffin, William Price, Neeraj Bhatia, Clark Thenhaus, Andrew Atwood (ALMOST) INVISIBLE Alexandra Cortez
10:30
ALMOST YOURS Bojin Zhu
11:00
ALMOST:OTHER LeeAnne Brown
11:30
BREAK
11:45
GENERATIVE DAILY OBJECTS Zhe Zhao
12:15 PM 12:45 1:15
ALMOST MONOLITHIC Yuxi Wei ALMOST DIVIDED Kevin (Xiangyu) Gao BREAK
FRIDAY, MAY 8 THESIS REVIEW 2020 2PM 5:45PM
SESSION 4 Presiding: Neyran Turan Critics: Jenny French, Sandhya Kochar, David Jaehning, Rudabeh Pakravan
2:00PM
ALMOST GROUNDED Nathan Loc H Nguyen
2:30
(UN)DESTRUCTION Kristen Smith
3:00
DISSOLUTION OF PERCEPTION Katherine Lo
3:30
BREAK
3:45
55 CORNERS Junyi Ding
4:15
BACKGROUNDING: IMPACT OF MATERIAL Yiming Zhang
2PM 5:45PM
SESSION 5 Presiding: Tom Buresh Critics: Mabel Wilson, Jason Young Susan Ubbelohde, Nataly Gattegno 1st half Dan Spiegel 2nd half
2:00PM
DENSER CITY Weijia Lu
2:30
FINAL ACTS Adam Weiss
3:00
URBANOVELLA Sarah Vermeer
3:30
BREAK
3:45
MIND THE GAP Marshall Gifford
4:15
CAT HOUSE Max Tang
4:45
FORMS OF FAILURE Rachel Blowes
4:45
UNREAL VISION Cui Wang
5:15
THE MINIMAL UNIT OF HOME: AN OBJECT’S LANDSCAPE Carolina Aguilar
5:15
SUPER INTIMATE Jack Kay
5:45
END DAY ONE
5:45
END DAY ONE
BERKELEY ARCHITECTURE THESIS REVIEW 2020
SATURDAY, MAY 9 THESIS REVIEW 2020 10AM 1:15PM
10:00AM 10:30
SESSION 6 Presiding: David Orkand Critics: Tei Carpenter, Janette Kim, Chris Leong, Brian Price UNDER THE OCEAN Chengxi Xie GESTURAL LINES: AN ARCHITECTURAL TRANSLATION Ho Ming Chau
11:00
ESSENTIAL WHIMSY Anna Samsonov
11:30
BREAK
11:45
PRACTICING CHAOS Jeralyn Tseng
12:15 PM 12:45 1:15
10AM 1:15PM
10:00AM 10:30 11:00
DOLLHOUSE | NARRATIVE DRAG Sophie Ruf ARCOLOGY REVISITED Steven Fisher BREAK
SESSION 7 Presiding: Tom Buresh Critics: Mohamed Sharif, Mitchell Squire, Keith Krumweide, Nathan John 1st half Ronald Rael 2nd half HIGH GROUNDS Kati Albee FLATTENED MUSES Ziye Zhong THE TERRITORIAL EXCHANGE Joseph Palmer
11:30
BREAK
11:45
GLITCH HOUSE Canran Chen
12:15 PM 12:45 1:15
10AM 1:15PM
10:00AM
FLUID BOUNDARIES Jenna Frowein SUBURBAN CONVERSIONS Thomas DeVore BREAK
SESSION 8 Presiding: Neyran Turan Critics: McLain Clutter, Jenny French, Irene Cheng, Raveevarn Choksombatchai AS DRAWN, AS BUILT Nan Xia
10:30
MISREFERENCING IMAGES Yuanpei Zhuang
11:00
NOT SO GOOD Yanhang Ren
11:30
BREAK
11:45
MODELING HOME Tara Shi
12:15 PM 12:45 1:15
A SERIES OF SMALL ACTS Reagan Lauder NOT JUST ONCE Eric Morrill BREAK
SATURDAY, MAY 9 THESIS REVIEW 2020 2PM 5:45PM
SESSION 9 Presiding: Mary-Ann Ray Critics: Jimenez Lai, Paulette Singley, Sara Dean, Li Hu/Huang Wenjing, Keith Plymale
2:00PM
ALPINE CONFLUENCE: THE URBAN AQUADUCT Kerstin Roeck
2:30
A COMPLEX (ATMOSPHERE) FOR CULTURAL PERISHABLES Caroline Chen
3:00
TALKING BORDERS IN RURALPOLITAN SPACE Yinfei Gu
3:30
BREAK
3:45
WHERE CAN YOU HANG OUT AT MIDNIGHT? Meaghan Lyons
2PM 5:45PM
SESSION 10 Presiding: Lisa Iwamoto Critics: Sean Canty, Heather Roberge, Michael Young, Irene Cheng, R. Choksombatchai
2:00PM
ALMOST ORDINARY Xiaokang Feng
2:30
ALMOST FORGOTTEN Yixuan Liu
3:00
ALMOST CONNECTED Karn Kingkaew
3:30
BREAK
3:45
THE HYBRID LANDSCAPE Zachary Whiteman
4:15
MASQUERADE Shengpeng Mao
4:15
MORE MUD Sandy Curth
4:45
4:45
URBAN VOID Hyeon Jun Lee
ALMOST SOMEWHERE Tanner Glackin
5:15
5:15
ANOTHER VOID Mian Qin
ALMOST VERNACULAR Weinan Huang
5:45
END DAY TWO
5:45
END DAY TWO
BERKELEY ARCHITECTURE THESIS REVIEW 2020
BERKELEY ARCHITECTURE THESIS Carolina Aguilar Kati Albee Julie Anna Anderson Qihui Bao Rachel Blowes LeeAnne Brown Ho Ming Chau Canran Chen Xinyi Chen Alexandra Cortez Sandy Curth Thomas DeVore Junyi Ding Athena Do Qi Feng Xiaokang Feng Steven Fisher Jenna Frowein Kevin (Xiangyu) Gao Marshall Gifford Tanner Glackin Yinfei Gu Dylan Harmon Weinan Huang Jack Kay Karn Kingkaew Reagan Lauder Hyeon Jun Lee Siyu Liu Xiuping Liu Yixuan Liu Katherine Lo Weijia Lu Miao Luo Meaghan Lyons Shengpeng Mao Nathan Loc H Nguyen
THE MINIMAL UNIT OF HOME: AN OBJECT’S LANDSCAPE HIGH GROUNDS FIRE LINE INTERTWINED: LABORATORY FOR AUGMENTED REALITY FORMS OF FAILURE ALMOST:OTHER GESTURAL LINES: AN ARCHITECTURAL TRANSLATION GLITCH HOUSE INSTAGRAMMABLE (ALMOST) INVISIBLE MORE MUD SUBURBAN CONVERSIONS 55 CORNERS FLAT REALITY NEW PRODUCTION SPACE IN THE SPACE BETWEEN THE URBAN AND RURAL ALMOST ORDINARY ARCOLOGY REVISITED FLUID BOUNDARIES ALMOST DIVIDED MIND THE GAP ALMOST SOMEWHERE TALKING BORDERS IN RURALPOLITAN SPACE [DE]CODING THE STANDARD ALMOST VERNACULAR SUPER INTIMATE ALMOST CONNECTED A SERIES OF SMALL ACTS URBAN VOID A HISTORY OF THE FUTURE: WORKSPACE SIMULACRUM OF CHINATOWN ALMOST FORGOTTEN DISSOLUTION OF PERCEPTION DENSER CITY NEW BABEL WHERE CAN YOU HANG OUT AT MIDNIGHT? MASQUERADE ALMOST GROUNDED
THESIS Joseph Palmer Mian Qin Yanhang Ren Sophie Ruf Anna Samsonov Tara Shi Kristen Smith Max Tang Jeralyn Tseng Yuxuan Tu Sarah Rutter Vermeer Cui Wang Yuxi Wei Adam Weiss Zachary Whiteman Nan Xia Chengxi Xie Shuang Yan Yiming Zhang Zhao Zhe Ziye Zhong Bojin Zhu Yuanpei Zhuang
THE TERRITORIAL EXCHANGE ANOTHER VOID NOT SO GOOD DOLLHOUSE | NARRATIVE DRAG ESSENTIAL WHIMSY MODELING HOME (UN)DESTRUCTION CAT HOUSE PRACTICING CHAOS THE DYS-PLACEMENT MACHINE URBANOVELLA UNREAL VISION ALMOST MONOLITHIC FINAL ACTS THE HYBRID LANDSCAPE AS DRAWN, AS BUILT UNDER THE OCEAN SENSORIUM BACKGROUNDING: IMPACT OF MATERIAL GENERATIVE DAILY OBJECTS FLATTENED MUSES ALMOST YOURS MISREFERENCING IMAGES
STUDIO ONE 3D PRINTING ADOBE VAULTS AND DOMES
Wanchen Cai Taoyu Han Hanyang Hu Sinae Jung Pei Li Vasudha Maiya Dingtong Wang Shengrui Xu Xu Zhang Churan Zheng
GUEST CRITICS Neeraj Bhatia
Neeraj Bhatia is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the California College of the Arts where he also co-directs the urbanism research lab, The Urban Works Agency. Neeraj is also founder of The Open Workshop.
Sean Canty
Sean Canty is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Harvard and the principal of Studio SC as well as a principal at Office III, an experimental collective based in New York, San Francisco, and Cambridge.
Tei Carpenter Irene Cheng McLain Clutter
Tei Carpenter is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia and founder of Brooklynbased design studio Agency—Agency.
Sara Dean Dawn Finley
Tei Carpenter is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia and founder of Brooklynbased design studio Agency—Agency.
Jenny French Nataly Gattegno
Jenny French is an Assistant Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard and a founding partner of Boston based French 2D.
Margaret Griffin
Margaret Griffin FAIA, is a member of the design faculty at SCI-Arc and principal of Los Angeles-based, Griffin Enright Architects.
Irene Cheng is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the California College of the Arts and a founding principal of Oakland based Cheng+Snyder. McLain Clutter is an Associate Professor and Chair of Architecture at the University of Michigan and a partner in the Ann Arbor based design practice EXTENTS. He is also the author of Imaginary Apparatus: New York City and its Mediated Representation. Park Books, 2015.
Dawn Finley is an Associate Professor of Architecture at Rice University and a founding principal of Interloop—Architecture, a Houston based design office that focuses on innovative building technologies, inventive forms, and precise material finishes.
Nataly Gattegno is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the California College of the Arts. She is also a partner of FUTUREFORMS, an interdisciplinary design and research collaborative.
Sandhya Kochar Perry Kulper
Sandhya Kochar is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Ohio State University.
Perry Kulper is an architect and an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan. Kulper co-authored Pamphlet Architecture 34, Fathoming the Unfathomable: Archival Ghosts and Paradoxical Shadows with Nat Chard.
Keith Krumweide
Keith Krumweide is Dean and Professor of Architecture at the California College of the Arts. He is the author of Atlas of Another America: An Architectural Fiction, Park Books, 2017.
Jimenez Lai Janette Kim
Jimenez Lai is a Lecturer in Architecture at UCLA. His first manifesto, Citizens of No Place, was published by Princeton Architectural Press.
Chris Leong EB Min Brian Price William Price Zoe Prillinger Jessica Reynolds
Chris Leong is currently Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia and partner at New York based, Leong Leong.
Janette Kim is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the California College of the Arts. She is also co-director of the Urban Works Agency at CCA, principal of All of the Above, and founding editor of the ARPA Journal.
EB Min is an Adjunct Professor of Architecture at the California College of the Arts and principal of San Francisco based Min Design. Brian Price is Chair of Graduate Architecture and Associate Professor at California College of the Arts.. His practice, Price Studio, is based in San Francisco. William Price is the Brown Endowed Chair, Graduate Coordinator and Associate Professor of Architecture at Prairie View A&M University. Zoe Prillinger is a partner at San Francisco based OPA (Ogrydziak and Prillinger Architects), a frequent studio critic and has taught design at Berkeley and Harvard. Jessica Reynolds is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia and a unit master for Diploma 13 at The Architectural Association. In 2009 she founded vPPR with Tatiana von Preussen and Catherine Pease.
GUEST CRITICS Heather Roberge Mohamed Sharif Paulette Singley
Heather Roberge is Chair and Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA. She is the founder and principal of Los Angeles based, Murmur.
Mitchell Squire Clark Thenhaus Jesus Vassallo Mabel Wilson
Mitchell Squire is an installation artist, sculptor, and performance artist and Professor of Architecture at Iowa State University.
Jason Young
Jason Young is a Professor and Director of Architecture at the University of Tennessee. He was a contributing co-editor for Stalking Detroit, Barcelona, ACTAR 2001, an anthology of essays, projects, and photographs offering an analytical description of Detroit.
Michael Young
Michael Young is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Cooper Union and a partner in New York based Young & Ayata.
Mohamed Sharif is an Assistant Adjunct Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA. He is a principal of Los Angeles based, Sharif, Lynch: Architecture. Paulette Singley is a Professor of Architecture at Woodbury University. She co-edited Eating Architecture with Jamie Horwitz, exploring the intersections of architecture and the culinary arts.
Clark Thenhaus is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the California College of the Arts and director of Oakland and Denver based Endemic Architecture. Jesus Vassallo is an Assistant Professor at Rice University. He is the author of Seamless: Digital Collage and Dirty Realism in Contemporary Architecture, Park Books, 2016. Mabel Wilson is the Nancy and George Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, a Professor in African American and African Diasporic Studies, and the Associate Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia. Wilson has published two books, Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture, 2016 and Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums, University of California Press 2012.
BERKELEY FACULTY CRITICS Mark Anderson Andrew Atwood Tom J. Buresh Dana Buntrock Luisa Caldas Greg Castillo Raveevarn Choksombatchai Renee Chow Margaret Crawford Greig Crysler Danelle Guthrie Sarah Hirschman Lisa Iwamoto David Jaehning Nathan John Dan Muntean David Orkand Rudabeh Pakravan Keith Plymale Eleanor Pries Ronald Rael Mary-Ann Ray Eric Reeder Simon Schleicher Andrew Shanken Dan Spiegel Kyle Steinfeld Neyran Turan Susan Ubbelohde Mia Zinni
THE MINIMAL UNIT OF HOME: AN OBJECT’S Carolina LANDSCAPE Aguilar Advisors Neyran Turan Rudabeh Pakravan
Crucial aspects in architecture have almost entirely been excluded from the discipline’s discussion such as mechanical services. This thesis discusses another layer that has often been similarly forgotten, the interiors. Program of spaces can be defined by its contents. The way we think of housing, the way we live, the character of home can be defined through the relationship between the objects that inhabit the space. The project aims to enhance and enrich the architecture-object relationship, in a space in which objects can be used as architectural elements and architectural elements can be used as objects. New norms begin to form, new adjacencies and object relationships begin to emerge. This thesis discusses a new way of living, one where the permanence of architecture won’t limit the way we live but opens the possibility of a form of living in which objects and their relationship to the interior define space.
Kati Albee Advisors Tom Buresh Nathan John
HIGH GROUNDS
As cities become increasingly more dense and chaotic, there is a necessity to simultaneously produce spaces that offer a departure from these unhealthy exposures. Some of the most consistently underutilized spaces in cities are their rooftops. This offers the potential for a new ecosystem to materialize, one that is both a physical and experiential ascension from the everyday terrain below. ‘High Grounds’ explores this potential through a series of experiential interventions situated on six rooftops in San Francisco’s Financial District. Through this emergent layer of sky islands, a new urban strata - one that is easily accessible to all - is registered within the public realm. Each intervention unveils a strange and uncanny landscape. By folding in both natural and artificial forces, city dwellers are provided the opportunity to sprinkle their daily routines with whimsical moments in the clouds.
Julie Anna Anderson Advisors Tom Buresh Andrew Atwood
FIRE LINE
This proposal challenges architecture to fundamentally re think|re imagine|re postulate how to construct in fire-prone regions: Build With Fire, Let Fire In. A shifting climate paradigm sparks catastrophic repercussions of amplified weather events and widespread wildfires. This new architecture not only fortifies, but also celebrates the cyclical nature of devastation and beautiful renewal through fire. Through studying materiality, cartographic mapping, case studies, and recent research a database of understanding forms the basis of the design. The experimental site selected for this proposal is nestled at the edge of the Napa Valley region, an area with deep ties to the land, agriculture, and fire. This architecture implements layers of protection ranging from passive to active, sacrificial to permanent, malleable to steadfast, and proactive to reactive. This architecture holds the fire at bay while also inviting it in. This architecture celebrates adaptation, resilience and rebirth.
INTERTWINED: LABORATORY FOR AUGQihui MENTED REALITY Bao Advisors David Orkand Luisa Caldas
AR is not fake reality. AR is an augmentation of the reality and it needs the presence of a physical interface to be applied. Human beings have the ability of perceiving spaces using depth, perspective and focal point of view. However the digital devices understand and recognize a geometry or shape of an interface similarly to how it read a QR code. One key technological challenge facing by AR developers today is achieving stable “tracking” as computer-generated virtual objects require “masked” to the orientation of real world objects. Today technologies often serve as design tools to help develop architecture but architecture seldom rewards back for developing technology. Architecture can be a new approach for us to make AR interface tangible and architecture can be redesigned as a series of laboratory spaces to better facilitate those AR applications and to test what characteristics of space are in favor of AR performance.
Rachel Blowes Advisors Tom Buresh Simon Schleicher
FORMS OF FAILURE
Architectural obsolescence can be classified into two categories: material failure, and programmatic oscillation. In rare instances, these two forms of obsolescence occur simultaneously, marking the end of a building life cycle; however, more frequently there is a misalignment of their relative rates. This misalignment results in the generation of waste. Demolition takes the lives of buildings prematurely, leaving behind a surplus of partially used building materials with nowhere to go but the landfill. At the same time, economists predict that a scarcity of many raw building materials will exist by the year 2030. Soon we will have no choice but to mine landfills or existing architecture for valuable building materials. To address this issue, architects must design entire building life cycles. Designing with failure in mind creates the opportunity to reveal material histories. Architecture must reveal, reclaim, reuse, reposition, and reinvent materials and space.
LeeAnne Brown Advisors Lisa Iwamoto Mia Zinni
ALMOST:OTHER
Can heterotopic spaces be reconfigured as positive catalysts for social change? Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias specifically condemns female bodies during menstruation and labor to his “other” spaces, making them always an “other” body. These heterotopias were once realized spatially in menstruation huts and continue to exist in contemporary spaces like lactation rooms and abortion clinics. These spaces are at once within society and without, places in which a productive irony is embedded: they are places for “others” only, no longer under the surveillance of the powers of oppression that put them there. The concept of heterotopia gives name to a collective purpose that women’s spaces hold in generating solidarity. An architectural analysis, reorientation and redesign of these spaces is an act as a feminist resistance, making women’s spaces prominent and publicly accessible while maintaining their productive heterotopic qualities.
GESTURAL LINES: AN ARCHITECTURAL Ho Ming TRANSLATION Chau Advisors David Orkand Kyle Steinfeld
“In modern societies, it seems, straightness has come to epitomize not only rational thought and disputation but also the values of civility and moral rectitude.” – Tim Ingold The attractiveness of the linear line is understandable, for its linking of data points in space associate itself with being a scientific, rational, and efficient construction. But as contemporary society moved beyond a structuralist construct, where does that left of architecture and its association with the linear line? Could meaning be given to every tangent of the line instead of only its end points? Are we ready to allow the line its own consciousness to wander the space it can occupy, its own will to negotiate the resistance in its immediate surroundings, much like an orchestra conductor allows the tip of its baton? What could architecture become if we shed the structuralist pretext of the modern line and embrace a line of gesture?
Canran Chen Advisors Tom Buresh Ronald Rael
GLITCH HOUSE
In 1963, Ivan Sutherland created Sketchpad- a computer program considered to be the early ancestor of computer-aided design. Now, 57 years later, we are completely dependent on digital technology to organize and visualize architecture prior to construction. As we become ever more immersed in technology, glitches are unavoidable. During the design process, we labor in an environment overwhelmed by responding to and correcting all manner of digital glitches. What if these glitches didn’t go away- is the point of departure for the Glitch House. Two dimensional drawings of Adolf Loos’s Villa Muller are subjected to multiple glitching protocols producing intensified and unexpected relationships between, spaces, materials, and human experiences within a domestic program.
Caroline Chen Advisors Mary-Ann Ray Tom Buresh Renee Chow
TITLE
At an urban level, day to day buildings are experienced as individually programmed bubbles that inhabitants pass through in typical interior exterior relationships. Is there opportunity here to then start to look within, where the contexts produced by interiors can be viewed relationally and overlapping to produce new ways of experiencing atmospheres, climate, and program? The project explores the potential for urban leakage through the banal program of climate controlled urban storage.These interiors are diversified into other acts of preservation, production, and consumption that are governed by an enclosed weather, creating a collage of programs and outdoor spaces that overlap and leak into each other to diffuse the experience of back of house urban storage into more social programs.
Jie Chen Advisors Name 1 Name 2
TITLE
Body
Xinyi Chen Advisors David Orkand Mark Anderson
INSTAGRAMMABLE
“In the current iteration of our digital age, Instagram is king in social media. Given the visual nature of the platform, architects and designers have flocked to the platform, using it to market their work, promote new ideas, and even pull in commissions. The thesis proposes guidelines as well as a sample project on how to design the Instagrammable architecture of one city. The project is a hotel located in Los Angeles. With the extracted symbol elements from Los Angeles itself incorporated, the architecture would bring unique spatial experiences and photography moments to the guests. Insofar as the bond between Instagram and space design is tight but also blurred, this thesis provides a novel methodology responding to this trend.�
Alexandra Cortez Advisors Lisa Iwamoto Andrew Atwood
(ALMOST) INVISIBLE
Architecture that exists as symbolic institutions of power are promulgated with devices of security. The increasing envelopment of public space and public life by an architecture of security is becoming a central urban issue of our times. Security as an object that is placed intrudes on the aesthetic dialog of architecture. The advancement of militant technology and security apparatuses opens new possibilities to the configuration of space. The conversion of devices of security into surfaces can transform space into an embedded field of security that works across scales. The U.S. Embassy, because of its prominence, vulnerability, and political associations has been the subject for hardening far longer than others. It is here that the core of public negotiations within security are first established and replicated. This thesis examines the reality of fortified space within the government interface and challenges whether this landscape of defense can be re-imagined and redefined through design.
Sandy Curth Advisors Mary-Ann Ray Tom Buresh Ronald Rael
MORE MUD
Imagine a world of procedural aggregation in which raw material, earth, water, trash, the mineral aftermath of both organic and chemical production, is sorted, synthesized and stacked into space recognizing the needs of humans and an ecology. The look of this stacking is the product of our own understanding of efficiency and order. Unlike nature, we still sometimes see feasibility in straight lines and 90 degree corners. In this future a new additive modality replaces nuts and bolts with paths and patterns, framing schemes will still largely be concerned with sequence, but less concerned with the joining of highly specific discrete elements. Construction becomes less like assembling a kit of parts and more like weaving a three dimensional tapestry. Here, I question what this future will look like and how it might restore and cultivate the oyster reefs that once lined the Richmond wetlands.
Thomas DeVore Advisors Tom Buresh Margaret Crawford
SUBURBAN CONVERSIONS
Suburban Conversions engages the mythology of the suburbs and proposes a new dream. It is a methodology of cut + paste; a process of working as a translator between collage, drawing, and digital model to break down existing spatial orders. The material of the suburbs is cannibalized and reorganized to discover productive conflicts. These techniques are used to: a) Envision community and shared resources. b) Counter the dominance of the car. c) Reflect the growing diversity of people in the suburbs with spatial+programmatic diversity. d) Transition from a landscape of consumption to one of regenerative production.
Junyi Ding Advisors Neyran Turan Renee Chow
55 CORNERS
Among the component of a room, the corners are the most expressive elements. A room, which is basically a box, joins at 4 corners. With the elimination of the corners, thus walls are turned into freestanding, movable slabs. By reassembling segments of these slabs, a new spatial context that integrates the former function of the demolished rooms is redefined. The aggregation of quasi objects, which in my case is the composition of aggregated corners, creates a matter of field condition which may be interrupted, or they may impinge upon each other. A corner intercepting another corner, attracts or repels it; reinforces it or interferes with it. The interaction of one corner with another causes strains and stress. An organization for individual corner can maintain a high degree of differentiation through yet a kind of repetition and the totality of the form can give a sense of unity.
Athena Do Advisors Mary-Ann Ray Tom Buresh Andrew Atwood
FLAT REALITY
We are moving towards a flat reality, where globalization has dissolved the territorial boundaries of space, and technology has destabilized one’s perception of time. In this flat reality, real and virtual operate in perpetual disagreement and coexistence, and replication freely moves between the physical and the abstract. This thesis accepts our existence in flat reality but questions the public interior it has created. Using the data center as a point of departure, it reimagines the intersection between the immaterial and material, public and private, to suggest an alternative interior. What happens when we seek to create a dumb architecture in an age where smart belies a hidden infrastructure that buries our security, labor, and environmental impacts within its flow of information? Can the architecture of a diagram, in its simplicity and directness, prompt a reprogramming of a reality that operates within these conflictual characteristics?
1/128” = 1’
NEW PRODUCTION SPACE IN THE SPACE Qi BETWEEN THE URBAN AND RURAL Feng Advisors Mary-Ann Ray Tom Buresh Mark Anderson
An unprecedented boom of Internet celebrity economy is taking place in rural China. As a process of counter-urbanization, social media serves as a new production space that breaks the boundary between the urban and rural. The program of online celebrity factory is proposed to provide conditions and guidance needed to broadcast live and make videos for those who want to pursue a career of online celebrities, creating job opportunities and increasing local income. Also, vernacular architecture and culture will receive more attention and have more opportunities to thrive. A strategic site in Gaozi Village is chosen. It was a silkworm breeding factory and abandoned for years. The project intends to preserve and develop the passive environmental control logic of silkworm factory by implanting a set of “eco manipulator�.
Xiaokang Feng Advisors Lisa Iwamoto Kyle Steinfeld
ALMOST ORDINARY
In this thesis, it starts from Ordinary. Those daily objects that are everywhere within us, from bread pans to buildings, and those everyday objects we see around us are indicators of our daily values. When it comes to contemporary art and architecture, when an artist tries to emphasize the whole sphere of space with objects, when an artist has exhausted object-oriented ideas and tries to de-object to emphasize the whole sphere of space with objects, like in Do Ho Suh’s work Fallen Star. Under those conditions, what is ordinary then? When objects are given more layers, our perception of the objects go beyond the objects themselves that produce other dimensions of connections. Thus, this thesis examines how the ordinary changes, and how the concepts of banal and ordinary are relevant today for contemporary architecture. Since humans cannot simply live in nature, rather, we must devise ways of finding and making shelter, clothing and feeding ourselves. In short, people need things, ordinary objects, to live in a world, and we make those things, not randomly or by chance, but systematically and intentionally. Those ordinary things shaping our behavior, helping us to choose the right things to say, providing rules for social interaction, realizing the situation of ordinary objects and the changing statues of ordinary— almost ordinary, is a way of seeing our daily values.
Steven Fisher Advisors David Orkand Nathan John
ARCOLOGY REVISITED
Alienation from consequence is what has enabled the destructive behavior of the past two centuries. The vulgarity of resource extraction is off-shored, the gory spectacles of clear-cutting, mining, fishing, e-waste disposal etc, are so far “out of sight, out of mind” as to be practically unimaginable. This thesis is an attempt to tackle this problem of alienation: of the worker from their product, of the consumer and their goods, of the farm and the grocery store, of the trash bin and the landfill, of the power plant and the lightbulb, of the individual and their social relations, of the animals and their habitats. To close the gap between action and consequence. The proposal is an urban project, a semi-closed system that strives to achieve material indepence from the larger economy, while still engaging the rich social fabric of urban agglomeration and acting as a laboratory for reimagining modern life. Centered around a large aquaponics food production system, this workers cooperative reclaims “live, work, play” to create a resilient and ethical community.
Jenna Frowein Advisors Tom Buresh Eleanor Pries
FLUID BOUNDARIES
Sea level rise must be embraced as a design catalyst rather than solely a threat. Architecture should celebrate this fluid boundary condition as it washes inland. Extend the boundary condition, widen it. Make the boundary inhabitable. The beautification of flood disaster is set in contrast with the expediency of solving the problem at hand. It is the contrast between the elegant and the expedient, the resolved and the ready-made. This serves as a critique of typical idealized waterfront projects that fail to address the changing waterline, while also elevating the glimmers of beauty still found in disaster becoming a new way of life. Through analyzing and representationally equating these contradicting extremes, one can synthesize a potentially more accurate reality.
Kevin (Xiangyu) Gao Advisors Lisa Iwamoto Mia Zinni
ALMOST DIVIDED
At one time a single country, the conflict between the two political ideologies that emerged directly after the second world war created a divided nation in Korea. This physical division fluctuated throughout the Korea war until its conclusion in 1953 where the line defined the demilitarized zone, known as the DMZ. On most borders, border architecture tends to seen as exclusive and separated. On the contrary, this thesis is trying to propose that border architecture is not xenophobic and divided, but blurry, coexisting and symbiotic. It can dissolve the boundary rather than strengthen it. This thesis reconsiders this North-south Korea boundary condition to construct a new architectural and social relationship between the two sides that leverages this lesser known landscape of the DMZ.
Marshall Gifford Advisors Tom Buresh Keith Plymale
MIND THE GAP
The home is a constant experimentation grappling with issues of configuration, privacy, individuality, collectivity, density and program – the balance of which constitutes the unique character of each home. Bound at all times by its original constructs, the house functions as an unfinished work of architecture. At the heart of these issues is the program and thereby the furniture organized within. Built-in furniture units become the domestic architectural standard. Each unit shaped to that piece of furniture and dictating the programmatic use of the space. Houses can be configured in numerous ways with units conglomerated or broken apart as individuals. Furniture unit arrangement articulates the delineations of spatial privacy. Spatial cuts open the possibility of new programmatic relationships and a space within the house unto itself. These spatial moves provoke unexplored possibilities of how a house comes together as a part of its furniture.
Tanner Glackin Advisors Lisa Iwamoto Greg Crysler
ALMOST SOMEWHERE
This thesis asks the question, how can consumer-based architecture be reclaimed to activate and connect neighborhoods, becoming a means of placemaking in a mostly non-place, transient oriented fabric? Gas stations, one of the most common consumer building typologies, are decreasing at an exponential rate. As our culture and energy economy shifts away from the use of petroleum to new means of renewable energy, this building typology will soon be obsolete, subject to abandonment, demolition or re-use. Through deconstruction, reconstruction, and remediation, this thesis aims to create a network of new forms, new meanings, and new social interactions on former gas station sites.
TALKING BORDERS IN RURALPOLITAN Yinfei SPACE Gu Advisors Mary-Ann Ray Tom Buresh Kyle Steinfeld
As an extreme example of contemporary urbanization, China has thousands of villages that are annexed into urban villages. Urban villages are hidden by wide roads, high walls, lines of shops, only with very few narrow entrances, causing them to be unrevealed ruralopolis. Floaters loose self efficacy, but they all have something special to share. This thesis aims to draw out the possibilities of new relationships between the villagers, immigrants and citizens, the foreign explorers and the floating college graduates on the edge of where they meet. Through forming ambiguous edges, porous borders, Incomplete form and unresolved narr atives.
Dylan Harmon Advisors Neyran Turan Dana Buntrock
[DE]CODING THE STANDARD
Architects have historically sought after a way to codify the discipline, ranging from aesthetic ordinances to building codes rooted in safety. Today, there is no part of the design and development of the built environment that is untouched by an abundance of rules, regulations, and standards relating to building form and performance. The building code is often seen as prohibitive; however, the rules relating to building form and performance must be understood as an integral part of the creative practice. The International Building Code is subjective. It verbally addresses a practice that is inherently visual, leaving much to interpretation. This thesis stretches the building code’s stipulations on finish, obstruction, and weatherproofing to examine whether we can mindfully interact with the text, using it to drive the design process. Through investigating the building code, this thesis questions what assumptions have been made and reimagines definitions and uses outlined in the code.
Weinan Huang Advisors Lisa Iwamoto Raveevarn Choksombatchai
ALMOST VERNACULAR
This thesis is trying to suggest that vernacular architecture is not as static or a frozen piece in time and place, but temporary and transitory, as a morphological evolution based on the continuously changing relationship between human, building, and context. ‘The primary function of vernacular architecture is not to re-interpret the past, but to inform the present.’ Hutong is an urban vernacular in Beijing, China. It has been heralded as the definitive exemplar of Beijing’s urbanism since the city became the capital during the Yuan Dynasty. However, the traditional town blocks are disappearing at a rapid pace without any alternative model and because of modern civilization, which is insuperable and becomes the precondition of the world. As a result, Beijing lost its identity, and the vernacular buildings are oversimplifying as a static iconic language or fake antique. The thesis project is trying to find if a proposal could balance the vernacular and international, the traditional and modern.
Jack Kay Advisors Tom Buresh Susan Ubbelohde
SUPER INTIMATE
This is an architecture of the super-intimate.... of the super, the land survey, the watershed, the interstate, an architecture of the conditions in which our communities exist... This is also an architecture of the intimate, of the pedestrian, rendered in the textures of the everyday, of the walls and rooms which form the backgrounds of our days... Each scale, the super and the intimate, offer their own way of seeing. Superlooking: seeing from above, inter-regional, precise division and abstraction of the landscape / the streetscape into portions edible and digestible. Intimate-looking: the ingestion of the world through experience, the center of attention. . . an architecture of the pedestrian, walking alongside the lines laid in layered utopian visions. The project: the design of five observatories. Buildings which choreograph the intimate act of looking, revealing the structure of the super. Buildings which utilize the scale of the intimate to reveal the scale of the super.
Karn Kingkaew Advisors Lisa Iwamoto Renee Chow
ALMOST CONNECTED
Today, the rise of digital shopping platform such as Amazon, along with various other social media and delivery services indicates that the public interest has shifted away from the traditional public space toward the digital spaces. The increasing amount of vacant retail space on the ground floor resulted in the declining quality of street walkability, so has the public interaction. This thesis then questions the legitimacy of the ‘residential over retail’ mix-use model as the generator of today’s urban public space. The investigation will be done in a form of a counter proposal to the shopping complex design proposal in Oakland ‘The Ridge.’ As a counter proposal, the design explore an alternative mix use model that introduce public interaction beyond the street level. Reconsidering the conflation between a public and private program.
Reagan Lauder Advisors Neyran Turan Margaret Crawford
A SERIES OF SMALL ACTS
At the edge of a city resistant to growth, wary of change, with a nostalgic taste for gingerbread trim, lies a row of old houses, seemingly normal from the street, but quite curious once you step inside. Perhaps it began as an act of desperation—exhausted from too many roommates, an overflow of AirBnBers, feeling a bit cramped, and wallets a bit too thin. The residents here stumbled into a series of small acts that gave way to new economies of living. Punctures were made through partitions and party walls, and everyday elements were inserted between. Small spaces gained dynamic use, and bits of luxury were sprinkled throughout the otherwise modest house. Space, means, and appliance were no longer bound by property lines or rooms named by singular activities. These small acts made way for new modes of sharing, altering notions of ownership and prompting a never-ending series of slight negotiations.
Hyeon Jun Lee Advisors Mary-Ann Ray Tom Buresh Eric Reeder
URBAN VOID
In a span of just 60 years, Seoul has witnessed two extremes of housing types- the traditional Hanok and the modern high-rise. With the modern housing, every essence of traditional spatial characteristics has disappeared. This thesis examines the possibility to evolve the Korean traditional dwelling within the dense city of Seoul. Drawing from the unique traditional space of Madang, an “empty� voided space at the center of the traditional Korean Hanok house, the thesis proposes multiple nested scales of voids. These voids have ambiguous potential for multiple modes of occupation, or emptiness. The project is situated at the edge of Seoul, between the city and nature. At the periphery, the urban voids operate as a permeable space between the complexity of the city and nature and the dwellings. The urban voids produce a partial view of nature and delineate a horizontal curvature within the ruthlessly vertical cityscape.
195*270
255*360
195*240~270
255*330~360
195*270
255*360
X
Siyu Liu Advisors Mary-Ann Ray Tom Buresh David Jaehning
A HISTORY OF THE FUTURE: WORKSPACE
Workspace, the one unique program that the environment has a close relationship with organizational behavior. Society, architecture, and economy meet and blend here. To achieve higher productivity, human interactions are unconsciously observed and considered by all the others. “Business does not demand a particular architecture.” Concealed by desire, stress, and amusement, how architecture play a role as an intermedium to reconsider the relationship between human and work environment, as well as humanity itself? This thesis, in retrospect, represents different work scenarios that happened in the “future.”
Xiuping Liu Advisors David Orkand Dan Muntean
SIMULACRUM OF CHINATOWN
In today’s world, how many of the “facts” we have witnessed are real facts? Today’s TV, film, photography, newspapers, magazines and other media makes us lost in the overwhelming second-hand information. Representation covers up reality and replace it, so the world becomes a simulacrum. Chinatown is a simulacrum of China. People put the building decorations with Chinese elements on the street facade, pretending that they still live in China. The selection and placement of ornaments are almost irregular. Based on this context, what would it be like if we exaggerate and enlarge this misuse, display and scaleless? All kinds of wrong Chinese elements, plans, structures are put together to form a new simulacrum world instead of the original Chinese impression. What the real reality looks like is no longer important. So, will people still have a sense of belonging under the hyper-real context of various Chinese elements being abused?
Yixuan Liu Advisors Lisa Iwamoto Andrew Shanken
ALMOST FORGOTTEN
Without memory, without the reading traces of the past there can be no recognition of difference, no tolerance for the rich complexity and instabilities of personal, cultural, and national identity. According to Kevin Lynch, “Identity is a case where an object is unique.” However, the socio-cultural and economic conditions, which have changed as a result of globalization, make it compulsory to re-shape cities and their identities. These rapid urban growth and globalization have inevitably devoured and assimilated local culture. “Memory” and “Remembrance ”seemed to be in crisis throughout the twentieth century and are still happening now. It becomes a central urban issue. This thesis is aimed to explore and analyze the formation and transformation of city identity and narrating it in the build environment. It will test the probability and the limitation of promoting urban identity and structuring the urban complex through memory by intervening people’s social act.
Katherine Lo Advisors Lisa Iwamoto Dan Spiegel
DISSOLUTION OF PERCEPTION
The proliferation of glazed surfaces in the modern city can create new images, new spaces, and new skylines beyond them. Transparency and reflectivity thus add new dimensions to the urban experience. Given that perceived space dominates experience as much as occupiable space, let us look back to see how the window makes the seen and unseen. In this thesis, the context will not be buildings, but the mirrors from which we can frame new spaces. Projections from these windows become objects onto themselves, and thus carve into each other to become new occupied space. What new experiences can be derived from this microcosm of the city?
Weijia Lu Advisors Mary-Ann Ray Tom Buresh David Jaehning
DENSER CITY
This thesis is to look for ways to preserve the unique fabric of urban villages, which is already very dense, and try to find a method to prepare them for the future rapid urbanization, where city will become denser and denser. Inspired by the science fiction Folding Beijing, the urban fabric that surrounded the urban villages will be folded and inserting into the existing urban village. It will have necessary structure touching the ground, and the old buildings underneath it will be removed to make ways for the natural light, air and open space. In the new building, a mix-up of different size of units will happen. Different units, from economy to high-end, might live next to each other and have subtle interventions, like a wardrobe or a bathtub pushing into another unit. People will not be classified by where they live and how their houses look like.
Miao Luo Advisors David Orkand David Jaehning
NEW BABEL
In this thesis project, I will review what is happening around the world as a bystander, since evaluating or solving social problems are not things that we have to do, even though it seems very popular now to ‘Sociologicalize’ everything. This project will not provide neither an effective evaluation system nor a methodology to improve the world. In this tower, people will give up all seriousness willingly. They will indulge in the drama of laughter and roar, the original competitive performance and the satisfaction of all instinctive impulses. All the high-density public event spaces are superimposed in this tower. The foreground and background of the stage will overlap but are separated from each other. People entertained in this new Babel Tower. At the same time, these entertainments will become the most gorgeous performances for viewers.
Meahgan Lyons Advisors Mary-Ann Ray Tom Buresh Greg Crysler
WHERE CAN YOU HANG OUT AT MIDNIGHT?
To acknowledge the ever-changing role of modern public library and public space, this thesis posits a new network of Bay Area libraries that operate collectively as resource repositories across twenty-four hours, linked through public transit infrastructure. These new branches are inserted into the urban fabric, either attaching to existing buildings or activating hidden public open spaces. With their own street entrances, each location has independent operating hours, calibrated to the specific library program it houses. While responding to site-specific context in form and program, each location is recognizable through material language as part of a greater network. Ultimately, this network can continue to aggregate, providing human-scale library interventions across the region.
Shengpeng Mao Advisors David Orkand Raveevarn Choksombatchai
MASQUERADE
This thesis starts with the interest of the scene that a modern space hide at the back of a piece of fake Victorian faรงade. Architecture becomes a tool of telling lies. In Paris, there is a modern Apple store in an old apartment. In Beijing, there is a supermarket in a 1500 years old temple. In New York, there are chaos office covered by giant clean curtain wall system. In Las Vegas, there is a hot dog store in a duck shape faรงade. In Nanjing, there is a traditional Chinese garden in a post-modernism museum. We cannot recognize the interior space through different kinds of standing masks along the street. This thesis trying to critique this ordinary situation happened in cities. More specifically, this project situated at the Kabukicho, Tokyo, Japan. By creating the space with a series of slim layers, people can walk through different layers without known what will happen behind this layer. Multiple programs emerge with multiple layers, multiple layers served as multiple masks, multiple masks telling multiple lies.
Eric P. S. K. Morrill Advisors Neyran Turan Andrew Shanken
NOT JUST ONCE
This project is a speculative practice that fuses demolition and reuse aesthetics with the vocabulary of high performance, rationalized wall assemblies. The practice begins with surgical demolition, allowing for reuse of elements that are typically discarded. During reassembly, aesthetics of historical palimpsest and degradation are at times retained as-is, and are at times made into blanked-out geometry. The recomposed building system, cloaked in contemporary materials, is put on display by apertures that alternately pierce, carve, or skim the multi-layered walls. Conceptually, this project seeks to open a dialog about preservation, site-specificity, and environmentalism.
Nathan Loc H Nguyen Advisors Name 1 Name 2
ALMOST GROUNDED
Sections and plans are similar representational conventions. Both describe cuts—the one horizontal, the other vertical. Le Corbusier has constantly reminded architects that: “the plan is the generator, the determination of everything, and is the primary motive that determines the design conception.” However, why isn’t the section considered as the generator? This thesis is looking to rethink the conventional definition of a section to explore its new agency in becoming a generator of the conception. At the urban scale, this thesis adopts the legibility of the section to create a new urban structure that supports the contemporary city’s social condenser. How would the future urbanization increase human interaction through spatial, social, and transportation interconnectedness? This thesis questions the planning potential of a “Master Section” in response to the city’s rapid population growth, its necessity for vertical expansion, its complex, multi-layered urban reality that cannot be described by the traditional planning methodology.
Joseph Palmer Advisors Tom Buresh Eric Reeder
THE TERRITORIAL EXCHANGE
As of 2020, the UN has identified a record 71 million refugees—a group comprising of people who are forcibly displaced from their homes and cannot return. At the same time, the US is struggling to transition from manufacturing to a technology and informationbased economy. The Territorial Exchange is situated as a response to a world in which traditional architectural morphologies cannot keep up with accelerating forces of human migration and automation. This proposal would simultaneously facilitate the movement of people and goods and act as an interface for migrant and local populations to work together. Parallel to its mission of integrating diverse populations, the block has metamorphosized separate sites into a single network, comprising a set of fluid ‘territories’ that are customized in-situ. By providing an ever-changing common ground for a mixed population, The Territorial Exchange seeks to rewrite the narratives of onesided immigrant assimilation and cycles of obsolescence.
co n v e y o r s y s t e m
e l e v ato r s (h u ma n + e qu i p me n t )
e g re s s
p u bli c p e de s tr i an acce s s
s e rv i ce all e y / tr u c k acc e s s
Mian Qin Advisors Mary-Ann Ray Tom Buresh Eleanor Pries
ANOTHER VOID
As the global efforts are trying to intervene with unforeseeable water issues, the resulting flows of chaos and vulnerability are shaping a new water’s edge, where a typical void keeps water away from cities. The thesis is interested in the sense of transition and lost along those edges, which are not places simply defined as flooded, or not flooded, but rather as typical sites of continual flux that challenge architecture and inhabitation to occupy a space of in-betweenness. Another Void is an exploration of architecture to reclaim itself in the void of flux. Shifting in between site and sight, it attempts to camouflage but also reveal through a hybrid form of object operations, designed atmospheres, and an expanded notion of environment, to create a balance between what feels familiar, natural, and what feels alien or fabricated, to challenge how we perceive this void both of physical reality and mental disorientation.
Yanhang Ren Advisors Neyran Turan Greg Castillo
NOT SO GOOD
Architecture is about translation. It starts from sketches, continues with models and drawings, and ends up with a building. People always value preciseness and try to avoid errors. Perfection, which represents a series of good qualities are never absent in architecture. Most importantly, our understandings of good have been good so much for long. But what if we think differently? What happens when we embrace the mistakes and celebrate the errors during translation? What if we use it as a tool to drive a new design with various possibilities? Perhaps it would shed a new light on architecture methodology and bring richness to the capacity of building making.
Kerstin Roeck Advisors Mary-Ann Ray Tom Buresh Margaret Crawford
ALPINE CONFLUENCE: THE URBAN AQUEDUCT
Decommissioned rail yards provide rare tabula rasa opportunities within otherwise static European cities. Many have been transformed into neighborhoods primarily made up of housing. This thesis envisions an alternative future for a historically productive cargo rail yard in Innsbruck, Austria. It seeks to contribute to a reconsideration of the urban/periphery dichotomy, in which tourist-historic urban centers are separated from the industrial processes of the productive hinterland. The project compresses productive processes of the Alpine hydro-scape and programs associated with urbanity into new adjacencies. By condensing these programs vertically, space is made for a partial renaturalization of the adjacent stream, which allows for a renegotiation of the edge between regional water systems and the built environment. Water is the project’s central spine; it weaves together the seemingly disparate programs, ultimately blurring the boundedness of the urban condition and embracing the wider territorial notion of a horizontal urbanism.
Sophie Ruf Advisors David Orkand Andrew Shanken
DOLLHOUSE | NARRATIVE DRAG
“In the tradition of Paris is Burning the [dollhouse] is officially open.” Adorned with saccharine pink paint and trim so ostentatious the drapes may as well be pure tinsel, this playscape is a sequence of inhabitable dollhouses. This typology boasts a sectional form, that exteriorizes the formerly interior, as well as a dogmatic and prescriptive gendering of domesticity and play (i.e. the play of preening and primping dolls). Much like the artform of D.R.A.G (dressed resembling a girl), playing with dolls or dollhouses is an abstracted and hyperbolic construct of femininity. Dollhouse provides a revealing procession through the composition of a D.R.A.G. performance from inception to finality. Each phase is hosted within a room with a blunt sectional exposure and ornamentation as sardonic as the artform, because “gender is ours’ to play with” in all manifestations. 1. Paris is Burning (1991), a documentary film exploring the Ball Culture drag movement of the mid-to-late 1980s in New York City. 2. Rupaul Andre Charles introducing a Ball Culture themed challenge on Rupaul’s Drag Race. 3.Rupaul’s Drag Race Season 9 winner Sasha Velour in 2017 interview with VH1
Anna Samsonov Advisors David Orkand Sarah Hirschman
ESSENTIAL WHIMSY
Whimsy is a playful, imaginative, and novel state of mind. This thesis is rooted in an exploration of whimsy as a design methodology. It asks what might happen if the architectural design process mirrored the pedagogy of the space it makes. It hypothesizes that the creation of a building can mimic educational game-play by setting clear parameters around which ample space for serendipitous discovery is provided. The components of this school’s design are limited to a handful of primitive blocks and basic shapes which are performatively deployed on a 2.6-acre plot of land in San Francisco’s Mission Bay. This 500-pupil kindergarten and primary school campus buildings are assembled from a family of whimsical formal characters. Some of them are so large they can hold up the roof. Others are smaller and invite individual interaction. Each day’s schedule charts a new course through class instruction, play, communal meals, naps, and quiet time, encouraging students’ independent exploration. Whimsy in the design process is experienced as freedom to discover in use – as children interact with the different figures and with one another, they design their own educations.
Tara Shi Advisors Neyran Turan Greg Castillo
MODELING HOME
Tracing the long lineage of western housing tradition, Pier Aureli & Maria Giudici in their essay “Familiar Horror” describe an unsettling feeling that arises when one recognizes the deep rooted assumptions built into the houses we know today. Designed over the centuries to individuate and separate members of the household based on gender, kinship, labor and socio-economic relations, the House is a site of familiar horror, a microcosm of a society that is “caught in a tangle of psychological constraints and needs that are not natural or unavoidable at all, a tangle in which people are subjugated through their very desires.” Presented as a series of stills, this thesis offers glimpses into the daily life of a family that moves into a model home, a suburban McMansion constructed around an alternative set of assumptions.
Kristen Smith Advisors Neyran Turan Rudabeh Pakravan
(UN)DESTRUCTION
Thousands of buildings are declared obsolete and torn down each year. Meanwhile, thousands more are being constructed, with the same bleak future ahead of them. As architects, we must think about this impending destruction from the conception of the design. Everything human made is impermanent, though at different scales of time. This project takes on the reality that buildings do fall apart, and reimagines that destruction as a way to prolong the building’s life. As the building falls apart, new facades are created from that action to reinforce and further protect the now more exposed interior space. As this deterioration happens, the layout of the building is changed over time. Users move out, new users move in. The cycle of the building’s life continues. The building embraces instability, and uses this instability as flexibility over very long scales of time. Its instability is used to extend its life, as its destruction is what is keeping it alive. Image: case study drawing of deterioration of Woo Hon Fai Hall’s façade
Max Tang Advisors Tom Buresh Luisa Caldas
CAT HOUSE
The study of animals is the study of humans. The connection between animals and humans has been established from before the beginning of civilization. According to pet industry statistics, Americans own some 78 million dogs, 85 million cats, 14 million birds, 12 million small mammals and 9 million reptiles. Why start with cats? Cats plays a vital role in mythology, religion and legends across the globe. Cat worship, that is revering cats as gods, has been practiced for thousands of years. Ancient texts and artwork underscore the power and persistence of cats in the minds and hearts of people. Architecture, as a result, must better respect and respond to this co-existing relationship. An “animal oriented� architecture then becomes an opportunity for us to think about architecture from another perspective. Cat House explores a co-existent humananimal environment that prioritizes the needs and desires of cats over people. Animals communicate but they don’t talk. The design of this project employs characteristics of cats in reality and importantly, cats as portrayed in popular culture- gods of pop culture, gods of cuteness and incompetence. As an example, there is Garfield. Garfield embodies the defining caricature of cats as most everyone knows that he hates Mondays, sleeps a lot, and loves eating. Cats cannot talk yet Garfield can.
Jeralyn Tseng Advisors David Orkand Nathan John
PRACTICING CHAOS
Embodied with the paradoxical qualities of unpredictability, randomness, and order, deterministic chaos lends creative process a way into infinite possibilities. While the human capacity to generate solutions are finite, different forms of chaos can be utilized as mechanisms to create difference, to depart from the stagnant, and to generate newness. This exploration seeks to examine the extent to which chaos can be applied as a method of producing and practicing architecture. Whether in nature, in art, on the urban or architectural scale, the product of chaos is often conceived through a number of iterations. Each cycle generates an output that is then used as an input. This process occurs through a black box that contains certain rules dictating the outcome, but that is unknown to the person of creation. Through this narrative, the thesis analyzes various forms of chaos, interrogates, and experiments with its potential for design.
Section C-C
Section A-A
Section B-B
Section C-C
Section D-D
Section D-D
Section C-C
Section A-A
Section A-A
Section D-D
Section D-D
Section C-C
Section B-B
Section A-A Section C-C
Section A-A
In modern society, we constantly find ourselves displaced, or [dys] Placed,from where we belong. Objects in the city- Ring roads, stairways, platforms, tunnels, bridges, are generating a labyrinth for the rootless floaters, building up invisible walls between different groups of people. This thesis is looking at the condition of the ground in a modern city and its potential to frame collective experience among people. By breaking the dichotomy between the objects and the field from a bottom up approach, the dysplacement machine propose a new ground in the modern city--one that both embrace efficiency that is indispensable of the modern experience, and accommodates the nostalgia of our shared displacement.
Section B-B
Advisors Mary-Ann Ray Tom Buresh Mark Anderson
Section B-B
Yuxuan Tu
THE DYS-PLACEMENT MACHINE
Section D-D
URBANOVELLA
Sarah Rutter Vermeer
Urbanovella reimagines the architectural drawing as graphic novel. By integrating personal narrative directly into architectural representation, it seeks to humanize the work, to make it relatable and accessible. When applied to the highly contentious entitlements process of urban residential development, this approach activates the drawing as housing advocate. The voices of those who stand to gain homes are granted space to be heard. Each narrative is curated both to elicit a sympathetic selfidentification of reader with resident, and to walk the reader through the architectural story of the project. The project is intentionally provocative: the wide, barren streets of the Sunset District are replaced with long, thin buildings running down the centerline. Narrow lanes on either side accommodate street games and the occasional car. The buildings are highly porous to pedestrian traffic and are activated at street level by resident-oriented amenities. In the three stories above, families make their homes.
Advisors Tom Buresh Rudabeh Pakravan
THE HILLS KILL ME.
HEYYYYY!!
I HAVE TO KEEP EARNING HIS CUSTOMERS’ TRUST.
WE LIKE IT.
I ALWAYS LIKED I HADN’T LIVED WITH MY PARENTS SINCE HIGH SCHOOL...
TO PLAY IN THE STREET
DON’T WE CHUBBS?
VICENTE 45TH AVE W
VICENTE
Cui Wang Advisors Neyran Turan Keith Plymale
UNREAL VISION
The ambiguity of the third dimension is always embedded in the nature of human eye perception. This is how literal transparency can happen, that perceptual quality allows the mind to discern the underlying governing concept or spatial composition. The characters of ambivalence, superimposition, and interpenetration appear in the space, giving viewers thousands of indications of underlying possibilities. This thesis is aimed at designing a building to stimulate viewers’ visual interpretation. The illusion of depth and form vague the reality of the vision. Spectators can have diverse impressions of the space, and they are not limited as an observer on the outside. They can become part of the composition through their imagination.
Yuxi Wei Advisors Lisa Iwamoto Andrew Atwood
ALMOST MONOLITHIC
There is an increasing interest in recent architectural works that have converged on monolithic features. These projects coincide in their extreme simplicity of overall form; also common in their capacity to deliver tremendous eloquence with very limited formal means. This thesis approaches the topic in two aspects, one is the architectural form and the other is the relationship to the city at large. It will test the possibility of contemporary monolithic architecture through the synthesis of architectural form and public space in contemporary fabric-less city center. The importance of shaping a public space is that public spaces are points of reference for the city. It gives sense and meaning to civic architecture. The importance of autonomous architecture, or monolithic architecture in this discussion, is that its presence increases one’s awareness of a place.
Adam Weiss Advisors Mary-Ann Ray Tom Buresh Dan Spiegel
FINAL ACTS
This thesis centers fantasy, desire, and agency in the design of an inpatient hospice facility. Hospices are gateways to death, but they are also the last sets for living. How might they fulfill last wishes, indulge fantasies, and invite individuals to see themselves anew? Counter to the contemporary hospice movement’s reliance upon narrowlyconceived aesthetics of domesticity, I employ theatricality as a means of empowering people to compose their own narratives and make their own meanings in the last stage of life. The space acknowledges the epic nature of final acts: taking stock, settling affairs, confronting fears, bidding farewell, letting go. Individuals are welcomed to cast themselves in new roles. Bodies heretofore hidden take center stage, occupying space in new ways.
Zachary Whiteman Advisors Lisa Iwamoto Eleanor Pries
THE HYBRID LANDSCAPE
At the edge of the city, where the urban environment meets an ecological context, the friction between constructed ground and operationalized landscape manifests. Here a new set of patterns and practices emerges from the overlap between city and environment. Natural forces during extreme climate events erode portions of the expanding city. How can this hybrid territory become a working landscape for resilient urban life and behaviors? How can the language of the city negotiate a non-binary relationship to its unconstructed surroundings? The hybrid landscapes examines the frameworks by which we understand city and environment, and proposes alternative perspectives for the spaces between the two.
Nan Xia Advisors Neyran Turan Raveevarn Choksombatchai
AS DRAWN, AS BUILT
After we enter the digital software era, perhaps no topic presents as many questions for architectural practice and pedagogy as the distinction between architects and builders. From 3D modeling and digital drawing to a piece of construction, material thickness is the problematic site where multiple forms of knowledge meet. In the digital modeling and drawing world, thickness is infinitely thin, and surface is seamlessly flat. Architecture appears as offsets, extrusions, and enclosed polysurfaces. However, such idealized digital language is open to wider interpretation and causing misunderstanding when it comes to builders, which will undergo loss or change due to construction reality and differential experience. This thesis is questioning how the translation process from digital drawing to on-site construction challenge and influence the architectural capacity for invention as well as control. It aims to unpack the ways and possibilities of how builders as executors conceptually respond to the ambiguity and idealization of architects’ drawings.
Chengxi Xie Advisors David Orkand Sarah Hirschman
UNDER THE OCEAN
The purpose of modern oceanariums is to raise awareness of the importance of protecting the oceans and marine creatures through entertainment, oceanariums provide human being a window towards the water. Oceanariums are always designed with huge tanks to create an environment as animals’ original habitats. Human beings always play the role of viewers outside of glass cages, rather than living with marine lives. In fact, with the exploration and expansion of the human realm into the ocean, marine creatures are constantly adapting to new changes. Man-made structures such as cross-ocean bridges, Transbay tubes, and oil platforms already became a part of fishes’ and invertebrates’ life and also their new habitats. The thesis would like to discuss how to use the existing man-made structures to deal with the relationship between humans and marine creatures and improve the way people get along with nature, gently and positively extend human understanding of the ocean.
Shuang Yan Advisors Tom Buresh Luisa Caldas
SENSORIUM
I want to explore the ways in which principles, skills, and strategies in architectural design integrate with other disciplines and further enhance experiences through immersive interfaces. Immersion is “a state of mental focusing so intense that awareness of the ‘real’ world is lost, generally resulting in a feeling of joy and satisfaction.” I find projects in immersive experience the most attractive due to its interactive nature at the intersection of humans, interfaces, and architecture.
Yiming Zhang Advisors Neyran Turan Keith Plymale
BACKGROUNDING: IMPACT OF MATERIAL
When we start to design a building, physical models are used to simulate the spatial relationship and express the aesthetics considerations. However, we never think about the materials that we used for the models. Will the appearance of the final building be different if we choose another material for the physical model during the design process? How do these materials affect the texture, details, and even the space of the building we design due to their different characteristics? This thesis is about to pay attention to the process of architectural making, using a physical model as a designer’s tool that may potentially affect the aesthetics and expectations of the designers and eventually change the appearance of the real building. By doing that, the materials become the actual design component.
Zhe Zhao Advisors Neyran Turan Luisa Caldas
GENERATIVE DAILY OBJECTS
In architectural design, we start with this universal normal template of abstract objects like triangles, cubes and spheres. But what will happen if our original template is more specific, like daily objects? What will the space be like? This thesis starts the design with everyday objects as the original model, researching the deformation and composition of them and how they create the space. Unlike the universal template with pure geometries, when scattering daily objects on the ground, the unique volume and spatial quality as well as the random orientation form different types of space naturally. After shifting the scale, the functionality of these objects is removed and altered in unfamiliar ways. When assembling them together, irrelevant objects composed together, results in the relationship changing with each other. Therefore, there is a generative power of the emergence in the project, which it is emerged naturally according to the objects and assembly. And the project focuses more on the detailed moments that translate from the objects and how they compose together then generate the building.
Ziye Zhong Advisors Tom Buresh Sarah Hirschman
FLATTENED MUSES
Nowadays, the museum is considered as a high-class destination storing many valuable artifacts. People don’t have enough energy to carefully view every single piece during their visit, and they usually just care about the most famous ones. The proposal is to get every piece of artifacts enough attention from people, and to provide everyone with equal chances to view, by flattening the museums, spreading out the artifacts into the city, and merging them into the railway system. The museums are engaged with the entrances of the stations, as a threshold from the station to the city, from the cart to people’s destinations. They become accessible to everyone. The displayed objects are related to the location where they are displayed; it is a chance for them go back to a more related context where they were created. The whole city becomes a museum. People would use metros to travel around.
Bojin Zhu Advisors Lisa Iwamoto Dan Muntean
ALMOST YOURS
If you ever took an Uber, you are already one part of today’s sharing economy. The most well-known practice of sharing economy should be Uber. Instead of the traditional model of corporations, in the sharing economy, individuals can rent or “share” idle resources like their cars to other people. This smart application of the sharing economy has made Uber keep thriving until today. The success of Uber showed that prosperity might exist in sharing but not occupying. Which brought up the question that is the boundary between “yours” and “mine” still as clear as before? Benefitting from sharing, do people still need to define all their properties with descriptions of “yours” and “mine”? Based in San Francisco, this thesis keeps an eye on the current housing shortage problem. Therefore, this thesis is an endeavor to explore future living potentials through a model of the sharing economy, to increase housing efficiency as a response to the current circumstance of the housing shortage.
Yuanpei Zhuang Advisors Neyran Turan Greg Castillo
MISREFERENCING IMAGES
This thesis is about Mis-referencing Image. The Conventional way to reference a precedent building is to read its orthographic drawings, like: plan, sections, elevation and axons. This is a typical way to understand the building’s relationship, as a whole. However, not everything could be understood from these orthographics. Moments are partial representations of a building. What would happen if we use these partial moments, to reference a building? Partial moments from buildings are used as reference. This technique is not only a design process, but also creates an able agenda architecture condition with a new way to think about precedents.
BERKELEY ARCHITECTURE STUDIO ONE 3D PRINTING ADOBE VAULTS AND DOMES Wanchen Cai Taoyu Han Hanyang Hu Sinae Jung Pei Li Vasudha Maiya Dingtong Wang Shengrui Xu Xu Zhang Churan Zheng
Advisor Ronald Rael
Nubian vault and squinch dome structures, popularized by the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy in the early 20th century, have been constructed for thousands of years. 3D printing a roof or enclosure is particularly challenging since the self weight of adobe often leads to collapse of the printed roof structure due to gravity. To overcome this problem, early prototypes reconsidered the basic barrel vault by closing one end, which enables for angled printing to be achieved, much like the angular coursing of Nubian vaults that lean against an existing adobe wall. Test vaults were also printed on inclined print beds using angled nozzles to keep the nozzle oriented normal to the extrusion direction for an angled layer deposition. Advanced scripting tools were developed for the generation of sophisticated toolpaths for the printer, allowing for non planar toolpaths and interlocking surface textures. This method of scripting increased the structural stability of the prints, thus proving to be critical for the successful print of the vault and dome prototypes. The research culminated in the design of five unique 3D printed shelters in Darfur, Sudan. The low cost house prototype has mainly three functions - gathering, sleeping and eating. Locally sourced materials like soil, straw, palm leaves, jute and fabric are used for printing and cladding for openings. The potential for generating apertures, integrated furniture, and staircases that integrate with vaults and domes were tested at 1:50 scale. Techniques for inserting wooden sticks between layers of prints were explored to accommodate auxiliary systems like a staircase or secondary roof structure. One of the printing methods took an unconventional approach of layer depositions in a bath of sand to eliminate the need for conservative print angles or printed support material. Once the clay print is dry, the sand is excavated from within the dome. The projects also look at the experiential quality of the printed adobe spaces. The entry of light, air and water into the built space is carefully crafted. This research is being further developed in the ongoing Spring semester, where the mud printing is integrated with a wooden roof. The Essay on Architecture was first published by Marc-Antoine Laugier in 1753. He argued for the simplicity of architecture, that architecture must return to its origins, the simple rustic hut. Eisen’s depiction of the hut, however, suggests that traditional architecture lacked technological sophistication. Our investigations posit that simple, and traditional technologies are not primitive, but highly developed strategies for construction that were refined over the last 10,000 years and responsive to their context. The final shelter will much more closely approach the idea of a “house”, and employ systems for plumbing and heating, and be responsive to the Northern California climate. The house will accommodate visiting scholars to the university and is to be located in the Berkeley Botanical Garden.
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BERKELEY ARCHITECTURE THESIS REVIEW 2020