The Subprime Monument
Making a New City Image . . . or, An Eye for AI
Eduardo Martínez-Mediero Rubio (MArch II) The Monument Instructors: Emanuel Christ, Christoph Gantenbein What is a monument today? The aim of the studio is to design a contemporary version of a monument in a time when the collective, the expression of the public sphere, or, more politically speaking, the value of democracy are all called into question.
The tower is organized by the layering of various 20th-century American housing typologies that exemplify the social and economic structures of their time while evidencing the linear evolution of the house, constantly changing after every crisis. The balloon frame is taken as the epitome of American housing construction, utilizing its ephemeral aesthetic to address
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the monument,
the fragility of an economic system that cannot again rely on the unstable foundation of the housing market.
Monument Structure Typology
Brian Ho (MDE) Independent Design Engineering Project Advisors: Robert Gerard Pietrusko, Krzysztof Z. Gajos (John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences)
What might we learn about the city using computer vision, deep learning, and data science? How might the history, theory, and practice of urbanism—which has long viewed the city as a subject of measurement—inform modern applications of computation to cities? Most importantly, can we ensure that both disciplines understand the city as it is perceived by people? This thesis revisits Kevin Lynch’s
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call into question
Image of the City (1960), applying machine-learning models to archival photographs and historical maps of Boston, and classifying from them Lynch’s five elements of the city image. Together, these methods produce a new mode of analysis that balances a comprehensive perspective at the scale of the city with a focus on the texture, color, and details of urban life.
Computation Mapping Urbanism