Portfolio
the Built Environment
The Bartlett Faculty of
THE GERM
CHANGING THE CHEMISTRY OF THE SOIL
HONORS
Oppression is an accumulation— sedimented in institutions, social practices, and the materiality of built space. It is an inheritance, carried forward through systemic formations that embed inequities within the very fabric of daily life. The histories of slavery, genocide, and labor exploitation did not simply pass; they calcified into the infrastructures of racial wealth gaps, urban exclusion, and ecological devastation. To engage architecture within this reality is to engage it as both an artifact and an agent of power—a force that has perpetuated oppression and one that holds the latent potential for its undoing.
This thesis argues that the architectural project must be rethought not as a singular intervention but as an active, continuous process—one that remakes not only the built environment but the very conditions of life itself. The metaphor of the Germ is central to this proposition. A Germ does not demolish; it infiltrates, mutates, and reconstitutes. The Germ is an alternative infrastructure—a
subversive layer of space that disrupts inherited patterns of exclusion, creating moments where violence dissipates into new forms of collective being. This investigation envisions a near future where economic systems collapse, racial and gender hierarchies persist, and climate catastrophe accelerates. Within this world, the Germ operates as an agent of redirection, cultivating new spatial practices that sever architecture from its complicity in oppression. It proposes a remaking of cities—not merely through technological sustainability but through a reconfiguration of lived experience. Housing, work, movement, and the aesthetics of the everyday must be reclaimed as democratic, collective, and fundamentally humane. Through speculative drawings, this thesis presents the Germ not as an architectural object but as a set of conditions that challenge the inertia of violence, forging spaces where the possibility of another world is not just imagined but enacted.
The Germ as defiant in Highways
The Germ as defiant in Highways
The Germ as Joy in Cities
The Germ as defiant in Highways
MAKING ROOM
LOS ANGELES AFORDABLE HOUSING COMPETITION
SUSTAINABILITY AWARD
Land is not an inert commodity but a finite and essential resource, as vital to planetary life as air and water. Yet, under prevailing systems, its social function has been subjugated to private ownership, severing the link between property and collective responsibility. This has widened the gulf between the needs of the biosphere, the rights of citizens, and the interests of capital. The question of who owns the land is therefore not simply a legal or economic concern, but a foundational issue of social justice, urban form, and ecological survival. The principles by which land is controlled dictate how cities grow, who has access to what spaces, and ultimately, how inequity is inscribed into the built environment. Profit in urban development is not derived from the provision of quality, life-affirming dwellings, but from the speculative value of land itself—deepening spatial injustices and reinforcing unsustainable urban expansion.
This award-winning project intervenes at the nexus of these issues, proposing a model of affordable housing that is enmeshed with transit networks to reduce reliance on private vehicles, ease congestion, and lower carbon emissions. By advocating for the insertion of ‘skinny’ homes along streets wider than 60 feet, it offers a strategy for delivering 500,000 new homes in Los Angeles while simultaneously densifying and optimizing land use. Yet, beyond metrics of efficiency and sustainability, the proposition is fundamentally about reimagining urban life: What if we collectively redefined space not as a site of individual possession, but as a shared resource? What if our built environments fostered reciprocity, agency, and mutual care rather than exclusion and speculation? What if, rather than being mere inhabitants of the system as it stands, we became the agents of its re-formation?
Site Selection:
Affordable housing with rideshare inclusion contributes to sustainable urban development by reducing the need for personal vehicles, easing traffic congestion, and lowering overall carbon emissions.
Site Section:
500,000 Homes
If skinny homes were added to streets over 60 feet wide, 500,000 new homes could be added. This density optimizes land use, reducing commutes, and
Ride Share
Affordable housing with rideshare inclusion contributes to sustainable urban development by reducing the need for personal vehicles, easing traffic congestion, and lowering overall carbon emissions.
Connection to Public Transit Lines
By situating housing developments within a short walking distance of transit hubs, residents enjoy the convenience of seamless connectivity.
Neighborhood Activation: Wealth Building Strategies:
DESIGN + BUILD
AFFORDABLE HOUSING PROJECT
MOSCOW HOUSING TRUST
What does learning by doing mean? What is the importance of a community life component? What is material experimentation? What is immersive learning?
In collaboration with the Moscow Affordable Housing Trust (MAHT) and COLAB Architecture, I contributed as part of a team to the construction of the inaugural residence in Lupine Flats, a planned development comprising six small houses on land owned by MAHT in Moscow. This initiative follows a phased approach, with architecture students constructing one house each summer through 2027. The development is designed as a clustered housing model, incorporating a shared common space to foster community engagement among homeowners. While MAHT will retain ownership of the land, individual homeowners will hold title to their respective residences.
CUMULATIVE REALITIES
AFFORDABLE HOUSING PROJECT
EDRA CONFRENCE PRESENTATION
The architectural landscape serves as a palimpsest, bearing the imprints of ideological shifts, power dynamics, and cultural transformations. This research is a speculative architectural history, propelled by a fundamental inquiry: In a world of nascent Christianity, what if Pagan Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate had a 30 year reign as opposed to the 5 years he was given?
Because we want to point to the generative force of these material assemblages we will refer to culturalarchitectural formations as machines. The first machine is the Christianmachine, structured by the typologies of Christian architecture. The second machine is the Pagan-Machine, powered by a speculative pagan architectural vision.
Being born into the Christianmachine, one already possesses the practices and narratives of Christianity, which are then reinforced via the specificity of cathedrals, monasteries, baptisteries, reliquaries, pilgrimage churches, marteria, catacombs, etc. Through these architectures different types of subjects – believers, adherents,
copyists, scholars, the saved, the devout, the crusader, the proselytizer–are produced. All of this is underpinned by a relationship with time that requires constant striving for the timeless eternal afterlife. In such a world, one’s place is clear, one’s possibilities are circumscribed, and expectations for right and wrong, good and evil, sacred and profane, as well as notions about civility, duty, and agency are preformed and given a priori.
A pagan machine would generate awareness of nature and “what is;” it would mark time in both its flow and cycles with particular emphasis on breaking down the boundaries between our bodies and the world around us; it would reveal and amplify our fundamental ontological emmeshments, open up attunements to our own potentialities, and erase selflimiting definitions of what it means to be human. The pagan machine would slow one down; the pagan machine would be ecological; the pagan machine would point to the imminent sacredness of the world.
The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment
Madalyn Asker