MIT Architecture Fall 2026 Thesis

MIT Architecture Final Thesis Reviews, December 18, 2025

MARCH SMARCHS AKPIA BSA

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE MIT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING

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MIT Architecture Final Thesis Reviews, December 18, 2025 Master of Architecture (MArch) Bolurin Adedipe 4 MArch Jabari Canada 6 MArch Mingjia Chen 8 MArch and MCP Chenyue Xdd Dai 10 MArch Hana Meihan Davis 12 MArch Manavi Dixit 14 MArch Mateo Fernandez 16 MArch Bernardo Gonzalez 18 MArch Junha Hwang 20 MArch Vincent Jackow 20 MArch Mara Jovanović 22 MArch Minyoung Kim 24 MArch Thomas Logan King 26 MArch Jin Zhenghua Li 28 MArch Molly Jingyun Ma 30 MArch Agnes Parker 32 MArch Cheung Qin 34 MArch Samantha Ratanarat 36 MArch Nia Rich 38 MArch Alissa Serfozo 40 MArch and MSRED Simmone Stearn 42 MArch Alex Stewart 44 MArch Christian Studebaker 46 MArch Domonique Valenzuela 48 MArch

Master of Science in Architecture Studies Aga Khan Progam AKPIA (SMArchS) SM Kaikobad 50 Aga Khan Program

Bachelor of Science in Architecture (BSA) Katrina J. Chan 52 BSA

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE MIT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING 3

THE CIVIC CASH & CARRY Bolurin Adedipe MArch Advisor: Rosalyne Shieh Reader: Svafa Grönfeldt

Charlton Riverside sits along the River Thames, London’s historic industrial corridor, where mills, glass works, recycling yards, and logistics depots have long shaped the city’s metabolism. Today, the area is being repositioned for large-scale regeneration, and my family’s wholesale African grocery store (a cash & carry) now stands between two new housing schemes, its access, visibility, and daily operations increasingly constrained. The store sits at a threshold: between memory and redevelopment, between what is recorded in archives and what is lived every day.

Growing up in London, the cash & carry was my portal to Nigeria—my primary encounter with a culture I did not grow up in physically, but which arrived through pallets, packaging, language, and food. In this way, the store functions as a diasporic infrastructure layered atop the industrial one: a place where everyday logistics become cultural transmission.

The store already operates as a gathering place, a civic anchor long before planning policy recognised it as such. Yet this public life remains invisible within regeneration frameworks. This thesis asks: What

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becomes possible when the industrial and diasporic logics of the site are made visible, and formally understood as civic architecture?

Rather than proposing a new building, the project performs a careful retrofit—revealing and amplifying what already exists. Existing operations; stacking, shelving, loading become architectural tools. Three public aisles cut across four interconnected buildings; new openings and canopies create shared thresholds; and a shelving–mezzanine prototype reclaims the upper volume as structure, shelving, and storage. Corners act as hinge conditions, portals between interior/exterior, industrial/diasporic, archive/lived worlds.

The Civic Cash & Carry reframes the site not as a plot awaiting replacement, but as an already-functioning cultural platform whose hidden logics can guide Charlton Riverside’s future. Through incremental, rule-based interventions, the project protects the ability for community to continue gathering here and for culture to continue to thrive. It transforms diasporic infrastructure into a civic one, without erasing the world that made it.

Image Credits: Bolurin Adedipe (Charlton Riverside, South East London)

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The Hum: Sound, Space, and Structural Isolation Jabari Canada MArch Advisor: Gediminas Urbonas Reader: Liam O'Brien Jr. This project uses The Hum, a reported low-frequency phenomenon with physiological and psychological effects, as a lens to examine how sound, structure, and communication shape collective experience. By studying how these effects are conditioned by the material behavior of walls and enclosures, and by observing how people gather on platforms like Reddit to interpret their experiences, the project positions architecture as a model for understanding communicative systems.

Nesting, layering, and recursion serve as the project’s primary spatial operations. These architectural strategies are reinterpreted as analogues for the procedural and recursive nature of information exchange, where signals are filtered, repeated, and transformed through structural and social frameworks.

At the center of the thesis is a short film in which two characters respond to The Hum in distinct ways. The film adopts the physical logic of a building: narratives are nested within narratives, creating a layered

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cinematic structure that echoes the architecture of acoustically isolated spaces.

The installation extends this logic by creating a viewing environment organized through nesting and layering. A decoupled structure and surface system materializes the thesis’s interest in layered assemblies, while a cube within a cube formalizes the act of nesting, making the spatial operations of the film legible in physical space.

In a moment when trust in institutions is eroding, new forms of collective meaning arise in surprising places. The Hum reveals how sound, architecture, and media converge to produce emergent social spaces.

Through narrative, form, and sound, the project uses cinema and spatial design to explore an acoustic phenomenon that generates belonging in the absence of shared civic spaces.

Image Credits (left) "The Hum" Tile Card, Jabari Canada; (right) "The Hum" film still, Jabari Canada.

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The Right to a Parcel: Toolkit for Boston Chinatown’s Stabilization Activism Mingjia Chen MArch, MCP Co-Advisor: Rosalyne Shieh Co-Advisor: Justin Steil For the past year, I have been closely following Boston Chinatown’s Rezoning Process as a community opinion writer for the local Chinatown Sampan Newspaper. In 2024, the developer Sing-Ming Chan submitted a proposal to the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) for a 25-floor luxury hotel tower on a site currently occupied by a historic building at 25 Harrison Ave, agitating Chinatown residents who wanted that parcel returned to use by the community as housing (it had most recently been used as an apartment building). During my weekly volunteering with neighborhood leaders and activists at the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA), I learned that Chinatown’s public amenities are not just the product of “benevolent” collaborations between public and private interests. They emerge from struggles for community development: parcel by parcel, lotline to lotline.

In Boston, the granting of planning permissions and development rights is largely discretionary and it takes place through the Article 80 process.

During development reviews, however, power is imbalanced. Community advocates are pressuring the city to better represent their interests as it negotiates with developers. Through my interrelated personal perspectives as a planning & architecture student, and as a community advocate, I study how major spatial struggles in Boston’s Chinatown have been structured from 1990 to the present.

Guided by an advocacy planning framework (Davidoff 1965) for urban struggles to the right to the city (LeFebvre 1967, Harvey 2008, Marcuse, 2009), I propose and design an organizing toolkit for the Chinatown Stabilization Committee, the Chinese Progressive Association’s (CPA’s) housing advocacy group, with whom I have been collaborating this year.

The toolkit includes a storybook about the significance of 25 Harrison Street in Chinatown, an index/glossary that explains Boston’s planning

A collage showing competing aspirations for the 15-25 Harrison Ave Parcel. Collage

By Mingjia Chen, with image credits to the Chinatown Stabilization Committee, City of Boston Parcel Tax Viewer, and JCJ Architecture.

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processes, and structured, low-barrier activities guiding people to envision their own futures for the parcel.

Together, the toolkit components deploy architectural techniques to aid Chinatown residents in challenging Chan’s proposal, producing noise outside of the negotiation table, and leveraging community pressure for an alternative development.

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Can You See the Space?

Chenyue Xdd Dai MArch Advisor: Behnaz Farahi Reader: Takehiko Nagakura

This thesis presents an interactive artistic experience conceived as a performative intervention for the final architectural review. Rather than a conventional presentation, the project transforms the review site into a collective perceptual experiment, where audiences encounter an augmented version of the presentation space and its surroundings through carefully orchestrated spatial and visual interventions.

The work investigates the fundamental question of how spatial perception is constructed, challenging the assumption that we passively receive architectural space. Drawing on Maurice MerleauPonty's phenomenology of embodied experience and James Gibson's theory of direct visual perception, alongside contemporary frameworks of predictive perception, the project reveals the invisible cognitive and sensory mechanisms that shape spatial awareness. Through multiple layered interventions, the experience exposes the hidden architecture of perception itself: the unconscious rules, expectations, and bodily engagements that determine how we understand and navigate space.

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By situating audiences within an augmented environment that disrupts conventional spatial reading, the project makes visible what typically remains imperceptible: the active, constructed nature of architectural experience. Each intervention operates as both spatial manipulation and pedagogical device, prompting participants to recognize their own perceptual processes. The final review becomes not merely a presentation of research but an embodied demonstration of its core argument: that architecture exists not in built form alone, but in the dynamic interplay between space, body, and consciousness.

Concept illustrations for "Can You See the Space?" synthesized by Chenyue "xdd" Dai

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On the Road to Hāna: Wealth, Water & the Land that Feeds Hana Meihan Davis MArch Advisor: Rania Ghosn Reader: Rocio Crosetto Brizzio In Native Hawaiian, wai is the word for 'water', kānāwai is the word for 'law', and waiwai means wealth as a 'shared abundance'. In other words, water is life and defines our relationship to one another. As a result, both community and the law are delineated by access to and management of Hawai'i’s fresh water. Land, or āina, is 'that which feeds'. It is understood as an ancestor, to be cared for but never possessed, emphasizing a familial and reciprocal connection between land and people.

The social & land division—or ahupua'a system—which sustained life was built around the flow of water from mauka (mountain) to makai (sea).

Lurking in the background of Maui’s beautiful hills is a fierce and centuries-long fight over water, where first sugar plantation owners, and now developers, have been pitted against Native Hawaiians. Though local communities have secured some victories protecting their use of water, their opponents have long dominated the political landscape, appropriating water for economic gains and bending Hawai'i’s water law toward their interests.

Water—as the cultural heritage of Hawai'i, as the system that once brought life and now fuels injustice—sits at the heart of this thesis. The

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lush slopes of the Haleakalā volcano are home to the East Maui Irrigation (EMI) System, Hawai'i’s most dramatic source of surface water and the largest privately financed irrigation system in the U.S. With 74 miles of infrastructure that moved, at its height, 165 million gallons per day, EMI draws water from the wet, windward slopes of East Maui to the flat, dry central valley—home to Alexander & Baldwin’s Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Company from the 1870s until it closed in 2016. The water diverted from East Maui allowed the plantation to flourish, at one point becoming the largest sugar plantation in the U.S. However, the diversion left East Maui in crisis, with streams running dry even as efforts continue to restore their natural flow. Today, tourism has replaced sugar as both the island’s primary economic driver and major source of extraction.

Running parallel to this ecosystem is the Hāna Highway (colloquially known as the ‘Road to Hāna’). This highway is the site of my thesis: Along it, I propose nine interventions that reimagine the Road as an infrastructure of care. The sites and programs each represent different aspects of East Maui’s landscape and history—with each addressing the recovery of water or encouraging authorship over local economies in a different way. Together, they are an example for how a constellation of small, scalable, actions might collectively shift the narrative from extraction and export to rehabilitation and community stewardship. While it does not undo centuries of colonial harm to Hawai'i, this vision turns the Road to Hāna into the spine of a living classroom, a healing watershed, and a platform for empowerment—bringing Maui closer to the historic promise of the ahupua'a.

Image Credits: (Left) Map of East Maui showing the nine sites and the Road to Hāna by author. (Right) Archive images of the EMI System and sugar label from the Alexander & Baldwin Sugar Musem in Maui; drawings and other photos by author.

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Building Between Systems: Assemblies for Climate Uncertainty Manavi Dixit MArch Advisor: Miho Mazereeuw Reader: Caitlin Mueller Climate change has become a defining force of the twenty-first century, yet its impacts remain profoundly uneven. While global narratives often frame the crisis as universal, vulnerability is shaped by histories of extraction and is entrenched in socio-political inequalities. Contemporary climate adaptations, highly engineered, capital-intensive, and technologically driven, largely serve a privileged minority. This raises a critical question, while we design for the 2%, how does the global majority navigate the escalating risk and uncertainty of climate change?

India is among the world's most climate vulnerable nations. The capital, New Delhi, stands at the frontline of climate volatility. In recent years, the city has recorded heatwaves exceeding 50 degree Celsius, sudden and extreme rainfall leading to flooding in vulnerable neighborhoods and hazardous winter smog levels, far beyond global health thresholds.

Rapid urbanization, socio-economic disparity, and extreme climate conditions converge and are most visibly along the Yamuna River floodplain.

As industrialization accelerated and formal housing provisions failed to keep pace, migrant laborers responded by establishing their own makeshift dwellings near the construction sites, giving rise to unrecognized settlements. These communities have since become multi-generational

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neighborhoods that are displaced every few years. They sustain Delhi’s informal economy, yet remain structurally marginalized, acknowledged in records but unrecognized in policy, and excluded from essential services and infrastructure.

Today, these settlements face dual pressures. Within this precarious threshold, residents rely on the architecture of “jugaad", a makeshift yet intentional form of construction to adapt to these uncertainties. The thesis examines these practices as acts of resistance within the overlapping systems of climate, governance and inequalities. While these strategies can sometimes be unsafe or unhealthy, they demonstrate a remarkable situational intelligence and material ingenuity that question conventional ideas of construction.

This research advocates for rethinking climate adaptation, not as a technical problem to be solved, but as an evolving condition that calls for new architectural vocabularies, aesthetic sensibilities, and frameworks rooted in care and collective authorship. It envisions collaborative, community-driven building systems that are simple, resourceful, functional and deeply embedded in the context. The thesis presents a proposal for a practice that relearns, reclaims, and restores agency to vulnerable communities. It seeks to keep knowledge open, fostering ways of building that exist in a stance of resistance while carrying a sense of ownership.

Image Credits (Left): Photograph of the hazardous smog by Saumya Khandelwal / Reuters. (Right): Graphic of a field assessment of on-site documenting construction materials and tools by author

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WoodSpray Mateo Fernandez MArch Advisor: Skylar Tibbits Reader: Marcelo Coelho

The construction industry is a major contributor to global carbon emissions, while sawmilling generates an enormous and underutilized waste stream in which 45–55% of each harvested tree becomes sawdust, chips, or bark that is typically burned, landfilled, or bound into low-value composites. WoodSpray proposes a new pathway for this overlooked material: transforming wood waste into a sprayable, biodegradable structural composite made from sawdust, lignin, and nanocellulose. Applied robotically over reusable formwork, the material offers a faster, healthier, and substantially lower-carbon alternative to cement and petrochemical products.

This thesis advances WoodSpray through three integrated areas of research. First, material formulation: refining binder ratios, particle sizes, solids content, and rheology to create consistent, high-performance sprayable pastes. Second, performance testing: evaluating mechanical behavior, including adhesion, compressive and flexural strength, tough-

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ness, moisture and UV durability, and thermal characteristics, to determine the viability of the material as a structural or enclosure system.

Third, full-scale prototyping: deploying spraying to fabricate architectural-scale components, documenting deposition rates, curing behavior, geometric control, and comparative cost and efficiency relative to conventional construction methods.

Results show that sawmill residues can form a carbon-storing, structurally capable composite suitable for rapid robotic deposition. The research positions WoodSpray as a new class of regenerative construction material, one that upcycles waste, reduces high-carbon manufacturing, labor intensity, and enables new fabrication workflows. The project demonstrates how bio-based chemistry and automation can converge to reshape material lifecycles and establish a foundation for post-carbon building systems.

Image Credits: Mateo Fernandez

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Maguey Remains: Transforming Mezcal By-Products for Maguey Architecture Bernardo Gonzalez MArch Advisor: Sheila Kennedy Reader: John A. Ochsendorf

La Sierra

mountain region Majority of Maguey cultivation occurs within the surrounding mountain region due to mineral soils and climate that make it ideal for the quality of Maguey.

Falcon

protector of maguey During the day, it is said, the falcon is the protector of Magueys. It is believed that once it lands on the stalk of a Maguey, it signifies that the Maguey is on the right path in its life.

Full Moon death of agave

the maguey’s life comes to an end during a full moon as it is believed to be ready to harvest.

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New Moon birth of agave

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of Espadin Maguey / Agave takes approx. eight years to reach full maturity, the shortest time within the maguey family.

Other Magueys can reach up to 15 years to mature. Soon after the Maguey starts to decay.

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1 ring = 1 full year

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Earth’s Turning

July

Bats

noctornal protectors

Espadin Pencas Espadin leaves

During the night, the flowers of the Maguey bloom and bats survive from the agave nectar during their migratory journey. As they visit each flower they pollinate the maguey and allows the Maguey to reproduce.

The Espadin species of maguey is named after espada which translates to sword due to Its pointy and slender leave shape that differs from other magueys/agaves.

Mayahuel

Aztec goddess of Maguey It is believed that Mayahuel, brought the Maguey as a gift for her people to use as food, shelter and celebration.

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The maguey plant holds spiritual value to many indigenous communities within Mexico. It is traditionally used for medicine, food and clothing; and it provides mezcal, a sacred drink believed to link humanity to the heavens. Mezcal has historically been a family craft, produced from the heart of the maguey, it follows ancestral techniques and methods preserved and shared orally across generations of mezcaleros.

Mezcal was first mass produced in the 17th century by Spanish colonizers. In fact, over the last three decades, mezcal production has become heavily industrialized by foreign investors across eight states within Mexico. Oaxaca, the state with the largest production of mezcal, accounts for ninety percent of mezcal production. The rising global demand for mezcal is producing an increase in palenques (mezcal distilleries) and is reducing the use of maguey to the extractive production of mezcal. Although this demand supports the region’s economy, it leads to mono-agricultural plantations of espadin maguey, and industrialized extraction methods that result in excessive production of maguey by-products, considered as ‘waste’.

This thesis recognizes the problems of mezcal production and the local economies it supports. It explores the diverse material properties of the maguey plant and investigates a re-utilization and transformation of the by-products of mezcal production to create a ‘maguey architecture’ that engages the maguey plant to its full extent.

The thesis explores systems of maguey construction at a domestic scale using mezcal ‘waste’ material and proposes a community workshop, at a collective scale, to support lost traditions, rainwater harvesting, and to amplify local economies that revolve around maguey. The thesis preserves maguey as a sacred resource, enabling locals in Oaxaca to create ‘maguey architecture’.

Image Credit: Titled "La Estrella de la Tierra / The Earth's Star"; by Bernardo Gonzalez; Diagram of the Birth of Maguey Through Time, and its Celestial Connections.

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HOUSE(WARM)ING: Human and Material Choreographies for Not-so-New Forms of Comfort Junha Hwang and Vincent Jackow MArch Advisors: Carrie Norman and Xavi Aguirre Reader: Brandon Clifford In a moment of growing climate and political instability that will cause conditions that forecast disruptions in energy and material supplies, this thesis argues that architecture must reclaim the means of domestic comfort; through the re-organization of spaces, materials, and everyday practices, particularly at the scale of the single-family house and its immediate community.

Today, our means of comfort are outsourced to an increasing number of appliances: HVAC, gas boiler, refrigerator, TV, etc., reinforcing our individualistic lifestyles and our dependencies on fossil fuels. Yet not long ago, our domestic comfort was sustained by design, using natural ventilation or thermal mass, or by collective rituals: sharing warm meals or bathing together, revealing comfort as both a thermal condition and a social choreography.

Facing uncertain futures, this thesis proposes incrementally replacing energy-intensive technologies with spatial systems of comfort built from readily available materials and operated by their inhabitants. Borrowing

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from pre-industrial systems, such as Korean heated floors or Iranian wind towers, these spatial adaptations are implemented across three timescales - 2025, 2042, and 2068 - and suggest other modes of living together through shared economies and collective action.

Ultimately, this thesis places renovation at the heart of architectural practice and advocates for doing more with the homes we already have. It positions repair as both a material improvisation and a cultural practice, one that proposes alternative forms of comfort by actively reengaging the inhabitants with their environments and with one another.

ACT 01 - 2025: Off-the-Shelf Retrofit ACT 02 - 2042: Home as Depot ACT 03 - 2068: Neighborhood Assembly

Image Credits: Photos by Authors

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Seeing and the Saw Mara Jovanović MArch Advisor: Carrie Norman Reader: J. Jih

This thesis is about cutting.

In our discipline, it’s cuts all the way down: projected cuts through buildings, which we call sections, are a ubiquitous way of proliferating architectural knowledge and taste; almost every line in such drawings stands in for some cut into matter. The thesis begins by studying that matter, and singling out grain as its familiar yet understudied property.

Grain has a double sense: it refers both to the inscrutable interior structure of matter, and to the image of that structure revealed on its surface. It is strung between body and skin, tectonics and graphics, opacity and nudity. These double senses are tethered and mediated by the cut.

Beginning in the realm of the craftsman, the thesis charts a history of cutting as a cultural technique and a productive act, with attention to the changing relationships to grain our evolving tools have afforded. The protagonists are the knife and the saw, whose affordances, and their attendant ethics, have tacitly but relentlessly shaped our ways of seeing and knowing, and ultimately our tastes. The knife, which prefers to follow grain, encourages deference to the existing. The saw, engineered to disregard grain, incites an irreverent agnosticism towards the specificity of the found, allowing us to act projectively on matter, giving us grain in its vertiginous two-dimensional sense, and prefiguring a desire for flatness and flushness. Since matter moves, and sawn planarity is ultimately unstable, recurrent abrasion is needed to preserve its clarity.

This lands us in the realm of architectural detail; from the French ‘detailler,’ a detail literally is a cutting. The thesis concludes with a study and offering of cuttings which are informed by this history, strung between abstraction and articulation, reverence and irreverence, clarity and vertigo.

(Right) Image by the author

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Festival Kit: Reassembling Collective Time Minyoung Kim MArch Advisor: Brandon Clifford Reader: Arindam Dutta

Contemporary urban life has grown denser but also increasingly discontinuous, making it difficult for communities to sustain shared forms of life at scale. In Seoul, this fragmentation has produced abrupt ruptures, most visibly in resident-supported mass demolitions. These city-wide redevelopments within community-oriented neighborhoods reveal how everyday cohesion can become fragile under urban-scale economic pressure. In response to these shifts, this thesis turns to the festival, culturally significant days that persist across generations. It considers the festival as a collective ritual capable of expanding everyday networks into broader civic alignments.

The project centers on a festival kit composed of three modular elements: two-sided blocks, lumber, and dowels. Together they form a vocabulary of parts that assemble into distinct configurations across the year and, after each event, return to a compact cubic form. Each festival produces a unique spatial figure, expressed through calibrated color and pattern logics that register the identity of each day.

The kit operates through cycles of construction, gathering, and dispersal: neither monumental nor disposable, but collectively re-made.

Anchoring this mobility is a set of receivers, small and permanent landscape elements that structure everyday occupation while enabling festival transformation. On ordinary days, they function as places for rest, games, small gatherings, and informal encounters.

During festival periods, they become pivot points, sockets, or tethering bases through which larger assemblies can rise collectively. The receivers provide the infrastructural continuity that activates the festival, while the kit amplifies their role as spatial and cultural tethers.

Together, the kit and its receivers form a cyclical spatial practice that resists erasure through iteration, reactivates communal capacities for making, and reframes the city as a place where collective life is not assumed but continually produced.

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Image Credits: Lunar 1.1, 4.8, 8.5, and 12.25 Festival scenes

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transtension Thomas Logan King MArch Advisor: Cristina Parreño Alonso Reader: Mark Jarzombek

transtension (n.) : a theory // methodology of (a/A)rchitecture predicated on subjectivity , Love , and sincerity . placed in opposition to 'the bottom line' (cn.) : that which contemporary society is predicated on , i.e. objectivity , capital , and efficiency . they ask , ’if a tree falls in the forest , and no one is around , does it even make a sound ?’ well , the question is not whether it makes a sound ; the question is whether the tree exists at all . transtension is a fell tree i came upon in the forest that is this existence. this thesis is an accumulation of branches i’ve gathered from that tree, then aggregated and arranged in (no) particular order , so as to share

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with others as proof of its existence . one day , maybe we can go visit that tree , together . but today , i can only share these fragments , arranged in (some) particular order //or this thesis is a mirrored window . depending up.on the angle of approach , as well as the viewing perspective , subjects will either be faced with a reflection of themselves , a reflection of their surroundings , or a mediated view of my.self . said another way , by inter.acting with this thesis , subjects will either be inter.facing with them.selves , specular reflections of/on the world , or a mimetic version of my.self . theoretically , the aim is something akin to conceptual anamorphism , where. in a disjointed outward appearance comes together [in time] , up.on accretion - think of lorenz attractors , wherein the formulaic inputs can be changed ever.so.slightly , leading to drastically different , often.times unexpected trajectories , but trajectories which never.the.less converge up.on the same general shape . and depending up.on the axis along which the attractor is oriented , as well as the construction plane along which the subject is oriented , this shape may appear flat or fluid , mute or motionless , two-dimensional , three- , or four- . this shape , these branches , this tree , our perception(s) of them , can be thought of as transtensional . transtensive . transtension

Images by the author

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CHEAP IS MORE Jin Zhenghua Li MArch Advisor: Jaffer Kolb Reader: John Ochsendorf

Price is the operative code behind nearly all forms of activity. Price construction functions as a society-wide engineering system, abstracting natural resources, human labor, time, and power into unitized numerical costs that culminate in priced, exchangeable commodities. To minimize costs, the system enacts systemic devaluation: lived experience and human time are monetized into skills and labor to facilitate exchange and ultimately accumulate capital. Yet, cheap products also extend an invitation—they allow individuals to access social services with relative equality and meet their own demands.

CHEAP IS MORE seeks to build through cheapness by disassembling the variables embedded in price formulas, recovering the values compressed or erased in cheap production. It is a strategy that infiltrates the system, exploits the strengths and loopholes, refuses to obey its logic, and seeks out the overlooked values embedde in the availables, abundants, and low-priced - such as the security afforded by material abundance in mass production; the sense of mission and ethical engagement in working with low-demand materials; the confidence enabled by

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low-cost raw materials; and the technical support of open knowledge and maintenance communities. By hijacking low-priced objects, it mobilizes the entire system as a tool.

CHEAP IS MORE advocates: 1 - Collaborative Antagonism - Leveraging rather than Obeying; 2 - Value Mining - locate discrepancies between PRICE and VALUE; identify high-value, low-price materials.

3 - Propagability - Use the universality of price to spread the practice and value.

4 - Decentralized Production - Spontaneous, Non-mainstream, Shared modes of production.

5 - Immediate Action — Here, Now, You. 6 - Multiple Agents — Nature, Money, Labor, Time, and all Price Factors, as allies.

The Architect's action is to apply expertise to endow the low-priced with value, through strutual machanics, geometry, tectonic; and equally through drawings, narrative, fabrication, and presentation.

Opposite page: A bottle of Coke in a vending machine embodies ingenious bottle design, a rich consumer-culture narrative, and modular uniformity, an airtight, highly stressed structural unit, a global logistics network, and cost-thinning from mass production — yet all of that is packaged and sold for only $1.50.

Image by author, Photo of Penultimate Review.

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Wish-Making as a Spatial Type: Building Architecture for Spiritual Ecology Molly Jingyun Ma MArch Advisor: Garnette Cadogan Reader: Brandon Clifford This thesis proposes and delineates wish-making as a new spatial type.

Traditionally, the act of wishing has existed as a narrative-dependent fragment, embedded within religious structures, folkloric customs, or event-based moments. In all these cases, wishing is triggered by externally defined occasions rather than by spatial agency itself. This study initiates a critical extraction of wish-making from its historical attachments, liberating it to function as an autonomous architectural entity within modern secular life.

Approaching wish-making architecturally, this thesis identifies four fundamental elements that constitute its spatial condition: Gesture (as an embodied mechanism of hope), Material (as a tactile interface for intention), Atmosphere (as a phenomenological field of spiritual sensibility), and Narrative Sequence (as a dramaturgy of collective imagination). Together, these elements construct the architectural substrate that enables wish-making—shaping space, act, and meaning.

Through design experiments that reconfigure these elements, the thesis explores the generative potential of wish-making as a spatial logic operating across scales: from the intimate dignity of maintenance gestures and the narrative agency of material fragments, to the reactivation of monumental urban residues and the polyphonic expression of desire. These inquiries reveal how minor spatial acts can redistribute agency, re-enchant the built environment, and challenge the asymmetries of contemporary life.

Ultimately, the thesis positions architecture as a form of spiritual infrastructure—mediating unseen forces, organizing attention, and hosting micro-rituals that bind individual experience into shared worlds of imagination. By opening this domain, the study advocates for an expanded architectural imagination, one that cultivates an ecology of care, meaning, and collective becoming beyond doctrine or formal religion.

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Images by the author

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Adaptive Fibers: Computational Knitting for Climate Responsive Natural Textiles Agnes Parker MArch Advisor: Skylar Tibbits Reader: Marcelo Coelho Our bodies and buildings struggle to adapt to increasingly extreme environmental conditions—heat waves, humidity fluctuations, and unpredictable weather that challenge human comfort and survival. The heating and cooling of buildings alone generates approximately 13% of U.S. domestic greenhouse gas emissions (ARPA-E 2018). Simultaneously, the materials of our environments have become dominated by synthetic products, with plastics ubiquitous from garments to building facades.

Natural materials possess inherently intelligent properties developed through millennia of evolutionary adaptation. Hygroscopic structures manage moisture, crimped geometries trap insulating air, and hollow cores regulate temperature. These are functional mechanisms that activate in response to environmental stimuli. Synthetic materials resist environmental conditions; natural materials work with them.

This distinction positions natural fibers as active materials capable of dynamic climate responses.Textiles represent one of humanity's earliest technologies for creating shelter. Buildings and bodies are analogous systems operating at different scales: both require protection, adaptation, and climate control through intelligent material interfaces.

This thesis demonstrates how computational knitting can assemble and optimize natural material properties, creating functionally graded fabrics that activate fiber behaviors in response to environmental stimuli. Two prototypes validate this framework: Rain + Shine, a hygroscopic and hydrophobic shading screen achieving passive cooling through evaporation; and Active Natural Materials, developed with the Self-Assembly Lab and Atelier LUMA, exploring technical textiles from natural fiber systems. Together, these investigations establish a methodology for climate-responsive design operating from wearable garments to architectural skins.

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Image Credits: (Top) Natural fibres in roving form, Agnes Parker; (Bottom) Regenerated wood hygroscopic membrane, Lloyd Lee.

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LONG HUGS: Stone as Relational Field in Architecture Cheung Qin MArch Advisor: Brandon Clifford Reader: Sarah Oppenheimer When we call stone a record of time, we begin to see it as static, a symbol of endurance valued for its origin or aesthetic. Yet stone is not mute. Even when extracted, cut, or fixed into place, it continues to turn, scrape, and shed its dust. In its slowness, time does not stop; it only slips beyond perception. Stone carries traces of geological duration and of the encounters that have shaped it: air, water, pressure, and touch. It exists as a field of relations, where forces meet and leave their marks.

By treating stone as silent, we have also silenced architecture itself.

Contemporary architecture practice leans toward objectification: stone as finish, as image, as a durable surface that should never change. This flattening suppresses the very behaviors that make stone meaningful.

What could be a slow, reciprocal exchange with the environment reduced to appearance and efficiency.

This thesis proposes that stone be understood not as a self-contained material but as part of a relational field. The experiments in this thesis begin from the premise: that wear, friction, erosion, and internal decay are forms of information. Each study isolates a condition and makes legible the exchanges that produce it. From this premise, the architectural joint begins to shift. If, for Kenneth Frampton, the joint reveals the ethics of construction in the present, here, it stretches across time. It is no longer a point of resolution but a site where future behavior is already anticipated, a detail that expects stone to stain, loosen, and weather.

The joint becomes a modest timekeeper, measuring how material and environment negotiate their slow reciprocity.

Thinking this way acknowledges that architecture does not end at assembly. It continues as climate, use, and matter work together, leaving traces on one another. Weather writes into the stone; the stone responds through changes in color, texture, and fit. These shifts are not failures but correspondences, evidence of a relationship unfolding at the scales of the hand, the corner, the threshold.

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Image: Stone as a Relational Field Diagram by Cheung Qin

To understand stone as a relational field is to understand architecture as something tended rather than fixed. Form becomes a process of becoming, shaped by weather, bodies, and the mineral memory within the stone itself. The building does not simply stand; it listens and records. Time becomes perceptible not through permanence but through the subtle, persistent changes that remind us we inhabit the same field of forces.

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Hot House, Mixed Grounds; A regenerative compound for climate, cultivation, and rural continuity in Southern Thailand Samantha Ratanarat MArch Advisor: Sheila Kennedy Reader: Caitlin Mueller Rubber and palm oil cultivation has shaped the agricultural economy of Southern Thailand for decades. These monocultural systems are integral to rural livelihoods, but their expansion since the 20th century has reduced ecological diversity and increased chemical inputs. The landscape is also shaped by a climate in which heat and humidity define conditions for shelter, a context that contemporary construction often meets with energy intensive materials and mechanical cooling. This thesis asks whether a different way of living and building can emerge within this landscape, shaped instead by regenerative forces and natural cycles.

A four-acre palm plantation in Surat Thani province becomes the ground for exploring the development of a regenerative rural compound. The existing order of the palm grid shapes the spatial organization of the site, where habitation, material experimentation, and expanded mixed planting establish a new program. Within this site, the thesis proposes a building system with rubberwood, a byproduct of the regional plantation cycle that is typically processed in nearby sawmills and exported for furniture production. Reconsidered here as a structural resource that remains within the landscape that produces it, the material’s locally milled dimensions guide the development of components suited to non-industrial construction and passive approaches to cooling in a hot, humid climate. Together, the integration of these spatial and material strategies explore how shelter and productive land use might operate within the working landscape while allowing the ground to move gradually toward ecological repair.

By drawing on one branch of the plantation economy to reorganise another, the proposal sets out a localised, closed-loop approach to land and material management.

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Clockwise from top: Aerial view of the site (right) showing adjacent rubber plantation (left), log intake at a rubberwood sawmill in Trang province, site view.

Photos by author, August 2025

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Sound Service: Networks of Sound and Place for Community Preservation and Collective Memory Nia Rich MArch Advisor: Xavi Aguirre Reader: Yolande Daniels Every oscillation which travels through a medium experiences attenuation but never achieves absolute zero. A neighborhood’s frequencies of the past, present, and future are no different, contributing to a palimpsest of rhythm and memory that propels continually into the future.

This thesis intervenes with that layering, positioning the archive, sound reproduction, and architectural intervention as tools of amplification to strengthen collective memory and place making.

In her syllabus project submission, “What Are Black Archives,” the archivist Dorothy Berry asserts: Black archives are a "Street, a Neighborhood, a House, a Hairstyle, a Dress, a Recipe, a Dessert, a Single video clip, a gallery opening, a pretty good DJ set, a Person Who Remembers, a Person Who is Remembered, a Person Who is Imagined but not Remembered, a Black person, all Black people.” This definition of archive is in contrast to that of the institution which often, through biased methods of appraisal and collection, freezes the image of the city or neighborhood around singular events or figures in history. What then are the types of infrastructure required to retain and care for a Black archive within its community and how can that archive be physically manifested within the built environment as a tool for both memory and community preservation?

These questions are considered through the medium of sound and framed within the context of the Washington Park District, the first planned black neighborhood in Atlanta, Georgia. While Washington Park and the adjacent Westside Atlanta neighborhoods initially thrived as havens for Atlanta’s black middle class, urban renewal and disinvestment led to their decline in the late 20th century. In the present, Washington Park faces an inflection point as one of many of Atlanta’s Westside neighborhoods adjacent to the city’s soon to be completed Beltline project, a loop of bike path and parks around the city and a key driver of gentrification. The predominantly Black Westside of Atlanta now fears yet another cycle of loss, a silencing of its rhythms.

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In response, this thesis imagines a sonic archive enterprise for Washington Park, rooted in its existing yet attenuated networks of self-sufficiency and community stewardship. The sound service consists of a network of programs which aid in the memory, cultural preservation and place-making of Washington Park and the Westside of Atlanta through the recording and transmission of sound. These programs are supported by an infrastructure that manifests itself physically via a kit of parts architectural assembly that propagates throughout the neighborhood grafting onto the neighborhood’s seen and unseen landscape.

Image by author

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Coiba: Feral Assemblies Alissa Serfozo MArch, MSRED Advisors: Rania Ghosn and Albert Saiz Reader: Caroline Jones

Located 15 miles off Panama’s Pacific coast, Coiba National Park encompasses Central America’s largest island, where penal isolation inadvertently preserved a vast rainforest. Today, the site is paralyzed by the collision of restrictive ecological mandates due to its World Heritage status and its traumatic history. At La Central Camp, a feral entanglement of forest and ruins persists, collapsing competing testimonies: the hellish landscape of forced labor and the "severe deterioration" cataloged by UNESCO officials.

Rejecting the sanitizing governance of traditional preservation, this thesis reframes decay not as a pathology, but as a critical atmospheric asset. The project operates within a zero-footprint margin to propose Feral Assemblies: a regenerative strategy rooted in material resonance.

Using local hardwoods once harvested by prisoner labor like Espavé and Amarillo, the design establishes three interventions: LIFT, bracketing

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crumbling masonry with timber armatures to arrest the momentum of collapse; MEET, laminating embodied program—kiosks, workshops, and viewing platforms—within existing shells to compel a close somatic reading of confinement; and ECHO, indexing the erased penal grid with elevated walkways that hover above the recovering forest floor.

This curatorial stance transforms "rubble" into a visceral destination, grounding the joint MSRED proposal. By monetizing the immersive experience of entropy rather than funding extensive restoration, the project secures the solvency of an autonomous Coiba Fund. This revenue directly finances UNESCO-mandated surveillance and livestock eradication, while unlocking a legally required 20% social dividend for local communities. Ultimately, the project positions the ekistic ambiguity of the site as the financial precondition for the island’s environmental survival.

Images by author, visualizing the thesis methodology through archival layering, material forensics, and speculative interventions within the former penal colony’s landscape.

Archives accessed include Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Harvard Herbaria.

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Face Value: The Speculative Preservation of Architectural Accumulations Simmone Stearn MArch Advisor: Adam Modesitt Reader: Sheila Kennedy Urban redevelopment strategies involving the restoration of historic buildings in the United States have been shaped by the practice of historic designation which qualitatively assesses and assigns value to buildings and architectural elements. This system favors and constructs societal value for original and subjectively characteristic forms of architecture, as determined by a current state of fluctuating values. The binary between “historic” and “non-historic” is particularly limited in the case of postindustrial cities, where the economic landscape resulting from deindustrialization created peculiar architectural conditions of cheap preservation layers that redevelopment strategies now aim to remove; many deteriorating historic buildings were, in an act of preservation, encased and sealed away, allowing buildings to maintain baseline serviceability, house new uses, or remain relevant in advertising and merchandising. These encasements provide new, unique identities for buildings and accumulate alternative histories that are also worthy of preservation. However at face value, in tandem with the flux of architectural fashion, these encasements are deemed expendable due to their

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oftentimes more makeshift nature and their juxtaposition to a contained older object. As a result, encasements are removed or replaced in remediation and restoration projects. This thesis recognizes that these layers, as witnesses to years of transformation, embody important decades in a city’s life and contain worth beyond face value; removing material accumulations to solely rehabilitate a contained building prevents the multiplicity of meanings a building can attain, as well as generates waste that returns to the environment.

This thesis asks, how can architecture rethink preservation and sustainability through constructing utility for the undervalued material layers and undervalued histories that buildings accumulate? This thesis rethinks the face value of material accumulations through transforming contained buildings and encasements together to create new, permeable thresholds. What results is a proposition for a new urban condition of public frontage space made from transformed encasement layers on historic commercial buildings in Buffalo, New York that combats the binary between the valuable “historic” and the expendable “non-historic” through their integration into public-facing spaces of communal worth.

Left: 1786 - 1900 Main Street, Buffalo, NY slip facade, by Author.

Below: Removal of interior furring wall in 1786 main street, screen capture from "COMPLETE RESTORATION | Saving Ford's First Full Service Dealership from Demolition for a New Life," Video. Posted June 9, 2025, by Undiscovered Classics, YouTube.

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CYBERPUNK-PUNK: Hacking Downtown Los Angeles Alex Stewart MArch Advisor: Rocio Crosetto Brizzio Reader: Adam Modesitt In the 60s, cyberpunk first weaved its stories of everyday individual lives struggling against an impossibly organized and increasingly oppressive techno-commercialist system. A spit in the face of the optimistic futures imagined by the Atomic Age, it was eventually absorbed into mainstream media and deprived of its teeth. The questions that Neuromancer and Blade Runner and Akira posed about how an unchecked capital-driven system would exploit the nascent Information Age received many answers, and they came with all of the expected melancholy and little to none of the cybernetic excitement.

This thesis argues, however, that the subject matter those cyberpunk stories warned us about is now more pressing than ever. Growing inequities, perpetuated by a new wave of emerging technologies with AI at the center, echo the techno-fueled social unrest of the sci-fi movies we’ve watched for decades–a phenomenon made manifest most especially in Los Angeles.

The largest population of unhoused people in the country seeks shelter mere blocks away from the towering financial district. Developments are

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either underfunded and in disrepair, or gentrifying and displacing. All of the hallmarks of the Second Gilded Age permeate alarmingly across Downtown: from the flashy LA Live to the ad hoc Santee Alley; from the unrealized Graffiti Towers to the bankrupt Skid Row Housing Trust; from the vacated Dome Village homeless shelters out west to the abandoned railroads to the east.

It is imperative that we bring a new, context-adaptive approach–a new cyber, and a new punk–to architecture. The ideas of the likes of Cedric Price, Kiyonori Kikutake, and Archigram must be assessed, authenticated, and adapted to a culture that is more fluctuating and more globalized than ever.

In revitalized cyberpunk fashion, this thesis strives to rebelliously design alternative spaces tailor-fit to the nomadic, fluctuating wants and needs of Downtown Los Angeles’s near-future “underbelly.” Sometimes covert, sometimes loud; sometimes intimate, sometimes public; CYBERPUNKPUNK identifies a collection of sites across the metropolis—typologies to worm into, to occupy, to leverage—and proposes an infrastructural, kit-of-parts approach to transforming them. The result, this thesis posits, is a reappropriation of available technologies, resources, and real estate; an evening of the odds; a revitalized re-punking of America’s most cyberpunk city.

Image Credits: Alex Stewart

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Future Ruins Christian Studebaker MArch Advisor: Adam Modesitt Reader: Larry Sass

This project explores how abandoned military forts can be reimagined through architectural grafting. Many of these sites sit in a strange state of limbo. They are too historically significant to ignore, but too damaged and too purposeless to simply restore. My work begins by closely reading the failures in their structures, tracing where stone walls have collapsed, where materials have shifted, and where original geometries have disappeared. These failures become the openings for new interventions.

Rather than treating the forts as artifacts frozen in time, I approach them as active frameworks that can support new programs. The project studies several forts, identifying moments where a grafted architectural response can repair, replace, or completely reimagine a portion of the structure. Timber plays an important role, not as a nostalgic counterpoint to stone, but as a material capable of occupying absence. It allows new structures to nest within or extend from the ruins without pretending to complete what was lost.

The work culminates in a series of speculative reconstructions that attach new programs to old forms. Some grafts rebuild collapsed walls to create enclosed space. Others introduce circulation or public functions into voids that were never originally meant to be occupied. By using the fort’s geometry as a starting point rather than a boundary, the thesis argues for a more adaptive approach to preservation.

In the end, the project asks how architecture can move a ruin into the present by giving it a purpose it never had, while still acknowledging the layered histories embedded in its walls.

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Image Credits: Christian Studebaker

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Recipro-Cities: Building in the US-Mexico Borderlands Domonique Valenzuela MArch Advisor: Jaffer Kolb Reader: Roi Salgueiro Barrio El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua form a binational metropolitan region driven by transnational flows of labor, investment, and capital, with a daily choreography of people, goods, and materials moving continuously across the international boundary. Each day, students cross the border to attend school or university; residents of El Paso travel to Juárez for medical care; residents of Juarez commute to El Paso for work while remittances support families across the border; and residents on both sides cross regularly to visit friends and family.

In the construction sector, workers from Juárez make up a significant portion of the labor force in El Paso, contributing to the production of homes, commercial buildings, and industrial facilities. Construction materials used in El Paso often find their way back into Juárez through formal resale channels, salvage yards, or informal reuse practices. Conversely, Juárez’s manufacturing industry generates substantial quantities of excess or second-quality stock such as offcuts, packaging, and components that circulate north into El Paso, where they are repurposed or reintegrated into local supply chains.

This thesis examines the complex interrelation between these two cities through the lens of cross-border construction labor and material flows, using these reciprocal exchanges as a foundation for developing architectural interventions within Juárez that engage the domestic scale. Although El Paso and Ciudad Juárez are deeply interconnected, construction practices on each side of the border differ significantly in their materials, regulatory frameworks, and cultural logics. The project centers on the historic center of Juárez, investigating how adapting and reinvesting in its existing domestic structures, drawing on materials embedded in regional building traditions as well as those moving through local exchange networks, can sustain a shared architectural lineage while countering the growing vacancy of its older neighborhoods.

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Image by Author: Photos from El Paso, TX and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua

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Beyond Heritage: Ruplal House as a Site of Collective Inheritance S M Kaikobad SMArchS, AKPIA Advisor: Huma Gupta Readers: Carrie Norman and Mohammad Habib Reza In Dhaka, dynamic capital of Bangladesh, heritage is simultaneously stabilized by law and destabilized by everyday urban life. Although Bangladesh’s Antiquities Act (1968) designates certain buildings as protected “antiquities” to preserve the past, this legal framework often reinforces entrenched power dynamics rather than addressing the ground realities of everyday use of these edifices. This thesis argues that heritage must be understood not as a static monument frozen in time, but as a site of collective inheritance where plural and contested claims, memories and uses prevail. Placing Ruplal House, a nineteenth-century neo-classical mansion on the Buriganga River in Old Dhaka in the foreground it offers to reveal the central paradox of heritage in Bangladesh: while the state freezes sites as “antiquities,” everyday life unfreezes them through occupation, adaptation, maintenance, memory, and survival. Based on this analysis, the thesis explores each stakeholder’s imagined “claim” to the house through speculative scenarios of future inheritance, revealing the legal, social, and ecological tensions informing the governance of heritage in Bangladesh.

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Image Credits: Author 01. The Lalbagh Fort (1678) by Muhammad Azam Shah 02. Bara Katra (1646) by Shah Shuja 03. Choto Katara (1663) by Shaista Khan 04. Armenian Church (1781) by Armenian Community 05. Ahsan Manzil Museum (1872) by Sheikh Enayetullah 06. Lalitakala Academy (1955) by Begum Afroza BulBul 07. Northbrook Hall (1880) by Raja Rai Bahadur 08. Northbrook Hall (1935) by Shudheer Das 09. R.uplal House (1825) by Armenian businessman, Stephen Aratoon

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What Remains: Designing for Temporal Resilience Katrina J. Chan BSA Advisor: Miho Mazereeuw How do you design a functional ruin?

Upon construction, architecture begins to negotiate an uneasy relationship with time. Structures are asked to endure forces that shift faster than traditional design life cycles can accommodate, resulting in a cycle of perpetual replacement. Such practices are no longer tenable, particularly within the escalating volatility of a changing climate. Rather than conceiving resilience as brute longevity, this thesis presents an alternative mode of design, reframing resilience as an ability to transform: fostering a relationship between environment, community, and time.

This thesis outlines a design philosophy that anticipates deterioration, harnessing weather events as agenerative force and deliberately shaping the spatial and formal conditions that emerge as structures age.

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Structures should not be considered complete at the moment of construction; like a living organism, they move through stages of performance, decline, adaptation, and reintegration. By designing for initial, future, and indeterminate states, buildings can remain valuable beyond their initial states. Thus, ruin is not an end but a segue: marking a new phase of use rather than the end of one.

Rising seas, frequent flooding, and increasingly destructive storms continuously force communities into cycles of rebuilding, each reconstruction compounding the environmental pressures that necessitated rebuilding in the first place. This thesis applies its design philosophy to a riverside performing arts complex in New Orleans, a city shaped by water, subsidence, and the long temporal arc of environmental precarity.

By anticipating material decay and channeling environmental forces into intentional spatial transformations, this thesis demonstrates how structures can remain functional beyond their prime, reframing deterioration as a productive phase rather than a terminal one and offering a model for resilience that endures time through transformation.

Structures can be defined not by what they lose, but by what remains.

Image Credits: (left) Temporal superposition visualization of a studio-gallery wing; (right) Elevation demonstrating exterior porches evolving to docks as sea levels rise, all images by Author.

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MIT Architecture Final Thesis Reviews, December 18, 2025 SPECIAL THANKS Architecture Faculty and Staff Taariq Alasa

Aashna Daga

John Hoder

Jennifer O'Brien

Eleni Aktypi

Chris Dewart

Ryan Lee

Paul Pettigrew

Darren Bennett

Jackie Dufault

Doug Le Vie

Diana Rooney

Kateri Bertin

Michael Gallino

Inala Locke

Jonasha Samedy

Kathaleen Brearley

Eduardo Gonzalez

Tonya Miller

Rosalyne Shieh

Joél Carela

Eliza Hamilton

Nicholas de Monchaux

Nandini Choudhury

Tessa Haynes

Claudine Monique

Advisors and Readers Xavi L. Aguirre

Svafa Grondfelt

Caitlin Mueller

Larry Sass

Garnette Cadogan

Huma Gupta

Takehiko Nagakura

Rosalyne Shieh

Brandon Clifford

Mark Jarzombek

Carrie Norman

Justin Steil

Marcelo Coelho

J. Jih

Liam O'Brien Jr.

Skylar Tibbits

Rocio Crosetto Brizzio

Caroline Jones

John Ochsendorf

Gediminas Urbonas

Yolande Daniels

Sheila Kennedy

Sarah Oppenheimer

Arindam Dutta

Jaffer Kolb

Cristina Parreno Alonso

Behnaz Farahi

Miho Mazereeuw

Albert Saiz

Rania Ghosn

Adam Modesitt

Roi Salgueiro Barrio

Guest Jurors Marie Law Adams

Antonio Furigele

Ang Li

Amelyn Ng

Jennifer Chuong

Yufan Gao

Meredith Miller

Ife Vanable

Jonathan Duval

Deborah Garcia

Jess Myers

Edward Eigen

Jeff Landman

Mohamad Nahleh

Massachusetts Institute of Technology • School of Architecture & Planning Department of Architecture 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 7-337 Cambridge, MA USA 02139 617 253 7791 • arch@mit.edu • architecture.mit.edu

© 2025 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Individual contributions are copyright their respective authors. Images are copyright their respective creators, unless otherwise noted.

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE MIT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING 54

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