KATERINA APOSTOLOPOULOU, NASIBE NUR DUNDAR ARIFOGLU, YINING BEI, RACHEL BLOWES, LINA BONDARENKO, BIRU CAO, DANIELA MARTÍNEZ CHAPA, CELIA QUYNH-MAI CHAUSSABEL, DOMINIC LIM CO, MINGHAO DU & KAICHENG ZHUANG, JIN GAO, DANNY GRIFFIN, RICHA GUPTA, NIKLAS HAGEMANN, AREZO HAKEMY, HAIDAR EL HAQ, YEWON JI, NAMHI KWUN, ALEXANDER HTET KYAW, SIMON LESINA-DEBIASI, TIEN YI LI, DIMITRIOS MOUTAFIDIS, HABIN PARK
MAY 15, 2025
Co-Authoring Beyond the Human:
Disordering Architectural Processes through Play and MultiAgent Co-Existence
Nasibe Nur Dundar Arifoglu
From Scar To Scaffold:
The Afterlife of the Oil Pipeline for a Decarbonizing World
Katerina Apostolopoulou
Natural Ineraction:
3D Modeling in Wearable VR Using a Gesture and Speech
Interface
Yining Bei
Dowel-Laminated Timber From Waste Lumber Offcuts: Towards Structural Component Circularity
Rachel Blowes
Social Sensory Somatic Scores for Species, Soils, Structures, and Spaces of Steep Slopes
Lina Bondarenko
Lumi-Modeling:
4D Reconstruction of Architectural Spaces Through Dynamic Lighting
Biru Cao
City in the River:
Regeneration of the Santa Catarina River as an Intermittent
Urban River
Daniela Martínez Chapa
The Objectiles’ Guide To Time Travel:
Re-Envisioning Building Materials as Narrative-Collecting Object-Projectiles on a Trajectory Through Space-Time
Celia Quynh-Mai Chaussabel
Formalizing the Informal:
Mapping Street-Level Informality in Ho Chi Minh
Dominic Lim Co
Toward an Age-ready Suburbia:
Retrofitting Neighborhood for Longevity
Minghao (William) Du, Kaicheng Zhuang
Mediators:
Participatory Collective Intelligence for Multi-Stakeholder Urban Decision-Making
Jin Gao
Guiding Labor:
Sensable Instructions through Digital Jigs
Danny Griffin
Generative Design Intelligence:
Emergent Behavior in Generative AI through Post-Processing in Design Process
Richa Gupta
ZipperBots
Towards Transformable and Reversible Objects
Niklas Hagemann
Weaving Borders, Mapping Place: Afghan War Rugs of the Soviet-Afghan war (1979-1989)
Arezo Hakemy
Koalisi Lahan–Gambut:
Assembling Peat–Land Futures in Kalimantan
Haidar El Haq
Post-Carbon Seoul:
Low-Carbon Interventions for High-Carbon Housing Stock
Yewon Ji
S(e)oul: A Body for Cremation
Namhi Kwun
On-Demand Production using Natural Language, 3D
Generative AI, and Discrete Robotic Assembly
Alexander
Simon Lesina-Debiasi
Modelling
Diary-writing and Moral Anxieties in China, 1918–62
Tien Yi Li
Banjiha Stories (2025): Seeing Seoul’s Hidden Homes and the Lives They Hold Habin Park
This thesis reconsiders architectural authorship and the extended processes through which the built environment is shaped, using a series of playful, participatory interventions to expose the human-centric assumptions embedded in spatial decision-making. Presented as a collection of games and booklets, the work invites participants to engage with a wide spectrum of architectural processes—from site understanding and planning to permitting, construction, and post-occupancy— through the perspectives of multiple agents entangled in shared environments. These agents include beings, materials, living organisms, legal frameworks, and other forces typically excluded from spatial authorship, challenging conventional boundaries and expanding the discourse around the entangled forces and relations that shape the spaces we inhabit.
A series of playful explorations opens space for friction, misalignment, and shared authorship. Each booklet engages a distinct stage of the architectural process through participatory formats that make visible the biases, exclusions, and regulatory fictions often treated as neutral. By gamifying these systems, the work reveals how architectural decision-making tends to privilege hierarchy, human control, and speed—often at the expense of multispecies co-existence.
This thesis positions play as a critical lens: a way to rehearse alternative futures, to listen differently, to embody other perspectives, and to surface the black-box logics embedded in architectural norms. It invites readers and players to participate in unbuilding these assumptions. And the games evolve—with each use, each misreading, each encounter, and each agent who joins the conversation.
Advisor: Jaffer Kolb
Readers: Mark Jarzombek, Skylar Tibbits
Co-authorship Beyond the Human Booklet Series. Image by Author
With over 86,000 kilometers of crude oil pipelines—and more than 2.13 million kilometers of total oil and gas pipelines in the United States as of 2024—many segments are corroded, aging, and deeply embedded within endangered urban and ecological systems. As the global energy transition accelerates, this thesis reconsiders decommissioned and declining pipelines not as obsolete relics, but as latent assets for ecological repair, climate resilience, and socio-environmental justice. Moving beyond narratives of extraction and decay, the project repositions pipelines as linear territories of opportunity—capable of retrofitting into new civic, ecological, and infrastructural frameworks.
The project transforms the pipeline’s linear extractive logic into a circular and connective one: a loop that is both finite and infinite, territorial and experiential. Focusing on a strategically selected loop spanning 14 states, the thesis constructs a cartographic and architectural framework to reimagine these lines as sites of repair, social infrastructure, and alternative energy distribution—where design, like a biological scaffold, acts as a catalyst for regeneration.
Through spatial analysis, typological classification, and mapping, five territorial conditions are defined along the loop, offering distinct opportunities for intervention. Speculative design prototypes transform the pipeline through operations of repurpose, renewable energy distribution, or ecological remediation—reframing invasive infrastructures into public and environmental assets.
Ultimately, the thesis proposes a post-carbon design paradigm rooted in ecological reciprocity, collective agency, and infrastructural care—revealing hidden energy landscapes and inscribing them with resilience, equity, and repair.
Advisor: Roi Salgueiro Barrio
Readers: Nicholas de Monchaux, Laura Narvaez Zertuche
Fig.1,2 Conceptual collages of speculative design prototypes transforming the pipeline. Image by Author.
Designers often rely on keyboard and mouse for 3D modeling, a method that can feel unintuitive or restrictive—especially in collaborative or spatially immersive settings. This thesis explores how multimodal interaction, specifically thWe combination of hand gestures and voice commands, can support more natural, efficient, and accessible 3D modeling in virtual reality (VR). Built on a custom Unity-based system integrating Meta Quest hand tracking and Wit.ai voice recognition, the study investigates how these two input modes—gesture and speech—can be used together to manipulate and modify 3D geometry in real time. The research proceeds in three phases: (1) a formative study analyzing how users intuitively design gestures, revealing common preferences, task breakdown strategies, and limitations in gesture inputs; (2) system design and implementation of both gesture-only and gesture + speech interfaces for navigation and object manipulation (e.g., translation, scaling, duplication); and (3) a comparative user study evaluating gesture-only, gesture + speech, and keyboard + mouse workflows in terms of learning curve, task efficiency, and user satisfaction.
Results show that gesture + speech enables smoother transitions across modeling subtasks and allows users to offload certain parameters (e.g., numeric values, distances) to voice while using gestures for spatial control. Participants reported higher engagement and lower cognitive load compared to keyboard-based workflows, especially in tasks involving spatial scale and collaboration. This thesis demonstrates the feasibility and design potential of multimodal interaction for immersive modeling workflows and offers insights for future XR design tools that seek to blend precision with embodied interaction.
Advisor: Takehiko Nagakura
Reader: Terry W. Knight
Scaling a Cube to 2× Size Using Gesture + Speech Input Image by Author
Gesture-only Interaction Vocabulary Image by Author
In the context of the global climate crisis, there is a need to develop low embodied carbon building systems. Moreover, construction and demolition generate substantial amounts of waste. The use of salvaged materials for structural applications presents the opportunity to divert this waste while reducing the embodied carbon of new structural components. This thesis proposes a typology for dowel-laminated timber (DLT) slabs built up from waste lumber offcuts. A mechanical model for a segmented DLT system composed of geometrically heterogeneous offcuts is developed. Prototypes of this mass timber system are fabricated and tested to observe their failure behavior and to evaluate the mechanical model. A computational workflow is introduced which employs algorithmic methods for inventory assignment and structural optimization to design slabs which meet deflection requirements under loading. These approaches are undertaken to evaluate whether DLT systems can leverage the irregularity of salvaged lumber dimensions to produce structurally efficient forms.
Advisor: Caitlin Mueller
Reader: Paul Mayencourt
Inventory-matched DLT slab designs. Image by Author
For millennia, species have been collaborating with and adapting to sloped terrain. The Great Rift Valley’s steep bioregional climate fostered upright hominids—an example of symbiogenesis—where life and land co-evolve. From Athens to Cusco, Varanasi to Hong Kong, Kyiv to San Francisco, urbanization has continued to follow the ecological, strategic, and mythological pull of the slope. With even Massachusetts meaning ‘large hill place’ and Boston colonized as the ‘city upon the hill,’ the slope is codified into our physiology and history. Land enclosure and improvement regimes have facilitated the commodification and abstraction of land, reshaping the earth’s undulating terrains. Modern infrastructure mediates how humans relate to topography— serving spatial standardization by containing, leveling, and rationalizing the inconsistency of geomorphological processes. These transformations perpetuate exploitation and displacement, reinforcing a cultural dissociation from embodied relationships with land-based knowledge, entrenching placelessness and alienation. SSSSSSSSSS turns toward sloped landscapes as sites for sympoiesis—producing a series of public ‘happenings’ with hills to reawaken the bodily intelligence of ‘Slorgs’ (sloped organisms) through sensory proprioception of slopes, gravity, tilt, and terrain. This ephemeral, situated practice is a medium for establishing topography beyond its physical or representational condition—towards a pedagogical, political, participatory, and celebratory one. Recent happenings include:
Slope Serenade, April 19 (Ringer Park, Allston)
A sonic score, deeply listening to the slopes, measured by original site-specific 22-piece instrument, the ‘Sonoslope’.
Slope Scene, April 27 (Prospect Hill Park, Somerville)
A surveying score, skewing perspectives through the custombuilt ‘Spectraslope’ and balancing on the ‘Sleat’.
Advisor: Gediminas Urbonas
Readers: Caroline Murphy, Rania Ghosn
Lighting plays a fundamental role in shaping architectural atmosphere, influencing how spaces are perceived and experienced. However, current digital design tools often fall short in capturing the dynamic interplay between light, material, and space, especially under real-world and timevarying conditions. This thesis presents a 4D reconstruction framework that employs the Gaussian Splatting technique to visualize architectural environments under diverse lighting and environmental scenarios in real time. By extracting geometric and photometric information from multi-view images, the system generates relightable 3D scenes, enabling high-fidelity reconstructions.
To facilitate exploration and analysis, a real-time graphical user interface has been developed. This interface allows users to interactively manipulate lighting directions, intensities, and environment maps. The framework is evaluated across a range of case studies, including archaeological sites captured in uncontrolled outdoor conditions and contemporary architectural spaces on the MIT campus.
These experiments demonstrate the versatility of the approach in supporting both heritage preservation and architectural design analysis. By bridging intuitive spatial thinking with computational precision, this work contributes a novel toolset for understanding and designing atmospheric conditions in architecture.
Advisor: Takehiko Nagakura
Reader: William T. Freeman
Fig.1: Relighting results under different environments.
Fig.2: Visualization of the reconstruction result within the GUI. Images by Author
Full of dichotomies, the Santa Catarina River is both dry and wet, present but forgotten, central yet disconnected, valued yet feared. How should an intermittent river in a dense urban context be regenerated? This thesis reimagines its ecological, hydrological, and public potential. Set in Monterrey, Mexico, this research addresses the urgent need to rethink water management in the face of the intensifying climate crisis through different urban systems and regeneration strategies within the river basin.
Focusing on the Santa Catarina River, long dismissed as a plot, void, or threat, this work proposes how an intermittent river might be re-understood not as an absence of activities or function but as a space of seasonal abundance, ecological possibility, and urban interaction. Historically engineered for control, the river has been used as a flood channel, market space, sports complex, transportation corridor, and more. However, rarely has it been seen, treated, or protected as a river.
Through the development of a pilot zone, this research suggests a replicable framework of regenerative strategies to slow down, retain, and absorb water flows, supporting both dry and wet season dynamics. These include restoring riparian ecologies, reintroducing soft edges, enabling groundwater recharge, and designing permeable, public, and accessible urban interventions that reconnect the city with the riverbed.
This thesis is not a fixed proposal but a living toolkit, an adaptable model to be tested, expanded, and reimagined in the pilot as time and nature take over. At stake is not only the river’s future but also the city’s capacity to shift from resistance to relation, becoming one with it, becoming a city in the river.
Advisor: Miho Mazereeuw Reader: Roi Salgueiro Barrio
Image by Author
Re-Envisioning Building Materials as Narrative-Collecting Object-Projectiles on a Trajectory Through Space-Time
As the architectural discipline grapples with its role in resource depletion, carbon emissions, and waste generation, there is a growing urgency to stop sourcing new materials and to reuse materials from existing buildings instead. One challenge to integrating reused materials into current building practices is technical: inventorying, deconstructing, reconditioning, and designing with reused materials is slower and more laborintensive than with new ones. But another challenge is cultural: the materials that make up architecture are currently perceived as unmoving and single-use, with little consideration for their trajectories from raw resource to landfill. This thesis is focused on developing an aesthetic sensibility and design methodology that helps us re-envision materials as objects on a trajectory instead: Objectiles, or object-projectiles.
Objectiles are objects on an adventure across space-time to collect as many uses as possible. Rather than remaining associated with one primary use, Objectiles are impressionable, bearing ambiguous traces of all the uses they encounter as they re-circulate. Through the aesthetic qualities that hint at their many uses, Objectiles invite us to time travel - to imagine the potential past and future narratives that may precede or follow their present physical state.
Embedding the aesthetics of Objectiles into architecture can lead to the development of a new collective consciousness of the materials that surround us. They can make us aware that all the objects around us have trajectories that extend beyond their present state, and lead to an alternative material culture of greater care in how we use, re-circulate, and dispose of all objects.
Advisor: Xavi L Aguirre
Readers: Ana Miljački, Carrie Norman
By 2050, the United Nations estimates that 68 percent of the world’s population will live in cities, with 90 percent of that growth concentrated in rapid urbanized informal communities in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. In these rapidly urbanising regions, informality, defined as unregulated commerce, adaptive reuse of space, incremental construction, and selforganised infrastructure, animates the everyday choreography Jane Jacobs called the “sidewalk ballet.” Yet because governments rarely collect census-grade data on such activity, it remains poorly documented and weakly understood.
This thesis introduces a transferable computer vision framework that formalises informality by turning crowd-sourced street imagery into an auditable taxonomy of practices. Ho Chi Minh City, where sidewalks are hotly contested among vendors, pedestrians, and regulators, serves as the test bed. A four-stage pipeline drives the analysis: a user-feedback enabled CLIP-based retrieval loop identifies candidate scenes; a lightweight ResNet flags informal activity; a vision-language model crafts detailed captions; and an instruction-tuned LLM distills these into policy-ready labels, such as health safety ratings, walkability flags, and more. By converting messy curbside realities into clear, updateable categories, the framework enables planners to recognise the adaptive value of informal practices, target genuine hazards, and design nuanced interventions such as sanitary upgrades, shared use time bands, and incremental housing support, without defaulting to blanket crackdowns. In doing so, it reframes informality as a measurable, regulatable component of urban development and offers a replicable blueprint for evidence-driven, equitable management of the public realm.
Advisor: Takehiko Nagakura
Readers: Sam Madden, Luis Alonso Pastor
As America’s population ages, suburban neighborhoods face urgent challenges. Originally designed for young, car-dependent families, the suburban landscape today often presents barriers to aging in place, including poor walkability, inaccessible housing, and limited access to essential services and care.
This thesis investigates these challenges and proposes a strategy for reimagining suburban environments through demographic analysis, spatial mapping, persona-driven research, architectural prototyping, and community planning. It traces the historical evolution of suburbia, critically evaluates existing senior housing typologies, and advances new frameworks for retrofitting residential neighborhoods to better support aging populations.
Focusing on Sacramento, California, the research identifies high-priority areas where aging, affordability challenges, and mobility barriers intersect. Grounded by a pilot care home project, the study demonstrates how modest interventions, such as retrofitting single-family homes into small-scale residential care environments, can enhance both livability and care access. The first phase of the pilot project has been constructed, offering a demonstration of the proposed model’s feasibility. A phased development and financial strategy is also outlined to ensure broader applicability.
While rooted in Sacramento, the thesis offers a framework relevant to many suburban contexts across the United States, particularly naturally occurring retirement communities (NORCs) where older adults are aging in place. Rather than creating isolated senior enclaves, the work promotes a distributed, community-integrated model that strengthens neighborhood resilience and supports intergenerational living. By combining design innovation with policy awareness and development feasibility, the thesis presents a scalable and adaptable approach to reshaping suburbs for an aging society.
Advisors: Brent D. Ryan, Rafi Segal
Reader:
Sheng-Hung Lee
Longevity Suburbanism. Image by Author
Cities are dynamic and evolving organisms shaped through the check-and-balance of interest exchange. As cities gain complexity and more stakeholders become involved in decision-making, reaching consensus becomes the core challenge and the essence of the urbanism process. This thesis introduces a computational framework for AIaugmented collective decision-making in urban settings. Based on real-world case studies, the core decision-making process is abstracted as a multiplayer board game modeling the check-and-balance dynamics among stakeholders with differing values. Players are encouraged to balance short-term interests and long-term resilience, and evaluate the risks and benefits of collaboration.
The system is implemented as a physical interactive play-table with digital interfaces, enabling two use cases: simulating potential outcomes via AI self-play, and human–agent co-play via human-in-the-loop interactions.
Technically, the framework integrates multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) for agent strategy training, multi-agent large language model (LLM) discussions to enable natural language negotiation, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to ground decisions in contextual knowledge. Together, these components form a full-stack pipeline for simulating collective decision-making enriched by human participation. This research offers a novel participatory tool for planners, policymakers, architects, and the public to examine how differing values shape development trajectories. It also demonstrates an integrated approach to collective intelligence, combining numerical optimization, language-based reasoning, and human participation, to explore how AI–AI and AI–human collaboration can emerge within complex multi-stakeholder environments.
Co-advisor:
Marcelo Coelho
Co-advisor: Manish Raghavan
Contemporary architects find themselves at a juncture, navigating the transition from traditional modes of instruction to the asymmetrical integration of digital technologies. Drawings remain central to architectural practice, yet a widening gap persists between tools for making drawings and tools for interpreting them. Since Alberti’s division between intellectual and productive labor, architectural instructions have been generated in remote offices and executed by interpreters on distant construction sites. Digital tools have expanded the information density of drawings, yet the process of interpretation on construction sites remains predominantly analog. Graphical conventions, though precise, are abstract, and so paper instructions alone lack spatial meaning. Builders ultimately rely on analog locating techniques to translate these abstractions into actions. Tools as simple as strings and squares have long been present on construction sites, enabling this translation. The limitations of analog locating became clear when the plumb bob, long trusted to define vertical, proved inadequate for navigating trajectories of flying objects. The solution was to embed physical devices with memory, marking a transition from tools which measure where they are to those that know where they are going. This shift from stateless to stateful devices gradually entered the construction industry, and though we might distrust the devices that make possible the steering of missiles, this paradigm shift offers a productive challenge to the field of architecture. If simplifying complex construction is worthwhile, then communication pathways which more faithfully transfer information from digital model to physical site must be explored. Central to this transformation are the tools which anchor instructions on site: interfaces which already mediate between architect and builder: and must now evolve to interpret digital signals from afar. Digital jigs will be the conduits of paperless instruction on physical sites, enabling what this thesis terms sensable instructions: instructions that can both be perceived by machines and humans on construction sites.
Advisor: Skylar Tibbits
Reader: Caitlin Mueller
Locating a brick with haptic clash detection. Image by Author
Generative AI models, for instance text-to-image tools, have recently introduced in the interior architectural design process. They translates conceptual ideas or simple design prompt into sophisticated visual representations but fails to account for deeper semantics of design intent and material relevance. This work explores a novel pipeline that integrates Generative AI with a real-world materials dataset to enrich AI-generated designs with actionable data such as sustainability metrics, cost and material usage insights, shifting AI’s role from visualization to decision-making.
A key contribution of the work is post-processing module that identifies top materials in the generated image and pairs them with carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e) values and other relevant metrics from a real-world materials database. This enables designers to immediately evaluate environmental impact, design intent and refine prompts/inputs accordingly.
The system was evaluated through three user tests with the goal of using sustainable materials: (1) no sustainability reference, (2) sustainability goals without metrics, and (3) sustainability goals informed by quantitative CO₂e data. Qualitative and quantitative results reveal that while metrics support more informed decisions, they can also lead to decision fatigue and reduced satisfaction. Majority of participants in the third test incorporated sustainability principles into their workflows, highlighting the value of integrated metrics.
The findings emphasize the importance of balancing design freedom with practical constraints, offering a path toward holistic, data-driven solutions in AI-assisted architectural design. This adaptable approach invites domain-specific AI applications and raises questions for Responsible AI by grounding generative outputs in real-world data and AI-interaction.
Advisors: Terry W. Knight, Takehiko Nagakura
Reader: Ashia Wilson
by Author
We don’t generally design things with reversibility in mind. The majority of manufactured products end up in landfill and it could be argued that the core of the problem is material complexity: modern consumer products contain a mix of many materials that are hard to separate.
By looking at friction, folding and interlocking of simple, planar materials, this thesis explores how we can create physical objects, structures and devices that are made to be inherently transformable and reconfigurable. Taking inspiration from zippers, origami and deployable space structures, a series of robotic experiments are developed to show that transformation, reversibility and material simplicity can become mutual goals in the things we make.
Co-advisor: Skylar Tibbits
Co-advisor: Daniela Rus
Zipper-based modules. Image by Author
Early Afghan War Rugs delineate place through their pictorial design, embedding spatial memory into the tactile surface of the woven field. Emerging in the wake of the Soviet invasion in the late 1970s, these rugs integrate modern war iconography of tanks, helicopters and maps into a medium historically tied to regional identity, spiritual practice, and craft. While earlier scholarship has often read these rugs as commodities of war tourism, this thesis moves beyond this interpretation to foreground the rug as a placemaking device, one that asserts territory and agency through mapping techniques.
Afghan war rugs frame and define space on a land that has largely been considered placeless, at times porous and seemingly unknown. Through their borders, these rugs resist the geopolitical narratives that have long reduced Afghanistan to a war-torn frontier. The border serves as a framing device, structuring the rug’s design while simultaneously asserting territorial presence. Whether following a prescribed cartoon or improvising patterns, the weaver actively engages in “border-ing,” exercising cartographic agency by embedding personal, traditional, and political motifs into the rug.
This research interrogates how early Afghan War Rugs engage in spatial representation against the backdrop of the Soviet-Afghan war from 1979-89. From historical colonial mapping projects to Soviet and American cartographic investigations, Afghanistan’s borders have long been sites of surveillance, resource extraction, and imperial ambition. Yet, in contrast to these external mapping practices, the war rug’s design is a resistant act of placemaking. Examining the rug as both artifact and map, this study explores how Afghan weavers reclaim their landscapes through rug making, embedding memory and materiality into woven form.
Advisor: Huma Gupta
Reader: Azra Akšamija
Afghan war rug with a map of Afghanistan in the center surrounded by a mountain pass. Rug, 1979-1989, wool rug, 138cm x 96.50cm
The British Museum.
Throughout Indonesia’s colonial and postcolonial histories, the peatlands of Kalimantan have been not only politically contested spaces but also sites of ontological struggle. From transmigrasi programs to Suharto’s Mega-Rice Project and today’s carbon offset regimes, peat has been transformed into a paradoxical ecology: degraded yet investible, conserved yet profitable. These transformations enclose land, criminalize fire, abandon regenerative forms of cultivation, and force communities to choose between extraction or restoration. These are histories of ontological occupation institutionalized: the marginalization of both peat’s inhabitants and the soil itself as world-making agents, shaped by speculative regimes of governance, rooted in planetary imaginaries of climate salvation and fantasies of productivity.
This thesis proposes Koalisi Lahan–Gambut (Peat–Land Coalition), a speculative para-institution that explores how coalitional spatial practices might reclaim inhabitation in peat ecologies. Situated in a Ngaju village within the buffer zone of one of the world’s largest carbon offset territories— between deep peat and riverine edges, between restoration enclosures and plantation areas—the coalition works through the murkiness of peat, the heterogeneity of its inhabitants, and the crowded terrain of overlapping institutional claims. It foregrounds the friction between gambut (peat) and lahan (land).
Structured as three fictional institutional documents, the thesis performs a counter-institutional inquiry: a Living Glossary that assembles field terms and relational epistemologies; a Genealogy that traces how peatlands were rendered “empty,” “unproductive,” and ultimately “land”; and a Speculative Field Report imagining the coalition’s future activities: markers and seed boats; tools for reclamation, cultivation, and attunement.
Advisor: Rania Ghosn
Readers: Gediminas Urbonas, Rosalea Monacella
Coalition documents. Image by Author
Seoul, South Korea, exhibits an exceptionally rapid residential demolition-reconstruction cycle of approximately 35 years, resulting in one of the world’s shortest apartment building lifespans. This entrenched status quo, fueled by post-war policies, real estate speculation, and finance models treating housing primarily as a short-term asset, contrasts sharply with other developed nations. This research critiques South Korea’s model of rapid demolition for its significant, often overlooked, environmental impacts and social costs.
To evaluate alternatives, the methodology comprises three key stages: A) a comparative analysis of the financial frameworks and sustainability outcomes characterizing Western residential longevity versus the unique Korean housing model; B) the formulation of a novel alternative practice focused on adaptive reuse and retrofitting, specifically tailored to integrate within South Korea’s economic system and cultural context; and C) the practical demonstration and assessment of this practice through a design case study, incorporating strategies like phased interventions and low-carbon materials such as mass timber.
The analysis reveals that this alternative extends building lifespan and achieves substantial carbon reductions by preserving the embodied carbon within existing structures. It offers long-term financial attractiveness, presenting a viable economic pathway aligning key stakeholder interests through enduring value over speculative gains. Ultimately, this research advocates a paradigm shift in Korean urban development away from the current resource-intensive cycle, promoting a sustainable and resilient model where both adaptive reuse efforts and necessary new construction (for additions or replacement) prioritize low-carbon materials such as timber.
Advisor: Christoph Reinhart
Reader: Caitlin Mueller
Interior of a mass-timber extension to an existing housing block (top), courtyards and underground parking replacing asphalt hardscape (middle) and neighborhood view of top-extended, front-extended, and new build low-carbon units (bottom).
Images by Author
Every year, there are over 70,000 fatalities around Seoul, with only two operating crematoria in the city, that is over 100 bodies a day each institution needs to process efficiently. Threading the remnants of mourning, Burning S(e)oul, in forms of a short film, is a dialogue between “absences” of bodies and architecture. It is presented as a triptych along three parallel timelines divided into five tableaux. Narrating the aftermaths of death, it reflects the bereaved, the deceased, and the workers’ perspective along three mandatory days of grieving.
Absence in this paradigm is not solely physical or emotional but rather phenomenological—what appears a quotidian existence of oneself is stripped off its corpse, reaffirming that the inherent genius loci of the crematorium instead reflect a broader influence that institutions have experienced since post-war Korea. It argues that the systematized practice of death processing is an apparatus used to sever the genealogy of individual bodies from their role in affirming personal and communal kinships. Embedded within its architectural design, this alienation dismantles time by shifting the condition of death processes as an engineered state, rather than historical or material one. This detachment is emblematic of the country’s post-war trajectory, where rapid modernization prioritized efficiency over continuity, severing long-standing rituals that once bond personal grief to communal memory. The friction between an engineered present and an inherited past manifest as a form of cultural desynchronization—one where the ostensibly modern remains haunted by the traditional. Beyond technical or practical concerns; it represents a deliberate method of assimilating a nonlinear modernization—one that in its pursuit of progress, distances itself from historical trauma. Yet this tension does not merely mark a transition; it accumulates as a generational melancholy, where the urgency of progress leaves grief suspended in an unresolved state, neither fully severed nor meaningfully preserved.
Advisors: Carrie Norman, Brent D. Ryan
Reader: Xavi L. Aguirre
A Body for Cremation. Image by Author
The thesis presents an automated system that transforms speech into physical objects by combining 3D generative AI and discrete robotic assembly. The system leverages natural language input to make design and manufacturing more accessible, enabling individuals without expertise in 3D modeling or robotic programming to create physical objects.
Advances in 3D generative AI have enabled the creation of geometries from text or image inputs. However, translating them into physical objects remains an open challenge due to fabrication constraints, production time, and material waste. While other studies has focused on using generative AI for 3D printing, challenges remain in making larger, functional objects involving multiple components.
Therefore, we contribute a novel system that integrates 3D generative AI with discrete robotic assembly to address fabrication constraints while enabling on-demand and sustainable production. The system integrates speech processing, 3D generative AI, component discretization, geometric processing, and robotic tool path generation. The results are demonstrated through the assembly of various objects, ranging from chairs to shelves, which are prompted via speech and realized within 5 minutes using a robotic arm.
This initial workflow is further developed to: 1) enable the assembly of multi-component objects by integrating VisionLanguage Models (VLMs), 2) support multi-modal user inputs by linking speech and gesture descriptions, and 3) enable the assembly of functional objects using reversible structural connections and assembly geometry.
Advisors: Larry
Sass, Randall Davis Reader: Caitlin Mueller
of the Speech to Reality system. Image by Author
The construction industry and building operations are one of the largest contributors to global carbon emissions and account for a large amount of total energy consumption. While novel construction materials, building techniques, and the implementation of “smart” devices offer improved local efficiency measurements, they miss an important sector that makes our buildings function. The digital footprint of our building operations captured by IoT (Internet of Things) devices embedded in our walls, doors, windows, and floors, is stored, analyzed, and managed off-site, in large data centers. Used for the training of AI models, surveillance, and the development of new advertisement and product packages, our “smart” environments demand increasingly more data centers and network infrastructure that come with their own needs for energy and resources, and are thus far, outside of any sustainability calculations and design considerations in the building industry.
As “smart” devices become an integral part of building operations, their environmental impact from mining operations, over data collection, to waste management need to be considered for a sustainable and efficient future. Through my thesis Sensing Buildings, I unpack the digital footprint of our sensing devices in a controlled environment and offers a deeper look into the environmental impact of our building’s data. Taking into account the complexity of the information industry, I build upon existing research around the environmental demands of network infrastructure and the material reality of data and add my analysis and experimentation to the current expectations and practices for sustainable building. Sensing Buildings is a framework for a more comprehensive understanding of buildings through which we evaluate and investigate their contribution to the climate crisis, including the necessary infrastructure that collects information and runs optimizations.
Advisor: Terry W. Knight
Reader: Ellan Spero
From Data to Materiality, Image by Author.
This thesis is a history of diary-writing in China from 1918 through 1961. Diaries are an increasingly popular but still inadequately understood primary source for historians of modern China. Previous scholars have suggested that, in the twentieth century, diary-writing became increasingly popular due to Japanese and Soviet influences, the increasing availability of manufactured blank diaries, and ruling governments that used diary-writing as a way of enforcing ideological conformity. This thesis traces an alternative history, starting from the popularization of published diaries in Shanghai in the long 1920s; to diaries’ emergence as a recognizable genre that could be discoursed and theorized; to the moment the genre gained its reputation as a kind of self-expression par excellence; to its widespread inclusion into school curricula; to loosely connected attempts on the part of educators to delimit a normative way of diary-writing that, ironically, increasingly regimented self-expression. In doing so, this thesis contributes to the existing historiography by offering three correctives: I argue that 1) the initial proliferation of diaries was economically—not ideologically—motivated, 2) the popularization of diary-writing was not a concerted effort orchestrated by China’s political leaders but at best a loosely connected effort led by a middling class of educators, textbook writers, and intellectuals, and 3) diary-writing was not only regimented by communist ideology in the Maoist era but shifting moral principles and anxieties thorughout the twentieth century. All in all, this thesis demonstrates the value of diaries for studying moral knowledege, epistemologies, and anxieties at the grassroots in midcentury China.
Advisor: Arindam Dutta
Reader: Arunabh Ghosh
Cover of How to Write a Diary (1949) by Lü Zhicheng.
Scanned by National Library of China
In post-Benjamin Franklin societies, lightning is neutralized: it is epistemically disenchanted as an electrical current and technologically channeled in the ground by the lightning rod. This “space prosthetic” generates a “cone of protection” that mediatizes a sublime distance with the sky and perpetuates a dialectical tension with Earth Energies. Whatever is inside is “protected” from lightning’s uncertainty. It is also abstracted: the cone transforms materials - buildings, humans, plants, and whatever is within it - into physical abstractions that are described solely in terms of their height and conductivity. The rods, however, fail. The space of energetic insulation they perform is an imaginary of risk control. I take this accidental failure as an opportunity to reclaim lightning’s worldmaking agency. Besides a “destructive” rupture, lightning is also a reviving repetition that sparks worlds. From the molecular to the cosmic space and from the fleeting to the cosmogonic time, I collect stories of energy contingency, decommodification, and individuation: burials, hymns, chemical fixations, magnetic rocks, trees, altars, vitrified soils, stars, buildings, and bodies, which, after being struck by lightning literally and metonymically, obtained political, mythical, and magical efficacies. To “venerate” these energy and material entanglements, I craft the meteoro-alchemical vessel of lightning. Inspired by Paracelsus’ alchemical meteorology and Aby Warburg’s concept of leitfossil, the vessel is an archaeological field of counter-cones, each re-enacting in the present a material transformation of lightning. The cones are full of risk, potency, and vibrancy. The rod’s constructed “void” of energy control is transmuted into a space that embraces uncertainty: a metonymical space full of contingency; possible pasts and futures; memories and omens that shout and whisper myths and hymns of energy. The cones are not objects but virtual diagrams of the rod’s failures. Fabulated, retroactive memories of lightning. Through this meteoro-alchemical fabulation, the thesis imagines how design can be performed with Earth Energies, embracing their uncertainty, flux materiality, and differential becoming.
Advisor: Rania Ghosn
Readers:
Cristina Parreño Alonso, Caroline A. Jones
The meteoro-alchemical vessel of lightning. Image by Author
Banjiha are everywhere in Seoul. You don’t always see them— tucked below eye level, half-hidden underground—but they’re there. First built as military bunkers after the Korean War, later turned into last-resort housing, banjiha have become symbols of urban failure—spaces of neglect, flooding disasters, a problem to be erased. Both media portrayals and policy responses have advocated for their disappearance. But does removal truly protect the people who call these spaces home?
This thesis moves beyond the idea that banjiha are simply failures of the city. Through three homes —three lives, it traces how these spaces are shaped, not just by policies and architecture but by the people who inhabit them. A home vulnerable to flooding, where protections exist—but not with the greatest risk. A place worn by time, held together by quiet repairs. A financial foothold in a city where affordable housing is disappearing. A space of temporary sacrifice. A shelter to return to, again and again.
This is not just a story of risk or resilience, neglect or demolition. It is a story of how people live; how they adapt, negotiate, and make do in spaces that were never designed with them in mind. Rather than asking how to erase banjiha, this thesis asks: What can we learn by noticing them? What would it mean to shift the conversation—from removal to recognition, from assumption to understanding?
To see these homes is to recognize not just their constraints, but the small interventions that could reshape them: a door that opens both ways so no one is trapped, policies that hold upstairs owners accountable for leaks, materials layered to prevent mold rather than mask it. Not grand reinventions, but deliberate shifts—openings for a different way forward.
But before deciding what must change, we must first learn to see.
Advisor: Rania Ghosn
Readers:
Gabriella Carolini, Jaffer Kolb
of Banjiha. Image by Author
Eleni Aktypi, Taariq Alasa, Kathaleen Brearley, Darren Bennett, Kateri Bertin, Joél Carela, Nandini Chowdhury, Christopher Dewart, Jacqueline Dufault, Mike Enos, Michael Gallino, Eduardo Gonzalez, James Harrington, Tessa Haynes, John Hoder, Douglas Le Vie, Inala Locke, Tonya Miller, Nicholas de Monchaux, Claudine Monique, Paul Pettigrew, Alan Reyes, Diana Rooney, Georgia Voyiatzis
Xavi L. Aguirre, Azra Akšamija, Cristina Parreño Alonso, Roi
Salgueiro Barrio, Gabriella Carolini, Marcelo Coelho, Randall Davis, Arindam Dutta, William T. Freeman, Arunabh Ghosh, Rania Ghosn, Huma Gupta, Mark Jarzombek, Caroline A. Jones
Sheng-Hung Lee, Terry W. Knight, Jaffer Kolb, Sam Madden, Paul Mayencourt, Miho Mazereeuw, Ana Miljački, Rosalea Monacella, Nicholas de Monchaux, Caitlin Mueller, Caroline Murphy, Takehiko Nagakura, Laura Narvaez, Carrie Norman, Luis Alonso Pastor, Manish Raghavan, Christoph Reinhart, Daniela Rus, Brent D. Ryan, Larry Sass, Rafi Segal, Ellan Spero, Skylar Tibbits, Gediminas Urbonas, Ashia Wilson
Rodrigo Cesarman, Brittany Ellis, Iman Fayyad, Kiley Feickert, Maggie Freeman, James Graham, Sheila Kennedy, Michael Kubo, Rosalea Monacella, Nof Nathanson, Holly Samuelson, Rosalyne Shieh, Maia Simon, Ben Taube, Daniel Tish, Theodora Vardouli, Lizzie Yarina
SMArchS DIRECTOR
Ana Miljački
BOOKLET DESIGN BY
Tejumola Bayowa, Suwan Kim, Samantha Ratanarat
2025 MASSACHUSETTS INSTUTE OF TECHNOLOGY. ALL MATERIALS ARE COPYRIGHT OF THEIR RESPECTIVE AUTHORS AND CREATORS UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED.
FINAL REVIEW HELD ON MAY 15, 2025
