Princeton University School of Architecture
Workbook 2023
The design and research included within this book reflect our pedagogical values: we believe in the importance of providing an interdisciplinary architectural education that balances design, technology, history and theory. The School intertwines these disciplines seamlessly, allowing faculty and students to fluidly work across them. We generate work which embodies ideas that have legs and thus can travel, so this workbook was designed to be taken apart and disseminated. Postcards, posters, and booklets are all up for the taking. We invite you to tear out your favorites and pin them to the walls in your workplaces, send them to friends, or take them along for a good read. This workbook reflects our emphasis on design grounded in interdisciplinary collaboration. The small size of the School encourages close interaction and collaboration between students and faculty. Leaders in the field comprise our core faculty. All our design professors maintain thriving architectural practices while our history/theory faculty intensely disseminate their scholarship through publications and exhibitions, and our technology faculty are at the cutting edge of research. As a result, our undergraduates receive a well-rounded liberal arts education and a strong basis for additional studies in architecture while our graduate students gain a comprehensive understanding of the field, preparing them for a career in practice and/or academia. —Mónica Ponce de León, Dean
Workbook 2023 2 Graduate Studios 3 11 19 29 33 43 49 55 65 75
ARC 501—Erin Besler, V. Mitch McEwen, and Mónica Ponce de León ARC 502—Cameron Wu and Darell W. Fields ARC 503—Paul Lewis and Guy Nordenson ARC 504—Michael Meredith ARC 504—Mira Henry and Matthew Au ARC 505a—Jesse Reiser ARC 505b—Anna Neimark and Michael Osman ARC 505c—Darell W. Fields ARC 506a—Jing Liu ARC 506b—Juergen Mayer H.
85 Professional Program Thesis Projects 127 Post-Professional Program Thesis Projects 141 Undergraduate Studios 143 153 161 169 173
ARC 204—Paul Lewis and Anda French ARC 205—Mario Gandelsonas and Ana Ozaki ARC 350—Marshall Brown ARC 351—Erin Besler ARC 404—Tessa Kelly
181 Undergraduate Thesis Projects 197 Ph.D. Program 203 Ph.D. Proseminars 209 Ph.D. Dissertation Abstracts
Graduate Studios
Master’s Program
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ARC 501 Architecture Design Studio Assistant Professors Erin Besler and V. Mitch McEwen, and Professor Mónica Ponce de León with Assistant Instructors Bernardo Guerra and Patty Hazle
Looking, Discussing, Building Together.
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This first-year studio is based upon looking, discussing, and making architecture together. Our focus is on the making of buildings. It will be an open, collaborative, and discursive process. We will share our experiences together. The studio will focus on three projects, which will move up in size and scale: from a room to a house to a small urban building. We will also move up with the scale of collaboration from working alone to working with other students to engaging an idea of (or literally) a community. Our pedagogical goals are to design while thinking about buildings from/ through multiple viewpoints, values and perspectives, as well as to be able to articulate design thinking. The underlying assumption here is that how we see buildings affects how we make them, and vice versa. The accumulation of different discussions will help form architectural values (thoughts on buildings) and will become part of our shared discourse together.
Master’s Program
4
Masa Crilley ARC 501 Looking, Discussing, Building Together.
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Shaun Lien ARC 501 Looking, Discussing, Building Together.
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Ana Brenda Rico Rubio ARC 501 Looking, Discussing, Building Together.
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ARC 502 Architecture Design Studio Assistant Professor Cameron Wu and Visiting Lecturer Darell W. Fields with Assistant Instructors Tamara Birghoffer, Xinyu Chen, and Jasen Domanico
Access and the Urban Collective
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This studio examines the relationship between Architecture and the city through a series of exercises and culminates in a single building project. As a preamble to the studio, we look at specific historical case studies where the architect’s project has embodied various speculations about the cityat-large. Rather than merely respond to given context, each student proposal will imagine, articulate, and project new ideas into the city. Our building program is a K-12 public school in a low-density neighborhood within the city of Trenton, New Jersey. Often considered a microcosm of the city, schools are an assemblage of heterogeneous room types whose size and scale is carefully choreographed. With a student body of approximately 1900 students, the school will be of enough magnitude to project new ideas for the city at large. During the design process, students simultaneously address the design of the spatial unit (room) and the fabric which it is part of (campus); exploration and rehearsal of specific compositional techniques are aimed at developing formal dexterity, and a thorough understanding of organizational logics. Exercises dealing with module aggregation, systems of growth, and part-to-whole relationships will be driven by the dialectics of figure/field, private/public, interior/ exterior, among others. Exercises increase in degrees of abstraction throughout the semester, culminating in a final composition that is highly specific in its programmatic desires and spatial complexity.
Master’s Program
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Shaun Lien ARC 502 Access and the Urban Collective
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Masa Crilley ARC 502 Access and the Urban Collective
North Elevation 1/16" = 1'-0"
Section E 1/16" = 1'-0"
Section C 1/16" = 1'-0"
Section A 1/16" = 1'-0"
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Section D 1/16" = 1'-0"
Section B 1/16" = 1'-0"
Madeline Smith ARC 502 Access and the Urban Collective
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1/32”=1’0”
ARC 503 Integrated Building Studio Professors Paul Lewis and Guy Nordenson with Assistant Instructor Ana Morris
Showroom / Warehouse for Circular Building Materials: Loam + Timber
Recognizing that linear construction sequences (take-make-trash) are both a key contributor to global carbon emissions, and deplete limited resources, this integrated building studio explores the implications of circular building materials from a series of overlapped trajectories. The program of the project is a prototype for a circular building material warehouse, showroom, and testing facility. Exploration of existing warehouse models— both locally (Habitat for Humanity’s ReStores, Construction
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Junction, etc.) and abroad (specifically Rotor DC’s facilities in Belgium)—and their many years of experience with the potential and limits of selective demolition, salvage and resale will benefit the studio. A further understanding in the ways circular economies foreground certain types of materials and objects over others, also reveals unintended consequences of conventional joints (the problem with adhesives) and typical construction. Instrumental to the studio is the idea that a building is a material bank, the role of design for disassembly, and the importance of using biogenic and earthen materials to minimize or sequester carbon, decrease toxicity and advance generative cycles through building. Two different material assemblies are the focus of the design projects: 3D printing of loam-based material and wood stick framing. More specifically, the studio develops a dialogue between what is 3D printed from the ground up and the longer span wood roof structures. Although CLT has become a new default in design studios—in part due to its easy alignment with rhino modeling and the relative simplicity of its joints—we will instead focus on the specific design of stick-framing, the consequence of joints and the space between members. This will range from open web trusses, lamellas, grid-shells, reciprocal structures, and more densely packed dowel-laminated timber. Our studio site is in Gloucester City, New Jersey, adjacent to other building material warehouses and fabrication facilities that support construction in the Philadelphia metropolitan region. Although it contains a concrete slab from demolished buildings, the site is selected for its more generic qualities—a post-industrial prototype applicable to other sites and cities. Master’s Program
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E-W SITE SECTION 1:4
N-S SITE SECTION 1:4
Jocelyn Beausire and Michelle Deng ARC 503 Showroom / Warehouse for Circular Building Materials
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Julia Chou and Ryan Shin ARC 503 Showroom / Warehouse for Circular Building Materials
MEDIUM MATERIAL LOADING DOCK
CUSTOMER PARKING LOT
LARGE MATERIAL LOADING DOCK
SMALL / MEDIUM MATERIAL LOADING DOCK
36” X 24” BOX (SMALL)
NUTS, BOLTS, NAILS, SCREWS, DOORKNOBS
SMALL FURNITURE (MEDIUM) CHAIRS, SIDETABLES, LAMPS, STOOLS
40” X 48” WOODEN CRATES (MEDIUM)
TILES, VENEER, PANELING, SHEATHING
72” X 30” LARGE FURNITURE (MEDIUM)
COUCHES, MATTRESSES, CABINETS, DINING TABLES
20’ + MATERIAL (LARGE)
DIMESIONAL LUMBER, PIPES, STRUCTURAL STEEL
MATERIAL MOVEMENT SCALE: 1” = 1/8”
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Sofia Dominguez Rojo and Chloe Froning ARC 503 Showroom / Warehouse for Circular Building Materials
26
Adrian Silva, Motuma Tulu, and Gabriella Villalobos ARC 503 Showroom / Warehouse for Circular Building Materials
28 1/4” = 1’ - 0”
ARC 504 Integrated Building Studio Professor Michael Meredith with Assistant Instructor Hermine Demael
A Rural Arts Commune. Something Personal. Something Shared.
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The rural is a place continually reimagined through reactionary desires and new beginnings. At times, it has been understood as a place of individualism, alone in nature, outside of society, the triumph of the personal, individual, and the act of reflecting on the nature of things. This tradition has been woven throughout an American narrative and mythology, by figures like Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Emerson, Walt Whitman, and continues into the present through the likes of Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, Annie Dillard, and many others. And in Art and Architecture this tradition can be seen through F.L. Wright in Taliesin, the Farm program at Black Mountain College, Donald Judd in Marfa, Charles Moore and company in Sonoma County (Sea Ranch,) Paolo Soleri at Arcosanti, Andrea Zittel in Joshua Tree, Samuel Mockbee in Mason’s Bend, and perhaps Steven Holl in Upstate NY. Yet, simultaneously, the rural has also been understood through the shared and communal. It has served as an experimentation ground for utopian fantasies, communes, religious and social experiments (many of which still exist, and many that do not.) Not to mention more mainstream historical formations such as the early century, farmers movements, and back-to-the-land movements (both libertarian and populist, originally belonging to the leftist politics) or more commonplace rituals like barn-raising. Recently, it is these collective aspects of American rural life which have intrigued architects from O.M Ungers to Aldo Rossi to Rem Koolhaas, among many others. The studio project is a small rural housing campus for artists with 8–12 units, along with a communal space and workshop/ studio. The artist commune will be associated with a rural arts organization Hubbard Hall located in Cambridge, New York. Master’s Program
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Reese Greenlee, Katie Solien, Will Fu, and Patty Hazle Olivia Ahmadi ARC 504 A Rural Arts Commune. Something Personal. Something Shared.
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ARC 504 Graduate Vertical Studio Visiting Lecturers Mira Henry and Matthew Au with Assistant Instructor Lucianan Rahde
Gathering
2023
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Workbook
The Brazilian experimental theater troop Teatro Oficina began occupying the building at Rua Jaceguai in 1961. According to the founding director José Celso Martinez Corrêa, the first design took eight months to build and included two seating areas with a stage in the middle. The group performed their radical manifest shows out of the space until it burned down in 1966, at which point it was redesigned with a revolving stage. A second fire brought that incarnation to an end as well and by 1980, Lina Bo Bardi implemented her design for the narrow building to be filled to the brim with structure, equipment, furniture, sets, colored lighting, fresh air, plants, and bodies—pulling the performance and party of the street through the building. The theater’s flat façade—with an anvil mounted over the entry for good luck—hid the pulsing drama of the deep interior, complete with a Macaw-blue scaffold, demonstrating the theater as a space of gathering that collects material assemblies, people, and cultural debate. This studio focuses on the design of a small theater for an infill lot in Los Angeles on Pico Boulevard—a road notably described as the most diverse cross-section of any city in America, where nearly every immigrant population in LA has settled along its 12-mile stretch. The theater presents questions of how to build an infrastructure for performance, one that can hold a discrete interior and simultaneously connect to the diverse life of the street. Students work intensely between physical model making and building details as a point of ideation for the design, and through studio travel, examining churches, ritual spaces, and the life of the street to inform our conversations around gathering, ecstasy, and excess.
Master’s Program
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Adie Mitchell and Bruce (Hongming) Liang ARC 504 Gathering
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William Dolin and Nigel Van Ha ARC 504 Gathering
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Danny Landez and Sophia Diodati ARC 504 Gathering
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elevation @ w pico blvd
Genyuan Hu and Elizabeth Nogueira Anjos Carrilho Siquei ARC 504 Gathering
wall section @ 1’=1 1/2”
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ARC 505a Graduate Vertical Studio Professor Jesse Reiser with Assistant Instructor Tengku Sharil Bin Tengku
Inujima EcoCultural Island
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This studio asks students to consider the art-island model and speculate on its potential evolution through the holistic reimagining of Inujima. This entails the design not only of permanent buildings, temporary structures, and the pathways between, but more pertinently the radical reconsideration and site design of the island itself. Of particular interest to the studio is the relationship of energy systems, manifested as infrastructural networks, and the ecologies that they interrupt, support and alter. Taking cues from the industrial history of the island, students begin with an in-depth exploration of the material and energetic potentials of the site (above/below ground and out to sea), and the ways in which they can be radically mobilized anew. The studio insists upon the importation of a massive energetic driver (geothermal, solar, nuclear etc.) that induces physical changes into the material substrate of the island, stimulating new environments and microclimatic conditions. The resulting system acts as a catalyst for the production of new art objects on the island and the life-world they induce. The hope would be that in radically reconfiguring the energetic and material flows of Inujima, the project inevitably generates new modes of sociability centered around work both with and in an augmented landscape, breaking down the nature-culture binary.
Master’s Program
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Ewa Paulina Roztocka ARC 505a Inujima EcoCultural Island
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Angel Arellano ARC 505a Inujima EcoCultural Island
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ARC 505b Graduate Vertical Studio Visiting Lecturers Anna Neimark and Michael Osman with Assistant Instructors Michelle Deng and Maxwell Smith-Holmes
Abstractions of War, Wars of Abstraction
49
The primary architecture of war is the fort. And, not arbitrarily, it is both a building and a strategy, a shared utility and a symbol of power. It is a two-hundred-year-old fact and a contemporary concern in need of our rethinking. The fort serves the studio as a literal expression of war, settlement, displacement, and as the urban expression of consensus, even stasis. Students acknowledge the political ramifications of war and the territorial aggression toward indigenous populations and enslaved people in which fortified structures played a central role. For these reasons, we propose to address the forts of the American continent as objects for our collective contemplation. We study these forts as formal figures, as infrastructural landscapes, as material archives, as urban prototypes, and as metaphors for holding a position in the field of architecture. To bring attention to geometric precision, to landscape infrastructure, to collective living, to political violence, we work deliberately through research into representation, retrofit, and design. In the first half of the semester, students analyze fortifications in the American landscape from archaeological surveys and engineering drawings. They construct arguments, drawings, and models that will serve as formworks for the development of the projects. In the second half, the studio develops ways for these structures to be retrofitted into new pedagogical tools and programs. The site of the studio is specific to each student’s case study, which includes a fort and its archive.
Master’s Program
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Kaleb Houston ARC 505b Abstractions of War, Wars of Abstraction
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ARC 505c Graduate Vertical Studio Visiting Lecturer Darell W. Fields with Assistant Instructor Pete Pham
Black Architecture 101: A House for…
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Black Formalism requires the consideration of architecture, first and foremost, as a sign system. Architecture may operate within its structural methodology but only as an architectural sign—a type. Pedagogically speaking, this interest in signs, types, and types of signs displaces conventional formal and programmatic routines. This is not, however, an attempt to escape architectural conventions. The first formal act of Blackness, methodologically speaking, is the embrace of ideological formations and typological entrenchments. No matter the uniformity and coherence of their appearance, types, like words, are inherently unstable and somewhat unpredictable. It is unnecessary to reject architecture in order to change it. A house type is, by definition, a concrete abstraction of social customs and cultural liturgies. Having achieved type status, its form signifies something very particular. Yet, because a house is a type, it cannot be understood as singular. When contemplating a house type, one understands it as an instance of another “house” thing. Architectural types, with little difference from Black linguistic play, are always indirect and signifying. Combining a house type with “a house for...” allows the type’s indirect potential to be captured and put to some other use. This process results in a psycho-architectonic projection allowing architecture to frame so-called otherness (and vice versa). Building on exercises reflecting course readings, each student constructs a sign system. The house type operates within the system. The system includes other signs relating personae, site, contextualisms, formalisms, etc. Properly constructed systems produce signs/types having little or nothing to do with a house. The “house for...” designation is entirely provisional. The house may survive its system’s methodological variation; or it succumbs to absence and reappears as an altogether different type. In other words, “house is ... an’ house ain’t ...” Master’s Program
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Jasen Domanico ARC 505c Black Architecture 101: A House for…
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Pete Pham ARC 505c Black Architecture 101: A House for…
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Elizabeth Nogueira Anjos Carrilho Siquei ARC 505c Black Architecture 101: A House for…
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Tamara Birghoffer ARC 505c Black Architecture 101: A House for…
Section 6
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ARC 506a Graduate Vertical Studio Visiting Lecturer Jing Liu with Assistant Instructor Nitzen Farfel
The Coming Community
There is such a thing as Baby-Boomer Architecture: the accelerated expansion of modern institutions of all sorts— corporations, research facilities, shopping malls, and transit centers—proliferated multi-building complexes on the fringes of American and European cities in the postwar decades. Many of these projects were sites for work (when work still provided meaning to life) or commerce (when access to goods seemed to promise progress), or where one rubbed shoulders with fellow human species and threaded the cozy social fabric. In this studio, we reexamine
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their value as spatialized and materialized social organisms and resuscitate their liveliness through radical preservation or vital transformation. As societies become increasingly atomized, capitals become increasingly consolidated, and unbridled material perturbation for the production of new things become increasingly unsustainable, a more empathic and critical attitude toward our recent past might bring worthy profit. We attempt to imagine a Coming Community that is “just a little different.” The case study for our studio situates itself somewhere in the middle of the spectrum—a 1970s office park built in a suburban setting similar to Princeton, New Jersey. The studio explores its continued use as a workplace and extends the utility of the already embodied carbon and embedded value without requiring an excessive amount of new capital. At the start of the studio, students interpreting the current condition of the campus through a model, and transform the campus following three distinct objectives in each subsequent design iteration: 1. maximize the density of working bodies with passive design strategies 2. make a work environment that resembles anything but a workspace 3. create a carbon-negative and ecologically positive environment Students deploy no further material resources beyond the production of the original model. The latter three models can only be made from materials already used in the studio. Thus, creativity, collaboration, and diplomacy are essential skills to sharpen, as bartering with peers is a necessary vocation in this studio. Students then sample, edit, collage, remix, and narrate four episodes into a final proposal in film format for the “Coming Community.” Master’s Program
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Julia Chou ARC 506a The Coming Community
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Hermine Demael ARC 506a The Coming Community
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Katie Solien ARC 506a The Coming Community
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Motuma Tulu ARC 506a The Coming Community
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ARC 506b Graduate Vertical Studio Visiting Lecturer Juergen Mayer H. with Assistant Instructor Ali Berkas
Habit, Habitat, Habitation
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Extinction of animal life is on the horizon, again. It’s not the first time this has happened, but this time it is likely induced by humans. Global warming and climate change, industrialized agriculture and CO2-emissions, weather extremes and changing migration patterns fuel our discussions on how to find options for change via new modes of interspecies cohabitation, resource-conscious consumption, and a circular economy. In architecture and the building industry, we see a new enthusiasm with vegetation on facades and on top of buildings. We research toward recycling and upcycling of construction materials and the energy performance of buildings. Beehives are popping up inside cities and in the allotment gardens of urban agglomerations. The disappearance of insects and the extinction of sea life is a central popular concern. And these global threats demand a serious call for action. You only live once—do something, make a difference!
Master’s Program
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DISPERSED
Micheal Levy ARC 506b Habit, Habitat, Habitation
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The Professional Program Thesis
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A general thematic question challenges thesis students to make an architectural response. The theme is explored in workshops, stated as a written proposition, and elaborated as a design proposal during the students’ final semester. Agreed upon by the faculty, thesis themes and topics serve as a hinge point between architecture and questions of politics, culture, technology, or society. The thematic organization of the final semester’s independent design research creates a shared point of departure for students, faculty, and visiting critics. PROFESSIONAL PROGRAM THESIS PROJECTS Barrington Calvert & Michael Lee THE SWELL BOX CIRCUIT
Chloe Froning The Dialectics of Micro Apartments
Jasen Domanico & Julian Gonzalez Get-In-Line
Rachel Ghindea ARCHITECTURE FOR PROTEST
Nitzan Farfel & Reese Greenlee Supersites
Joseph Guadagno Gospel Swamp
Ewa Roztocka & Tengku Sharil Bin Tengku Abdul Kadir Projective Revitalization: Architecture Prosthetics for Spare Capacity
Bernardo Guerra Jr. Customs n’ Death Ellen Harris Within and Without the One Room Schoolhouse Patty Hazle Building Pedagogy
Tanya Al Saleh Beit al-Sumud — Crumple Homes
Dillon Horwitz Combinatorial Choreography
Michelle Deng Rough Stuff
Kaleb Houston Glimmer
Laura Fegely Out of the Box
Rinna Fangyi Jiang Living Traces
Master’s Program
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Christopher Loofs Pedagogy of Play — Crafting Commons & Educating Publics Cassandra Rota Scope Creep: Architecture as Process Eunice Takahaye Slanwa “Well, well, well,” the nomad responds. Adrian Silva Behavior Fluidity Shoshana Torn Exodus: Architectures for Abortion Access Priscilla Zhang Bridging: An Attempt for an Event-based Community Xingyu Zhang SEEP Jonah Zimet Cassini
Barrington Calvert & Michael Lee Advisor: Darell W. Fields
THE SWELL BOX CIRCUIT The Swell Box Circuit recontextualizes the church organ and much like the Chitlin’ Circuit before it, creates an infrastructure of large instruments that aim to reoccupy the voids left by the departed Black residents. By placing these instruments at the sites of bygone Black music venues, the Swell Box Circuit exploits its scale to make the displaced visible and weaponizes its sound to reclaim Black territories once lost. In doing so, the architecture avoids static monumentality and becomes an active participant in the cultural production that resists ongoing gentrification.
TheThe Swell Chitlin Box Circuit, circa 2023 1941-51
North End, Detroit, Michigan
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150
450
140
420
130
390
120
360
110
330
300
100
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270
Population 88,508
70 Quick Facts:
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82.3% Hispanic/Latino Disabled ~9,000
50
Elderly ~7,000
Proposed workforce training facility
Proposed 2,000 units 150% SHI increase
Volume (SF in thousands)
Volume (units in thousands)
90
~10,000 Increase 10 years
240
~270k SF recommended 30k SF per 10k people
Proposed grocery store
210
180
200% increase
Proposed Behavioral Health & Rehabilitation Center
Proposed Community Center
150
Homeless ~ 230
40
Median Household Income $47,542 ($23,316 per capita)
30
20
Poverty Line (19.4%)
120
90
Building/material related occupations 37.13%
Households 30,291
Community Facilities 135,500 SF
Grocery Stores 110,000 SF 235% increase
60
2.86 persons per household
No sense of downtown identity
30
10
SHI - 4,037 (14.8%)1
Healthcare 33,700 SF
Notes: 1. (SHI) Subsidized Housing Inventory
Jasen Domanico & Julian Gonzalez
Advisors: Cameron Wu, M. Christine Boyer
Get-In-Line There are currently 114 thousand miles of abandoned rail lines and buildings sprawling across the United States: displacing people, dividing the urban realm, and manifesting pockets of poverty. These urbanistic, social, cultural, and economic consequences stem from a top-down ideological perspective of a particular future. This paralyzes the urban realm with walls of underutilized infrastructure while maintaining their oppression over the inhabitants. We recognize these in-between zones of defunct abandonments, these rail lines, these walls, as forgotten and lost assets. These interstitial abandoned walls, wedged between lots, are the ideal instruments to address societal concerns such as workforce training, low-income housing, food accessibility, healthcare, community engagement, and much more. The beauty of these uninterrupted networks is their ability to distribute community amenities throughout the city with ample accessibility. Their varying topology and widths present a range of opportunities for distinct architectural interventions. Our project, Get-In-Line, reverses a walls’ paradigm and redefines its spatial make-up by providing essential amenities along and through an axis that once displaced its context.
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Nitzan Farfel & Reese Greenlee
Advisors: Liz Diller, Sylvia Lavin
Supersites The crisis of infrastructure in the United States is an old story–ever since entering the public consciousness in the 1980s, infrastructure has been synonymous with decline. Year after year more systems are assessed to be in critical condition, and proposed solutions are typically slow, heavy, expensive, and inert. By contrast, the speed of social, technological, and institutional upheavals has never been greater. The projects listed in the US’s current infrastructure bill, H.R.3684: Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, will be realized by one-offs and fixed architecture on a timescale of decades. The paradigm of permanence will once again result in an infrastructure incapable of responding to the rate at which societal needs are transforming. In the face of climate change, health crises, and economic and political instability, Supersites proposes a deployable infrastructure that can match the speed of disruption. Supersites is a national infrastructure that embraces flexibility and impermanence. Its architecture is loose- fitting, defined by deployability, quick builds, tailored wraps, and smart disassembly–a flexible kit of parts that requires the architect to be as concerned with de-building as they are with building. By reconsidering projects from disaster shelters to polling centers to entertainment, Supersites positions infrastructure as capable of responding to both humanitarian and cultural needs.
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Ewa Roztocka & Tengku Sharil Bin Tengku Abdul Kadir Advisors: Liz Diller, Sylvia Lavin
Projective Revitalization: Architecture Prosthetics for Spare Capacity Architecture is limited in its capacity to address time. It is often suspended between obsolescence and permanence, which results in immense cultural and material waste. Buildings are demolished if considered invaluable, or museumified if viewed as culturally significant artifacts for the future. This paradigm is inadequately addressed in the built environment, as conventional preservation inhibits an accommodation of change. Newer categories of preservation practices, such as adaptive reuse, are also overly specific and myopic. In order to navigate accelerating technological change, a better building practice that mediates the two deviating worlds of demolition and preservation is urgently needed. The project pioneers a new ‘futureproofing’ methodology called ‘Projective Revitalization.’ It seeks to resuscitate obsolete building structures by strengthening their capabilities to adapt to future change. This is provided through flexible ‘Design Prosthetics’ offering adaptability and spare capacity. Moving floor slabs, adjustable partitions and expandable floorplates accommodate potential futures. This method is tested as a 50 year projected future of the last office park building remaining in Neptune, NJ. It is observed as a cultural artifact—an obsolete architectural typology of the pre-digital work era, which should continue its existence and retain value as a technologically adapted archive for the future.
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Michelle Deng
Advisors: Paul Lewis, Sylvia Lavin
Rough Stuff Rough stuff blurs the boundaries between (1) the natural history artifacts on display (2) the stone of the quarry (3) and the stone that makes up the building. Architecture facilitates varied degrees of exposure to the elements rather than demarcating an impenetrable line between interior and exterior. Rough stuff makes use of material that is considered flawed by building standards, embracing rejects deemed too uncontrollable. Rather than a site of extraction, the quarry is a site of exchange, challenging control in the built environment and reconfiguring material and programmatic flows.
96
Laura Fegely
Advisor: Guy Nordenson
Out of the Box ‘Out of the Box’ investigates the ramifications of the commodification of housing on the homeowner and the act of ownership. Through a three-part installation exploring non-traditional and DIY ‘home improvement’ projects, the role of equity and resale value in informing homeowners choices about their own spaces is questioned. Meant not only as a provocation to homeowners to claim their homes as spaces for themselves in their own present, but an exploration of the application of acoustics, algorithms, and alternative construction processes, this thesis posits a future in which the architect once again becomes relevant to the suburban building type through direct collaboration with the resident.
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steve is a single dad in need of affordable housing. he would like a private bathroom and playroom for his daughter. Steve is very busy and doesn't mind sharing a kitchen and living room. He would like floor access to laundry and a study area for when he works from home. the shared living area allows his neighbor lillah to help watch his Daughter when he has an emergency at work
the whole building requested a community garden on the roof of the building. Gladys has leisure time to care for the garden and bring the fruit and vegetables down to the food bank for the block. community events are also held on the roof for the kids in the building as well as movie river, tessa, and kate are young students or workers night. the next request was for solar panels in san Fransisco looking to share living space. they to help energy costs all want their own private bedrooms but shared bathroom, kitchen, and living room. River likes to game in the shared living room to socialize and make new friends. they all want access to a yoga space so they can relax from their stressful busy scedules with work and school
river, tessa, and kate are young students or workers in san Fransisco looking to share living space. they all want their own private bedrooms but shared bathroom, kitchen, and living room. River likes to game in the shared living room to socialize and make new friends. they all want access to a yoga space so they can relax from their stressful busy scedules with work and school
maggie is an elderly retired person looking to size down and seeks help with care. she wants to share her kitchen, restroom, and living room to help her clean and care for herself. she also wishes to share a small garden with the people helping her. she also placed her old records and books in the common area for everyone to share
steve is a single dad in need of affordable housing. he would like a private bathroom and playroom for his daughter. Steve is very busy and doesn't mind sharing a kitchen and living room. He would like floor access to laundry and a study area for when he works from home. the shared living area allows his neighbor lillah to help watch his Daughter when he has an emergency at work
the whole building requested a community garden on the roof of the building. Gladys has leisure time to care for the garden and bring the fruit and vegetables down to the food bank for the block. community events are also held on the roof for the kids in the building as well as movie night. the next request was for solar panels to help energy costs
maggie is an elderly retired person looking to size down and seeks help with care. she wants to share her kitchen, restroom, and living room to help her clean and care for herself. she also wishes to share a small garden with the people helping her. she also placed her old records and books in the common area for everyone to share
steve is a single dad in need of affordable housing. he would like a private bathroom and playroom for his daughter. Steve is very busy and doesn't mind sharing a kitchen and living room. He would like floor access to laundry and a study area for when he works from home. the shared living area allows his neighbor lillah to help watch his Daughter when he has an emergency at work
the whole building requested a community garden on the roof of the building. Gladys has leisure time to care for the garden and bring the fruit and vegetables down to the food bank for the block. community events are also held on the roof for the kids in the building as well as movie night. the next request was for solar panels to help energy costs
river, tessa, and kate are young students or workers in san Fransisco looking to share living space. they all want their own private bedrooms but shared bathroom, kitchen, and living room. River likes to game in the shared living room to socialize and make new friends. they all want access to a yoga space so they can relax from their stressful busy scedules with work and school
maggie is an elderly retired person looking to size down and seeks help with care. she wants to share her kitchen, restroom, and living room to help her clean and care for herself. she also wishes to share a small garden with the people helping her. she also placed her old records and books in the common area for everyone to share
Chloe Fronin
Advisors: Mónica Ponce de León, M. Christine Boyer
After decades of cities becoming more dense and the expansion of single-family homes and apartments, the United States is witnessing a rise in micro apartments as a response to increasing urbanization, demographic shifts, and changing lifestyle preferences. This is prompting a reevaluation of traditional notions of residential architecture and challenging the perception around what constitutes livable and sustainable living spaces. The rise of micro apartments as a viable housing option in the United States has prompted an interest in the didactics of designing and inhabiting compact living spaces. These micro apartments, typically ranging from 150 to 400 square feet, require a new set of skills and strategies for efficient organization, storage, and multi-functional usage that may not be intuitive for those accustomed to traditional homes. As such, it is crucial to examine the multifaceted aspects of micro apartments and their potential impact on the future of urban living. This thesis first takes a critical look at the implications behind a micro apartment becoming completely commodified by capitalism. My argument is that the efficiency of the micro apartments driven by capitalism will push not just the space, but the humane environment for the user, too far. This will be envisioned through a science fiction or cyberpunk narrative. Science fiction offers vital contemporary political commentary allowing me to take this narrative to the extreme. What happens when efficiency for profit goes too far? What would a utopian apartment complex look like for the developer, landowner, or property owner. I will then examine a proposal against this outcome. Designing where the individual user is empowered within their own differences, and can arrange the space based on user driven moves. This portion can therefore be framed as a heterotopia. I will explore how these ideas manifest within the design of micro apartments. Choosing to represent this in a comic book style to tell the story of the individuals living in this cohousing apartment.
maggie is an elderly retired person looking to size down and seeks help with care. she wants to share her kitchen, restroom, and living room to help her clean and care for herself. she also wishes to share a small garden with the people helping her. she also placed her old records and books in the common area for everyone to share steve is a single dad in need of affordable housing. he would like a private bathroom and playroom for his daughter. Steve is very busy and doesn't mind sharing a kitchen and living room. He would like floor access to laundry and a study area for when he works from home. the shared living area allows his neighbor lillah to help watch his Daughter when he has an emergency at work
the whole building requested a community garden on the roof of the building. Gladys has leisure time to care for the garden and bring the fruit and vegetables down to the food bank for the block. community events are also held on the roof for the kids in the building as well as movie night. the next request was for solar panels to help energy costs
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river, tessa, and kate are young students or workers in san Fransisco looking to share living space. they all want their own private bedrooms but shared bathroom, kitchen, and living room. River likes to game in the shared living room to socialize and make new friends. they all want access to a yoga space so they can relax from their stressful busy scedules with work and school
The Dialectics of Micro Apartments
Joseph Guadagno Advisor: Marshall Brown
Gospel Swamp GOSPEL SWAMP is the future of Garden Grove, California. It doubles down on the backyard as the heart of the city, amplifying the many activities occurring in these dynamic, cultural spaces. It imagines the backyard not as private, personal property but as a shared civic infrastructure. Neighbors will be able to enjoy a variety of activities and resources while also managing issues such as drought and flood in ways that individual households could not. The center of the block will become a place for collecting water, producing food, escaping the heating, working, playing and gathering together. As the block develops over time, the architecture around and within it will change to accommodate this new way of living. Houses will be defined less by driveways, garages and bedrooms and more by their relationships to each other and the lively outdoor spaces between them. By redefining backyards as something shared and used together, Gospel Swamp will allow a new civic life to flourish in the city.
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Bernardo Guerra Jr. Advisor: Darell W. Fields
Customs n’ Death The thesis is a critique on the systematic marginalization of the Borderland. The international border of the United States and Mexico represents the beginning and end of a country. Offset from the international border is a checkpoint infrastructure that defines another edge on the U.S. side. This edge represents the beginning and end of the Borderland. This land by nature is transactional because of its location between the two countries. The transactional behavior is an integral part of daily routines and rituals of the community, including international trade, shopping, religious practice, language, and culture. Checkpoint stations are located off highways outside of city limits in remote areas. The site of the project is located at a checkpoint that is near a Catholic cemetery. The close proximity between the sacred and profane landmarks make for a sublime context. Building off the relationship between the cemetery and the checkpoint station, the project acts as a disruptor by implementing other programmatic elements with atypical relationships into the site. This adds more complexity to the site and will mitigate the checkpoint station. Creating a point of agitation at the margin of the Borderland.
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Patty Hazle
Advisor: Paul Lewis
Building Pedagogy Under a liberatory education model, students acquire participatory design skills and security for the future through the hands-on investment and development of their own housing cooperatives. The project arises in the context of 4 broad structural problems: 1. The economy must be reorganized around meeting discrete human needs rather than generating endless economic growth; 2. The cost of education and the burden of student debt is exclusionary and propels students into limited forms of wage labor; 3. Speculation and the profit-oriented housing market concentrate wealth at the expense of affordable, sustainable housing for all; 4. Existing modes of architecture pedagogy offer few chances to address the above crises and separate students’ money, time, learning, and skills from real-world application. Using a catalog of spatial and material techniques, common building typologies—the strip mall, the office, and the warehouse—are reshaped into carbon-neutral, bio-regionally appropriate buildings for living and learning. The thesis reimagines both the format for schooling and the architectural lifecycle, predicating each on systems of shared ownership, adaptability, natural building materials, and local economies. As existing building stock is transformed into a network of housing held in cooperative ownership, new life cycles of ‘Building’ and ‘Pedagogy’ emerge.
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Dillon Horwitz
Advisors: Cameron Wu, M. Christine Boyer
Combinatorial Choreography This thesis proposes novel, comparative housing schemes on combined lots within a specific residential block in Philadelphia, PA. Beginning with an analysis of existing property vacancies, municipal zoning regulations, and recently passed state legislation, dimensional and economic variables are identified that, when synthesized through a series of new combinatorial processes, lead to communal interpretations and opportunities for more equitable, accessible planning. As access to resources becomes more limited, patterns of individualized occupation and consumption need to shift to more communal systems. A natural site to test architectural interventions that may lead to new communal paradigms are rowhouses. Since interdependent, complex structural, domestic, and public- private dynamics are already embedded in the typology, rowhouse blocks provide a compelling set of conditions that can be rethought to address contemporary challenges. Put another way, working within the historical framework and scale of this existing, common building stock, we can rethink density to provide affordable housing. While this project is focused on the specific context and characteristics of Philadelphia and its rowhouses, these designs will be applicable beyond the immediate bounds of the city, suggesting new design approaches and methods of working in the field that can be applied to the existing housing stock and urban fabric of cities around the world.
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Rinna Fangyi Jiang Advisor: Jesse Reiser
Living Traces The thesis project delves into the concept of humans blending with architecture, shifting the focus of inhabitation from physical presence to a profound connection with the ongoing traces and memories of a space. This research explores the transformative potential of architecture in shaping human experiences, viewing inhabitation as a dynamic process that intertwines human existence with the essence of a place. Drawing upon phenomenology, psychogeography, and post-occupancy evaluation, the project investigates how individuals interact with architecture on sensory and emotional levels, recognizing the built environment’s capacity to evoke memories, elicit emotions, and foster connections. The research aims to uncover design strategies that enhance human engagement and integration with architectural spaces. By acknowledging the reciprocal relationship between humans and their surroundings, it advocates for a holistic approach to architecture that fosters a symbiotic bond between inhabitants and the built environment. A case study of Penn South, a cooperative housing program in Chelsea, Manhattan, exemplifies the design strategy. Utilizing plans and overlapping traces of people, things, and architectural components’ movement through time, the study challenges conventional notions of inhabitation, envisioning architecture as a vessel for seamlessly blending human experiences with the ever-evolving traces of space.
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Christopher Loofs
Advisor: Mónica Ponce de León
Pedagogy of Play— Crafting Commons & Educating Publics Play is not an aesthetic state, it is not inhibited by society’s expectations of what is possible, and it is not an experience isolated from everyday life. It is the fundamental condition in which people comfortably explore, discover, and create. Play takes many forms: games, simulations, design challenges, group activities — but no matter what form it takes, play can be an equalizing force to bring stakeholders together. Play is a choice. There is agency in choosing to play or choosing not to; being able to step in and out of the space defined by the established rules. This thesis explores the implications of a playful design process in two forms — first, as a pedagogical tool for architectural design studios — second, as a medium for educating publics, specifically as a board game. All three facets of exploration intermingle, layer, and overlap as they question what a playful pedagogy could produce.
FOR 2-4 PLAYERS
Adapt to rising sea levels and plan the future of a region at risk. Collaborate with or compete against other players, all while contending with the ever-increasing threat of rising waters.
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Larger openings every 5 bays to allow for material to be inserted and retrieved
Cassandra Rota
Advisors: Erin Besler, Sylvia Lavin
Scope Creep: Architecture as Process This project embraces affinities between two neglected systems in Detroit—transportation and material circulation— and provides a single space for the arrival, sorting, redistribution and eventual departure of both people and building material. This is Detroit Material Processing—a node in future bus and rail transit systems, as well as a material sorting center. The material sorting center fuels a regime of constant change in the building. The project is organized as a series of methods for small-scale constructions that add up to a building always in flux. The three systems—for fenestration, masonry construction, and storage—and their implementation sit between maintenance and construction, challenging the idea that these are different at all and that buildings go through phases of life. The method of fragmentation allows the project to work toward a new understanding of the building. By fragmenting and atomizing it, working only at a scale smaller than the whole structure, the domain of the building is extended and the building is understood as dispersed across space and time.
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Adrian Silva
Advisors: Mónica Ponce de León, Liz Diller
Behavior Fluidity Architecture establishes decorum, and can enhance alternative forms of behavior. Decorum emerges not from form, but spatial variety, spatial scenarios, use and disuse. Public land can allow for elements of play, and for the exploring of the idea of things being feral. This framework aims to pose new sets of contemporary social, cultural, and environmental concerns. In the architectural context, behavior fluidity focuses on designing spaces that can adapt to different users needs, and aims to explore the potentials of designing fluid spaces and its implications on architectural practice, as well as approaching the public park differently than the 19th century model, that sees parks as manicured and proper. Parks are defined by what you can’t do. Flipping this script can develop a different kind of public space that sees the park not as a proper landscape, but one where you can explore behavior.
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Eunice Takahaye Slanwa Advisor: Paul Lewis
“Well, well, well,” the nomad responds. The Sahara is not empty. Yet for centuries, through imagery and discourse, it has been presented as a land devoid of life. The conceptualization of the desert as “empty” has served, and continues to serve, as the justification for colonial and imperial possession of arid land, in which desertification and land possession are reciprocal. In the Sahel, the relationship between climate change and “emptiness” is most apparent. The changes in rain patterns and higher temperatures forcibly displace, de-nomadize, and even eradicate Sahelian communities whose livelihoods and cultures are dependent on their ecology. Their collectively owned land is then at risk of being claimed, occupied, and exploited. In their new context—usually a city— their presence creates frictions that jeopardize their potential to thrive in those environments. This project aims to produce architecture that opposes the regime of “emptiness.” It acknowledges nomadic practices to develop a language for a new Sahelian urbanism that is mapped onto a gradient of urban densities. This allows nomads to migrate to cities without compromising their identity and culture, while leaving a marker in the remote landscape to communicate presence of life and ownership of the land. Nomadic migrations in arid regions are directed by the knowledge and presence of natural water sources. These water sources become nodes of convergence in nomadic transportation networks, however they are rapidly disappearing due to climate change. This project reimagines these networks by 1) identifying existing convergences, 2) establishing new sites of convergence by situating a well, and 3) designing interfaces for interaction between different people groups; people and animals; people and the city; animals and the city.
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Shoshana Torn
Advisor: Mónica Ponce de León
Exodus: Architectures for Abortion Access I. Thesis a. The United States contains a shifting territory of legal abortion access. In the archipelago of safe havens, the State of Illinois is positioned as an island for total reproductive care against its restrictive neighbors. Given the dramatic influx of travel for abortion-seekers and the rising migration of medical providers and clinics, how can architecture compose and offer ground? b. A hybrid type is needed to address the changing post-Roe landscape of abortion access. Exodus is a case study of what happens when a hotel and clinic merge, sited in the town of Carbondale, IL. The thesis speculates on the architectural slice of the reproductive care system in these uncertain futures. Through the building, design can question and interrogate how havens and sanctuaries are defined in the 21st century. c. The above is a proposal to transform spaces of exception into exceptional spaces. II. Both-And a. Architecture is both a social art and political act. The architectas-citizen shapes and constructs in multitudes. Architects must advocate, work, and organize in full consideration of social frameworks that touch our buildings, our discipline. b. Less border patrol, more birth control. c. Barrier as motivator. d. Design as protest. e. Erosion requires fortification.
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Priscilla Zhang Advisor: Erin Besler
Bridging: An Attempt for an Event-based Community Since the economic reform in the 80s, China has developed and reinforced a system of land ownership that creates a duality/ divide between urban and rural, between city and village. The values in this system have primarily put a positive emphasis on urbanization and its expansion. However in the space between the urban and the rural, “urban villages” have emerged on the edges of and within downtown areas of cities in China. One of the most valuable things about these Urban Villages is that they have developed their own systems of ingenuity (and creativity) that produce new models of connectivity and collectivity. Their vibrant systems of exchange—of goods, people, and land— supports a mongrel quality that blends public and private, formal and informal, regulated and unregulated. These systems sit in opposition to the isolationist approach that has characterized urbanization efforts, which are most notably registered through the presence of gated communities and the infrastructure of the gate itself. In a moment when urban village is coming to an end/ disappearing, and the residential area is instead constructed in the typology of gated communities, this thesis works to restructure the dominance of gates and the systems associated with them by proposing a new infrastructure for the city that emerges from models of connectivity present in Urban Villages. The project connects multiple, isolated, gated communities together along a new public network. 0
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RESIDENTIAL COMMITTEE OFFICE, COMMUNITY WORKSHOP, MINI THEATER, AND
Xingyu Zhang Advisor: Jesse Reiser
SEEP Architecture is an artificial and deliberate leakage. This project is a permeable pavilion in Tokyo, as a symbol of the harmonious co-existence between artificial and natural elements. Challenging traditional architectural norms, this structure reimagines boundaries between interior and exterior spaces and acknowledges leakage as an inherent aspect rather than a failure. The pavilion leverages adaptive materials and technologies to create a fluid space that is capable of evolving in response to environmental conditions. It features an innovative primary hydraulic cylinder system that allows for the modulation of vertical movement and structural form, and a secondary hydraulic rod system supports a flexible fabric layer that responds dynamically to the movements of the primary system. This gives the pavilion a unique ability to adjust its light conditions, surface temperatures, and humidity, making it a dynamic, collective landscape. Besides, the structure’s translucent fabric enables the pavilion to interact visually with its surroundings, capturing shadows and inviting the intrusion of natural elements. The pavilion thus becomes a dynamic microcosm, offering variations in light conditions, surface temperatures, and humidity. Its translucent fabric captures the shadows of nearby trees while openings in the structure invite natural elements like leaves, petals, and wind. On the ground, there is completely exposed spaces, space that is protected by waterproof fabric, or adorned by watersoaked fabric, dripping slowly onto the earth. In all, SEEP, set against Tokyo’s backdrop, mirrors the city’s sociocultural dichotomy between hyper-urbanization and a deepseated respect for nature.
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Jonah Zimet
Advisor: Jesse Reiser
Cassini In 1997 NASA launched the Cassini space probe, to explore the moons of Saturn and discover insights into the origins of our own planet, and how life on earth came to be. In this project, new forms, enabled by technology, are inspired by their origins. The building is a prototype, located at the Packard Plant in Detroit. Buildings in a state of ruin or collapse, or in the midst of demolition, have a sentience in their transient state that is shared by all things living. In this project the architect’s hand is a voice for that sentience. As a prototype, the represented methodology can be applied to numerous sites and programs, but in this instance it demonstrates the primordial cave hut–the first evidence of human activity. The ground level is a social gathering space, and levels above hold residential units. In addition to a building, the project is an exercise in product design, employing the same design ideology to the development of tools and utensils. These are neo-proto-tools, digitally developed from the primordial origins of their forms. The objects we make and the spaces we create make us as human as the organs and bones in our bodies do.
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The Post-Professional Program Thesis
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Workbook
The Post-Professional Thesis is an independent, academic year-long, open-format architectural project with a parallel component(s) in a written work (or other work in a previously agreed-upon format). Topics may be wide-ranging and varied in character but must evidence (wider) disciplinary implications and make clear both the historical and contemporary positioning of any work produced. Thesis work must be coherent, concise, and concrete as a design(-research) project, reasonable in scope for two semesters of study but also demonstrative of a long-running and sustainable project of disciplinary inquiry with the potential for continuation following completion of thesis work at Princeton. POST-PROFESSIONAL PROGRAM THESIS PROJECTS Nancy Ai The Public Acclimation Station—Glendale Shirley (Dongwei) Chen Working Interiors Xinyu Chen A Seam(less) Construct Andy Kim Shape within Shape. Rewilding Brooklyn
Master’s Program
Danial Mahfoud Three Corners Ana Morris Refuse Grotto Ali Berk Senbas The Paradox of Exterior Shelter : Perpetual Campfire Guanglei Zhang Warm Cloud
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PAS ACCLIMATION KIT
STEP 1a
STEP 1b
Open the garment cover to retrieve the acclimation kit. Unzip the zipper at the neckline and wear the kit.
Unzip the zipper at the neckline and wear the kit.
PAS GLENDALE • INSTRUCTION MANUAL
STEP 2a
STEP 2b Each port is adjustable depending on the amount of airflow needed.
STEP 3b
STEP 3a
ACCLIMATION KIT Preheat the heat-bed by pressing the on button. The light will be red. It takes about 3 minutes to heat up.
Three ventilation ports provide maximum airflow to help cool the core.
ACCLIMATION KIT
To turn on the self-powered sensory detection, simply press the switch located on the back. Once activated, this kit provides the utmost protection and monitoring while a body is surrounded by flames.
At the event of any ember particle collisions, this wearable will change in color to warn you of danger
PAS
STEP 1
STEP 2
Then take out the two containers in this box. Keep the box because you will need it to store the kit after using it.
Combine (3) scoop-spoons full of hydrogel, (3) scoop-spoons full of Chlorella pyrenoidosa powder, and (5) Urea granules into the glass cylinder. Mix the ingredients with the spatula tip of the sampler.
PAS GLENDALE • INSTRUCTION MANUAL
FILTRATION KIT
STEP 3
STEP 4
After the hydrogel-algae mixture is combined, pour a cap full of activating liquid into the hydrogel-algae mixture and quickly stir. Once this mixture becomes a consistent thick paste, insert the glass cylinder into the heat bed at the heart of the kit container.
STEP 5
The heat bed converts 350 microeinstein into lux and fully activates the mixture, turning it into a liquid gel in 2-3 minutes.
Pour the liquid gel into the syringe and wait 2 minutes for it to cool and thicken.
STEP 6 Now your purification gel is ready to apply onto any surfaces or seal and filter any gaps!
You know it is activated and ready to take out when the On button turns green.
Services we provide
We provide services at three scales: that of the individual body (Kit Demonstration and Distribution on Level 1), that of the building (the Body Acclimation Training Center on Level 2), and that of the network (the Air Monitoring and Research Center on Level 3).
We are here to serve you!
WELCOME
Through these unprecedented times, your Public Acclimation Station is here to help provide proactive solutions against the air pollution crisis worsened by wildfire infernos and global warming.
PUBLIC ACCLIMATION STATION • GLENDALE
Why Glendale?
Come visit us! Website: Phone:
PASglendale.org 1-800-air-2day 1-800-247-2329 Address: 605 E Harvard St, Glendale, CA 91205 We are one block away from the Glendale City Hall. You can get here via the Glendale Beeline Bus or drive here.
We pride Los Angeles for being the mobile and sprawling metropolis in the middle of a complex and beautiful natural environment with mountain ranges and valleys. But this mix of nature and metropolis makes us vulnerable to hazardous wildfires and prolonged air pollution. The city of Glendale is no exception. Located in a valley surrounded mountains and freeways, it is extremely vulnerable to prolonged smoke due to temperature inversions. With the addition of Santa Ana Winds, the smoke will then pass through Glendale with increasing speed and spread beyond Los Angeles.
we are here
PAS
Nancy Ai
Advisor: Erin Besler
The Public Acclimation Station—Glendale Welcome to your Public Acclimation Station! We are a nationwide network of stations dedicated to supporting your preparations amid the wildfire crisis. Wildfires are increasing with global warming. They can grow into long-lasting infernos and emit greenhouse gasses and particulate matter, detrimental to the human body. What’s more, the right to breathable air is not just about the bad stuff in the air. It’s also about the distribution of power and support amongst individuals and communities to be informed and able to endure a crisis. As our environment gets harder to control, architecture needs to do more, at both the scale of the body and at the scale of a building. Your Public Acclimation Station is committed to provide three essential services, each at different timescales: survival kit distribution and demonstration, body acclimation training, and air monitoring. Thank you for your active participation through this crisis.
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AIR QUALITY WARNING SYSTEM & PROJECTION These light-wells are connected with our real-time air monitoring data infrastructure and glow in different colors!
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CARDIOVASCULAR ENDURANCE TRAINING ZONE Come here for a series of ramping conveyor belts that adjust to various heights and speeds.
CRYOTHERAPY ROOM Dip into a therapeutic application of extremely cold dry air, between −110°C and −80°C. LOW PRESSURE ZONE Improve your body’s molecular responses to low air pressure and high elevations by gradual exposure to low air pressure.
VISION IMPROVEMENT ZONE Vision exercises are necessary to see better in smoke while also slowing progression of myopia.
HEAT THERAPY ROOM Train your body to cool itself more efficiently with heat therapy and body monitoring at a constant 75% humidity.
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RECEPTION Come here for any questions or additional resources.
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TRAINING DEMO AREA Pause here for instructions on how to use the training materials.
KIT DEMONSTRATION AREA
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INTERACTIVE AREA This area provides interactive education on air pollution and wildfires.
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ENTRANCE Welcome!
KIT PICK-UP (ZONE A) Online pick-up.
KIT PICK-UP (ZONE B) On-site order and pick-up.
Shirley (Dongwei) Chen
Advisors: Stan Allen, Cameron Wu
Working Interiors Architecture participates in the construction of technology and its hidden interiors. By inventorying and reassembling the post-vacancy tech office, this thesis imagines the gig workers, who have been excluded from the tech work space, as its new occupants. The approach attends to the bodies, labor and lives of those that were previously concealed. The Automaton Chess Player … is a metaphor and a historical precedent; its mechanism underscores connections between spatial interiors and technological demonstrations. Through choreographed movements of its human and non-human occupants, this ingenious work of cabinet-making made its interior invisible. The automaton reminds us that the (mis)representations of technological wonders are often spatially enabled. The Gig Workers ... occupy the interior of the contemporary tech industry behind its polished facade. On November 3, 2020, Proposition 22 passed in California. Prop 22 classifies gig workers as independent contractors instead of employees, thus excluding ride-hail and delivery drivers from most labor protections and unemployment insurance. In the meantime, urban tech headquarters in SoMa, San Francisco stayed unoccupied since the onset of the pandemic. These office interiors are full of stuff, yet remain idle. An Architecture of Appropriation This thesis proposes spatial tactics to appropriate unused tech offices into supporting programs for the gig workers. The disintegrating office interior gives way to new spaces of collectivity and solidarity. Existing infrastructure, from vehicle ramps to sit-stand desks, are surveyed and reassembled into amenities that support the workers’ needs. Shifting away from the space’s intended use and assembly, the proposal makes visible and re- centers the working bodies of the gig workers.
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Xinyu Chen
Advisors: Stan Allen, M. Christine Boyer
A Seamless Construct A post-digital society embodies two forms of spatiality, both of which employ montage techniques in formulating understandings. Physically, spatial fields are perceived along a person’s movement trajectory. To comprehend a space therefore requires a mental construct as an intellectual montage. On the other hand, in the virtual space ushered by mass media, perceptual movement is defined through enlargement of flat images, wherein depth is embodied in oscillating layers underlying the imagery surface. In contrast to a spatial perception based on three-dimensional movement, the image arrests, and collapses space, wherein the possibility to “look around a corner” is eliminated. Whether for surveillance cameras or photographs shared and exposed, the zoom-in logic of imagery analysis means that to preserve privacy nowadays is to intentionally exploit the shallow depth of images in addition to planning physical encounters. Seams are norms in architectural design. They divide hence organize interior life. As public and semi-public programs are reintroduced to the close vicinity of traditional homes, a new form of domesticity is called for to sustain our daily routine. This domesticity operates within the fluctuating relationship between physical experience and its imagery counterpart. Specifically in this thesis, market space is enmeshed with traditional housing. The set-up is simultaneously an acknowledgement of a much-needed trend in contemporary society, and an experimentation on seam operations in image and space making. Gilles Deleuze has famously argued that it is necessary to “overcome this duality of image and movement, of consciousness and thing.” In the end, seamless is a fusion of programs, a softening of the edge, an embracement of the advent of the hyper-real, and an exploration of technologically enhanced uncanniness to construct domesticity in a world with increasingly loose boundaries. It proposes to investigate the instrumentality of images. It uses meta-montage to understand culture, to storyboard, and to define a new way of living.
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Danial Mahfoud
Advisors: Paul Lewis, Cameron Wu
Three Corners Contemporary timber construction prioritizes the economy of mass production and the structural capacity of engineered timber, while maintaining a tenuous correlation to wood’s innate expressive and mechanical performance, as well as its tectonic, spatial, and functional potential. Three Corners is a generic detail study on the relationship between sheet timber tectonics and their resultant visual, functional, and spatial effects. By appropriating traditional interlocking wood joinery techniques in conjunction with the logic of massly produced sheet timber, each corner investigates the possibility to adapt a character of wood that conceives of building systems continuity, exposing wood’s mechanical properties, and determining spatial consequence realized in processes coincident with an expressive tectonic assembly. Interlocking joinery techniques stress the capacity of wood to minimally rely on external materials such as steel and concrete connectors. Thus, a mono-mechanical tectonic culminates in a scalable congruous structure. In other words, a continuity of systems is derived from rethinking connections as transitions. Prioritizing a high level of control over details provides an opportunity to rework the typical sheet timber wall assembly. While most timber projects mimic the logic of concrete or steel framing, they mostly incorporate additional facades or rain screens and occasionally expose wood surfaces on the inside. Sheet timber in this project is joined as an exposed superstructure hosting an internal surface. By revealing structure and internalizing assemblies, the typical sheet timber wall assembly is inverted.
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Ali Berk Senbas Advisor: Liz Diller
The Paradox of Exterior Shelter: Perpetual Campfire The climate and weather patterns are changing, and this change will likely result in extreme weather conditions such as extended winters or extended summers, or even both, for longer periods of time. Possibly the temperate and “nice” climate will be reduced in a year and will become a rare occurrence— i.e. going outside for a run would be a seasonal activity rather than year round. Architecture subconsciously relies on temperate weather. Every architectural work relies on an exterior that we can go to continuously. So we need to invent an infrastructure to shelter the exterior. The main question arise; How do we shelter the exterior? How can we maintain or invent a thermal condition which allows us to go outside without interiorifying it. A thermal gradient should be able to be maintained under a structure open on the sides; and therefore comfort. Departing from these observations and necessities I would like to propose a shelter system which combines the systems of; umbrella, solar energy collection, wind circulation, radiator heating/cooling, and (even maybe vegetation being part of the thermal barrier.) This shelter system, at a theoretical level, aimed to generate the desired condition of “gradient barrier”. Thesis invents a new paradoxical condition for architecture— sheltering exterior. And searches for a solution to this paradox; the perpetual campfire (cooler).
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Guanglei Zhang Advisor: Jesse Reiser
Warm Cloud Warm Cloud imagines a hybrid tactic to Dutch land reclamation through the harmonization of aeroponic farming and data hub’s organizational framework. Instead of solely occupying low-lying reclaimed polders for production and habitation, this project introduces an aquatic infrastructure that allows architecture to become an artificial ground, synergistically processing and interacting with the fluid flows and substances inherent to the environment. The core components of this aquatic infrastructure—plants and servers—both derive sustenance from geological minerals. However, Warm Cloud demonstrates that they can thrive within a dynamic, liquid-based environment. By synchronizing the technical systems of water-cooled data centers with aeroponic farms, the project establishes a performative landscape where data centers function as environmental catalysts for plant growth, while concurrently enabling plants to reveal and clarify the otherwise hidden operations of the data center. The proposed aquatic infrastructure aims to navigate the intricate interactions among more-than-human agents and connect them in an open-ended, distributed network. Operating on both geopolitical and informational levels, this artificial ground unifies fluid posthuman bodies into a synergistic whole.
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Undergraduate Studios
2023
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The undergraduate program provides a foundation for graduate professional study in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, historic preservation, and related fields of study. The program prepares students for further study at the graduate level in design and the history and theory of architecture or art.
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ARC 204 Undergraduate Design Studio Professor Paul Lewis and Visiting Lecturer Anda French with Assistant Instructors Patty Hazel, Dillon Horwitz, Michael Lee, Christopher Loofs, Tengku Sharil Bin Tengku, and Shoshana Torn
Introduction to Architectural Design
2023
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An introductory studio course in architectural design, ARC204 examines the origins and conventions of representation in architecture. Spatial relationships—and the qualities of space itself—will be examined using photography, two-dimensional projections of sectional planes (plan and section), computer models, and three-dimensional physical models. Comprising a series of sequential projects, the studio develops both technical skills and conceptual thinking. Abstract and inventive thinking will be used through a series of projects that transform spatial relationships from three dimensions into two dimensions, and from two dimensions into three. Particular emphasis is placed on how these abstract representations of physical space may be ordered in such a way to introduce notions of movement and time. Concepts of the scale of the body in relationship to space are examined through the introduction of site and program. Attention to craft—both in the making of two-dimensional drawings and three-dimensional models—will be emphasized as a way of developing precision and abstraction in both thinking and making.
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Sol Seo Choi ARC 204 Introduction to Architectural Design
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Jonathan Gagnon ARC 204 Introduction to Architectural Design
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Hailey Hubbard ARC 204 Introduction to Architectural Design
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Helen Zhao ARC 204 Introduction to Architectural Design
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ARC 205 Undergraduate Design Studio Professor Mario Gandelsonas and Princeton Mellon Fellow Ana Ozaki with Assistant Instructor Christopher Loofs
Interdisciplinary Design Studio
2023
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This course includes a studio and a seminar to provide an introduction to architectural and urban design through a number of assignments: from the domestic to the urban scale, from enclosed to open places, from spaces to buildings. The studio focuses on the conventions of representation at different scales along with the complex spatial thinking involved in architectural composition, structured with a sequence of projects using two-dimensional projection (plan and section), computer models and physical models. Through an iterative sequence of assignments students will learn how to transform three-dimensional relationships into two-dimensional drawings and two-dimensional drawings into three-dimensional models, and how to represent notions of the body in space, movement and time. The studio will emphasize notions of abstraction and precision in the making of two-dimensional drawings and the construction of three-dimensional models. The seminar invites guest speakers on issues related to modernist architecture and landscape, gender, and race.
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CIRCULATION
23'-0"
17'-0"
LOADING
105'-9"
43'-4"
43'-4"
12'-0" 118'-0"
MARKET
23'-0"
MARKET
CIRCULATION
23'-0"
17'-0"
LOADING
105'-9"
43'-4"
118'-0"
12'-0"
SINGLE ZONE PLAN 1/16" = 1'-0"
23'-0" SINGLE ZONE PLAN 1/16" = 1'-0"
Max Widmann ARC 205 Interdisciplinary Design Studio
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Paola Moncada ARC 205 Interdisciplinary Design Studio
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Hudson Stedman ARC 205 Interdisciplinary Design Studio
160 SECTION 1/16" = 1'-0"
ARC 350 Junior Design Studio I Professor Marshall Brown with Assistant Instructor Nitzan Farfel and Danial Mahfoud
HOME+STUDIO
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The Junior Design Studio examines architecture as cultural production, considering its capacity to structure physical environments and reflect social organizations. This studio focuses on architectural work, culture, habits, tools, infrastructure, and accommodations, in contrast and adjacent to domestic life. Students will engage these issues through the design of a home and studio for an architect. Pedagogically, the course focuses on how to establish compelling and productive relationships between diverse, complementary, and conflicting uses, scales, and materials. It achieves this through an advanced understanding of architectonics as the art of joining multiple, disparate elements into synthetic formations for which the whole exceeds the sum of its parts (1+1=3), and an advanced knowledge of the building envelope as a mediating condition between public and private domains, with specific emphasis on fenestration, thresholds, and façade composition. The studio also emphasizes how to develop frameworks for integrating architecture and landscape within an urban site; to work recursively and confront multiple issues at disparate scales simultaneously; to consider three dimensional spatial and formal descriptions with careful attention to the conventions of architectural graphics, especially axonometric drawing and physical models; and to develop a rhetorical facility in the visual, written, and oral presentation of architectural work. Focused daily production is fundamental to a sustainable creative practice. Repetition, careful attention, and depth of engagement will be emphasized as critical values that stand against contemporary trends toward multi-tasking and distractedness. Success is measured by the quality of our products rather than the quantity of material we produce. Our work ethic is based on the intensity of our engagement rather than the amount of time that we use. We see with our eyes, hands, and bodies, and therefore dedicate ourselves to the pursuit of physical encounters: making drawings, building models, reading real books, and experiencing real architecture. Undergraduate Program
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Oscar Platt ARC 350 HOME+STUDIO
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Ayinde Bradford ARC 350 HOME+STUDIO
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Hannah Su ARC 350 HOME+STUDIO
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ARC 351 Junior Design Studio II Assistant Professor Erin Besler with Assistant Instructors Cassandra Rota and Tanya Al Saleh
Greenhouse Effects
While questions of resources should be at the forefront of every architectural project, it’s alarming that so many buildings are demolished rather than reused or reinvented. Though some buildings are in a state beyond repair, or otherwise hazardous, the pattern and proliferation of demolition practices often has less to do with the buildings, and more to do with forces of capitalism and the real estate market. 2023
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In Philadelphia, this is increasingly evident both through the sheer quantity of vacant lots and through the increasing number of new developments and rising property costs. Thinking through the collision of these issues the studio will design through the logics of reuse, recirculation, and reassembly. We will work on the retrofit of an existing warehouse building and adjacent vacant lots in Philadelphia to accommodate new workshops, greenhouses, distribution facilities, and event spaces for the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. At one time, Philadelphia was known as the Workshop of the World. Manufacturing, furniture making, and other forms of production grew alongside the city’s population in the 19th and early 20th century. This growth was facilitated by the city’s location, nestled between the Delaware River with access to the Atlantic Ocean on the one side, and the Schuylkill River with access inland on the other. The mid-1900s saw a decline in industry: the city lost 160,000 manufacturing jobs and a significant percentage of its population. Empty, abandoned, or otherwise unmaintained buildings were symptomatic of this decline. Many buildings were razed. Today there are over 40,000 vacant lots in Philadelphia. About 25% of them are publicly owned. Various community-based organizations have worked to put platforms in place that would help to redistribute these lots. Philadelphia Land Bank, for example, was established to facilitate the transfer of vacant lots to individuals and Community Land Trusts; the outcomes however, have been largely underwhelming. More recently, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, an organization that has been in existence since the mid-19th century, has been working to recuperate vacant lots into gardens, working across the region to distribute food, seeds, plants, and host workshops. Undergraduate Program
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Keith Zhang and John Graham ARC 351 Greenhouse Effects
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ARC 404 Advanced Design Studio Visiting Faculty Tessa Kelly
Senior Design Studio
2023
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The goal of this course is to expand both conceptual and technical design skills. As the ultimate studio in the non-professional undergraduate degree sequence, students will respond to multi-layered architectural issues, including heterogeneous program, materiality, interface with the city fabric, community identity, and urban history. Work is developed through the various modes of architectural representation: concept diagrams, building plans, sections, elevations, renderings, and physical models. We will explore composition and a thorough understanding of organizational logics.
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Cam My Nguyen ARC 404 Senior Design Studio
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Eric Lin ARC 404 Senior Design Studio
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Lauren Murphy ARC 404 Senior Design Studio
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Undergraduate Thesis Projects
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Workbook
The senior thesis is a detailed project, presenting a well-argued piece of research on a precise architectural theme, and may include a substantial amount and variety of visual materials, including any of several forms of representation: architectural drawings, models, video, photographs, and computer-generated images. The relative proportion of written to visual material for each student must be agreed upon with the adviser and thesis committee. The final presentation and oral defense of the senior thesis in the spring will constitute the departmental examination.
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UNDERGRADUATE THESIS PROJECTS Natalie Lu Malachi Benjamin Constructing Punishment: An Investigation of Carcerality in the Built Environment AJ Comsti From Fortress to Fantasy: Analyzing the Evolution of Castle Architecture Through History and Media Mona Hassan Sacred or Superficial: The Convergence of Westernization, Modernism, and Traditionalism in Saudi Arabian Masjids and Palaces from 1938 to the Modern Day
2023
Eric Lin An Archaeology of Frank Gehry’s Lewis Residence: The Architect and the Computer Lauren Murphy Intervention on the Island: The Impacts of Non-Institutionalized Accommodations and Urban Infrastructure on Tourist Destinations Cam My Nguyen Designing for Deconstruction: The Architectural Implications of Impermanence
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Malachi Benjamin
Advisors: Jay Cephas, Darell Fields, M. Christine Boyer
Constructing Punishment: An Investigation of Carcerality in the Built Environment Public housing projects designed throughout the 20th century were often touted as architectural marvels. Yet it would not take long for “the projects’’ to become associated with extreme poverty, rampant crime, and, ultimately, to fail the people it was meant to serve. In architectural discussions surrounding public housing, the social dimensions are sometimes addressed, but to a far lesser extent than the general design implications. This thesis combines a philosophical analysis of the logics of punishment, a historical analysis of how punishment and surveillance shape the design of the built environment—from plantations to prisons— along with a formal architectural analysis of the Cabrini-Green Homes in Chicago, and a social analysis of people’s lived experiences in and around Chicago housing projects. Throughout each of these discussions, how architectural scholars have understood the relationship between race, space, and power are considered and analyzed. Different forms of evidence demonstrate how both the physical architecture and the social architecture of the city are deeply intertwined. Ultimately, I argue that public housing, as it has taken shape in the United States, is a form of incarceration designed to punish the poor.
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top: The Eastern State Penitentiary, 1856. Source: https:// philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/ left: Cabrini-Green Homes. Source: Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press. Source: https://nbcnews .com/id/wbna40450463
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AJ Comsti
Advisors: Beatriz Colomina, Sylvia Lavin, Jay Cephas
From Fortress to Fantasy: Analyzing the Evolution of Castle Architecture Through History and Media Castles in modern popular culture differ not just from their historical counterparts but also from each other. Despite these differences, it is still easy to recognize a castle through certain key architectural features, such as stone walls and towers. This is a byproduct of artwork throughout history distilling the castle into simple, recognizable forms that symbolize concepts such as nobility, power, and bravery. This translation of architecture-into-artwork tends to dramatize the form of the structure into unrealistic proportions and shapes to emphasize these concepts. In motion pictures, however, the architecture on film must contribute to worldbuilding and suspending the audience’s disbelief in addition to conveying these symbolic connotations. To this end, architectural models, which cinematographers often use to represent castles, must serve as both artistic objects (dramatized forms meant for symbolism over practicality) and architectural objects (structures that can be practically used by characters within the film world and by the actors that portray them). This is a unique condition for architecture in film, and exemplifies the changes that occur when architecture is translated into different artistic mediums.
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top: Castell Conwy by Samule Lawson Booth. This painting was made in 1900, over six centuries after the original castle was built. bottom: The Siege of Minas Tirith. Notice how all the armies and siege equipment can face one direction as a fighting force, rather than having to spread their numbers around an entire circular city.
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Mona Hassan
Advisors: Jay Cephas, Sylvia Lavin, Beatriz Colomina
Sacred or Superficial: The Convergence of Westernization, Modernism, and Traditionalism in Saudi Arabian Masjids and Palaces from 1938 to the Modern Day A comparative analysis of Saudi Arabia’s grand palaces—from Qasr al-Murabba and Qasr al-Yamamah to Masjid al-Nabawi. The Masjid is widely considered the root of all Islamic architecture, and reveals how the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia redefines Islamic architecture to portray loyalty to Islamic values and gain approval from the larger Saudi population through architecture as a representational medium while still committing to modernizing the nation. The Saudi government and the King—who acts as the “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques”—are able to control the narrative of what does and does not constitute Islamic architecture. They are creating a new reality that is no longer restricted to the audience of foreign diplomats, leaders, and guests, but rather is effectively using architectural representation to unify the monarchy, Islam, and the kingdom more widely within a new, modernized environment, demonstrating that there is not a clear-cut definition of Islamic architecture it is ever-changing and reflective of the current social state.
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Project for al-Haram a-Nabawi, elevation of the women’s prayer hall (musalla)
2023
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Eric Lin
Advisors: Sylvia Lavin, Jay Cephas, Erin Besler
An Archaeology of Frank Gehry’s Lewis Residence: The Architect and the Computer In an increasingly digital era, what is the role of the computer in architecture? And in turn, how does that affect the role of the architect? To answer these questions, I turn to Greg Lynn’s Archaeology of the Digital, a retrospective look at material evidence from digital projects. Using Lynn’s framework—in conjunction with his convenient collection of digital materials—I seek to bridge what Lynn describes as a gap between digital theory and practice, specifically investigating Frank Gehry’s Lewis Residence. In this digital discourse, Gehry occupies a sort of middle ground: he relies on a digital Master Model to communicate his designs, but he reserves the design responsibility for himself, as the Master Builder. The material analysis of Gehry’s Lewis Residence reveals a “happy medium” of digital influence that was not quite agency but a definitive stamp on the design of Gehry’s project. Overall, digital architects should embrace this “happy medium” of computer influence, mediating between the analog, digital, material, historical, and theoretical realms to produce innovative and successful designs. We are moving forward into an increasingly digital space, one where architects become the ultimate mediators, navigating the complexities of the digital realm and beyond.
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top: Fish study models right: Fish CATIA model
2023
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Lauren Murphy
Advisors: Guy Nordenson, Sylvia Lavin, Forrest Meggers
Intervention on the Island: The Impacts of Non-Institutionalized Accommodations and Urban Infrastructure on Tourist Destinations With the increase in access to destinations across the globe by sea or air, many historically and architecturally rich places have become flooded with tourists, leading to environmental degradation and a loss in cultural heritage. Three factors driving the impactful growth of tourism on an environmental and social level over the last few decades were analyzed: the Airbnb platform, cruise ship growth, and changes in urban infrastructure. The resulting research proves how sustainable tourism practices must be followed in order to not only preserve these places for future years of visitors, but to also maintain the resident population that currently exists in these areas.
Undergraduate Program
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top: Map of Santorini showing hotels and Airbnbs as of 2021. Map created using ArcGIS Pro. bottom: Map of Santorini showing private versus public Airbnbs as of 2021. Map created using ArcGIS Pro.
2023
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Cam My Nguyen
Advisors: Paul Lewis, Sylvia Lavin, Beatriz Colomina
Designing for Deconstruction: The Architectural Implications of Impermanence Designing for Disassembly or Designing for Deconstruction (DfD) “is the design of buildings to facilitate future change and the eventual dismantlement (in part or whole) for recovery of systems, components, and materials. This design process includes developing the assemblies, components, materials, construction techniques, and information and management systems to accomplish this goal.” 1 Integrating DfD can prevent obsolescence and discourage destructive practices, in our current practice of a linear economy—where products eventually become waste. The current practice of architectural design disregards the reality of impermanence that all architecture will inevitably face, leading to unnecessary and unsustainable waste. The relationship between the Grand Palais Éphémère and the Grand Palais demonstrates the architectural implications of Designing for Deconstruction that emerge when obsolescence is considered. The architectural implications of DfD—de-solidified structures, integration into a material network, and dry assembly—embrace temporary yet durable and long-term modes of existence. These characteristics serve as a starting point toward a more sustainable future. 1. Brad Guy and Nicholas Ciarimboli, Design for Disassembly in the Built Environment: A Guide to Closed Loop Design and Building, n.d., https://www.lifecyclebuilding.org/docs/DfDseattle.pdf.
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Isometry showing simulation of a partial reuse of the Grand Palais Éphémère’s framework as a EuroLeague-level basketball arena with reception and training areas.
2023
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Princeton University School of Architecture Architecture Building Princeton NJ 08544-5264 Main Office Programs Fax E-Mail Site
609–258–3741 609–258–3641 609–258–4740 soa@princeton.edu soa.princeton.edu
Design: Omnivore
Undergraduate Program
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Doctoral Degree in Architecture
The Ph.D. Program
2023
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The Ph.D. program consists of the History and Theory track and the Computation and Energy track. The interdisciplinary nature of the program stresses the relationship of architecture, urbanism, landscape, and building technologies to their cultural, social, and political milieux. Supported by strong affiliations with other departments in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, the program has developed a comprehensive approach to the study of the field.
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History and Theory Track The Ph.D. Committee sets the course requirements for each student according to the student’s previous experience, specialized interests, and progress through the program. Each semester, prior to the beginning of classes, students must discuss and receive approval from the DGS for their chosen courses. For the first two years, each student engages in course work and independent study, and is required to complete a minimum of three classes for credit each semester for a total of twelve courses, at least nine of which must be taken for a letter grade (not P/D/F) and result in a full-length paper. Of the twelve courses, at least six must be taken within the School of Architecture (the two required proseminars will count). During the first year of residence, a twoterm required proseminar introduces students to the process of developing historically-based research, the literature review process, and methods for innovative critical hypothesis generation and analysis and guides the subsequent development of individual research proposals. Computation and Energy Track The computation and energy Ph.D. track was launched in 2014. The track was an addition to the Ph.D. program that develops research in the field of embodied computation and new systems for energy and environmental performance in architecture. Through associated faculty, it is linked to the School of Engineering and Applied Science, particularly with Computer Science, Robotics, Material Science (PRISM), and the Andlinger Center for Energy and Environment. A proseminar for the Ph.D. track supports the initial methods and processes for this research. The applied research component of the track is supported by world-class research facilities and laboratories, and through independently funded grants for research.
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Recently Completed Dissertations in History and Theory The wide range of possible research topics is illustrated by the following dissertations: Victoria Bugge Øye, “YOU MUST RELAX”: STRESS AND ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH IN THE WORK OF COOP HIMMELBLAU, 1969–1977, 2023; advisor: Beatriz Colomina Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco, José Val del Omar’s Redesign of the Sensorium: Media, Politics, and Space in Francoist Spain, 2023; advisor: Spyros Papapetros Evangelos Kotsioris, Komp’iuter Architecture(s): Constructing the Soviet Information Age, 1953–1982, 2023; advisor: Beatriz Colomina Federica Soletta, OF LINES AND LENSES: PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE ORIGINS OF MODERN ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY (1839–1881), 2023; advisors: Spyros Papapetros, Eduardo Cadava Vajdon Sohaili, The Shape of Unity: Architecture, Art, and the Designs of Postwar Transnational Settler Colonial Community, 2023; advisors: Spyros Papapetros, Brigid Doherty Nicholas Risteen, After the Disaster: Architecture and Ruination in Twentieth-Century Japan, 2022; advisor: Beatriz Colomina Ruo Jia, Different Shades of the Concrete: Chinese Experimental Architecture or French Poststructuralist Theory, 2022; advisor: Beatriz Colomina Martín Cobas Sosa, LIMINAL CREATURES/LIMINAL TOPOGRAPHIES: Rhetorics of Excess in the New World, 2021; advisor: Beatriz Colomina Michael Faciejew, Building “Worldwide Society”: The Architecture of Documentation, 1859–1939, 2021; advisors: Lucia Allais, Sylvia Lavin, Spyros Papapetros Juan Cristóbal Amunátegui, The Société Anonyme De L’Hippodrome: Architecture and Association in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris, 2020; advisor: Lucia Allais Dorit Aviv, Design for Heat Transfer: Formal and Material Strategies to leverage Thermodynamics in the Built Environment, 2020; advisor: Forrest Meggers Mauricio Loyola, A Computational Method For Quantitative Post Occupancy Evaluation Of Occupants’ Spatial Behavior In Buildings, 2020; advisor: Forrest Meggers Eric Teitelbaum, Design With Comfort: A Systems And Materials Approach To Expanded Psychrometrics, 2020; advisor: Forrest Meggers Ph.D. Program
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Matthew Mullane, World Observation: Itō Chūta and the Making of Architectural Knowledge in Modern Japan, 2019; advisor: Spyros Papapetros Kaicong Wu, Robotic Assembly: A Generative Architectural Design Strategy through Component Arrangements in Highly Constrained Design Spaces, 2019; advisors: Axel Kilian, Forrest Meggers Hongshan Guo, Energy Delivery Reconditioned for Thermal Comfort, 2019; advisor: Forrest Meggers Esther Choi, The Organization of Life: Architecture and the Life Sciences in Britain, 1921–1951, 2019; advisor: Spyros Papapetros Federica Vannucchi, A Disciplinary Mechanism: The Milan Triennale, 1964–1973, 2019; advisor: Lucia Allais Jose Araguez Escobar, Rethinking the Formal Domain: Deep Scientization of Design and Architecture-Engineering Hybrid, 1956–2006, 2019; advisor: Sylvia Lavin Margo Kelly Handwerker, Art/Work: The Systems-Oriented Artist Expert, 1968–1984, 2019; advisor Edward Eigen Anna-Maria Meister, From Form to Norm: Systems and Values in German Design circa 1022, 1936, 1953, 2018; advisor: Lucia Allais Masha Panteleyeva, Re-Forming the Socialist City: Form and Image in the Work of the Soviet Experimental Group NER, 1960–1970, 2018; advisor: Lucia Allais Ignacio Gonzálaz Galán, Circulating Interiors: The Logics of Arredamento and the Furnishing of National Imaginaries in Italy, 1922–1945, 2018; advisors: Lucia Allais, Beatriz Colomina Vanessa Grossman, A Concrete Alliance: Modernism, Communism, and the Design of Urban France, 1958–1981,”2018; advisors: Lucia Allais, Jean-Louis Cohen Joseph Bedford, Creativity’s Shadow: Dalibor Vesely, Phenomenology and Architectural Education (1968–89), 2017; advisor: Lucia Allais Daniela Fabricius, Calculation and Risk: The Rational Turn in West German Architecture, 2017; advisor: Spyros Papapetros Meredith TenHoor, The Architecture of the Market: Food, Media and Biopolitics from Les Halles to Rungis, 2020; advisor: Edward Eigen Daria Ricchi, From Storia to History; and Back): Fiction, Literature, and Historiography in Postwar Italian Architecture, 2016; advisor: Spyros Papapetros 2023
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Luis Aviles Rincon, Rhetoric Matters: Image, Textures, and the Discussion around Modern Ornamentation (1932–61), 2016; advisor: Beatriz Colomina Jasmine Benyamin, Towards a (New) Objectivity: Photography in German Architectural Discourse 1900–14, 2015; advisor: M. Christine Boyer Leonardo Diaz Borioli, Collective Autobiography Building Luis Barragán, 2015; advisor: Beatriz Colomina Zvi Efrat, The Object of Zionism: Architecture of Statehood in Israel, 1948–73, 2014; advisor: Beatriz Colomina Alicia Imperiale, Alternate Organics: The Aesthetics of Experimentation in Art, Technology & Architecture in Postwar Italy, 2014; advisor: M. Christine Boyer Molly W. Steenson, Architectures of Information: Christopher Alexander, Cedric Price, and Nicholas Negroponte & MIT’s Architecture Machine Group, 2014; advisor: M. Christine Boyer Craig Buckley, Graphic Apparatuses: Architecture, Media, and the Reinvention of Assembly 1956–73, 2013; advisor: Beatriz Colomina Mark Campbell, A Beautiful Leisure: The Decadent Architectural Humanism of Geoffrey Scott, Bernard and Mary Berenson, 2013; advisor: Beatriz Colomina Anthony Fontenot, Non-Design and the Non-Planned City, 2013; advisor: M. Christine Boyer Lisa L. Hsieh, ArchiteXt: The Readable, Playable and Edible Architecture of Japanese New Wave, 2013; advisor: Beatriz Colomina Lydia Kallipoliti, MISSION GALATIC HOUSEHOLD: The Resurgence of Cosmological Imagination in the Architecture of the 1960s and 1970s, 2013; advisor: Beatriz Colomina Diana Kurkovsky West, CyberSovietica: Planning, Design, and the Cybernetics of Soviet Space, 1954–86, 2013; advisor: M. Christine Boyer Daniel Lopez-Perez, SKYSCRAPEROLOGY: Tall Buildings in History and Building Practice (1975–84), 2013; advisor: Spyros Papapetros Enrique Ramirez, Airs of Modernity 1881–1914, 2013; advisor: M. Christine Boyer Irene Sunwoo, Between the ‘Well-Laid Table’ and the ‘Marketplace’: Alvin Boyarsky’s Experiments in Architectural Pedagogy, 2013; advisor: Spyros Papapetros Els Verbakel, Of Voids, Networks and Platforms: Post-War Visions for a European Transnational City: 1952–58, 2013; advisor: M. Christine Boyer Ph.D. Program
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Ph.D. Proseminars
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ARC 571 Ph.D. Proseminar Professors Beatriz Colomina and José Lira with Assistant Instructor Dante Furioso
The Bachelor Home as Living Machine This seminar explores domesticity and singlehood—a huge blind spot in architectural historiography despite being at the center of diverse architectural programs with massive social, political, economic, sexual and psychological connotations. The bachelor house has played a pivotal role in the history of modern architecture, but it has been neglected. The course surveys multiple meanings of singlehood and its typological responses as a key for understanding and rethinking domesticity globally. Further, the pro-seminar considers architectural research techniques through collaborative investigation of a specific issue facing the field. Rather than study research methods in the abstract, students actively carry out detailed research on the topic of their choice related to the overall theme and reflect upon its limits and potentials in a collaborative exploration. The research project of each semester is carried through to realization in the form of a book, a conference, or an exhibition organized by the students in subsequent semesters. This year the issue is THE BACHELOR HOUSE, launching a new research project on singlehood.
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ARC 572 Ph.D. Proseminar Professor M. Christine Boyer
What is an Archive? Despite the fantasy of achieving a total collection, an archive can never contain everything. It can amass many things, but there will be gaps in the series collected, ruptures in the field surveyed, erasures and silences of the non-archived. “Going against the grain” of the archive means explaining the reasons behind what is actually retrieved, and who is allowed access. It requires developing an external view of the archive. This class will explore issues surrounding the constitution of an archive. Focusing on the figure of the archive and archival practices, it will question the relationship between the system of accumulation and the politics of its use by critics, curators, historians, artists, architects and administrators. The course aims to contextualize the constitution of an archive at the time of its accumulations and exclusions. It will self-consciously reflect on and debate the contemporary archival impulse. And it will examine the challenges computational media make to the archive as a container of things and a storage for memory. “What is an archive?” The answers to this question acknowledge that an archive is an extended field, one that stretches the authoritative notion of an archive to include documents, events, materials not considered to be official archives. How does architecture relate to this extended field? Beside the collection of selected aspects of an architect’s oeuvre in centers such as The Getty Research Institute, The Canadian Centre for Architecture, Avery Special Collections Columbia University, or The Architectural Archives, The University of Pennsylvania, and various centers around the world too numerous to list, how does one compile an archive when there is no official storage house? How do we sift through collections of thoughts or 2023
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objects, writings of books and articles, notes on scraps of paper, autobiographical accounts, traces of events witnessed in materials, in photographs, in forensic evidence? If the power of the archive is aligned with the state, often the imperial state, then how do we decolonize these official archives? How do we rub the archive ‘against the grain’ so that it reveals silences, forgotten events, things that were never collected? How do we make a fuss when examining these forgotten architectural events and architectural silences? Can we establish alternative ways of researching architecture as evidence and questioning evidence of what?
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ARC 573a Ph.D. Proseminar Associate Professor Forrest Meggers
Computation, Energy, Technology in Architecture: Project Development Designed for incoming PhD students in the SoA’s Computation, Energy, Building Technology PhD track (also open to interested Professional and Post-Professional students, upon request), this pro-seminar introduces scientific methods in the context of rigorous technical research within architecture and engineering. It is structured as a series of introductory presentations providing exemplary methods based on case studies along with a number of guest presentations from collaborating disciplines. Among the two Computation, Energy, Technology in Architecture pro-seminars, this course (“a”) focuses specifically on Project Development in which students study the creative process in the context of hypothesis-development—constructing research objectives, goals, and strategies, which is then executed through a central project developed for the course The goal of the course is to build the necessary skill set for executing technical research projects. This includes practice developing testable hypotheses, discovering and situating ideas and hypotheses within the discourse, as well as contemporary research being carried out across multiple fields. As the program in computation and energy does not fit within one field, the main proficiency is not domain specific. Rather, it is in the ability to take and apply expertise to real problems, and formulate new questions that contribute to the way in which computation and energy are addressed in architecture. 2023
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ARC 573b Ph.D. Proseminar Associate Professor Forrest Meggers
Computation, Energy, Technology in Architecture: Critical Review Designed for incoming PhD students in the SoA’s Computation, Energy, Building Technology PhD track (also open to interested Professional and Post-Professional students, upon request), this pro-seminar introduces scientific methods in the context of rigorous technical research within architecture and engineering. It is structured as a series of introductory presentations providing exemplary methods based on case studies along with a number of guest presentations from collaborating disciplines. Among the two Computation, Energy, Technology in Architecture pro-seminars, this course (“b”) focuses specifically on Critical Review in which students explore the methods and processes for extensive previous research work, characterizing gaps or pwotential overlaps in fields to generate new avenues of inquiry and support research hypotheses. The goal of the course is to build the necessary skill set for executing technical research projects. This includes practice developing testable hypotheses, discovering and situating ideas and hypotheses within the discourse, as well as contemporary research being carried out across multiple fields. As the program in computation and energy does not fit within one field, the main proficiency is not domain specific. Rather, it is in the ability to take and apply expertise to real problems, and formulate new questions that contribute to the way in which computation and energy are addressed in architecture. Ph.D. Program
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Ph.D. Dissertation Abstracts
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Victoria Bugge Øye
“YOU MUST RELAX”: Stress and Environmental Health in the Work of Coop Himmelb(l)au, 1969–1977 This dissertation explores the impact of changes in conceptions of health and the relationship between mind and body on the field of architecture in the decades following WWII. The increased concern about lifestyle-diseases in the 1960s and 70s was frequently expressed through the concept of “stress,” which, this dissertation argues, became a central model through which architects and planners would come to understand and design the relationship between humans and their environment. Through a study of the experimental architecture group Coop Himmelblau and their collaboration with the Institute of Environmental Health in Vienna, this dissertation traces how theories of stress and relaxation, and emerging concerns about the environment in the late 1960s, helped forge interdisciplinary collaborations between architecture and medicine, and to establish the field of environmental health in Austria. It examines the shifting status of architecture and the home during a highly progressive and transformative period in Austrian politics, and the investment in housing as a research object and medium to alleviate pressures between individual and a rapidly modernizing society. While the work of Coop Himmelblau is often understood as part of an international corpus of experimental architecture, this dissertation looks at how their work engages with local and contemporaneous social, institutional, political, and urban conditions. It reads their practice in relation to transformations in the field of health and the concurrent expansion of the Austrian welfare state. The Institute of Environmental Health was established in 1970 by the newly elected Kreisky-government to assess the impact of the environment on human health and productivity. Drawing from stress-research, Ph.D. Program
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biofeedback, cybernetics, ecology, and the nascent brain sciences, Coop Himmelblau and the institute collaborated on several projects and experiments that centered on the cognitive, behavioral, and emotional effects of the environment. The three chapters of the dissertation trace Coop Himmelblau’s work across three distinct scales and modes of intervention: from their early biofeedback-inspired gallery installations; their laboratory experiments with the institute; and finally, their attempt to implement their findings on the level of public policy with Entspannungsarchitektur 1, a proposal to redesign 19th century Viennese apartment buildings to promote relaxation.
Coop Himmelblau, Entspannungsarchitektur 1, 1976. Courtesy of Coop Himmelb(l)au.
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Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco
José Val del Omar’s Redesign of the Sensorium: Media, Politics, and Space in Francoist Spain This dissertation addresses the material implications of mass media politics and their cultural impact in Francoist Spain, from 1939 to 1966. It surveys the evolution of physiological, psychological, and architectural media theories from their use toward totalitarian propaganda during the embryonic Francoist autarky to their apparent liberalization following the regime’s alignment with the Cold War Western Bloc. I argue that the transformation and spatialization of the senses by modern media became key in discourses on national identity and state building. To do so, I focus on the work of filmmaker, audiovisual technician, and media theorist José Val del Omar (1904–1982). Through a close analysis of Val Del Omar’s writings, films, and other media projects, the dissertation aims to reconstruct the interdisciplinary discourse on the senses entertained both by governmental media and technoscientific institutions, and engaged with in the individual work of other Spanish artists, architects, filmmakers, and scientists. Each of the dissertation’s five chapters centers on the frictions between Val del Omar’s progressive politics of spectatorship and his engagement with different institutions connected to the official Francoist media apparatus sponsoring his projects. In light of contemporary controversies around Val del Omar’s politics, this dissertation aims to foreground alternative frameworks for understanding contestation and resistance within authoritarian political contexts.
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José Val del Omar, Filming of Fuego en Castilla (Fire in Castilla) in the National Sculpture Museum of Valladolid (1957–58). Courtesy of the Val del Omar Archive.
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Evangelos Kotsioris
Komp’iuter Architecture(s): Constructing the Soviet Information Age, 1953–1982 Komp’iuter Architecture(s) composes an architectural history of Soviet computerization during the Cold War. Organized in five roughly chronological chapters, it charts the multiplicity of architectures engendered by the introduction, dissemination, and mediatization of the digital electronic computer in the USSR during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years (1953–1982): from prototyping laboratories, national exhibition pavilions, secret industrial cities, and educational institutions, to the first computer centers, data networks, architectural algorithms, and computer-aided design institutes. Bringing together archival material from two hitherto separate scholarly domains, originating in both Russia and the United States, this transatlantic account seeks to dismantle prevailing historiographic narratives that have traditionally interpreted computers and their adoption by designers towards creative ends as an exclusively North American or Western European invention. Arguing for the urgency of a global history of architectural computing, the dissertation assembles and analyzes the uncharted contributions of Soviet architects, town planners, and engineers who formed strong coalitions with mathematicians, cyberneticists, and computer scientists to devise the spatial organization and mediatized image of the Soviet Information Age. While historical in nature, this project ultimately seeks to shed light on contemporary debates on the political and social frictions engendered by the deployment of digital technologies. The undertheorized side-effects of this ongoing process are exemplified by such familiar spatial tropes as those of “smart buildings,” “urban intelligence,” “data-driven planning,” the “Internet of Things,” or even the supposedly dematerialized “cloud” — all of them so omnipresent to the point that they have effectively become invisible, let alone challenged. Ph.D. Program
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“Pixelated” rendition of the CCCP (USSR) acronym formed by festively lit-up office spaces of the four administrative buildings on Kalinin Avenue in Moscow, possibly for the anniversary celebration of the “Great October Socialist Revolution” of 1917, c.1972.
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Federica Soletta
Of Lines and Lenses: Photography and the Origins of Modern Architectural History (1839–1881) This dissertation investigates the shifting genres of architectural history and writing that became more popular, particularly in the British context, in the mid-nineteenth century as a result of the introduction of photography, advancements in press technology, and the use of the methodological influence of natural sciences. Early photography, as a scientific endeavor as well as a popular vehicle of knowledge, became a critical tool for developing a “new” genre of architectural history and disseminating architectural theories visually and graphically. While the story of photography’s central role in the construction of modernist architectural histories, such as those of Sigfried Giedion and Bruno Zevi is better known, this dissertation aims to narrate the prehistory of such role a century earlier, when photographs do not yet appear on the pages of architectural history books but are used primarily as a tool for developing a comparative and scientific method. Within the development of architectural history, early photography became a synoptic tool, used both as a form of drawing and as a narrative device. This dissertation examines the reception and the production of architectural knowledge via “photographic histories” which, although popular, frequently addressed significant national architectural issues of the period while seeking to create a “world architectural history.” The first part of the dissertation investigates how architectural photographs were received through the exhibitions of the Architectural Photographic Association, the architect John Johnson’s collection of photographs, and James Robertson’s album of Grecian Antiquities. The second part focuses on the production of a new, “photographic,” architectural history through the language of Ph.D. Program
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science, the press, and the historic-ethnographic interpretations of architectural history promoted by the photographs from archaeological and geographic expeditions. The research leverages the correspondence between the architectural historian James Fergusson—the main informant of the research— and his publisher John Murray. Their letters reveal Fergusson’s determined intention of writing a “complete” history, scientific rather than antiquarian, as well as Murray’s popular concept of a Handbook. As a result, a renewed lexicon of architectural history emerged: photographic in narrative, global in scope, popular in form, and scientific in aim.
Overlapped images of the south side of the Theseion from the southeast. Athens, 1854–1854 (ΦA_1_98) + GRI Special Collections 2001.R.1.
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Vajdon Sohaili
The Shape of Unity: Architecture, Art, and the Designs of Postwar Transnational Settler Colonial Community Following the 1945 signing of the United Nations Charter and the resulting waves of decolonization, projects of public architecture and art increasingly sought to shape conceptions of political community unified under idealized consensus. Yet, in contexts resisting decolonization—specifically, settler colonial contexts—such projects served to perpetuate settler interests, affirming non-existent, incomplete, or unwanted social harmonies. Analyzing public institutional architecture and public art—officially sanctioned works seeking to represent pluralist, humanistic ideals and interpellate collective self-understandings—in three post-WWII settler colonial societies, I argue that “unity,” “community,” and their contextual avatars supplied not only a logic for spatial design, but also a transnationally traded alibi for the perpetuation of settler power. First, in the former Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), a disingenuous policy of “interracial partnership” permits a White minority to defer Black majority rule, and results in the construction of a circular National Museum that monumentalizes settler archaeology. Second, preaching a doctrine of “oneness,” the Bahá’í religion constructs two monumental devotional buildings—one in the newly-constituted Israel, another in suburban Chicago—as twin base-camps for a global conversion campaign drawn along colonial lines and sustained by settlerism’s strategies of elimination. And third, in Montréal, against violent acts of separatism by Quebec-nationalists, expressions of social and artistic “integration” animate the construction of a massive performing arts complex and the techno-utopian idealism of Expo 67, both founded on Indigenous erasures. In each case, a public Ph.D. Program
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byword—respectively, “partnership,” “oneness,” “integration”— operates as a discursive surrogate of unity, channeling the populist appeal of community rhetoric, and shaping a program of cultural-institutional production driven by a complicit settler creative class of architects and artists. Reframing history and political mythology via spatial and iconographic conflations, these projects exhibit the erasures and clefts of settlerism’s eliminationist logic, while at the same time, channeling and repurposing the communitary idealisms associated with postwar modernism. Geographically diverse, but structurally and materially entwined, the three case studies examined here disclose a transnational settler typology of public-institutional architecture and art ostensibly oriented towards reparative notions of unity and community, but pragmatically arranged to forestall decolonial fragmentation.
National Museum of Southern Rhodesia, Bulawayo, completed 1962. Undated photograph of pre-construction model.
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Princeton University School of Architecture Architecture Building Princeton NJ 08544-5264 Main Office Programs Fax E-Mail Site
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Design: Omnivore
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