Workbook 2021 by Princeton University School of Architecture

Princeton University School of Architecture

Workbook 2021

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 2021 2 Graduate Studios 3 15 39 63 49 29 69 79 89 99

ARC 501—Michael Meredith and Erin Besler ARC 502—Mónica Ponce de León and Cameron Wu ARC 503—Jesse Reiser ARC 504—Stan Allen ARC 504—Alejandro Zaera-Polo ARC 505a—Mira Henry and Matthew Au ARC 505b—Anda French and Jenny French ARC 505c—Jing Liu and Florian Idenburg ARC 506a—Ryan Bollum and DK Osseo-Asare ARC 506b—Wonne Ickx

107 Professional Program Thesis Projects 135 Post-Professional Program Thesis Projects 147 Undergraduate Studios 149 161 161 161 165 177

ARC 204—Paul Lewis and Annie Barrett ARC 205—Mario Gandelsonas ARC 205—Elisa Silva ARC 350—Elisa Silva ARC 351—Anda French ARC 404—Marshall Brown

189 Undergraduate Thesis Projects 209 Ph.D. Program 215 Ph.D. Proseminars 221 Ph.D. Dissertation Abstracts

Graduate Studios

Master’s Program

ARC 501 Architecture Design Studio Associate Professor Michael Meredith and Assistant Professor Erin Besler with Assistant Instructors Reese Lewis, Christina Moushoul

Looking, Discussing, Building Together.

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. These projects 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. In no particular order, below are some preliminary thoughts on looking, discussing, and building together, excerpted. These are meant in the spirit of starting a conversation. 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

Ellen Harris ARC 501—Fall 2020 Looking, Discussing, Building Together.

Eunice Takahaye Slanwa ARC 501—Fall 2020 Looking, Discussing, Building Together.

25’

30’ 3’

Jonah Zimet ARC 501—Fall 2020 Looking, Discussing, Building Together.

Tanya Al Saleh ARC 501—Fall 2020 Looking, Discussing, Building Together.

ARC 502 Architecture Design Studio Professor Mónica Ponce de León and Assistant Professor Cameron Wu with Assistant Instructors Anna Kerr, Victor Rivas Valencia, Art Uribe

Access and the Urban Collective This studio will examine the relationship between architecture and the city through a series of exercises and culminating in a single building project. Analyses of specific historical precedents in which the architect’s project has embodied various speculations about the city at large will inform the studio in two primary ways: 1) how architecture symbiotically responds to the city’s multiple demands for varied access and circulatory hierarchies among multiple constituents, and 2) how architecture calibrates scalar transitions to navigate between the spatial requirements of the collective and the individual. In addition to responding to the given context, each student proposal will be expected to imagine, articulate, and reciprocally project new ideas back into the city.

The building program is a K-12 public school with community event spaces in a low-density neighborhood in Trenton, NJ. The community event spaces will serve the public at large and are expected to be accessible independently of the school. This dual purpose of the building will be the focus of the semester. Often considered a microcosm of the city, schools are an assemblage of heterogenous room types whose size and scale is carefully choreographed. With a student body of over 1500 students, the school and associated programs will be of adequate magnitude to project new ideas for the city at large. In the case of our K-12, these ideas will directly impact Trenton given that all the non-classroom functions in the building will be accessible to the community. The “microcosm” is not an isolated exemplar, but an integral part of the whole, capable of effecting change at multiple levels. In order to enable the K-12 to materialize ideas about the future of Trenton, we will explore and rehearse specific compositional techniques, aimed at developing formal dexterity, and a thorough understanding of organizational logics. Exercises that deal with module aggregation, systems of growth, and part-to-whole relationships will be driven by dialectics of figure/field, private/public, interior/exterior, among others. Exercises will increase in degrees of abstraction complexity throughout the course of the semester.

Master’s Program

Barrington Calvert ARC 502—Spring 2021 Access and the Urban Collective

Cassandra Rota ARC 502—Spring 2021 Access and the Urban Collective

Ground Floor Plan

Jasen Domanico ARC 502—Spring 2021 Access and the Urban Collective

FLOOR PLAN | LARGE PROGRAMS & LOADING ZONE

Julian Gonzalez ARC 502—Spring 2021 Access and the Urban Collective

JULIAN GONZALEZ

FLOOR P

ERSPECTIVE | PUBLIC ACCESSIBLE RUNNING TRACK & SPORTS FIELD

22 JULIAN GO

Kaleb Houston ARC 502—Spring 2021 Access and the Urban Collective

SECTION A

24 SECTION B

Michelle Deng ARC 502—Spring 2021 Access and the Urban Collective

16' 8' 0' 2' 4'

SCHOOL CIRCULATION 1" = 15'-0"

EAST / WEST SECTION

Patty Hazle ARC 502—Spring 2021 Access and the Urban Collective

Priscilla Zhang ARC 502—Spring 2021 Access and the Urban Collective

Reese Greenlee ARC 502—Spring 2021 Access and the Urban Collective

'0 '01 '02 '05 '001

100' 50' 20' 10' 0'

SITE PLAN

Middle

High

Elementary

Rinna Jiang ARC 502—Spring 2021 Access and the Urban Collective

SITE PLAN

10'

20'

50'

100'

ARC 503 Integrated Building Studio Professor Jesse Reiser with Assistant Instructor Zaid Kashef Alghata

Grassroots Institution: Reprogramming American Civil Service

The Institution and the Grassroots One way of interpreting, and admittedly generalizing, the protests and events of 2020 is the systemic failure of larger institutions to adequately serve individuals on the community level. Perhaps most clearly seen in the failure of our nation’s law enforcement to represent, protect, and serve the citizens of their respective cities, towns, and neighborhoods, it extends to the failures of our federal and state-wide agencies to contain COVID-19 and ensure the safety of our citizenry and healthcare workers. As a countermeasure, calls to ‘defund the police’ and reinvest in more localized, grassroots community programs have taken a strong hold in the public consciousness, and designers, entrepreneurs, and good samaritans have invented their own ways to manufacture and distribute personal protective equipment to frontline healthcare workers, in response to our governments’ own inadequacies. From systemic racism to public health calamity, the efficacy of top-down governance, manifested in institutions, to positively affect the healthcare and safety of our citizenry has been rightly called into serious question. Indeed, grassroots organizations are often more agile, direct, and effective at rendering community services than larger governmental organizations. At the same time, the instrumen tality of our institutions towards the maintenance of a healthy and well-functioning democracy cannot be overstated. It has often been noted that American democracy is only as strong as American institutions, and the more recent, sustained attacks on our Department of Justice has perhaps never brought our nation closer to totalitarianism. Meanwhile, the misuse of our federal health resources in dealing with the current pandemic has made clear the utter necessity of topdown leadership and planning. In short, what is indisputable Master’s Program

is that both top-down institutional organizations and bottom-up grassroots movements both have their own benefits and drawbacks within the larger context of American society. It is also essential to note that many, if not most, of our more established governmental organizations and institutions originally began as informal, ‘grassroots’ movements in their own rights. As the United States military originated from informally organized bands of militias, modern policing finds its roots in the slave patrols of the antebellum south. As the progressive organization and federalizations of these movements has undoubtedly led to greater oversight, the systemic disconnect between these organizations, their larger societal missions, and their members has never been comprehensively addressed in American society to a satisfactory degree. Reprogramming American Civil Service In past years, the Princeton School of Architecture thesis has been themed around institutions, “...asking the students to invent a new institution—designing its mission, its value system, its pedigree, its organizational structure, its funding mechanisms, its publicity strategies, etc., in addition to its spatial logic and formal expression.” Although related, this studio instead begins at and centers on the opposite end of the institution’s birth and functioning: on the direct and immediate mobilization of individuals, imaginative (if not only seemingly quixotic) visions of possible outcomes, and the necessity to convince (if not seduce) the public of its utility and probable efficacy through film and other media, even if its logistics and infrastructure have not been fully flushed out. This studio works backwards, from the bottom-up, from intended effects towards logistics and planning, in hopes of producing novel institutional models that begin and are 2021

Workbook

centered upon real consequence and action. In other words, rather than focusing on technical concerns, we will be looking at, and designing, entire institutional cultures that equally serve to define and direct their functioning. Specifically, students will be tasked with the invention of a new ‘grassroots institution,’ one which relies upon the individual initiative and action of its participants yet is supported by government resources and partner organizations. While the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps are two existing models worth our study, we will also look towards conscripted military and civil service in several foreign countries, including Israel, Finland, Denmark, and, notably, Switzerland, where the intermingling, training, and mobilization of their respective citizenries towards common public service is but a rite of passage. In these foreign nations, conscription is rewarded not only with tax and educational benefits, but also with opportunities to connect and work with peoples of different origins and upbringings, all while traveling about and being exposed to a fuller range of customs in their home countries. Students will use their visualization and design skills to develop a convincing model of 21st century public service that can be adopted on a local level but also scaled-up and federalized if needed. Although architecture may lack the financial and political instruments to actualize such models, the power to convince via representations, to speculate on alternative modes of living via reprogramming, and to direct organizational identities via symbols, rituals, and talismans, is no doubt within the architect’s command and responsibilities.

Master’s Program

Tyler Armstrong ARC 503—Fall 2020 Grassroots Institution: Reprogramming American Civil Service

Luis Fernanfo Muñoz ARC 503—Fall 2020 Grassroots Institution: Reprogramming American Civil Service

ARC 504 Integrated Building Studio Professor Alejandro Zaera-Polo with Assistant Instructor Jane Ilyasova

Emerging Urban Technologies: The City of the Near Future

2021

Workbook

In 1933, Le Corbusier and a few other members of the CIAM issued The Athens Charter, a document aimed at orchestrating contemporaneous urban technologies into a coherent proposal for the future of cities. Fastforward to 2020. Cities have become the prevalent human habitat on earth and the main source of inequality and environmental degradation, which are even threatening the very subsistence of the planet. Despite the fact that the crucial questions cities need to address—air pollution, rising water levels, draught, heat island effect, deforestation, biodiversity, food security, automatized work, pervasive computation—are primarily driven by non-human concerns, cities remain primarily designed around human functions. Meanwhile, we inhabit ecosystems which transcend our specific urban realms. In the Anthropocene, the primeval elements—air, water, energy and earth—have been politicized, and therefore, urbanized. In this imminent cosmopolitical regime, these natural elements are mediated by the technologies that feed us, transport us, condition our environments, recycle our refuse, manufacture goods or connect us to each other. An entirely new set of technologies with urban or architectural applications have emerged and radically transformed urban protocols and experiences: smartphones, GPS, artificial sensing, electromobility, biotechnology, etc, while still remaining largely outside the practices of urban planners and designers. Cities have become now a crucial intersection between technology and politics where the equation between wealth, labor, resources and energy have to be reset. The purpose of the studio is to collectively investigate and explore the opportunities that exist for architecture in its engagement with these processes. Technology has become the primary driver of the imminent design space of architecture and urbanism. Master’s Program

South Elevation

Chase Galis ARC 504—Fall 2020 Emerging Urban Technologies: The City of the Near Future

Existing Buildings 5869-5867 Centre Boulevard Pittsburgh, PA

1,008 Terje Chair Shading System

Salvaged Sash Window Facade

Surplus Plywood from Nearby Development Projects

Salvaged Corrugated Steel

Salvaged Open Web Truss Structure

THE PUBLIC NETWORK

THE AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION

publicnetwork.org/map/libraries/sedgwick/streetview

Christina Moushoul ARC 504—Fall 2020 Emerging Urban Technologies: The City of the Near Future

ABOUT

MAP

publicnetwork.org/libraries

THE PUBLIC NETWORK

THE AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION

GOV

HOST

JOIN

EMERGENCY

Fiorella Barreto ARC 504—Fall 2020 Emerging Urban Technologies: The City of the Near Future

Peter Pak ARC 504—Fall 2020 Emerging Urban Technologies: The City of the Near Future

Ruta Misiunas ARC 504—Fall 2020 Emerging Urban Technologies: The City of the Near Future

ARC 504 Integrated Building Studio Professor Stan Allen, Associate Professor Forrest Meggers, and Visiting Lecturer Peter Pelsinski with Assistant Instructor Naomi Steinhagen

Nature Lab Princeton

The precedent for the work of this semester’s Integrated Building Studio is the Edna Lawrence Nature Lab at the Rhode Island School of Design. Originally established in 1937, the Nature Lab provided an accessible collection of natural history specimens that were intended to introduce students to natural principles of order and design. They served as models for drawing and study, and as a resource showcasing the visual richness and complexity to be found in nature. The original collection was displayed as a “cabinet of curiosities;” it included skeletons as well as preserved plant, animal and insect species. More recently the facilities have been expanded and upgraded with electron microscopy, GIS and a bio-mimetic maker space. The brief for this current studio is to design a new facility on the Princeton campus: a Princeton Nature Lab, a space and a collection that will engage questions of nature and ecology from the perspective of the humanities and the creative arts. It is expected that the Princeton Nature Lab will be used by students from the Visual Arts and Architecture programs as well as Music, Performing Arts and Creative Writing, in collaboration with Engineering, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment and the Princeton Environmental Institute. The Nature Lab is not intended to replace existing scientific laboratories, but instead to facilitate conversations between the sciences, the humanities and the creative arts: to foster creative and speculative work around contemporary questions of nature and ecology.

Master’s Program

Grace Lee, Evan Crawford ARC 504—Spring 2021 Nature Lab Princeton

8’

Anthony Lam, Sophie Jiang ARC 504—Spring 2021 Nature Lab Princeton

ARC 505a Graduate Vertical Studio Visiting Lecturers Mira Henry and Matthew Au with Assistant Instructor Takayuki Tachibe

Underground

2021

Workbook

In 2015 the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles announced their affiliation with a small hub called The Underground Museum. It was a joint commitment between two friends - MoCA curator Helen Molesworth and artist Noah Davis. Prior to the institutional relationship with MoCA, The Underground Museum existed as Noah and Karon Davis’ studio and home, which they opened to sidestep the gallery system and create an art space to celebrate Black excellence. The name of the museum evokes an ethos of working fugitively and in the shadows for reasons of necessity or desire—think the Underground Railroad, or an underground club. This is a spot known as much for its parties and performances as it is for its art talks and blue chip gallery shows. The story of this art space and its incredible success is highly particular, and yet the practice of large art institutions developing local collaborative satellites relates to a broader phenomenon that is challenging staid notions of top-down museum franchising. The case of the Underground, which developed out of an arrangement with an existing grassroots organization, is reflective of an expanded field of strategies1 that re-envision the models of decentralization in which many large art institutions have invested over the past 50 years.2 The potential of an existing institution that serves and supports its community but also has channels of access to greater resources and a national audience is a promising one, and one that requires critical and creative attention. This studio begins with the reflection: what does it mean for a big museum to move into a small neighborhood through these collaborative models? What are some of the social, spatial, and economic consequences of such an act—both on the building and on its surrounding context? Master’s Program

Along with the The Underground Museum, we will be looking at a set of case studies that reflect a range of models nationwide, and we will be considering how specific subjects, or multiple publics, can affect the conceptual framework, the material construct, and the life of a building. Beginning from the example that the Underground Museum has set, in politics and vibe, we propose a design scenario more locally here in Princeton. Let’s say a group of nationally recognized artists and architects that live in the area and teach at the University have begun to engage with community leaders in the neighborhood of Witherspoon-Jackson. This is an area that, in 2016, was named an historic preservation district to honor its legacy as the center of Black life for nearly two centuries3. The process of gaining historic preservation designation required years of effort led by community members who feared that shifting demographics would lead to the near erasure of the neighborhood’s history. This studio imagines a scenario in which, together, the artists/architects and a diverse set of community leaders receive funding from a national art museum to create a satellite entity. It will support the design of a new building in the Witherspoon-Jackson district that is to hold a range of activities including museum-quality exhibitions, performances, community events, and a neighborhood historical archive. In this way the project positions itself as a catalyst for new forms of event as well as a caretaker of the past.

Master’s Program

Cole Cataneo, Cole Cataneo, Juan Pablo Ponce de Leon ARC 505a—Fall 2020 Underground

James Wood, Daniel Hall ARC 505a—Fall 2020 Underground

Helen Fialkowski, Melinda Denn ARC 505a—Fall 2020 Underground

ARC 505b Graduate Vertical Studio Visiting Lecturer Anda French with Assistant Instructor Sonia Sobrino Ralston

CO. HOUSING. CRISIS.

2021

Workbook

Intentional Living. Co-Living. Communes. Coops. There are many terms for contemporary collective living, and various debates over their definitions. Uttering the word “cohousing” often conjures romantic assumptions about seamless coexistence, imagined as a universal answer to market-driven traditional housing, with visions of spontaneously shared space and resources. While these notions can be productive as aspirational imaginaries, they often belie the rigorous terms under which cohousing has historically been built, financed, and inhabited. This studio contends that in the US cohousing is a highly specific, fairly idiosyncratic, and much guarded model of semi-communal living. Cohousing is both an answer and a conundrum. At a moment when fundamental challenges to the social, economic and political fabric are imperative, this studio will push, pull, and remold cohousing, and its current incarnation in the US, as a fertile ground for critique, experimentation, and action at broader, more inclusive scales. We will address both the positive impact of cohousing and the barriers to entry. We will pay close attention to both the operative and associative power of architectural form when designers concurrently work on the financial model and social compacts of a proposed housing community.

Master’s Program

Christopher Myefski ARC 505b—Fall 2020 CO. HOUSING.CRISIS.

Jane Ilyasova ARC 505b—Fall 2020 CO. HOUSING.CRISIS.

Manuel Zermeno ARC 505b—Fall 2020 CO. HOUSING.CRISIS.

ARC 505c Graduate Vertical Studio Visiting Lecturers Jing Liu and Florian Idenburg with Assistant Instructor XXXX

Imagine A Sustainable Future for Humanity

Master’s Program

Patrick Yundong Yang ARC 505c—Fall 2020 Imagine A Sustainable Future for Humanity

Taka Tachibe ARC 505c—Fall 2020 Imagine A Sustainable Future for Humanity

Floor Plan

Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton School of Architecture

Mound-structure, sheep chute, and lakes

ARC 506a Graduate Vertical Studio Visiting Lecturers Ryan Bollom and DK Osseo-Asare with Assistant Instructor Yundong Yang

Living Museum: Pan-African Futures

The museum in Western consciousness has roots springing from notions since classical antiquity regarding the importance of the Muse-ion in Alexandria, a Hellenistic institution built in Egypt that housed the wondrous library and various academies as constituents of a temple to the Greek goddesses of art, science, music, poetry and philosophy. As an architectural typology, the museum extends a history-long precedent of humans building sites that function in tandem as temples and centers of scholarship, even preceding those maintained by the priestesses of ancient Egypt’s Seshat goddess of writing, the divine cosmographer who carries both the knowledge of how to inscribe (write and draw meaning) and how to use the stars (stellar arrays) to orient building and temple foundations properly on the surface of the earth. Today the global role of museums is in flux. On one hand, conventional models of museum sustainability—entangling politics, finance and philanthropy—are less stable in some future scenarios, tracking regional demographic and economic change, competition with digital lifestyles, social distancing and between museums, galleries, biennales and expositions, as well as a proliferation of private buyers and collectors. Internet-enabled exchange markets challenge the supremacy of historically significant cultural institutions by distributing both content and patronage. On the other hand, museology faces its own inevitable reckoning regarding complicity and interdependence with colonial projects and regimes of modernity built out of empire. The provenance of myriad objects sequestered in museums worldwide speak to their forced, illicit, illegal and violent removal from their places of origination. As much as 90 percent of Africa’s premier cultural heritage is held in spaces outside Master’s Program

of Africa. In November 2018, Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr and French art historian Bénédicte Savoy presented to President Emmanuel Macron of France the 258-page report, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational Ethics , following his statement in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, a year prior that: “African heritage must be highlighted in Paris, but also in Dakar, in Lagos, in Cotonou. In the next five years, I want the conditions to be met for the temporary or permanent restitution of African heritage to Africa.” Although officially a response framing policy for the French government’s public museums only, The Sarr-Savoy Report sets a precedent by implicating Western museums in the crimes and violence of colonialism and proposing a framework of “maximal restitution”. Restitution in this context refers to repatriation, which creates friction in certain camps given its resonance with reparation. Meanwhile in mechanics of materials, the term denotes restoration of something to its original state, relating to elasticity, which in physics describes something’s ability to return to its original state. A spring exhibits “elastic recoil” when it rebounds in response to a force, or stimuli. This studio explores how restitution may be made operative in architecture, in multiple ways and at various levels, including by means of collective practices of dis/assembly, repair and resynthesis. We also present how architecture can be made more non-violent by means of materials lifecycling (understanding the complete lifecycle of a building from the perspective of not only materials throughput, but also the lifespan, locus of origination and codependencies of material-agents) and commons-based value networks.

Participants will investigate what may be appropriate future-oriented architectures for engendering spaces that celebrate cultural transmission while transcending cycles of exploitation by means of regenerative cohabitation with non-human actors.

Master’s Program

Auditorium

Gallery III

Auditorium

Gallery II

Gallery III

Gallery I

Gallery II

Gallery I

Module A x 32 Module B x 51

Module C x2

Drainage module x3 Main girder x 300 ft

Felix Yiu ARC 506a—Spring 2021 Living Museum: Pan-African Futures

Joseph Lee ARC 506a—Spring 2021 Living Museum: Pan-African Futures

Ai Teng ARC 506a—Spring 2021 Living Museum: Pan-African Futures

The Heart

94 0

10m

ARC 506b Graduate Vertical Studio Visiting Lecturer Wonne Ickx with Assistant Instructor Helen Fialkowski

Proximity

Lately, I have been driving through the American countryside and became fascinated by the many collections of agrarian structures scattered around in the landscape. Awkwardlooking ensembles of different shapes, forms, periods, materials and purposes are grouped together in tightly packed clusters or loosely arranged ensembles. Sometimes it is simply a layer of paint, a basic color scheme, that ties all the different components together. Sometimes it is their shear proximity, as they touch each other, lean against another, overlap or intersect. In other occasions, volumes are grouped around a central courtyard, or a gravel field for trucks and tractors to maneuver in multiple ways, creating open and permeable compositions. Pragmatism, functional concerns and organic growth are intertwined with local building traditions and esthetic ambitions. The industrial, the rural and the domestic all combine into a specific arrangement. A first set of reference projects, showing architectural ideas on the grouping of buildings, is added on the following pages. How is architecture grouped into an ensemble of buildings? What compositional, functional or expressive logic does a grouping of buildings present? How can these groupings create a significant totality, while at the same time reinforce the individual quality of each building? How near is too close? How distant is too far? What if two entities are squeezed against each other? What is a polite distance? How are buildings functionally connected? How are they related structurally, proportionally, esthetically? What is the role of the landscape; how do plazas, walkways and green spaces support these conglomerates? Is it a homogenous cluster of buildings with material similarities or are they ‘tutti frutti’ ensembles? Are they all built at once, or do they grow in phases?

Master’s Program

Lisa Ramsburg ARC 506b—Spring 2021 Proximity

Hannah Terry ARC 506b—Spring 2021 Proximity

100

Anna Kerr ARC 506b—Spring 2021 Proximity

102

The Professional Program Thesis

2021

103

Workbook

Each semester, thesis students are challenged to make an architectural response to a general thematic question. The theme is explored in workshops, stated as a written proposition and elaborated as a design proposal during the students’ final semester. Thesis topics are agreed upon by the faculty that 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 Landon Carter Collective Living and Learning

Infrastructure, Accessibility and Craft in the Checkerboard

Cole Cataneo Fresh Air Network

Jacob McCarthy Architecture in the Middle

Jonah Coe-Scharff Living on the (Lot) Line: Collective Housing for a Low-Rise American City

Ruta Misiunas New Housemates: A Domestic Response to Climate Change Christopher Myefski The Superior Trail

Hailey Craft Perverse Preservation as a New Architectural Strategy

Luis Fernando Muñoz New Grounds: A Post-Oil Vision

Chase Galis Leaky Buildings

Sonia Sobrino Ralston Utilizing Power

Larissa Guimaraes The Preservation Circus

Naomi Steinhagen Three Community Health Stations

Jane Ilyasova Industrial Farming

Arturo Uribe xxxxxxxx

Simon Lesina-Debiasi Public to the Public Matthew Maldonado urban (ep)ilogue: experiments with sonic landscapes Elena M’Bouroukounda Current and Currency: Master’s Program

Victor Rivas Valencia Equine Strip Yundong Yang Blending the Space of Production & Consumption: The Street as a Manufacturing Place

104

Landon Carter

Advisor: Monica Ponce de Leon

Collective Living and Learning The community college was conceived as the most egalitarian form of higher education. Yet, the institution has become a site of massive inequality. Despite offering low tuition, community colleges remain inaccessible due to a lack of affordable housing. Half of community college students experience housing insecurity and a fifth experience homelessness. This economic barrier necessitates change at a policy level, as well as a reimagining of the institution. The thesis proposes that community colleges must adapt to become places of dwelling in addition to learning. The thesis presents a new housing typology for community college campuses which can be configured to accommodate a multiplicity of sites and inhabitants. Topologically, the type is simply a closed curve which traces existing site conditions. The resulting closed form produces an internal landscape at two scales: a large public courtyard bounded by the curve, and an internal void of collective spaces terracing through the curve. In this new landscape, students collectively live, learn, and play, and in doing so, blur the boundaries between what is a college campus, housing, public space, and community amenity.

106

Cole Cataneo

Advisor: Cameron Wu

Fresh Air Network Fresh Air Network (FAN) proposes a system of clean air infrastructure in conjunction with the city of Hayward California’s public transportation system.

108

Jonah Coe-Scharff Advisor: Cameron Wu

Living on the (Lot) Line: Collective Housing for a LowRise American City Property relations may invisibly condition the social, but property lines visibly shape the everyday built environment. They overdetermine that typical residential scenario of a single-family house set back from the edges of its owner-occupied lot. What new forms of collective life might become imaginable, what new practices of economic solidarity might become possible, and what new patterns of urbanization might unfold, if we could imagine the relationship of the ubiquitous single-family house to its lot in other ways?

Imagined on a prototypical residential block in Englewood, NJ, these new typologies facilitate an urban strategy of densifying-in-place. Marginalized homeowners and renters face escalating cost burdens, shortages of affordable housing, and the threat of transit-induced gentrification. Adapting local zoning codes to permit certain kinds of development on shared side lots could spur the creation of low-cost housing, while giving control over neighborhood change to existing residents.

This thesis begins from a provocation to investigate the relationship between domesticity and property by reimaging the suburban lot line as a site for the design of inclusive and inclusionary housing. Living on the (lot) line introduces the friction necessary to reimage a series of property’s downstream consequences: on domestic typology, on forms of housing tenure, on the economic and political arrangements of development, and on the possibilities for collective life in suburbs and low-rise cities.

Incremental construction and varied collaborations between neighbors would result in a range of economic arrangements and architectural expressions. Piecemeal development might operate on the long-term hedge that a half-house along a lot line could be completed by a neighbor years later. As coordination becomes more appealing, infill housing could incorporate public alleyways and shared amenities, or even stitch existing houses into continuous, flexible mats. The new buildings’ roofs, expressed as folded plates, extend continuous lines across properties and buildings, celebrating the new structures’ difference without implying discontinuity.

Occupying the property line itself—and cross-stepping, sliding, and hopscotching across it—creates flexibility through topological indeterminacy. Double-enfilade, point-loaded plan types bring the newfound fungibility of the property line into the interior, where shifting jurisdictional boundaries create diverse apartments that can adapt over time.

110

Hailey Craft

Advisor: Cameron Wu

Perverse Preservation as a New Architectural Strategy The methods for the preservation of historic buildings is mostly concerned with merely salvaging the decorative and aesthetic qualities of the historic surface. However, this mentality can be pushed further to an extreme by giving these (single) surfaces a unified exterior (and therefore making them volumetric). In doing this and stripping away at many existing floor plates within the space allows for the perception of these preserved spaces as objects rather than only as decorated surface and image. The volumetric objectification and abstraction of these spaces made explicit in the building allows the even the general public to understand architectural issues (capital A) of type, sequence, spatial packing, and 3d relationships in xray vision—as if they were miniaturized and placed inside an analytical/axonometric drawing, yet also experiencing it through perspective. The ironic doubling down of the limited strategy of surface salvage emerges to produce an earnest architectural strategy of much greater ambition.

112

Chase Galis

Advisor: Liz Diller

Leaky Buildings This is a project about buildings and the many ways that they leak. It consists of a series of details designed to provide a more conscious exchange of environmental phenomena between interior and exterior spaces. They have been specifically designed for use in the construction or renovation of a house. And they could be easily modified for other kinds of buildings too. Details describe the seals, gaps, and seams that manage our relationship with the environments beyond our walls. This smallest scale of architectural intervention uses technical and aesthetic design to modify the behavior, performance, and experience of architectural space. Each detail in the project set takes a standard wall assembly, environmental systems component, or common site of a leak and uses their aptitude for environmental transmission to allow for planned, safe, and positive atmospheric exchange. Rather than keeping everything out, let’s let some things in.

114

SUPPORTING REPAIR HORIZON LINES

UP THE STEPS SECTION DETAIL

RHYTHMIC LANDING SECTION DETAIL

RHYTHMIC LANDING ASSEMBLY

SEEING THROUGH SECTION DETAIL

SUPPORTING REPAIR NEW COMPONENTS

Larissa Guimaraes Advisor: Elisa Silva

The Preservation Circus The Preservation Circus is an itinerant exhibition through threatened sites of Modern built heritage in Latin America. It hopes to awaken nostalgia for an utopian idea of the past, while projecting possible new futures for spaces and for culture. More in https:// preservar.me/

SUPPORTING REPAIR

116

Jane Ilyasova

Advisor: Paul Lewis

Industrial Farming By creating a new ground, this thesis offers the possibility of a place-based agriculture, constructed around the growth and production of fresh, local food. This new ground is inherently tied to the existing structural and social capacities of the buildings and neighborhoods it inhabits and it suggests the possibilities and benefits of blurring the distinction between the urban and industrial with the rural, pastoral, and productive.

118

Simon Lesina-Debiasi Advisor: Michael Meredith

Public to the Public This project tries to investigate the dynamics behind the making of public space and the implied impacts that neoliberal consumerism has on the creation and imagination of a public space. Through a network of workshops and tool libraries in combination with existing community gardens and local organizations it tries helping individuals and communities to both improve their homes and create new spaces within the urban fabric. Public to the Public imagines an infrastructure for the local and community driven creation of a public imaginary, programming abandoned sites, and opening new opportunities for the creation of community and identity.

120

Matthew Maldonado Advisor: Michael Meredith

urban (ep)ilogue: experiments with sonic landscapes Consistent infrastructural noise disenfranchises those without access to alternative forums for political, social, and community discourse. This thesis proposes an urban park as a sonic barrier between the elevated train line and residential housing on Park Avenue between E 99 St and E 106 St. The identified need for both sonic mediation and physical connectivity prompts a multipurpose architectural solution—a continuous surface that creates differentiated spatial relationships.

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Administration

Athletics

Food

Rest Stop

Education

Arts

Rest Stop

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Jacob McCarthy Advisor: Cameron Wu

Architecture in the Middle A design for a Safety Rest Area in Sherman, Illinois.

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Ruta Misiunas Advisor: Stan Allen

New Housemates: A Domestic Response to Climate Change “Ranch house” is a speculative proposal for an adaptation of the suburban ranch house in response to the environmental crisis. Global warming is forcing plant species to migrate in search of tolerable climates faster than physically possible. Additionally, these migration paths are blocked by suburban developments, ultimately endangering numerous plant species each year. For this reason, the structure’s form was manipulated to generate biodiversity in the backyard through stormwater collection and green roof infrastructure. The interior is completely reimagined to accommodate a life where homeowners must actively promote a more sustainable lifestyle. Overall, the project presents a near future where plants and humans cohabitate under one roof.

126

Christopher Myefski Advisor: Guy Nordenson

The Superior Trail The far off boundaries and remote interiors of the American North captivate the mind as a projective landscape of promise and escape. A vast territory defined only through canopy growth and mineral extraction. Long since conquered, this frontier continues to pull the American psyche. A cross-territory expedition is its inevitable surveyor. Estranged, this landscape archives the monuments of a not so distant past; airfields, missile batteries, low frequency transmitters, and radar stations. This thesis calls to question the agency of national landscapes and post-military infrastructures within the distended time of continual decay. Sited amongst the old and new growth forests of the American North, this project embarks upon a 280 mile hike through and across territories of the abandoned and the ‘natural’ in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Proposing a series of atemporal touristic encampments along a ‘northern’ expedition. The landscape invites further investigation while new station architectures inscribe the dormant with the sublime. A dangerous mix of leisure and decay, you are brought within the frameworks of magnanimity, and through observation and participation, this post-weaponized frontier is slowly humanized.

128

Luis Fernando Muñoz Advisor: Jesse Reiser

New Grounds: A Post-Oil Vision Megastructures have historically sought to further densify already metropolitan areas, and failed to propose a way to sustain social and economic mobility. Rather than relying on bigness as a means of urban densification, the megastructure becomes a new ground meant for suburban remediation. This thesis offers an alternative to current ideas of zoning and challenges past ideas of the generic “technocratic” human through the design of a new ground that is to serve as a network for working, living, and playing built upon the infrastructure of the mineral extraction industry, and the town that emerged as a result. This reclaims the territory, protects against natural disaster, and provides new spaces of production and leisure. The thesis also poses the question of style, with many. megastructures of the past relying on industrial aesthetics, this new ground pushes against the hegemony of past proposals and of the current built environment, designing for varying, but specific audiences. This scale is to be the testing ground of how architecture can contribute in creating new models of post-human sustainability that will create new environments that allow for the introduction of different non native species, using both animal and human labor, localized agriculture, and facilitating the sustained cohabitation of human and nonhuman life.

130

Sonia Sobrino Ralston Advisor: Erin Besler

Utilizing Power The United States’ ground, air, and water contains an immense amount of toxicity. As a result of industrial processes and urbanization, residues of toxics leave traces on our bodies and the environment, traces that often evade regulatory control, governance, and even public consciousness. This thesis triangulates around the problems presented by federal Superfund sites, current significant violators identified by the Environmental Protection Agency, and their impact on local communities in rural and suburban areas. Even as a federally-funded programs, the enormity of the scale of remediation, exacerbated effects from climate change, and the nearly-permanent nature of toxic residue necessitates continuous maintenance and care which our current systems do not offer to this nearly ubiquitous issue. Using an existing network of New Deal-era public utility buildings, Rural Electric Cooperatives, the thesis proposes to embed a space for environmental and toxics activist work to create community observatories in rural and suburban areas that typically do not face the same burden of proof as other environmental justice communities. In the age of environmental remediation and a greener, newer deal, this thesis aims to amend our idea of the public utility to include not just the transmission of electricity, but also in proposing the utility as a site for public education in the form of a community observatory. Though the problem of existing toxics is not one that can be removed, capped, or resolved, the opportunity to utilize a network of organizing power to increase awareness of its permanence, encourage its maintenance and cessation as a public utility network is critical. As a new model of public education and distribution centers for tools of environmental activism, these cooperatives can benefit from environmental organizing power, as opposed to just electrical power.

132

Naomi Steinhagen

Advisor: Mónica Ponce de León

Three Community Health Stations The US has the highest maternal and infant mortality rates among developed countries. Despite spending more per capita on health insurance than any country there is still a lack of access to basic care, especially amongst the most at risk populations. New Jersey is ranked 47th in the country for maternal health, where the maternal death rate for black women is 46.5%. As a reaction to the hospital as a singular and dominant insti tution, healthcare facilities must be diffused throughout and embedded within the communities they serve. There must be a creation of public institutions that are embedded into communities, with healthcare embedded into unifying social programs. Rather than regarding maternal and infant health by individual instances, it must be taken as a whole life process that is ubiquitous. Using the language of intersection and internal continuity, community health stations is an attempt to show that it is possible to have healthcare embedded within community spaces. Rather than the large convoluted spaces of hospitals, community health stations are small scale, and easily navigable with a clarity of program and use that are able to incorporate many scales and levels of privacy.

134

Yundong Yang

Advisors: Mario Gandelsonas, Christine Boyer

Blending The Space of Production & Consumption: The Street as A Manufacturing Place Manufacturing used to stay in the city in search of cheap labor. During globalization, the industry of mass production left the city and further left the country in search of even cheaper labor and raw materials. Some have concluded that manufacturing is dead in cities. However, studies have found that, in contrast to this common theory, some flexible and innovative small batch manufacturing have survived and continued to thrive. In New York for example, industries like food and beverage, customized furniture, apparel design and making, quick prototyping and hardware for exhibition/installation have successfully found their niche clients. The city is an attractive place as it gives better access to skilled workers, new technologies and platforms for shared resources. So why is the industry displacement still happening? It’s a battle between the manufacturers and developers, which some may call gentrification. The direct cause is the rising rent. When the developers come in, they turn industrial buildings into residential uses, and raise the land value. When the manufacturers can no longer afford, they leave. To some extent, the core of the battle is the space. What the developers are looking for is the space which can be turned into lucrative stores and apartments. What the manufacturers are looking for is also the space to expand their thriving business. The government now is using zoning and policy as a tool to reserve the land and control the rent to allow manufacturing to stay in the city, for instance, the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Sunset Park Industry City. But these are too separated from the city center.

The new manufacturing now calls for agglomeration, the kind of concentration of different thinkers, researchers, designers, makers and suppliers. To meet this agglomeration, we need to move the manufacturing zones back to the city center where most institutions and high-tech companies are located. Therefore, my project aims to claim more space in the city and create a decentralized infrastructure network for manufacturing. The proposal is to occupy the space just below the street and connect it to the nearby subway stations. Makers will turn this space into workshops, showrooms, and other incubator labs while the goods will be transported by the subway system. This will drastically reduce the needs for trucks, and accompanying with the assumption that cities will have less and less cars in the future, some lanes would be canceled and more space will be given to the pedestrians. The synergy between production and transportation for both human and goods will allow the commuting distance to be reduced and manufacturers can work closer to where they live. It’s also an opportunity to reorganize the underground infra structures such as cables, conduits, pipes and ducts. Most of these were built several decades ago, desperately demanding repairing and upgrading. The proposal will allow the city to maintain these infrastructures without digging and covering the street over and over again. It will set up a new foundation for the city to grow in the future Furthermore, my project aims to expose the manufacturing process and turn it into a new urban experience. By encountering various production scenes at different moments in the city, people will start to understand how daily products are made and where they come from. The knowledge of the packaged consumables on the shelf will extend to their origins. By making these processes visible and raising the awareness, manufacturing will no longer be overwhelmed by consumption and will again become the catalyst for urban growth.

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The Post-Professional Program Thesis

2021

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Workbook

The Post-Professional program culminates in a thesis in which design itself is considered a form of research. In lieu of a studio presentation, students exhibit their work at a gallery in New York City during their final semester, however due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2021 Post-Professional thesis exhibition was converted into an online gallery through a specially designed website. Utilizing Princeton’s unique interdisciplinary potential as a research university, students are free to seek advisers from within and outside the faculty of architecture. This tradition draws on architecture’s history that has incorporated a vast spectrum of disciplines from the humanities, arts, and sciences.

POST-PROFESSIONAL PROGRAM THESIS PROJECTS Nathaniel Banks and Yidian Liu Plastic Plastic Kaitlin Faherty Future Flush: Eco-Social Infrastructure for Emergent Public Space

Emmanuel Osorno On Softness: Images + Preservation Jeff Yinong Tao Evaluating Trees

Piao Liu Urban Cinematics: design of the Eastern Parkway at 5/10/15/50 FPS Tiantian Lou Weaving as Metaphor

Master’s Program

138

Nathaniel Banks and Yidian Liu Advisors: Paul Lewis, Guy Nordenson, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Nanako Umemoto

Plastic Plastic Every year, 150 million tonnes of plastic leaches into the world’s oceans. The extent of oceaning plastic contamination is rapidly approaching a critical level where there will soon be more plastic in the ocean by mass, than fish. Currently, the vast majority of plastic leaches into the oceans via polluted rivers, and coalesces into vast ‘plastic islands’ deep in the ocean. However, despite being aware of the points of discharge and coalescence, little has been attempted to collect waterborne plastics. This is because the extreme disparity between the minute scales of plastic pollutants, and their colossal areas of contamination, makes it challenging for humans to adequately comprehend, let alone manage. Our thesis situates architecture as a medium through which both scales of plastic pollution can be addressed, as a tool through which plastic pollutants can be consolidated into a manageable and perceptible scale. Focusing on the Pacific garbage patch and the mouth of the LA river as sites of intervention, this thesis speculates upon the development of novel architectural systems for the extraction and long term storage of aquatic plastic pollutants. Once implemented, our sites serve to consolidate plastic sediments from vast geographies of minute fragments, into a dense nucleation of plastic landscapes and architecture. Through its continued growth and mutation, the site becomes a lifeform for the accumulation and eventual digestion of plastic pollutants. As societies gradually transition away from plastics, towards less harmful alternatives, we anticipate the growth of the site to stagnate, transforming it into an artifact of bygone plastic consumption, all the while locking away plastics within the dense fabric of the city.

140

Kaitlin Faherty Advisor: Liz Diller

Future Flush: Eco-Social Infrastructure for Emergent Public Space This project works between infrastructural, architectural, and bodily scales to propose a reinvented concept for the public bathroom, situated in the space of a car lane on our near-future urban streets, where autonomous vehicles will fundamentally change the choreography of the street, and where the former spaces of the car are being tested for new programmatic possibilities. Focusing on Midtown Manhattan as a case study, where the need for public utilities is especially visible, the urban proposition requires an expanded yet carefully calibrated composition of bodily care programs: washing, expulsion, grooming, baby care, ablution and prayer, cooking, delivery points, digital connectivity, shelter, and shade. Recognizing that the history of the public bathroom is one of disinvestment and privatization, the material and economic cycling required to sustain the project in a primarily off-grid manner is calibrated at the scale of an architectural prototype. The case study prototype elaborates on the street presence and material assemblage of the proposition, taking the project to the scale of the room, the body, and the fixture, detailed in a way that is mass-producible and customizable, much like a car. The project plays on notions of efficiency to reinvent existing elements—a sink built into a door, a bench warmed by waste heat, furniture shared through a privacy screen. Between spaces and functions, the project looks to twist the legacy of efficiency to provoke small social moments. These custom fixtures produce double functions towards a consciousness of other bodies; actants and agents of change to move the legacy of the public bathroom away from shame and abjection, towards dignity and sharing and an expanded idea of comfort in public.

142

Piao Liu

Advisor: Stan Allen

Urban Cinematics: design of the Eastern Parkway at 5/10/15/50 FPS This thesis explores infrastructural designs based on multiple speeds and architectural designs from views on the road, in order to create multiple sets of urban cinematic experiences from movements and attention of details. The advancement of technology of speed has greatly changed how we register time and space in notations from individual movements to road traffic. It also changed how big and how fast our cities can be, and how the intersections between highway, roads, and local streets are designed. Differences in speed also determines the view from the road, more specifically, the scale of signs and relationship between buildings and street front. Speed also modifies the amount of information and resolution perceived. As near objects rush past more rapidly, they are perceived as blurs and attention may shift to more distance and more stable elements. Larger spaces and forms take demand. The scene shifts from detail to generality. This thesis brings this research to today’s existing infrastructure, the Eastern Parkway, to explore the speed and movements both in plan-based urban design, and architectural designs from elevations and perspectives. My questions for the thesis are how architectural operations can precisely control and design with motion, the amount of information perceived, and how to design a public space with various cinematic experiences for different speeds?

144

Tiantian Lou

Advisor: Stan Allen

Weaving as Metaphor “The beauty of the weaving metaphor is that each move made by the weaver keeps the whole fabric in view, much like the ruling of a state. For Plato, the aim of state making is justice, which means, in effect, weaving together the various social virtues without allowing one more than the other to dominate.” —Arthur Danto The thesis probes textile in architecture through both its materiality and its logic of assembly. The experiment intends to initiate an intimate relationship between body and the built environment through textile. The thesis first engages in the pliable and ephemeral materiality of textile. The softness of textile encourages bodily movements, and inviting inhabitants to configure their own surroundings. In contrast to the concrete geometric order imposed on us, textile really allows the built environment to be manipulated, creating fluid boundaries, and allowing varying degrees of contact. For centuries, the dominant ideal of architecture is the solid, resistant, and inflexible entity, having an enduring order upon the living scenarios around it. Textile as a building material creates spaces for the ephemeral, using its softness and temporality to incorporate the transient spatial needs.

Beyond the materiality of textile, the thesis investigates the construction logic of weaving as an organizing system that interlocks parts into a larger entity. Threads are connected together without joinery or adhesive, but a process of packing independent lines. Unlike knitting which involves continuous looping of yarn, weaving consists of a stack of individually piled elements. Each segment can be adjusted and removed, the fabric stills hold together. While performing independently, the integrity of weaving comes collectively, rooted in the tightly packed lines. The weaving logic requires the aggregation and density of small parts for the fabric to hold together. The thesis hopes to take on the part to whole logic that is specific to weaving and perform it onto built space across scale. The concept of spatial weave that is beyond the softness of the material is the essential. The current discussion of textile architecture is grounded in this Semperian model. Beyond the prehistoric and primitive hut model of textile architecture, the use of textile is not only a continuous one throughout history but also an increasing contemporary one, echoing the growing need for mobility in contemporary culture.

146

Emmanuel Osorno Advisor:Erin Besler

On Softness: Images & Preservation The high volume and rapid consumption of visual media circulating in our digital platforms have placed this content in the same playing field as news, reports, and studies that have been peer-reviewed, fact-checked, and corroborated. In this post-truth era, the consumer is constantly faced with the choice of determining what to believe and what to accept as real, evidencing the dwindling capacity of images to preserve the truth. As architects, we are producers of images: our modes of production lie within the distortive projections of drawings, the rationalizing simplicity of diagrams, and the realism of renderings. Each of these necessitate a translation of the real, suggesting that we are trained to operate within the scope of parafiction. Yet, as a profession, we have decided to stop producing images once the building has been designed or built, seldom engaging in other forms of media through which our buildings are perceived. This is particularly worrisome in regards to building preservation: The public does not understand or value buildings the same way as we do; yet, we fail to communicate it. By leveraging marketing, photography, and even propaganda, this thesis proposes to insidiously, if not forcefully, insert the image of two endangered buildings—the New Jersey Department of Health and Agriculture buildings—into existing forms of media through which our buildings circulate and gain value, seeking to create a media campaign to advocate for their preservation. The buildings are translated into several artifacts that can be easily consumed by the general public, exploiting existing structures of power and value to shift and influence the public perception of the buildings.

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Jeff Yinong Tao Advisor:Erin Besler

Evaluating Trees Today, of only 5 % of the world’s population, the US has consumed 28% of global wood production. The calculation of sustainable approaches encourages consumption and the conversion of the forest into timberland. A supposed equation that has led to more monetization of nature is itself problematic. This thesis proposes an alternative view that facilitates the industry’s interest in nature to cross the longstanding economic and ecological barriers. The project speculates aspects of standardization, manual assembly, and graphic identity through the design of a home shelter for forest rangers.

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Undergraduate Studios

2021

151

Workbook

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.

Undergraduate Program

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ARC 204 Junior Design Studio Professor Paul Lewis and Visiting Lecturer Annie Barrett with Assistant Instructors Kaitlin Faherty, Jonah Coe-Scharff, Ruta Misiunas

Introduction to Architectural Design

2021

153

Workbook

This is an introductory studio course in architectural design, examining the origins and conventions of representation in architecture. Spatial relationships, and the qualities of space itself, will be examined using photography, twodimensional projections of sectional planes (plan and section), computer models, and three-dimensional physical models. The studio is comprised of a series of sequential projects that develop both technical skills and conceptual thinking. Abstract and inventive thinking will be developed through a series of projects that transform spatial relationships from three dimensions into two dimensions, and from two dimensions into three. Particular emphasis will be paid to 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 will be examined through the introduction of site and program. Attention to craft, in both the making of two-dimensional drawings and three-dimensional models, will be emphasized as way of developing precision and abstraction in both thinking and making.

Undergraduate Program

154

Ayinde Bradford ARC 204—Spring 2021 Introduction to Architectural Design

156

Jack Green ARC 204—Spring 2021 Introduction to Architectural Design Spring & Fall Swings

Winter Rink

Spring & Fall Swings

158

Summer Pool

Paul Le Jonah Coe-Sch ARC

Jovan Aigbekaen ARC 204—Spring 2021 Introduction to Architectural Design

160

Sydney Berry ARC 204—Spring 2021 Introduction to Architectural Design

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Tara Frederick ARC 204—Spring 2021 Introduction to Architectural Design

15'-0" 9'-0"

9'-0" 15'-0" 9'-0"

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ARC 205 Junior Design Studio Professor Mario Gandelsonas and Princeton Mellon Fellow Adrián Lerner Patrón with Assistant Instructor Piao Liu

Interdisciplinary Design Studio

2021

165

Workbook

The objective of the course is 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 course includes a studio and a seminar with invited guest speakers. The studio will focus on the conventions of representation at different scales and the complex spatial thinking involved in architectural composition. The studio will be 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 threedimensional models. The seminar with invited guest speakers will address issues related to modernist architecture, landscape and urban water infrastructure in Brazil.

Undergraduate Program

166

Maya McHugh ARC 205—Fall 2020 Interdisciplinary Design Studio

168

Samantha Anderson ARC 205—Fall 2020 Interdisciplinary Design Studio

170

OVERALL STRU

Sophia Solganik ARC 205—Fall 2020 Interdisciplinary Design Studio

172

Zazuka Asatiani ARC 205—Fall 2020 Interdisciplinary Design Studio

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ARC 205 Junior Design Studio Visiting Lecturer Elisa Silva with Assistant Instructor Larissa Guimarães

Interdisciplinary Design Studio

2021

175

Workbook

The objective of the studio is to introduce students to the various fields, scales and audiences of design including architecture, landscape and urban design through an interdisciplinary approach that considers the historic, economic, social and environmental aspects defining each intervention in the built environment. The course will also analyze and discuss the opportunities and constraints embedded in the different modes of representation available to architects as well as the complex spatial thinking involved in architectural composition. The studio will be structured through three assignments that focus on different historic time periods, cultures, geographic regions and scales. Students will consider the effects ideologies, economic structures, migration and instruments of representation have on the design of objects and space. They will become versed in the use of orthographic two-dimensional projection (plan, section and isometric drawings), mapping, diagraming and computer aided design. A lecture series with outside invited guests from various disciplines will further strengthen the course´s interdisciplinary content and provide different angles and points of entry for each time period, scale and design modality.

Undergraduate Program

176

Yousef Ebied ARC 205—Spring 2021 Interdisciplinary Design Studio

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ARC 350 Junior Design Studio Visiting Lecturer Elisa Silva with Assistant Instructor Elena M´Bouroukounda

Delaware Raritan Canal

2021

179

Workbook

The objective of the studio is to build on student’s previous studio experiences such as ARC 204 and ARC 205, and further develop their design knowledge and skills. Students will become more facile at analyzing sites and programs, as well as designing in various media including hand drawing, computer aided drawing, model making and 3-dimensional representations. The semester will focus on the design of an addition to an existing unused masonry structure along the Delaware Raritan canal, approximately 3 miles from Princeton University’s campus. Students will contemplate how people use and perceive this piece of infrastructure, how it defines the landscape and contemplate opportunities for its transformation. Projects should ultimately reflect an awareness of the existing site and project spatial forms and environments that encourage human interaction, contemplation, exercise, gardening and or other activities. The studio will be structured with a brief research exercise at the beginning of the semester, followed by the production of a group virtual site model, as well as individual smallscale models each student will build independently. The semester concludes with the design of a building of modest scale and complexity developed into a full set of drawings, 3-dimensional representations and a model that fits into their own independent site model. Special attention to the quality and effectiveness of representations will be consistently considered in all drawings produced throughout the semester.

Undergraduate Program

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Avigail Gilad ARC 350—Fall 2020 Delaware Raritan Canal

GROUND FLOOR

10m

SECOND FLOOR

10m

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Felix Chen ARC 350—Fall 2020 Delaware Raritan Canal

an $

r Plan

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Megan-Pai ARC 350—Fall 2020 Delaware Raritan Canal

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TRANSVERSE 186 SECTIONS

Oluwatobiloba Ajayi ARC 350—Fall 2020 Delaware Raritan Canal

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ARC 351 Junior Design Studio Visiting Lecturer Anda French with Assistant Instructors Jacqueline Mix, Juan Pablo Ponce de Leon

Common Goals. Child’s play + collectives

2021

189

Workbook

In multiple forms of intentional living, the notion of the commoning of space, resources, interactions, and communication is central to the ethos of the community. These communities are often worlds unto themselves, in which individuals and groups of households commit to various forms of the sharing of everyday life. Recent interest in these intentional forms of commoning has focused on how they address societal-scale issues like loneliness, environmental impact, social justice, childcare, health advocacy, aging, political polarization. However, given the time and cost commitment involved in creating these ground-up communities and developments, the number of intentional communities in the US remains at approximately 1200. Can communing as an ethos be deployed in more nimble and accessible ways to lift this work from the fringe and place it squarely in the middle? This studio will ask you to consider how a set of simple spatial and architectural interventions that prioritize the notion of commoning within the existing residential fabric of Princeton, might produce similarly meaningful impact. By seeding commons thinking and collective action into our existing reality, can we prototype simple proposals that could reassess zoning, land use, resource allocation, and property, while encouraging mutual community support? The site is in downtown Princeton, and you will be asked to consider how six properties, containing 12 residential units in 5 houses, along with one commercial space in a single building, might reconsider their property lines, land use and resources to produce common interior and exterior spaces. As a way into this problem, we will use the lens of childhood to rethink the value of, nooks, gardens, grounds, and shared spaces. Can we use children’s play as a lens to rethink land use and collective resource sharing? All design interventions you produce will be driven by the lens of childhood development, childcare and community building as we study the roots of socialization, sharing, and social justice through children’s learning and play. Undergraduate Program

190

Sandy Lee ARC 351—Spring 2021 Common Goals, Child’s play + collectives

192

Sean Horton ARC 351—Spring 2021 Common Goals, Child’s play + collectives

194

Theodora Petrovich ARC 351—Spring 2021 Common Goals, Child’s play + collectives

196

Warren Yuan ARC 351—Spring 2021 Common Goals, Child’s play + collectives

198

ARC 404 Advanced Design Studio Associate Professor Marshall Brown

Homestudio

2021

199

Workbook

The Advanced Design Studio examines architecture as cultural production, taking into account its capacity to structure physical environments and reflect social organizations. This studio will focus on the consideration of architectural work, its associated habits, tools, infrastructure, and accommodations, integrated within the domestic context. Students will engage these issues through the design of a home and studio for an architect.

Undergraduate Program

200

Clara Roth ARC 404—Fall 2020 Homestudio

202

Undergraduate Thesis Projects

2021

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Workbook

The senior thesis is a detailed project, presenting a wellargued 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 is agreed upon with the adviser and thesis committee. The final presentation and oral defense of the senior thesis in the spring constitutes a section of the departmental examination.

UNDERGRADUATE THESIS PROJECTS Natalie Lu Beyond Classicism: The New York State Theater & “Rubies” Anoushka Mariwala Larger Than Life: Space, Politics, and Ritual in Mumbai’s Ganesh Chaturthi Festival Halima Matthews Carnival and Architecture in the Caribbean: Re-centering the Focus on Culture in Trinidadian Design

Clara Roth A New City Streetscape: Investigating Public Space Programs in New York City under COVID-19 Luke Turner Comfortable Courtyards: Thermal Solutions To An Air Conditioned World

Chitra Parikh Reclaiming the Corridor: Modulating Circulation and Air Transmission to Build Flexibility in Clinical Design

Undergraduate Program

204

Natalie Lu

Adviser: Cameron Wu

Beyond Classicism: The New York State Theater & “Rubies” Architecture and dance are similar in that they deal with space. Architecture delimits space, while dance moves in it. Although architecture is generally static, it facilitates and influences movement by requiring people move in relation to it, whether it be going around, above, below, or through it. According to architect Philip Johnson, architecture is not merely a built structure. It needs to be experienced in sequence and in time. Similarly, dance becomes choreography when it is put in an ordered sequence. George Balanchine explained that choreographed movement is “used to produce visual sensations” and “create the impression of intensity and beauty”. How can architecture, in its fixity, choreograph the dynamic movement of people? This paper will compare Balanchine’s choreography for “Rubies” from Jewels to Johnson’s design for the New York State Theater (now David H. Koch Theater) at Lincoln Center, to investigate the ways in which their creative decisions were influence by the classical style. Analyses will focus on the spatial procession and parti of the theater as well as the formations and movement diagrams of the ballet.

2021

205

Workbook

State Theater auditorium, view from stage

Undergraduate Program

206

Chitra Parikh Adviser: Erin Besler

Reclaiming the Corridor: Modulating Circulation and Air Transmission to Build Flexibility in Clinical Design Both historically and conceptually in architecture, the corridor has oscillated in favorability. Post-World War II ‘anti-corridic’ sentiments characterize the corridor as lacking architectural merit, evidenced in its sharp decline in popularity despite its increasingly functional qualities and use—for instance, as a means of circulation and egress. While much of this literature has focused on the corridor in residential and office buildings, there exists little contemporary discussion on the role of the corridor’s value in the specific context of the hospital. This paper assesses the value of the corridor in the hospital specifically through an investigation of its ability to build flexibility via modular design, analyzed through the example of infectious disease and resulting pandemic surge. Amidst a pandemic, spatial understanding and adaptability are key to optimizing medically oriented responses. Under normal circumstances, negative pressure isolation rooms are the standard of care for highly infectious diseases. A pandemic surge, however, poses new concerns: at once, the hospital must increase the number of negative pressure isolation rooms while also converting open spaces to accommodate new testing sites, patient check-in areas, and acute care facilities. Hospital design has long negotiated related concerns of disease transmission, circulation, hygiene, and ventilation. These clinical issues have directly resulted in the development of various hospital typologies (such as the linked pavilion-style plan and the “podium on a platform” typology). This thesis i dentifies significant historical conversations linking questions of building design, disease spread, and flexibility through examples such as Alvar Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium and Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Hospitals. Moving towards the current day, 2021

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Workbook

I then identify spatial demands on the hospital in responding to COVID-19. Ultimately, through in-depth case studies of spatial design modifications made at The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City and Rush University Medical Center, I investigate the disregard of the corridor, particularly in spaces of health, through the lens of circulation and ventilation. In the case of infectious disease, the corridor mediates containment through measured control of both the circulation of air and the circulation of people. Thus, this thesis argues that the corridor has an integral role in the typology of the modern hospital, indicating that the corridor’s value can be derived from the role it plays in the restructuring of hospitals as they anticipate and accommodate surge.

IV Drips and Monitors Placed Outside Patient Rooms i n Hallways During COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020, Redesigning Hospital Spaces on the Fly by Ariadne Labs and MASS Design Group, p.5.

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Clara Roth

Adviser: M. Christine Boyer

A New City Streetscape: Investigating Public Space Programs in New York City under COVID-19 In light of the global COVID-19 pandemic, cities around the world have implemented pedestrianization programs to provide safe spaces for people to physically distance while being outside. In New York City, four new public space programs emerged over the summer of 2020 to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus, facilitate the reopening of businesses, and allow residents to safely spend time outdoors. All of these programs entailed the transformation of vehicular roadways into pedestrian priority spaces, contributing to and accelerating an existing trend towards pedestrianizing the city. This paper broadly investigates the benefits and drawbacks of these novel pedestrianization programs, their spatial impacts on the city’s public spaces and their social and economic impacts on the city’s residents over the course of the past year. The programs have been successful in terms of increased visibility and promotion, participant eligibility, ease of application and approval, and communication and collaboration between city agencies and communities. However, the accelerated timeline under which the programs were implemented also led to hidden barriers and unintended consequences, such as prescriptive and inhibitive program regulations, inconsistent inspections and policy enforcement, and failure to address existing urban inequalities in the city. Moreover, this paper explores the interplay of different actors in governing the development of urban public spaces, with a specific focus on the role of the architect as related to COVID-19 in New York City. Given the benefits and drawbacks of the novel public space programs, the process of pedestrianization was ambiguous at times and required expert 2021

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navigation. As both design work and community engagement were critical for the implementation of the new programs, architects had to take on a more diverse set of roles over the course of the pandemic. Aside from their traditional services of providing expertise construction knowledge and creative design work, architects increasingly took on the role of community agents for underserved neighborhoods in need of help.

from top: DIY Barrier, Custom Barrier, Flexible-use Barrier

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Luke Turner

Adviser: Forrest Meggers

Comfortable Courtyards: Thermal Solutions To An Air Conditioned World The purpose of this writing is to study the thermal capabilities of courtyards, identify their possible effect within suburban homes and argue that they provide a perfect solution to current and future problems related to thermal comfort, caused by air conditioning. I will introduce the problem regarding thermal comfort by discussing the history of AC becoming normalized within the american home and its repercussions. As this technology slowly became an essential within the home, its original intentions became distant while the exterior of the home became separate. The mass production of air conditioning marked a large shift in its use, which can still be noticed today as thermal comfort has become subjective. Following the normalization of air conditioning is also around the time that the suburbs were discovered and deemed separation between families and their homes . Around the mid 20th century during the cold war, people began to be dispersed from the city as ecotechnologies began to be implemented within the home, like the solar house. Using the creation of the suburbs that followed the cold war, I will establish my argument as being purely related to central air conditioning in family homes and also relate it to the current political push for more efficient ones. Advancements in new thermal technologies continued and followed up to today but do not have the same adaptability and or level of thermal comfort that courtyards provide. Throughout my studies I will be calculating thermal comfort using the predicted mean vote (PMV) and the predicted percentage of dissatisfied (PPD), which was created in thermal comfort studies by Povl Ole Fanger. As well as using the Standard-55 created by ASHRAE as a more current approach to calculating thermal comfort. Introducing the calculations of thermal comfort, I will show examples of the thermal issues within air conditioned houses. I also must first find how courtyards are able to provide thermal 2021

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comfort before looking at how they perform. By looking at different designs of courtyards along with present environmental aspects, a detailed discussion on how they provide thermal comfort will be held. Taking my own data from courtyards around Princeton’s campus will present a more personal discussion of comfort values and how they differ from the indoor environments surrounding these outdoor spaces. Eventually finding that courtyards are an adaptive element to a home that can provide a universal level of thermal comfort, providing connections between people, the home and the outdoors and an overall better quality of life. I hope to give the reader the tools to have their own discussion on thermal comfort as well.

1971 Lennox Air Conditioning: What a Valentine vintage print ad

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Doctoral Degree in Architecture

The Ph.D. Program

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The interdisciplinary nature of the doctoral (Ph.D.) program stresses the relationship of architecture, urbanism, landscape, and building technologies to their cultural, social, and political milieus. Supported by strong affiliations with other departments in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, the program offers a comprehensive approach to the study of the field. Students interact with their peers to sustain individual projects in a context of collective research.

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History and Theory Track The Ph.D. committee sets the course requirements for each student according to his or her previous experience, specialized interests, and progress through the program. For the first two years, each student engages in coursework and independent study 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 and result in a full-length paper. Of the twelve courses, at least six must be taken within the School of Architecture. During the first year of residence, a two-term 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. Technology Track Initiated in 2014, the technology track Ph.D. program 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 PhD 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. The program requires the student to identify a research focus through courses inside and outside the school of architecture including fields such as computer science, artificial intelligence, robotics, energy systems and environmental science. The course plan will be developed with the technology track committee to develop a coherent research direction. A required two-semester proseminar will expose the students to the necessary experimental tools, literature review processes, and methods for innovative scientific hypothesis generation and analysis. In order to sit for the General Examination, the student is required to complete 10 courses, at least 8 of which must be taken for credit. 2021

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Recently Completed Dissertations in History and Theory The wide range of possible research topics is illustrated by the following dissertations: 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, 1895–1939, 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 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); advisor: 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 Ph.D. Program

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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 González Galán, Circulating Interiors: The Logics of Arredamento and the Furnishing of National Imaginaries in Italy 1922–1945 (2018); advisors: Lucia Allais and Beatriz Colomina Vanessa Grossman, A Concrete Alliance: Modernism, Communism, and the Design of Urban France, 1958–1981 (2018); advisors: Lucia Allais and Jean-Louis Cohen 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 Joseph Bedford, Creativity’s Shadow: Dalibor Vesely, Phenomenology and Architectural Education (1968–89) (2017); advisor: Lucia Allais Daria Ricchi, From Storia to History (and Back): Fiction, Literature, and Historiography in Postwar Italian Architecture (2016); advisor: Spyros Papapetros 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 2021

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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 Paul B. Preciado, Gender, Sexuality, and the Biopolitics of Architecture from the Secret Museum to Playboy (2012); advisor: Beatriz Colomina

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Ph.D. Proseminars

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ARC 571 Ph.D. Proseminar Professor Beatriz Colomina

Architecture in the Age of Pandemics Architecture and medicine have always been tightly interlinked. Architectural discourse weaves itself through theories of body and brain, constructing the architect as a kind of doctor and the client as patient. Every age has its signature afflictions and each affliction has its architecture. The age of bacterial diseases, particularly tuberculosis, gave birth to modern architecture, to white buildings detached from the “humid ground where disease breeds,” as Le Corbusier put it. The discovery of streptomycin put an end to that age. In the postwar years, attention shifted to psychological problems. The architect was not seen just as a doctor but as a shrink, the house not just a medical device for the prevention of disease, but for providing psychological comfort, “nervous health.” The twenty-first century is the age of neurological disorders: depression, ADHD, borderline personality disorders, burnout syndrome and allergies—the “environmentally hypersensitive” unable to live in the modern world. But pandemics have returned. With COVID-19, a virus is completely reshaping architecture and urbanism and once again disease exposes the structural inequities of race, class and gender. Will architectural discourse and practice likewise reshape itself? This PhD pro-seminar explores architectural research techniques through collaborative investigation of a specific issue facing the field. This year the issue is the architecture of pandemics. Rather than study research methods in the abstract, students will actively carry out detailed research on a topic of their choice related to the overall theme and reflect upon its limits and potentials in a collaborative exploration. Ph.D. Program

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After a series of two introductory sessions on the relationship between illnesses and architecture, each seminar will be dedicated to the architectural and urban consequences of a different pandemic, medical technology or theory of health proposed by the participants. Particular attention will be paid to the transcalar implications of illnesses from body, to furniture, to interior, to building, neighborhood, city and globe. All students will be required to make a presentation during at least one of the sessions and write a term paper. The syllabus itself is treated as a collaborative project worked on throughout the semester, with the session’s topics and bibliography proposed by the students. The research project of the semester will be carried through to realization in the form of a book, a conference, or an exhibition organized by the students in subsequent semesters. Last year’s seminar on Illness and Architecture, for example, culminated in an e-flux online publication series entitled Sick Architecture, which will start coming out in September. 2021

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ARC 572 Ph.D. Proseminar on Historiography: Associate Professor Spyros Papapetros

On the Methodologies of Architectural History Architectural authors are rarely aware of the methodologies they use. This overview of the major historical writings on architecture from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries aims to raise that awareness. As opposed to a linear survey of the various histories of architecture, the seminar examines the varying attitudes of architectural historians towards the uses and abuses of history (and theory) as well as their individual grasping of historical time. Issues to be discussed include historicism, anachronism, revival, prehistory, and post-histoire.

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Ph.D. Dissertation Abstracts

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Martín Cobas Sosa

LIMINAL CREATURES/LIMINAL TOPOGRAPHIES: Rhetorics of Excess in the New World Brazilian modernity was born “creaturely,” often through imaginary or fantastical beings, from Jean de Léry’s cannibales to Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma. Triggered by creation (as Kreatur), taxonomy (as specimen), or tragedy (as monster), by rhetorical declination or extravagant imagery, the creature exposed our “animal reserve” and unsettled the space of reason to become a tool of translation in a modernizing society in search of a topical idiom. Yet, how does the creaturely operate in architecture? Partly motivated by the emergence of the creaturely as a ubiquitous trope in the post-humanities— from zoopoetics to the turn to ontology, this dissertation proposes an alternate genealogy of Brazilian modern architecture and complicates those categories that have been blithely applied to histories of modernization, including its teleological inevitability. Polochons (double-headed pigs), monkeys, Birman cats, urubus (ravens), an inventory of cockroaches … but also, irrespective to exteriorities and Kingdom, half-living beings, herbariums and Brasilianas, epiphytes and geologies, an assemblage of alterecologies that facilitated provisional exchanges (and enchantments). The inflection that I place on the creaturely is aimed at unveiling a non-linguistic rhetoric of alterity that remained an enduring marker—often expressed in the form of taxonomical perplexities, already at work in the Age of Exploration—throughout Brazil’s twentieth century and helped articulate difference as newness. Through a series of critical interventions that articulate subjects (human and otherwise), objects-artifacts, and their milieus, the dissertation hypothesizes that modernization in Brazil was the result of coexisting and often conflicting ontologies of figuration which Ph.D. Program

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were inextricably linked to, and operated on par with, strategies of spatialization. The dissertation thus traces the work of Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992), framed alongside that of French sociologist Roger Bastide (1898-1974), and Czech-born philosopher and media theorist Vilém Flusser (1920-1991). The multifarious ways in which these protagonists have engaged the creaturely cannot be categorized as merely metaphorical but are rather to be understood as continuous with their strategies of resistance (social, cultural, political)—i.e. constitutively and not derivatively. The history of the creaturely modern foreshadows what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls a métaphysique cannibale. Is it therefore possible to conceive of architecture as a liminal creature?

Pigeon atop Assis Chateaubriand’s stone at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo’s ground-level plaza. Photograph: Martín Cobas, 2018.

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Michael Faciejew

Building “Worldwide Society”: The Architecture of Documentation, 1895–1939 Between nineteenth-century print culture and the post-World War II era of information, an alliance was forged between modern architecture and the discourse of documentation, a forerunner of today’s information science. European proponents of documentation science forecasted the imminent substitution of the book by a comprehensive set of informational media that would create a new, ostensibly international public sphere. Taking as a starting point the work of the Belgian internationalist and founder of documentation science Paul Otlet, including his collaboration in the 1920s with Le Corbusier on the iconic Mundaneum project, the dissertation examines the modernization of early twentieth-century “memory institutions” (libraries, museums, archives, and administrative offices) to uncover how a technical understanding of information in francophone Europe reconfigured the assumed relationship between the order of knowledge and the order of society. It examines institutions such as the International Institute of Bibliography, the Solvay Institute of Sociology, the Union Internationale des Villes, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, where designers such as Constant Bosmans and Henri Vandeveld, Louis Van der Swaelmen, and Michel Roux-Spitz crafted a modernization agenda rooted in the rationalization of intellectual labor. Tracing an interdisciplinary group of architects, planners, documentalists, librarians, politicians, sociologists, and scientists, the dissertation identifies an alternate genealogy for the principles of architectural modernism, locating its roots not in an industrial paradigm but an informational one. Although French and Belgian proponents of documentation leveraged the discourses of neutrality and internationalism in their pursuit of a “worldwide society,” the networked conception of Ph.D. Program

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documents they promoted inherited the ideologies of empire and expansionism that shaped the long nineteenth century. The chapters analyze the transformation of four spatial notions that underlie the historiography of modern architecture (network, city, museum, and library) to show how the bureaucratic apparatus of documentation science validated the imperializing self-evidence that to organize information is to organize the world. At multiple scales, this architecture of “Big Data” veiled nationalistic and colonial agendas which thrust a problematic dimension of the European project of civilization into a proto-informational era.

Organizational diagram for an international network of institutions contributing to the reconstruction of Belgium after World War I. From Louis van der Swaelmen, Préliminaires d’Art Civique: mis en relation avec le “Cas clinique” de la Belgique (1916).

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