WSOA Thesis 2025

capstone Graduate Thesis 2025

Woodbury School of Architecture

WSOA DEAN HEATHER FLOOD

The capstone projects at Woodbury School of Architecture embody critical, technical, and theoretical frameworks for understanding the world—and for imagining alternative futures. Grounded in ethics, students engage with pressing issues, explore innovative solutions, and design environments that challenge how we build and inhabit the world.

Though these projects mark the culmination of a rigorous course of study, they open new doors and leave us with possibilities for shaping a better future.

Congratulations to all the students. My deepest thanks for showing us not only the world as it is, but as it could and should be.

UNDERGRADUATE programs

Applied Computer Science - Media Arts: Thesis II

Professor Echo Theohar

As students progress through the ACSMA program they are tasked with reconciling the “technical” with the “artistic”, often discovering along the way that these terms are not so different at all. With the goal of fostering cross-disciplinary individuals who look toward the future of their fields, the ACSMA thesis track pushes students to interrogate their relationship with currently available software tools and imagine alternatives that enhance the way we live, work, and play. This is accomplished via an iterative prototyping methodology where students have the freedom to explore a creative gesture or idea with the scaffolding of 3 years of engineering experience in their toolbelts. Our graduates seek to improve our experience of technology through a critical, nuanced, and imaginative eye — a perspective that is increasingly valuable in a swiftly approaching future

—ECHO THEOHAR

Maxine Inc. is an innovative technology startup dedicated to transforming the way people engage with fitness through cutting-edge augmented reality (AR) experiences. Our flagship mobile application offers a unique blend of immersive technology and personalized workout guidance, designed specifically for young professionals balancing demanding schedules and wellness goals. We recognize that not everyone has the time or flexibility to attend the gym regularly, which is why our app delivers adaptive, on-the-go routines that fit seamlessly into daily life. Whether users are looking for a high-intensity session, a restorative rest-day routine, or simply a way to stay consistent, Maxine empowers them to take control of their fitness journey anytime, anywhere.

Antonio Tayborn Maxine Inc.

Architecture: Studio 10

Section 1 | Professor Matthew Gillis, AIA

The Always Already Architecture research course and Architecture, It’s About Time studio asked students to position, provoke, and implicate themselves at the threshold of architectural productionaand meaning. Central to this challenge was the engagement with the liminal condition of the water’s edge—a boundary that exists between land and water, embodying both physical and metaphorical thresholds. In this context, students were tasked with critically examining the ontological status of architecture, understanding it not only as a constructed object but also as a responsive system that reacts and adapts to the environment around it. Students explored architecture’s role within the shifting environmental, material, and phenomenological boundaries of contemporary society, offering new perspectives on the agency and potential of building architecture in the context of an increasingly uncertain and mutable world.

—MATTHEW GILLIS, AIA

The Promethean Lake is a long-duration architectural intervention sited in California’s Owens Valley. As climate conditions worsen and existing dust mitigation strategies collapse under their own water demands, the project casts vast sail-like membranes across the dry lakebed, capturing airborne dust into berms that reshape the landscape over time. Eventually, with the obsolescence of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, water returns—slowly and unevenly— reanimating the lake. The headquarters, once instrumental, becomes sedimented into memory and terrain. Designed as both research headquarters and environmental register, the project archives human ambition, ecological collapse, and the slow return of water to a scarred basin.

The Promethean reference speaks to the hubris of human intervention—the theft of natural order in pursuit of progress, and the long shadow such actions cast. Like Prometheus’s fire, the Aqueduct brought life and expansion at great environmental cost. This project confronts that legacy, offering a counter-myth rooted in endurance, repair, and eventual surrender to time.

Victor Ortiz

The Promethean Lake

PORTÉE explores the adaptive reuse of a shipping vessel as a performing arts complex at the Port of Long Beach, integrating movement as a spatial and generative force in architecture. Rooted in the French term portée —to carry, to bear, or to extend—the name evokes the transmission of force and the spatial reach of both body and structure. In ballet, a porté refers to being lifted or carried through space, mirroring architecture’s capacity to suspend and transfer energy across form. Architecture and dance share a reliance on movement—not as something that occupies space, but as a medium that constructs it. Motion becomes form through force, rhythm, resistance, and trajectory. Reimagined as a performing arts center dedicated to krump, the vessel engages the port’s kinetic landscape—tides, cranes, and cargo. Shipping containers form theatrical facades, preserving maritime materiality. Boundaries dissolve, yielding an evolving stage where performance, infrastructure, and architecture converge in constant motion.

Redrawing the River explores how alternative forms of representation can inform and produce design methodologies and logics within the Los Angeles River. The project reimagines a 1-mile stretch of the river near Downtown LA as a sequence of platforms and public venues that transform the concrete channel into a dynamic civic space. Through non-hierarchical and sequential representation, the river is framed as a continuous, malleable field, allowing for dispersed interventions that connect surrounding communities without relying on a singular architectural monument. By rethinking the river’s edge and embracing the dichotomous presence of water, the project suggests new habitation strategies that integrate territory, architecture, and human activity during all conditions of the river. Representational strategies are reshaped as a design tool that drives both process and outcome.

Jose Reyes Redrawing the River

Vanessa Villegas

Channeling the Boundary

Perception shapes how we experience and interpret spaces when the boundary between the built and natural environment manipulates the perception of reality. Channeling the Boundary confronts the hard concrete boundary of the LA River that separates the water’s edge from the landscape. The boundary of the channel shifts when it pushes further into the Los Feliz Golf Course, an underutilized property. The site is reconditioned into a community based bank that bridges the site with the waters edge through simulacra. The transformation challenges the perception of nature through the seasonal flooding, reflection, and imitation to simulate the natural environment that is carefully curated and meant to reflect back to reality.

Feararium investigates a psychological phobia of the ocean and explores the caustics at the water’s edge. The Feararium is a procession into the depths of thalassophobia where the atmosphere incrementally intensifies the exposure of the ocean. Large acrylic panels visually shift in gradient translucencies modulating light and depth as one descends. As the boundaries of fear are tested, beauty emerges in the tension within the extensive scale of the deep. At each gradient shift, an exit tunnel is integrated allowing an escape, shaping the experience through personal limits and self awareness. As the fear is overcome, it is met with a visual reward of vibrant caustics transforming the once-threatening depths into a mesmerizing atmosphere.

Nour Fayek Feararium: Caustic Depths

Natalya Estrada

It’s Your Fault: Reconstructing Memory

An uncomfortable aspect of life is to confine our experiences to time, in this way our memory becomes a beacon of truth for us all, as we recollect key moments that are heightened by our senses. This project explores memory through the ephemeral qualities of architectural materials, where memory takes form in malleable elements through casting, impressing, and encrusting natural elements within the site’s immediate context. Influenced by the San Andreas Fault, the work exacerbates the visual, auditory, and tangible aspects of earthen breakage and become artificially reconstructed out of industrial and modern materials, emphasizing a contrast between natural and human constructed languages, and enhancing our understanding of human condition.

Excavating to Reveal is situated alongside the Mojave River’s Transition Zone in the Pacific Palisades Ranch, a series of volumetric impressions created will be serving as a tool to shape human perception and spatial experience. It seeks to engage with the Mojave River’s hidden flow and its moments of emergence through a series of carved interventions that shape spatial perception, redefine material presence, and create immersive environmental experiences. The excavation undergoes the process of unseen forces shaping the landscape while integrating human interaction with the ephemeral qualities of water, terrain, and atmospheric conditions.

Valerie Flores Excavating to Reveal

Alina Varzhapetyan

The Salt Spine

The Salt Spine preserves both the topography of the coastline and the continuity of the coastal experience. Located along the exclusive 17 Mile Drive in Monterey, California, it challenges the site’s privatization by introducing a public promenade—a social and ecological “spine” embedded within the bluffs that contrasts the privately accessible road above. This intervention redefines the edge between land and sea by nesting circulation and gathering spaces within the landscape, while a sea wall-based ecological infrastructure provides long-term protection from erosion. Key public programs—including a welcome center, café, and coastal viewpoints—are placed strategically along the path to activate and diversify the experience. Rejecting conventional suburban sprawl and luxury waterfront development, The Salt Spine reframes coastal occupation as a form of preservation—proposing an adaptable, site-specific framework that promotes environmental longevity and inclusive access to the shoreline.

WILD TRACES explores adaptive reuse within the abandoned Surfridge community, currently knows as the LAX dunes. Embracing reflective nostalgia –The idea of the past as irretrievable yet a source for interpretation and inspiration– By overlaying rigid parcel lines, vegetation patterns, and shifting dune topography. Generating interventions that preserve and retrieve remnants of the past such as material and ruin infrastructure; redefining its spatial significance as a living coastal landscape that actively interacts with the defined interventions. Conservation and rehabilitation spaces that invites the public to educate them and allow them to experience the fauna and flora of the dunes.

Valerie Hernandez Mata WILD TRACES

Elena Gharibyan Camera Obscura

Camera Obscura proposes an embedded observatory at McWay Falls, using camouflage and subtractive architecture to dissolve into the landscape rather than stand apart from it. Carved into the cliffs beneath Pacific Coast Highway, the project conceals itself through shadow, negative space, and natural materiality. Rammed earth, reinforced concrete, and excavated rock blend with the coastal palette, while openings are minimized to frameless slits of light and view. Inspired by ancient underground settlements and natural camouflage systems, the structure hides in plain sight, resisting spectacle. As visitors move through a sequence of recessed chambers and open-air voids, the architecture reveals itself slowly—favoring disappearance over declaration and redefining presence through absence.In direct opposition to billboard architecture, this project questions visibility as a metric of value, offering a new mode of inhabiting sensitive terrain through quiet, immersive concealment.

Where Edges Dissolve explores our perception of architecture within the ever-changing Mojave Wash. Chromaticity and moirés are utilized to create dissolution of spatial understanding through overlaying, shading, and reflecting. Scale influences human interaction with the built form through changes in proximity. The contrast of colors, patterns, and scale along the muted tones of the desert fade into the shifting backdrop of the gradient sky. Positioned between two man-made lakes and a natural wash, the project intertwines the artificial and natural water edges. The intervention at the artificial edge involves the channelization of a river flowing from the lakes, while the natural edge is introduced to a permeable structure at the wash. Manipulating the edge of water in a desert fosters a deeper connection between the built environment and its natural surroundings, highlighting the transient and fluid nature of the wash.

William Abraamyan Where Edges Dissolve

Britanni Dighero

T.U.F.A. (Threshing Urban Ferrocement Assembly) redefines the act of gathering construction materials as a process of cultivation rather than extraction. Inspired by the natural formation of tufa towers, the project explores how biologically grown minerals can generate new forms of architecture. Located in the exclusively industrial city of Vernon, along the Los Angeles River, the site becomes a testing ground where geology, biology, and design converge.

Rather than serving as a container for research, T.U.F.A., a Mineral Research, Development & Manufacturing Facility, actively participates in the processes it studies. Geotextile drapes function as living surfaces for bacterial mineralization—cultivated, harvested, and renewed in cycles. The site’s architectural form—defined by scaffold, façade, and canyon—expresses a continuous dialogue between structure and process.

T.U.F.A. proposes a shift from static architecture to one shaped by erosion, growth, and renewal. It positions material research not as context but as architecture itself—a system where form and process are inseparable.

The Lighthouse Boneyard explores how abandoned lighthouses can serve as markers of memory, decay, and transformation by relocating them to a landscape that itself embodies environmental loss. Rather than restoring them as static relics, the project investigates how they can be repurposed as interactive memorials, fragmented ruins, or habitable spaces that allow visitors to engage with both architectural history and the shifting nature of humanmade landscapes. The design operates at multiple scales—from the singular lighthouse as an isolated artifact to the collective arrangement as a spatial narrative, creating an immersive experience that questions preservation, erasure, and renewal. Material strategies, spatial sequencing, and atmospheric design contribute to a layered, embodied encounter with time, echoing the haunting persistence of obsolete infrastructure. The project features an underground museum system inviting movement, touch, and perspective, forming connections between structures while revealing the scale of loss and the poetic weight of architectural displacement.

Aryan Lopez

The Lighthouse Boneyard

Once California’s largest lake, the Salton Sea is rapidly shrinking, leaving behind a landscape of dust, decay, and ecological collapse. Acting as a living archive, Vista of Absence responds to erosion, memory, and transformation. As the lake recedes, layers of debris—sediment, fish remains, and industrial remnants—become embedded in new spatial forms. Planes, voids, and frames mark what was, what is, and what’s vanishing, revealing the shifting terrain.

The project comprises three elements: the Alluvial Index (research facilities), interstice enclosures, and A-Cars (mobile rail units). Archive stations document ecological shifts, sediment patterns, and wildlife changes. Interstices frame erosion and views of the decaying sea, while A-Cars follow the receding shoreline, capturing fleeting moments and guiding movement across the exposed lakebed.

Rather than preventing loss, the disappearance frames it, transforming an overlooked site into a space of reflection, where erosion becomes visible and the land archives itself before fading.

Liminal Horizons introduces superimposition as an intervening framework for rehabilitation, emphasizing the interplay between memory and physical space. Liminality—defined as the threshold between two conditions— materialized though glass,which serves as a guiding spatial and conceptual strategy, allowing architecture to operate between past and present, interion and exterior, structure and landscape.

Reflection, as personal memory and material—dissolves boundaries and shapes experiences that are immersive layered and emotionally resonant, encouraging connection and engagement.

Datum lines at the water’s edge align and overlap in layers to reveal a duality of memory and form, enabling spatial transformation by applying new structure within the existing one. The dynamic interaction between built and surrounding environments is adaptable to urban rural, and natural contexts.

Architecture becomes a vessel for personal and collective memory—a methodology not only for connection and healing, but for the restoration of place and the continuity of experience across time.

Martin Sargsyan Where Edges Dissolve

Emil Amyan

Tethys’s Mesh

Tethys’s Mesh adapts the diagrid, positioning it as the organizing principle that undertakes both architectural design and infrastructural strategy. The diagrid within a rectangular perimeter is morphed to respond to environmental effects and urban development. The inherent flexibility of the diagrid enables extreme transformations to occur with no loss in integrity. The transformed diagrid orchestrates the site, accommodating the unique habitat of the marsh preserve on the mouth of the Santa Ana River. Drawing inspiration from Tethys, the goddess of wetlands and marshes, the strategy prioritizes environmental preservation through providing dedicated animal preservation zones, open space, research facilities, and communal spaces. All these spaces are arranged according to the geometric language received from the diagrid to ensure uninterrupted movement throughout the site.

Architecture: Studio 10

Section 2 | Professor Gerhard Smulevich

A Tale of Two Scales: The Design of a Resilient Future

The class looks at how specific urban fabric and certain building design processes can interact and help define the built climate-resilient environment of the future.

At two very distinct scales, The Urban and the Architectural, with related threads of the same forces, the projects investigate systems that respond to physical and demographic changes that are foreseen for the next 100 years. Urban Fabric deals with logistics, infrastructure, and landscape while architecture (as in buildings) deals mostly with form, program and materiality. But the design problems are connected, they interact and over time fuse into a single character, a narrative that becomes an important foundation for cultural paradigms and the construction of an evolved society around those narratives.

—GERHARD SMULEVICH

David Juarez

Urban housing located above retail and office spaces promotes efficient land use and vibrant, walkable communities. To reduce the urban heat island effect, the design incorporates open courtyards and doubleheight spaces that encourage natural airflow and passive cooling. These features help lower temperatures, improve air quality, and create comfortable living environments. The integration of greenery within courtyards also adds visual appeal and supports biodiversity. This mixed-use approach not only addresses housing demands but also fosters economic activity at the street level, making it a sustainable and human-centered solution for modern urban development.

Los Angeles’ housing system doesn’t serve all its residents, as homelessness rises and housing units decrease. Diverse Housingification presents a new mode of housing with Oceanwide Plaza—an abandoned building reclaimed by taggers—becoming a vertical community that builds on this act of urban authorship. The project brings shelters and affordable and market-rate housing together in a single community: housing through its spectrum of formalities. The building’s takeover is a symbol of resistance and belonging, the design empowering residents at all levels. It fosters upward mobility, mixed interactions, and a more inclusive urban future.

Saad Ladhani Diverse Housingification

Lorents Assadourian Embracing the Sea, Architectural Solutions for Rising Waters)

Venice Beach, California, is a renowned coastal destination, yet its future is at risk due to rising sea levels. By 2150, projections indicate a 20-foot rise in water levels, potentially submerging half of the city. With an annual population increase of 0.5%, urban density will shrink from 871 sq ft per person to 528 sq ft. This crisis demands a radical urban response—one that integrates water into the city’s fabric rather than resisting it.

Inspired by Venice, Italy, and Thailand’s floating markets, my proposal reimagines Venice Beach as a water-adaptive city. Primary roads will extend into the sea, forming a structured grid where buildings rise from the ocean’s edge. The plan distributes 46,000 residential units along eight major boulevards stretching 1.36 miles inland. Mixed-use developments will include retail, offices, and communal spaces on the lower levels, while residences will be elevated above a pedestrian promenade.

Sustainability is central to this vision, incorporating solar panels, wind turbines, and lush green spaces covering 25% of residential areas. Bridges will connect buildings, fostering an interconnected community. This transformative approach envisions a resilient, thriving Venice Beach, where architecture harmonizes with the evolving coastline rather than succumbing to it.

QUARRYTECTURA proposes a regenerative architectural strategy that reclaims post-extraction landscapes as resilient, community-centered developments resisting the unchecked urban sprawl threatening rural Mexico. By transforming quarries into cultural, ecological, and housing hubs, the project advocates for density over displacement, and material memory over erasure. It draws from indigenous spatial logics and local topographies to foster collective identity, autonomy, and environmental repair. Through decentralized systems, adaptable units, and landscaperesponsive design, QUARRYTECTURA reimagines the rural periphery not as a sacrifice zone, but as a site for innovation—where damaged ground becomes the foundation for rooted, equitable, and future-facing inhabitation.

Jose Alvarado QUARRYTECTURA

Arbor Nexus

Arbor Nexus envisions Los Angeles 100 years from now as a dense, transit-oriented metropolis liberated from car dependency. Former freeways are transformed into elevated maglev rail lines, cutting swiftly across the city. At key junctions, fast, open-air transit hubs emerge—lightweight structures built from steel trusses and metal panels that seem to hover above the urban fabric. These hubs act as anchors of connectivity and community. Beneath them, greenbelts weave through the city, cooling the landscape and restoring ecology. High-density housing grows around the transit lines, forming walkable, climate-responsive neighborhoods shaped by speed, access, and architectural lightness.

Griffin Hagen

INTER-STITCH LA

Between the speed of the freeway and the rigidity of the city, a thread is drawn. Inter-Stitch LA navigates the residual spaces of division, not to heal, but to provoke. It operates in fragments: grafts of connection, slippages of structure, passages suspended between intention and improvisation. Neither a bridge nor barrier, it proposes a third condition—a spatial negotiation unfolding across thresholds. Flow becomes form and disjunction becomes opportunity. The city, once cleaved by velocity, is restitched by movement at the scale of the body. Here, architecture is not an object, but an act—performed, reconfigured, and lived over time.

David Covarrubias

INTER-STITCH LA

Sebastian Fanucci

An exploration of Los Angeles’ natural climate systems, this project embraces both challenges and advantages to guide future urban growth. By studying prevailing winds and the role of mountains in shaping microclimates, it proposes higher-density housing that works with, not against, LA’s diverse environment. The design passively cools at an urban scale—shielding residents from harsh, dry winds while capturing cooler onshore and upwind breezes. Through climate-responsive planning, the project redefines desirable living zones by creating self-regulating microclimates, expanding possibilities for where people can comfortably live in the city.

The goal of Fleetwave rental hub is to eliminate the need for automobile ownership, which will ease traffic and free up urban space. Its fleet of shared, autonomous electric vehicles reduces polluction while enabling smooth mobility. Wave’s AI-powered fleet improves safety, reduces travel times, and optimizes traffic flow while traditional cars squander space and damage communities. Wave cars are comfortable vehicles that provide entertainment, leisure, and work areas. Sustainability is essential; cars are powered by renewable energy, and old parking lots are turned into green areas. Fleetwave, which was founded in Los Angeles, is a global leader in promoting the transition to effective, community-focused transportation. This is a revolution, not just a matter of mobility.

Meena Afshar FLEETWAVE: A Ride to the Future

Peter Vazquez

Rising sea levels pose a critical threat to coastal cities, endangering wetlands, residential areas, and public spacaes. Rather than resisting the ocean, this thesis explores adaptive architectural solutions that integrate water into urban design, using wetlands as natural buffers while remaining resilient residential and public spaces. By embracing change rather than retreating, the project envisions a future where architecture coexists with rising seas, transforming vulnerability into opportunity and fostering a sustainable relationship between built environments and shifting coastlines.

Travis Taylor

Arc Horizon is an architectural redefinition of urban fabric in response to climate change, resource scarcity, and technological evolution. Faced with desertification, migrations, and the weaknesses in traditional cities, humanity shifts toward vertical urbanism and orbital expansion. Anchor site megastructures and orbital cities form a new interconnected system, enabling rewilding on the surface, autonomous mobility, and off-world industry. This threedimensional urban fabric transcends terrestrial limits, catalyzing a regenerative, symbiotic relationship with the planet. As the orbital economy supplants geopolitics, humanity transitions to an interplanetary species, one that thrives across Earth and orbit, united through innovation and stewardship of the planet.

Kevin Munoz

The Living Mesh: An Interlaced Urban Ecosystem

Los Angeles’ rigid zoning boundaries have resulted in underutilized land and a disjointed urban landscape. The Living Mesh challenges these constraints by integrating residential, manufacturing, commercial, and public spaces into a unified, interdependent ecosystem. Three residential towers frame and structurally support a central manufacturing hub, which sits above dynamic retail and public spaces at ground level. This layering of programs fosters synergy between domestic production, affordable housing, and economic opportunity, addressing housing shortages, rent spikes, and job accessibility. Additionally, the project introduces drone-based transportation solutions, enhancing connectivity and efficiency within this reimagined urban framework for a more adaptable and inclusive city.

The coastline is no longer just land’s end—it breathes, it moves, it lives. A twelve mile long artery made up of prosthetic strata yields the restless tide and earthfall at each edge. Communities that once were sundered by nature’s wrath are uni ed again through diverse speeds of arti cial trails. Boots back on the ground alongside silent wheels, an advancement of adventure between worlds—land and sea, past and future. Here, humanity extends itself into the ocean’s belly, not in conquest, but in harmony, to intertwine nature and innovation through the extension of artificial limb.

Heather Silk

David Otuzbiryan Urban Reconnection

This urban design reimagines the freeway as a central infrastructure for sustainable city development by introducing a tram system built within its median, running atop a landscaped green corridor. Flanking the freeway, a series of mixeduse buildings integrate housing and commerce, forming dense, livable corridors that embrace transit accessibility. Elevated pedestrian bridges span the freeway, linking both sides and promoting walkability, social connectivity, and cohesion across the urban fabric. By transforming a space once dominated by cars into a vibrant, multi-modal transit axis, the project activates underused freeway zones and redefines them as inclusive, transit-oriented, and ecologically responsive urban environments.

From FLOOD CONTROL To CONTROLLED FLOODING

My project envisions a resilient, adaptive future for Venice Beach. Rewilding wetlands atop a superstructure elevated 16 feet to withstand storm surges and rising sea levels. Integrating brackish water systems using seawater, greywater, and sewage, the design sustains rooftop wetlands while curved surfaces harness onshore winds for natural ventilation and protection. The structure’s lower commercial section and residential towers, each with 400 units, create a self-sustaining ecosystem where urban living and ecological restoration coexist. This vision transforms a vulnerable coastal area into a thriving, adaptive habitat, redefining urban resilience in the face of climate change.

Ervin Vartoomian

From FLOOD CONTROL To CONTROLLED FLOODING

Andrew Boehm Chavez Junction

When analyzing existing conditions and contemplating future modes and methods of life within Los Angeles, a pattern appears. We are a place and people defined as much by our connections as our disconnections. The highways run everywhere, but we are starved for pedestrianized connections that put people’s feet on the ground, breathing that warm California air.

My proposal for a multi-modal pedestrianized transit hub in the heart of LA will seek out new dimensions of verticality for conceptualizing new modes of urban transit. An elevated pedestrian and cycling bridge will connect Los Angles State Historic Park to the Ed P. Reyes River Gateway in the Glendale Junction industrial sector. At this new location, paired structures with a metal skin of up-cycled train rails will allow for an over-land aerial tramway that will connect to nearby Dodger stadium, creating pedestrianized links that can energize this sorely underutilized quarter of Los Angeles.

Architecture: Studio 10

Section 3 | Professor Carlo Sturken

The Rocks Look Different Here

After reoccurring wildfires in California have increased in both intensity and frequency, insurance companies have altogether abandoned the State and the buildings therein. Those who choose to remain on the urban fringe must seek new models of urbanization and inhabitation to accept wildfire as commonplace context. In that future, roughly 10 years from today, buildings may not look like buildings, rocks may not always be rocks. Embracing a potential future whose wildland-urban environments are continuously ravished by wildfires, students will embark on an individual thesis project to develop an architectural theory, a design method, and a design project that critically addresses questions of naturality and artificiality through the design of buildings/scapes (also called architectures/urbanisms) that coexist with wildfires.

—CARLO STURKEN

Johline Yao

Evolve Through Embers

What if buildings could withstand fire and become stronger because of it? My thesis explores an architectural system where fire is not a destructive force but a natural part of a building’s evolution. Each time a fire occurs, it burns and damages the outermost clay layers of the structure. Instead of weakening the building, this process allows for repair and renewal. New clay layers are added, reinforcing the structure and making it more resilient over time. With every fire, the building thickens, its form changes, and its durability increases, embracing fire as a force of transformation rather than destruction.

Wildfires driven by seasonal winds increasingly threaten the urban fringe of the Verdugo Woodlands. The Emberbreak City aims to mitigate airborne embers with a line of concrete superstructures along the Verdugo Wash. This approach reimagines urban co-existence at the wildland-urban interface, by disrupting embers movement, reducing the risk of wildfire spread, and maintaining porous connections between the modules and the surrounding environment. The system integrates multi-level, modular units into a regional superstructure that doubles as wildfire defense and urban expansion. With replaceable modules, vertical layering, open terraces, and public transit, it forms a resilient, adaptive framework for living with wildfire.

Anson Feng Emberbreak City

William Saint

Verdugo Park Community Center

In 2035, wildfires in the Verdugo Mountains are now occurring every 2–3 years, destroying 200–300 structures per event. This project presents a subterranean, fire-resistant community center built into the hillside of Verdugo Park, offering both protection and a new way to live underground. By using the hillside as a natural barrier and incorporating light wells that deliver daylight deep into the space, the design supports a safe, connected, and practical subterranean lifestyle.

“Concrete Reinforced Insulated Structural Panel” explores the integration of fire-resistant materials and construction techniques in a mixed-use apartment building within the Verdugo Woodlands in Burbank, emphasizing the use of intumescent coatings, concrete, and layered fire barriers to enhance structural resilience and integrity. By exaggerating repetitive layering to form a pretensioned modular unit, this proposal aims to develop a fire-resistant wall system that ensures long-term durability, minimizes long-term material waste, and informs a specific courtyard typology to ensure safety for occupants.

Essie Aika Domingo C.R.I.S.P.-Y

David Dallakyan

Giomimic Modularity in Architecture

This thesis explores an innovative architectural system rooted in biomimicry, drawing inspiration from the structural principles of crystal formations. By mimicking nature’s efficiency and resilience, the study proposes a modular construction approach that emphasizes adaptability, sustainability, and rapid deployment. Crystal formations exhibit inherent structural integrity and interlocking properties, which can be translated into an architectural framework capable of responding effectively to environmental challenges.

In 2035, would you prioritize safety over residing in a water tower? By introducing mid-rise communes at the critical interface between urban sprawl and the Verdugo Woodlands, this project prioritizes wildfire protection for pre-existing communities. As urbanization expands, the edges of cities become critical zones where development meets natural landscapes, addressing wildfire risk. This project responds to these challenges by introducing mid-rise communes to protect already existing buildings in the transitional zone between urban sprawl and the Verdugo Woodlands. Buildings capture and direct rainwater through water canals filtration and storage infrastructure, ensuring a sustainable supply for communal use while also serving as an emergency resource for wildfire suppression. By leveraging urban edges as sites for integrated water collection and fire mitigation, this project redefines the role of infrastructure—not just as a support system for urban growth but as an active agent in environmental resilience.

Saja Albariki

Commons

Rebecca Montanez

Verdugo Fire Base: A New Era of Firefighting

The proposed facility includes 6 helipads - Five fixed on an elevated concrete platform and one mounted on a hydraulic lift system for direct maintenance access. This design provides immediate liftoff capability while offering infrastructure for long term helicopter care and refueling. The architectural form is guided by function: A steel frame, concrete core, and brick masonry reinforce safety, durability and identity. The building includes command centers, training quarters, emergency dormitories and spaces adaptable for sheltering evacuees.

Located in the Verdugo region, this site bridges mountainous wildfire terrain and densely populated urban zones. Ground access in this area is limited to due to rugged topography, which makes aerial deployment not just ideal - but essential. The facility’s placement optimizes visibility and minimizes disturbance to residential areas while maintaining rapid access to threatened zones.

This project challenges the boundaries of what a fire station can be, merging emergency operations with community resilience and forward-thinking infrastructure. It is not just a station —it is a lifeline, prepared to meet the wildfire realities of 2035 and beyond.

The intention of this project is to create a stronger relationship between nature and the built environment, bridging the existing gap by proposing a new form of housing that will allow the space within the building to intertwine with the space outside the building; altering the form of space and allowing it to share space with nature therefore becoming a part of nature.

One of the key features of this new housing design is its adaptability. The homes will incorporate moving elements that serve multiple purposes. These elements will not only function as openings but also as shading devices, platforms, and mainly protective barriers. The flexibility of these moving components will allow homeowners to control how much exposure their homes have to natural elements such as sunlight, wind, and rain. The movements allow inside and outside space to share a boundary, which is in a way no boundary. Being able to open a room to the elements lets you experience nature without sacrificing the protection of your home. These movements will also benefit the form based on the site itself, as some elements will function better in a more sloped terrain while some might function better in a more flat terrain. This user-centric approach ensures that residents can customize their living spaces according to their needs and preferences.

Suren Khachatryan Moving Materials

Spencer Sprotte

Verdugo Woodlands Wildfire Cultural Center

What if buildings could withstand fire and become stronger because of it? My thesis explores an architectural system where fire is not a destructive force but a natural part of a building’s evolution. Each time a fire occurs, it burns and damages the outermost clay layers of the structure. Instead of weakening the building, this process allows for repair and renewal. New clay layers are added, reinforcing the structure and making it more resilient over time. With every fire, the building thickens, its form changes, and its durability increases, embracing fire as a force of transformation rather than destruction.

Jasmine Porter

Wildflourish: An Ash to Table Dining Experience

Wildflourish reimagines architecture as an active agent in the climate crisis. Set in a wildfire prone region, the building captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, especially during wildfire events, and uses it to grow food through hydroponic towers. At the heart of the project is a greenhouse dining experience that allows guests to eat food grown from captured carbon, physically connecting them to the cycles of climate, consumption, and survival. Alongside it is a museum space that educates visitors about the science, ethics, and urgency of atmospheric intervention.

Camryn Andrews

Verdugo Escape

Increased wildfires in the Verdugo Valley have led to a social rehaul, inspiring a new relationship between people and wildfires. In an attempt to incorporate wildfire evacuation drills into their daily lives, these citizens have instead created a new cultural phenomenon: The Verdugo Escape Festival. Neighborhoods band together and march along their designated parade routes towards the underground cultural event – and for shelter. Monolithic shards point in the directions of these routes, acting as beacons and funneling the parade inside. A large festival in this underground city center takes place, keeping the people safe and in high spirits.

Pearl Diaz

On the edge where the city meets flame, this project envisions a new way of living within fire-prone landscapes. In Oakmont, a thin, amorphic shell rises—expanding with heat, shielding elevated homes from wildfire. Below, agroforestry weaves renewal into the soil, reducing fuel while nourishing both land and community. Architecture and ecology intertwine, not to resist fire, but to move with it—like wind through trees, like seasons shifting. This prototype is more than shelter; it is a rhythm, a system, a future. Replicable across wildfire zones, it offers a grounded path toward safety, restoration, and enduring harmony with a changing climate.

The Living Edge

Existing within the cyclic events of fire, flood, then landslide, this building reimagines hillside architecture to embrace landslides and its intersection with the built environment. Overtime as debris flows move minerals along the site, land layers upon the structure and invades the interior through porous walls, informing the spaces as a forever adaptive and organic urban typology. This approach redefines the concept of “burial” from a destructive event to a protective measure that enhances the building’s long term resilience.

Areni Davityan

Justin Gonzalez MycoSprawl

Architecture must abandon its obsession with permanence and embrace the intelligence of decay. This thesis proposes an occupiable firebreak of mycelium—an evolving, regenerative infrastructure that sprawls across the Verdugo Mountains, challenging traditional notions of resilience, urbanism, and public space. More than a defense against wildfire, this living system thrives in cycles of growth and decomposition, offering seasonal mushroom harvests while dissolving back into the land. By integrating a mycelium production facility, the project envisions an architecture that regenerates a protective layer, forging a new paradigm of infrastructure as an evolving organism one that deconstructs the boundaries between nature, materiality, and human habitation.

Borna Torabinejad

In 2035 where wildfires become an ecological norm in Los Angeles, a subterranean urban fabric offers an alternative vision—one in which life continues uninterrupted, infrastructure remains intact, and people stay unharmed, allowing the surface to return. Drawing from Los Angeles’ rich storytelling heritage, the design method for this new urban fabric is Movie Architecture, where every space is shaped by real-life moments and interactions that define our stories. The goal is not to provide refuge or escape, but to rather sustain uninterrupted urban life while coexisting with nature. The proposed design method is an experimental paper architecture that incorporates storytelling and is called “Movie Architecture.” In this method, similar to the storyboarding technique used by legendary storytellers like Walt Disney, a series of short, descriptive passages are created, resembling scene descriptions in novels and movie scripts. Once these passages are developed, they are input into Chat GPT’s Text-to-Visual creator. From this point, a collaborative negotiation begins between the AI and me, involving textual tweaks and adjustments to generate visual representations for each story.

The Cinemetropolis

Architecture: Studio 10

Section 4 | Professors Parsa Rezaee + Aaron Gensler

This course examines production design as a framework for architectural inquiry. Drawing from film, theater, and related disciplines, the course explores how scenographic strategies, material logics, and representational techniques inform the construction of spatial narratives and atmospheres. Students engaged in research-driven design exercises, analyzing the translation of visual, temporal, and affective devices into architectural propositions. Their propositions are grounded in staging, choreography, and the use of scenographic composition and representation as central design strategies.

—PARSA REZAEE + AARON GENSLER

Alfonzo Martinez

Peripheral Noise: A U.S. Pavilion Entry for the Venice Biennale

This site-specific installation for the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale explores the psychological landscape of American suburbia through a liminal lens. A manicured cul-de-sac constructed in the Pavilion’s courtyard introduces a sense of familiarity, simulating suburban spatial order. Inside, five sequential rooms progressively distort this environment through surreal architecture, reflective surfaces, and disorienting atmospheres. Flickering lights and distorted projections introduce visual noise, disrupting perception and evoking unease. Familiar domestic forms become abstract and uncanny, immersing visitors in a space where repetition fractures reality and the boundaries between memory, identity, and space dissolve into a landscape of profound ambiguity.

Emerald Express is an itinerant, multi-stage theater experience designed to bring large-scale cultural performances to underserved and rural communities across the country. Spanning 360,000 sqft, the production features interactive, modular sets that can adapt to each location, offering an environment where set design and performance seamlessly merge. Each quadrant of the theater is designed for flexibility, allowing them to be customized for various themed productions. For this project, the narrative is based on The Wizard of Oz, but the adaptable design can accommodate any storyline. The train transports the performance, connecting communities with transformative cultural experiences.

Mateo De Leon Emerald Express

Public Spaces that are safe for women, especially at night, remain scarce. The Moonlit Plaza reimagines Pershing Square by confronting the patriarchal dominance of skyscrapers and developing the urban landscape through a feminist lens. Inspiration from transformative aesthetics in animation, particularly Sailor Moon, reinvents the park as a sanctuary, offering comfort, and empowerment to all who seek safety in a public space.

Parks are poorly lit and unwelcoming after dark, the Moonlit Plaza utilizes light as a design tool for the security of the park and its atmosphere. Light extends beyond the park, spilling onto adjacent buildings, claiming them as part of this reimagined urban realm. Visibility is incorporated in the park’s design, sparking a dialogue on urban safety and the prevention of harassment.

Beyond a mere redesign, Moonlit Plaza is a bold icon to women in the city, prioritizing the experience of a neutral user, rather than catering to the able-bodied male perspective. In doing so, the park fosters an inclusive, and vibrant space welcoming all to relax, shop, and dine with the confidence of security.

Kaci Theros Moonlit Plaza

Alisa Kelly Everlux Resort and Residences

Welcome to Everlux Resort and Residences, where paradise isn’t just a destination… it’s your ultimate getaway! Suspended above downtown Los Angeles, this all-inclusive oasis transforms everyday living into an endless escape. If You Can Imagine It, It’s Here! Plunge down towering waterslides, bask on a sun-soaked beach with its perfect breeze, or sip cocktails at the sky bar as waterfalls cascade around you. Scale the rock-climbing atrium, test your luck in the high-rise casino, or experience the rush of indoor skydiving. At Everlux, indulgence is a lifestyle, and the ordinary simply won’t do. Whether you’re staying for the night or a lifetime, paradise is always at your doorstep!

The city builds in repetition!

Steel, glass, and concrete!

Buildings rise with faceless facades. Buildings without memory, buildings without place! They stand as polished mirrors reflecting nothing.

Steel, glass, and concrete!

Shackles of sameness! Flattening the world, making only illusions of permanence.

Steel, glass, and concrete!

Vessels unmoved by seasons, deaf to the land beneath them. Polished materials to express the contemporary time.

But the ground beneath us is not polished. It shifts.

It resists.

It speaks if one is willing to listen.

The fallen leaves tell a story — of what was, what will be, and what must return.

To build is not to conquer, but to commune. Not to replace, but to reveal.

The bones of the land are here.

Buried. Waiting. Growing. Shaped by wind and time.

We bring the tools to let buildings emerge.

A home is not given.

A home is not prescribed.

A home is anywhere we are.

Anywhere the hands shape shelter.

Anywhere the earth answers the call.

We do not build to conform.

We do not build to obey.

We build to belong.

This is rejection. This is return.

We are the Splinter-Born

Christian Becerra The Splintered Return

This project envisions a culinary performance center as an urban food hub, perched above Grand Central Market in Downtown Los Angeles, celebrates the theatricality of food production. Inspired by the communal act of “breaking bread,” the design reinterprets the amphitheater as a modern gathering space—an architectural hearth where food’s creation and consumption become a shared experience.

Drawing from typologies of performance centers and museums, the proposal frames meal preparation as both an art form and a spectacle. The design features eight distinct stages, each tailored to a specific epicurean type and operation, exploring the interplay between static and dynamic elements, as well as the relationship between display, consumption and viewership. Through intentional circulation and seating configurations, the center transforms the act of cooking into an immersive experience—blurring the line between audience and performer in the shared ritual of food.

Monika Uguryan Culinary Chronicles

Los Angeles never sleeps—so why should its most iconic music landmark? The Night Shift transforms the Capitol Records Tower into a 24-hour cultural hub, evolving from a historic recording industry stronghold into a dynamic space for nightlife, performance, and creative collaboration. The tower’s radial floor plan, originally designed for workplace equality, now fosters an egalitarian nightlife experience. By adapting the architecture to the specific requirements of various genres, and shifting programmatic spaces, the building pulses with energy day and night. Preserving its legacy while embracing the future, this project ensures Capitol Records remains a landmark of music, culture, and perpetual motion.

Zakar Papaian

The Night Shift: Reimagining the Capitol Records Tower

What can emerge from waste upon waste upon waste? While a landfill may come to mind, this project envisions an educational center and studio space dedicated to fashion. As one of the largest contributors to fabric waste, the fashion industry often overlooks the potential in discarded materials. But what if waste were seen as an opportunity? By repurposing an abandoned mall – a former beacon of consumption – alongside discarded textiles, this project transforms excess into a hub for innovation, sustainability, and education. It reimagine waste as a resource, challenging conventional perceptions and creating something both meaningful and impactful.

Kayla Clodfelter Waste-to-Wearhouse

Hockey fandom is rapidly growing in Los Angeles, and this arena redefines the experience by blending the fan perspective with the players’ daily lives. The design seamlessly integrates public spaces, player and enthusiast residences, and training facilities, allowing spectators to witness training and preparation firsthand. This creates a direct, immersive connection to the sport, transforming hockey from mere entertainment into a lifestyle. The inclusion of not just player housing , but those looking to be embedded in the game, fosters a deep sense of belonging and commitment, making the arena more than just a venue. By embedding retail and residences within its structure, the design activates the stadium beyond game days, encouraging interaction between players, residents, and fans. Located between the Arts District and Little Tokyo in Downtown Los Angeles, the project revitalizes its surroundings while integrating into the city’s urban fabric. This vision creates a vibrant, multi-functional hub where hockey culture thrives, making every visitor part of the Kings’ pursuit of greatness.

Hakob Chagaian

The Fortress

Angel Esparza

The Quantum Window

In a world where urban density confines people to dull, obstructed views, and every breath feels like a battle against smog and steel, humanity is caged by its creation. The Quantum Window offers revolutionary views—immersive portals to boundless landscapes. This research envisions a future where architecture no longer restricts, but liberates, transforming lifeless walls into interactive sanctuaries of nature and light. By merging augmented reality, environmental conditioning, and personalized experiences, The Quantum Window redefines well-being, creativity, and sustainable living. This thesis argues that the future of urban design is not about escape but transformation—turning the obstructed, blocked window into a gateway to inspiration, serenity, and the limitless possibilities of human imagination.

Architecture is a mirror of our society, shaping and reflecting cultural values, aspirations, and the commercialization of not just goods but entire lifestyles. The Shops at Narcissus reimagines the Beverly Center Mall as a statusdriven environment shaped by influencer culture and Los Angeles’ obsession with visibility. This project critiques how architecture reinforces social hierarchies by structuring the mall in tiers—mainstream retailers on lower levels, while exclusive, high-end spaces occupy the upper floors. The redesigned circulation system is deliberately structured to emphasize privacy, isolation, and display, ensuring that movement within the mall is dictated by status and performance. Every interaction is carefully curated, underscoring the performative nature of consumerism in LA. This approach highlights how architecture is far from neutral—it actively shapes social identity, where lifestyle itself is commercialized alongside the goods sold. By blending Los Angeles’ fascination with visibility and social performance, the project offers a critical exploration of how architecture reinforces social identity and status, reflecting the city’s deep entanglement with image, exclusivity, and the power of display.

Alex Duarte

The Shops at Narcissus

Maneh Nazaryan

Re-Occupy Wall Street

Re-occupy Wall Street challenges American capitalism and the epidemic of work-life imbalance by deconstructing and rearranging the New York Stock Exchange building. The deliberate fragmentation of the structure will expose the architectural and symbolic disproportions embedded within the financial system. By distorting and reassembling key elements—columns, trading floors, and facades—the building turned installation will speak on the disproportions in American work culture. The reimagined space will serve as both a critique and a meditation on the human cost of financial dominance, encouraging reflection on the need for more equitable economic and social structures.

Erosion of Eternity reimagines the fashion show as a temporal and immersive spectacle, where history, materiality, and performance converge. Presented at the LA Coliseum, the show opens fashion’s traditionally exclusive event to a vast public audience. Archival collections appear alongside contemporary pieces, creating a dialogue between past and present. Shifting installations—sand, statues, projections, and billowing fabric—transform the space, merging runway and audience within fluid bleachers. Beneath the historic arches, a pop-up installation extends the experience, while a concert afterward turns the event into a living festival. Drifting sand, echoing ancient journeys from the Middle East to Rome, evokes civilizations that continue to stand the test of time. Architecture becomes an active participant in the narrative of time, acting as a canvas for nature’s reclamation. By juxtaposing decay with luxury, and permanence with impermanence, the thesis explores how materiality, space, and spectacle evolve into an ephemeral yet enduring experience.

Alaa Bakhiet Erosion of Eternity

Jessica Mejia Aida: The Theatrics of Transition

In contemporary workplaces, the boundary between work and personal life is increasingly blurred, often leading to mental fatigue and burnout. This thesis reimagines workplace circulation as a series of exaggerated sensory thresholds immersive, nature-infused spaces that disrupt routine movement and provide moments of refuge. It investigates circulation as both a spatial and sensory threshold, challenging conventional movement patterns to create moments of pause, engagement, and transition. By exaggerating natural elements grass mounds, waterfalls, and dense vegetation within lobbies and break areas, the design introduces immersive environments that disrupt the rigid flow of work. These interventions function as architectural devices that recalibrate perception, emphasizing the in-between as a distinct spatial condition rather than a mere passage. Drawing from biophilic design, biomimicry, and set design, the project redefines circulation as an active experience that shifts between compression and expansion, opacity and transparency, enclosure and exposure. Inspired by the performative nature of movement, the design positions circulation as both a

Los Angeles spans 4,084 square miles and is home to 9.6 million people, making its experience vast and multifaceted. My intervention reimagines Terminal B, “Tom Bradley,” as a theatrical sequence, where each significant program becomes a scene in a larger narrative. This procession mirrors the journey of both new and returning patrons, acclimating them to the essence of L.A. as they move through the terminal. The project draws parallels between LAX and Sunset Blvd., a cultural artery of the city, guiding users from passive spectators to active participants. Each space is designed to evoke the city’s dynamic character—blending Hollywood spectacle, urban energy, and iconic landscapes into a seamless transition. The terminal becomes more than an entry point; it is a staged experience, welcoming travelers into the performance of Los Angeles..

Chester Tumbos LA_x

Meghrig Zaki

Spaces of Comfort: Redefining Fearful Architectural Archetypes

This thesis investigates the psychological effects of architectural design, focusing on the fear and discomfort often elicited by spaces such as stairs and hallways.

The research examines how these spaces influence emotional responses by creating a duplex with contrasting designs.

One half is designed with a series of closed rooms and tapering walls, which create a more enclosed, confined environment. The other half features an open floor plan with minimal barriers and no storage, aiming to create a more spacious and unrestricted atmosphere.

This project explores the preservation and adaptive reuse of two 18th–19th century houses in Yerevan, Armenia, using modern methogs to recreate and honor traditoinal ornamentation. The existing site is in poor condition, with damaged facades, partial interior walls, and overgrown vegetation. The proposal perserves these elements by transforming the ground floor into a public courtyard tha showcases the ruins. The basement will house a museum displaying hard-to-access Armenian artifacts, bringing culture to the city center. A boutique hotel will be added to support growing tourism, with both functions connected through a central threshold that unifies past and present.

Anto Amirkhanian Roots and Remnants

Architecture: Studio 10

Section 5 | Professor Cody Miner

Flaps and Gaps repositions model making as a tool for exploring novelty in form, structure, and assembly. Rather than starting with glue, the course begins with a simple prompt: enclose a volume without using any adhesive. From there, students develop their own model tectonics, relying on slots, notches, flaps, friction, or whatever else they devise. The models respond to how they’re fastened: they might slump, buckle, hold tension, or land somewhere in between. Models are treated less as representations and more as tools for speculation, ways of thinking through making. This leads to a further shift, as students begin to translate these experiments into architectural interests, shaped by questions of program and use. The end results may be flappy, chunky, slumped, bare - just to name a few characteristics.

—CODY MINER

Daisy Sotoj WESHINE

From its external appearance architecture is meant to be viewed upright, sturdy and exude a solid posture. David Eskanzi followed Galileo’s observations in Two New Sciences during his exploration in Two Scrolls in 2019, a physical model resembles its larger building counterpart but it cannot be identical. What happens when architecture begins to appear to waiver, this project began with a series of models that expressed looseness and weakness that an architectural frame could allow. In order to create a building that resembles similar qualities shown in the physical model, I chose to design a concert hall that could illuminate.

This project is grounded in the concept of the pocket, a small, everyday space used to keep important things safe and close. A pocket protects, organizes, and holds what matters. Applied as a design strategy for a daycare, this concept informs both the architecture and interior environment.

The daycare is envisioned as a series of architectural pocket spaces that care for children in the same way a pocket cares for its contents. The overall form functions like a telescope, allowing nested rooms to open and extend, providing space for exploration and play, or folding inward to create calm, secure zones for rest. The pocket concept is also integrated into the interior walls through furniture, storage, and soft resting areas, allowing children to learn, relax, and store personal items within protective, scaled environments.

Each room functions like a pocket, offering safety while supporting activity, flexibility, and comfort. The building’s central core anchors the design, flanked by six movable modules, three on each side, that operate as folding rooms. These modules can slide, shift, or drop slightly to create varied levels and spatial experiences. The result is a daycare that balances comfort and play, an environment that evolves and transforms alongside the children it shelters.

Seyedehkatayon Mosaviarabi Pocket Space

FRINGE COMMUNITIES are a result of having different habits, beliefs, thoughts, morals, activities, etc. They are communities that often exist outside the ‘conventional’ of our society. An example of a community like this is exconvicts or those who have been released from prison. These people most of the time have trouble readjusting to life after prison because of the challenges with how others view them, most employers not hiring them, no resources to help with any issues they might have, and limited housing options. This causes them to relapse into their bad habits and get convicted again. FLUX aims to give these people the resources to do something positive and readjust to society; prison doesn’t rehabilitate ex-convicts. The project features housing, classrooms to teach a trade or skill, and spaces to create a small business and sell any items they learn to make to guests. FRINGE LEARNING or learning skills and skill building outside mainstream education would help them do so. This makes it so people passing by actually interact with the project rather than treat it as an isolated space for ex-convicts to reform; it helps the exconvicts interact with others to try and help their readjustment. The building’s design is also meant to invite people as well as a courtyard space to interact with those living there. The FRINGES on the building or the extensions also represents the ex-convicts being on the edges of society but the courtyard shows that they can still come together with society and readjust. This design denies the idea of another isolated project and instead focuses on the idea of the project feeling integrated to the community.

PROGRAM: Correctional Rehabilitation Center, Vocational Training, Community Reintegration

Alberto Vazquez

FLUX - Fringe Learning Urban Exchange

Slumped & Bare reimagines Redondo Beach’s retired AES power plant by reintroducing the historic old salt lake (The old salt lake was once vital to the Tongva tribes salt trade). The coast is opened up to flood the site with saltwater. A desalination plant converts saltwater into potable water to distribute to the community. Similarly to how the previous salt lake distributed salt and the powerplant distributed power. The structural system is exposed and unhidden revealing how the architecture is put together. The landscaping is given back to the public realm for markets, recreation, and education.

Matthew Silva Slumped & Bare

This investigation of space began with a question: how can a 2D object be transformed into an inhabitable space? The answer was clips. By folding a cut plane and clipping its ends, the plane evolved into a volume. Three conditions emerged from this exploration—ground, air, and wall. With these strategies, how can we create a space that begins to address a pressing problem?

Los Angeles faces a growing issue of shade inequity, where underprivileged communities lack access to shaded public spaces. As temperatures rise, the absence of shade in these areas makes outdoor activity uncomfortable and often hazardous, discouraging public gathering, social interaction, and economic exchange. This disparity disproportionately affects neighborhoods like Boyle Heights, where industrialization has overtaken the urban landscape, displacing opportunities for culture, health, and livelihood.

This project seeks to reclaim urban space for the people of Boyle Heights through a shading structure that introduces the full farm-to-table cycle—from growing to selling to consuming—within a single, accessible site. By collapsing the traditional food supply chain, the project gives residents direct control over food production and distribution, empowering local farmers, vendors, and families alike. It becomes a space not only of nourishment, but of knowledgesharing, cultural celebration, and sustainable practice.

By challenging the dominance of industrial sprawl and addressing the lack of both shade and food access, this project proposes a model for equitable, community-driven urban design—ensuring that Boyle Heights not only reclaims its spaces, but thrives through them.

Nandini Prajapati Clipped Commons

Architecture has become immobile, static, and sterile. It is produced to be still. Many public programs are often spread out across cities and require users to drive ten minutes to possibly over an hour. Some of these programs might not be populated everyday of the year or might even be seasonal. Ragdoll allows for these programs to happen on one site, giving cities and users the ability to create public programs without being confined to a fixed form or space. Using rings and modular panels, the users are able to change the form depending on the event being held, using the building like a rag-doll.

Meredith Roush Ragdoll

Urban open spaces are often overlooked in city planning, yet they are essential for improving quality of life, fostering social interaction, and supporting well-being. This proposal introduces a Vertical Park designed to maximize limited urban land by creating multi-level green spaces with gardens, walking paths, and recreational zones. This approach transforms traditional horizontal parks into layered environments that encourage both active recreation and reflection.

The vertical park will feature stacked levels, each offering distinct topographical experiences, such as varying slopes, terraced gardens, and elevated walkways. These elements invite visitors to interact with the landscape in new ways. Each layer will also explore different materials like grass, gravel, sand, and dirt, creating spaces with various textures.

A key component of the park is the use of native plants, sourced from Los Angeles soils and molded into tiered landscapes. This promotes sustainability by minimizing water usage and maintenance, while supporting indigenous plant species that thrive in the local climate.

This vertical park will provide both active spaces and quiet areas, promoting inclusivity, connection, and social interaction, especially in neighborhoods without traditional green spaces. The goal is to redefine the park, turning it from a passive area into a lively, multi-layered space that meets the diverse needs of urban life.

America Bravo Stacked Groundds

Mind The Flap explores an assembly system that uses the flap as a primary design tool, integrating structure with spatial organization. By extending beyond the plane, flaps act as modular joinery elements, allowing for efficient assembly, disassembly, and reconfiguration. The result is a shell-like structure that not only encloses housing units but also shapes spatial relationships, forming interconnected courtyards. Drawing inspiration from the Moriyama House and House N, the flaps shift between structural, functional, and aesthetic roles—defining thresholds, supporting furniture, and guiding circulation. This research repositions the flap as an adaptive architectural element, influencing both how buildings are made and how space is experienced.

Jennifer Perez Mind The Flap

This investigation began with looking at the construction of primitive huts. Typically the hut is composed of a skeleton and overlapping surfaces on the exterior, much like the act of collaging. This is applied into multiple buildings in the new Compton Arts Center, located at 601 S. Acacia Ave. Within this new complex, each building typology displays a unique appendage that surfaces its exterior and introduces a new personality to the campus and neighboring building. Each one of these structures a character of their own establishing a specific role and interacting in the lives of those in Compton. 1. An Auditorium with scale like appendages that provide sound proofing and highlight music. 2. An Art Wall with big fin shapes that will be used to highlight creative freedom. 3. An Art Store/ Learning Center with large blinds that surround it to let in light and show the growth. 4. A Gallery with curled flaps that mimic the inside holding art pieces and give a space for artists to work. 5. An outdoor lounge with translucent wraps that give shade and privacy. This is important that we break this rigidity of building styles in Compton to make each space more inviting. Lappy Architecure is creating something new from things we have come to known and giving them a new sense meaning and character.

Ahshohn Casilan Into a Lappy Architecture

Jagjot Rathor

The Chunky Grid

The Chunky Grid, initially developed from modeling techniques of thickening tape application, extracts to a solid form itself as it expands to massive urban scale. The project looks to free a recreation center from the ground and place it on a pedestal. This megastructure uses the extracted grid as a circulation system and allows massive amounts of fields to occupy the site. This elevated condition not only amplifies visibility and accessibility but also redefines the relationship between architecture and landscape. By reclaiming the ground as an active civic platform, the project fosters a new urban typology where recreation, commerce, and community intersect dynamically.

Uncovering Understanding reimagines a design school, where students learn through the architecture they inhabit. Assembled by the students using dry fit construction techniques teaching them through hands-on action. The current environment in design school has a large disconnect between the students and the structures they design or inhabit, having no sense of the labor involved. This nomadic school allows for the institution to be in constant flux, allowing the students to assemble and disassemble the dry fit assemblies anywhere, anytime. Customizing spaces or even moving entire structures becomes an easy task.

Benjamin Fala

Uncovering Understanding

Porter Watson Dead City

This project aims to extrude the tradition of burial, taking what has long been a horizontal practice and reimagining it vertically. As space becomes more limited and the number of deceased continues to rise, the solution is to build upward. This creates a new kind of graveyard experience, one that invites collective grieving. With an appreciation for everyone laid to rest, visitors encounter a kind of “window” into the soul—a space that represents each loved one and allows others to pass by, absorb their presence, and catch a glimpse of who they were, even with just a glance.

This project explores an ephemeral architectural language, focusing initially on follies—purposeless, programless objects dispersed throughout the dense city of Los Angeles. These objects respond to their surroundings, “bombing” the cityscape in an attempt to mediate between landscape and architecture. Their forms resemble primitive structures with stacked elements and architectural patterns reminiscent of construction material. Constructed from paper pulp and plaster, materials with naturally weakened fibers, the objects are designed to decay over time. Embedded with seeds at the initial stage, they encourage natural overgrowth, blurring the boundary between build form and nature. By integrating materials with distinct properties but shared life cycles, the project challenges conventional material hierarchies, presenting all components as part of a unified process of transformation and decay.

Leslie Ramirez Durational Experience of Deterioration

Oliver Portillo

Traditional data centers are hidden, opaque infrastructures isolated from public awareness and engagement. This project challenges that norm by transforming digital infrastructure into a civic interface within Los Angeles’s Financial District. It integrates three interconnected scales within a rigid grid structure system strategically carved out to create distinct spaces inside: a data center, a hybrid digital space, and a public library. The three scales work together to bridge the gap between digital data and physical public knowledge. The data center, shielded by a solid façade and restricted from public access, features billboards designed for distant visibility. The hybrid digital space is semi-accessible, with openings in the grid allowing for programmatic flexibility and billboards intended for the scale of vehicular movement, making them legible to passing cars and pedestrians crossing the street. The library is the most accessible, with the grid further expanded to maximize public space and encourage human-scale interaction with billboards. A waste heat exchange system sustains all three, redefining data transparency as an interactive, community-driven resource that transforms abstract digital information into tangible, accessible knowledge.

Our earliest experiences with weaving mat date back to our earliest memories. Weaving objects of care have been used in terms of baskets, clothes, and shelter. Woven fabrics have played a critical role in clothing individuals and providing shelter, offering warmth and security—fundamental needs for care and comfort.

The project expresses the geometry of weaving into a Women’s Wellness Center, including a birthing center, mental health facility, physical care center, and hospice care unit. Located in El Paso, Texas—a state that faces considerable scrutiny regarding policies affecting women’s equality—this facility also sits in a high-risk area for human trafficking due to its proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Weaving Wellness will serve as a sanctuary for women on both sides of the border, dedicated to nurturing and supporting women at every stage of life, from childbirth to end-of-life care. The program offers a holistic 360-degree approach, symbolizing the act of weaving and mending broken threads, representing resilience, healing, and empowerment.

Elizabeth Valles Weaving Wellness

Karen Aywazian Atria Sanctum

The architecture serves as a seamless fortress for women, blending security with sanctuary. Light is wielded as a powerful tool, drawing the public into open communal spaces where exposed roofs flood the interiors with natural illumination. Yet, for the women seeking refuge, the design takes an unexpected turn—what is traditionally feared, dimly lit corridors, becomes their path to safety. These shadowed passageways, punctuated by dashed roof openings, lead them to open-air spaces and discreet staircases. Step by step, they ascend to an elevated, separate structure within the building—a hidden sanctuary woven into the very fabric of the design. The program consists of individual and group counseling and therapy rooms for women, creating a supportive and healing environment. A women-only dining space provides a secure, nurturing setting for shared meals and community building. Complementing this is a large theater and a library open to all, encouraging education, cultural engagement, and inclusive dialogue.

BARCH Architecture: Studio 10

Section 6 | Professor Hannah Hortick

Escuela TeaMargarita

Drawing from deep Guatemalan research and rich traditions of tropical village life, Escuela TeaMargarita fuses ancient and customary wisdom with architectural ingenuity to maintain and enrich the identity of this community. A core ruleset is derived from the Mayan base-20 mathematical system, deployed as a modular 20x20 grid that organizes space and breathes logic into the design. Contextual building materiality is both pragmatic and poetic: concrete, wood, thatch, and metal compose the kit of parts for construction. The resulting combination is a hybrid school and civic center that is flexible enough for community customs, sturdy enough for natural disasters, and sacred enough to feel like home. This initiative is more than a building - it’s a lifeline that offers humanitarian aid for clean water, safe food preparation space, and protective shelter. My thesis serves as a manifesto for designing with the land, with local traditions, for the people, and through the past – establishing a replicable framework for rural communities around the world.

Angel Aguilar

Mariana Ottan

BRICKWAVE Creating fluidity through rigidity

The rigid, repetitive, and modular nature of brick is manipulated to create organic forms for a high school boarding school in Salvador, Brazil. By using masonry as both building material and organizational logic, Brickwave explores how repetition and pattern generate fluidity through rigidity at multiple scales.

The site, hardscape, curved walls, and secondary architectural elements follow the same brick-based logic. Components such as furniture, openings, and flooring patterns respond directly to the dimensions and rhythm of the brick. Straight, repeated brick units form curves by following specific spatial rules that guide stacking patterns, define curvature limits, and manage transitions between bonds and orientations.

Mortar plays a critical role in the project, not just as a filler but as an active shaper of patterns and voids. At its minimum, it sharpens alignment and enforces precision. As it thickens, it introduces flexibility, allowing bricks to shift from strict geometry. This interplay within this thickness creates angles that generate curvature, allowing a fluid expression through modular means.

In summary, this project demonstrates how the deviation of bricks can transform rigid modularity into fluid architectural forms.

Neha Vignesh

Exhale // Undone

What if the grid—so central to architecture—could breathe?

The architectural grid has long served as a foundational tool—structuring everything from urban fabric to building systems and spatial programs. While efficient, this grid is also rigid and reductive, often stripping space of its potential to be fluid and intuitive. This project reinterprets the conventional grid, introducing distortion as a method to generate a more responsive architecture.

Here, the grid is no longer static—it reacts. At the urban scale, it responds to density and movement: the more populated or active a space becomes, the more the city grid bends and warps to accommodate that energy. At the building level, the structural grid adapts to the nuances of human interaction, reshaping itself based on how bodies navigate and occupy space. Materiality, too, is responsive. It follows the movement of the distorted structural grid, softening and transforming with it—removing rigidity not just from form, but from the experience of space itself.

Through this process, Exhale // Undone proposes an architecture that listens and moves, one that breaks away from imposed order to embrace a more natural, living spatial language—fluid, undulating, and profoundly human.

The two existing runways of Burbank Airport provide the axis for a grid system deployed across the existing territory, a new terminal, and the surrounding area. Points are generated at the intersections of these non-parallel grids. These points produce a footprint that intersect each other and form irregular shapes, translating into three distinct scenarios: void, graphic, or column.

Where the function of a space does not allow a physical intervention, void holds the place of the point’s footprint, operating subtractively to bring light into the building. Graphics operate similarly, allowing the point’s footprint to manifest in material deviations where void or column is not possible. The columns are used in several different ways; firstly, to simply support the building, additionally, they become occupied as rooms or circulation throughout the building. When the footprint of the points overlap, they create unique joint footprints, replacing familiar structural shapes.

The effect of the points across the vast site joins disparate buildings and infrastructures into a cohesive architectural language, visible from inside, outside and high above.

Chris Shirinian SPACE WITHIN COLUMNS

This project explores two houses—an original and a reinterpretation—constructed from the same architectural elements. The first house adopts a conventional layout typical of large-scale residential design, where the in-home caretaker’s quarters are marginalized—tucked away from the primary living areas and hidden from the rhythms of daily life.

The second house reorganizes the same components around the presence of the caretaker. Here, the caretaker’s space is relocated to the heart of the home, becoming a central node of circulation and social interaction. Rather than serving as a hidden utility space, it functions like a courtyard—open, shared, and essential to the experience of the house. This rearrangement disregards conventional hierarchies and domestic zoning in favor of a caretaker-centric structure, leading to unexpected spatial consequences.

Architecturally, the second house appears fragmented and reassembled, reconstructed with no regard for its original composition—only the priority of centering the caretaker. This conceptual reordering manifests in the materials and finishes: crown molding, baseboards, and painted drywall, traditionally reserved for interiors, now surface on exterior walls, while stucco, gutters, and concrete ornaments are found inside. These material inversions, all drawn from the original architectural language, blur distinctions between inside and outside, order and disorder—reinforcing the themes of reconstruction, disruption, and the redefinition of spatial relationships.

Riesse Hansen Fragmented

Megastructures of the past have been proposed as solutions for the benefit of humanity, this project is proposed as a consequence of it. After COVID, Rome has seen a 5x increase in tourism centered around arriving at each monument for a picture without paying any mind to what is in between. The situation requires a drastic solution to save Rome from this growing infestation of tourists. A new system of tunnels showcasing the key monuments in Rome, cuts through whatever is between each monument, including homes and businesses, to achieve the most direct route possible. Tourists are discouraged to traverse the city’s surface and their overnight stays are isolated to the tunnel’s terminals. Views along the tunnels are curated to reveal the most picturesque angle of the monuments and there are few other openings between.

The tunnels become a new monument that gives both parties what they wanted; the perfect photo and their homes back, however its ambivalence towards the classical architecture around it serves as a reminder of what tourism has made Rome become. The industrial steel against the ancient stone redefines the character of the city; there no longer lives a unique Roman style. Juxtaposition is the new character of Rome.

Christian Martinez The New Infrastructure (Rome)

The project focuses on the use of a singular materia—hot rolled steel—and utilizes the technique of folds to create a series of interventions—pavilions, restrooms, food vendors, benches and lamp posts—scattered throughout Alamo Square Park. Interventions follow two gradients overlaying on the site, determining the number of folds as well as the radius of those folds.

On a journey through the park, the interventions share similar characteristics of material and technique—very different from the materials and techniques typically used to produce mundane park infrastructure. While technique and material unite the objects, each is fundamentally unique as it exists in its specific location within the gradient. Upon passing through the park, forms shift subtly but lampposts on one end feel comparatively different than the ones on the other end.

Alexa Schlepp Into the Folds

After Trace is the disassembly of legibility in drawing through a controlled manipulative technique. A ruleset dictates curve extraction, repetition, and thickness, reconstructing still lifes, representing them through color values. The number of repeated curves are limited and dependent on the size of the extracted trace. One set of the drawings resists immediate depiction, producing a shift in hierarchy from accurate representation to disorienting effect. The other set produces a referential - yet still disorienting - effect due to change in technique more clearly exposing the original. This questions how architectural drawing can be used beyond literal representation and instead exist in the thresholds between legibility and abstraction, allowing for a new perceptual version of an original.

Omnia Abdalla After Trace

Pershing Square, often viewed as a disconnected and underutilized urban plaza in Downtown Los Angeles, is reimagined as Echoes of Grounding—a living, immersive maze designed to foster mindfulness and sensory engagement. Inspired by grounding techniques that engage the five senses—taste, smell, hear, touch, and see—the design transforms the square into a journey of emotional reconnection.

Flowing hedgerows carve five distinct sensory zones, guiding visitors through spaces that invite reflection, stillness, and discovery. Varying in height and density, the hedgerows create moments of both intimacy and openness, offering a contemplative path within the city’s chaos. Textured surfaces, aromatic plants, ambient sounds, and edible herbs immerse the senses, encouraging visitors to slow down and ground themselves in the present moment.

The maze’s sinuous form is visible from surrounding buildings, turning Pershing Square into a living artwork that draws the eye from skyline to street. As people navigate the space, they become part of the visual and emotional rhythm of the urban fabric.

Echoes of Grounding redefines Pershing Square as a sanctuary—an experience that invites personal reflection and community connection in the heart of the city’s spatial tapestry.

Trinity Santillan Echoes of Grounding: A Maze of Sensory Connection

Nicholas Sinanian

The Future of Family Living

As traditional nuclear families become less common, a new architectural model is needed that reflects the evolving makeup of modern households. Despite significant demographic shifts—more unmarried individuals, fewer children, and a broader range of domestic arrangements—most housing still assumes outdated living structures.

This project suggests a way that architecture can adapt to these changes by rethinking the single-family home as a flexible, responsive system. Through the lens of one such house - inherited by a woman who evolves from living alone, to hosting foreign exchange students, to partnering without having children - the design explores how homes can “breathe” with their inhabitants. Over time, the house subtly transforms—structurally and materially—showing traces of lived experience through kinetic elements like shifting walls, sliding storage, and shared utility blocks that serve multiple rooms.

Rather than demolishing or starting over, this thesis explores what already exists, proposing interventions that are both specific and broadly deployable. The result is a home that accommodates non-traditional family trajectories and creates space for ways of living that conventional residential architecture often overlooks.

Milen Taroyan ARDI PERFORMANCE ARTS CENTER

New steel and concrete forms create a material contrast within an existing underutilized brick theater. The orientation of the new forms is inspired by the surrounding residential buildings, making the design feel intentionally connected to its context. The intervention reactivates the area, making it welcoming for everyone by expanding the existing theater program, originally limited to plays and acting, by introducing a cinema and a theater for musical and dance performances.

Rather than prioritizing one over the other, the old and new structures hold equal weight while the overlapped, interstitial zones become the focus of material saturation. Inherently both combined and separate spaces, these zones serve as connections, offering a unique experience, distinct from both the old and the new.

This thesis aims to translate the idea of two-dimensional surface into three-dimensional space by appropriating details from a picasso painting and refashioning them into a building. Isolating the solid-colored shapes from the painting and arranging them by the original overlayering of the work translates to volumetric massing. The product creates interior perspective illusions, recapturing the dynamic interplay between the painting and the building. Materials and textures are chosen according to the hatchings and markings of the painting, using them as a guide for surface treatments.

Rules of design come directly from the painting; however, where its two-dimensionality fails to define space, the site completes the rules. The cerro san cristobal hiking trail, located in the heart of picasso’s birthplace, malaga, spain, traces through a hill with varying elevations. The building follows and expands upon the hiking trail, becoming a part of the site and giving visitors the chance to experience picasso’s art in three-dimensional form.

Ovsanna Kalamdaryan PULLING ARCHITECTURE

Ying Zhen Imposter

We’ve been conditioned to see adaptive reuse as a practical solution——where efficiency becomes the top priority. But efficiency is limiting. We place too much meaning on function when architecture is just a container that we can put anything in. The real conflict lies in how we treat program as fixed, when in reality it’s a changing event. This thesis tries to prove it.

Through a series of elevational vignettes from an outsider’s point of view, Imposter explores absurd pairings between architecture and program by following a self-imposed rule: each transformation must pair an un-hatchable structure—— highly specific architecture——with a hatchable program——functions with repetitive, modular elements. These combinations are not meant to be seamless or efficient but instead highlight the artificiality of the architectural “fit”. Set in Los Angeles, these reimagined landmarks quietly shed their original uses and take on new lives. By making buildings into imposters of themselves, Imposter exposes the illusion of architectural permanence and advocates for a more playful, liberating approach to reuse——one that embraces contradiction, absurdity, and the freedom to become something else.

This project explores how order shapes spatial perception in architecture, how hierarchy guides movement, evokes psychological responses, and ultimately defines our interaction with space. Through the interplay of material, opacity, color, and overlapping grids, layers emerge, each creating a distinct sidedness. Success is measured in the illusion of surface—woven from familiar techniques of screens and the fluid imprint of paint, where depth and perception dissolve into one another. Layers do not only stack; they interact, hiding and revealing depending on position, light, or perspective. The screen material introduces sidedness through its thickness, while the transparent tulle fabric allows the Checkscape to bleed through. Passersby may filter through the installation unweaving the sidedness of the checkscape. As it stirs their curiosity, it also defines their overall sense of the layers.

Zina Shakrouf CHECKSCAPE

Danny Tahiraj Fareback

Fareback proposes an institutional alternative to the demolition of corner lot gas station structures as we transition to an electric future - a deployable prototype of one standard, radial timber greenhouse, an abode reconstruction of the existing building footprint, a projecting open air canopy with a triangular stance, and lots of sun grown produce. The existing building initiates a quick exercise on space that gets interpreted by the local community’s needs. The variety of sites and orientation of lots all across the city get translated towards a programmatic focus that shapes the architectural details and program relations.

The spatial isolation of any corner has ramifications at large, therefore an architectural intervention towards furthering:

\ Urban Food Growing Initiatives

\ Educational Programming & Play

\ Local Information Sharing

\ Acts of Donation &

\ Local Economic Empowerment Opportunities

will aim to engender transparency to the food we consume, from just around the corner.

This mental health spa explores how architectural form and light can respond to the emotional complexities of seeking support. Individuals with mental health issues can feel shame or discomfort when reaching out for support, this project replaces the clinical with care, offering a subtle, supportive environment that feels less like therapy and more like a space to feel safe and (un)seen.

While light is often seen as essential to healing, the design questions that assumption. Spaces are prioritized that feel safe, private, and emotionally supportive because often darkness provides a foundation prior to healing. Curved forms and overhanging walls guide and diffuse the light; warm light filters into rooms and shifts in tone depending on what it touches–soft textiles, cool concrete, or rippling water, mirroring the contrast in architecture between light–what is healing–and dark–what feels emotionally safe.

The design embraces the need for safety and comfort, creating spaces where dimness, shadow, and enclosure offer relief instead of resistance, then introduces spaces of light to provide healing. Through manipulation of light and offering various lighting conditions, the design lets users heal differently, on their terms.

Yamin Eizali

Zaw Htet Myat Moe Healing Through Contrast

Interior Design

Professor Heather Scott Peterson

IT IS THE BUSINESS OF THE FUTURE TO BE DANGEROUS*

And it should be. Design, by nature, is an inconclusive practice that draws more inquiry than it resolves. As a matter of course, it requires us to come face-to-face with the limits of knowledge—to stare into the abyss, and keep working. Design is also an anticipatory act, attempting to represent and assume a future feat before it comes to pass. And so, a relevant act of design must tempt the danger of not knowing, and dance with the formidable future.

The members of this graduating class are poised with a broad, heterogeneous mix of claims, and in them we see the daring and verve of tightrope walkers and fire-eaters. Their education has provided each of them with a deep orientation to the opacities of the future. We should be compelled by the knowledge that our students are uniquely suited to the task of wandering into the unknown with a rapt sense of purpose, and a fine disregard for anything too certain. The future of the depends upon it.

—HEATHER SCOTT PETERSON

*Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 1925

IDES

Sheila Naranjo

Aperture and Illumination: Shaping Space for Hilma af Klint

The manipulation of apertures in architecture reveals a dialogue between materiality, light, and spatial perception. Through close readings of John Soane’s House in London, Le Corbusier’s church of Ronchamp, and La Tourette Monastery, I have explored how apertures shape the sensory experience of space through their scale, orientation, and material treatment. This thesis will investigate the design of a space for the work of Swedish painter, Hilma af Klint, where apertures will play a critical role in framing and defining their presence within the architectural composition. Internal apertures will emerge as fundamental spatial definers, shaping the perception of architectural boundaries and the experimental qualities of space.

Alisa Hou

The Eye: Exploring Verticality and Void

In architecture, the eye is a vertical void at the center of spiraling circulation which allows light to pass from top to bottom. It is often seen as a passive void. However, there is potential to develop the eye into a dynamic space that improves user engagement and spatial experience. By redefining the eye as more than a light well, its functions are enhanced, and a deeper connection is formed between movement, visibility, and human experience. Through the hybrid program of a rare book library and garden at the Huntington, this project will allow visitors to travel up and down a ramp, where a vertical garden is introduced in the eye, to enhance air quality and foster a peaceful ambiance, transforming it from a consequence of circulation into a crucial component of the spatial narrative.

Neil Eiklor

The history of architecture is deeply tied to the cycles of making, unmaking, and remaking. Yet, conventional construction practices often resist material afterlives, discarding remnants as waste rather than engaging with their potential for reuse. This thesis investigates the role of reuse as an architectural act, centering on brick—a material born of fire and uniquely resilient to it. The chimneys left standing after the Altadena fires serve as both artifact and opportunity, anchoring the community. Through this, the project explores how architectural materiality can respond to cycles of destruction and renewal while being resilient to dynamic environmental forces.

Film, like architecture, is a temporal medium where scale shifts, making it challenging to exhibit. Traditionally, film exhibitions focus on props, costumes, and behind-the-scenes materials but often fail to capture the immersive experience of film itself. This thesis explores how cinematic framing can be transformed into a spatial experience. Using Wes Anderson’s films as the subject, it examines his use of one point perspective and framing. Instead of recreating full sets, the exhibition showcases anamorphic sets–where a complete image is only visible from a specific camera position, reflecting the way the camera sees a scene. By turning cinematic framing into an interactive and immersive spatial experience, this exhibition challenges traditional film displays and reveals how film constructs perception.

Fatima Garba Anamorphic Illusion: Constructing Cinematic Perception

Melody Martinez

Resonant Grain: The Language of Trees

Modern forestry practices and the timber industry have reduced wood to a commodity, with standardized and abstract dimensions. This approach erases the material’s inherent character, stripping away its natural grain, knots, and imperfections. Embracing wood’s organic potential reveals a design language that moves beyond a two-dimensional surface, allowing the material to guide form. Experimental processes—using axes, saws, or grinders—expose unexpected textures, patterns, and even scents, challenging uniform fabrication methods. Honoring the tree’s lifecycle, each piece is treated as a unique fingerprint, carrying the story of its growth, environmental conditions, and natural transformations.

Grotesque Sanctuary is a chapel-grotto designed for baptism. It takes inspiration from Renaissance grottos, which used materials like shells and pebbles to create textured interiors. In this project, those materials are replaced with natural elements like leaves, bark, and tree branches. These are cast in plaster to form columns, arches, and a baptismal tub. The natural materials leave their shapes and textures in the plaster, and sometimes small pieces stay stuck, becoming part of the surface. Over time, the leaves and bark may fall off or change color, so the space slowly changes. The chapel is placed in a side chapel and part of the crypt in San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, creating a layered, sectional experience. The project combines the church’s structured architecture and the irregular forms of nature, using change and decay as part of the design process.

Diana Maltez Grotesque Sanctuary

Briella Wadkins

The Balance of Branding in Atmosphere

In contemporary architecture, the involvement of multiple disciplines often results in fragmented design, gaps emerge in projects where one discipline ends and another begins. However, through a holistic design approach, we can enhance both the aesthetic and functional qualities of architectural spaces. Gesamtkunstwerk embodies a holistic design approach where every element of a space is integrated to form a unified, immersive environment, creating a seamless blend of art and function that transforms architecture into a total work of art. By using a Gesamtkunstwerk philosophy in architectural projects, we can create immersive environments that provoke and engage users on multiple sensory and emotional levels. Tactics to employ this type of methodology into a project can involve the careful incorporation of graphic design and branding in consideration with materials, atmosphere and the overall user experience of a space.

Architecture is not a static object but a dynamic medium that continuously evolves through an active dialogue with time, inscribing change onto structure. Through an exploration of vineyard and winery–as a landscape of fermentation– materiality acts as an inextricable link between human and environmental events, indexing the processes of fermentation, oxidation, and evaporation inherent in winemaking. Through this lens, the project advocates for an architecture that records rather than resists time, embodying transformation as a central value.

Mary Dilanchian Touch, Tarnish, and Temporal Palimpsest

Nora Galustyan

Beyond the Mirror

Mirrors and reflective surfaces have governed the way that we view ourselves, both optically and psychologically, particularly in the spaces of fashion. Through the strategic use of materiality, spatial sequencing, and optics, this project explores the intersection of fashion, architecture, and perception, transforming retail into a site of immersive discovery rather than passive display. An absence of reflection will allow for fluid, personal experiences of self-expression, where fashion is understood through sensation rather than appearance. By disrupting retail conventions, the design removes habitual self-evaluation, shifting the focus from passive visual observation to embodied interaction. Without the ability to rely on reflection, clients engage with clothing through movement, touch, and spatial awareness, fostering a deeper sensory relationship between the body, space, and garments.

This project proposes an architecture shaped not in defiance of the elements, but in collaboration with them. Rather than resisting water, it embraces it as a sculptor—using rain to erode and carve salt-based architectural forms over time. Drawing inspiration from Gothic architecture, particularly its intricate portals, pilasters, and apertures, the project reimagines these elements as vessels for environmental engagement. In contrast to modernist ideals, which conceal water systems and treat weathering as failure, this work exposes environmental forces as active participants in form-making. Architecture becomes both vulnerable and alive—a slow, fragile transformation where erosion is not failure, but expression.

Narine Keyan Wet Stereotomy

Construction Management

Professor Emily Bills

Presented in a unique studio-based format, the Construction Management program helps our graduates transform the built environment by placing sustainability at the forefront of our curriculum. Students integrate design, technology, business analytics, and executive skills with sustainability and the liberal arts, using experiential, hands-on learning to advance as agile, future-ready leaders and entrepreneurs in the developer, construction, and design-related industries.

—EMILY BILLS

Construction Management

Professor Emily Bills

Isha Prajapati

Arpy Jivalagian

Mary Abrahamyan

GRADUATE programs

MARCH

Master of Architecture

Professor Erin Wright

The Graduate Thesis course marks the pinnacle of the professional program, allowing each student to embark on a self-directed thesis project in collaboration with a faculty member. This course serves as a platform to test and refine architectural ideas through exhaustive create exploration and rigorous implementation. The students were prompted throughout the semester to be conceptually daring and aesthetically provocative. The projects that have emerged have a particular interest on either form, construction or cultural implication. Students have been challenged to utilize diverse methodologies and interests related to architectural production, encompassing various mediums such as writings, diagrams, collages, images, plans, sections, elevations, physical and digital models, structural systems, contextual and environmental concerns, social implications, film, animation, and more.

—ERIN WRIGHT

Gregory Scott

Design for Disassembly Utilizing Cross-laminated Timber (CLT)

Mounting global greenhouse gas emission, current urban densification occurring in major metropolises, and the systemic mass destruction of concrete structures for rebuilding are pressing widescale trends which beg for the development and adoption of innovative best practices in the Architecture-Engineering-Construction industry. A Design for Disassembly strategy squarely addresses these concerns, in large measure. Prefabricated subassemblies (wall elements) of buildings, in a mixed-use context, provides an illustrative context for such a strategy. CLT’s stellar strength-to-weight ratio, superior thermal insular value and inherently renewable and resource-efficient nature – compared to many conventional building materials - make it a prime candidate for material-sourcing for this proposed typology of project. In addition, the disassembly-for-reuse protocol inherent in this model of design and construction could effectively extend a building’s lifespan, albeit at a different site, two-four times the normal 50-100 year lifecycle of conventional structures – rationalizing the proportionally greater up-front cost required for manufacturing CLT elements.

The project, an imagined mental health facility, focuses on architecture’s role in improving mental health treatment. It considers how design facilitates positive community engagement. By being open to and serving the public as well as residents, the facility is both a tool of normalization and an anchor point accessible to patients. The idea of a treatment center as an all encompassing building is discarded, breaking it up into smaller pieces creating a gradient of public and private space flows in multiple directions. This is represented in a series of illustrations to convey the atmosphere of the site on a user level.

Evan Luckey

Christopher Lee Truss

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This visionary floating park is designed for a Middle Eastern coast, blending contemporary Islamic architecture and future community engagement. It serves as a dynamic gathering space, bringing locals and visitors together through diverse programs, including cultural events, recreational activities, and educational workshops suitable for all ages. The park is self-energized through Pavegen tiles, harnessing kinetic energy from footsteps to generate power. Its unique structure, supported by braided cables, ensures stability while maintaining a lightweight and adaptable design. By combining innovation, accessibility, and social interaction, this floating park redefines waterfront spaces as vibrant, self-sustaining urban hubs for future generations.

Tannaz Fatehi Echoes In The Blue

Imagine afternoons filled with exploration, creativity, and connection—not screens. Today, many children spend a third of their after-school hours online, leading to sleep disruptions, anxiety, and health issues. The pandemic worsened this trend, with platforms like TikTok dominating free time. Loneliness is rising, as 7.7 million U.S. children return to empty homes, while after-school programs remain largely inaccessible. More than just a bridge, this space serves as a social armature, fostering play, learning, and community. With a library, lounge, makerspace, and areas for learning new languages and instruments, it transforms after-school time into an active, enriching, and immersive experience.

Ruth Kohanteb

Dan Benaroch

What if architecture could heal—not just individuals, but an entire system? Conventional treatment centers isolate individuals, reinforcing stigma and detachment. This project reimagines recovery by embedding it within the urban fabric, integrating treatment into the city rather than sequestering it. Situated in downtown San Diego—an epicenter of homelessness and addiction—the campus provides immediate medical stabilization, peer-supported transitions, and long-term reintegration. Inspired by synaptic pathways, the design replaces rigid, institutional layouts with fluid, neuro-responsive spaces that reduce stress and enhance engagement. The structure opens outward, connecting to the city and surrounding environment, breaking from clinical rigidity to create a welcoming, non-institutional atmosphere. Angular geometries and shifting planes evoke movement, mirroring the nonlinear nature of healing. More than a treatment center, this project serves as an architectural intervention, redefining recovery. It challenges conventional models by creating spaces that promote dignity, agency, and collective renewal, emphasizing the transformative potential of architecture.

Welcome to Aircadia—Nike’s fully immersive charter city. Residents win entry through a lottery or golden ticket hidden in select sneakers. For one year, they live, work, and compete in a world where every surface is branded, and every action is monitored. From testing Nike gear to tracking performance data, daily life is part of a corporate feedback loop. But beneath the polished surface, a rogue ex-employee tags across the city, captured by Nike’s hidden surveillance. With no cars, only suspended metro pods, running and cycling tracks, Aircadia asks: what happens when a corporation runs a city?

Jordan Chevalier Aircadia

Katayoun Jangi Nejad

Fluid Future

Fluid Future is a visionary architectural proposal for autonomous, amphibious homes designed to adapt to rising sea levels and climate hazards. These self-sustaining, anti-flood structures feature sealed hollow concrete foundations that adjust to water levels and detach to float when necessary. Using a gyroid-based design for strength and efficiency, the homes support long-term living on water, forming floating communities that share amenities and open spaces. Built with UHPC and Geopolymer Cement, they are fire-resistant, durable, and modular. Prefabricated with robotic fabrication, they ensure rapid, scalable deployment. Fluid Future redefines resilient, site-responsive living for an uncertain climate future.

Traditional footwear production lacks individualization and generates significant material wastr. While architecture leads in computational design and sustainable material innovation, its tools and principles remain siloed - rarely intersecting with product design for consumers. Theres a critical gap between scalable personalization and environmentally responsible design. Adaptrix bridges this gap by merging architectural computation with product design, creating an AI- powered, fully 3D-printed footwear system. At it’s core is Loomy , an AI interface that guides users through architectural design prompts. Users describe their aesthetic preferences—such as their favorite architect, structures, or forms and the AI translates those ideas into production-ready renders/geometry.

Adaptrix

Rakshith Somashekar Adaptrix

Matt Feldman

Between the Lines reimagines residential lot boundaries and ADU legislation—not as lines of division, but as opportunities for connection. The project revitalizes the ADU as a practical, desirable, and communityenhancing option for both homeowners and residents. At the heart of this vision is a network of shared backyard pathways that transform underused setback spaces into connective tissue between neighbors. Where fences once stood as barriers, these architectural threads weave a more cohesive urban fabric. With over 70% of Los Angeles zoned for single-family housing, Between the Lines offers an alternative to upzoning—one that preserves neighborhood character while cultivating stronger bonds between ADU residents. The project, proposed in Eagle Rock, delivers a turnkey living experience just a five-minute walk from grocery stores, schools, and major transit lines.

The thesis project focuses on designing an AI Center, a forward-thinking space where the relationship between humans and robots can evolve in an integrated environment. The AI Center will be a hub for cutting-edge research, development, and innovation in artificial intelligence, robotics, and human-machine interaction. The project will include specialized areas for testing, learning, listening and developing new AI visual applications. In essence, the project examines how architecture can mediate the complex relationships between humans, robots, and the built environment. The AI Center will not only be a place for technological innovation but also a prototype for how architecture can evolve in tandem with the rapid advances in robotics and AI, ultimately fostering a future where humans and machines collaborate seamlessly within intelligently designed spaces.

Chant Karaghousian AI STAM Center

Master of Science in Architecture

Professor Erin Wright

The Graduate Thesis course marks the pinnacle of the professional program, allowing each student to embark on a self-directed thesis project in collaboration with a faculty member. This course serves as a platform to test and refine architectural ideas through exhaustive create exploration and rigorous implementation. The students were prompted throughout the semester to be conceptually daring and aesthetically provocative. The projects that have emerged have a particular interest on either form, construction or cultural implication. Students have been challenged to utilize diverse methodologies and interests related to architectural production, encompassing various mediums such as writings, diagrams, collages, images, plans, sections, elevations, physical and digital models, structural systems, contextual and environmental concerns, social implications, film, animation, and more.

—ERIN WRIGHT

The Bio-Inspired Facade for Water Collection by the Calla Lily’s funnel-shaped petals, designed to efficiently manage rainwater while integrating a dynamic aesthetic. Each panel mimics the flower’s smooth, self-cleaning surface, guiding water towards a central collection point. As water accumulates, the panel tilts or adjusts, triggering controlled release into a filtration system. The system is passive, relying on gravity or flexible materials for movement, and does not require active energy sources. The responsive panels create a dynamic, organic movement across the facade, enhancing both its visual appeal and sustainable water management.

Sara Ghanavati Biomimetic Responsive Façade Systems

Graduate Thesis 2025

Woodbury School of Architecture