BERKELEY ARCHITECTURE 2021 THESIS REVIEW

THE SIS 21 BERKELEY ARCHITECTURE

BERKELEY ARCHITECTURE THESIS REVIEW 2021

UTOPIA, MYTOPIA, DYSTOPIA HERE MARK ANDERSON We are living through a moment of great uncertainty everywhere in the world. Shaky institutional structures fail us at the very moment our world can no longer postpone unavoidable struggles with racial injustice, pandemic, climate change, economic inequity and general cultural confusion.

As architects, we are responsible for imagining, proposing and seeking to build the form and space of human interaction within the physical world.

It is sometimes believed that this responsibility sits aside from policymaking and social-political decisions. Sometimes it is believed that policies must be decided first by other disciplines, and then that architects can apply physical structure in support of those policies. Some architects propose that our mission should be primarily aesthetic and functional rather than political.

Other architects have argued that physical structures and spatial organization are always political, and that architecture can and must lead in developing the material world to best serve and enable progress and change in social structure.

The literature on such debates is enormous, opinions diverse. Within this long standing debate we find a history of utopian thinking in which architects have been great contributors. We also find large bodies of work by architects that might be regarded as critical analyses of the world, dystopian projections of current contradictions.

Just beneath the radar, we will find even more contributions to mytopic architecture. Here I need to explain, because mytopia is not actually a word.

It finds itself here in our seminar title first of all because (as we will discuss later), a thesis must often struggle in creative word play as well as in drawings. Writing is one of the essential media in the production of architecture, beginning first of all with drawing, but then also encompassing creative acts in making, writing and mathematics, most often all essentially codependent and “cross-platform” in our working processes.

While writing consumes much of an architect’s work day, texts are most often expository in architecture, earnestly structured to convey specific information that is about something. Less frequently in architecture, we imagine that we can sketch freely with words, we can explore and search and delight ourselves in surprise as words flow forth, just as we more often pursue such discovery through drawing. I like to sketch and explore with words, to write just one step ahead of what I am able to think. Or more precisely, to sketch my writing as a process of thinking. That is what you are seeing here--a search for my own clarity about issues that are important to me as an architect. This brings us back to the seminar title, which we can use as an example of an architect sketching with words. First of all, words have a life, they have sound, they connote association, reference, context. This doesn’t have to be fancy-let’s pick this apart: Our current moment is dire, as I mentioned above, and as you may well have noticed yourself.

Therefore, we need to have big ideas if we have any hope of making the world better. This suggests the word utopia. Already this word is enormous in its context and connotation, and often seems frighteningly bombastic. This is probably why projections of utopia only rarely come into fashion among architects and why we are usually so hesitant to engage utopian projections out loud.

In my own case, whenever I design something, or write something, I am highly doubtful about the potential for great certainty in human acts. In fact, I never trust certainty, and typically do my best to poke fun and undermine its possibility wherever positions of certainty assert themselves. As a result, in every project of mine, you are likely to find intentional “poison pills” acknowledging doubt and denying closure or circumscription in the work. Thus, if we have thoughts of utopia (visions of a perfect world), we must equally entertain dystopia (visions of an imperfect world,

often serving to critique the world as we know it). Many students might resist having to make a thesis projecting utopia. They may not believe in such possibilities--it would be a waste of time, even irritating in concept. Utopia and Dystopia together might offer something for everyone, even the cynics and grumps. This could lead to interesting discussion, may even require staking a personal claim to one or the other, possibly a first step into a personally significant thesis. But even these two powerful words may not be enough on their own, they suggest too much certainty of one extreme or another. Perhaps we need more sand in the oyster. What happens when we avoid considering either utopia or dystopia?

I mentioned that words have a life, they have sound, they connote reference far beyond immediate purpose--just like elements in a building. As I was sitting down to write this syllabus with these “opian” words, a pointless old American rhyme came strangely to mind: “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!” I suppose I was making fun of myself. The title needed a little more oomph, and here was some inspiration, carrying along with it another subtextually deprecatory poison pill so important to someone like me (having never quite fully shaken off that lingering taint of American anti-intellectual embarrassment as I’ve wandered from construction sites into the halls of serious scholarship). Utopia, Mytopia, Dystopia: that was starting to have a nice ring to it, ripe for open-ended flights of architectural fancy in a thesis seminar.

But wait!--is mytopia even a word? I didn’t think so, but looked it up everywhere and I was right-it is not really a word, but I could not actually claim it myself, because the Urban Dictionary had already collected it:

Mytopia: A society built on ideas and actions that have negative effects into the future because of not thinking about the consequences (A combination of the words myopia and topia/dystopia).

This mytopia is perfect for our purposes! It cannot be typed without spellcheck jumping in and corrupting its letters into normative blandness-something to get our hackles up and demand productive resistance every time it is used. More than that, mytopia explains everything about bad architecture, bad politics and the unintended consequential mess our world has frequently fallen into. Mytopia explains what happens when as designers or politicians or citizens we fail to think broadly, fail to think deeply and contextually, fail to act with a clear thesis well-studied, wellreferenced within the broadest context. And, this word lays the whole mess at my own feet. Now we’ve got three great words pretty much summing up the full spectrum of potential approaches to architecture, good, bad and indifferent: every student can find something of interest here, even if by default.

But the title still didn’t quite sing to me. It needed one further hammer on the issue of context-here: ideas in context, thesis in context. Here is very specific. Here happens in a certain place, with actual people, surroundings, history and reference. Better than that, in my own movingmy-lips-while-I read, jive-rhyming sensibility, it sounds good. And one more extra: we now embed yet another pomposity-popping, goodold American, aw-shucks poison-pill: dys, topia, here. (“Dis here topia, you know what I mean?

Your ‘topia, My ‘topia, dis here ‘topia; everybody’s got their own ‘topia.”). Something for everybody-but nobody has it all to themselves. We have to see everybody’s else’s ideas, too, right here next to us, in the whole big picture.

DIFFERENCING: CONTINUOUS PROJECT ALTERED DAILY* TOM BURESH Differencing is to cause or constitute a difference in or between something. In this seminar/studio it means - to make a difference. *Continuous Project Altered Daily is collection of essays by sculptor and author Robert Morris from the 1960s to the 1980s addressing wide-ranging intellectual and philosophical problems of sculpture, raising issues of materiality, size and shape, anti-illusionism, and perceptual conditions. We cite it here to underscore the consistent pursuit of an idea and an architecture rigorously and patiently revealed over a finite period of time.

Esthetics and ethics and are not mutually e xclusi ve ambitions.

Architecture is complicit. There exists no shortage of concerns/challenges that we confront where architecture plays an important role. You will be asked to uncover and define that role for architecture generally and yourself specifically. We will seek an initially broad then deeper understanding of our current situation and speculate on a differing futures.

We will acknowledge then engage the small, medium or large yet difficult issues of our time- the environment, energy, the economy, politics, health, ethnicity, housing, spirituality, immigration, diversity, equity, inclusion, etc...

That is, circumstances and events that are neither easily defined nor resolved and imagine an architecture in response. We will not seek perfection. Questions are as important as proposals. We are as concerned with tomorrow as much as yesterday and today.

We will labor to make connections between, matters of the day, resources, ways of making, human activity, perception and experience. We know these connections are contingent, unstable even slippery. We favor the adoption of temporary truths as a method to navigate the unknown.

While skeptical by nature we are not cynical. We believe architecture is consequential and makes a difference. A difference that matters.

The seminar/studio progresses through weekly assignments that are structured generally as a reflection of one’s advancement through a thesis in architecture. The assignments are consecutive, but will become generative, interdependent, and cumulative, through concurrent thinking, making and deliberation.

Research, critical thinking and visualization are the core of the seminar’s pedagogy. We begin by broadly examining architectures constituent parts; Players (roles, responsibilities and potentials), Situations (a social/cultural/environmental/etc. condition) and Methods (architectural techniques and effects) and conclude with a clear and provocative position on architecture’s role in a contemporary cultural setting.

Difference, making a difference, difference makers, difference machines, differencing – to make a difference.

Differencing: Continuous Project Altered Daily is sponsored by The Church of Anything Goes (TCOAG). TCOAG is a nondenominational, tax free, free range, free speech and nonprofit, organization dedicated to the expansion our collective architectural imagination We are guided by the Hejdukian maxim paraphrased here, “The first decision is arbitrary. Every decision after that is not arbitrary.”

TCOAG is inspired by Barbara Stauffacher Solomon’s “academic adult comic book” ”UTOPIA MYOPIA: 36 PLAYS ON A PAGE” and will refer to it as a model.

INSIDE-OUT LISA IWAMOTO What is a building if not a compilation of its parts?

Walls, doors, windows, skylights, stairs, ramps, chimneys, handrails, frames, beams, columns, ceilings, floors, corridors, roofs,facades. The list goes on.

These elements gang together to perform one essential purpose – separate inside from out, space from space. Encoded in this separation is a host of conventions, meanings and expectations. This thesis term proposes that we take a focused look at one or more of these elements to reconceive new possibilities between inside and out, space from space. By doing this, can we find innovative ways to design for more inclusivity? Social justice? Unexpected encounters? Better and healthier airflow? Unconventional access to light?

By asking a simple, purely architectural design question first (e.g. how do I design a window?), we can also address a larger question (e.g. How can a building façade can create an equitable civic space? Or, What are alternative ways to bring in natural light?), and subsequently arrive at a thesis topic (e.g. 25 Apertures: The Vertical Public Realm. Or, The Deep Floorplate: Alternative Modes of Living in Urban Centers).

These made-up examples serve to illustrate the possibilities of starting with a narrow architectural focus.

The opportunities for innovation are vast.

Thesis is ultimately about asking relevant questions through design and representation. Without each of these three elements – Thesis Inquiry, Design, Drawings – the architectural thesis is incomplete. Importantly, each of these elements is the representation of an idea through different formats -- one in words, one in space and form, and one in representation. As alluded to in the premise, our strategy will be to work in reverse order by prefacing the design and re-conception of a particular element first. As we shelter-in-place, this better provides a clearly defined platform for discovery. However, it is not only the design of the element itself that is important. HOW the design is revealed through drawing is what will further broaden and enrich ideas.

BERKELEY ARCHITECTURE THESIS REVIEW 2021

INTERLUDES MARCEL SANCHEZ PRIETO Thesis proposals are reflective journeys, an interlude to study our environment’s challenges and pressing issues, a dialogue, medium and strategy. It is a lens to see through and construct observations on how architecture could interlace and operate. For better or worse, the current global crisis has accelerated the latent changes in architecture, highlighting many of the fundamental questions for the future of cities already in question before March 2020.

In the midst of it all, thesis proposals exchange perspectives about the city and architecture, addressing climate change, mobility, equity, health, and the state in which architecture is produced. A common thread between the proposals are concepts such as inclusion, redistribution and adaptation towards emergent needs, questioning architecture on how it can adapt to the depopulation of cities? How ingrown be an alternative to the established neoliberal capitalist approach? Are territorial ambiguities opportunities for new types of settlements? Is food production poised to change community integration?

As a whole, the proposals explore axes in which architects could intervene, evaluating the present, and a call to act on; do we need to reconsider the bareness of modern ideals in architecture detached from the idiosyncrasies of daily life? What have we lost in our communities in the rapid urbanization of our cities? Can architecture perform as a backup plan to the increasing natural disasters? How can we integrate the influx of data centers in our cities’ core as we become ever so dependent on the commodity of information? Is developing the underground our new frontier for dwelling?

This moment of interlude is a spatial problem, alternating between the civic values of the individual within the boundaries of the collective; architecture can act in our environment as a direct expression of democracy

MASTER OF ADVANCED ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN RONALD RAEL Overview California is on fire. One of the primary reasons for the phenomena of seasonal fires in the state, particularly Northern California, is the excess of small diameter timber present in forest ecologies. While wood harvesting companies in the United States focus primarily on timber that is greater than 10” in diameter, leaving behind large amounts of small trees, brush and a flammable ecology that has been made vulnerable to the consequences of climate change, particularly drought and global warming, lending to disastrous outcomes. California also has a long history of earthen construction, buildings made of unfired clay-rich soil (adobe) and the use of fired ceramic materials for the roof, which has been overlooked in contemporary design. Each of these material resources, wood and earth, have the capacity to be rethought through technologies contributes to a fire-resistant strategy for building-making, but also for improving our forest to reduce their susceptibility to forest fires, while providing a resource to establish new models for technological development and application with the intent to establish Residential Urbanism through a Wildland-Urban Interface.

Image by (by Sinae Jung)

Provocation By harvesting small diameter timber for the development of new wood technologies and using clay based materials for fire-proof building component systems, there is the potential to reduce the risk and hazards of fire, to both forests and our build environment. This year-long studio will look at two ways of conceptualizing a response to forest fires in California that pertain to the key issues of Technology, Society and Ecology by: 1. Harvesting of small diameter timber for the production of cross-laminated timber (CLT) and wood based additive manufacturing applications and explores ways that contemporary technological building practices can arrive at new strategies for building 2. The exploration of California’s traditional earthen building practices (adobe and ceramics) coupled with additive manufacturing to produce fire-proof building materials and systems that engage with the ecosystems of the wildland/urban edge.

THURSDAY, MAY 6 THESIS REVIEW 2021 10AM 1:15PM

10:00AM

SESSION 1 Presiding: Mark Anderson Critics: Laura Bouwman, Leo Chow, Mona Ghandi, Megumi Tamanaha, Terri Thornton BUFFER David (Xinwei) Chen

10:30

BACK IN TIME Yimo Sun

11:00

THE POTATO AND THE BUCKET BRIGADE Safia Dziri

11:30

BREAK

11:45

PHYGITAL UTOPIA Yifeng Wang

12:15 PM

NEO_BABEL TOWER Jingran Chu

12:45

INDIVIDUAL PUBLIC Steven (Yu) Zhang

1:15

BREAK

10AM 1:45PM

10:00AM

SESSION 2 Presiding: Tom Buresh Critics: Gordon Kipping, Perry Kulper, Jeana Ripple, Gretchen Wilkins, Jason Young FUTURE FAILURES Adam Kor

10:30

REALITY, VIRTUAL & OTHERWISE Jingyi Chen

11:00

THE LAST RED GUARDS MEMORIAL Chengyu Zhang

11:30

BREAK

11:45

FINDING SENSIBILITY Emiel Cockx

12:15 PM

12:45

1:15

THE STORIES THAT ARCHITECTURE TELLS Zhengjia Huo SCAR TISSUE: URBAN INTERVENTION AS HEALING Sally Lape THE INTERMINABLE FUTURES Jaime Yin Ching Chan

THURSDAY, MAY 6 THESIS REVIEW 2021 2PM 5:45PM

SESSION 3 Presiding: Marcel Sanchez Critics: Lori Brown, Lily Chi, Todd Gannon, Megan Groth, Elisa Iturbe

2PM 5:45PM

SESSION 4 Presiding: Lisa Iwamoto Critics: Mariana Ibanez, Michelle Chang, Marcelyn Gow, Laura Briggs, Lyndon Neri

2:00PM

BAKING THE BOX Eric Dell’Orco

2:00PM

OVERHEAD: HYPER DENSIFICATION OF THE UNOCCUPIED Francisco Alvarez

2:30

FRAYING FOR KEEPS: A LOVE STORY Phoebe Johannensen

2:30

3:00

THE OPPORTUNITY IN BETWEEN Jessica Gameros

INSIDE OUT Ik Hun Chang

3:00

3:30

BREAK

OUT OF CONTEXT Claire Yuna Jang

3:45

ARCHITECTURE OF INCOMPLETENESS Rachel Tove-White

3:30

BREAK

3:45

INSIDE THE OUTSIDE Dan Dan Liu

4:15

REGENERATE SHANGHAI LILONG PUBLIC SPACE Haoyu Wang

4:15

RE, FORM, MATTED Andrew McCormack

4:45

4:45

STORAGE AS A FRAMEWORK

CORNER OF SYMMETRY Xiaoye Qin

5:15

POROUS FIGURES Lillian Zhou

5:45

END DAY ONE

Yunyi Chen 5:15

INGROWN Elena Bouton

BERKELEY ARCHITECTURE THESIS REVIEW 2021

FRIDAY, MAY 7 THESIS REVIEW 2021 10AM 1:15PM

10:00AM

10:30

SESSION 5 Presiding: Marcel Sanchez Critics: Lori Brown, Luca Galofaro, Whitney Moon, Marc Neveu

LIVING ARCHITECTURE FOR AGING Chenyu Huang TOUCH BEYOND THE BOUNDARY Ruohan Liu

10AM 1:45PM

10:00AM

SESSION 6 Presiding: Tom Buresh Critics: Danelle Guthrie, Nathan John, Amy Kulper, Mitchell Squire, Jason Young, Paola Zellner GEOMEGALOMECHANNIBALISM

Yafei Li

10:30

ARCHitchen Yiyang Wang

11:00

MONSTROUS TRUTHS: NOTES ON THE DOUBLEDDETACHED HOUSE Michael Clyde Johnson

11:00

DWELL BELOW Kyunghyun Cho

11:30

BREAK

11:30

BREAK

11:45

REHABILITATION OF THE URBAN DECAY Xinwei Lu

11:45

CON-FIGURING Adriana Salim

12:15 PM 12:45 1:15

FALLBACK PLAN Dean Chang OTHER SAND STORIES Alicia Moreira BREAK

12:15 PM 12:45 1:15

FRAMING Marta Elliott SEAMING Lily Oyler BREAK

FRIDAY, MAY 7 THESIS REVIEW 2021 2PM 5:45PM

SESSION 7 Presiding: Mark Anderson Critics: Peter Anderson, Carol Batker, Mona Ghandi, Walter Hood, Jill Stoner, Ho Puay-Peng

2PM 5:45PM

SESSION 8 Presiding: Lisa Iwamoto Critics: Sean Canty, Irene Chang, Michael Maltzan, Ajay Manthripagada, Michael Young

2:00PM

LAST EDEN Eva Yunqi Wei

2:00PM

2:30

PARA-SPACE Peiquan Ma

ALTERNATIVE INTERPRETATION OF A SPATIAL BOUNDARY Maple Lin

3:00

YIMBY, THE PLATFORM FOR DIY URBANISM Kristopher T Swick

3:30

BREAK

3:45

AMERICAN FACTORY: RETHINKING NEW WORKING MODES IN POST-PANDEMIC ERA Muran Yang

4:15

SPACETOPIA: A NEW REALITY FOR SPACE SETTLEMENT Yue (Abby) Gao

4:45

LIGHT AND COLOR IN FUNERARY ARCHITECTURE Jacqueline Lin

5:15

ME AND THE REST OF ME Qiaoxi Chelsea Wang

2:30

ISLANDS WITHIN ISLANDS, COLUMNS BEYOND COLUMNS Seymour Lu

3:00

ALMOST BRIDGING Xin Zhou

3:30

BREAK

3:45

UNSETTLED CONSTRUCTIONS Jeff Schaefer

4:15

MISFIT MODULES Sarah Baxendale

4:45

THE CLOSET Nathalie Canate

5:15

DORM DAYS Matthias Arauco

5:45

END DAY TWO

BERKELEY ARCHITECTURE THESIS REVIEW 2021

BERKELEY ARCHITECTURE THESIS Francisco Javier Alvarez Matthias Arauco Sarah Baxendale Elena Bouton Nathalie Canate Jaime Yin Ching Chan Dean Chang Ik Hun Chang Jingyi Chen Xinwei (David) Chen Yunyi Chen Kyunghyun Cho Jingran Chu Emiel Cockx Eric Dell’Orco Safia Dziri Marta Elliott Jessica Gameros Yue (Abby) Gao Chenyu Huang Zhengjia Huo Claire Yuna Jang Phoebe Johannensen Michael Clyde Johnson Adam Kor Sally Lape Yafei Li Jacqueline Lin Maple Lin Dan Dan Liu Ruohan Liu Xinwei Lu Seymour Lu Peiquan Ma Andrew McCormack Alicia Moreira Lily Oyler

OVERHEAD: HYPER DENSIFICATION OF THE UNOCCUPIED DORM DAYS MISFIT MODULES INGROWN THE CLOSET THE INTERMINABLE FUTURES FALLBACK PLAN INSIDE OUT REALITY, VIRTUAL & OTHERWISE BUFFER STORAGE AS A FRAMEWORK DWELL BELOW NEO_BABEL TOWER FINDING SENSIBILITY BAKING THE BOX THE POTATO AND THE BUCKET BRIGADE FRAMING THE OPPORTUNITY IN BETWEEN SPACETOPIA: A NEW REALITY FOR SPACE SETTLEMENT LIVING ARCHITECTURE FOR AGING THE STORIES THAT ARCHITECTURE TELLS OUT OF CONTEXT FRAYING FOR KEEPS: A LOVE STORY MONSTROUS TRUTHS: NOTES ON THE DOUBLEDDETACHED HOUSE FUTURE FAILURES SCAR TISSUE: URBAN INTERVENTION AS HEALING GEOMEGALOMECHANNIBALISM LIGHT AND COLOR IN FUNERARY ARCHITECTURE ALTERNATIVE INTERPRETATION OF A SPATIAL BOUNDARY INSIDE THE OUTSIDE TOUCH BEYOND THE BOUNDARY REHABILITATION OF THE URBAN DECAY ISLANDS WITHIN ISLANDS, COLUMNS BEYOND COLUMNS PARA-SPACE RE, FORM, MATTED OTHER SAND STORIES SEAMING

THESIS Xiaoye Qin Adriana Salim Jeff Schaefer Yimo Sun Kristopher T Swick Rachel Tove-White Haoyu Wang Qiaoxi Chelsea Wang Yifeng Wang Yiyang Wang Eva Yunqi Wei Muran Yang Chengyu Zhang Yu (Steven) Zhang Lillian Zhou Xin Zhou

CORNER OF SYMMETRY CON-FIGURING UNSETTLED CONSTRUCTIONS BACK IN TIME YIMBY, THE PLATFORM FOR DIY URBANISM ARCHITECTURE OF INCOMPLETENESS REGENERATE SHANGHAI LILONG PUBLIC SPACE ME AND THE REST OF ME PHYGITAL UTOPIA ARCHITCHEN LAST EDEN AMERICAN FACTORY: RETHINKING NEW WORKING MODE IN POST-PANDEMIC ERA THE LAST RED GUARDS MEMORIAL INDIVIDUAL PUBLIC POROUS FIGURES ALMOST BRIDGING

MASTER OF ADVANCED ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN SHIYAN CHEN ESTEBAN LEY SIDA WANG HANYANG ZHANG

FIREBREAK CITY THE CITY SEED A FUTURE TEACHING TOOL GINGKO COOPERATION

GUEST CRITICS Peter Anderson

Peter Anderson is Principal of Anderson Anderson Architecture in San Francisco, Professor of Architecture at California College of the Arts, and a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.

Carol Batker

Carol Batker is Professor of English Literature at the University of San Francisco. Her teaching and scholarship is on literature of American women and ethnic communities.

Laura Bouwman

Laura Bouwman is a Partner in Bouwman Zago Architecture in Los Angeles, California, and Howard Friedman Visiting Professor of Architecture at UC Berkeley.

Laura Briggs

Laura Briggs is Partner at BriggsKnowles Studio. She has served as chair of Sustainable Architecture at Parsons New School of Design and is currently critic and has served as Architecture Department Head at RISD.

Lori Brown

Lori Brown, is Professor and Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Syracuse University School of Architecture. Brown was Awarded Emerging Voices 2021 by Architectural League of New York and co-editor of Contested Space: Abortion Clinics, Women’s Shelters and Hospitals.

Sean Canty

Sean Canty is Assistant Professor and first year studio coordinator at Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is founder of Studio SC, and co-founder of Office III whose work has been exhibited and published nationally and internationally.

Lily Chi

Lily Chi, is the Director of Graduate Studies and the M.S.AAD Program at Cornell University Architecture Art and Planning. Chi served as design editor for the Journal of Architectural Education from 2000–04.

Michelle Chang

Michelle Chang is Assistant Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is founder and director of the practice JaJa Co which received the Architectural League Prize for young architects in 2017. She was the Summer 2020 Richard Rogers Fellow.

Leo Chow

Leo Chow is Design Partner of SOM in San Francisco, and Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.

Irene Cheng

Irene Cheng is an architectural historian, critic, writer and educator. She is associate professor at California College of the Arts where her research explores entanglements of architecture, culture, politics and the environment in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

She is also founding principal of the multi-disciplinary practice Cheng+Snyder.

Elisa Iturbe

Elisa Iturbe is a critic at the Yale School of Architecture. where she coordinates the dual-degree program with the Yale School of the Environment; she guest-edited Log 47 titled Overcoming Carbon Form and co-wrote with Peter Eisenman the book, Lateness.

Luca Galofaro

Luca Galofaro is Partner at LGSM_A and Associate professor at Università di Camerino - SAAD Ascoli Piceno in Italy. He is Co-Curator of the first Architecture Biennale in Orleans, France, and founder member of the research collective CAMPO.

Todd Gannon

Todd Gannon is thr Robert S. Livesey Professor of Architecture and Head of the Architecture Section of the Knowlton School of Architecture. Gannon’s research focuses on the history and theory of late 20th-century and contemporary architecture.

Mona Ghandi

Mona Ghandi is a practicing architect and Professor of Architecture at Washington State University School of Architecture.

Megan Groth

Megan Groth, is Practice Coordinator at Woodbury School of Architecture. Megan has been awarded the 2021 ACSA Course Development Prize in Architecture, Climate Change, and Society.

Walter Hood

Walter Hood is a practicing architect and landscape architect with a noted national practice based in Oakland, California, and is Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley.

Mariana Ibanez

Mariana Ibanez is Chair and Associate Professor at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design department. She taught previously at Harvard Graduate School of Design, Columbia and MIT. She is also co-founder and principal of the award-winning office Ibanez Kim.

Gordon Kipping

Gordon Kipping is an Adj. Asst. Professor of Architecture at Columbia University. He is the founder of the NYC based architecture firm G TECTS and a professional engineer.

Kuc is Professor of Architecture and Urban Design Faculty at Cracow University of Sabina Sabina Technology, in Cracow Poland.

Kuc

Amy Catania Kulper

Amy Catania Kulper is Architecture Department Head and Assoc. Professor at RISD. She is the author of Domesticated Natures: Victor Horta and the Art Nouveau Interior, Routledge (2017).

GUEST CRITICS Perry Kulper

Perry Kulper is an architect and an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan. Kulper co-authored Pamphlet Architecture 34, Fathoming the Unfathomable: Archival Ghosts and Paradoxical Shadows with Nat Chard.

Michael Maltzan

Michael Maltzan is founder of MMA, Michael Maltzan Architecture. The firm is widely recognized and published and has received numerous Progressive Architecture awards.

He was elected to the National Academy of Design.

Ajay Manthriprigada

Ajay Manthriprigada is Assistant Professor of Design and Representation at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He is founding director of the architecture practice Manthriprigada.

Whitney Moon

Whitney Moon is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee. Moon’s research interests reside in 20th and 21st century art and architecture, with an emphasis on theatricality, performance and ephemeral works.

Lyndon Neri

Lyndon Neri is founder and Partner of the internationally recognized architecture practice Neri&Hu Design and Research Office based in Shanghai, China. The firm has received numerous award and honors since its founding.

Marc J Neveu

Marc J Neveu is the head of the Architecture Program in The Design School at Arizona State University. He is editor of the biannual peer-reviewed Journal of Architectural Education and his research considers the role of history in contemporary praxis.

Ho Puay-Peng

Ho Puay-Peng is an architect and historian, UNESCO Chair on Architecture Heritage Conservation and Management in Asia, and Professor and Head of the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore.

Jeana Ripple

Jeana Ripple is Graduate Program Director and Assoc. Professor at the University of Virginia. She is Principal and co-founder of the collaborative architecture firm, Mir Collective, and Founding Editor of TAD: Technology Architecture and Design.

Zhang Rui

Zhang Rui is Principal of Rui Design and Professor of Architecture at Northwest Polytechnic University in Xi’an, China.

Jill Stoner

Jill Stoner is Professor and Director of the Azrieli School of Architecture at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and Professor at UC Berkeley. A practicing architect and scholar, she is author of the books Poems for Architects, and Toward a Minor Architecture.

Mitchell Squire

Mitchell Squire is an artist and educator whose practice encompasses architecture, visual art and material culture. He is a Professor of Architecture at Iowa State University.

Squire recently co-curated “Black Stories” an exhibition at the Des Moines Art Center and established GATEWAY a fund supporting emerging BIPOC artists, designers and activists.

Megumi Tamanaha

Megumi Tamanaha is a practicing arcchitect and Studio Director at Architecture Research Office (ARO) in New York.

Terri Thornton

Terri Thornton is a practicing artist in the medium of drawing, is Curator for Education at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and founder/curator of the experimental exhibition space Blind Alley Gallery in Fort Worth, Texas.

Gretchen Wilkins

Gretchen Wilkins is Head of the Architecture Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Prior she was Assoc. Professor and Head of Design at RMIT University’s Vietnam campus. She is the editor of Distributed Urbanism: Cities after Google Earth.

Jason Young

Jason Young is a Professor and Director of Architecture at the University of Tennessee. He was a contributing co-editor for Stalking Detroit, (Barcelona, ACTAR 2001), an anthology of essays, projects, and photographs offering an analytical description of Detroit.

Michael Young

Michael Young is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Cooper Union and a partner in New York based Young & Ayata.

Paola Zellner

Paola Zellner is an Assoc. Professor in Architecture at Virginia Tech, secretary/member of the Executive Committee of the International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA) and principal of Zellner + Bassett.

BERKELEY FACULTY CRITICS Mark Anderson Andrew Atwood Giovanni Betti Tom J. Buresh Dana Buntrock Luisa Caldas Greg Castillo Raveevarn Choksombatchai Renee Chow Greig Crysler

Danelle Guthrie M. Paz Gutierrez Sarah Hirschman Lisa Iwamoto David Jaehning Nathan John Dan Muntean David Orkand Rudabeh Pakravan Keith Plymale

Eleanor Pries Ronald Rael Eric Reeder Marcel Sanchez Prieto Simon Schleicher Andrew Shanken Dan Spiegel Kyle Steinfeld Neyran Turan Mia Zinni

BERKELEY ARCHITECTURE THESIS REVIEW 2021

OVERHEAD: HYPER DENSIFICATION Francisco OF THE UNOCCUPIED Alvarez Advisors Lisa Iwamoto Paz Gutierrez

The urban fabric of Downtown Los Angeles is shared not only by different real estate qualities and zonings, but also by the mixed economies that allow access to places.

Such differences cause segregation, lack of opportunities and impacts in quality of life.

Overhead is a proposal to take over the unused office space buildings increasingly in decline to add 50% more square feet availability for micro living units.

By taking advantage of the overhead spaces of office building heights, Overhead looks into opportunities of desification within the existing built environment, specifically office space buildings. With low residential occupations, a variety of solutions were considered to allow opportunities of growth for newcomers and people living under the gap of ownership.

Matthias Arauco Advisors Lisa Iwamoto Andrew Atwood

DORM DAYS

It’s college. Much to your chagrin, your parents hug and wave you goodbye in front of your new roommates, who also appear to cope with untimely parental existence. As they turn out of the parking lot, you come to terms with your new quarters in which a standard set of provisions seemingly renders you a universal subject. What is the meaning of all this? Unbeknownst to you, the dormitory too is facing an identity crisis.

Like many other architectures, the dormitory must evolve beyond the stage where technology can proclaim it a redundant, rent-collecting device. How does it adhere to notions of economy while presenting new forms of living? Dorm Days misuses conventional, standard, and familiar objects and architectural devices to suggest another framework for co-habitation.

Sarah Baxendale Advisors Lisa Iwamoto Keith Plymale

MISFIT MODULES

My thesis seeks to explore the future of urban high-rise living through the relationship between interior and exterior spaces, and more importantly the spaces that connect them. By investigating the downfalls of current urban living, there’s a clear consensus about the lack of many integral features. Although some have opted to move to the suburbs, millennials are unwilling to sacrifice walkable and programmatically diverse neighbourhoods. This begs the question, how can we improve upon our urban dwellings affordably, by bringing light, air, and additional greenspace in, all while increasing social interaction? The result: a misfit within the traditional city fabric. This project investigates modular design as a basis for study, but innovates on the system by proliferating the concept of the typical boundary of the exterior, through architectural interventions.

Through the extraction of a system of small modules from a traditional unit, and further breaking it down by its key features, the small modules are rotated and reassembled as a collective modular unit. When amalgamated, the result is a series of misfit spaces, adjoined more impactfully as interunit, communal and green spaces with access to light and air.

1 BEDROOM

6’

7’

ENTRY+STORAGE UNIT 6’ x 7’

8’

6’

KITCHEN UNIT 6’ x 8’

2 BEDROOM

10’

12’

BEDROOM UNIT 10’ x 12’

8’

5’

BATHROOM UNIT 8’ x 5’

3 BEDROOM

Elena Bouton Advisors Marcel Sanchez Sarah Hirschman

INGROWN

The word ingrown is one of unpleasantness. It speaks to a bodily discomfort, an ingrown toenail or ingrown hair. It is a term of restriction, friction, and limits. From the condition of being pushed against the perimeters, there is potential to turn inward. This thesis develops the ingrown as a methodology to understand material transformation and limits, as it moves upward in scale from the body to the neighborhood. The framework is used to analyze recent changes in zoning and policy for Accessory Dwelling Units, to propose new ways of growing and living that challenge existing hierarchies.

Nathalie Canate Advisors Lisa Iwamoto Greig Crysler

THE CLOSET

The word closet holds two meanings. One, a place where things are stored and two, the way in which the queer identity is concealed and revealed. The closet is where we store our belongings and sometimes set aside things we don’t want in plain sight. But what if we instead took this space and inverted it? Metaphorically, the closet that is commonly known as a safe space for queer people to hide is now unapologetically exposed. This grants us the permission to be free, to be our true self. This thesis is working towards understanding the closet, the intersection of primary shapes and boundless space.

Through the overlapping of primary shapes therein lies the potential to create a type of closet - the un-designed, the undesirable, a small fragment, a leftover, a vestige or a remnant space.

Jaime Yin Ching Chan Advisors Tom Buresh Dan Spiegel

THE INTERMINABLE FUTURES

How can the notion of palimpsest be integrated in the practice of retrofitting to reveal the layer(s) of time embedded, evoke new meanings and contribute a sense of depth to the contemporary world? Often regarded as a reminder of the past, palimpsest is more than just a writing piece. It is a long term accumulation of layers rewriting through time with the act of peeling, imprinting, overlapping and marking. The notion of palimpsest brings out that the creation is neither the past, present or future.

Instead, it is the synthesis of the past, present AND future. With this quality echoing with the characteristic of architecture being a collage of time while layers of history are embedded in the contemporary context, this proposal studies the possibility of architecture being the active palimpsest that brings in new reinterpretation and depth to the city through the integration and collision of old & new layers.

Dean Chang Advisors Marcel Sanchez Greig Crysler

FALLBACK PLAN

Cities all around the world are developing to deal with various needs in modern society.

Infrastructures like police & fire stations, hospitals, churches, etc. work together to help the civilization function in a city scale. However, throughout history, it showed that we are not ready to deal with disasters in a spatial operation. Post-architectural designs are helping in a passive way. The thesis is about creating a prepared space situated in a city. The new program will be able to strengthen the notion of citizens when facing catastrophe and also being a welcoming space of their daily life.

Ik Hun Chang Advisors Lisa Iwamoto David Orkand

INSIDE OUT

Once a hallmark building during the rise of America’s automotive culture and highway stayover system, motels are becoming abandoned. Motels are fading away in the midst of luxurious hotels, Airbnb, and the global pandemic. While motels are an ideal place for budget travelers who only need a place to sleep, the living space is not an ideal place for the stayover experience. Additionally, motels are considered cheap and unpleasant, due to their ubiquitous appearance. This thesis explores the ubiquitous building typology of the motel through the investigation of the relationship of its component parts — the building massing, the corridor, the room. By examining how these parts can be reconfigured, the aim of this thesis is to redefine the stay over experience relative to post-COVID travel, social interaction, and delight — and therefore, re-imagine this classic American experience.

Jingyi Chen Advisors Tom Buresh Luisa Caldas

REALITY, VIRTUAL & OTHERWISE

This thesis proposal is based on a predictive future scenario influenced by advanced AR/ VR technology. It would explore the possibilities of architecture in a virtual environment, and discuss the consequences projected in the physical world.

Xinwei David Chen Advisors Mark Anderson James Leng

BUFFER

This thesis explores the confrontation of references in architecture, by emphasizing the transitions from one grid to the other, resonating and materializing the shift of individuals identities from social to personal, imagining a social housing project that responds to the external while defending the internal.

Yunyi Chen Advisors Marcel Sanchez Renee Chow

STORAGE AS A FRAMEWORK

Storage space, which exists for a longtime, has been ignored and poorly operated. The storage space provides people and cooperation to save their belongings. However, the storage can be more than that. This thesis asks: How to bring experience to storage space? How to have the storage as a framework to integrate with people’s lives, such as in working, living and social scenario? The thesis project locates in an urban village in China, which occupied by painting industry and in need of multiple formats and options of storage, both personal items and paintings. The storage framework achieves an architectural importance and it is involved into the urban village in terms of different functions.

Kyunghyun Cho Advisors Marcel Sanchez Luisa Caldas

DWELL BELOW

The urban population is continuously increased and now cities meet the limit of enlarging their sizes to accept them. It is the interlude period for the cities to find a new space without covering the whole land with concrete. One of the potential areas is underground space, and now many cities are developing subsurface space as a fascinating public space. However, the residential area is the only architectural program that is still not welcome within the underground environment. This project will propose a suitable subterranean space that can interact with the current urban infrastructure and contain the increasing population in a pleasant and inhabitable environment. This proposal will be the first step to create a new category of the city, the underground city.

Jingran Chu Advisors Mark Anderson Kyle Steinfeld

NEO_BABEL TOWER

The first, the Ordovician mass extinction, which took place 445 million years ago, involved the disappearance of 85 percent of all species including brachiopods, bryophytes, and tripods. The second, Late Devonian mass extinction: Sea life disappeared between 375 million and 360 million years ago. The third, the Permian extinction, saw 75% of all living things disappear. The fourth, the Triassic extinction, wiped out 80% of the dinosaurs’ natural enemies and ushered in the age of dinosaurs. The fifth, the Cretaceous mass extinction, the dinosaurs disappeared. At first, no one cared about one disaster It was just a wildfire, a plague, the extinction of a species, the disappearance of a city. Until everyone involved into it...In 2022’survivors launched the Neo-Babel Tower project and began to escape from the ground.

Emiel Cockx Advisors Tom Buresh Marcel Sanchez

FINDING SENSIBILITY

How does one design a space that is profoundly moving? Is it intuition? An innate sensibility for the poetic? // Between the conceived and the constructed lays a space, a tension in which we are moved deeply. We find that tension between notes on paper and the sound of the violin, between precise linework and the drawing sketched by hand, between a desire for perfection and the authentically moving of that which is vulnerably real. // In order to design within this tension, we drastically need to change the way we think about how we design. We need to push ourselves beyond architecture as the conceived form and calling changing light “phenomenology”. I propose a new and more holistic way of thinking about how we should design, found in the tension between idea and place, in the surprising closeness of that which is ever out of reach, in the unattainable yet profoundly moving pursuit of perfection.

Eric Dell’Orco Advisors Marcel Sanchez Greg Castillo

BAKING THE BOX

Baking the box is a recipe for re-negotiating and subverting the big box supermarket and transforming it into a social and gastronomic infrastructure. This thesis focuses on building community through food and speculates how architectural elements can participate in the production of food with an emphasis on educational environments, small businesses, and amateur cooks. Culinary metaphor will serve as a mode of transformation for deconstructing and manipulating an existing supermarket structure and using its tectonics and organizational system as the raw ingredients for a Municipal Urban Food Infrastructure Network. When you bake the box, you get [M.U.F.I.Ns]

Safia Dziri Advisors Mark Anderson Andrew Shanken

THE POTATO AND THE BUCKET BRIGADE

During these times of pandemic, the COVID-19 curve, although most pressing, isn’t the only one that needs to be “flattened”. Due to widespread unemployment, breakdowns in food distribution and permanent closure of important organizations and businesses, the essential resources like food, housing, income supports, and caregiving support come more amiss than ever impacting already precarious communities the most. The essential resource demand curve can only be flattened thanks to short and mid-term “fixes” and longer term policy measures and deeper life changes. This will require the coordination of many individuals and organizations centered around the spatial problem of resource distribution. Central to tackling such a complex problem with many actors and localities, organizations report needing a better understanding of the needs. The aim of this thesis is to contribute to solving the essential resource crisis by disseminating information about the supply chains at stake –where are the issues and what can be done – suggesting short- and long-term solutions by making maps and infographics.

Marta Elliott Advisors Tom Buresh Andrew Atwood

FRAMING

Easements and right-of-ways blur conventions of ownership, property, rights, use, and access. These ambiguous spaces are created as an afterthought when the need to share is not immediately apparent. What if these shared spaces were not a transactional contingency in writing but planned reciprocal negotiations? Rather than starting from scratch, this project chips away at abundance to arrive at something ambiguous.

Framing and layering create ambiguous spatial conditions where sharing happens intentionally and not out of necessity. Chipping away suggests that a different kind of progress might come of dispensing with the need for a neatly packaged whole. Coexistence anticipates a multiplicity of experiences which lacks a ‘knowable’ narrative.

Harnessing ambiguity provides a model for working with what we have in a world where it feels like we need to know everything.

Jessica Maria Gameros Advisors Marcel Sanchez Ron Rael

THE OPPORTUNITY IN BETWEEN

This Thesis seeks an attempt to integrate and underscore the essential links between the border cities Ciudad Juarez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas United states. The investigation will focus on the urban hierarchy of the border space: proposing geographical adjacency of structural differences and the interaction of simultaneous process in between the spaces. The border itself. The project is a statement to reiterate why the border should exist and the advantages of a frontier city.

SPACETOPIA: A NEW REALITY FOR Yue (Abby) SPACE SETTLEMENT Gao Advisors Mark Anderson Paz Gutierrez

It’s 2221, the earth is uninhabitable. Crop blights and dust storms threaten humanity’s survival. Corn is the last viable crop. Because of this threat, the world also regresses into a post-truth society where younger generations are taught false history. People no longer trust others or care about others’ feelings. Human lives are extremely disconnected. Under this unfortunate condition, the UN seeks new alternatives to save human beings, one of which is to explore human habitat in space. As a part of the Space Colonization Program, the UN looks for 10,000 volunteers to be the first immigrants of the United Imaginations (UI). Their missions include not only to explore a new habitat for settlement, but also try to wake up the natural goodness of human beings as a part of a society. The spaceship designed in this thesis is the future habitat of the United Imaginations(UI).

Chenyu Huang Advisors Marcel Sanchez Luisa Caldas

LIVING ARCHITECTURE FOR AGING

To design for aging is to design for our own future. In an aging society, higher life expectancy and morbidity creat an increasing aging population who seek daily physical and cognitive assistance from long-term care service. Yet, architecture for senior longterm care is treated as a banal typology that is unworthy of attention, while elders living in these facilities are confronting the consequences of design marginalization against aging population. In 2020, global crisis such as COVID-19, economic reess, and climate change are worsening the situation and threatening the well-being of elders, who are disproportionally struck by pressing social and health challenges. By addressing architecture for aging and the elders who live in it, we are designing for elders’ resilience, to help them overcome some of today’s most pressing crisis, and we are reconnecting architecture to the issues of care, vulnerability, user needs, and user autonomy. We hope to find the answers for the following questions. What are the challenges of senior long-term care in an aging society? What is the spatial driver for designing senior long-term care? How do we design beyond a mere “beautiful cage” that puts elders into their premature burial? How can we design to adapt the aging process? How can long-term care architecture envision a proactive lifestyles for the elders?

Zhengjia Huo Advisors Tom Buresh Rene Davids

THE STORIES THAT ARCHITECTURE TELLS

Architecture should tell multiple stories. According to this statement, I will explore and design two parts together, which are multiple stories that architecture tells and the ways to express multiple stories in a single building. The multiple stories can be the original function and meaning of the building, or they can be redesigned and added stories. The building can be a new one, or it can be a transformation on an existing famous building.

Claire Yuna Jang Advisors Lisa Iwamoto David Orkand

OUT OF CONTEXT

A building and its site have a complicated relationship: architects want to make a building “in context” out of respect for the existing memory of a site, but constructing anything new is often antithetical to that endeavor. This thesis wonders how the past can carry on in a new building. To test this, the project excavates erased artifacts in Emeryville— the city’s former railway, factories, street grids, and landscape are extracted, rescaled, and overlayed. From the layers of these artifacts, a latent order is found, a new space is drawn, and an order unfamiliar to the present is made apparent. In this thesis, what seems to be out of place is merely a trace of what’s forgotten, a palimpsest brought to form as a spatial experience.

Phoebe

FRAYING FOR KEEPS: A LOVE STORY

Johannensen Advisors Marcel Sanchez Ron Rael

Buildings stand as immovable, unnatural objects within their environments. As suburbs sprawl, animals, habitats, and ecosystems are displaced. Homes are curated to keep as much control of the natural world within property lines. However, there is only so much we can do. Termites erode structures, weeds threaten lawns, bats make dwellings of the attic. As much as we believe we have control, we do not, and the more we try to keep out the natural, the more ways it finds its way in. Life has become maintenance. But what if there is another way? This one man’s journey explores exactly that.

MONSTROUS TRUTHS: Michael NOTES ON THE DOUBLED-DETACHED HOUSE Clyde Johnson Advisors Tom Buresh Neyran Turan

Monstrous is that which deviates from convention, not so obviously grotesque in its appearance, but through its deviancy revealing of those norms upon which meaning systems rely. Beginning from an examination of an historical model housing typology which connects space, image, and self, this project then inquires into various frames of reference which allow for such representational constructions.

Adam Kor Advisors Tom Buresh David Orkand

FUTURE FAILURES

Flushing Meadows, New York City...A future without ashes. A future transformed…watch the world of tomorrow unfolds as you arrive at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Every pile of detritus and grime has been razed to rewrite the story of the great Corona dump in the days of F. Scott Fitzgerald…embedded within the word, “future” is not only what is to come, but also the expectation of something revolutionary, innovative, and new. Though a promise of the World’s Fair, “newness” is often tradition in disguise. Projections look backward as much as they do forward...this thesis will apply the framework of future archaeology to examine strands of past future on the existing Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, New York, and propose a design and narrative that considers history as material not only to be studied but tinkered and hacked.

Albert Speer’s Volkshalle

On the Other Side is Chaos

Democracity - Model City

Your Guide to the Future

SCAR TISSUE: Sally URBAN INTERVENTION AS HEALING Lape Advisors Tom Buresh Andrew Shanken

The built environment is often referred to as an “urban fabric:” as if our surroundings consist of a continuous physical entity. The nature of this fabric can be defined at any given moment as a series of blocks, buildings, roads, sidewalks: solids and voids that make up larger neighborhoods and cities. These physical elements, though tangible and documentable, are in a constant state of flux, pushed and pulled by an endless array of historical, social, political, and economic forces. The urban context is constantly being redeveloped, redefined, reinterpreted. Endlessly characterized, it is by definition incomplete, and cannot meet the needs of all its constituents. As it changes and grows and reaches toward an impossible completion, it is in need of repair.

Urban interventions have the potential to provide this repair, addressing interruptions or fractures in the urban fabric as a form of “scar tissue.” This thesis aims to address the fragmented nature of the urban fabric through a series of six design interventions in the Berkeley Area.

Yafei Li Advisors Tom Buresh Mark Anderson

GEOMEGALOMECHANNIBALISM:

A Planetary Manual and Troubleshooting Guide

Arrogant Ventilator. Air, it is politicized, it is brainwashing, it has two colors, red and blue, it is composed of characters, connected by chemical bonds. In human eyes, it is transparent, colorless, odorless. An arrogant ventilator, lying on the atmosphere, crawling all over, always blowing, ventilating. A rapidly rotating cam, eight pistons facing eight trigrams. Flexible air manifolds, millions of tension cables, from the cylinder to the human nose. Air molecules, absorbed by blood cells, flooding through the human body. They become unconscious, mindless, emotionless, dragging the cam to spin tirelessly. The ventilator is strengthened, intensified by the positive loop. The cam rotates faster and faster, the atmosphere grows thicker and thicker. Arrogantly expanding.

Jacqueline Lin Advisors Mark Anderson Eleanor Pries

LIGHT AND COLOR IN FUNERARY ARCHITECTURE

Typical experiences of death are removed from the everyday, somber experiences in a palette of black and gray. In the late 19th century, San Francisco moved its cemeteries and dead into the outskirts of the city. This project reinserts death and mourning back into the city through a columbarium and cemetery complex in the San Francisco Mission District.

This thesis explores the use of color and daylighting to transform death in urban and daily life. The program becomes dynamic, visibly changing with the effects of color and light. Mourners and visitors experience an alternative way of living with the dead, pausing in moments of saturated bright color or in moments of brilliant specularity.

ALTERNATIVE INTERPRETATION OF A Maple SPATIAL BOUNDARY Lin Advisors Lisa Iwamoto James Leng

The thesis started with the exploration of spatial boundaries as delineation of perceptual boundaries that are ambiguous and varying. The spatial conditions, equivocal and open to alternative perception, stimulate individuals’ interpretation and re-interpretation of space. Two terms in the investigation are – physical spatial border, defined to be the tangible boundary of space – and sensual spatial border, defined to be the personal perception of the physical spatial borders. The position and proportion of openings on spatial border can lead to multiple reading of the space. The thesis investigation will be experimented as an elementary school in which spatial conditions are created to encourage the children’s alternative perception of such space. The project aims to transform an explicitly plan-generated spatial condition into a spatial interpretationgenerated space that is equivocal and opens to individuals’ alternative perceptions.

Dan Dan Liu Advisors Lisa Iwamoto Dan Spiegel

INSIDE THE OUTSIDE

This thesis project is an exploration of liminal space as the driver of physical, intellectual, and social interactions through architecture. Through the design of a library in East Oakland, the project addresses the issues related to the algorithmic targeting of users on the internet, which generates a presence of echo chambers, an insularity of views, and intolerance for other ideas. Liminality is implemented through a volumetric “mesh” tectonic to create an ambiguity between interior and exterior and a permeability for the transmission of sensory information between walls. Through the blurring of the boundary between spaces, the proposal aspires to generate a transformative experience of the public library and access to information.

Ruohan Liu Advisors Marcel Sanchez Luisa Caldas

TOUCH BEYOND THE BOUNDARY

Data centers are bases for so many things your apps, your newsfeed, photos, videos.

It is a building filled with servers rapidly processing digital information. Nevertheless, data centers are now inaccessible and inconspicuous for most people, and they are built in the most secret place in the world. The spaces that created is for machines and servers, it is not a space for human. As the society is more dependent on technology for information service, there is a new trend that data centers are built inside our cities.

But what would happen when human live with machines? How we live with data center in our daily life and in which way data center could be injected to our society? My project tries to explore these questions and envision the way citizens touch technology when the boundary in between is blurred.

Xinwei Lu Advisors Marcel Sanchez Greig Crysler

REHABILITATION OF THE URBAN DECAY

This project conducts an experiment on how the architecture could be a tool to the solution of urban decay. The site is in Detroit, Joe Louis Arena while the stadium was recently deconstructed. So this land became the urban vacant lands but its location is special, it was in the downtown of Detroit. Compared to other high-rise buildings and commercial plaza as a stimulation to reactive the urban economy, this project attempted to touch the liminal space between work and dwelling. The economic assumption is remote work includes Uber and deliverers who receive orders online. In this case, the space shows the feature of continuity and the boundary of working and living is blurred.

The inhabitants may have the ability to define the boundary of the specific functionality of the space while the building itself could become a narrator that documents this urban regeneration story.

ISLANDS WITHIN ISLANDS, Seymour COLUMNS BEYOND COLUMNS Lu Advisors Lisa Iwamoto James Leng

As a term of art, defamiliarization is invented as a mean to distinguish poetic from practical language on the basis of the former’s perceptibility. This approach addresses the contrast between the commonality of everyday life and the mystery hidden behind, which evokes a feeling of inexplicable enlightenment. The thesis explores defamiliarization of architecture that creates tension in unexpected sensations that familiar elements of architecture produce. This is investigated through the reinterpretation of columns, specifically by using techniques such as distortion of scale, modification of positioning and alternating structural functions.

Peiquan Ma Advisors Mark Anderson Marcel Sanchez

PARA-SPACE

This thesis was inspired by a question - Does architecture really only serve 10%? The numbers may be exaggerated, but even in the most prosperous cities, there is a spatial gap between the architectural world and the non-architectural world. Think of those slums caught in the bustling city, where there is only the pursuit of survival, not the pursuit of architecture. The visible or invisible gap between slums and luxury city streets have killed 90% of people’s chances of a better life. This bold and horrifying argument evokes me to think, how to create a para-space with minimal intervention, providing people living in an informal urban environment with better opportunities to integrate into the city?

Andrew

RE, FORM, MATTED

McCormack Advisors Lisa Iwamoto Dan Spiegel

Re, Form, Matted investigates the existing threshold conditions of the North Berkeley BART Station revealing the formal vernacular at the human scale and the typologies of the urban scale. Located at a site that sits at the nexus of these scales, the project intervenes on the housing and public realm by reformatting the conditions of density, adjacencies, and landscape.

Alicia Moreira Advisors Marcel Sanchez Neyran Turan

OTHER SAND STORIES

Feeding the planet’s largest extractive industry, sand contributes to the production of glass, concrete, golf courses, paint, bricks, electronics and land to name a few.

Sand mining renders land as commodity and resource within the naturalized logics of territory, property and ownership. Sites of ambiguous ownership become conditions of productive confusion that serve to irritate capital accumulation through the care, maintenance and repair of land rather than its exploitation. This project choreographs a different story of sand—one of commoning rather than commodifying. Instructions for appropriation leave room for (mis)interpretations and (mis)use, attempting to collectivize labor, socialize reproductive care and formalize without solidifying raw material. Sand’s inherent precarity as a building material, causing architecture to droop, flop, sag, slump, necessitates continuous making and remaking, repair and maintenance. Looseness of material thus becomes productive in forming structures of care in sites of ambiguous ownership, provoking how we might live otherwise.

Lily Oyler Advisors Tom Buresh Sarah Hirschman

SEAMING

In this thesis, we understand “seaming” to be the active, tactile process of repairing, [re]making, and reconnecting at multiple scales-- especially those of the body, community, and place. “Seamlessness” is familiar to us as a modern ideal of ease and speed; the imagined seams connote labor, time, inefficiency, and bulk. And yet these same characteristics offer value-- these moments of interface are occasions for intentionality, investment, increased connection and more thorough awareness of the systems in which we participate. I seek to better understand the potential of our architectural tools in the face of communal fracture and loss, and I am interested in the opportunity of the architectural seam-- the in-between, the slow-- as a space of resilience and collectivity, restoration, and resistance to that ‘seamless’ ideal.

Xiaoye Qin Advisors Lisa Iwamoo Paz Gutierrez

CORNER OF SYMMETRY

This thesis explores the place for symmetry in contemporary architecture, through the investigation of mirror reflection and corner extension, especially as to how corners influence the perception of space. The research investigates the potential of reflection symmetry as a tool of production rather than for its visual effect. The design is to develop a student dormitory. The project synthesizes the concept from thesis statement to create new perception and arrangement of space is to instill a sense of community among students and provide and foster students social interaction. The traditional student dormitories have corners’ interior and exterior conditions, which generate space being the gathering social space for students. Coped with the apertures and mirrors, the design will link the interior and exterior.

Adriana Salim Advisors Tom Buresh Neyran Turan

CON-FIGURING

Buildings experience continuous changes during their lifetime. Human interventions and natural processes selectively replace, reposition and remove architectural components to fit in new programs. This thesis addresses the issues of resource, time and aesthetic in architecture through material conversion and reconfiguration of an existing building. In one of its evolution phases, a long-span building is reimagined into cellular units of non-specific programs, which are always in a process of assembly and dismantling, growth and decay. The building is treated as a material resource; materials and architectural elements on-site are reconfigured in a collage-like method, and transformed both in their physical form and function through a series of architectural misuses.

Jeff Schaefer Advisors Lisa Iwamoto Darell Fields

UNSETTLED CONSTRUCTIONS

A small mixed-use apartment building along Park Boulevard in Oakland is chosen as the format for a set of living spaces with unusual adjacencies. Through a series of misreadings, neighboring facades are unrolled and rerolled, articulated and intersected, and finally carved apart and reconstructed, creating spatial and programmatic relationships intended to provoke occupants to form their own personal conceptions of the building’s structures and occupation. Conceived as a set of nested and intertwined interiors, 2833 Park Boulevard aspires to enrich the urban imaginaries of all inhabitants of the surrounding urban fabric, from residents of the building to occasional visitors.

Yimo Sun Advisors Mark Anderson Andrew Shanken

BACK IN TIME

This thesis shows the possibilities of staging performance in unexpected yet accessible urban places. The location becomes an important factor in each performance. It affects the development of the narrative, the relationship of the audience to the performance, and the technical requirements of the stage. This project investigates the urban stage in the context of a lost public market in Tapei.

Kristopher T Swick Advisors Mark Anderson Renee Chow

YIMBY, THE PLATFORM FOR DIY URBANISM

YIMBY is a platform for DIY urbanism that aims to place the means of design and construction in directly the hands of the consumer, reducing barriers to entry while connecting them more directly to the design and building trades. In this way, a new spatial collectivity can emerge as a diversity of ideas are invited from all parts of the community; design agency is distributed across a pluralist society, so that Nimby-ism and other reluctance may subside in favor of much-needed housing development. The platform is composed of two intertwined components. The first, a DIY building platform for placing accessory dwelling units (ADU) and other structures around existing housing while connecting users with designers, developers, funding sources, and other resources. Individually designed proposals then become part of a collectively produced urban vision, overlaid with a location-based social media platform, and embedded with opportunities to gather for collective decision making and political action.

Rachel Tove-White Advisors Marcel Sanchez Rene Davids

ARCHITECTURE OF INCOMPLETENESS

The current approach towards architecture favors static and permanent structures.

The goal is to design, construct, and conclude. Rarely does standard practice consider architecture across time or as a mutable product of its context. What can be achieved when designers identify a site as incomplete? Instead of perceiving the beginning of the process as the moment when we sit down to design, this thesis explores what may result from viewing a design process as ongoing. What we have understood to be the start, is really a moment of continuation and transformation. Our end is the passingof-the-torch to the users or other designers. By considering a site as incomplete, we create an ongoing dialogue between designers, users, and site. This thesis will explore this idea through small interventions occurring across time gaps. These interventions will arise in response to existing elements as well as activities that occur between moments of intervention.

Haoyu Wang Advisors Marcel Sanchez Renee Chow

REGENERATE SHANGHAI LILONG PUBLIC SPACE

The project will add six interventions in different kinds of public spaces. By exploring these six different intervention methods, public facilities with different functions are created at each place. Through vertical or horizontal negotiation, they maximize multiple functions in limited spaces, the life quality and community environment could be ultimately improved.

Qiaoxi Chelsea Wang Advisors Mark Anderson Eleanor Pries

ME AND THE REST OF ME

Taking the question of how to prove my own existence, I asked myself if it is possible to separate my existence with my surroundings, and the answer is no (currently). Seven pieces of memory: the fountain, trapezoid school, what time is it now, mirrored, movie night, a slope besides an egg and the bathroom were extracted and represented in this project in different ways. Architecture is used as one of the mediums. The drawings are representations of the architecture, meanwhile the architecture, as well as the paintings and the poems are all representations of the memory. Having “me” in the past defined by the sites described in this project, they become portraits of me. And people that later occupy the sites are going to become extensions of me. With the memory map created, the architectures are also defined by the landscape, and in the similar way, can not be separated from it.

Yifeng Wang Advisors Mark Anderson Kyle Steinfeld

PHYGITAL UTOPIA

Architecture has always trying to mediate and enhance people’s experiences through different means. Material selection, light manipulation, and scale contrast are some commonly used tools for architects. A rough concrete under your finger or a fragrance of the pine panel can arouse certain memory and feeling of space and indicate certain behaviors. Ernesto Neto’s project minimizes straight lines and sharp edges in the spaces. Even without actually enter this space, the curves, and rounded corners can already arouse a softer sensual. Phygital public space as a hybrid of digital and physical space and an imaginary exploration of how the future public space could focus on the possibility digital technology can bring into public space experience and how it can change the way people living both domestic life and public life.

Yiyang Wang Advisors Tom Buresh David Jaehning

ARCHIitchen

This thesis is about exploring the potential of using architecture conventions to communicate information. It proposed a space named ARCHitchen for architects to rethink the everyday object and the relationship between them via an architectural lens. In this project, we will take “CHINESE LUNAR NEW YEAR EVE’S DINNER 2021” as our site to have a conversation on how to make things and how to convey information behind the food production and consumption process. In this kitchen, we will share our design thinking, concept diagram, visual tools, representation thoughts, and technical skills to prepare drawings/food. We are very excited to see the potential of architecture representation skills not only to illustrate information but also to stimulate different design proposals. Welcome to the ARCHitchen!

Eva Yunqi Wei Advisors Mark Anderson Greg Castillo

LAST EDEN

This project fictionalized a story about nature in the post Anthropocene era. A piece of “wilderness”, which had been preserved most strictly, sustained itself by constantly consuming energy and resource from all over the world. Being monumentalized as a symbol, it is the pastoral past, the memory, the last Eden on the planet. By creating an amalgamation of authentic primitiveness and extreme artificiality, the project aims to explore the possible position of nature in the contemporary logic of the global capital, and therefore exposing the tensions between different systems, that is, development unevenness, environmental depredation, invisible underground, and other absurd contradiction of reality. The thesis would like to ask, in brief, how do we conceptualize nature differently in the ongoing Anthropocene scenario? And what’s the architect’s approach, giving up the arrogance of visionaries and technocrats while acting as a mediating mechanism between human beings and our living environment.

AMERICAN FACTORY: RETHINKING NEW Muran WORKING MODES IN POST-PANDEMIC ERA Yang Advisors Mark Anderson Rene Davids

Today, we have entered an era of transition from an industrial society to an information society, and the representative work¬space has also evolved from the assembly line of American au¬tomobile factories in the 1930s to the exciting workspace of those technology companies. However, in the post-pandemic era, when people have become used to working from home, facing a new hybrid working mode, we may don’t need to build more office buildings to accommodate needs of new jobs. So how do we use existing cities or neighborhood to adapt to the new hybrid working mode? My thesis attempts to explore a new living environment based on a new hybrid working mode in the post-pandemic era.

Chengyu Zhang Advisors Tom Buresh Greg Castillo

THE LAST RED GUARDS MEMORIAL

Memorials convey dense emotions and memories, they obtain an essential position in the web of social meanings. Most of them are simple, legible and contain a single narrative. While in some situations, there is a desideration for multiple narratives to construct the whole story.

Yu (Steven) Zhang Advisors Mark Anderson Kyle Steinfeld

INDIVIDUAL PUBLIC

In an age of social media booming, the virtual world constructed by the world wide web(WWW) gradually replace the traditional publicspace in the physical world to become a new spot to express individual identityand form the new communities.As architects, how can we find the tool to shape those virtual spaces to let them become more transparent but also not lose the diversity? How individualownership can express in a collective design world? What’s the role of architects in thisvirtue world? Individual Public Space will use a VR game as media toexplore a new type of public space in the virtual world.

Lillian Zhou Advisors Lisa Iwamoto Kristen Sidell

POROUS FIGURES

This thesis investigates the potential of apertures to facilitate healing and well-being through the geometric and spatial explorations of curved windows. The modernist movement had a prevailing use of glass walls in residential homes, which allowed for extensive connections to the outside, but was typically associated with wealthy families in private and suburban sites. Also, Le Corbusier’s Radiant City proposed a city with plentiful amounts of natural light, air, and green space. However, it would be the result of destroying existing cities and had an influence on subsequent failed urban renewal projects. This proposal seeks to find a middle ground where a convalescent home in Manhattan can have these interior-exterior connections but is not necessarily an antiurban strategy to achieve healing. By reimagining the window as an inhabitable healing space, an operable, round corner window facilitates the investigation of rethinking the conventional suburban strategy in a denser context.

Xin Zhou Advisors Lisa Iwamoto Eleanor Pries

ALMOST BRIDGING

BERKELEY ARCHITECTURE STUDIO ONE FOREST FUTURES IN THE OAKLANDS Advisor Ronald Rael

Shiyan Chen

Esteban Ley

Sida Wang

Hanyang Zhang

Shiyan Chen

GINGKO COOPERATION

In 2018, a major wildfire destroyed most of Paradise, California, and much of the adjacent communities. I propose, as a solution for making, or remaking a resilient city in Paradise, that can serve as a model for other communities threatened by wildfires, is to generate an economy around building products that have a direct influence on the forest ecology. Therefore, I propose to establish a startup company that creates a global and local market for fireproof building cladding systems made of 3D printed ceramics, as well as interior tiles made of bioplastic made of harvested small-diameter timber. Harvesting small-diameter timber in old-growth forests minimizes the threat of fires and improves the forest ecology. Because of the company’s capabilities to produce building materials, the company will also manufacture prefabricated housing to reestablish housing in Paradise, but also around the country. By creating a startup company located in Paradise, we will bring back jobs, as well as housing, to reestablish community in Paradise and other communities in California and beyond.

Esteban Ley

THE CITY SEED

REINVENTING HUMAN HABITATION AT THE WILDLIFE-URBAN INTERFACE THROUGH COMBINATORY URBAN MORPHOLOGIES

This project explores strategies of urban planning and applications of earthen construction at the architectural scale to address human habitation at the wildlife-Urban interface. It envisions a new city morphology which establishes semi-urban habitation as a strategy to manage forest ecologies, and the fire disasters which plague them.

Situated in Paradise California, the project addresses the phases of city transformation, growth, and destruction instigated by four initial developments. Explored through various architectural models at several scales, the combinatory formal strategy produces a multiplicity of microclimates and spatial conditions. Additionally, the complex aggregation of various prototype forms negotiates the incorporation of water reservoirs, public recreation spaces, and tree farms into the landscape of Urban habitation.

The project critically reconsiders of the ground plane as a hybrid of synthetic and natural landscapes. Embedded in this new field condition is a series of interconnected subterranean courtyard dwellings. In its excavation of earth, the project both produces fire protected living spaces while mining for building material. Built up earth, 3d printed earth and ceramic tiles, as well as use of small diameter timber are used as strategies of fire preventative architecture fabrication.

Sida Wang

A FUTURE TEACHING TOOL

The project is producing a teaching tool for future generation through animation. This project is focus on fire and architecture which address fire from a series of topics such as material, technology, climate, etc. The end product also including an animated book with chapters according to the topics above. The goal of this book is to educate the future generation what they can do to prevent a catastrophic fire situation.

Hanyang Zhang

FIREBREAK CITY

If taking natural forest as a human’s hair, to some circumstance, having a stylish haircut helps people keep a healthy condition. And it’s same to Firebreak City, which is a model for creating resilient urbanism at the wildland-urban interface. Uses firebreaks to define forest zones, which nurture healthy forest ecologies that are not homogenous, but instead, thrive as part of a heterogeneous network of forest islands. And it also creates evacuation zones for safe egress from the city in a fire disaster. Creates outdoor urban program amenities in the firebreak zones that move through the city. Among these urban amenities include parks, trails for biking, hiking, and public transportation infrastructure as well as commercial zones. Employs a vertical housing infrastructure that lifts housing above the forest canopy as a vertical firebreak to allow residents to live harmoniously with nature.

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NOTES

BERKELEY ARCHITECTURE THESIS REVIEW 2020