WORKBOOK 2025

Princeton University School of Architecture

Workbook 2025

The design and research included within this book reflect our pedagogical values: we believe in the importance of providing an interdisciplinary architectural education that balances design, technology, history and theory. The School intertwines these disciplines seamlessly, allowing faculty and students to fluidly work across them. We generate work which embodies ideas that have legs and thus can travel, so this WORKBOOK was designed to be taken apart and disseminated. Postcards, posters, and booklets are all up for the taking. We invite you to tear out your favorites and pin them to the walls in your workplaces, send them to friends, or take them along for a good read.

This WORKBOOK reflects our emphasis on design grounded in interdisciplinary collaboration. The small size of the School encourages close interaction and collaboration between students and faculty. Leaders in the field comprise our core faculty. All our design professors maintain thriving architectural practices while our history/ theory faculty intensely disseminate their scholarship through publications and exhibitions, and our technology faculty are at the cutting edge of research. As a result, our undergraduates receive a well-rounded liberal arts education and a strong basis for additional studies in architecture while our graduate students gain a comprehensive understanding of the field, preparing them for a career in practice and/or academia.

—Mónica Ponce de León, Dean

Workbook 2025

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501—Anda French, V. Mitch McEwen, and Mónica Ponce de León

11 ARC 502—Cameron Wu and Darell W. Fields

19 ARC 503—Jing Liu

27 ARC 503b—Paul Lewis and Guy Nordenson

37 ARC 503c—Jesse Reiser

45 ARC 504—Michael Meredith

49 ARC 505a—Stan Allen

59 ARC 505b—Elizabeth Diller

65 ARC 506a—Lyndon Neri

73 ARC 506b—Florencia Pita

151 ARC 206—Cameron Wu, Zachary Schumacher

167 ARC 204—Paul Lewis, Anda French, and Erica Goetz

179 ARC 350—Marshall Brown

187 ARC 350—Zachary Schumacher

195 ARC 351—Daisy Ames

205 ARC 353—Tei Carpenter

213 ARC 404—Tessa Kelly

221 ARC 205—Mario Gandelsonas and Victor Prospero (Fall), Aaron Shkuda (Spring)

Graduate Studios

ARC 501

Architecture Design Studio

Visiting Lecturer Anda French, Assistant Professor V. Mitch McEwen, and Professor Mónica Ponce de León

with Teaching Assistants Kyara Robinson, Stephanie Rosas, Allison Wenner

Choosing Building

Listening Gathering Reading Drawing in Studio

This first-year course introduces a range of activities that design studios engage throughout students’ graduate studies. Through three exercises progressing through three different scales, this studio invites students to create productive relationships between actions of thought, assessment, and craft. Rather than compartmentalizing theory, analysis, and site, the studio sets up a non-linear sequence of engagement and enmeshes architectural concepts, history, code, and local context.

The three sites are in proximity to existing buildings. Program and site will involve aspects of active choice. How students gather and read texts, and how they choose references, might inform how they listen to the site or read a building. A productive synthesis might emerge across the three projects, or they may choose to keep them as highly differentiated investigations.

This nonlinear and open format is structured by shared discussion with key visitors and texts. The texts have been chosen to provoke an intervention in historical priorities of the discipline of architecture. Dianne Suzette Harris’s Introduction to Little White Houses situates the mundane and ordinary within a racial field of meaning and media.

Tina Campt’s introduction to Listening to Images , “An Exercise in Counterintuition” offers an art historical turn from the primacy of visuality. Theorist bell hooks’ significant journal article “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” while written in relation to cinematic space, offers a feminist spatial critique of how we ‘tell a sense of place.’ The film Koolhaas Houselife by Ila Beka and Louise Lemoine stages the labor of maintenance as a frame for understanding and visiting a canonical work of architecture.

ARC 501

Choosing Building Listening Gathering

Reading Drawing in Studio

ARC 502

Architecture Design Studio

Assistant Professor Cameron Wu and Visiting Lecturer Darell W. Fields

with Teaching Assistants Alan Carrizosa Acevedo, Jeyda Muhammad, and Lee Onbargi

Access and the Urban Collective

This studio examines the relationship between architecture and the city through a series of exercises and culminates in a single building project. As a preamble to the studio, students look at specific historical case studies where the architect’s project has embodied various speculations about the city-at-large. Rather than merely respond to given context, each student proposal imagines, articulates, and projects new ideas into the city.

The studio’s building program is a K-12 public school in a low-density neighborhood within the city of Trenton, New Jersey. Often considered a microcosm of the city, schools are an assemblage of heterogeneous room types whose size and scale is carefully choreographed. With a student body of approximately 1000 students, the school will be of enough magnitude to project new ideas for the city at large. During the design process, students simultaneously address the design of the spatial unit (room) and the fabric which it is part of (campus); exploration and rehearsal of specific compositional techniques are aimed at developing formal dexterity, and a thorough understanding of organizational logics. Exercises dealing with module aggregation, systems of growth, and part-to-whole relationships are driven by the dialectics of figure/field, private/public, interior/exterior, among others. Exercises increase in degrees of abstraction throughout the semester, culminating in a final composition that is highly specific in its programmatic desires and spatial complexity.

ARC 503 Integrated Building Studio Visiting Lecturer Jing Liu with Teaching Assistant Madeline Joo Sun Kim

The Coming Community

In The Coming Community, Giorgio Agamben recounts the following tale, as told by Walter Benjamin to Ernst Bloch:

“The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.”

Architecture has long been infatuated with newness—new forms, new media, new materials, new images, new desires, and even new crises—and has created a convex lens that often magnifies surficial elements and obscures that which persists underneath. At the same time, the doctrines of modernism—standardization and efficiency—have made copy-pasting the default best practice. Repeated enough times, the mundane becomes bestof-class. As a result, we have forgotten the wondrous world of kintsugi, spolia, and metamorphosis, where what has passed and what is to engage in a dance of co-becoming, thrusting both meaning and purpose into being. The Coming Community studio earnestly examines the relics—material, social, formal, typological, and philosophical. It refrains from the production of complacent architectural objects varnished in “glitz.” Instead, it takes “disdained’’ architectural elements—their outdated forms, overlooked (mis)uses, obsolete programs, (dis)functional parts, expiring materials, antiquated systems, and forgotten desires, and embeds within, bonds together, traces over, and transforms them to engender life. We observe the liminal moment where the past transgresses into the coming by paying attention and insisting on imagination. As the world becomes increasingly atomized and siloed, capitals increasingly consolidated, and unbridled material and energy extraction increasingly unsustainable, a more empathic attitude towards the past might bring worthy profit.

ARC 503

ARC 503b

Integrated Building Studio

Professors Paul Lewis and Guy Nordenson with Teaching Assistant Madeleine Smith

Regenerative Training Center

(Straw + Timber in Rural Mississippi)

This studio focuses on developing new models of construction using biogenic materials. Two material assemblies are the basis of the design projects: prefabricated straw and timber sticks. These materials are derived from two distinctly different material streams and agricultural productions, with straw a residue of cereal grain production, and lumber the primary output of the forestry industry.

The regional site of the project, the Mississippi Delta, is defined by a long history of agriculture, with rice, wheat and southern yellow pine among the dominant crops. Moreover, the program, a work-force training center for plant-based construction, foregrounds this focus on the translation from field to form.

The site for the studio is Rolling Fork, MS a small town of around 1,800, yet also the county seat of Sharkey County. The center for its rural agricultural community, the town was severely damaged by an EF4 tornado on March 24, 2023, which cut a wide zone of destruction through the heart of the town, including causing catastrophic damage to many of its public buildings. This project asks how one might develop a type of community center based on training for the construction of straw-based building systems, themselves a means toward regenerating the very structures of the town. To anchor the project further to the land and expand the social capacity of the building, the project includes a baseball field, whose backstop, dugouts and bleachers need to be incorporated into the building.

Where innovative pre-fabricated straw construction is relatively new, stick framing has centuries of precedents. Only in the past 15 years have the two materials been coordinated to form insulated structural straw panels that leverage the capacity of both materials. Furthermore the studio develops a dialogue between the prefabricated thickness of straw assemblies and the longer span of wood roof structures. Although CLT has become a new default in design studios—in part due to its easy alignment with rhino modeling and the relative simplicity of its joints—this studio instead focuses on the specific design of stick-framing, the consequence of joints, the space between members and the integration between wood frames and the load-bearing insulation of straw.

ARC 503c

Integrated Building Studio Professor Jesse Reiser with Teaching Assistant Ving Hung (Ryan) Nguyen

Inujima EcoCultural Island

The semester’s work serves as part of an ongoing multi-year investigation of Inujima and the surrounding art islands, in dialogue with architects Kazuyo Sejima, Kengo Kuma and theorist Sanford Kwinter, along with ecologists, climate scientists, and engineers.

This studio asks students to consider the art-island model and speculate on its potential evolution through the holistic reimagining of Inujima. This entails the design not only of permanent buildings, temporary structures, and the pathways between, but more pertinently the radical reconsideration and site design of the island itself. Of particular interest to the studio is the relationship of energy systems, manifested as infrastructural networks, and the ecologies that they interrupt, support and alter. Taking cues from the industrial history of the island, students begin with an in-depth exploration of the material and energetic potentials of the site (above/below ground and out to sea) and the ways in which they can be radically mobilized anew. The studio insists upon the importation of a massive energetic driver (geothermal, solar, nuclear etc.) that induces physical changes into the material substrate of the island, stimulating new environments and microclimatic conditions. The system would act as catalyst for the production of new art objects on the island and the life-world they induce. The hope would be that in radically reconfiguring the energetic and material flows of Inujima the project would inevitably generate new modes of sociability centered around work— both with and in—an augmented landscape, breaking down the nature/culture binary.

Inujima EcoCultural Island

Inujima EcoCultural Island

ARC 504

Integrated Building Studio

Professor Michael Meredith with with Teaching Assistant Chad Miller

Learning From the Arts and Crafts: Something Personal.

The premise of this studio is to revisit and learn from the reform movement and communal utopian project of the Arts and Crafts Movement from the late 1800s, exemplified by figures such as William Morris, Phillip Webb, and John Ruskin. The studio looks at this period not to copy it, but simply as a shared reference as students work towards an architecture of direct engagement, on a smaller scale, in a very material fashion and utilizing the contemporary world of construction and production.

The studio itself focuses on a shared set of construction documents and large-scale models, centered around a communal campus model, where everything is made by the inhabitants who live there. The students are both the designers and the inhabitants. The students/inhabitants design and model the buildings, as well as the furnishings. The campus needs collective housing, communal buildings, such as kitchens and dining, various spaces for making, rainwater collection areas, composting and recycling spaces, food gardens, and so on. The specifics, their scope, and scale are determined by the students.

This studio site is located on the site of Kelmscott Manor (aka Nowhere). The site was depicted in William Morris’ short story News from Nowhere, published in 1890, and it also operated as part of Morris’ publishing house Kelmscott Press.

NOWHERE STUDIO: Franco Denari, Mariana Garcia Rendon, Vaida Kidykaite, Dominica Kusmierczyk, Ethan Lethander, Chenkun Ma, Mayra Monge, Leti Ryder, Elaine Wang, Allison Wenner, Ethan Young

ARC 505a

Graduate Vertical Studio

Professor Stan Allen

with Teaching Assistant Chad Miller

Scattered Cities: The Urban House

The single-family house has long been a laboratory for design experiment. The program of the house touches on fundamental issues of public and private space, as well as basic architectural questions of inside/outside, structure, movement, enclosure and site. Questions of construction and material enter in, and the role of media, privacy, changing lifestyles and alternative work patterns have all been

addressed in the recent past. For many architects, a house is one of the first projects they construct. The history of architecture is, in many ways, written through canonical houses.

But it is also true that the single-family house is, more often than not, located on a rural or suburban lot. The anachronistic model of the villa in a pastoral landscape has had a surprising longevity in the discipline. At a time when architects have an imperative to address urban issues, the changing character of city, and new concepts of family and social roles, the single-family house is often deemed irrelevant. But this is to ignore the facts on the ground, particularly in the context of the American city.

While it is true that single-family homes make up a relatively small percentage of the housing stock in New York City (around 15%), in cities such as Philadelphia and Baltimore the majority of the housing stock consists of single-family houses. In Detroit, 70% of the population lives in single-family units, the majority of which are detached houses. In northern Europe and the UK, single-family houses also make up a substantial percentage of the housing stock. Steen Eiler Rasmussen has characterized these as “scattered cities,” and they in turn became the model for the American city. Despite this, with a few notable exceptions, significant single-family houses, recent and historical, are almost all located outside of the city. The premise of this studio is that the program of the single-family house can be a powerful tool to work simultaneously at a detailed architectural scale and at an urban scale.

The studio is concerned both with the design of a prototypical house and its aggregation into a larger urban whole: street, block, neighborhood.

Ethan Young ARC 505a

Scattered Cities: The Urban House

Scattered Cities: The Urban House

Scattered Cities: The Urban House

Scattered Cities: The Urban House

ARC 505b

Graduate Vertical Studio

Professor Elizabeth Diller with Teaching Assistant Win Overholser

Can Space Matter?

“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck” (1996): French theorist Paul Virilio called the production of accidents the “enigmatic counterpart” of technological advancement. He observed that, with the rise of live television broadcasting, accidents and their dissemination in media had accelerated, approaching simultaneity. Decades later, the exponential growth of digital media made the world more interconnected, more informed, and more

responsive, yet it has also made it more vulnerable to widespread accidents. Virilio could never have anticipated how accident prone our hyper-connected digital world would become, nor how vulnerable it would be to fraudulence.

This semester coincided with a critical juncture that will determine our collective future. The 2024 US Presidential Election was unfolding within a chaotic and unreliable information landscape beset by manipulation, propaganda, and hacking. Forces beyond the ballot box had the potential to alter the course of the election, or throw it into limbo with a contested outcome.

As we contemplated the fate of democracy in those months, the question emerged: “can real space matter”? In contrast to the liabilities of digital platforms, the National Mall in Washington, D.C. has been an enduring symbol of American democracy equated with the first amendment and free speech. It is the place where citizens can gather to express their opinions and speak to power. Like a spatial megaphone, expression on the Mall is amplified and extended by media. Landmark events like Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech (1963), the Million Man March (1995), the AIDS Quilt display (1987), and the Women’s March (2017) were pivotal moments in American history shared with audiences across the nation and beyond. However, the events of January 6, 2021 highlighted the counterpart to free speech in the digital age, as extremist views and conspiracy theories cultivated online gave rise to a coordinated attack in the space of the Mall, its monuments, and its institutions. This studio explores architecture’s place at the intersection of real space and media. The semester is organized into three acts, each with a challenge that corresponds to real-time events.

505b Can Space Matter?

Ma ARC 505b

Can Space Matter?

ARC 506a

Graduate Vertical Studio

Visiting Lecturer Lyndon Neri with Teaching Assistant Yuanyuan (Yuki) Cao

Autonomy & Engagement: Mott Street / A New Vision for Chinatown

The theme of “Architecture between Autonomy and Engagement” frames this studio as an inquiry into the dialectical relationship between architecture’s internal logic and its role as a mediator of social, cultural, and environmental realities. Autonomy, defined through formal and material innovation, embodies the discipline’s theoretical and intellectual rigor. Engagement, conversely, prioritizes architecture’s capacity to address the complexities of human life, adapting to cultural and socio-economic contingencies.

New York’s Mott Street serves as an emblematic site for examining the tension between preservation and transformation within the urban fabric. Functioning as Chinatown’s informal “Main Street,” its historic significance and layered cultural identities resist homogenization even as gentrification threatens its character. The site exemplifies the interrelation of architectural and social histories, shaped by migration, labor, and urban flux. Chinatown’s evolution—from its Guangdong origins to its current status as a multicultural enclave—reflects broader urban dynamics. Its resilience lies in the communal governance of property and its capacity to absorb external influences without losing its distinct identity. Yet, this resilience raises critical questions: How can architecture negotiate the pressures of cultural commodification and displacement while maintaining Chinatown’s complex, heterogeneous vitality?

A major part of the design brief is to work with existing buildings and found artifacts on the site for adaptive re-use as well as to propose new interventions and infill architecture. Students are guided with weekly design assignments, desk crits with an emphasis on drawings and physical model-making.

ARC 506a

Autonomy & Engagement: Mott Street / A New Vision for Chinatown

ARC 506a

Autonomy & Engagement: Mott Street / A New Vision for Chinatown

ARC 506b

Graduate Vertical Studio

Visiting Lecturer Florencia Pita

with Teaching Assistant Ana Brenda Rico Rubio

Practical Aesthetics

Throughout this course, students critically engage with Gottfried Semper’s writings, exploring his theories on the role of materials and their cultural significance in architectural design. Semper argues that textiles, as the original form of shelter, epitomize the interplay between technical necessity and aesthetic expression.

The course’s study involves an analysis of both historical and contemporary applications of Semper’s ideas, emphasizing the integration of textile concepts into architectural practices.

Through lectures, discussions, and design projects, students examine how principles of weaving and layering can inform spatial organization, structural integrity, and sensory experience.

In this course, students also examine the work of architect Miguel Fisac, whose innovative approach, termed “poured architecture,” provides a compelling case study for understanding the intersections between structure, ornamentation, and textile-like enclosure as articulated in Semper’s writings. His designs often blur the boundaries between solid form and spatial enclosure, creating fluid, organic shapes that evoke the qualities of textile drapery. This resonates with Semper’s assertion that walls, although necessary as support structures, can be viewed through the lens of aesthetic representation akin to woven fabrics.

The project site will be located in Mexico City, specifically within the neighborhood of Colonia Centro. This area is historically and culturally significant, renowned for its architectural richness and urban life. Colonia Centro serves as an urban hub, featuring a mix of historic landmarks, markets, and public spaces. The project program is housing, and requires a maximum volume of nine floors. The site currently hosts an existing building, which is an integral component of the new design. The proposal seeks to harmonize the old and new, ensuring that the architectural innovation respects and enhances the character of the original structure.

The studio connects Mexico’s rich textile history with Gottfried Semper’s theories on materiality and spatial identity. Semper viewed textiles as fundamental elements that reflect cultural narratives and technical innovation, a perspective evident in Mexico’s diverse weaving traditions, from pre-Hispanic techniques to contemporary craftsmanship.

Ma ARC 506b

The Professional Program Thesis

A general thematic question challenges thesis students to make an architectural response. The theme is explored in workshops, stated as a written proposition, and elaborated as a design proposal during the students’ final semester. Agreed upon by the faculty, thesis themes and topics serve as a hinge point between architecture and questions of politics, culture, technology, or society. The thematic organization of the final semester’s independent design research creates a shared point of departure for students, faculty, and visiting critics.

PROFESSIONAL PROGRAM THESIS PROJECTS

Maysam Abdeljaber

N.E.S.T. // Not Exactly Somewhere Temporary

Yohana Ansari-Thomas The Bulldozer Ballet

Sigi Buzi Soft Rules

Alan Carrizosa Acevedo Hydroreflexive Forms of Exchange

Zoe King Man Cheung The Future of Nostalgia: Toward a Collective History

Vicky Chow Future Renovation of the Princeton Art Museum

Masa Crilley Degrowth City

Tianyi Huang and Madeleine Smith Seats of Power

Esther J. Ishimwe

Kibra “Land of the Forest”: Water Catchment as Class Resistance

Madeline Joo Sun Kim Cyclical Temporality, Rituals of Care

Sandy Lee Architecture Off the Ground

Shaun Lien Moving Mountains

Zhuofan JOJO Ma Central Park 2.0—A Balanced Framework for Central Park’s Ecological Future

Jeyda Muhammad Polychomatopia: Streets, Design and Life

Emilio Sebastian Olivas Beachfront Futures in Puerto Escondido

Lee Onbargi

Casa Caseros

Winfred Ovur

Decomposing Insulation: Turning an Old Leaf

Josue Pisors (Re)Framing (Authorship) a House

Maryam Popoola tabula No rasa: making space in failing utopias

Ana Brenda Rico Rubio Complicit Forms and Queer Spatial Imaginaries: Disorienting the Apparatus

Kyara Robinson A Black Sonic Cosmology

Sally Jane “SJ” Ruybalid Kairos: Between Dreams of Neoliberal Globalization, Purpose, and Sports

Meriel Vogliotti Holding Water

Logan West A Toxic Score

Valen Zhang

Meta Garden Museum: Architectural Readymades and the Recombinant Logic of Yuanlin

Janeen Zheng Charged Ground

Maysam Abdeljaber Advisor: Marshall Brown

N.E.S.T. // Not Exactly Somewhere Temporary

NEST is a proposed civic infrastructure for migrants resettling through the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a federal agency that partners with local nonprofits to support refugees. In the 1980s, the ORR shifted its focus from long-term societal integration to rapid employment, cutting financial assistance from 36 months to just 90 days. This pivot—aimed at promoting “self-sufficiency” through immediate employment, has created systemic challenges: refugees are expected to work immediately, leaving little room for sustainable transition, education, or language learning. The lack of investment in migrants resettling stifles opportunities for upward mobility.

Located in South Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a city where migrants from Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South America continue to resettled each year. NEST reimagines resettlement by embedding its services within public libraries. Unlike isolated service offices or temporary agency sites, libraries are inherently civic: open, trusted, and spaces of learning, gathering, and refuge that are accessible to all. This model blurs the boundaries between civic life and service infrastructure, positioning resettlement as an integrated, community-anchored process rather than a short-term program. NEST creates a shared space that enables continuity, connection, and collective transition, for both newly arriving migrants and existing residents.

Yohana Ansari-Thomas

Advisors: Cameron Wu, Sylvia Lavin

The Bulldozer Ballet

Ecological upheaval, military intervention, law enforcement, and architectural production hinge around the bulldozer. The bulldozer is both friend and foe. Where “bulldozer politics” is a relatively recent addition to a contemporary lexicon, the bulldozer in India stands as the primary symbol and material instrument of an increasingly emboldened authoritarian party currently in the seat of power. Undergirding a culture of mass clearance in the name of massive development lies the de facto practice of extrajudicial, targeted demolitions: a form of collective punishment used against individuals, communities, and institutions viewed as threatening or undesirable to a Hindutva nationalist agenda. Within this context, rootedness to the ground renders buildings and histories vulnerable to erasure.

In reaction to the bulldozer’s weaponization, this thesis proposes a new reality for one of our discipline’s most ubiquitous tools. The project reappropriates the mechanisms of the JCB Backhoe Loader to perform an alternative mode of architectural production. It structures a series of buildings that rest in defensive anticipation, poised to disassemble, move, and reassemble—a perpetual process of becoming and unbecoming: the Bulldozer Ballet.

Sigi Buzi

Advisor: Anda French

Soft Rules

The success of standardization relies on the fixity of rules, dimensions, and processes—a notion that often fails to respond to the dynamic nature of the environment, materials, bodies, and behavior. In the abstract regulatory thicket of New York City, a standard logical process can produce an illogical condition. The intensification of Local Law 10/11 over decades has led to the continual repair of facades, producing a second skin that surfaces vast stretches of the city. The ubiquitous support structure, the scaffold, exists as a repository of standardized materials and building practices, shaped by codes and industrial production. Simultaneously, it is a fixture suspended in legal and physical ambiguity; as an extension of private space onto a public sidewalk and as a temporary structure that bypasses zoning laws, the liminal zone it occupies becomes a negotiation of the fixed boundaries that shape the city.

This inquiry responds to recent efforts by New York City’s Department of Buildings to minimize scaffolding and its disruptions. Rather than viewing this disruption as blight, the thesis frames it as a generative condition with spatial and social potential. It reimagines the scaffold as a structure for temporal modes of occupation that hybridize notions of labor and leisure, rendering the repair process visible, while also challenging fixed rules and behavior. The Cathedral of St. Sava, a church in a constant state of repair, becomes a site for experimenting with the scaffold’s affordances, both inherent and imagined, including material and structural capacities, levels of comfort, patterns of use, types of users, and building performance.

Alàn Carrizosa Acevedo Advisor: Cameron Wu

Hydroreflexive Forms of Exchange

Mexico City—a metropolis of 23 million—exists in a state of hydraulic paradox, oscillating between catastrophic flooding and severe drought. Rapid urbanization has exacerbated environmental degradation, manifesting in ground subsidence, aquifer depletion, and the slow death of remnant lakes like Zumpango, Chalco, and Xochimilco. Current infrastructures are designed to resist rather than adapt, perpetuating a cycle of crisis. This thesis proposes hydro-reflexive devices—spatial interventions that instrumentalize flux, transforming infrastructure from a rigid technocratic system into a civic, ecological mediator/maneuver.

Focusing on Lake Zumpango—the Valley of Mexico’s last semi-intact lacustrine body—this thesis asks how architecture can simultaneously perform in drought and flood conditions and protect water bodies from further degradation. Rejecting binary solutions, it hybridizes a levee-asfilter/sponge along a calibrated perimeter block that grants access, filters, stores, and redistributes water. This landform merges ecological preservation with utilitarian instrumentality, a host for water works, recycling, and agricultures; salt harvesting, all while resisting urban encroachment.

The thesis critiques Mexico City’s suicidal water management—where collapse ‘cannot be reversed even if the city were to stop pumping, or pump water back into the ground’, and drainage systems fail to control sewage-laden floods. By spatializing infrastructure as public space, we can then reimagine water as both subject and object: a force for ritual. The resulting landscapes operate as open-air theaters of water’s movements and all the in between, where seasonal cycles dictate use and flows. Rather than resisting hydrological extremes, Hydroreflexive Forms of Exchange flows with the forces, proposing systems that use the hydraulic forces of nature to index, envision, amplify, and propose strategies to remediate water’s volatility in the Valley of Mexico and preserve the phantom of the ancient Lake Texcoco.

Zoe King Man Cheung

Advisors: Mónica Ponce de León, Tao Zhu

The Future of Nostalgia: Toward a Collective History

To make a city “new again,” urban renewal replaces the old with the new. It is not only visual changes to the built environment, but it also brings about radical physical transformations. Such physical changes, depending on their scales, disrupt, even kill the well-established social interactions of communities that were informed by the physical environment. However, what is the most destructive is that the stories and memories of people built up over time around the physical environment no longer find their physical evidence. In other words, urban renewal, in pursuit of future, kills the future of local communities and leaves no material traces of their past—the history of the place. In the meantime, the city’s history is narrated through a selected array of events by the authority to serve for certain political propaganda and ideology. On the other hand, considering its subject being matter, urban renewal is an extremely wasteful process, turning well-functioning built structures into complete waste.

My thesis specifically looks at Hong Kong, a city that started off as a British colony. Later handed back to China, it remained an administratively autonomous area, independent from Mainland China until recently. While a museum featuring the country has immediately been proposed and the existing Museum of History is temporarily closed for setting up a gallery designated for the country before the completion of the new museum, a new round of urban renewal projects is underway altering the urban environment. While new stories and history are being made, lingering on the past is people’s defense for their original collective memories and identities. And my thesis is to provide a space for such productive nostalgia.

Vicky Chow Advisor: Marshall Brown

Future Renovation of the Princeton Art Museum

What if museums were built for people instead of art?

How would museums look and feel if the architecture served the users instead of the architect or the art?

This thesis attempts to bring rigor from ideation to design by involving ethnographic research and design testing. This project tests the architect’s understanding of the layman and proposes an alternative where the fundamental assumptions of architectural designs are tested and fed into the design process.

Looking at the soon-to-be-reopened Princeton Art Museum, and understanding the economics and cycles of art museums, this project proposes the next iteration of the museum, focusing on the following changes:

1. Integration into the urban fabric

2. Bringing the outside in

3. Exploration and navigation

Masa Crilley

Advisor: Paul Lewis

Degrowth City

Degrowth City is a proposal for the assisted care of the depopulating city of Higashimurayama, located on the western periphery of Tokyo Prefecture, by reengaging with the ground and linking abandoned buildings. The existing ground, often cited as an obstacle to progress among the post-war Metabolist generation, was covered up by asphalt and concrete in service of an expansive cybernetic city. However, if we were to take seriously the Metabolist mantra that the city is an organism, the city must accommodate both expansion and contraction phases within the urban lifecycle. As more buildings become abandoned and property lines lose their status, the thesis calls for a reevaluation of the productive but isolating individualism reflected in suburban cities, and offers a slower means of living through an active participation of the ground and the synthesis of separate buildings to create interconnected spaces that reintroduce programs of care pushed out to the countryside. The thesis, through an assemblage of stereotomic and tectonic strategies, stitches structures together to create an amoebic communal space that reflects the shifting needs of the current and future population.

Tianyi Huang & Madeleine Smith

Advisors: Darell Wayne Fields, Sylvia Lavin

Seats of Power

In the aftermath of a partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, ineffective communications from government officials led to public fear of harm from radiation. This dark history resurfaced as Constellation Energy restarted Reactor 1 to power Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence servers. Nuclear has been claimed as the “only clean” solution to satisfy the technology’s soaring demands.

Nuclear and data infrastructures are global networks that expand beyond the power plants and data centers. Their presence repeats through kits of parts that dictate human operations: the control room, the cooling towers, the tiles, the servers, etc. These infrastructural spaces cannot be separated if we are to consider what is at stake; environmental impact, political influence, and technological ruptures. The cultural potency of infrastructural elements as signs allows for subsequent symbolic displacement. A dystopian future created under the guise of techno-utopia, the cooling tower of Three Mile Island, as a sign of fear in protests, is applied to the forms of data centers and corporate offices, unifying their mission and architectural language. However, when the kits of parts fail, so does the repetition and flow between labor and resources. The different labors of maintenance and repair, and the literal disruption of productivity, further amplifies the imbalances these power structures operate upon.

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly indiscernible from our daily lives and an extension of infrastructural space, we need to interrogate the political and symbolic dimensions of power infrastructures through their built forms to critique our rapid technological advancement at all costs.

Esther J. Ishimwe Advisor: Paul Lewis

Kibra “Land of the Forest”: Water Catchment as Class Resistance

The speculations of cities of tomorrow stand at odds with the presence of informal settlements: in some cases, they are demolished to provide a fresh canvas for new “smart” infrastructure. Such a reductionist solution is not only impractical but unjust to the residents who live with the constant fear of seeing their community and the results of their efforts disappear one morning. Kibra, known as Land of the Forests in Nubian, is a clear example of the stifling conditions those who live on the informal peripheries of the city face. Surrounded by real estate, the biggest settlement in Sub-Saharan Africa still lacks water amongst other basic necessities, struggling to mark its permanence on the map.

This project aims to erase these clear lines of class separation and apply the morality and economy of water catchment as a communally shared gift. The water collection stands in stark contrast to the profit generating market it shelters below, proving that societies need both for long term sustenance and prosperity. These stitches cross physical and social boundaries aiming to connect through disruption the city to the slum, the permanent to the impermanent, the displayed to the hidden.

Madeline Joo Sun Kim

Advisor: Mónica Ponce de León

Cyclical Temporality, Rituals of Care

The New York City Department of Care (DCNY) is dedicated to the ongoing stewardship of the city’s shared infrastructure. As a sister agency to the Departments of Parks and Recreation and Sanitation, the DCNY embraces the city’s infrastructure as lived, temporal systems.

While infrastructure is typically rendered banal and something to be hidden, the DCNY foregrounds its presence through the ritual of collective maintenance. It is tasked with the cyclical construction and soft repair of a network of temporal structures. In doing so, it nurtures a culture of civic intimacy and shared responsibility. Nimbler than traditional municipal agencies, the DCNY is interested in altering the existing conditions of the everyday. It values slowness, attentiveness, and adaptability. It believes that there is beauty in the mundane.

This thesis interrogates architecture’s capacity to engage time through the transformation of two seasonal infrastructures in Red Hook, Brooklyn: the Red Hook Recreation Centre Pool and a salt shed beneath the Gowanus Expressway. Across seasons, a programmatic oscillation from utility to social infrastructure addresses the neighborhood’s lack of community space and agency. Through the collective care of a constellation of temporal interventions, the project proposes a new form of maintenance architecture that embraces the social and seasonal fluctuations of the city.

Sandy Lee Advisor: Paul Lewis

Architecture

Off the Ground

The current architecture industry frames the urban ground as a site for further capitalization, inflicting ecological violence for new developments and profit. This contributes to climate change by increasing carbon emissions and environmental pollution, ultimately worsening floods as the ground and bodies of water become contaminated. As a result, pollutants often seep into buildings through basements. Despite these conditions, developers and architects continue to excavate basements in toxic sites, NYC’s Gowanus Canal being one of them.

The Gowanus Canal was constructed in 1869 by straightening what was originally Gowanus Creek and filling in the natural wetlands. The waterfront was mainly industrial and commercial, but is now a mixed-use Superfund site.

Rather than framing the Gowanus Canal as a site for capitalization, my thesis project frames it as a site for ecological repair. By accepting that the site is now toxic and flood-prone, the project has two main goals: to let the ground heal through phytoremediation by allowing it to return to a wetland; and to design a space safe from flooding by elevating the building. This will enable the ground to heal while still responding to the architectural needs of the neighborhood.

Shaun Lien

Advisors: Anda French, Sylvia Lavin

Moving Mountains

Mountains appear to be self-evident parts of the natural, but are in fact highly constructed in that their visuality—both how they are experienced and represented—is directly implicated in issues of land use and ownership. At the same time, their unstable, angled, and rugged surfaces are at odds with modern architecture’s insistent preference for flat ground, challenging the purported purity of universal space.

At 4727 feet tall, Shin-Cheng mountain (or Pngpung Uking) straddles the border of a National Park in eastern Taiwan. At its mid-elevations, a quarry owned by a cement corporation has been chipping away at it for more than fifty years. Doubly displaced by the Japanese colonial government and later by the quarry, the Truku people live in a village at its bottom and without their ancestral home. Moving Mountains proposes a partially mechanized pathway between the heart of the village and the summit, making visible the quarry and its many infrastructural supports. Through architecture and its techniques, the project portrays the mountain not as a static object, but a malleable one constantly remade through human and non-human forces. By virtue of being a pathway that traces the surface of the mountain, the project becomes a site of friction because it necessarily generates a series of artifacts that draw together the disparate claimants of Shin-Cheng mountain: the cement corporation, the villagers, the National Park, and arguably the mountain itself.

Zhuofann JOJO Ma

Advisors: Elizabeth Diller, Mario Gandelsonas

Central Park 2.0— A Balanced Framework for Central Park’s Ecological Future

This thesis proposes a new paradigm for Central Park that reconciles the competing demands of public access and ecological preservation through a system of elevated pathways and strategic zoning. As visitor numbers continue to rise, traditional management approaches have failed to prevent the degradation of the park’s landscapes, resulting in eroded areas, declining biodiversity, and an increasing reliance on fencing to protect vulnerable spaces.

Rather than accepting a future where the park becomes increasingly restricted and fragmented, this project envisions a comprehensive solution that creates designated “wilding” preserves within the interior of the park while concentrating human activity along elevated circulation routes and perimeter zones. By implementing a multi-level pathway system that floats above sensitive landscapes, visitors can experience the full beauty of Central Park without contributing to its deterioration. This circulation strategy is supported by a temporal management framework—incorporating daily, weekly, and seasonal assessments—to dynamically guide visitor flows, reduce congestion, and ensure a more equitable and sustainable distribution of access.

Jeyda Muhammad

Advisors: Marshall Brown, V. Mitch McEwen

Polychomatopia: Streets, Design and Life

Buildings are basically abstracted people. They reflect the stories of the people that move through and past them. Buildings marked with age or graffiti, “move” in their stillness because you feel moved when you pass them. They are emotional: the sharp lines are angry and the curvilinear ones are soft. Softened. But they bleed into one another on the page to create a new reading of interwoven and overlapped spaces. They explode through, along, between, and from within. They unbuild space to create new spaces. They are bodies in motion.

A wall is an abstraction of detail because you can’t see the layers and labor that went into it from just its coat of paint. Similarly, a building abstracts people in their lives. You may only see the facade, but this is a drawing of an expressive building where people are a part of the architecture. Their movement is part of the design. A design where doorways open wide enough to accommodate jazz bands walking through, or massive plates of food coming out. Where sidewalks are wide enough to accommodate unregulated groups of people. What if life bled into the streets instead of onto them? What if architects widened space to promote harmony instead of reduction? So, these colors claim space and envelop streets and resurrect culture and overcome the ground line. They look like sections, but they are really connections. These are drawings of life connections, because buildings are abstracted people anyway.

Emilio Sebastian Olivas Advisor: Cameron Wu

Beachfront Futures in Puerto Escondido

El Futuro del frente de playa en Puerto Escondido

Once a quiet fishing village, Puerto Escondido remained relatively unknown until the early 2000s. Unlike other coastal cities in Mexico, its lack of major infrastructure kept it off the tourist radar until the COVID-19 pandemic, when its open borders and relaxed restrictions, amplified by social media, triggered a sudden tourism boom. Visitor numbers doubled between 2020 and 2021, and projections suggest nearly five million tourists annually by 2040. This rapid, unregulated growth has placed immense pressure on the town’s infrastructure and landscape. Puerto Escondido now stands at a critical crossroads: it can follow the path of large-scale resort development by privatizing its beaches and erasing its unique identity or it can imagine a new model of coastal urbanism. This thesis proposes the introduction of Special Development Districts zones where growth is guided rather than resisted. These districts operate under specific design guidelines that protect beach access, preserve ocean views, support ecological resilience, and integrate tourism into the local context. By controlling how and where development happens, the proposal offers a vision for Puerto Escondido that embraces its future while keeping the spirit that makes it authentic.

Lee Onbargi

Advisors: S.E. Eisterer, Darell Wayne Fields

Casa Caseros

Casa Caseros is a space for trans life and memory in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This thesis interrogates the history of the senior living facility, and outlines how histories of exclusion and extraction have led to the erasure of visible, aging queer bodies and an absence of spaces that house them. Rather than ignoring histories of institutional violence—enacted architecturally through prisons, archives, hospitals, workhouses, and other panoptic types—this project reassembles various institutional programs in the shell of the abandoned Caseros Prison, across from the current Archivo General de la Nación, to highlight the capacity of transness to reappropriate and reorient systems of oppression. The new Casa Caseros (Spanish, Homemade House) is a living facility for aging trans women in Buenos Aires, as well as a multi-generational living and learning environment, a public event space, health clinic, vocational training space, and home to the Archivo de la Memoria Trans, an existing local grassroots institution.

Winfred Ovur Advisor: Michael Meredith

Decomposing Insulation: Turning an Old Leaf

People feed the buildings by the heaping rakeful. In turn, the buildings keep their people warm—not by shuttering them from the outside, but by sheltering them with it. The buildings metabolize in place: first as insulation, then as hearth. The leaves keep the cold out until they decay; then the compost passes to the building’s second stomach, where the rot becomes the heat for next fall’s harvest to contain. The nutrients never leave the site. The trees reabsorb the fresh humus. Rifts realign through an architecturally mediated ecology. Walls, bodies, trees, and soil co-constitute one another. The cycle continues, alive as all things are. In a time of planetary crisis, this is an architecture that stays with the fall. Come spring, it grows back, only to die again. So we rake on, leaves against the season, borne ceaselessly into the grass.

Josue Pisors Advisor: Cameron Wu

(Re)Framing (Authorship)

a House

Architecture reserves authorship of “its” works from users through designed and constructed resistance. Designed resistance mainly is referring to metaphysical obstacles that keep users from altering an architect’s “perfect final” design. Constructed resistance simply means that buildings don’t like to or often can’t handle change, they’re built without consideration as to how it might want to adapt. All of this resistance is against inevitable, sustainable, and accessible user prompted modifications and appropriations. This thesis addresses the problems this resistance causes as they manifest in houses- 98% of the building stock in the US. Type five wood framed construction is wasteful, increasingly expensive, and resistant. Just house construction consumes 45% of wood products in the usa, and even while each new build uses strictly new materials- about 10-15% of wood procured for new construction projects ends up in recycling or waste streams without being used at all. A possible solution to this is fostering sustainable and accessible user prompted modifications and appropriations through careful material treatments and non-destructive construction methods prioritizing reused materials and adaptable assemblies that afford change as well as the option for an afterlife. This manifests in a novel way of designing as well as constructing north american single family homes by tying together the sticks and hugging the surfaces.

Maryam Popoola

Advisor: Anda French

tabula No rasa: making space in failing utopias

How does architecture navigate a failing utopia? Lagos’s pursuit of an ideal image and by extent, its performance of progress, has turned its peripheries into major sites of loss. In a bid to progress, city-doubles are created through heavy land reclamation, resulting in enclaves which privilege the identity of the city as a product as opposed to an inhabitable space for the collective. In a bid to progress, Lagos seeks a tabula rasa, an escape from existing urban problems and strife, an ideal image which opposes the logic of the existing city. Yet the ideal image remains unattainable, as utopia is forced to confront the intricacies of the world’s economic system and the perfect conditions which hold up the ideology disintegrate, leaving reclaimed cities in stall—unbuilt, unoccupied.

Located on the periphery of Lagos, Eko Atlantic City (EAC) stands as the city’s most ambitious urban vision and arguably its biggest failure yet. This thesis confronts failure or the state of failing as a site for reconstruction, by reconciling spatial artefacts intrinsic to the existing city’s quotidian life with the infrastructural ghosts of stalled urban visions. In doing so, it explores the organization of market spaces around, within, and astride the remnants of EAC. Ultimately, it makes space for Lagosians at the edge of their city.

Ana Brenda Rico Rubio

Advisors: Darell Wayne Fields, S.E. Eisterer

In Collaboration with Almas Cautivas A.C., Mexico City

Complicit Forms and Queer Spatial Imaginaries: Disorienting the Apparatus

The discipline’s engagement with architectures of captivity must be disrupted through frameworks that challenge legibility, unsettle architectural logics, and open speculative possibilities for becoming otherwise; a framework that turns to queer and trans methodologies as generative frameworks for resistance. Through collaborative drawing workshops with unfree queer and trans individuals in Mexico City, conducted in partnership with the organization Almas Cautivas AC, “Disorienting the Apparatus” engages drawing as a method of spatial resistance and collective world-making. These drawing practices defy epistemological capture and propose ambiguous, transitive spatial imaginaries—spaces where architecture, even in its complicity, might host emergent, collective, and liberatory desires.

The spatial, symbolic, and systemic dimensions of the apparatus of capture—a network of power relations, institutional operations, and architectural forms that collectively produce and manage regimes of unfreedom—illustrate the historical role of architecture and the relationship between space and capture. Architecture, within this apparatus, plays a complicit role. It cannot extricate itself from the system; instead, it must confront its embedded participation. Seeking not to redeem architecture, but to critically reckon with its historical and ongoing involvement in disciplining space and subjectivity, this thesis proposes a disciplinary reorientation—toward abstraction, affect, and aspiration as critical tools. Lingering in the generative tension between fantasy and reality, the project resists the drive toward resolution.

Schedule Time: 3:00-5:00

Recreation & Visitors

Kyara Robinson

Advisor: Mónica Ponce de León

A Black Sonic Cosmology

Organized by centripetal form—the spatial language of inward pull, circular drifts, and gathered intensities. Rooms, walls, and thresholds spiral around zones of performance, forming a cosmos of nested enclosures and sonic gradients. Horizontal density compresses thresholds, layers acoustic membranes, and choreographs movement across overlapping bands of sound. One (some, many) is positioned, immersed, and implicated in the sound. The architecture becomes an instrument— holding, adapting, and listening for vibrations of repetition and return.

Meriel Vogliotti

Advisors: Cameron Wu, M. Christine Boyer

Holding Water

Tijuana, Mexico’s most populous border city, is defined by its extremes. Where winters are measured by heavy deluges and landslide wreckage, summers bring prolonged drought and resource scarcity. The region’s precarity is further compounded by rising U.S.-Mexico geopolitical tensions-such as the recent exclusion of Mexico from the annual allotment of Colorado River water-which has caused an unprecedented shift in international water management and further complicated drought conditions along the border. As reservoirs reach critically low levels and the dry season extends, Tijuana’s capacity to provide reliable water for its growing population is increasingly threatened.

This crisis stems from decades of infrastructural neglect, austerity in urban investment, and a planning paradigm ill-equipped for the city’s rapid urbanization. Excluded from Tijuana’s limited formal housing market and pushed to the urban periphery, migrants and low-income communities settle on unstable canyons and hillsides, where aging infrastructure and unregulated development heighten environmental risks for residents.

In response to this crisis, the work done in this thesis positions ecological remediation as a catalyst for urban development and renewal. Proposed as a new model for dense social housing on Tijuana’s urban margins, the project leverages the region’s steep topography to act as a localized water management system, one that captures, filters, and stores urban runoff. This system mitigates flooding, provides potable water for surrounding neighborhoods, and repurposes stormwater for recreational spaces-utilizing a precious resource to negotiate between scarcity and surplus.

West Advisor: Elizabeth Diller

A Toxic Score

Architecture’s relationship to the ground has become a liability. Today, the industry standard for developing polluted land reflects ideals of purity: first remediate through excavation, capping, ventilation, or bioremediation; then wait (often five to ten years); after the ground is deemed “clean”, only then can construction and habitation proceed—if at all. This rigid sequencing treats remediation, construction, and living as distinct, mechanical acts, severing our relationship to the ongoing consequences of environmental degradation.

At its core, this project repostulates the dweller by embedding its architectural framework into the active logics of soil remediation. The aim is to reframe contaminated ground as a generative condition capable of addressing the need for new models of housing by transforming damaged landscapes into spaces of ongoing inhabitation. A series of vertical strata populates the site in direct response to subsurface contamination, revealing the ground’s hidden conditions as a legible organizational framework. These strata operate as novel technical objects that mediate between the domestic and infrastructural scales, simultaneously hosting household fixtures and remediation systems. All in all, this thesis takes a position of critical optimism towards “dead tech” and leverages the uncertainty of the ground to speculate on novel domestic forms.

Valen Zhang

Advisor: Mario Gandelsonas

Meta Garden Museum: Architectural Readymades and the Recombinant Logic of Yuanlin

Suzhou gardens (Yuanlin) today exist as fractured symbols—caught between erasure by China’s urbanization and exoticization by the West. At home, they have been reduced to nostalgic spectacle or static exhibit, while abroad they are consumed as portable aesthetic motifs, stripped of spatial and philosophical complexity. This thesis challenges such misreadings through the Meta-Garden Museum, a hybrid of traditional yuanlin logic and institutional critique built from architectural ready-mades. Dislocated elements—like a corridor from the Humble Administrator’s Garden or a Lingering Garden pavilion—are reassembled as critical re-embodiments, operating not as replicas but as spatial arguments. Each fragment acts as a Duchampian readymade: simultaneously exposing the commodification of gardens and reconstructing their design intelligence. The museum becomes a heterotopia of compensation (Foucault), using friction—not harmony—to critique the constraints of display and authorship. Garden principles such as layered revelation, sequencing, and controlled perception are deployed as tools of cognitive disruption. Paths split to reveal curatorial intent; vistas frame artifice; water systems metaphorize interpretive fluidity. This is affirmative subversion: using the garden’s own language to destabilize notions of authenticity. Refusing both terminal critique and passive preservation, the Meta-Garden Museum enacts what Agamben calls the contemporary—re-seeing the past in order to confront the present. It is not about gardens, nor against them, but through them— a living framework for architectural self-interrogation.

Janeen Zheng

Advisors: Anda French, Marina Otero

Charged Ground

Located in Northern Nevada, the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine is a rural site deeply entangled with global enterprise. Lithium is marketed as a clean solution which promises to liberate us from fossil fuel dependency, however its production depends on mining operations located in remote sites purposely obfuscated from the public consciousness. These operations are highly undocumented. Over a third of the US’s mines seen from satellite imagery are absent from official paperwork, leaving enormous data gaps around contamination and its impact on local communities.

This project positions architecture as a key tool in knowledge production which can bridge this critical gap in data. A network of research stations emerges along the fenceline of the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine, unfolding gradually over the mine’s projected 41-year lifespan. Each fragment supports non-expert scientific observation through simple acts of noticing and documenting. By inviting public participation in environmental monitoring, the project opens scientific inquiry beyond the bounds of academia and industry. In doing so, it democratizes environmental regulation and positions citizen science as a counterforce to the financial imperatives that often divide communities facing extractive development. Architecture becomes a tool for witnessing, recording, and resisting, exposing what is meant to stay hidden, and empowering communities to confront the destructive legacies of extraction.

The Post-Professional Program Thesis

The Post-Professional Thesis is an independent, academic year-long, open-format architectural project with a parallel component(s) in a written work (or other work in a previously agreed-upon format). Topics may be wide-ranging and varied in character but must evidence (wider) disciplinary implications and make clear both the historical and contemporary positioning of any work produced. Thesis work must be coherent, concise, and concrete as a design(-research) project, reasonable in scope for two semesters of study but also demonstrative of a long-running and sustainable project of disciplinary inquiry with the potential for continuation following completion of thesis work at Princeton.

POST-PROFESSIONAL PROGRAM THESIS PROJECTS

Mariam Arwa

Tightrope

Yuanyuan (Yuki) Cao

Nomadic Permanence

Tzuchun (Austin) Hsu [REDACTED]

Chad Miller

Three CLT Houses

Vinh Hung (Ryan) Nguyen

A Wet Wet­ Market

Ana Sevilla

Frozen Salmon: Wild Fictions in the Chilean Patagonia

Zee (Ruizi) Zeng

Ngolok: On a Dangerous Building

Mariam Arwa

Advisors: Elizabeth Diller, Sylvia Lavin

Tightrope

Rentier states reliant on oil as their primary export have developed novel architectural symptoms out of their economies of petrochemicalization, visible above all else across their landscapes. While oil-reliance has produced a complex tangle of ecological challenges, it has also granted these states economic stability and geopolitical influence through their control of this valuable resource. In preparation for the arrival of a post-oil world, those who have gained the most from oil must now be the most strategic in securing their economic and geopolitical futures. Saudi Arabia is preparing for this shift through the development of 1200 km of coastline along the Red Sea for eco-touristic projects, international transport infrastructure, and technocratic megacities. The decline of oil heralds a transition towards more ecologically sustainable practices, but consequently promises the hypertrophic scars of development across pristine coastal landscapes.

“Tightrope,” an optimistic take on current models of coastal development, suggests a counterproposal to an ongoing touristic giga-project along the Red Sea, wherein architecture is unmoored from land. Utilizing decommissioned oil rigs within the vicinity of proposed coastal development as site proxies for eco-touristic programming, the reduction of economic dependence on oil without the cost of land development is encouraged and incentivized. Seeking to satiate the hunger of economy and power, and leveraging economic disparities to facilitate international movements of bodies and goods, it is a meeting ground for disparate programs: luxe hospitality meeting aerial transport infrastructure, and retired oil rig meeting friendly home for marine life. Scoping out new territories and gradually expanding its reach, it carefully walks the line into an oncoming depetrochemicalized era.

Yuanyuan (Yuki) Cao

Advisors: Michael Meredith, Stan Allen

Nomadic Permanence

Nomadism and permanence, often perceived as opposing practices, instead exist in dynamic tension, shaping landscapes and livelihoods in complex ways. On the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, Ke’er Village grapples with severe desertification and economic stagnation—challenges countered by the region’s nomadic herders through ecological restoration and sustainable economic practices. By planting Saxaul Trees to stabilize shifting sands and cultivating the medicinal plant Cistanche, they demonstrate both ecological restoration and income generation through the practice of Nomadic Permanence.

A term drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of nomadology, Nomadic Permanence challenges the notion of immovable stability—suggesting that resilience arises through continuous adaptation and the capacity to respond to fluctuating environments. Expanding on such nomadology, this thesis examines the permanent yet nomadic nature not only in the context of time and society but also within the spatial realm. Nomadic Permanence posits that true stability does not emerge from fixity but through ongoing processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. In this context, permanence does not imply immutability but rather serves as the foundational framework of an adaptive system. Nomadism is not limited to physical mobility but should proactively respond to ecological, social, and economic fluctuations. Guided by these principles, the thesis proposes a hybrid design methodology that intertwines permanent and nomadic interventions. By anchoring ecological restoration through stable structures while accommodating seasonal, socio-economic, and environmental changes through flexible elements, architecture becomes a catalyst for resilience.

Much like the landscape interventions that gradually cultivate stabilization from shifting sands, this approach reveals how architecture could take on a “becoming” quality, mediating between the forces of nature and the needs of its inhabitants and creating spaces that balance transient nomadism with permanence.

Tzuchun (Austin) Hsu

Advisor: Michael Meredith

[REDACTED]

This thesis examines the architectural implications of Vantablack, a material known for its near-total absorption of light, and its ability to redefine the perception of space. By removing light and reflection, Vantablack generates a condition of spatial ambiguity, challenging traditional architectural conventions that rely on light as a means of defining form, volume, and weight.

This study asks whether architecture can be a medium of absence, drawing from theories of spatial perception, phenomenology, and materiality to investigate how darkness functions as both a conceptual and material construct. Inspired by Louis Kahn’s servant spaces, filmic representations of silence, and the psychology of voids, the project interrogates the intersection between absence and presence, seen and unseen, material and immaterial.

A central component of this research is an 11ft by 16ft drawing, which explores Vantablack’s perceptual effects at an immersive scale. The drawing serves as both an analytical tool and a speculative representation—testing the limits of visibility, depth, and spatial dissolution. Through a combination of architectural drawing techniques, optical studies, and material experimentation, the work examines how extreme darkness alters perception, movement, and spatial understanding.

By framing architecture through the lens of negation, this thesis seeks to expand critical discourse on material agency, sensory experience, and the psychological dimensions of spatial voids. Ultimately, it proposes new ways of engaging with architecture’s unseen dimensions, questioning how built environments might be defined by what is missing rather than what is present.

Chad Miller Advisor: Paul Lewis

Three CLT Houses

Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) is a sheet good produced by aggregating small pieces of soft wood into massive, structurally capable panels. In recent years, its environmental performance—namely, its ability to sequester carbon and be produced through sustainable forestry—has made it something of a disciplinary darling. For its proponents CLT offers answers for architecture’s present, worrying relationship with the environment. But it remains a replacement material for established architectural conventions. Despite its promise, CLT stands in for ordinary walls in ordinary building types. Through details and models, “Three CLT Houses” identifies a different aspect of CLT worth taking seriously—it is an out-of-scale sheet good, one with the capacity to alter building practices and domestic norms.

As a sheet good, techniques of modeling used at smaller scales (in particular notched intersections) can be expanded to the architectural scale. Variations in these notches produce tight fit corners, looseness, unstable overlaps, weird thicknesses, and other tectonic effects. The models offer aggregations of these details into house proposals that play out these effects at the domestic scale. Here, the other key advantage of sheet-good construction becomes apparent: CLT can be cut into most any shape just as easily as it can remain a simple rectangle. Its various parts might droop, spike, soar, or cower, all while remaining integral to the structure.

“Three CLT Houses” imagines an architecture of aggregation—dripping with figures as the particularities of a sheet-good tectonic produce a theater of domestic life—replete with bedding zones, fox dens, mouse markets, hard-to-clean corners, ominous shadows, mold mouldings, a spare tomato plant, cozy reading nooks, places to put mugs, collections, and so on. While CLT may not mend all ecological ills, it offers more than a substitute—it affords the proliferation of obscure architectural effects and more profound reversals of common architectural binaries.

Vinh Hung (Ryan) Nguyen

Advisors: Marshall Brown, Cynthia Davidson

A Wet Wet-Market

This project is a new wet market in Hoian Ancient Town, at the edge of the Thu Bon River near Vietnam’s coast. Initially inhabited by the Cham people, Hoian was integrated into Vietnamese territory in the 15th century. Later, Japanese and Cantonese merchants transformed it into a thriving trade hub. Despite enduring two wars in the 20th century, Hoian was designated a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site in 1999. Since then, it has become a magnet for tourists, who—along with UNESCO and local authorities—have sought to preserve its image as a cultural artifact frozen in time. Yet, this static vision conflicts with the town’s pressing realistic needs to address environmental challenges, labor displacement, and over-tourism.

Sitting on the threshold between heritage land and rising water, the rapidly decaying local wet-market remains the last place that sustains longtime residents rather than catering to visitors. The proposed new wet-market strategically deploys and layers the language of historical architecture as it helps navigate the escalating environmental challenges. Accentuating the flows of water, products, and people, this project introduces three adaptive groundplanes, allowing vendors to adjust spaces for daily routines and unpredictable flood levels:

The Groundscape: An infrastructural field managing different modes of traffic and spatial arrangements—where water meets ground.

The Roofscape: An architectural field diffusing sunlight, enhancing natural ventilation—where air meets light.

The Column & Mezzaninescape: A connective system providing storage, signage and individuality to vendors—where element meets identity.

Drawing on the Ancient to address the Current, the Wet Wet-Market repositions architecture as an active mediator in dissolving the false tension between cultural heritage and environmental adaptation.

Ana Sevilla Advisor: Elizabeth Diller

Frozen Salmon: Wild Fictions in the Chilean Patagonia

Beneath the surface of the Chilean seas lies an ecological fabric simultaneously vulnerable to pollution and essential for global biodiversity. The area is highly managed through a patchwork of public and private regulations, yet industrial farming and ocean exploitation persist as dominant forces. Since the introduction of salmon into the Chilean Patagonia ecosystem in 1980, salmon farming has emerged as a key polluter, causing eutrophication and habitat disruption. Outbreaks like the ISA virus and toxic algae blooms cascade into civil upheaval and ecological repercussions. In response, the Chilean state has established Indigenous Marine Areas (IMAs) to safeguard traditional practices and biocultural diversity, while paradoxically enacting legislation that allows the salmon industry to expand its operations into the Aysén and Magallanes regions in Chile’s southernmost reaches—a second colonization of the south. Over time, this transformation of human interaction with nature has led to new understandings of the sea and its use. Chile is a prime example of how an export-driven economy relies on the concept of “cheap nature.” Salmon farming expands agricultural logic (mass production at maximum capacity) to the water.

Frozen Salmon recasts the practice of salmon farming in the Chilean Patagonia through alternate relationships to metabolic cycles. The thesis works in symbiosis with nature, ingesting the excess nutrients caused by salmon waste to enrich the sea with oxygen and increase the aquatic habitat. It is an architecture that travels across the Patagonian Sea as a visible attraction of care and environmental sensing.

The project is a two-part network of ecological devices: sensing stations dependent on metabolizing waste into energy via microbial fuel cells and abandoned salmon farm infrastructures spread across the coast, revitalized by the local communities for kelp forest rehabilitation. Microbes, Huiro (kelp), shade, cold, and oxygen-rich water become the home and spawning ground for marine habitat all year round.

Zee (Ruizi) Zeng

Advisors: Erin Besler, Mario Gandelsonas

Ngolok: On a Dangerous Building

Sertar has long been the land of the Ngolok—a name that, in the language of the High Plateau, evokes rebellion, defiance, and those who turn their heads against the wind. In this contested terrain, Larung Gar Buddhist Academy embodies the language of Ngolok, where architecture negotiates control, resistance, and ambiguous legality. The academy’s structures— ranging from ephemeral wooden sheds to state-imposed concrete hotels—exist within a shifting dialectic: what is physically fragile grants political freedom, while what is materially permanent enforces surveillance.

What makes a building dangerous? Is it the instability of its foundation, or the fissure it opens in the order of things? In Larung Gar, wooden sheds once flickered like apparitions, slipping through the net of surveillance—their impermanence a form of survival. Then came concrete: rigid, legible, and bound to the bureaucratic gaze.

This thesis explores how selective dismantling and adaptive reconstruction—drawing from Gordon Matta-Clark’s “anarchitecture” and Walter Benjamin’s anthropological materialism—can repurpose permanence as a tool of resistance. On one hand, by strategically destabilizing the hotel’s structural integrity without complete collapse, the project creates a condition of “temporary permanence.” On the other hand, through the deliberate stabilization of the structure using additive materials that fall outside official classification, it reinstates a state of “permanent temporariness.” Leveraging the very logic of codification to subvert control while preserving habitability, the building stands—dangerous in all the right ways.

Undergraduate Studios

The undergraduate program at the School of Architecture is known for its rigorous interdisciplinary approach to pre-professional education. The four-year undergraduate program leads to an A.B. with a concentration in architecture and offers an introduction to the discipline of architecture within the framework of a liberal arts curriculum. The program prepares students for a graduate program in architecture or other related disciplines such as landscape architecture, urban planning, historic preservation, civil engineering, art history, and the visual arts.

ARC 206

Assistant Professor Cameron Wu with Teaching Assistants Shaun Lien and Chenkun Ma

Geometry & Architectural Representation

This course introduces the role of geometry in the design and construction process, as well as the origins, methods, and contemporary implications of projective geometry more broadly in visual culture and our physical environment. Students in this course will learn by doing. Through a sequence of drawing and modeling exercises, students will construct, interrogate, and transform volumes and spatial interiors. These exercises explicitly address orthographic projection, parallel oblique projection, volumetric intersections, surface development, and affine transformations.

EXERCISE 06A: SLICE

Objective: Represent the interior passages through your cube with scaled section drawings, cut in the orientations of your ex04 planes.

Copy the planes from your ex04 model to the new excavated model, and use each one as the cut plane to produce a section drawing. Don’t forget to orient your camera to the plane of the cut, and make sure you are in a parallel view mode before using Make2d.

Treat the Make2d as the foundation upon which to draft. Use layers with different line weights to distinguish between poche, silhouette, fold, and material texture. Add section markers in the plan to show the orientations of section planes.

ARC 206

Visiting Lecturer Zachary Schumacher with Teaching Assistants Eric Lawler and Elaine Qin Wang (Fall) and Fernando Avila and Kunyue Qi (Spring)

Geometry & Architectural Representation

This course delves into the significance of geometry in architectural design and construction, exploring the origins, methods, and contemporary implications of representation in visual culture. The algorithm introduces an alternative to translating information, which rely on a discrete list of executable steps that prioritize proportion and relation over finite dimensions and form. A set of indefatigable instructions speaks to both the human and machine, or for the sake of this course, the student, CAD software, and laser cutter. Through eight drawing and modeling exercises, students will construct, interrogate, transform, and reorder geometric elements. Within this sequence, precision will be leveraged not only as a means of communicating accurate and replicable information but also as a tool for persuasion and distortion to evaluate digital representation’s capacity to engage with material composition.

ARC 204

Undergraduate Design Studio Professor Paul Lewis and Visiting Lecturers Anda French and Erica Goetz with Teaching Assistants Sigi Buzi, Madeleine Smith, and Janeen Zheng

Introduction to Architectural Design

This is an introductory studio course in architectural design, examining the origins and conventions of representation in architecture. Spatial relationships, and the qualities of space itself, are examined using photography, two-dimensional projections of sectional planes (plan and section), computer models, and three-dimensional physical models. The studio consists of a series of sequential projects that develop both technical skills and conceptual thinking. Abstract and inventive thinking is used through a series of projects that transform spatial relationships from three dimensions into two dimensions, and from two dimensions into three. Particular emphasis is on how these abstract representations of physical space may be ordered in such a way to introduce notions of movement and time. Concepts of the scale of the body in relationship to space are examined through the introduction of site and program. Attention to craft, in both the making of two-dimensional drawings and three-dimensional models, is emphasized as a way of developing precision and abstraction in both thinking and making.

Project 1 detail

ARC 350

Junior Design Studio I Professor Marshall Brown with Teaching Assistants Tzuchun (Austin) Hsu and Jade Zhang

Bridge House Hostel

This studio examines architecture as a cultural production that structures physical environments and reflects social organizations. The course focuses on the potential for recreation and hospitality to create a small center of civic life. Students engage these issues by designing a hostel within the Millstone River Scenic Byway. Pedagogical objectives include conceptualizing the architectural act as an intervention in a longer historical arc; creating compelling relationships between diverse activities, scales, and materials; and understanding architectonics as the art of joining disparate components. Other aims focus on advancing knowledge of building envelopes as mediators between interior and exterior spaces; learning how to integrate fenestration, thresholds, and cladding; and breaking boundaries between architecture and landscape. In this studio, focused daily production is fundamental to a sustainable creative practice. Repetition, careful attention, and depth of engagement are emphasized as challenges to contemporary tendencies toward multi-tasking and distraction. Students measure their success by the quality, rather than the quantity, of their products. The course revolves around the pursuit of physical encounters: making drawings, building models, and experiencing architecture.

ARC 350

Junior Design Studio I

Visiting Lecturer Zachary Schumacher with Teaching Assistants Loretta Koch and Tianyu Zhang

Bridge Tender’s House to Bunkhouse

The opening of the Delaware and Raritan Canal in 1834 marked the beginning of the modern transportation era in Rocky Hill. This new waterway sparked a commercial boom in the small village, which peaked towards the end of the 19th century. At its height, the canal served as a critical commercial route between New York City and Philadelphia, providing a shorter passage for ships that avoided navigating around New Jersey’s southern peninsula. However, following the canal’s abandonment in 1930, few of its structures remain.

The studio’s site, approximately 3 miles from Princeton University’s campus at the junction of the Kingston Branch Loop Trail, preserves the foundation of a bridgetender’s house. This house provided residence for the employee responsible for operating the bridge to allow canal boats to pass. Although the house in Rocky Hill has long since been demolished, its foundation has been reconstructed on the original footings. The semester’s focus is on designing a public facility on the bridgetender’s house foundation. Students explore how people use and perceive this new infrastructure, how it engages with the landscape and community, and where opportunities lie for its transformation.

Students work within two timescales: “as is” (the current conditions) and “as if” (projected future conditions). These projections begin by redesigning an architectural core on the foundation of the former bridgetender’s house. As a concept, the core is already as condensed as possible. While leisure spaces can vary in size and are relatively flexible, the core—comprising essential areas such as the kitchen, washrooms, utility closets, and other functional spaces—must adhere to the fixed dimensions necessary for human use and can’t be squeezed any further. Though the core of a building may traditionally evoke images of a hearth or, more recently, a mechanical shaft, the concept can be simplified and reinterpreted in many ways.

Studio assignments include sketching, hand drawing, model building, and 3D representations. Projects should effectively demonstrate and clearly communicate a deep understanding of the existing site, progressing from the pre-existing foundation and newly designed core to a fully enclosed space that proposes spatial conditions for human interaction, contemplation, exercise, and other public activities.

ARC 350

Bridge Tender’s House to Bunkhouse

ARC 351

Junior Design Studio II

Visiting Lecturer Daisy Ames with Teaching Assistant Loretta Koch

Urban Agricultural Community Center

This studio investigates urban agriculture as a method for addressing the long-term challenges many post-industrial cities in the United States have experienced since the mid19th century. The challenges many cities such as Detroit, Cleveland and Philadelphia have experienced are a result of policy changes in which public housing ceased to be maintained, urban infrastructural projects divided neighborhoods, and communities became distressed by the lack of resources. In some of the post-industrial cities today, blighted areas and vacant lots are being temporarily and/or informally used for urban revitalization projects such as new housing and community initiatives. Urban agriculture (UA) has been a method for achieving neighborhood redevelopment by facilitating community collaboration, education, as well as being a method of reducing food insecurity.

The students in this studio will be tasked with designing an urban agricultural community center in Newark, New Jersey. Newark is a city with a history founded on agricultural hopes, and like the cities mentioned before, has experienced the arc of industrialization, de-industrialization and post-industrial decline. Today the city is seeing renewed investment through art institutions, sporting events and tech; yet the communities and public spaces still need strategies for care and support for social resiliency.

ARC 353

Elective Studio

Visiting Lecturer Tei Carpenter with Teaching Assistant Tianyu Zhang

Slippery When Wet: A Vertical Public Bath

The studio explores thresholds of space that navigate scale, from the intimate scale of the body to the vastness of a building, from the interior of a room to the exterior of the city. It looks at the possibility for layers of thresholds, choreographing spatial and environmental conditions in the design of a public bath.

Within a liberal arts context, the studio underscores architecture as a socio-cultural discipline. It develops methods to synthesize architectural questions of program, civic identity, and a building’s relationship to the city. Students continue to develop foundational design skills investigating part-towhole relationships, figure/ground considerations, private/ public dialectics, circulation sequence, and logics of program organization. In parallel, students strengthen representational techniques of drawing, model making, and model photography with a particular focus on the section and the physical model. Fundamental issues of tectonics, Universal Design, and a dimensional understanding of stairs and ramps are addressed.

For the semester’s studio project, students developed individual designs for a public bath in New York City. Rather than a space of luxury, the public bath recaptures the historic role of this typology as a social infrastructure and space of collectivity. As much a bath as a community center, the design project asks students to consider the cohabitation of bodies with watery environments to offer new formats of being together in the city. Students engage a historical and typological understanding of the bath in terms of its organization and structure, alongside its cultural importance related to hygiene, queer space, and collective health.

The public bath is a civic building which is located on an infill site on a typical double-wide building lot in the Lower East Side of New York City. This necessitated stacking a program that is typically understood to be horizontal. The semester is structured around three exercises that each serve as a departure point for the next one, a cumulative building up of analytical and technical skills. Exercises explore precedent, rituals, and rehearse techniques of composition, circulation, and organization.

COMMUNITYGARDEN

COMMUNALBATH2

TEPIDARIUM HAERET

COMMUNALBATH1

CAMEKAN

PROGRAM

CIRCULATION

ARC 404

Advanced Design Studio

Visiting Lecturer Tessa Kelly with Teaching Assistants Ana Sevilla and Ruizi (Zee) Zeng

Senior Design Studio

The goal of this course is to expand both conceptual and technical design skills. As the final studio in the undergraduate degree sequence, students respond to multi-layered architectural issues, including heterogeneous program, materiality, composition, organizational logic, interface with the city fabric, community identity, and urban history. Work is developed through the modes of architectural representation: concept diagrams, building plans, sections, elevations, and physical models.

The studio’s project is located in Pittsfield, MA, a “Gateway City,” defined by the state of Massachusetts as “midsize urban centers, [which] for generations...were home to industry that offered residents good jobs and a ‘gateway’ to the American Dream. Over the past several decades, manufacturing jobs slowly disappeared...While Gateway Cities face stubborn social and economic challenges as a result, they retain many assets with unrealized potential.” The studio’s work focused on the interface between Downtown Pittsfield and the Westside neighborhood.

The Westside is immediately adjacent to Downtown, and developed beginning in the 1850s as an immigrant neighborhood where small businesses and housing were closely intertwined. Beginning in the 1930s, the Westside suffered the impacts of redlining: “the practice of arbitrarily denying or limiting financial services to specific neighborhoods, generally because its residents are people of color or are poor.” In the late 1960s, Urban Renewal demolished much of the residential and commercial fabric that connected the Westside with Downtown. Today, average lifespan in the Westside is 9.5 years shorter than other areas of Pittsfield, and the median income is $27,163/year compared to the citywide median of $52,223/year. Downtown Pittsfield is the Central Business District for surrounding Berkshire County. First, the studio created a new urban plan reimagining a 15-acre area demolished during Urban Renewal and now dominated by high-speed roads, impassable by foot traffic, between the Westside and Downtown. Second, each student designed a 20,000sf building to be located within the new urban plan. Each student received a unique program for their building and selected its site within the overall site plan. The studio visited Pittsfield to present our urban-scale work and to install a public exhibition that fostered a community conversation.

Merritt ARC 404

Senior Design Studio

Senior Design Studio

ARC 205

Professor Mario Gandelsonas and Princeton-Mellon Fellow Victor Prospero (Fall), Visiting Lecturer Aaron Shkuda (Spring) with Teaching Assistants Laetitia Ryder (Fall) and Shaun Lien (Spring)

The objective of the course is to provide an introduction to architectural and urban design through a number of assignments from the domestic to the urban scale, from enclosed to open places, from spaces to buildings. The course includes a studio and a seminar with invited guest speakers.

The studio focuses on the conventions of representation at different scales and the complex spatial thinking involved in architectural composition. The studio is structured with a sequence of projects using two-dimensional projection (plan and section), computer models, and physical models.

Through an iterative sequence of assignments students learn how to transform three-dimensional relationships into two-dimensional drawings and two-dimensional drawings into three-dimensional models, and how to represent notions of the body in space, movement and time. The studio emphasizes notions of abstraction and precision in the making of two-dimensional drawings and the construction of three-dimensional models. The seminar with invited guest speakers coordinated by Victor Prospero addressed the complicated relationship between architecture, urbanism and dictatorship in Brazil over the course of the twentieth century as a context for the studio assignments.

105'-9"

AXONOMETRIC VIEW

Undergraduate Thesis Projects

The senior thesis is a detailed project, presenting a well-argued piece of research on a precise architectural theme, and may include a substantial amount and variety of visual materials, including any of several forms of representation: architectural drawings, models, video, photographs, and computer-generated images. The relative proportion of written to visual material for each student must be agreed upon with the adviser and thesis committee. The final presentation and oral defense of the senior thesis in the spring will constitute the departmental examination.

Clarissa Allert

ASL and Architecture: The Impact of Culture, Language, and Rights Advocacy on Deaf Space at Gallaudet University

Lhogan Benjamin

The High-Rise on Nkrumah’s Legacy: Architectures of Pan-Africanism and Western Exploitation in Accra, Ghana

Kayleen A. Gowers

The Adaptive City Metaphor: Vertical Forests as Nodes and AI as Synapses in a Global Network

Cienna Halls

War Rubble and Human Remains: Landfills as Sites of Commemoration

Anlin Smaantha Kopf

Architecture’s Seduction: How Architecture Creates Displays of Fashion to Influence Society

Emily K Nguyen

The Mausoleums We Leave Behind: An Architectural Memoir

Nyherowo E. Omene

Forging Identity: The Intersection of Tradition and Modernity in Nigerian Architecture

Alanna Marie Perez

Community Resistance and Transit-Oriented Gentrification in Upham’s Corner

Schuyler Wesley Saint-Phard

Built Hierarchies: Race and Spatial Dynamics of Plantations in Gullah Geechee Georgia and South Carolina

Corey Kim-Hà Segal

Los Angeles’s Forgotten Gems: The Historic Movie Theater Interface in the City and Memory

Lily Turri

Malleable Portraits of a City: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Photos From Varied Perspectives

Hannah Van Zandt-Rollins

Constructing Historic Perception: Restoration in the Face of Climate Change

Chiara Lea Vilna-Santos

Life of the Party: Architecture of Shadow, Movement, and Sound in the Berlin Nightclub

Antonio Warren

From the Moorish to the Modern in Mexico City: Exploring the Islamic Presence in Casa Luis Barragán (1948)

Clarissa Allert Advisor: Jay Cephas

ASL and Architecture: The Impact of Culture, Language, and Rights Advocacy on Deaf Space at Gallaudet University

My thesis explores the relationship between American Sign Language (ASL) and architecture, examining how this connection, along with the history of Deaf communities, education, language, and advocacy for Deaf rights, has shaped the physical spaces and spatial practices at Gallaudet University. Tracing the history of Deaf education reveals key figures who both supported and opposed the use of sign language in learning environments, ultimately leading to the founding of Gallaudet. Analyzing the university’s leadership and organizational history further clarifies the conditions that helped lead to the Deaf President Now (DPN) movement. The DPN movement impacted both the Deaf community at large and the physical campus, resulting in significant changes. One of the more influential outcomes was the creation of the DeafSpace design guidelines, a result of the DeafSpace workshop and project. Using these guidelines as a framework, I analyze several contemporary buildings that integrate DeafSpace principles into their design.

Lhogan Benjamin

Advisors:

V.

Mitch McEwen and Jay Cephas

The High-Rise on Nkrumah’s Legacy: Architectures of Pan-Africanism and Western Exploitation in Accra, Ghana

Recent development initiatives in Ghana have prompted the construction of residential high-rises in Accra, coinciding with an influx of wealthy international investors seeking to acquire and profit off of Ghanaian land. Although based on Ghana’s foundational ideologies in Pan-Africanism and a vision for a “better Ghana,” these programs are merely perpetuating imperialism in West Africa and creating a chasm between foreign settlers and the locals that cannot successfully participate in the rapidly globalizing market. This thesis uses architectural and image analysis, historical analysis, and critical fabulation in observing patterns of built development in Accra from post-independence to present day, revealing how Pan-Africanism has been co-opted as a framework to fuel Accra’s urbanization—specifically the construction of luxury high-density housing—paradoxically worsening the lives of African locals.

Kayleen A. Gowers

Advisor: Mario Gandelsonas

The Adaptive City Metaphor: Vertical Forests as

Nodes and AI as Synapses in a Global Network

This thesis reimagines the city not as a horizontal surface but as a vertical ecology. In the face of accelerating urbanization and ecological crisis, the traditional ground plane can no longer sustain the demands of environmental resilience and urban growth. Historically, cities have been imagined in plan—as networks of streets, plots, and voids stretched across the ground. But cities must now be understood in section—as multilayered systems where architecture and nature intertwine.

Through case studies like Stefano Boeri Architetti’s Bosco Verticale and WOHA’s Parkroyal Collection Pickering, this thesis examines the vertical forest as a new urban typology that fragments, multiplies, and redistributes the ground across height. While these projects succeed at integrating nature into the built form, they remain isolated gestures. Drawing on the metaphor of the neural network— not as a literal analogy, but as a conceptual framework—this thesis proposes a shift: that vertical forests operate as nodes in a global ecological network, with artificial intelligence functioning as synaptic tissue—gathering, analyzing, and responding to environmental data across buildings and geographies.

Recasting vertical forests as ecological-computational hybrids, the thesis challenges architecture’s conventional focus on static form. It advocates for a design language based on porosity, feedback, and adaptation, where architecture functions not as object but as system. Ultimately, this is both a design and philosophical proposition: to imagine buildings that are not fixed forms but evolving participants in planetary resilience.

Cienna Halls

Advisor: Guy Nordenson

War Rubble and Human Remains: Landfills as Sites of Commemoration

In the aftermath of war, the rehabilitated war landfill can act as a doubly beneficial space for a city: first by facilitating the healing process for those whose loved ones were never found, and second by creating recreative green spaces that foster community belonging. The space’s potential as a site of mourning stems from the likelihood that human remains were mixed in with the rubble that now fills the landfill. Through symbolic design, these spaces can help to transform grief into mourning and properly honor the memory of the deceased, connecting the bereaved to the dead that may be interred there. Creating public green spaces atop rubble mounds can further benefit the city by providing its inhabitants with space for leisure and gatherings. This may increase the emotional wellbeing of city-dwellers, as well as their sense of community, something that survivors turn to cope with the trauma of war and destruction. Primary case studies are Munich’s Olympic Park and Beirut’s coastal landfills.

Anlin Samantha Kopf Advisor: Mónica Ponce de León

Architecture’s Seduction:

How Architecture Creates Displays of Fashion to Influence Society

Fashion and architecture share a similar problem: how to prove that they have value beyond tangible or material use. This paper focuses on how spaces made to display fashion garments (runways, luxury stores, and museums) use different techniques in order to seduce customers into perceiving value in fashion and then again in architecture. Part I focuses on how spaces of fashion display emphasize value in viewing fashion, through appropriations of art and activations of melancholic feelings, while Part II focuses on how these spaces create fantastical environments that make it desirable to participate in fashion, through proposing ideal, fashionable lives by creating homely fantasies but also through providing safe yet transgressive spaces through the use of spectacle and the uncanny.

Emily K Nguyen Advisor: Anda French

The Mausoleums We Leave Behind: An Architectural Memoir

The thesis is an experimentation in form and methodology through the topic of my family’s ancestral mausoleums in An Bắng, Việt Nam. It was conceived as between the academic and the intimate, without sacrificing elements of either. At the same time, it became clear as the research progressed that the personal was inextricable from the academic given how close the topic is. This led to the realization that this thesis cannot exist as an architectural research project in earnest, but rather an experiment in the form of an architectural memoir. It takes methodologies from disciplines and techniques such as anthropology, feminist theory, pedagogical practice, and poetry and adopts the tools of architecture against, between, and beyond my memory and myself to depict the structures. The mausoleums we leave behind become emblematic of the physical remnants as well as the ancestors that they are built for, the lives and families still living, and so many more elements which illustrate the multiplicity—that being the perpetually layered, tense, and often dueling quality—of migration and diaspora. In the end, we are left not only with a cemetery of mausoleums, but one of the memory, selves, home, and nationhood.

Nyherowo E. Omene

Advisor: Spyros Papapetros

Forging Identity: The Intersection of Tradition and Modernity in Nigerian Architecture

By engaging with the indigenous architectural traditions of the three major tribes of Nigeria, the Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo tribes, and how they intertwine with British colonization, this thesis argues that Nigerian and West African architecture has developed a third architectural paradigm that is neither indigenous nor colonial. In doing so, this hybrid emerges as a catalyst for furthering the conversations surrounding Nigeria’s rich history, but also as a tool that can elevate Nigeria, West Africa, and the rest of the Global South on the global stage.

Alanna Marie Perez

Advisors: Marshall Brown and Aaron Shkuda

Community Resistance and Transit-Oriented Gentrification in Upham’s Corner

This thesis explores how the Dominican, Haitian, and Cape Verdean communities in Upham’s Corner, Dorchester, have responded to transit-oriented gentrification triggered by the Fairmount Line development and the Imagine Boston 2030 plan. Centering on Upham’s Corner as a case study, the project examines how grassroots activism, cultural institutions, and local organizing efforts work to resist displacement and preserve community identity. Using art and architecture as primary lenses, the project analyzes how the built environment and visual culture are shaped by community resistance. At the core of this research is an investigation into the widely discussed ideal of “development without displacement.” The project asks whether this goal is achievable in historically marginalized neighborhoods now targeted by new investment. It also considers the role of public art, particularly murals, as a form of cultural resistance, identity-making, and visual storytelling that asserts community presence amid rapid change.

Schuyler Wesley Saint-Phard Advisor: Jay Cephas

Built Hierarchies: Race and Spatial Dynamics of Plantations in Gullah Geechee Georgia and South Carolina

At the center of this thesis is a discussion of the Gullah Geechee. The Gullah Geechee (often referred to as Gullah) are an ethnic group located in coastal North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida who originated from West Africa. The Gullah Geechee worked as slaves on rice plantations. The rice coast was home to the Gullah people, a unique cultural group of enslaved Africans who retained many of their traditional customs and practices. This thesis argues that the hierarchy present in slave-era plantations was not merely a neutral or functional arrangement of space, but was actively shaped by racial hierarchies and the institution of slavery. I visit three plantations throughout Georgia and South Carolina to uncover ways in which the built environment affects the way of life for the Gullah, as well as the visitor’s experience at each plantation.

Corey Kim-Hà Segal Advisor: Paul Lewis

Los Angeles’s Forgotten Gems: The Historic Movie Theater Interface in the City and Memory

My senior thesis examines historic movie theaters in Los Angeles constructed during the Golden Age of Hollywood. These movie theaters occupy cities in peculiar ways; their huge auditoriums do not require light or windows, and thus, many embedded themselves in the block behind storefronts or office space. As such, theaters were largely hidden, but paradoxically, they needed to make their presence known. What resulted was the movie theater interface—a highly communicative zone that interacts with surroundings and identifies the theater, including the bright neon marquee that seduces pedestrians and cars, the patterned sidewalk and recessed entrance that encourage gathering, and the ticket booth that facilitates the sales process. This zone is robust and blurs the notion of building, film, city, and event, and no other interface exists quite like it. Through studying the components of the movie theater interface, specific theaters in distinct parts of L.A., and their lingering traces in the city, I unpack how historic movie theaters relate to and shape their surroundings. Between their highly communicative nature and their embeddedness within the city, historic movie theaters survive as important cultural places, even despite changed uses over time.

Advisor: Spyros Papapetros

Malleable Portraits of a City: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Photos From Varied Perspectives

This thesis concerns itself with the use of photographs to construct narratives regarding cities and urban change through an examination of W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh photographs. In Chapter I, I examine Smith’s photographs in the context of Stefan Lorant’s illustrated history book, Pittsburgh: The Story of an American City. This chapter argues that Lorant uses images to contribute to an overly simplified progress narrative of Pittsburgh’s postwar urban renewal. Chapter II looks at Smith’s own photo-essay of his Pittsburgh work, entitled “Labyrinthian Walk,” suggesting that the piece pushes back on the progress narrative of Lorant and attempts to characterize the city in a more nuanced way, particularly through the formal effect and structure of contrast. Chapter III considers the omissions from these two presentations of Smith’s Pittsburgh photographs, made visible by the archival record. I then delve into a discussion of my own curation of Smith’s omitted Pittsburgh photographs, seeking to produce a more abstract, non-narrative sequence that draws from a sense of collective memory and personal experience. Together, these chapters contribute to our understanding of the malleability of these photographs and how they are made to fit differing perspectives on the meaning of this transformational period in Pittsburgh’s history.

Hannah Van Zandt-Rollins

Advisor: Aaron Shkuda

Constructing Historic Perception: Restoration in the Face of Climate Change

The Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, New Hampshire is an outdoor, waterfront history museum on the site of what was once the original English colonial settlement and the neighborhood of Puddle Dock established in 1623. Today’s museum occupies the infilled colonial dock neighborhood, much of which was bulldozed as part of the urban renewal project from which the museum was born, and represents an eclectic collection of preserved historic buildings from the colonial period which have, for one reason or another, been deemed important to the local culture. My thesis explores issues of creation and control of cultural significance, memory, and perception which lie at the heart of the historic preservation at Strawbery Banke. I look at ways the museum has mobilized the surrounding community to its benefit for its initial creation and today to combat the threat of rising sea levels at the constructed site of the museum and historic Puddle Dock neighborhood. The museum’s unusual origins in an urban renewal project make it noteworthy, and further the threats facing this museum represent an increasingly common consequence of climate change within vulnerable coastal communities, making this case study generally applicable to development of a variety of future preservation practices.

Chiara Lea Vilna-Santos Advisor: S.E. Eisterer

Life of the Party: Architecture of Shadow, Movement, and Sound in the Berlin Nightclub

This paper focuses on modern-day techno nightclubs in Berlin. It explores how shadows, sound, and crowd define users’ perception of the physical space of a nightclub. The lighting environment, sonic experience, and mass of users are indispensable to the experience of the nightclub in a way that goes beyond the walls and physical organization of the interior. The ephemeral elements of the nightclub facilitate embodied experiences and create an alternative mode of being—temporally and spatially—from that of everyday city life. Through this analysis, I explore the somatic experience of the nightclub and grapple with the question of why people choose to spend hours, weekends, and generations dancing together.

Antonio Warren Advisor: Michael Meredith

From the Moorish to the Modern in Mexico City: Exploring the Islamic Presence in Casa Luis Barragán (1948)

Luis Barragán (1902-1988) is the most prominent modernist Mexican architect to ever live. Born just outside of Guadalajara—a populous city in Mexico’s midwest—Barragán grew up on an expansive ranch, embedded in nature, riding horses and exploring Sierra del Tigre as a boy. In 1935, Barragán moved to Mexico City. The works Barragán produced in Mexico’s capital would receive great critical acclaim and, years after their completion, significant international recognition. In 1980, Luis Barragán received the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s greatest professional honor. Upon receiving the Pritzker, Barragán gave a short acceptance speech in which he acknowledged his Mexican heritage and the ideas and influences integral to his designs. Interestingly, Barragán repeatedly highlights Islamic-inspired architecture in his speech. Nearly 10 percent of Barragán’s address evokes examples of Islamic creation like the “Patio of Myrtles” in the Alhambra or “North African villages.” The importance of Islamic architecture in Barragán’s life comes as a relative surprise: Barragán completed all of his works in Mexico, and any mention of Islam escapes much of the existing literature on Barragán. This paper explores the connection between the Islamic and Barragán’s approach to architecture, comparing elements of Moorish masterpieces in Southern Spain and those of Casa Luis Barragán in Mexico City.

Princeton University School of Architecture

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Design: Omnivore

Doctoral Degree in Architecture

The Ph.D. Program

The Ph.D. program consists of the History and Theory track and the Computation and Energy track. The interdisciplinary nature of the program stresses the relationship of architecture, urbanism, landscape, and building technologies to their cultural, social, and political milieux. Supported by strong affiliations with other departments in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, the program has developed a comprehensive approach to the study of the field.

History and Theory Track

The Ph.D. Committee sets the course requirements for each student according to the student’s previous experience, specialized interests, and progress through the program. Each semester, prior to the beginning of classes, students must discuss and receive approval from the DGS for their chosen courses. For the first two years, each student engages in course work and independent study, and is required to complete a minimum of three classes for credit each semester for a total of twelve courses, at least nine of which must be taken for a letter grade (not P/D/F) and result in a full-length paper. Of the twelve courses, at least six must be taken within the School of Architecture (the two required proseminars will count). During the first year of residence, a two-term required proseminar introduces students to the process of developing historically-based research, the literature review process, and methods for innovative critical hypothesis generation and analysis and guides the subsequent development of individual research proposals.

Computation and Energy Track

The computation and energy Ph.D. track was launched in 2014. The track was an addition to the Ph.D. program that develops research in the field of embodied computation and new systems for energy and environmental performance in architecture. Through associated faculty, it is linked to the School of Engineering and Applied Science, particularly with Computer Science, Robotics, Material Science (PRISM), and the Andlinger Center for Energy and Environment. A proseminar for the Ph.D. track supports the initial methods and processes for this research. The applied research component of the track is supported by world-class research facilities and laboratories, and through independently funded grants for research.

Ph.D. Proseminars

Ph.D. Proseminar

Professors Beatriz Colomina and Sylvia Lavin

With

Teaching Assistant Maxwell Smith-Holmes

Nuclear Architectures

From secret laboratories to monumental infrastructures and the many landscapes of war, energy, and waste in between, nuclear power is at the core of a vast and radically understudied array of 20th century architectures. Central to some of the most iconic architectural images of the post-war era while simultaneously rendered invisible in apparently unseen wastelands, atomic weapons, nuclear reactors, and atmospheric fallout eventually became simultaneously subjects and objects of intense architectural attention. Drawing on a wide range of literatures, this seminar considers the histories and theory of nuclear design and aesthetics, atomic environments and warscapes, and explores how the nuclear penetrated even the most private spaces of the architectural studio, the domestic realm and the human body.

The Ph.D. pro-seminar explores architectural research techniques through collaborative investigation of a specific issue facing the field. Rather than study research methods in the abstract, students actively carry out detailed research on the topic of their choice related to the overall theme and reflect upon its limits and potentials in a collaborative exploration. The research project of each semester is carried through to realization in the form of a book, a conference, or an exhibition organized by the students in subsequent semesters.

Ph.D. Proseminar

Associate Professor Spyros Papapetros

On the Methodologies of Architectural History

Architectural authors are rarely aware of the methodologies they use. This overview of the major historical writings on architecture from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries aims to raise that awareness. As opposed to a linear survey of the various histories of architecture, the seminar examines the varying attitudes of architectural historians towards the uses and abuses of history (and theory) as well as their individual grasping of historical time. This semester the seminar is thematically centered on the reciprocal relations between history and theory in the production of architectural historiography with a special focus on the writings of Anthony Vidler and the texts of other architectural and cultural historians and theorists analyzed in his work.

Ph.D. Proseminar Assistant Professor Arash Adel

Research Methods

Research Methods offers an introduction to and discussion of research methodologies and theories within the interdisciplinary fields of architecture and technology. The seminar’s main objective is to equip doctoral students in the Computation and Energy track at the School of Architecture with the theoretical background and essential tools for conducting rigorous academic research. Throughout the course, students engage with diverse research methods, including qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches, emphasizing their application to architectural and engineering research. The seminar additionally emphasizes research ethics and the responsible conduct of research. Moreover, the course delves into contemporary theories of digital architecture, drawing on texts such as Digital Culture in Architecture (Picon, 2010), The Alphabet and the Algorithm (Carpo, 2011), Builders of the Vision: Software and the Imagination of Design (Cardoso Llach, 2015), and Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (Steenson, 2017). Beyond these disciplinary texts, the course explores broader themes such as climate change, material culture in architecture, and the evolving nature of labor and the future of work in architecture, engineering, and construction.

This seminar is structured around key activities designed to enrich the learning experience and deepen students’ engagement with the material. Through these activities, students gain theoretical and methodological insights and develop practical skills in research design, data analysis, and scholarly communication, preparing them to contribute meaningfully to the advancement of architecture and technology.

Ph.D. Dissertation Abstracts

Tairan

The Incidental Artifactuality of the Observational Sciences in Italy, c.

1840–1880

This dissertation probes a diverse array of architectural and infrastructural artifacts that became involved in the scientific observation of nature in mid-to-late nineteenth-century Italy. It assembles an eclectic miscellany of research institutions and field stations, ranging from observatories for volcano monitoring and centers for marine biology to viewing spots for solar eclipses and outposts for ornithological fieldwork, that incidentally mediated and redefined the natural world as it was just coming into new forms of visibility. By engaging observational settings both deliberately constructed and occasionally occupied, the dissertation unfolds through a series of episodes where science and architecture came into contact and worked in tandem. Gravitating towards sites afflicted by especially unstable and capricious natural processes, these places of research gave rise to a particular approach to knowledge that involved simultaneously inventing and undoing nature.

At the core of the study is an investigation of the unintended ramifications of observatory-based research programs. While devised solely to observe, they inadvertently effected both tangible alterations and unforeseen epistemological shifts within the field; these repercussions, in turn, reshaped the observational mechanism. This dissertation argues that these effects are anchored in “incidental artifactuality,” which refers, first, to the cascade of “things”— logistical, infrastructural, or mediatic—contingently sparked into relevance by the implementation of observation, and the spontaneous impact they had on further research. These certainly include the architectural accommodations, while more pervasive were the telluric and atmospheric features that interfered with field observation

from unexpected places, ranging from air and water pollutants to an obstructive cloud. The term, furthermore, extends to the emergent epistemologies that serendipitously arose, deemed essential to account for the new relations precipitated by the deployment of the observational program in the field. Inextricably, a myriad of unpremeditated situations embroiled highly specific environmental, economic, and political concerns into the knowledge pursuits of the scientists. Knowingly or otherwise, they found themselves constantly implicated in navigating the nexus between metropole and frontier.

Focused on South Italy in the wake of the Risorgimento and extending into East Africa, the study discloses how coloniality structured the very ideation of the world as an elemental condition, and the ways in which architecture among complex currents of power acted as a conduit to negotiate nature in order to convert it. It demonstrates that by the late nineteenth century, neither the scientist nor the architect could assert the purity either of knowledge or of nature except as a matter of belief. Instead, both practices found themselves entangled in intermedial hybrids and techno-natural assemblages that I argue remain embedded if uncharted in the material and epistemological foundations of modern architecture and the natural sciences.

Eugène Sevaistre, “Naples pris du chateau St. Elme,” albumen silver stereograph, in Souvenirs stéréoscopiques d’Italie (ca. 1859). Courtesy of Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal.

Collective Creativity between Humans and Machines: Exploring Improvisational

Design-Fabrication Workflows Enabled by Robotics and Artificial Intelligence

Over the past few decades, robotic technology has been adopted in the architectural field mainly to automate the fabrication process and materialize complex parametric designs. While this approach ensures precision in form and assembly, it often lacks adaptability, accessibility, and resilience to change once construction begins on-site. In response, this research draws from human-robot interaction (HRI) and artificial intelligence (AI) to explore new frameworks where heterogeneous teams of humans and robots collaboratively design and fabricate without relying on pre-defined blueprints.

By integrating robotic precision and strength with human craft and sensitivity, this approach enables more dynamic structures while lowering technological barriers to broader participation. Bidirectional communication between humans and robots fosters creativity, expanding design possibilities beyond automation. Additionally, it enhances sustainability by accelerating design-fabrication cycles and reducing material constraints.

This dissertation begins by establishing the theoretical framework for Collective Human-Robot Construction (CHRC) through a review paper centered on two intersecting research axes: autonomycollaboration and design-fabrication. From this foundation, a series of physical prototypes—developed at increasing scales and across diverse material systems—serve to test and refine an improvisational design-fabrication workflow. These experiments span from sculptural to pavilion-scale structures, employing strategies ranging from the

Ph.D. Program

stacking of simple geometric units to the interlocking of organic bamboo rods and the assembly of wooden and steel tensegrity structures.

The dissertation also investigates different modes of HRI within fabrication and environment-shaping processes, some enhanced by AI to promote more intuitive and accessible human-robot engagement. Experiments were conducted to equip robots with vision and voice capabilities, enabling them to perceive the built environment and communicate with humans through natural language. With these enhanced HRI tools, humans and robots can co-create their surroundings in real time.

Grounded in HRI, AI, and materials science, this research explores strategies for making robotic workflows more responsive to human input. It envisions a future where design and construction are collaborative, inclusive, and dynamically responsive, redefining machines as co-creators rather than mere executors.

A robotic arm assists in the design and fabrication of tensegrity structures using visual servoing. Image credit: Isla Xi Han.

Clemens Finkelstein

Architectures of Vibration: Environmental Control, Seismic Colonialism,

and Planetary Epistemology, 1898–1928

Historically oscillating between intellectual attraction and existential terror, human engagement with the phenomenon of vibration reveals a deep-seated uncertainty toward the defining marker of environmental conditions at the end of the nineteenth century. This dissertation examines the moment vibration’s environmental impact turned perceptible, measurable, and controllable via the entanglements and intersections of modern architecture, science, and technology. Dissecting discrete moments of this epistemic shift as it materializes in the German project of a seismic survey of the world, the study investigates the specialized designs of modern geophysics’ seismic research stations. Creating spatial buffer zones between vibrating environmental sectors, from epistemic spaces of complete isolation to liminal spaces operating as environmental filters, architecture discerned destructive from creative and obstructive from instructive vibrations. Two parts spanning four intersecting case studies examine the materialized cosmologies of vibration before, during, and after a significant epistemic shift that transformed the passive technoscientific approach to the physical phenomenon into an active phenomenotechnique.

Part 1, “Seismicity as Design-Technique in Wilhelmine Germany,” traces the evolving spatial complexity of modern scientific architectures in the recently unified nation, epitomizing the unique German engagement with planetary vibrations as an epistemic carrier, design technique, and industrial accelerator. By inhabiting an intermediary space amid theory and application, architecture assumed a significant role in deciphering Earth and transforming planetary epistemology at the turn of the twentieth century. While German

seismicity grounded national identity beyond surficial topography in the subterranean geology of the European homeland, it likewise catalyzed imperial aspirations via a novel form of seismic colonialism that marshaled the geophysical properties of Germany’s dispersed colonies and protectorates to revise geopolitical strategies.

Part 2, “Building a Seismic Colonialism in the South Pacific,” examines the alliance between colonial expansionism and pure scientific inquiry in the protectorate of German-Samoa. There, architecture realized novel alliances of planetary-scale technologies, merging the geophysical reception of Earth’s seismic waves with Germany’s expanding broadcasting network of radio waves. Soaring from the deepest depths to the highest heights of the planet, this Icarian ambition underlined the growing international importance of German geophysics while foreshadowing its precarious standing at the edge of global warfare.

Jessica Hoi-Mun Ngan

Architecture at the Limits: Environmentalism and Industrial Agriculture, c. 1970

In the late 1960s, the growing momentum of the environmentalist movement added to the culminating doubts of postwar architects in technology as a central tenet of modernist ideology. One way to recuperate the diminishing agency of architecture in the face of impending resource scarcity was to transform agricultural production to fit into the urban context. Agricultural systems were introduced into the architectures in domestic and urban spheres, to both prevent contribution to environmental degradation and shelter from the effects of environmental mismanagement. At the same time, changing federal labor policy and the Civil Rights Movement spurred a vast unionization campaign by industrial farmworkers. Through marches, pickets, and boycotts, the farmworker rights movement connected the rural space of production to the urban space of consumption. The failure of farmworker housing had been a major catalyst for the organization of farmworkers and remained an important site of action. By weaving together the histories of industrial and urban agriculture, the dissertation identifies both throughlines and disjuncts, which elucidate the stakes of transposing agriculture from rural to urban space. This transposition took place within a longer history of industrial agriculture and its trenchant failure to provide adequate living conditions for seasonal farmworkers. The failure of farmworker housing was furthered by architects’ modernist embrace of new manufactured materials in the camp-building programs of the late 1960s. The design of new urban spaces of agricultural production attempted to address both rising environmentalist anxieties and the trenchant failures to provide for industrial agricultural labor. Firstly, agricultural labor was replaced by automated feeding and environmental control systems in

the design of closed environment agriculture. Secondly, agricultural labor was subsumed as a leisure activity and as reproductive labor in the new domestic architectures that integrated agricultural production into waste processing systems. A counterexample to these attempts to circumvent agricultural labor is given in the construction of unionbuilt housing for retired farmworkers. The maximization of resource exploitation in the face of projected future resource scarcity was in contrast to the strategy of building alliances and cultivating mutual aid when faced with the conditions of actual resource scarcity.

The “Envirodome” was produced for commercial sale by the Environmental Research Laboratory at the University of Arizona’s Institute of Atmospheric Physics, hybridizing the domestic space of a solarium with the horticultural space of a greenhouse.

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