Cover image: detail of Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Chromosaturation . Photo by T. Ng
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Thesis at Taubman College
Thesis for the M.Arch degree is the terminal year of the graduate architecture program where every student ballot into one of the studios at the beginning of the year. The studios are thematically framed, guided by an advisor, who works with the student during the fall term in the seminar and continuing in the winter term in the design studio. The consecutive nature is strategic to hone skills, knowledge, and develop the research so that students can undertake their own line of inquiry in the design studio. The thesis year is a true highlight for the students, both in terms of following their own interest within the discipline of architecture in how they frame their own project, as well as marking the output as the final comprehensive production of their graduate studies. This year, there are a total of eighty-one students across seven thesis studios.
The work coming from these seven studios will be on display during the annual thesis exhibition, held at Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning, University of Michigan on April 29th and 30th. During the two-day event, students present their work to a group of critics for discussion, with the work to remain on view during graduation weekend. The exhibition captures the incredible creative efforts of the students, exemplies the diverse types and modes of design explorations, and is the embodiment of the vibrant conversations that took place over the course of the year.
Architecture Faculty
Ellie Abrons
Zain Abuseir
Robert Adams
Mania Aghaei Meibodi
Sean Ahlquist
María Arquero de Alarcón
Craig Borum
Bryan Boyer
James Chaffers
Angela Cho
Tess Clancy
McLain Clutter
Jacob Comerci
Gabriel Cuéllar
Nitzan Farfel
Robert Fishman
Adam Fure
Dawn Gilpin
Lars Gräbner
Linda N. Groat
Sharon Haar
Peter Halquist
Christina Hansen
Melissa Harris
Rachael Henry
Andrew Herscher
Irene Hwang
Andrew Ibrahim
El Hadi Jazairy
Lars Junghans
Michael Kennedy
Jong-Jin Kim
Joy Knoblauch
Perry Kulper
Emily Kutil
Yojairo Lomeli
Jen Maigret
Kuukuwa Manful
Steven Mankouche
Robert Marans
John Marshall
Jonathan Massey
Francesca Mavaracchio
Kit McCullough
Malcolm McCullough
Wesley McGee
John McMorrough
Julia McMorrough
Mark Meier
Meredith Miller
Keith Mitnick
Thomas Moran
Ana Morcillo Pallarés
Athar Mufreh
Upali Nanda
Mojtaba Navvab
Catie Newell
Tsz Yan Ng
Charlie O’Geen
Cynthia Pachikara
Cyrus Peñarroyo
Gina Reichert
Neal Robinson
Mireille Roddier
Jonathan Rule
Lisa Sauvé
Ishan Pal Singh
Anya Sirota
Łukasz Stanek
Antje Steinmuller
Jono Sturt
Geoffrey Thün
Anca Trandafirescu
Christian Unverzagt
Mohsen Vatandoost
Kathy Velikov
Peter von Bülow
Gus Wendel
Claudia Wigger
Glenn Wilcox
Craig Wilkins
Visiting Critics
Ila Berman
University of Virginia
Joseph Choma Florida Atlantic University
Karl Daubman
Lawrence Technological University
Sarah Dunn University of Illinois Chicago
Joyce Hwang University of Buffalo
Max Kuo University of California, Los Angeles
Amelyn Ng Columbia University
Christopher Romano University of Buffalo
Georgeen Theodore New Jersey Institute of Technology
Gretchen Wilkins
Lawrence Technological University
Jason Young University of Tennessee
Class of 2026
Mira Abdalla
Mortimer Ackerman
Alexandra Acosta
Malavika Anand
Tamar Ayalew
Jack Barbour
Stephanie Bednarski
Jacob Brookhouse
Natalie Brown
Ainsley Capps
Sayyoung Chang
Xinlei Chen
Ranhui Chen
Arushi Chopra
Hui-Cheng Chung
Ngoc Minh Dang
Pablo De La Garza
Jiayi Ding
Cayla Ellis
Basma Elsheikh
Angelica Facey
Cory Hoffmann
Linde Ji
Ryan Karczewski
Shonit Kotian
Sujeong Koo
Ravi Kumar
Felix Lam
Alex Landgrave
Jordan Lindberg
Jason Loeb
Nicholas Londono
Tingshu Mao
Arpit Malhotra
Brianna Manzor
Roman Marra
Andrew Masternak
Chris Meade
Kristen McCullough
Gabbriella McKinley
Francis Michel
Qiting Mo
Riley Montgomery
Talia Morison-Allen
Cameron Mussay
Michael Natinsky
Emily Naumann
Wang Kin Ng
Danah Owaida
Anna Peterson
Steven Powers
Pute Qiu
Edward Rapa
Erin Roberts
Vieniq Romero
Yicheng Rong
David Rugen
Kallista Sayer
Xinyu Shi
Jacob Shichman
Jack Smith
Clarence Song
James Sotiroff
Charlie Tokowitz
Tamer Tubishat
David Vega
Amely Wackerbauer
Claire Walker
Chun Wang
Zihang Wang
Abriana Wilson
Alex Anne White
Jiaxin Wu
Guanjingchan Xu
Yihan Yang
Ruixue Yang
Yuzhe Yang
Junxian Yu
Shuyang Zhang
Hui Zhu
Yufei Zhu
Table of Contents
Part/System
Adam Fure
Architecture School*
Sharon Haar
Orders of Magnitude, A Research Thesis in Architecture
Irene Hwang
Iridescent Irises
Perry Kulper
Microcosm Thesis, Architecture as Microcosm of Issues
John McMorrough
Concrete Labor_Circularity
Tsz Yan Ng
Bio-logics, experimental practices in architecture’s biological turn_ Kathy Velikov
Part/System
Instructor: Adam Fure
This thesis section investigates how architecture acts on the world—its agency. It begins from two premises: that everything is interconnected, and that buildings possess their own power. Architecture emerges from a complex web of financial, political, and material forces that shape the built environment, while also existing as discrete entities with tangible impacts on specific people and places. Rather than privileging one of these dimensions, this work considers how they are intertwined—how systems shape parts, and how parts in turn shape systems.
Across the semester, students examined how architectural decisions, from program and circulation to site orientation, shape patterns of use and experience. At the same time, they grappled with the broader forces that condition these decisions. Architecture’s agency was framed through what Michel Foucault calls an apparatus: a heterogeneous ensemble of discourses, institutions, laws, and forms that structures how subjects engage with the world. Students approached this not as a constraint, but as a framework for understanding the systems within which architecture operates.
The work extends beyond visible design to less tangible forces, such as economic, political, legal, cultural, environmental, and historical, that shape architectural possibilities. These forces were understood as dynamic, shaped by histories of policy, exclusion, and resistance, as well as shifting social and technological conditions.
In parallel, students developed discrete architectural interventions as active participants within larger networks. Drawing on actor-network theory, these proposals treat architectural elements as agents embedded in relationships among people, materials, and institutions. Even small interventions were explored for their capacity to generate effects across broader socio-spatial systems.
By engaging both systems and parts, the projects articulate distinct architectural positions. Together, they demonstrate how design can respond to existing conditions while asserting new possibilities—engaging the apparatus with precision, intention, and clarity.
Housing the Habitat
Designing for Multispecies Cohabitation
Malavika Anand
This thesis redefines the built environment as a broader assemblage of human and nonhuman actors—animals, plants, soils, water systems, and atmospheric processes. Within this framework, housing becomes a shared ecological infrastructure designed for all species. It proposes a radical rethinking of conventional housing by shifting away architectural agenda from its primarily anthropocentric logics—such as the parcel system and human-centered design—and toward habitat restoration and multispecies coexistence.
Postwar suburban development in the American Midwest has produced an urban landscape characterized by low-density single-family housing, fragmented ecological systems, and privatized land. Large continuous forests and habitats have been subdivided into fenced backyards on individual parcels, reducing the once-connected ecosystems to isolated fragments. They now function less as living environments and more as ornamental landscapes. In Southeast Michigan, where forests, wetlands, and ecological corridors have progressively given way to industrialization and suburban expansion, this condition contributed to declining biodiversity and disrupted species movement.
As a response, Housing the Habitat develops a prototype for single-family housing in which biodiversity becomes a primary spatial driver. Rather than repeating isolated houses across subdivided lots, dwellings are organized into a collective spatial field that consolidates land into shared ground. Fragmented backyards are replaced with continuous habitats and third-place communal spaces that support both multispecies occupation and human gathering. Building envelopes and spatial systems are designed to host nonhuman life, transforming the house itself into a living interface between domestic space and habitat.
By prioritizing biodiversity and habitat continuity over the logic of individual property, this thesis positions housing as ecological infrastructure and argues for an architecture that restores ecological networks while redefining the role of the house within a more-than-human urban landscape.
Calibrated Infrastructures
Tamar Ayalew
This thesis examines how architecture can recalibrate waiting and environmental conditions within Detroit’s former Black Bottom neighborhood. It aims to do so through the insertion of thickened public infrastructures at bus stop edges where urban renewal produced environmental exposure.
Black Bottom was once a dense and walkable district sustained by local businesses and strong economic circulation within Detroit’s Black community. The clearance of this historically Black neighborhood during the 1960s through racialized urban renewal policies and highway construction dismantled these networks. Buildings that once mediated climate and enclosure were removed and Black-owned commercial corridors were displaced. In their place emerged exposed and transit-dependent landscapes where waiting now occurs in exposed sensory environments.
The project proposes a series of architectural interventions that operate simultaneously as bus stop infrastructure and food networks. Rather than functioning only as points of transit, these sites become places where people wait, gather, and access community-based food systems. Food access is organized through a farm stop, co-op grocer, and a mutual aid hub. Stalls and shared distribution spaces prioritize locally owned businesses so economic activity circulates within neighborhoods most affected by displacement. Commerce becomes a mechanism for redistributing wealth back into the community while rebuilding localized economic networks.
Architecture mediates the sensory environment through calibrated mass, shade, enclosure, and materiality that provide protection from heat, glare, and traffic noise. Each intervention responds to its surrounding condition, from heavier buffering near highway infrastructure, semi-enclosed infrastructure within a heat-retentive lot, to a more porous structure within an open landscape.
Together, these interventions transform exposed transit waiting into inhabitable environments while reconnecting everyday mobility with locally rooted food systems and community-based economic circulation.
Relativistic City Urban
Curvature and the Accumulation of Time-Experience
Sayyoung Chang
Cities are often understood as flat systems organized around efficiency and the shortest paths of movement. Yet the actual experience of the city cannot be explained solely through this logic of efficiency. People linger, return repeatedly to particular places, and accumulate time and experiences there, creating invisible differences in density across urban space.
To visualize this temporal accumulation, an experimental drawing machine was developed that records layered trajectories over time. As gears rotate, a mechanical arm traces lines that gradually build up through repeated motion, producing a visual record of time’s accumulation.
This thesis interprets these accumulations through the concept of urban curvature. Just as mass bends space in physics, the accumulation of time and experience alters the character of urban space and produces varying spatial intensities across places. From this perspective, a good space is not simply one that is functionally efficient, but one where people stay, experience, and build layers of time. Places with greater accumulations of experience develop stronger urban curvature, gradually attracting movement and attention.
This thesis investigates these ideas through the site of LACMA in Los Angeles, where museums, public spaces, and the La Brea Tar Pits overlap. However, the buildings and programs exist as largely independent elements, producing experiences that remain spatially dispersed. As a result, the accumulation of time and experience tends to remain localized rather than forming a larger urban density across the site.
The project introduces a new infrastructural framework between existing buildings and programs, allowing time and experience to accumulate more deeply across the entire site.
In this context, infrastructure can be understood not merely as a technical system, but as a structure capable of connecting dispersed spaces and organizing flows of experience.
The Experience of Accessibility School of Movement, Sound, and Light
Jiayi Ding
Accessibility in schools is often treated as a set of technical requirements like ramps, circulation, or specialized rooms designed for specific users. While these elements are necessary, they rarely influence the overall spatial experience of learning environments. As a result, accessibility is frequently implemented as an add-on rather than a generative design strategy.
This thesis explores how accessibility can instead become a spatial framework for organizing elementary school architecture. Rather than separating “regular” classrooms from specialized sensory rooms, the project proposes three primary classroom environments that respond to different sensory and bodily experiences: movement and tactile exploration, acoustic navigation, and light variations. Each classroom type creates a distinct atmosphere that supports different ways of learning, such as active exploration, focused listening, and reflective reading.
Around these classrooms, smaller learning areas and shared spaces are loosely arranged without rigid boundaries, forming a continuous learning landscape. In this way, accessibility is not treated as a specialized accommodation but as a spatial strategy that shapes how all students move, perceive, and participate within the school environment.
Plugged City Infrastructure for a Post-Carbon World
Cory Hoffmann
My thesis explores repurposing obsolescent building types as energy infrastructure, specifically urban vacant offices and rural aging gas stations. These sites were chosen for their liminality ; spaces occupying transitional conditions produced by smoothing and standardization. These sites represent remnants of past economic systems, which were once centralized in our society but become increasingly underutilized in a changing energy and labor landscape. Rather than viewing them as obsolete, waiting for their turn to be demolished, this project imagines them as important infrastructures once again, capable of supporting new energy generation, social interaction and circular open loops of energy.
Set in the year 2065, this speculative project assumes a world in which gasoline has become obsolete due to widespread renewable energy adoption and electrification. As a result, rural gas stations have gone obsolete and are repurposed as community nodes powered by vast solar and wind farms. They maintain their historic role as a place of exchange, but instead of fueling gas tanks they charge batteries and social relations.
In the city, the widespread shift towards decentralized work and automation has left most office buildings vacant. Obsolete in terms of their original function, these spaces are converted energy generators powered by human motion, transferring personal energy into electricity. Human kinetic energy –from lifting weights to stationary bikes to floor plates that convert steps into watts of electricity – turn humans from consumers to generators of power within a new urban energy network.
In both locations, these nodes become places of charging, gathering, repairing and sharing resources. Rather than erasing the liminal leftovers of past economies, we can shape them for the future of energy and community.
Amphibious Adaptation
Flood-Responsive Coastal
Architecture
Sujeong Koo
This project explores how infrastructure and architecture can coexist within coastal territories under conditions of environmental uncertainty. Infrastructure is understood not only as large-scale technical systems that manage water, energy, and circulation, but as a distributed spatial network embedded within everyday life. Architecture, in this context, is not treated as an isolated object, but as an active mediator that organizes space, material, and social relationships.
The project analyzes coastal environments through three key parameters: flood hazard, population density, and vulnerability, revealing how environmental risk and social inequality overlap to produce differentiated spatial conditions. In these contexts, conventional infrastructure—often centralized and designed for control—struggles to respond to continuous and extreme environmental pressures, while architecture remains largely disconnected from these systems. The necessity for coexistence emerges from this condition. Flooding is no longer an exceptional event, but an ongoing environmental state that must be accommodated rather than resisted. This requires a shift from isolated systems toward distributed and spatially integrated approaches.
The central thesis of the project is that architecture can operate as an infrastructural agent. By integrating systems of water storage, filtration, and controlled release, architecture engages both engineering performance and social adaptation. At the same time, architectural interventions support this system by providing spaces for collective use and everyday life. The proposal introduces floodable ground floors that remain publicly accessible during normal conditions, and transform to accommodate water during flooding. Floating and amphibious platforms enable continuity of circulation and habitation under changing water levels, while vertical cores organize water, energy, and movement.
In addition, the project incorporates community spaces that support gathering, resource sharing, and social resilience. These architectural elements do not merely host infrastructure but actively shape how it is experienced, accessed, and maintained. Ultimately, architecture is redefined as part of a larger infrastructural system that manages water while sustaining collective life in coastal environments.
After Obsolescence Toward a Metabolic Urban Field
Ravi Kumar
New York is a city increasingly defined by spatial obsolescence. While demands shift and economies fluctuate, its architectural framework struggles to adapt. Widespread vacancy and declining asset value reveal a growing misalignment between the permanence of architecture and the dynamism of the systems it strives to serve. Nevertheless, the structural bones of these buildings are remarkably persistent and durable. After Obsolescence speculates on the spatial consequences of this condition. Rather than altering buildings through the narrow lens of adaptive reuse, this thesis proposes a more radical transformation through strategic additive and subtractive processes.
This thesis identifies an unrealized opportunity: to leverage obsolescence not as a terminal state, but as a condition through which the city can be reorganized. Office towers that define Midtown Manhattan are reflective of dated zoning regimes and economic logics that once mediated the relationship between interior and exterior space. These buildings persist structurally, while the conditions that produced them have eroded. The work proposes a continuous urban armature, utilizing the durable systems that remain while activating new potentials. It operates within the voids of zoning-defined formalism, occupying roof planes, setback zones, and residual spaces. Elevated circulation paths and thermally moderated enclosures establish new modes of occupation that extend beyond the conventional limits of weatherization, producing a gradient of environmental conditions and reframing the built environment as a continuous field rather than a collection of disparate objects.
As buildings are dismantled and reconfigured, their material and structural systems are recirculated into a metabolic field of function and occupation. This field operates as a self-regulating framework capable of adaptation, redistribution, and growth. Architecture is no longer defined by static form, but by its capacity to evolve. Manhattan persists not through renewal or replacement, but through the continual reorganization of structures, systems, and spaces unseen within conventions of urban development.
InVelope
Kallista Sayer
This thesis rethinks the building envelope as something elastic and active. In adaptive reuse, the envelope is usually assumed to be a fixed outer limit of what can change, but what if it could be reimagined as a gradient instead of a boundary? Drawing on ideas of porosity and topology, the project explores how folding surfaces and layered systems can turn the edge of a building into a thickened zone of exchange, shaped by environmental forces rather than static rules of form.
The proposal introduces a weatherproofing layer that wraps both around and through the building, creating a range of spaces that shift from fully protected to more directly exposed to the outside climate. Rather than a single hard boundary between inside and out, the building becomes a series of in-between conditions. This gradient is not just a technical strategy, it shapes how people move through and experience the space.
Webster Elementary School, built in 1921 in Pontiac, Michigan, serves as the site for this experiment. Like most buildings of its era, Webster was designed around symmetry and the even distribution of space. Its only real relationship to its environment is its orientation, which faces nearly due south. It does not respond to climate in any meaningful way. The intervention keeps the existing building intact, preserving its history and character, while layering new elements on top of and around it. Glass and metal meet historic brick, making the combination of old and new clearly visible. The result is a building that holds onto its past while adapting to the environmental demands of the future. This thesis ultimately argues that the envelope should be thought of as a gradient rather than a line. It is a tool for connecting a building to its climate, not just closing it off from it.
Housing as Active Form
Charlie Tokowitz
Contemporary affordable housing is largely produced through developerled delivery models and pro forma financial logics that prioritize efficiency, predictability, and standardized building types. While these systems produce efficient housing units, they often limit the range of dwelling practices, social relationships, and spatial possibilities that housing can support. Forms of collective life, informal maintenance, environmental adaptation, and shared spatial use often remain outside the frameworks through which housing is designed and built.
This thesis reframes housing not as a fixed typology or technical problem but as a relational medium in which social, material, and institutional forces interact to shape how dwelling emerges. Drawing on actor-network theory, cultural techniques, and the political dimensions of aesthetics, the project examines how architecture participates in negotiating these forces. Precedent studies, including housing projects as well as experimental civic and infrastructural interventions, expand the investigation beyond residential typologies to identify transferable spatial and organizational techniques.
To compare these projects, the research develops a series of relational field grids in which each precedent is positioned according to attributes such as agency, temporality, materiality, spatial organization, affect, and disciplinary alignment. Plotting the precedents across these fields reveals recurring patterns, tensions, and techniques through which different dwelling conditions are produced. From this process, the thesis identifies architectural parts such as thresholds, structural frameworks, incremental growth logics, and collective infrastructures that can redistribute relationships among residents, materials, institutions, and environments.
The thesis culminates in a prototype housing proposal for a block in Detroit’s Core City neighborhood. The project translates techniques derived from the precedent mappings into architectural parts that respond to specific spatial, social, and material conditions of the site, testing how targeted interventions can reorganize relationships within the housing medium and support more adaptable and collectively produced forms of dwelling.
Crafting Repair
Claire Walker
This thesis rethinks home repair through craft, defined here as the innate human capacity to build and make, which all have the ability to perform. Drawing inspiration from communal crafting practices, specifically quilting circles, led to a textile based architecture that explores building skins made from flexible sheet goods. By adapting techniques from collective craft traditions, this thesis simplifies the construction process and makes building knowledge more accessible.
Working between scaled physical models, digital 2D line drawings, and photogrammetry, the project develops a material log that documents the performance and assembly of various sheet materials. Through a series of material studies, these skins form the basis of a material database that informs the design of both interior and exterior building layers.
Interior skins prioritize comfort, while exterior skins prioritize protection. Once developed, these building skins are translated into a step-by-step instruction manual intended to make construction processes more accessible and understandable. The manual provides guidance for installing these skins onto existing homes, allowing individuals to craft and take on repairs independently.
Sheet based materials such as foam, EPDM, cork, Tyvek are layered onto the existing structure of a house. Detailed wall sections accompany the instruction manuals, illustrating each crafted building skin.
By approaching wall assembly as a craft practice, this thesis rethinks home repair to simplify construction. In doing so, it proposes an alternative to reliance on professional construction trades, which are often costly and difficult to access, providing individuals with the knowledge and tools needed to repair their own homes and making craft feel accessible to all.
Slab City On Megastructure Reuse
Chun Wang
The volatility of real estate–driven development frequently results in financially stalled projects, leaving megastructures unfinished and converting significant material and economic investment into urban waste. Conventional urban renewal strategies prioritize demolition; however, dismantling megastructures is both economically burdensome and environmentally wasteful. This thesis proposes a post-demolition urban renewal that reclaims existing structure as a framework for revitalization.
Huaxiang Park in Shenyang, Liaoning Province is a 116,000-square-meter site originally envisioned as the world’s largest indoor amusement park. Following the project’s abandonment, the site is now dominated by an immense reinforced-concrete column–beam framework and expansive steel truss sheds that stand as monolithic interruptions within the surrounding urban fabric. Rather than treating this unfinished megastructure as demolition waste, this research develops a design methodology for its adaptive reuse, transforming the cavernous interior and industrial skeleton into a multi-layer, mixed-use environment that integrates public life, ecological systems, and everyday urban activity. Through strategic carving of the existing mass and the insertion of diverse programmatic elements, the project reconfigures the structural frame into a dense, self-sustaining neighborhood integrating residential, commercial, educational, service, and green spaces.
Ultimately, this thesis reframes unfinished megastructures as active urban platforms, unlocking their potential to host a vertically layered neighborhood. Interwoven with multi-level passageways and cycling networks, the project cultivates a dense mix of programs that blur boundaries between living, movement, and public life.
Water, Pipes, and Place Infrastructure as Civic Architecture
Jiaxin Wu
Urban flooding has become an increasing challenge in Guangzhou, where intense monsoon rainfall and rapid urbanization place pressure on the city’s drainage infrastructure. Large underground pipe networks manage most stormwater flows, yet these systems remain largely invisible to the public. As a result, water infrastructure is often understood only as technical engineering rather than as a spatial and civic system embedded within the city.
This thesis explores how architecture can operate as an infrastructural node within the urban water network. The project proposes a public building that integrates stormwater storage with civic space, allowing architecture to participate directly in the management of urban flooding. Rather than simply directing water into underground pipes, the design introduces a sequence of stepped spaces—including a plaza, a water observation terrace, and a lower fountain basin—that temporarily store and regulate stormwater on site.
Adjustable hydraulic walls control water levels between these spaces, enabling the system to respond to varying rainfall conditions. As water gradually moves through the stepped landscape, measurement walls with marked scales allow visitors to observe changing water levels over time. At the lowest level, exposed pipes and fountain basins reveal the circulation and storage of water within the infrastructure itself.
By integrating public space with stormwater management, the project demonstrates how architectural nodes can contribute to the larger urban water system. In doing so, infrastructure becomes visible, accessible, and experiential, transforming water management from a hidden technical process into an active part of urban life.
Bidirectional System Support
Reimagining Shenzhen’s Urban Villages
Bidirectional System Support: Reimagining Shenzhen’s Urban Villages
Junxian Yu
Junxian Yu
With the continuous expansion of Chinese cities, the urban villages that once provided housing for migrant workers, along with the distinctive lifestyle they embody, are gradually being neglected and marginalized. This thesis investigates the urban villages of Shenzhen as integral yet often overlooked components of the contemporary metropolitan system. Despite being widely characterized as dense, chaotic, and temporary environments, urban villages operate as highly adaptive urban systems that provide affordable housing, support small-scale economies, and accommodate the rapidly shifting population of the city. This thesis considers urban villages as integral parts of the city, acknowledging their self-sufficient nature, and proposing an architecture to support and enhance their internally organized characteristics.
With the continuous expansion of Chinese cities, the urban villages that once provided housing for migrant workers, along with the distinctive lifestyle they embody, are gradually being neglected and marginalized. This thesis investigates the urban villages of Shenzhen as integral yet often overlooked components of the contemporary metropolitan system. Despite being widely characterized as dense, chaotic, and temporary environments, urban villages operate as highly adaptive urban systems that provide affordable housing, support small-scale economies, and accommodate the rapidly shifting population of the city. This thesis considers urban villages as integral parts of the city, acknowledging their self-sufficient nature, and proposing an architecture to support and enhance their internally organized characteristics.
The project seeks to better integrate the urban villages of Shenzen into the surrounding city. Utilizing a combination of top-down and bottom-up design strategies, the aim is to improve disordered living conditions while enhancing aspects that make urban villages distinctive. While preserving the existing building framework, the right to modify spaces is ensured through methods such as providing self-built modular housing, with an emphasis on the utilization and efficiency of space.
The design outcome proposes a clustered architectural complex that consolidates residential, commercial, and community programs into an integrated system. Rather than replacing the existing urban structure, the project introduces a flexible framework that improves living conditions, circulation, and public space while maintaining the density and mixed-use character that define urban village life. Through this approach, architecture acts as a mediating layer between informal urban processes and formal urban development.
The project seeks to better integrate the urban villages of Shenzen into the surrounding city. Utilizing a combination of top-down and bottom-up design strategies, the aim is to improve disordered living conditions while enhancing aspects that make urban villages distinctive. While preserving the existing building framework, the right to modify spaces is ensured through methods such as providing self-built modular housing, with an emphasis on the utilization and efficiency of space.
The design outcome proposes a clustered architectural complex that consolidates residential, commercial, and community programs into an integrated system. Rather than replacing the existing urban structure, the project introduces a flexible framework that improves living conditions, circulation, and public space while maintaining the density and mixed-use character that define urban village life. Through this approach, architecture acts as a mediating layer between informal urban processes and formal urban development.
Architecture School*
Instructor: Sharon Haar
Architectural education as we know it today began to take shape in the late18th century with the Enlightenment’s codification of societal power relations. Models of architectural practice at that time expected that the architect would know and respond to a social contract reflecting the relationship between authority and society within clearly defined boundaries. The schools of architecture that began to form in the US and elsewhere in the middle of the 19th century were designed to support these expectations and boundaries. As the profession emerged, these boundaries were codified to legally control the title “architect.” From a regulatory perspective, they also shrank to define architecture’s expertise as the protection of “health, safety, and welfare,” a constriction on the contents of the discipline. In truth, these boundaries are shift-shaping, porous, and in constant conversation with myriad externalities. In this critical moment for our field, Architecture School* offers an opportunity to envision a project of designed scenarios, relationships, and spaces for an education both for this time of rapid environmental, technical, social, political, and economic upheaval, and a proposition that speculates on a yet unknown future. In understanding the thesis as a proposition built upon the construction of an argument (as opposed to a speculation), we are reminded that an argument requires a defense and, therefore, the need to construct a foundation built on disciplinary knowledge. What better place to defend our discipline than in an architecture school.
*Architecture School is here broadly construed as a curriculum, pedagogy, and environment for the study of the territories, urbanisms, landscapes, and structures of the built environment. It may not be designed as an institution of higher education, nor must it be designed as a NAAB accredited professional degree program.
Towards Architectural Intelligence
Angelica Facey
Towards Architectural Intelligence investigates the intersection of Architecture and Artificial Intelligence (AI) through a multidisciplinary, hybrid architecture curriculum. This postgraduate education welcomes architecture and computer science students to explore the parallel theories, language, and practice of both disciplines simultaneously. Throughout the curriculum, students will oscillate between disciplines and synthesize new design methodologies with AI, gradually shaping a new archetype for the architect.
For decades, AI has been part of architectural discourse. However, advanced multimodal AI models are changing our modes of design thinking and representation because of their ability to generate and interpret images. As a result, the architectural discipline and curriculum are retrofitting (yet again) their pedagogical approach due to current technological advancements. This thesis explores a design methodology that highlights the operative qualities of an architectural pattern language and leverages Generative AI’s imageprocessing capabilities when designing a college campus master plan.
The methodology focuses on interacting with current proprietary multimodal models through a series of inquiries, asking what architectural patterns they “see” when given a site plan drawn by designers. Subsequently, the patterns are collated and cataloged into a pattern library. These patterns are then utilized to representationally translate spatial qualities and computationally build novel design tools. The methodology demonstrates pattern language as both an architectural and computational affordance. The usage of patterns builds out the architectural and spatial logic of a campus. Concurrently, the patterns yield themselves as a computational “scaffold” when designing the AI model’s architecture. Ultimately, the patterns synthesize an intuitive visual and verbal language, rendering the site plan from a representation into an operational image of a campus.
Materializing the proposed curriculum suggests how architecture schools can adapt AI models within their design process and encourage future architects to shape a digitally evolving landscape towards architectural intelligence.
Detroit Center for Architecture and Repair (D/CAR)
Jack Smith
The Detroit Center for Architecture and Repair (D/CAR) argues that architectural education must shift away from novelty as its primary output and toward practicing building repair as a civic practice. Through the transformation of the abandoned Crockett Technical High School into an early/middle college, the existing high school campus becomes an architectural vocational school and point of shared resources for the neighborhood and AEC ecosystem Students work alongside faculty, many of whom are tradespeople, planners, community development organizers, and practitioners already active in the city. The project repositions architectural education around adaptive reuse, building repair, land regeneration, and civic stewardship. D/CAR teaches students through direct engagement with real conditions of vacancy, deferred maintenance, environmental damage, and neighborhood change while fostering a creative environment for students to explore their own interests.
The campus is embedded within Detroit’s east side Aviation sub neighborhood. D/CAR treats the existing school building, its surrounding yard, and adjacent vacant parcels as continuous sites of learning, experimentation, and investment. High school students are able to acquire college credit and experience related to the construction industry while completing their general high school requirement through classes in drafting, modeling, material salvage, building repair, landscape, and small-scale construction.
D/CAR is a revitalized anchor for the broader neighborhood. The existing school building houses focused academic, fabrication, and communal spaces while the yard provides space for outdoor education, urban agriculture initiatives, and student-built housing prototypes. The site strategy is informed by an analysis of historic and contemporary zoning of the Aviation sub neighborhood, while the expansive space of the yard is subdivided into residential-scale parcels that enables programming into a more legible and the flexible framework evolving with capacity of the school.
Three Sisters Academy
Clarence Song
Three Sisters Academy is based on animist principles, and shares many ideas with ecofeminism, queer ecologies, and post-humanist thought.
In a time of metastasizing, multilayered crises, the academy aims at recovering psycho-spiritual health, belonging-within-the-world, and addressing basic needs in a local condition, that of Highland Park, Michigan.
-The school is an architectural one, emerging locally as an endogenous social project. Students and teachers are drawn from the area, or move, invest in, and live there.
-Classes are largely analog, aiming at the education of a scholar, artist, artisan, activist, and above all, a human that is a member of the neighborhood, city, and planet. Coursework preserves core classes but without the aid of digital tools where possible, familiarizing students with more relational tools and modes of production that enhance mental and physical health, instead of corroding it.
-Studio is based on the design build model, where all members participate in the ongoing design and construction of the school, community spaces, and homes.
-The arts, especially community focused and relationally critical ones like theater, dance and public art, are centered.
-Activism, advocacy, and organization are intrinsic to the project.
-Campus is designed to connect with neighbors, surrounding communities and institutions, and to serve the area’s most vulnerable constituents. Students and teachers live, work, dine, and maintain the school’s facilities, while constantly working to make them accessible, respondent, and safe. Dancing, cooking, and cleaning and gardening are required and collectivized activities that ground the school in the business of life and reproduction, those devalued, class and gender-coded tasks that are the very ground from which architecture emerges.
-Neighborhood residents are always already consulted as they themselves comprise the staff of artists, thinkers and tradespersons, as well as the students, elder advisors, the incarcerated and the unhoused.
School of Situated Architecture
Tamer Tubishat
The School of Situated Architecture investigates how architectural education can be reoriented around the process of learning rather than the production of final design objects. While traditional architecture schools often evaluate students primarily through completed projects, this model overlooks the collaborative, iterative, and reflective practices through which architectural knowledge is developed. The project proposes a new architecture school that foregrounds process as the central pedagogical framework, emphasizing how students research, negotiate ideas, learn from one another, and engage with real contexts throughout their education.
The proposed school is conceived as a spatial environment where learning activities—making, inquiry, reflection, and dialogue—are visibly interconnected. At the heart of the project is a collective making hall where experimentation, prototyping, and collaborative work occur. Surrounded by this field is a porous core of reflection and archive that continuously displays and records the evolving processes of students and faculty. Rather than serving as a static library, this active archive becomes a living memory of the school, allowing past work to inform ongoing projects and future investigations.
The school is located in Jordan and engages directly with local communities through collaborative projects, reviews, and shared workshops. At the same time, digital platforms support connections with global collaborators, enabling the school to operate as a locally grounded yet internationally connected node of architectural exchange. Environmental strategies draw from regional building traditions, including thick stone mass for thermal stability, courtyard systems for microclimate regulation, and tensile shading structures inspired by Bedouin tents.
By aligning pedagogy, spatial organization, and environmental design, the thesis proposes an architecture school that treats the process of learning as architecture itself, cultivating a culture where experimentation, collaboration, and collective reflection become the primary tools through which architectural knowledge is produced.
RECLAIM.ARCH
Abriana Wilson
Architectural pedagogies taught in institutions today are direct extensions of 18th-century Western methodologies and principles. While we understand architecture to be a universal practice extending across the globe, pedagogies brought to the United States (and later to developing countries) all stem from European models of how the built environment should manifest. Principles from historic European institutions such as the École des Beaux Arts defined a gold standard for architectural education, changing architecture from a coveted craft to a learned profession.
In the 21st century, underrepresented communities have recognized the lack of impact their histories and ideas have had in the creation of the design professions, bringing to light cracks in the current institutional framework. How can we upset the westernized colonial landscape of architectural education? What does it look like when we take charge of an education that did not envision us (people of color, women, etc.) during its creation?
RECLAIM.ARCH decentralizes the colonial roots of current architectural pedagogies by bringing in the history and acknowledgement of indigenous and local practices. This school aims to highlight underrepresented communities’ relationship with architecture before institutionalized learning. Located in West Oakland, California, RECLAIM.ARCH recognizes how social issues and design discussions impact the spaces we live in through direct collaboration with the West Oakland community.
RECLAIM.ARCH acts as an architectural informational hub for West Oakland residents by connecting them with existing small businesses and community organizations. The site is organized for modularity to provide flexibility and the potential for expanding the program for community needs. At RECLAIM. ARCH we recognize that to build for the community, you need the active engagement of all residents.
THE JOURNEY
Yuzhe Yang
This project does not aim to design a better architecture school in the conventional sense. Instead, it asks a more fundamental question: whether the architecture school, as a separate and enclosed professional institution, should eventually disappear. Contemporary architectural education remains concentrated within a limited number of universities and professional systems, where knowledge is treated as the property of specialists. In response, this project redefines the architect not as the author of the city, but as its shadow—someone who enters reality, reads it, organizes it, and withdraws when necessary.
Rather than proposing a singular campus, the project constructs an educational network capable of splitting, growing, and redistributing itself beyond any fixed form. It operates not as a centralized institution, but as a distributed system in which headquarters, main campus, and satellite campuses function only as temporary nodes. What persists is the continuous circulation of knowledge.
This system is grounded in real social structures. It begins with vocational students and local residents as its primary carriers, accepts governmental frameworks as operative conditions, and situates itself within infrastructural and neighborhood contexts such as the railway station and the urban block. Temporally, it is organized through an eight-year alternation between school and professional practice. Spatially, it draws from the distributed logic of the Suzhou courtyard and garden. Its growth unfolds through stages of epiphany, cooperation, and transmission.
Ultimately, the project reframes architectural education from an institutional problem into a cultural process. Architecture is no longer tied to a specific school or professional system, but exists through continuous transmission within society. It is learned, reinterpreted, and shared through everyday practices, gradually becoming a form of cultural capacity embedded in public life rather than a discipline reserved for specialists.
Orders of Magnitude A Research Thesis in Architecture
Instructor: Irene Hwang
For the 2025-2026 Graduate Architecture Thesis sequence at Taubman College, Orders of Magnitude posits a framework where architecture serves as the principal provoking agent of significant change or action.
The inspiration for Orders of Magnitude is drawn from understanding architecture’s power to direct and influence change in our world. In many places around the globe, architecture arguably sits sidelined at the periphery of society. In this position, architecture is often dismissed as a luxury good or service, rendered unavailable to most and accessible only to a very elite and privileged few. Architecture functions as a placeholder, merely adjacent to the levers of real power, a byproduct of influence rather than a source of it.
Orders of Magnitude challenges this existing power dynamic head on in order to subvert and invert the status quo. This year-long research and design endeavor gave students the following charge: To cultivate and share their vision for how to powerfully influence and affect change through architecture.
Twelve visions emerged from an expansive range of inspirations. Be it a big idea, a worrying concern, a small detail, or a beautiful muse, architecture inhabits a multitude of physical, psychological, emotional, technical, aesthetic, geographic, religious, political, and economic conditions. Orders of Magnitude is where each student has created an authored conception of architecture serving as a powerful agent to change, to shift, to inspire, to impact.
The overarching goal for each project is to not only be interesting and intelligent, but also to have the body of work develop and deliver an order of magnitude larger than itself.
Between Here and Hue An Exploration Of Light, Color, and Material Shaping Experience
Alexandra Acosta
Often understood only as spaces of circulation, hallways are typically designed with minimal consideration beyond efficiency. This project challenges that assumption by asking how these transitional spaces might instead become moments of emotional engagement. Through the use of color, light, transparent scrims, and reflective materials, the thesis investigates how architectural elements can transform a simple passage into a space that evokes feelings of calm, joy, peace, or even motivation.
Architecture has the ability to influence how we feel within a space. Window placement, the intensity and color of light, and the textures or reflectivity of materials all shape our perception and emotional response. While architecture performs many roles, one of its most powerful capacities is the ability to affect human experience. Introducing playful and atmospheric interventions within these short transitional moments displays how architecture can shift emotions as we move from one space to another.
Early in my architectural education, I became drawn to the relationship between light, reflection, and color. Those early ideas shaped the way I think about space, and this thesis continues that exploration by testing how these elements can produce powerful spatial experiences.
The concept of Orders of Magnitude appears in the relationship between small architectural interventions and their larger experiential impact. Minor adjustments in light intensity, color gradients, or reflective surfaces can significantly alter how a corridor is perceived and remembered.
The final body of work takes the form of both an installation and a series of imagined hallway typologies. The installation recreates a small part of a corridor using scrim, color, light, and reflection to allow viewers to physically experience these shifts. Complementing this are rendered studies that explore emotional conditions across residential and workplace environments. By taking out human figures from these images, the spaces allow for viewers to imagine themselves within them.
Spatial Overtime
Designing Experiences After the Clock Runs Out
Ainsley Capps
The principal impact of my body of work is to extend and amplify the life of sporting events through architectural interventions. While the emotions generated by sports, intense anticipation, and shared joy are often capped at the final whistle, my research explores how the built environment can sustain these fleeting moments. By transforming stadium environments from purely event-based venues into spaces of ongoing engagement, I aim to foster lasting connections between individuals and communities, ensuring that the collective energy of a game persists long after the clocks run out.
This fascination began at a young age. I looked forward to the Olympics, when my family and I would gather around the TV, sharing excitement and emotion throughout the games. Those games sparked a sense of connection that resonated well beyond the closing ceremony, a phenomenon I later recognized in sports at every level. Regardless of scale, sports uniquely unite people from diverse backgrounds through a shared emotional currency. However, because this intensity is typically confined to a screen or a stadium, it remains temporary. My work intervenes at this junction, utilizing architecture to capture and preserve the memory, anticipation, and joy that sports provide.
To achieve this, my research operates across three distinct “Orders of Magnitude” that bridge the gap between the spectacle and the city. By examining the urban scale in cities like Barcelona, Detroit, and Oaxaca, the event scale of global and local competitions, and the architectural scale of intimate fan experiences, I create a framework for interventions that fundamentally reshape the community landscape. These spaces transition from exclusive, high-cost venues into inclusive public assets that prioritize accessibility and social equity. By embedding sports architecture into the daily fabric of the environment, I provide people with a permanent site for connection and collective memory. This approach ensures that the elongated excitement of the game becomes a catalyst for year-round community engagement, transforming the neighborhood into a living archive of shared triumph and a perpetual source of civic pride.
Engineered Blindness
The Chicago River as a Managed System of Pollution, Displacement, and Unequal Urban Metabolism
Hui-Cheng Chung
At first glance, the Chicago River today feels renewed. The water appears cleaner, wildlife has returned, and the riverwalk has become one of the city’s most vibrant public spaces. Yet this visible transformation raises a quieter question: what if pollution never truly disappeared, but simply became invisible? For over a century, contamination has been managed through hidden infrastructures—pipes, filtration systems, and drainage networks that redirect and disperse pollutants out of sight. The principal impact of this work is to reveal these concealed processes and translate them into spatial experiences that reconnect environmental systems with public perception.
The project unfolds along the river as a sequence of four nodes, tracing pollution from upstream ecological stress to downstream regeneration. Each moment reveals a distinct relationship between the city and its water: subtle biological changes in upstream habitats, the metabolic flows of urban life in the city center, the sedimented memory of industrial production, and finally the possibility of ecological recovery. Through this progression, the river becomes more than a physical landscape; it becomes an environmental archive that records layered interactions between infrastructure, industry, and ecology.
This research is meaningful because it explores the distance between environmental reality and public awareness. Cities often address ecological crises through technical solutions that operate out of view. The historic reversal of the Chicago River in 1900 exemplifies this—a remarkable engineering intervention that protected Lake Michigan while redirecting pollution elsewhere. Over time, these systems have made contamination less visible, and therefore less tangible.
The concept of Orders of Magnitude emerges through the connection of scales. Microscopic microalgae respond to pollutants at the biological level, while architectural spaces amplify these reactions, making environmental change legible to the public. Organized as a river journey, the final format follows the movement of water itself, allowing ecological processes to unfold as a narrative that links awareness, infrastructure, and regeneration.
Framing Time Rethinking Heritage as Method
Basma Elsheikh
This thesis examines the mashrabiya, a traditional wooden lattice screen in historic Egyptian Islamic architecture, as a complex architectural system rather than a decorative element. The research focuses on small crafted components that contain centuries of environmental knowledge, social practices, and material intelligence, exploring the mashrabiya as a device that connects craft, climateresponsive design, and cultural identity within historic urban environments.
Instead of approaching preservation through restoration alone, the study adopts an archival and investigative method through field documentation, photography, interviews with craftsmen, and the collection of archival material. The aim is to preserve not only the architectural object, but also the techniques and spatial logic embedded in its making, whose knowledge is increasingly threatened by modernization and industrial production.
A central position of this work is the rejection of the idea that tradition belongs only to the past. Traditional architecture is often treated as a relic to be preserved nostalgically rather than understood as an active system of knowledge. This thesis avoids attaching nostalgia to the mashrabiya and instead studies it as a working device whose environmental, social, and material logic remains relevant today, showing that many contemporary design problems were already solved through craft, climate awareness, and accumulated local knowledge.
The concept of Orders of Magnitude structures the mashrabiya across scales from spindle, to lattice, to façade, to city. Beyond form, it demonstrates that preserving craft and climate-responsive design can influence Egypt’s economy, urban identity, and architectural practice, inspiring future architects to value tested, traditional solutions. Personally, the project is an act of reclaiming authorship over my own heritage as an Egyptian designer, with the intention of regenerating cultural pride, craftsmanship, and economic value within my own country.
The final exhibition format extends the archival method, allowing fragments, drawings, and constructed elements to be experienced physically, transforming the research into a shared and accessible architectural archive.
Re-Con-Struc-Tiv-Ism
Jason Loeb
Jewish life in pre-World War II Europe was not hidden, but embedded within the everyday fabric of the city, particularly during the Weimar Republic. In Western and Central German spa towns such as Bad Nauheim, Bad Kissingen, and Baden-Baden, Jewish-owned hotels operated as active participants in civic and social life, fostering spaces of openness, visibility, and cultural exchange. My family’s hotel in Bad Nauheim, owned by my great-great-grandfather Jonas Löb, serves as a point of entry into this history, grounding the project in both personal and spatial context. In these settings, architecture expanded, enabling integration within the broader urban fabric.
As persecution intensified under Nazism, this condition was systematically dismantled. Spaces that once supported openness were forced to contract as they came under Nazi control, transforming from sites of stability into improvised spaces of refuge. Jewish communities adapted existing buildings and rural landscapes into environments of survival, navigating conditions of fear, displacement, and concealment. Case studies, including the Anne Frank House, Miła 18 in Warsaw, and rural barn lofts across Ukraine, demonstrate how architecture became layered, compressed, and restricted, marking a rapid shift from visibility to concealment.
Re-Con-Struc-Tiv-Ism is a three-part spatial analysis of Jewish refuge before, during, and after the Holocaust. The thesis examines how architecture expands in moments of safety and contracts under conditions of threat, identifying spatial patterns across these transformations. These patterns reemerge in Germany in the context of the contemporary Ukrainian refugee crisis, where the country once again becomes a site of refuge. The project culminates in a housing proposal within Berlin’s dense urban fabric, where displaced populations and existing communities coexist, proposing how architecture can negotiate visibility, integration, and protection in the present.
Cellular Urbanism Adaptive Zoning for Metro Manila
Nicholas Londono
The world knows the Philippines for its pristine beaches and the proud, warm hospitality of its people. But its capital, Manila, tells a vastly different story. Shaped by centuries of colonial occupation and fragmented growth, its urban form has evolved into one of the most decentralized, chaotic places on earth. Burdened by some of the worst traffic and pollution in Southeast Asia, the city’s current gridlock lays bare the overwhelming complexity of its deeply layered history.
One thing that remains constant is the remnants of the barangays. Building on this foundation, this body of work reimagines Metro Manila as a living organism where these autonomous, self-organizing neighborhoods dictate growth to reshape the city’s shifting landscape. Championing the barangay as the primary engine of this development empowers a decentralized urbanism driven by the people who build it. Which leads to an adaptive regulatory framework that supports high-density growth, and preserves the unique character and organic grit of every local community.
The research proposes a zoning framework that recognizes the cellular organization of Manila and uses it as the foundation for a more adaptive regulatory system. Four case studies test the framework in different conditions across the city, including riverfront districts, coastal landscapes, dense barangay neighborhoods, and transit hubs. By linking zoning incentives to public and environmental performance, the thesis demonstrates how incremental changes within individual communities can collectively produce large-scale improvements to the urban environment. The goal is to shift zoning from a static regulatory tool toward a flexible system capable of supporting the evolving social and spatial complexity of Manila.
Here, Again A Palimpsest of Memory and the Power of Recovery
Anna W. Peterson
Palimpsest : A surface written, erased, and written again—where traces remain, revealing layers apparent beneath the surface.
Landscapes, cities, and buildings are continually altered, demolished, and rebuilt, layering the past within the present. Few histories remain visible, while others are erased or buried, waiting to be rediscovered. Architecture is more than form, but a record shaped by preservation and erasure, revealing what society chooses to remember and what it allows to disappear.
Traditional preservation relies on two-dimensional drawings, capturing form, but rarely the lived human experiences embedded within space. Yet memory often resides in quieter elements, stories carried through generations, overlooked histories lying beneath the surface, and the emotional weight of places that outlive those who once inhabited them. When these layers surface, architecture reveals itself as a vessel for memory and history across personal, cultural, and urban scales.
In Upper Arlington, Ohio, the demolition of my former high school revealed human remains from a nineteenth-century cemetery founded by Pleasant Litchford, a formerly enslaved man, a history once intentionally overlooked, now brought to light. In Detroit, Michigan, my late grandmother’s childhood home still stands, holding fragments of a life she rarely spoke about. The architecture preserves stories beyond words, a palimpsest of inherited memory, intimate and resilient.
Together, these sites show architecture as a vessel of erasure and recovery, where individual and collective histories collide. By uncovering what has been hidden or forgotten, this work explores the power of recovery: how architecture can make the absent felt, reanimate human presence, and transform remembering into an act of justice.
In Translation From Linguistics to Architecture
Steven Powers
What happens when architecture is read as language? How might this begin to change the way we design the world around us? Language simply does not describe the world we live in, but it structures it. The words we use when we speak frame how we see, interpret, and imagine the world. Architecture begins not with construction but with speech. Before spaces are drawn or built, they are named, described, and understood. Through vocabulary, cultural meaning, and the ways we describe space, language begins to construct the script through which the built environment is perceived and formed.
Through the exploration of semiotics, language, and architectural design. It argues that the built world can be understood as a grammar through which daily life is organized. If architecture operates like language, then walls, thresholds, and objects act as elements within a larger syntax. To rethink design, therefore, is also to rethink how language shapes the meanings we assign to space. It is important to draw wisdom from many different places; when knowledge is taken from only one source, it risks becoming rigid and stale. Understanding different languages, cultures, and viewpoints allows designers to engage with the world in a more empathetic and sensitive way.
During my childhood, I was surrounded by learned several languages in my family. This experience showed me how different cultures describe the same things, relationships, and environments. Small changes in vocabulary or phrasing lead to different meanings in other languages. These experiences with different perspectives became a way of noticing how each language shapes how spaces are perceived, remembered, and constructed.
Seeing architecture in this way starts to operate across many scales of meaning. A word, an object, a room, or an entire landscape can all participate in the same system of interpretation. These layered relationships reveal a continuous engagement through which language, culture, and spatial form influence one another. The spaces we build are not only physical constructions but part of a broader field of shared understanding through words.
Right: Field of language that uses words to layer into a form of design
Assembly as Agency Collective Making in Little Village
Edward Rapa
Set in the Little Village Neighborhood of Chicago, this thesis explores how architects can provide designed tools for community use that improve upon existing community interventions.
The neighborhood is home primarily to Mexican Americans and other immigrant communities, and their resilience informs a “kit of parts” approach rooted in adaptability and collective agency. The project asks: how can architects better enable community members to shape their built environment from the bottom up by themselves and for themselves? The scope of the project has expanded from just a kit of temporary infrastructures to provide physical support to the web of ongoing caretaking practices that currently exist informally in the neighborhood. The proposed kit does not aim to replace these more informal spaces but to provide community-led, designed interventions that enhance their comfort, functionality, and experience.
Derived from studying the spaces that these practices occupy, the provided kit of parts attempts not to replace these shared spaces, but to provide community-led designed interventions to make the experience even better. Referencing the framework of Orders of Magnitude, the kit of parts provides three levels of assembly requiring: one, more (2-5), and many (6-10) individuals to construct, with an additional three scales of experience: individual, vehicle, and group, in which the built kit of parts can be approached.
The thesis is developed through visual narratives as a method for testing how residents might adapt components to everyday needs and shifting conditions. Many interventions intentionally engage “in-between” or contested urban zones such as sidewalks, parking spaces, and vacant lots. These spaces are typically municipally owned yet already informally reclaimed and repurposed by community members. Ultimately, this work argues that architects should not only envision better futures, but also actively participate in supporting communities today through tools that extend local capacity and communityagency.
Between Concealment and Display
David Rugen
Hybridization, commonly understood as the combination of architectural styles, has existed in architecture for centuries. Buildings frequently absorb influences from multiple cultural and geographic origins, creating forms whose details and spatial systems can be traced to a range of precedents. While this process of stylistic convergence is not new, its manifestations during the mid–twentieth century reveal a particularly complex relationship between architecture, politics, and cultural exchange. Examining buildings produced between the 1930s and 1960s allows these layered influences to be unraveled, revealing how architecture can embody multiple histories within a single form.
During this period, the circulation of architectural ideas, materials, and technologies intensified through colonial administration, international exhibitions, and ideological expansion. As architectural languages moved across political and cultural boundaries, they were adapted and reassembled within new contexts. The resulting buildings often appear stylistically unified, yet closer analysis reveals the coexistence of different architectural systems operating simultaneously. Elements derived from local construction traditions, climatic strategies, or craft practices frequently exist alongside imported formal languages and institutional standards. However, these systems rarely occupy equal roles within the building. Certain elements are emphasized to project authority and legitimacy, while others remain embedded within the structure to ensure its functionality within local conditions.
By dissecting these buildings through analytical drawings that separate and reveal their layered systems, this thesis exposes hybridization not as a stylistic condition but as a spatial mechanism through which power is embedded and normalized within everyday architecture. This logic can be applied not only to structures but to life as a whole, recognizing that there is more than meets the eye and that surface conditions in buildings, people, and everyday objects can tell a greater and different story the more one goes beyond the initial surface.
Pa’Lante An Atlas of Critcal Proximity
David N. Vega II
PA’LANTE! A call to keep moving forward has echoed through generations— in our homes, our protests, our music, and in everyday conversations. For Puerto Ricans across the diaspora, it has long been a language of survival and resistance. This atlas begins there—not as a book of maps, but a celebration and reflection of forward motion for the field of architecture.
The South Bronx and Puerto Rico are often mapped as distant places—one a borough of New York City, the other an island in the Caribbean—but for millions, they are part of the same geography. Families move between them. Music exchanges and evolves. Language, memory, and politics circulate and clash constantly across the distance. However, what appears disjointed on a map—1,609 miles—is deeply connected in everyday lives. This project will map these connections and the cultural intangibles that shape them; unfurling through four specific lenses: a cultural theme, a catalytic moment, a personal narrative, and the spatial consequences that ripple across scales—the body, the home, the street, the borough, the island, and ultimately the diaspora.
The atlas begins with music and rhythms as a form of community infrastructure and basis of expression. When Puerto Ricans migrated to New York, traditions did not disappear—they transformed, reappearing in vacant landscapes, salsa clubs, block parties, and apartment living rooms across the diaspora. Sound became our oral history, one that cannot be erased. Our memories became space; shaping how we inhabit, demand, and fight for it. Yet, culture alone does not shape place. Housing, land, and policy also influence, alongside the acts of resistance and subversion they provoke.
PA’LANTE! Gritty, unapologetic, and alive. A call to step into the stories embedded in streets and buildings, to listen to culture that keeps communities alive, and to learn the shared histories that never made it into textbooks.
Submerged Landscapes and Enduring Memories
Hui Zhu
This project focuses on Qiandao Lake in Zhejiang Province, China, a landscape transformed in 1959 by the Xin’an River Hydropower Station. The resulting reservoir submerged dozens of villages, farmland, bridges, and an ancient city, forcing nearly 290,000 residents to relocate. Some were resettled around the lake, while others moved to Jiangxi, Anhui, or into cities. Though the landscape changed permanently, memories and identities connected to these villages remain deeply embedded in the lives of displaced residents.
The project explores how the histories of submerged villages and displaced communities can be remembered and acknowledged today, and how design and spatial storytelling might help rebuild belonging and support emotional well-being after relocation. It aims to bring attention to Qiandao Lake and reveal the human experiences behind this large-scale displacement. The topic is personally meaningful, as some of my relatives experienced this relocation firsthand. While ordinary people had little power to influence events, this project seeks to create a space to recognize and share their memories and emotions.
The concept of Orders of Magnitude is reflected in the scale of the event: while the project focuses on individual memories and everyday objects, it also represents a larger reality affecting hundreds of thousands and reshaping an entire community network.
Presented as an exhibition, the work uses archival photographs, papercut objects, and everyday artifacts to guide visitors through three zones— landscape, memory, and future. It maps the region’s transformation, reconstructs village life, and explores communal spaces such as shared kitchens and porches to support social interaction.
While design cannot restore the past, this project shows how memory, identity, and belonging can be acknowledged, shared, and experienced again through thoughtful storytelling and curated experiences.
Iridescent Irises
Instructor: Perry Kulper
There was no specific brief. The Iridescent Irises constructed their own scope—topics, positions, approaches, working methods, techniques and deliverables. They challenged default assumptions, and augmented accepted norms. It mattered less what was worked on, and more on how intensely it was worked on. The conceptual range, quality of engagement, and density of the work is palpable. Infectious.
Architectural education must open eyes and minds to what is philosophically, conceptually, technologically, and representationally possible—yours, mine and theirs. ‘I Could Imagines’, opened trajectories for multiple thesis orientations. ‘Entourage’ established the context for their interests, and ‘Mechanics of Engagement’ staked out the roles of the variables in their thesis constructions. A ‘Studio Brief’ established the stakes, and possible trajectories for their questions. Design methods, representation techniques, possible deliverables and the leave, were in the game. Finally, the design work, hinged to an ‘Operating Manual’, and chased in the winter term, wiggled, squirmed and stood tall.
While there are overlapping areas of interest, each thesis is unique. Across the board the work demonstrated a richness of ideation, and a range of articulations. The I I’s work tickled: instrumentality and poetics; (re) envisioning the dark side of the moon; analogous relations of architecture and music; generative spatial use of Islamic theology; the value of indeterminacy; celebrating life and death cycles; autonomous and collective architectures; marginalized populations and geographies; restorative capacities of drawing; labor and migratory histories; deep crafting; vision fields; and lost histories.
The students provoked new breeds, and alternative species, considering some of the most pressing issues of our time. Finally, the students have not left the studio culture. Rather, they go into the world as agents of change, leveraging new practices, while constructing augmented forms of knowledge. And, most importantly, contributing, generously, to the discipline of architecture and to cultural imaginaries.
Physical Metaphysicalities An Architecture of Sacred Presence
Mira Abdalla
Domes, minarets, muqarnas, and arches are spatial touchstones often associated with Islamic architecture. While in a Western context Islam is frequently misrepresented or feared, contemporary Islamic spaces continue to reproduce historical forms without engaging the principles that originally generated them—reinforcing Orientalist beliefs that Islam is “stuck in the past” or “unfit for our time.”
Throughout history Muslims were known to be leaders and innovators in mathematics (al- Khwarizmi), the sciences (ibn-Hayyan), and architecture (Mimar Sinan). They drew intellectual and spiritual frameworks from their faith that enabled them to transform their disciplines. Physical Metaphysicalities revives this spirit, contemporarily, restructuring varied Islamic principles to evolve a relevant approach to sacred architecture that benefits the contemporary Western world.
In Islam, it is believed that God constantly surrounds us with endless ayahs, or signs and reminders of His divine artistry and power. These signs—including the vast cosmos, life sustaining water, fruit bearing trees, light that enables sight, and much more, serve as earthly connections to the divine, for those who reflect. In a fast-paced society filled with experiential overloads and a multitude of distractions, these signs frequently go unnoticed as we grow increasingly detached from our surroundings and our souls.
To reroute these societal tendencies, Physical Metaphysicalities establishes spatial realms of presence, establishing parameters through which architecture establishes experiences linked to slowness, awe, deeper understandings of the natural world, and remembrance of the Divine. Specific geometric systems and spatial proportions combine with the orchestration of water, light, textures, and landscape to frame encounters with the natural world to vivify sacred moments of reflection. Beyond a singular aesthetic, this thesis establishes a methodological framework for Islamic architecture that is adaptable across contexts, cultures, and scales—reintroducing moments of awe and sacred awareness into everyday life.
Cloud Tethering
Mortimer Ackerman
Spinning, scratching. The work starts from architectural representation— techniques, common mediums, historical tools, un/conventions—and folds in qualities lifted from broader fields. The thesis moves between drawing, collage, and composite means as manners of metering and re-calibrating assumptions about what visualization practices might yield. Automatic and reflective modes of generation serve as entry on halflives of paper-play. For you, for me, together, between us, away from here, in space, perceptually. Much ado in this zone, more interesting are il/logics and il/legibilities.
The basic product of professional architectural labor, construction documents intended as building instruction, have acquired regularities written in blood. Built forms preexist as half-yet incorporeal phantoms. Know, no map describes its object as plainly lineated, is an artifact of utility. Situated and operating in theaters, thesis endeavors might tread in other rivers, hum, deal in representation’s distinct arena. By ‘re-see’-ing through ‘tools’, might material manipulations envelop a variety of processes and actors differently, tracing flows, the phenomenological, un/particularity, nosing toward reciprocity.
Serial production of lightly absurdist follies cumulate like a chat pile to set the table from the hutch. The overall work cares for tactility and the tactical.
it’s not what it seams to be
Ngoc Minh Dang
Not simply a mapped line, the Silk Road was a complex network of bodies, sensations, and negotiations. Transitory, it moved merchants, craftsmen, translators, pilgrims, and laborers who carried commodities and constructed cosmologies: mythologies, rituals, spatial logics, and disciplinary codes were structured spatially in cities, caravanserai, and thresholds encountered. ‘It’s not what it seams to be’ investigates migration and diaspora through the lens of spatial translation, proposing that built form is the material record of cultural encounter, displacement, and the uneven distribution of visibility.
Central to this inquiry is a single typological argument: the marketplacemotel. Historically represented as caravanserai, simultaneously a site of transaction, rest, cultural exchange, and labor, this hybrid type migrates across five Silk Road nodes, each revealing a different spatial condition. The port, mountain, and oasis expose the coercive architecture of forced encounter. The field and river crossing foreground labor without monument, the body in landscape, while sustaining civilization without leaving a signature. The alleyway and flea market preserve spatial intelligences of informal economies and negotiated diaspora inhabitation. The kitchen and weaving factory hold gendered transmissions of knowledge, myth carried in recipe, pattern, and the discipline of the hands. The concert hall marks the endpoint: formalized culture, legitimized and separated from the conditions of its making.
Each node is a different prompt for the same question. Silk, spices, olive oil, incense, and wine traverse all five sensory objects promising pleasure and ritual to consumers, while the labor of their production is absorbed into infrastructure, rendered invisible by the architecture that trade built. That gap between visible and invisible labor becomes a historical-spatial condition. This thesis proposes that the marketplace-motel, read across all five nodes, is the architectural instrument for designing in that gap, recovering the sensory, cultural, and bodily dimensions of labor that the Silk Road materialized.
Staging Permanence
Scripted Architectures for Unstable Landscapes
Ryan Karczewski
Florida is frequently imagined through images of leisure, spectacle, and coastal development, yet the state’s landscapes are structured by ecological and social systems that continually destabilize assumptions of permanence. Porous limestone geology, expansive aquifer networks, migratory populations, tourism economies, and recurring environmental disruptions produce a territory where stability must be continually reconstructed rather than assumed. Beneath the visible landscape lies a dense field of hidden interdependencies in which ecological processes and cultural formations produce space through instability, repetition, and adaptation rather than through fixed architectural form.
This thesis investigates how architecture might operate when permanence is no longer an ethical or physical possibility. Florida is approached as a constructed situation where unstable ground and fragile infrastructures reveal permanence not as a natural condition but as something socially produced, environmentally negotiated, and continually maintained.
The research examines three spatial logics that structure this terrain: ephemeral occupations, subterranean commons, and fragile permanence. Ephemeral occupations describe temporary spatial claims that emerge through cycles of presence rather than ownership: festivals, circus wintering grounds, cruising territories, and seasonal tourist populations that repeatedly occupy space without consolidating permanence. Subterranean commons refer to shared ecological and social systems that operate beneath visibility yet organize collective life above: aquifers, migration routes, informal labor networks, and counterpublic cultural infrastructures that bind communities through mutual dependency. Fragile permanence describes architectures that appear stable and enduring yet depend upon precarious environmental, economic, and political conditions, revealing permanence as something performed through cycles of repair, repetition, and adaptation.
Through mapping, scenographic constructions, and spatial frameworks, the work treats Florida as a site of architectural rehearsal, where space emerges through occupation, hidden interdependence, and precarious endurance: operating less as permanent object than as event, script, and trace.
Crafting Negotiations
Architecture as Techne
Shonit Kotian
The thesis seeks to find an intelligence which is not devoid of life. When a body has carried a tool long enough that it ceases to think about it, when resistance becomes information, when the hand adjusts mid-stroke because the grain communicated a threshold, this is not intuition. This is Techne: a regime of intelligence that is generative, adaptive, and multi-generational. One that cannot be pre-resolved, because its highest value is produced at the moment of encounter between a learned technique and an unexpected condition, between what one generation transmitted and what the next discovers it cannot yet say.
The discipline has learned to pre-resolve its buildings as data, evacuating the friction through which thinking-in-making once emerged. This thesis insists design must think with its hands again and that machines must be reimagined not as replacements, but as instruments for intensifying the hand’s reach.
It proposes a Laboratory of Making: not a revival of canonical crafts, but a future-facing instrument for fabrication intelligence across human and machinic agencies, across generations through which tacit knowledge accumulates, misfires, and reinvents itself. Each gesture, its pressure, rhythm, and fatigue is captured and extended by machines that listen rather than override. The wrist’s local decision becomes the span’s global articulation. Joints, tool paths, and transitions are made deliberately visible sites where architect, artisan, machine, and material argue in matter rather than language. Authorship is distributed. Form is residue. The most radical act in an age of automation is not to resist the machine, but to choreograph it into a practice of righteous, living craft.
The form that emerges is the residue of that negotiation, carrying knowledge that cannot be extracted, only inherited by the next body, the next material, the next generation of makers who will extend it in directions we cannot yet name.
Room No. ?
Tingshu Mao
This thesis is situated within a world that cannot be fully described, mapped, or narrated. Rather than translating literature into architecture, it operates under the assumption that narrative frameworks fail where spatial necessity begins.
The future condition addressed here is not one of total collapse, but of prolonged instability—where time no longer progresses cleanly, where maintenance outweighs production, and where meaning accumulates through repetition rather than novelty. In such a condition, architecture can no longer function as a singular object or a solution-driven artifact. It must instead emerge as a spatial response to ongoing pressures: environmental degradation, temporal sedimentation, and the persistence of human and nonhuman labor.
The literary reference serves only as permission to work through fragments, states, and partial conditions. The work replaces narrative representation with spatial necessity, asking what kinds of spaces must exist for life, memory, and beauty to remain perceptible under conditions of uncertainty.
I attempted to focus on constructing a surreal/supernatural room—a private, ambiguous, intimate, and potentially boundless room—as my response to the world. By creating a space with ambiguity and imagination, I aimed to break down the limitations of human perception of the environment and the oscillation between illusion and reality. Architecture itself became a carrier of “symbols”, not only dissolving the physicality of space but also embodying the possibilities of emotion and memory.
The room or architecture here is not a depiction of a world, but a chance that allows the world to continue—quietly, imperfectly, and without resolution.
Dignifying Death and Dying…
Gabbi Mckinley
Contemporary death practices in the U.S. are extremely isolationist and foster an unhealthy relationship with mortality and grief. The thesis mediates and proposes different methods for dealing with and engaging death, foregrounding the possibilities for personal and environmental wellbeing and collective care. The core ambition is to destigmatize conversations surrounding death while embracing such an inevitability, where more participants can realize a fuller range of the constitution of their humanity. To probe these interests, Dignifying Death and Dying harnesses three ecologically minded mechanisms of final disposition–alkaline hydrolysis, open-air flame cremation, and natural burial. These, participating across nine separate sites that are formed into a single cohesive space; “one” building, “one” garden. The thesis derives its numerology from Maranasati, a Buddhist meditation on death and permanence. The nine sites touch a range of situations, broadening audience range, and are divided into three groups, each of which produce a different textile fiber: one bast (flax), one animal (wool), and one stalk (straw, wheat or rice). Structuring the interconnectivity and cyclical nature of life and death, all nine systems nourish each other, where a byproduct from one site is transported to another for animal feed, or compost, for example. Fiber harvested from each site is used in production of memorial textiles, articulated as shrouds, burial clothing, quilts, or ‘other’ through alternative forms of demonstration. The care for grief and the bereaved is indexed through this participation in fiber arts, offering literal and tangible means of working through tragedy and intense emotion, while enabling a fuller range of experiences as related to what it means to be human.
The Backside of the Moon
Wang Kin (Justin) Ng
The thesis “Backside of the Moon” speculates on an alternative composition of the Backside of the Moon through a World-Expo’ish carnival that is situated in the 4th dimension between the Sun and Earth. As time is only one dimension of this world, and humans as three-dimensional organisms are only able to observe discrete fragments of the fourth-dimension world. Depending on the instant at which an individual enters, the condition and appearance of this realm is different.
This realm is constituted of two sets of silicon-based hybrid organisms that have evolved in the environment and chemical composition between the Moon and Earth. One set of the species, Directors, constructs and directs the way of survival in this utopian world. The other species, Occupants, occupy these environments freely, while also unnoticeably enabling the operation of the ecosystem that is created. The infrastructures and pavilions that Directors construct on the Backside of the Moon are mainly made up of gravitational fields and liquefied silicon solutions. While most of these infrastructures are visible to the naked eye, distortion of light and shadows reveal hints of the technologies that Directors have developed to facilitate survival in this unique land. Visitors are spiritually transformed into a rabbit’ish species on the Backside of the Moon in order to experience this realm, and they are able to return through interaction with a Tapirus species. Together, this speculative ecology constructs an everchanging world where visitors temporarily step into this unfamiliar, welcoming and futuristic cosmology instance.
From A Distance Preserving and Performing Lost Palestinian Space
Danah Owaida
Preservation and Adaptive Reuse are embedded into our discipline as important modes of practice, but we have yet to develop an attitude towards preserving spaces that are difficult to access, sparsely documented, or no longer exist. Here, experimental preservation becomes provocative, valuable, and relevant. My Palestinian ancestry motivates active consideration of this question through the lens of an endangered heritage. The lack of access to Palestinian culture, space, and land is by design—a way to erase and conceal. In relation to histories of marginalized peoples worldwide, it is our moral imperative to consider how to address questions of research, preservation, and distance in cases where knowns are limited and suppressed, and unknowns are plentiful.
The challenge, then, lies in working with known and unknown information to reconstruct fragments of the past. This thesis documents/visualizes my grandmother’s memories of her childhood home in 1950s–60s Gaza—her family’s place of refuge immediately following the 1948 Nakba. This home is a medium of engagement to address the question of archiving from a distance—an available architectural space in Palestine familiar to close family members, with whom I have contact. Strategically, From a Distance proposes several—sometimes contradictory—modes of articulating preservation from a distance using a variety of architectural, narrative, and curatorial techniques.
Utilizing analogical relations to ‘staging’, and the situation of a theater(-ish), opportunities to appropriate existing techniques in visual and performative storytelling emerge... think props, lighting, atmosphere, and production. The table is a protagonist in the narrative about my grandmother’s home, and my retelling of it—it embodies the role of a vessel for slow discovery, curiosity and collective gathering, experimentally preserving that which typically evades preservation. From a Distance is performed through the table, which holds the allegory of a feast—of information, documentation, artifacts, textures, stories, memory, and emotion.
Changing Tack this thesis is my Quarter-Life Crisis
Erin Roberts
This thesis argues that architecture’s future relevance lies not in disciplinary autonomy or the continued cycles of constructing and demolishing buildings, but in the dismantling and redistribution of architectural knowledge across other domains. Using the lifecycle of ships as a conceptual framework, it proposes a shift from architecture as a self-contained discipline toward architecture as a transferable, hybrid intelligence working beyond its traditional boundaries. If the freeport represents architecture’s autonomous past and the shipyard its assimilative present, the ship-breaking yard marks a possible future: a site where architectural knowledge is dismantled, reassembled, and dispersed elsewhere.
Peter Eisenman’s conception of architecture as an independent discourse parallels the freeport’s insulated status within global economic systems as a zone that exists physically within a country, but operates outside its regulatory and economic structures. In both cases, the system exists within a broader context while remaining largely detached from it.
Contemporary architecture, however, operates differently. Modern practice and education acknowledge that architecture is inherently interdisciplinary, yet the relationship is often extractive. External knowledge is brought into architecture primarily to strengthen the discipline itself. This condition is comparable to the shipyard: a site where diverse expertise is gathered, specialized, and assembled into a coherent whole.
This thesis positions itself within the ship-breaking yard. In these landscapes, ships are dismantled and their materials redistributed across industries and geographies. Value is no longer concentrated in the unified object, but dispersed through reuse. Building on this analogy, the thesis proposes new “rafts” constructed from repurposed architectural knowledge. They embody architectural intelligence, drifting between fields and temporarily embedding within different contexts. Components detach, migrate independently, or recombine with other rafts, allowing the knowledge to circulate rather than settle. Through processes of fragmentation, redistribution, and recombination, architectural knowledge collaborates across disciplines, enabling reciprocal exchange in which architecture contributes to and evolves through engagement with other fields.
Echoes of Perception A Tripartite Journey of Emotion, Music, and Space
Yicheng Rong
“Echoes of Perception” explores the profound intersection of human experience, soundscapes, and physical environments. Rather than dictating fixed architectural forms, this design proposes a conceptual framework of three distinct experiential stages. Each stage represents a unique mode of contact between the visitor, music, and space, with the core objective of constructing an internal emotional bridge that unifies these elements.
The first stage initiates the journey by utilizing music as a raw, immersive force. It aims to evoke visceral emotional responses, challenging sensory boundaries and prompting spontaneous physical movement. Here, sound acts as the primary catalyst for spatial exploration.
The second stage transitions into a realm of conscious interaction. It introduces a dynamic dialogue where human movement directly influences acoustic frequencies and spatial atmosphere. This active engagement cultivates a sense of resonance, transforming the initial intensity into a state of structural harmony.
The final stage dissolves the separation between the visitor and the architecture. In this culmination, the individual’s mere presence and movement continuously generate the spatial and musical environment. Human action becomes the ultimate apparatus, seamlessly blending motion into sound, and sound into spatial manifestation.
This thesis serves as an open-ended exploration of sensory possibilities. By empowering the audience as both creators and participants within a synesthetic experience, the design demonstrates that space is not merely a static container, but a resonant, living extension of human emotion.
Peripheral Obsolescence
Roman Marra
Afterlife is not an illusion rather a situation which negotiates between recollection and the subsequent. Peripheral vision establishes a mirrored coherent bias, our central vision might be the subsequent or focal point, while the hemispherical degrees to peripheral vision are the collected reminiscents of previous memories. Obsolescence transitions from the state of neglect to the state of reimagination. The thesis operates in a similar exchange, through the dismantling of an obsolete medical instrument to a new reconfigured apparatus.
The Zeiss Humphrey Visual Field carries operational weight, formerly an ophthalmic instrument which measured peripheral vision to detect instances of glaucoma and progressive visual loss. The thesis investigates the instrument as a form of adaptive reuse. Realizing each object carries previous dependencies like patient response, to instances of diagnosis. In its reconfiguration, the device transitions from an instrument which once measured peripheral vision to an apparatus which now produces visions. Its task reoriented, memory to projection and obsolescence to new possibilities.
The device carries diverse material, ranging from stepping motors to rotating armatures, each which was previously fixed to certain axes and protocol. The nature of the thesis is to understand that while the pieces are being retrained to serve a role of production, their previous lives as tenets to the visual field machine are not forgotten. The pieces hesitate, they are relying on memory and their prior routines to be agents of their new work. The pieces become contingent on memory and the past to produce the exercises of its new afterlife.
Poetic Synergies
Xinyu Shi
In a world organized by modern technology, as exemplified by Gestell, or enframing—a German word meaning a mode of understanding reality, much is arranged as Bestand—also German, meaning ‘standing reserve’, or inventory. Contemporarily, myriad worlds are programmed into Bestand, relegating them to resources for practical use. Rivers are no longer rivers, but energy supplies; city blocks are no longer communities, but traffic channels; and human beings become resources, or commodities. Such calculative rationality takes efficiency as the primary value, while quietly denying and marginalizing other modes of thought and possible ways of being.
In contrast to Gestell, there exists another mode of revealing, or Poiesis—the act of bringing forth, a way of allowing things to reveal themselves without being reduced to efficiency or purpose.
This thesis probes architecture as a medium of aletheia—an experiment in spatial imagery and imagination that allows things to be revealed—to become, or emerge, rather than being relegated to what they are “supposed to do”. By staging perceptible uncertainty in movements between enframing and poiesis, the thesis prompts visitors to become witnesses, confronting the deep potential of the unknown in a tensional play with states of knowing. Invitationally, the witnesses and their perceptions are misaligned with existing experience and common sense, provoking collisions of rationality and exposing the instability of cognition through poetic engagement with the world.
Alongside H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmism—the indifference of the universe and the limits of human cognition, this thesis also embraces another attitude toward the unknown—the Carl Sagan-like curiosity and awe that arises from encountering mystery. The value of the unknown lies in its ability to expand perception by opening alternative ways of sensing and navigating the world, that are frequently suffocated by relegating experiences to cognitive, measured and rational domains.
MICROCOSM THESIS
Architecture as Microcosm of Issues
Instructor: John McMorrough
“Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I always trust the microcosm over the macrocosm.”
Gloria Steinem
A microcosm (like architecture) acts as a totality at a reasonable scale, both representing and manifesting. As a part that acts as a whole, it addresses multiplicities and finds in sufficiency its potential (and limit).
Taking the premise of “building as microcosm” as a starting point, in this section, participants will first work in a seminar format studying speculative examples in architecture and films (“Possible Worlds”), followed by a workshop applying those insights to envision contexts for exploration (“World Building”). The winter term will begin in a studio format, developing representations to describe a design (“Building Media”). It will conclude with a practicum that develops the thesis as a model (“Media Architecture”). Each thesis will be determined by each student individually, in consultation with the faculty advisor.
Image: Edward Steed, “That’s where we are right now.”
The New Yorker, December 15, 2014.
Casa Mature House as Microcosm of Change
Jack Barbour
A house functions as a responsive organism that breathes with its inhabitants. It expands and contracts based on occupation, shifts with seasons, and transforms to serve evolving purposes. Like urban centers that adapt to a changing population, a dwelling should physically reshape itself around the lives it contains.
Customization is central to this model. Inhabitants don’t passively occupy space—they actively edit and mark their environment. Shelves hold personal collections. Paint colors shift. Furniture migrates. These modifications aren’t temporary; they’re essential storytelling. The house becomes a living archive of who lives there, recording layered histories through accumulated choices. Spaces become fluid and multipurpose. A bedroom metamorphoses into an office by day, a studio by evening, a meditation chamber at night. Rather than fixed rooms with singular identities, the house offers flexible zones that inhabitants reconfigure as needs dictate. Walls aren’t permanent boundaries but responsive membranes.
When a house responds to its inhabitants rather than dictating how they live, it becomes truly alive—a dynamic entity that grows, transforms, and ages alongside those within it. The home becomes not a place you inhabit, but a living partner in the narrative of your life.
Renewal Power Station Energy as Microcosm of Heliolatry
Jacob Brookhouse
The sun is life. It is the primary source of energy for all life on earth. The 4.5 billion year old cosmic being has been deservedly deified by countless civilizations throughout humanity’s relatively brief history. It has thousands of names across cultures and its significance bridges science and religion.
The power station is like the sun in many ways. It’s big. It’s bright. It’s warm. It hums. It’s far away. It’s simultaneously familiar and mysterious. It produces energy. It demands no observer; its ceaseless operation demarcates the relentless onward march of time. It brings order to an otherwise chaotic life.
The power station is also unlike the sun in many ways. It isn’t singular, rather one of many, part of a larger network. It provides a service, but also needs servicing. Its existence isn’t given; it has to be cared for, maintained. It will not continue to burn long after human footprints disappear from the surface of the earth, like the sun will; in fact, it might only survive a few hours on its own.
This power station, like others, provides utility; it powers. It converts natural sources of energy into electricity to be used by those connected to it across the grid. The building itself embraces this utilitarian nature. It provides shade, warmth, respite. It has places to sit, to look, to listen. It has bathrooms. These basic practicalities become venerated, lifted to a state that necessitates reflection, urges reverence. The power station elevates the most basic of human needs. It renews.
The Sorting House Storage as Microcosm of Hoarding
Linde Ji
Human beings move through time while inhabiting space. Life unfolds through moments that gradually pass, leaving traces primarily in memory rather than in material form.
Objects, however, follow a different trajectory. They are acquired, used, and placed within everyday environments. Over time, they accumulate—quietly occupying space while absorbing fragments of personal history. What once served a practical purpose gradually becomes something more ambiguous: a carrier of memory, emotion, and identity. As a result, objects are rarely discarded simply because they are no longer useful. Letting go of them often feels like letting go of a part of oneself. In this sense, the world becomes a vast container of things—an aggregation of time and space embedded within material objects. Homes, closets, and storage rooms slowly transform into landscapes of accumulation, where belongings stack upon one another and the boundary between necessity and attachment becomes increasingly blurred. Within such environments, the act of deciding what to keep and what to release becomes unexpectedly difficult.
This project proposes a spatial condition situated between storage, archive, and exhibition. Rather than eliminating excess, the building creates an environment where individuals are given space, time, and distance to confront their belongings. Inside the building, the act of sorting becomes a spatial experience. Objects are carried, placed, examined, categorized, and temporarily held. Storage systems of different scales, visible shelving, and accessible circulation paths allow objects to be observed from new perspectives. Through this process, accumulation is gradually reorganized, and personal belongings begin to shift from private attachments into visible artifacts.
Edible Commons Restaurant as Microcosm of Worlds
Brianna Manzor
Recalling the original definition of the restaurant, “to restore” the work applies this intent within the environment and among the constituents. The building operates through reciprocity, functioning as a symbiotic organism that participates in modes of production and participation.
Formally porous and programmatically unresolved. Boundaries are collapsed between domestic and productive space. The form becomes a highway for flora and fauna. Migratory birds, livestock, native grasses, minerals, and microbes are a short list of users. Systems are intentionally inefficient, slowing processes of production and consumption to reorient users toward the land. Ingredients are locally foraged and hunted. Slaughter becomes political theater and composting becomes a public ritual.
The building is materially inseparable from its site as the building reimagines and reassembles local discarded building material into an open structure. Seasonal infill constructed from locally abundant matter results in an architecture that registers cycles of growth, decay, labor, and extraction. This cyclical process of disassembly and reassembly allows the building to register time, labor, and ecological conditions. The kitchen is exposed as a common hearth that gathers the cosmos. It operates as a planetary system in miniature where metabolism, hierarchy, care, exploitation, and joy collide. Energy circulates across bodies and materials through acts of foraging, hunting, fermenting, prepping, cooking, and eating.
Reimagines a commons beyond the human, not by offering resolution, but by highlighting interconnected and interdependent networks amongst entities.
1138
Ruin as Microcosm of Building
Frank Michel
These are your borders. These are your resources. Nothing exists beyond what is already here.
In its origin, the structure resembled a living organism. At the center: a heart generated power without pause. Veins- corridors and conduits- distributed energy to rotating zones of production, creating a cyclical architecture of movement. A nervous system enabled communication, while structural bones held everything in tension.
But the population grew. Over time, the bones were stripped, the nervous system dismantled. Materials were harvested to build new layers. The organism began to consume itself.
Space is finite. Materials are finite. Expansion becomes impossible. Survival becomes recycling- cutting into old spaces to build new ones. Construction and excavation becomes the same act.
Still, the heart continues. It beats beyond its intended life- fragile, untouchable. The space around it is forbidden. It is maintained with precision but never altered, feared as much as relied upon.
Time deepens until memory cannot reach the beginning. Entire generations live and die knowing no world other than this interior. The past survives only as architectural scars - exposed beams, sealed corridors, patched surfacesthe fossils of former rooms embedded within new ones.
The building becomes its own archaeology.
Horseshoe Bay Terminal Waystation as Microcosm of Nomadism
Chris Meade
A waystation is a point along a path of travel. By leveraging the cultural, systematic, and aesthetic ideas of nomadic tribes through the use of modern membrane structures, these ideas can be connected in a way that puts emphasis on the temporality and sitedness of both experiences.
The Horseshoe Bay Ferry Terminal poses a unique opportunity to connect to a real in progress infrastructural project which is expanding the capacity for travel and revitalizing the coastal area. The terminal completes the canceled portion; made up of a terminal, footbridge, and connection to both the existing urban context and the new coastal park.
The membrane structure allows the space to be affected by the pervading conditions of an area such that the space changes with the site itself. This connects to the Bedouin idea that connection to the natural landscape is a way of grounding a person in the moment allowing for the journey to be understood as a collection of instances rather than a single event. This relationship to the environment is further emphasized by the climatic variability of the coastal site chosen in Horseshoe Bay, Vancouver. The project acts as a means of connecting the many systems related to the station namely the B.C. Ferry System, the Horseshoe Bay community, the City of Vancouver, and the natural landscape of the area in a way that benefits each of them.
Mid-Coast Mental Health Center Clinic as Microcosm of Mind
Talia Morison-Allen
Neuroscience is the physical study of the whole nervous system, including the brain.
Psychology is the phenomenal study of the mind through emotion, memory, behavior, and consciousness.
With the development of modern medication to treat mental illnesses and machinery capable of studying physical brain reaction to psychological phenomena, the two fields have become increasingly interdisciplinary. The Mid-Coast Mental Health Center proposes interweaving a psychiatric treatment facility with neuroscience laboratories.
Today’s mental health clinic focuses on patient comfort. Designers in the field recommend daylighting, biophilia, and home-like environments. Similarly, designs for today’s bioscience laboratories focus on transparency and introducing informal spaces for socializing, catering to the emotional and physical well-being of the scientists. The organization of the Mid-Coast Mental Health Center is modeled on the Buurtzorg method, in which small teams of caregivers operate independently to establish more personal connections with patients or amongst each other as researching teams.
The building is divided by its bay structure. Each bay is programmed to operate semi-autonomously. Interior courtyards and exterior windows allow for daylight access, a hybrid model that references traditional courtyard homes. Though the facilities will remain separate, shared programming such as informal dining spaces, auditoriums, recreation spaces, and courtyards will act as interlinking connectors.
The Phenomenological Institute Project as Microcosm of Being
Michael Natinsky
A phenomenon, or that which appears, is unique. Every individual has a distinct experience when interacting with the same field of perception. Even in the absence of an object of perception, the human mind perceives itself. The human mind is a phenomena that elicits different emotions based on our memories and imaginations. We all have a train of thought. A stream of consciousness. We have moments when the world around us becomes secondary to the experience of our mind. Phenomenologists aim to understand experience that cannot be measured objectively.
The Phenomenological Institute embraces the philosophical foundations through which phenomenology understands our world. Drawing on Edmund Husserl’s concept of reduction, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of embodied perception, and Martin Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world, the building becomes a microcosm of these ideas where phenomenology can be experienced through architecture. In this building, professionals are studying the history of phenomenology and applying it to our thinking about the future. How do these ideas about perception, about consciousness serve as a lens through which to the world?
This project explores a new relationship between phenomenology and architecture. Whether or not architecture consciously engages the multisensory and atmospheric qualities described by Juhani Pallasmaa, all architecture is experienced as a phenomenon. This project creates a place for the philosophy of phenomenology itself, where the experience of architecture reveals both the conscious and unconscious ways we perceive the world around us.
Zeitgeist Winery Vineyard as Microcosm of Culture
Emily Naumann
The art and practice of wine-making has evolved over the centuries, yet it has remained a steadfast part of human culture and identity. This project acts as a repository of this culture as well, enticing and educating people about wine in a way that is demystifying yet maintains the sanctity of the ancient practice.
The approach to this building mimics the terroirists’ approach to wine in that the design should be deeply rooted to the place (site) and culture that produced it (program). The vineyard typology can not be separated from its land, and this is particularly poignant in the age of climate change.
Physically, there will be a duality of old and new, stereotomic and tectonicforms reminiscent of caves, beautifully designed glass, and an appreciation of process. This architecture aims to emulate the design of a wine glass not formally but experientially, representing the culmination of acquired knowledge and design evolution.
In acting as a microcosm of culture, the vineyard addresses issues of social rituals and mitigates the relationship with past and future. Ultimately, culture is ongoing; this project is about finding a balance of preservation and transformation. We can not live in the past, yet currently there is little thought for anything but the future.
Dovetail Crafts Store as Microcosm of Artisanship
Jacob Shichman
Dovetail Crafts is a furniture boutique that serves as an interface between makers and users. This atmosphere reinforces the idea that each object carries the presence of its maker and the time invested in its construction.
The project is a workspace and retail environment centered around quality and authorship. While a typical store functions on efficiency and consumption, this building operates as an extension of craft culture. Spaces are arranged to slow down the pace of viewing, allowing furniture to be encountered as singular works rather than inventory. The spatial experience is nearly as important as the objects themselves. The building emphasizes the individuality of crafted work.
Artisanship is a cultural value embedded within the architecture itself.
Cruzando Fronteras Co-op as Microcosm of Community
Vieniq Romero
The structure will fascilitate the lifestyle needed for a workers’ cooperative by fostering an environment in which one has access to privacy, public facing work zones, as well as spaces to maintain wellness. By maintaining distinctive sections for this programing, each zone will be able to meet the occupant’s needs without bleeding into each other, ideally encouraging a healthy work-life balance.
Communities are heavily dependent on one’s ability to feel connected to one’s neighbors and local businesses. If one is able regularly encounter those who live near them, feel freely able to communicate with them, and be able to access the resources and goods one needs on a daily basis without extensive travel, one is more likely to feel tethered to their community. By providing storefronts for local businesses, access to small scale urban agriculture to mitigate the impacts of food deserts, residential dwellings, as well as healthcare clinics, this collection of structures should fulfill many needs occupants may have. Additionally, opening some of the programming to be public facing means other locals will be able to supplement their needs here as well, tethering the occupant community to the site’s greater context in a positive light.
While research and informed design will greatly determine a building’s ability to functionally serve programming needs, materiality is equally significant in impacting an individual’s ability to feel both safety and contentness. Careful consideration is necessary to ensure that one does not feel a space is hostile, and a community cannot thrive if the members do not feel welcome to spend their time in it. “Airiness” and “coziness” are potential requirements to furthering pleasant emotions in one's surroundings.
Center of Solace Shelter as Microcosm of Disaster
Ruixue Yang
This project understands disaster as a condition of collapsed order and proposes architecture as a means of constructing a new one. It shifts from an individualized logic of habitation toward an experimental model of collective coexistence. It introduces an alternative mode of living that positions the building as a starting point for the reconstruction of both social and psychological order.
Catastrophe may erupt as a sudden crisis, or unfold as a slow erosion of balance. When disaster strikes, structures lose their capacity to protect, and people are forced to search for refuge. Throughout history, shelter in catastrophe has taken on different forms: from temporary dwellings, to cots in stadiums, to purpose built institutions for vulnerable populations. While these spaces address immediate survival, they often remain confined to exigency driven solutions.
Rather than emphasizing sharp boundaries and rigid clarity, thesis proposal uses blurred edges and layered thresholds, spatial conditions that respond to the instability and disorientation produced by disaster. Color is employed not as decoration, but as an atmospheric instrument, modulating light, perception, and mood to foster a sense of psychological ease and gradual restoration.
Gradient Commons Center as Microcosm of Attention
Yihan Yang
The attention crisis is a cultural condition in which focus is compressed, fragmented, and constantly redirected. Rather than resisting this situation, the building allows multiple attentional modes coexist. It spatializes the gradient between stimulation and recovery, translating society situation into architectural form.
From every elevation, the building reads as a sequence of masses stepping from low and open to tall and enclosed. Public programs such as plaza, theatre, food court and exhibition occupy the lower, broader volumes. These spaces embrace movement, noise, and visual density. Study lounges, offices, and meditation spaces rise vertically, becoming more enclosed and controlled. The facade reinforces this hierarchy: openings shift from wide to narrow, echoing the rhythm of heights.
The volumes enclose an outdoor sunken plaza. This acts as a shared ground between overload and recovery, a social condenser where different user groups intersect. Circulation wraps and threads around this open core, become the most public space in the project. From a technical perspective, this project combines large span public spaces with vertically stacked enclosure structures, highlighting the spatial characteristics through structural differences.
This building is not for a single behavior mode, but rather a diverse environment. It provides a space for the dynamic changes of people’s attention, allowing them to choose how to deal with their attention.
MEDITATION
STUDY
RECOVERY
STIMULATION
PLAZA CAFE
LOUNGE
Concrete Labor_Circularity
Instructor: Tsz Yan Ng
Linked course instructor: Wes McGee
Concrete, one of the most pervasive building materials in architecture has diverse associations culturally, politically, and socially in the modern period. As a unique material, its processes of formation are defined not by itself but through another vessel that simultaneously contains it and gives it form –where the solid state appears only after elaborate formwork preparation and removal. The labor of casting in concrete historically has been split between unskilled labor, that of manual labor for making formwork on-site, and intellectual command, that which resides in specialized concrete engineering and highly crafted designs for formwork. For concrete designs, the split of manual and intellectual labor in the contemporary context is seeing a revision – where architectural production is realigning the labor involved in the testing, prototyping, and fabrication of concrete work.
Simultaneous to this shift, sustainable building practices and climate change imperatives are more consequential than ever given the palpable effects of global warming. In order to address concrete construction, we need to look at the entire process more holistically. The focus for Concrete Labor this year examines CIRCULARITY and its intricacies, of complex and mutually influential relationship between construction (concrete forming, of technique and processes), use (design, inhabitation, and operations), and end of life considerations. The focus will address forming with alternative materials, reuse materials, and sustainable designs. Could computational tools and simulations direct better optimized designs that would demand less concrete use? Could the building components themselves have a second life, are modular in design so that they could be easily deployed for reuse? The goals this year will advance along these different fronts; from gaining heuristic knowledge in material making with digital fabrication processes for experimental concrete forming, to leveraging newly devised techniques and materials to prototype highly tuned designs that integrate various circular principles and performance criteria.
Patterned Deformation Form Through Casting
Stephanie Bednarski Arpit Malhotra
This thesis investigates plastic membrane formwork as a system for making precast modular concrete units. At the brink of a plastic waste crisis, the project seeks to transform discarded material from an environmental burden into an architectural medium. Beyond the development of a specific forming technique, the thesis frames recycled plastic as a component within a circular material logic. Plastic waste is not simply diverted from landfill but temporarily reactivated as a tool for shaping durable architectural elements, reconsidering how low-value materials can participate in the production of long-lasting building components. While the prototypes use commercially available LDPE sheets for consistency and control, the system is designed to incorporate recycled plastic waste streams, particularly plastic bags, as a readily available, globally distributed resource.
The research proposes a hybrid membrane formwork system made of thin low-density polyethylene (LDPE) sheets that are cut, patterned, and heatseamed in a flat state. Through this process, plastic sheets transform into malleable molds used to pour volumetric concrete structures. The units do not fully take form until casting, when the pressure, tension, and gravity of liquid concrete activate the membrane. In this process, the mold and material work together to produce form, and deformation becomes a design parameter rather than a flaw. Seams and stress patterns act as controlled tools that guide surface articulation and structural depth.
Unlike rigid formwork, which sets geometry in advance, this system uses the behavior of flexible membranes to create variation, articulation, and localized thickening within each element. Seam locations, weld patterns, and boundary constraints influence both performance and appearance.
The project concludes with a series of repeatable modular units that can be assembled into lightweight architectural systems, including screens, partitions, and porous walls. This thesis proposes an alternate fabrication process combining circular material reuse, developable surface logic, and membrane-based casting.
Cured Creases
Felix Lam Andrew Masternak
Historically, concrete building elements, such as columns, are robust, heavy, and durable parts of a building’s structure. Their monolithic form conveys this both literally and conceptually. The formwork for casting, which is removed to reveal the final cured form is also reflective of this. This is a practical response, where the formwork must be robust enough to resist the substantial amount of hydrostatic pressure of the concrete in liquid form. In a world that is ever more conscious about circular practices - one that focuses on carbon emission reduction at every stage of the building’s lifecycle - formwork material waste reduction, reuse, and recycling can be a prime moment to interrogate sustainable practices for concrete construction.
Inspired by Japanese origami, and the research of J. Choma and E. LloretFritschi, our project seeks to perfect a system of concrete formworks by simply using folded paper membranes and corrugated cardboard supports to cast column components. The interest in using recyclable paper products as the basis for our formwork system is both pragmatic and conceptual. The paper formworks are lightweight, with folded geometries that stiffen the paper sleeve to resist hydrostatic pressure. The cardboard exoskeleton acts both as a support cage for the sleeve which helps with buckling deformations, and as a guide for the paper sleeve to “lock” into place for ease and speed of assembly. Using wood fiber based recyclable products allows us to design three dimensional formworks, which can be flat packed into a fraction of the volume and material weight (compared to steel and timber) and unfolded on site. In contrast to traditional formwork systems, the reduced weight and profile of the paper formworks make it easier to transport and deploy, reducing the embodied emissions for transportation and time for setup. After casting, the majority of the formwork can be reused, reclaimed, or recycled. Paper formworks are a unique low cost, low emission strategy for producing beautiful, and seemingly unexpected delicate structural concrete forms.
Second Cast Functional Grading with Foam and Recycled Concrete
James Sotiroff Pablo De La Garza
Concrete is the second most consumed material in the world next to water. For more than two centuries, its high compressive strength, moldability, and dimensional stability have enabled its extensive adoption for building globally. However, the environmental cost of its production is significant. Approximately eight percent of global carbon dioxide emissions are attributed to concrete production. At the end of a building’s life cycle, concrete also constitutes the largest proportion of construction and demolition waste. Conventional demolition practices typically result in concrete being crushed into low-grade recycled aggregate, which is commonly used as road base or backfill, while significant quantities are ultimately directed into landfills.
Brandon Clifford writes in The Cannibal’s Cookbook, “The city grows upwards with intrepid velocity. It stops at nothing to grow more, make new, eradicate old.” The current demolition and recycling systems largely reinforce a culture of downcycling, in which material value is progressively reduced. Second Cast proposes a material strategy intended to disrupt this cycle. Greater value is argued to exist with resources that have already been extracted. Within the building industry, new systems of collection, sorting, reuse, and processing therefore can be developed to extend the life and utility of existing material stock. Building upon this premise, Second Cast is a material strategy leveraging and utilizing varying concrete densities, coalesced into a new way of making building components. Our project combines recycled concrete rubble with foamcrete and non-autocalve aerated concrete (NAAC) to create building components that add acoustic and thermal properties.
We believe turning recycled concrete into lightweight, modular, and deployable units not only adds value to waste, but is also a more sustainable approach to keeping materials in circulation.
Textured Interfaces
Amely Wackerbauer Cayla Ellis
Circular approaches that minimize waste and maximize material lifespan are critical for construction methods, specifically pertaining to concrete which makes up eight percent of the global carbon footprint. Sand casting, in particular, offers a promising pathway toward sustainable component manufacturing with its ability to reclaim, recondition, and reuse the molding sand many times. This process can also reduce tooling costs while producing components with complex geometries and unique finishes through stamped textures on the molding sand surface. Sand casting as such not only lowers environmental impact through reduction in formwork waste, but also allows for rapid prototyping of diverse forms and textures.
Textured Interfaces leverages sand casting through the creation of stackable components with custom corresponding textured surfaces. These surfaces, tuned to ensure non-sliding behavior by the friction between textures, offer the possibility of stable stacking at extreme angles that would not be possible with traditionally smooth mass-produced concrete molded surfaces. Empirical testing, combined with the computational analysis of components’ center of mass, enables easier assembly possibilities without scaffolding support to take place. These self-supporting units reduce the time, labor, and material needed, especially for scaffold construction, whereby a keystone arch can be assembled without the falsework.
Applications for these findings, like historical preservation, illuminate beneficial opportunities in moments where the use of falsework in archways, bridges, and retaining structures is physically impossible or finanically limited. With reduced labor requirements, projects can be completed on aggressive timelines while not compromising on design. This method of reusable molds offers concrete a modern take on traditional dry-stacking by pushing its limits through advancements in technology, additive manufacturing, and computational analysis.
Soft Shell Fabric-Cast Concrete as an Architectural Component System
Guanjingchan Xu
Kristen McCullough
Soft Shell investigates how textile formwork can redefine the relationship between material formation and architectural assembly. Instead of relying on rigid molds that impose predetermined geometries, this research explores how flexible fabric systems allow concrete to form through gravity, tension, and controlled deformation. The project asks how material behavior itself can become a driver for architectural component design.
Through a series of casting experiments, the research tests how variations in fabric density, edge reinforcement, and cable tensioning influence thickness, curvature, and load distribution. These studies focus on producing lightweight shell components with complex double-curved geometries that cannot be easily achieved through conventional formwork. Each iteration of prototyping informs adjustments in casting sequence, anchoring strategies, and material flow control.
Rather than proposing a singular building form, the thesis considers how these fabric-cast elements can operate as modular architectural components. The aggregation of repeatable units suggests the possibility of constructing spatial enclosures, shaded thresholds, or semi-open gathering conditions. In this sense, architecture emerges not from a fixed formal object but from the assembly logic of components.
The research also explores the potential for components to support multiple modes of inhabitation. At one scale, the curvature and structural thickness of the units may allow them to function as seating surfaces, low partitions, or platforms. While at another, the assemblies at inhabitable scale point toward a possibility where structure, surface, and modular unit aggregation contribute to flexible spatial conditions.
Ultimately, Soft Shell proposes textile formwork not only as a fabrication technique, but as a conceptual framework for thinking about adaptability, incremental construction, and spatial formation through aggregation.
Clay Things
Jessco Zhang
Zihang Wang
This project investigates a constructive logic of layered material assembly with clay as a primary medium for mold making. Rather than treating clay as a final object, the work approaches it as a system in which form emerges through layered accumulation cut by a robotic knife. Each layer is added and compressed on the previous one, allowing the mold to develop gradually from the base upward. In this process, stacking and shaping operate both as a structural strategy and as a method of space exploration.
The project emphasizes the responsive qualities of clay. Unlike rigid fabrication methods, clay permits continuous adjustment during construction: each layer can be pressed, smoothed, or reshaped as the mold rises. This flexibility creates an immediate dialogue between the hand and material, where touch, gravity, and small decisions made in the moment influence the final geometry. As layers accumulate, form is not fully predetermined, but partly discovered through making.
Working with clay also reveals the relationship between gravity, stability, and form. Because each layer depends on the support of the one below, the mold must negotiate balance and structural integrity as it grows vertically. This condition turns a simple manual technique into a study of incremental construction, material behavior, and the negotiation between structural stability and formal expression.
Ultimately, the project reflects on how architectural form can emerge from repetitive, small-scale actions. Through the gradual accumulation of clay layers, the mold becomes a spatial artifact shaped by process rather than imposed design. The work proposes construction itself as a generative tool, where material logic and human gesture collaborate in the production of form. Casting in the negative space of the mold yields concrete components that can be assembled into a wall system, extending the process from moldmaking into architectural application.
bio-logics experimental practices in architecture’s biological turn
Instructor: Kathy Velikov
bio-logics: experimental practices in architecture’s biological turn takes Catherine Ingraham’s statement as both a prompt and a provocation to interrogate the history of architecture’s relationship to the natural world, by exploring the contemporary “biological turn” in architecture. The biological turn, adapts from theorist and historian Mario Carpo’s The Digital Turn in Architecture, where Carpo argues that the shift from mechanical to digital technologies in the second half of the 20th century was a major historical turning point in terms of the long history of cultural technologies, and particularly for architecture, which could start to break out of its “early modern techno-cultural” conventions of notational drawing and of authorial design. The biological turn is thus considered not only another technological transformation in terms of, say biotechnology, but is also conceived as a “cultural technology”. Biology can be understood a worldview that has the capacity to frame meaning and to shape identity and about oneself in relation to other things. Consequently, the biological turn may even further disrupt the notion of what an architect is and does, and what should comprise architectural knowledge and expertise.
The work of the thesis unit is set within the broader contexts of ecological design, climate action, environmental philosophy, regenerative practices, and postnatural studies. These perspectives eschew the culturally constructed duality between built and natural worlds toward an ontology of intertwined and co-creative material vitality and approaches grounded in empathy that resist the confines of instrumentality while engaging with technological, ethical, and aesthetic questions. Topics explored include ideas of nature, landscape theory, ecology and systems in design, biomimicry, biogenic materials, biodigital hybrids, living architectures, ruderal landscapes, animal architectures, nature-based solutions, and biologic and artificial intelligences. Thesis propositions take a range of formats and methods, including material exploration, full scale installation, speculative design, territorial exploration, and theoretical investigation.
Architecture, as an act of design and construction, is, by definition, always at a remove from life processes. One of its primary technical roles is to regulate the exertion of external force on organisms in the form of light, materiality, heating/cooling, and so forth. If architecture becomes evolutionary in imitation of the biological body—even if it is only at the figurative or metaphoric level—there ensures what can only be called a“mimetic crisis”between organism and milieu. Architecture begins tomistakeitselfforanorganismandlifeforatechnology, both of which “mistakes” describe some of the recent work in the field.
Catherine Ingraham, Architecture, Animal, Human
The Shape of Shade Passive Cooling in Extreme Heat Landscapes
Natalie Brown
Extreme heat is becoming one of the most escalating climate threats in the American Southwest, particularly in suburban environments that rely heavily on mechanical cooling. In the Phoenix metro area, prolonged heat waves increasingly threaten vulnerable populations, especially aging communities whose housing and infrastructure were not designed for sustaining extreme temperatures. As climate conditions intensify, new forms of localized and passive heat resilience are urgently needed.
This thesis proposes a prototype network of climate resilience hubs embedded within the floodplain of the Agua Fria River near Sun City, Arizona. Rather than functioning as isolated emergency shelters, the project positions architecture as part of a broader environmental system, employing nature-based solutions to generate localized microclimates.
The floodplain is reimagined as environmental infrastructure that moderates extreme heat through water retention, vegetation, and shading. A restored landscape of water-slowing terraces, desert plant clusters, and shaded pathways connects surrounding neighborhoods to a series of small refuge structures distributed across the site.
Each hub combines an enclosed refuge constructed from compressed earth blocks with a shaded outdoor living space. Passive cooling strategies, such as stack ventilation, thermal mass, and ribbed self-shading systems, create gradients of thermal comfort, allowing outdoor shaded areas to transition into cooler interior spaces during extreme heat events.
Together, these landscape and architectural interventions form a decentralized system of heat resilience, transforming suburban floodplains into adaptive public infrastructure for a warming climate.
Scaffolds for Life A Structure for Nature to Finish
Ranhui Chen
“Leverage points are places in a system where a small change could lead to a large shift.”
— Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems, 2008
“Critters do not exist before their relations; they make each other.”
“Sympoietic systems do not have fixed spatial or temporal boundaries.”
— Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2016
This thesis explores the idea that ecological systems are shaped by relationships, feedback, and distributed agency rather than isolated elements. Drawing on systems thinking and posthumanist theory, it redefines architecture as a participant within multi-species ecologies, rather than a stable, human-centered object.
The thesis proposes an architectural prototype that operates as a mediating framework within an ecological system. Instead of controlling the environment, it activates leverage points: subtle spatial and material conditions that can trigger broader ecological change over time.
At the intervention scale, the architecture takes the form of a porous scaffold between terrains, enabling movement and exchange among light, air, water, plants, and animals. Initially open and undefined, it supports human use while allowing ecological processes to emerge. Over time, the structure is shaped by multi-species interactions. Plants, animals, and environmental forces inhabit and extend the structure over time, through accumulation, feedback, and adaptation. Architecture thus becomes an evolving, relationship-driven condition rather than a finished object.
The thesis frames architecture as a sympoietic system—collectively produced and without fixed boundaries. As a replicable prototype, it proposes a distributed network along the Rouge River, where each instance evolves in response to local conditions. Together, they shift architecture from form to process, from control to participation, and toward a shared multi-species habitat.
Beyond Metabolism A Living Metabolic Architecture for Hong Kong
Xinlei “Sean” Chen
Metabolism is an architectural movement that originated in 1960’s Japan, shaped by its culture and socioeconomic conditions. Metabolism emerged in Japan as an architectural response to postwar reconstruction, rapid urban growth, and the need to imagine the city as an expandable, replaceable structure rather than a fixed composition. This realized the concept of the city as an “evolvable system,” introducing strategies such as modular infrastructures and capsule architectures that allow change based on growth and replacement.
In Hong Kong, the equivalent condition is not postwar urbanization, but rather the tension between extreme development pressure, the legal and cultural protection of Victoria Harbour, and the city’s historical identity as a maritime network. This thesis reinterprets Metabolism through Hong Kong’s harbour conditions and affordances, now focusing on metabolism as a broader concept: a “living” architectural development method with growth cycles through circular systems. The project proposes an adaptive and co-evolutionary floating architecture that grows and changes by docking, clustering, and time-based reconfiguration rather than by permanent land reclamation.
The speculative project explores a clustering and docking logic that follows a part-to-part aggregation and bottom-up growth logic that draws on natural compound reactions. The growth/aggregation process will follow a set of rules that act like “genetic codes,” allowing the whole system to expand, grow, decay, reform, renew, and replace like a “living” thing. What this project is proposing is not a static object dominated by overall form, but a dynamic life system driven by local interactions and metabolic processes (water, energy, material, and waste cycles). It is a prototype that is designed to transform, grow, and evolve in the future; the proposed architectural blueprints are merely the first-generation genes.
Feral Succession Choreographing Regeneration in Ruins of Extraction
Arushi Chopra
The Anthropocene is leaving an indelible mark on the planet, with centuries of industrial urbanization establishing a legacy of extraction and contamination. A global transition towards sustainability is underway, however, it has not curbed the demand for materials, metals, and minerals- continuing to perpetuate cycles of exploitation and extractivism through processes such as mining. Structures we live in and systems we abide by have naturalized the concept of extraction. Landscapes are viewed as valuable only when they provide resources to capitalize on. Mining companies, having exploited the earth’s resources, are abandoning the scars they carve. Mining causes severe harm to ecosystems and dispossesses indigenous communities and habitats, leaving people and wildlife displaced and vulnerable.
In post- extraction landscapes, remediation and rehabilitation can take back the craters and pits, replacing them with thriving ecosystems. Sarah Jaquette Ray states, “a bleak picture is just one side of the story”. Contrary to the model of extraction, rehabilitation is as much an act of social and economic justice as an ecological imperative. Considering the degraded nature of post-mining soils, restoring the landscape that once existed is no longer an efficient model. Peter Del Tredici expresses that the critical question to be addressed is not “What plants grew in the past?” but “What will grow there in the future?” Bamboo is proposed as a radical pioneer species for post-mining remediation for the environmental services it can offer while also empowering impacted communities.
The intention of this thesis is to choreograph processes of regeneration that collapse current extractive systems. The inevitable future appears eerily apocalyptic, but it is possible to initiate a shift in the transverse direction by creating systems that sustain ecosystems and local communities without endangerment or further harm. Feral Succession experiments with the unruly, undeterred nature of bamboo as an advantage in landscapes that cannot support much life. Sustainable landscapes can be spearheaded by bamboo and hardy, native species, creating productive systems that regenerate ecosystems and communities.
Aether’s Fables
Co-Designing
Architecture with the Sky
Alex Landgrave
In an age of increasing technology, human experience of the sky has shifted from direct observation to abstract measurement. The atmosphere is often understood through scientific data, meteorological systems, and mechanical regulation, creating a cultural and perceptual distance between people and the environmental forces that shape daily life. This thesis investigates how architecture might re-establish a relationship with the sky by treating atmospheric forces as collaborators in the design process.
Aether’s Fables: Co-Designing Architecture with the Sky, uses fables to scaffold and propel a design methodology. Historically, fables have used storytelling to frame moral relationships between humans and the natural world. In this thesis, fables become a lens for exploring architecture’s relationship with the atmosphere through a series of written narratives, drawings, and physical models.
The work unfolds across three thematic explorations. The first examines the history of the sky through the cultural and scientific ways humans have observed and measured the atmosphere and reveals an increasing detachment from its presence. The second speculates on unrealized futures, imagining dreamlike cloud cities alongside visions of polluted and unstable atmospheric environments. The third translates these explorations into architectural reality, proposing a dwelling shaped through collaboration with atmospheric agents such as light and wind. Through exploration of different design mediums, the thesis argues for an architecture that engages the sky not as backdrop but as co-designer, fostering renewed awareness of the atmospheric systems that sustain life.
A Kitchen that Grows Care and Cultivation in the Home
Jordan Lindberg
Algae is one of the few organisms that can produce air, food, and material at a small scale. Living with it requires us to pay attention in ways we have mostly forgotten. Kitchens used to be a network of care. The hearth was at the center of the home, a place where cooking, washing, and tending to the household all unfolded together with supporting systems alongside it. The smells, the heat, and the mess of cooking became the center of activity and a part of daily life. Over time, kitchens became part of invisible city networks, their work largely hidden and no longer at the center of the home.
This thesis envisions a kitchen where growth, care, and cooking merge. Counters, prep areas, and shared spaces host multiple processes at once, allowing humans and algae to exist in rhythm. Daily acts of misting, observation, and tending form occupiable spaces that hold moisture, while vessels catch light and air. The home becomes an ongoing network of care between people and the microbes around them.
Through material explorations, the work investigates how the kitchen can host growth, nourishment, and small-scale production, and how the stewardship of algae reshapes domestic life. Rather than focusing on production alone, it considers the daily tending and maintenance required to support living systems. Daily habits begin to shift alongside algae, where the hum of supporting systems and the movement of growth take on a presence within the home. The gifts of algae, air, food, and material, emerge in response to care, making the kitchen a space of interdependence.
Slow Ground Devices for Caring Urban Soil
Qiting Mo
Beneath the city lies a living ground. Urban soil is not simply a surface to build upon, but a dynamic ecological system where organic matter, roots, microorganisms, and time slowly work together to sustain urban landscapes. Yet these processes remain largely invisible in architecture and urban design.
Design for living ground operates through a series of “soil recipes” and spatial devices that work together to engage, care for, and celebrate urban soil. Rather than treating soil as a passive substrate, the project frames design as a set of small, repeatable actions—such as gathering organic matter, loosening compacted ground, and returning nutrients—that unfold over time and invite ongoing participation.
Spatial strategies and lightweight structures collaborate with these soil recipes, mediating between human activity and subterranean ecologies. Together, they create moments where soil can be observed, touched, and cared for, making its slow processes visible and transforming everyday urban spaces into sites of ecological awareness and collective maintenance.
Through these interventions, the project reframes soil not as hidden infrastructure but as a shared urban responsibility. By revealing the slow metabolism beneath cities, the thesis proposes a shift from designing finished landscapes toward cultivating ongoing relationships with the living ground.
Post Extraction
Speculative Futures for Michigan’s Upper Peninsula
Riley Montgomery
Modern architecture’s obsession with permanence, stability, and private ownership is rooted in colonial systems that defined land as a territorial asset to be secured through “forever” construction. As climate instability accelerates, and extractive economies re-emerge under the guise of renewable energy transition, this thesis asks how architecture might refuse these inherited logics and instead operate as a spatial practice of repair, adaptability, and reciprocity. This thesis explores these dynamics in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where historic copper, iron, and timber industries displaced Anishinaabe communities, fragmented ecosystems, and produced abandoned infrastructures alongside a new designation as a “climate haven.” Rather than framing the region solely as a site for development, the project positions it as an opportunity for imagining systems of care.
Today, the Upper Peninsula faces a convergence of conditions: an aging and declining population, widespread absentee and foreign land ownership, and renewed speculation around reopening copper and nickel mines driven by demand for “green” technologies. Its branding as a climate refuge risks triggering new waves of investment that repeat historical patterns of exploitation. This thesis treats these pressures not as isolated problems but as a critical moment for anticipatory planning, asking how architecture might intervene before another cycle of irreversible transformation solidifies.
Through world-building, the project imagines speculative futures decades ahead, exploring how land, buildings, and infrastructure might evolve if extractive logics are refused. A series of time-based scroll drawings traces the region from deep geological time through Indigenous stewardship and industrial extraction before projecting multiple possible futures shaped by different socio-political conditions. The thesis operates across scales by mapping the broader region and proposing architectural interventions. By operating beyond immediate feasibility, the project uses speculation as a tool for foresight, offering architecture as a mediator between deep time, uncertain futures, and the urgent need for more ethical ways of inhabiting ground.
The Quiet Fold Presence without Permanence
Cameron Mussay
This thesis explores how architecture can support a quieter and more temporary relationship with the landscape. Rather than focusing on permanence, it draws inspiration from the ethics and experiences of camping, where inhabitation is brief, intentional, and responsive to the surrounding environment. Camping encourages a heightened awareness of place through silence, observation, and physical engagement with one’s shelter. Moments such as light filtering through trees, the sound of wind moving through branches, or the stillness of sitting beside water reveal how simple spatial conditions can deepen our awareness of both landscape and self.
The project proposes a folded architectural structure that creates a small reflection space within the landscape. Folding operates as both a spatial and ethical strategy, allowing the structure to be portable, deployable, and reversible while maintaining a light footprint. Inspired by the act of pitching a tent, the structure is not simply encountered as a finished object but understood through its assembly. It encourages direct engagement between user, material, and site. The form follows a spiraling geometry, transitioning from a grounded, structural base to a more porous upper canopy that filters light. Integrated seating supports stillness rather than movement, positioning the structure as a place to pause, observe, and reflect within the landscape.
More broadly, this thesis questions the assumption that architecture must be permenant to be meaningful. Instead, it proposes an alternative approach grounded in temporality, mobility, and restraint. By drawing from the ethics of camping, the project explores how architecture can exist in cycles of arrival and departure, fostering an attentive relationship with the environment. In doing so, it reframes architecture not as a lasting object imposed on the landscape, but as a temporary condition that heightens awareness, supports reflection, and ultimately leaves a site unchanged.
When the bird slowly lands Design for cities’ non-human species
Pute Qiu
Architecture is often defined as a space belonging to humans, but in reality, areas neglected by humans often become havens for non-human creatures. With spaces that originally belonged to them gradually being encroached upon by humans, should we consider these unmanaged spaces as spaces that serve as a link for coexistence between humans and these inhabitants? This thesis uses the spatiotemporal transformation of migratory birds as an anchor point to explore the spaces and design forms within urban areas that hold these possibilities.
Migratory birds move through the city only briefly each year. This thesis proposes a distributed network of architectural habitats grafted with everyday urban spaces. Narrowing the focus to Chicago, floating wetland-like structures in the water bodies provide resting grounds for waterfowl and support aquatic life below, while roof perching-gardens and foldable shelter façades offer vegetation, insects, and spaces to rest across the city.
When birds depart, nutrients they leave behind are captured by ecological buffering layers, stimulating the growth of plants, insects, and aquatic organisms, gradually regenerating resources for the next migratory cycle.
This cycle turns short-term migration events into long-term ecological productivity. Architecture serves not only as shelter but also as a seasonal framework that supports migratory birds and the urban ecosystems cohabited by humans. Rather than a temporary or experimental condition, this thesis positions human and non-human coexistence as an enduring urban paradigm.
Salvage Circuit Hyperlocal Material Reuse Systems
Alex Anne White
Salvage Circuit investigates the interconnected systems of current material production practices in Southeast Michigan. The exploration of local materials and a commitment to upcycling will create smaller regenerative material loops that will positively influence the resilience of structures and redefine architectural practice.
The interconnected systems of current production practices cause climate catastrophe through the large, linear material footprints. Sustainability is no longer sufficient. Designing for abundance is necessary to go beyond doing less harm and actively contribute to ecological and social growth. In the age of the Anthropocene, local material connections are imperative to the resilience of communities.
A holistic understanding of our surroundings is created by analyzing local building materials and emphasizing smaller circular economies. By fostering an alternative practice of care in communities, the built environment becomes a social catalyst through direct material influence. A material field guide analyzes where materials are harvested, produced, and transported and where they end up after demolition. The production manual addresses key agents in building with policy and systems of material reuse. The set of resources challenges the way architects, builders, and citizens navigate growth.
This approach to sustainable design goes beyond renewable resources to focus on systems and economies and critique existing design and building practices. Salvage Circuit proposes a necessary shift in practice that changes the way communities navigate growth in the Anthropocene.
Architecture in Living Cycles
Biomaterials, Decay,
and the Aesthetics of Material Transformation
Yufei Zhu
Contemporary architecture largely assumes that building materials must be stable, durable, and resistant to change. Biological materials challenge this assumption. Materials such as mycelium, bioplastics, and hemp-based composites are inherently dynamic: they grow, transform, and decay over time. Rather than attempting to stabilize these materials to mimic conventional construction materials, this thesis investigates how design might operate when material transformation is understood as a normal and productive condition.
This thesis explores the relationship between biomaterials, decay, and architectural aesthetics through a material lifecycle framework. Instead of focusing solely on fabrication, the project traces materials through a sequence of stages: formation or growth, fabrication, architectural placement, environmental exposure, and eventual transformation or decomposition. Through this approach, decay is not treated as failure but as a generative process that produces new textures, patterns, and spatial qualities.
The thesis develops a series of small-scale material experiments using mycelium, bioplastics, and hempcrete. These materials are fabricated into samples and exposed to outdoor environmental conditions, where their changes are documented over time. Observations focus not only on physical degradation but also on visual and sensory transformations, including changes in surface texture, color, deformation, and biological growth.
The project then translates these observations into architectural speculation. Rather than proposing biomaterials as structural replacements, the research examines their potential roles as architectural skins, interior surfaces, membranes, and replaceable layers: positions within buildings where transformation and decay may be accommodated rather than resisted.
Ultimately, this thesis proposes a shift in how architecture understands material permanence. By engaging with biological materials as part of living cycles, architecture can begin to incorporate processes of growth, decay, care, and renewal as integral components of design.
