Reviews
Post-Professional M. Arch II Independent Design Research Studio Final Review
ARCH 5005 & 5006: Independent Design Research Studio
Instructors: Bimal Mendis and Deborah Garcia
Teaching Fellow: Izzy Kornblatt
Instructors: Bimal Mendis and Deborah Garcia
Teaching Fellow: Izzy Kornblatt
Ubiquitania
Benjamin Luebkemann
Trattie Davies, Charles Musser, advisors
In a span much less than predicted, the continent was conquered coast to coast and a few feet deep. And beneath this American surface runs its lifeblood of development—a vein of contagious fanaticism that entrances the rational and irrational alike into a desperate frenzy of solutionism. Look to the landscape and relish in their remnants—memorials and trash heaps bestowed equal veneration as symbols of having done something. This observational survey adopts the methodology of the transect index. The national transect charts a westward course between the 41st and 42nd parallels, following the original colonial land claim of Connecticut from the Atlantic to Pacific. The transect collates an index of found objects which operates as a new set of potential initial points, typological emblems of American expansion. In this manic landscape, we find Ubiquitania — a place where the extraordinary is the ordinary and the exception is the rule. of order. The invisible craft that turns chaos into ground and holds the ship of humanity fast to the planet.
Framework of Survivial in the Open Prison
Rizek Bahbah
Tatiana Bilbao, Jordan Carver, advisors
Framework of Survival examines how Palestinians in Gaza transform destruction into resistance through building. Emergency architecture becomes a political act, asserting life where displacement seeks to erase it. Improvised, temporary structures reject enforced absence and affirm presence. Communities rebuild with inherited knowledge, adapting ruins into shelter and sustaining self-build traditions. Places like Al-Mawasi show how necessity reshapes space under siege.
The project frames architecture as resistance against genocide: every rebuilt wall is a refusal to disappear. By turning the same tools used to extract information into tools that transmit knowledge, skill, and solidarity back to Gaza, it proposes a framework of survival.
By studying these strategies, the project also questions dominant reconstruction models that erase the practices that allowed communities to survive. Instead, it asks what a future Palestinian house, neighborhood, or city might look like if collective knowledge, adaptability, and self-build traditions became the foundation for rebuilding.
Jerusalem (Re)Narrated
Yasmin Mansour
Jordan Carver, Summer Sutton, advisors
This thesis responds to nineteenth and early twentieth-century European writings, maps, and visual representations that framed Jerusalem as a lost Holy Land awaiting rediscovery, excavation, or preservation. These depictions flattened the city’s urban fabric and erased its architectural and social complexity, portraying Jerusalem as timeless and abandoned rather than inhabited and continuously evolving.
Drawing on the diaries of Jerusalem residents (most notably Khalil al-Sakakini, Wasif Jawhariyyeh, and Salih Turjman) the project foregrounds local voices that document everyday life in the city and its surrounding villages during the transition from late Ottoman rule to the British Mandate. These firsthand accounts reveal intimate relationships between people, architecture, and landscape at a moment when colonial narratives and planning interventions were reshaping the city. The research is translated into an architectural graphic narrative in which the medieval Jerusalemite geographer al-Maqdisi transforms into a bird and travels across time, observing the city through different historical moments and re-narrating its architecture through lived experience.
Reimagining Urban Topography
Konstantin Frolov
Nicholas McDermott, advisor
The “Archaeosphere,” the thick strata of human interaction, infrastructure, and architectural remains, defines the hidden depth of our cities. Yet, in the modern metropolis, this layer is repressed beneath a conceptually impermeable crust of asphalt. Using New York’s City Hall Park as a case study, this project investigates the site as a dense palimpsest of dormant history, from 18th-century foundations to unused subway stations. By thickening the urban threshold, the project unveils these buried layers to reframe the park from a fenced monument of administrative authority into a site of civic agency. It proposes a new “City Hall”: a civic typology that integrates the complex, vital life of the subterranean with the public realm. Ultimately, the work reimagines the ground not as a barrier, but as a “Hall for the City,” a living room where the intersection of history, technology, and community establishes a new, holistic way of living in the metropolis.
What We Carry, What We Keep
Sophia Bachas-Daunert
Joyce Hsiang, advisor
Increasingly strong and frequent hurricanes have altered shorelines and disrupted how communities understand and hold on to the idea of home. Evacuation becomes an act of distillation, where people gather objects that hold identity when the house itself may not survive. What We Carry, What We Keep explores how architecture might respond to the intangible dimensions of disaster, foregrounding loss, memory, and belonging. It proposes a new typology dedicated to safeguarding the belongings that anchor people’s identities, creating spaces where memory can persist even after structures are gone. Existing evacuation infrastructures offer safety but rarely continuity, so this project aims to preserve the ties that bind people to place. Drawing from coastal remnants such as water cisterns and towers, lighthouses, and observation structures, the typology reimagines them as vessels for memory and recovery. Distributed across vulnerable urban areas like the Florida Keys, they form an archipelago of identity and care.
Cartographies of Knowledge Transfer
Meghana Ramesh
Vyjayanthi Rao, Summer Sutton, advisors
Educational spaces have long embodied power, social structure, and identity, operating as institutions that integrate individuals into the logics of the present order. This thesis asks: how can learning become a practice of freedom—an act of liberation? Drawing on the idea that cities themselves hold vast, often underutilized reservoirs of knowledge, it positions urban space as a pedagogical tool.
The project situates a neighborhood in Bangalore, India, as both a spatial and epistemic site where embodied knowledge circulates through everyday labour and intergenerational exchange. By linking the tactile use of tools and materials to broader civic and spatial infrastructures, it traces how these practices move between domestic and public life. The project engages the operational logics of the conservancy—a distributed labor transit network, to reimagine it as an urban school. In doing so, it challenges colonial frameworks and caste hierarchies that have historically shaped how labour is seen and valued.
Move Out, Stay In, Come Back
Yixing (Cindy) Liu
Norma Barbacci, advisor
“Move Out, Stay In” is the slogan of China’s Targeted Poverty Alleviation Relocation Program. Migrant resettlement villages were built to relocate residents from traditional Yaodong dwellings on the Loess Plateau. Despite good intentions, the program has produced uneven outcomes: limited income opportunities, insufficient social infrastructure, and the erosion of collective identity have contributed to continued population decline. As a result, many Yaodong villages today stand abandoned, while the new settlements struggle to sustain viable communities.
This project aims to enhance livability, preserve cultural continuity, and strengthen community identity by reconciling these two village types into a living ecosystem. By activating underutilized spaces into essential social infrastructure that supports everyday life, the project forges a lateral network resisting the gravitational pull toward the urban centers and potentially attracting younger generations to return. It envisions the next step — “Come Back,” which also means “Move Forward” — toward a future that integrates tradition with new realities.
A Tale of Two Cities
Taesha Aurora
Alan Plattus, Vyjayanthi Rao, advisors
This thesis is situated in Gurgaon, a city exemplifying the contradictions of India’s urban transition. Once an agrarian site, it’s now dubbed India’s “Millenial City” due to rapid development. Despite this “growth,” India’s political climate and millennia old caste-system continue to affect marginalized migrant workers and informal labourers whose contributions to the city’s physical and economic infrastructure remain invisible. Unchecked urban development causes an AQI crisis - construction activities cause 30% of the region’s air pollution. To mitigate this issue, a zoning law requires “windbreaking sheets at a height of 3 meters to enclose construction sites.” Developers use metal sheets to enclose sites.
The law claims to prevent dust from escaping construction sites while it ends up capturing that dust within the sheet- where urban India’s most vulnerable population lives - construction workers and their families. This project intervenes at the scale of the sheet - which is embedded in the DNA of India’s urban fabric being used in creative ways to build makeshift shelters, fences, small commercial shacks and even being integrated into formal houses. The project imagines a bamboo-jute panel which would create a breathable barrier, and allow for the same construction site creativity to shape and appropriate its uses.
Xawümen: Frontier as Political Shared Space
Sebastián Simonetti Grez
Jordan Carver, Tatiana Bilbao, advisors
This research explores how architecture can intervene in the borders of politically contested territories. Currently, architecture has been used as an element of division and denial. But what if architecture could transform these places of confrontation into spaces of agonistic negotiation?
The research focuses on the Mapuche conflict in Chile, where ongoing territorial disputes between communities and state have developed after centuries of dispossession. Revisiting both the Parlamentos—treaties that defined the Bio-Bio River as a shared frontier—and the Mapuche concept Xawümen—borders understood as shared spaces—the research contrasts past and present border practices. It proposes new “in-between spaces” seeking to materialize coexistence and mutual recognition through design, and offering an alternative to current models of territorial separation. The design explores an itinerant architectural artifact that moves through the territory, questioning the idea of site and land division. Air does not recognize borders or frontiers. The prototype uses floating balloons positioned above existing fences to create temporary spaces of encounter for communities on either side. The intention is not to resolve the conflict but to serve as a starting point for dialogue—an “architectural event” that enables different communities sharing the same territory to meet and engage.
What It Takes to Age in Place
Aya Wen
Emily Abruzzo, Joel Sanders, advisors
Set within Japan’s aging Danchi communities, this project investigates how adaptable housing and intergenerational programs can transform stigmatized social housing complexes into integral components of the surrounding neighborhood. Built during the postwar period as symbols of modern living, many Danchi now face decline within Japan’s super-aging society. As younger residents move away, numerous units remain vacant while elderly residents often live alone, resulting in social isolation and the fragmentation of once vibrant communities. Increasingly disconnected from the urban fabric, these complexes are frequently perceived as outdated or neglected.
Rather than erasing its history through demolition, the thesis proposes preserving the existing architecture while introducing new structure alongside them. The project reimagines the Danchi as a place where older and younger generations can coexist, support one another, and age in place. By reactivating the typology as housing, cultural space, and community archive, the project seeks to restore the dignity and relevance the Danchi once embodied. Instead of treating the elderly and aging architecture as broken elements to be removed, this thesis argues for honoring and integrating them back to the society, cultivating a culture that values the full lifespan of both human life and life of architecture.
Dormant Circuits: Re-staging the DMZ Buffer
Alexander Jeong
Sunil Bald, advisor
The Korean DMZ is a Border. False. The Korean DMZ is a Buffer Zone—a floating cloud of public memories and productive frictions creating a -shared- space between states. The nature of the buffer is heterotopic, residing in the domain of the XL. It is the ultimate non-site, generating a condition of permanent suspension, awaiting future connection. Proximity to the buffer spawns new spatial crossings. The thesis explores the Korean DMZ buffer beyond an uncanny heterotopic condition, reframing it as a way of thinking about architectural temporality within the suspended space between states. At the level of connection is the train and rail, embedded with diplomacy and promise. A train from Dorasan Station in the south crossing toward the northern industrial complex for joint economic activity has long witnessed negotiation—breaking tracks, founding structures, disconnecting and reconnecting. The site becomes a junction through the rail as spatial device at a point of greatest tension, a broken circuit waiting to reconnect. The project asks: What happens if the train never arrives, suspended within the buffer, reactivating dormant circuits? The train becomes a connector between sites of question, stealthed into land, hidden from surveillance. This becomes state and theatre folded inside the buffer, a stage for performance, choreography, and negotiation.
Re_Claiming Airspace
Eli Aerden
Antonia Devine, Alan Organschi, advisors
Many metropolitan areas in the United States are facing the same condition: emptiness. As cities stretch into their suburban edges, their cores are being quietly hollowed out. New working patterns and technological shifts have pushed large portions of the office landscape into obsolescence. The scale is difficult to ignore. In San Francisco, vacant office space now accounts for almost half of the downtown area.
What alternatives exist for engaging this vacant stock and unlocking its urban potential? And can this emptiness become an opening to imagine fullness in a more vibrant and multi programmatic way? This thesis explores these questions through case studies across major U.S. downtowns, focusing on places where vacancy is most present. By examining the interests of different stakeholders and the regulatory contexts that shape them, it proposes a framework that rethinks reuse through three intertwined motives: ecological reasons that question the environmental cost of demolition, urban reasons that recognize the spatial and social potential of reactivated towers, and financial reasons that reveal the economic structures determining feasibility. The outcome is a framework that challenges the dominant one-size-fits-all conversion model and reformulates the role of the architect within the practice of reuse.
In Your Front Yard: What Leaves as Waste Returns
Megan Ju
Joyce Hsiang, advisor
Waste is a commodity with a broken end.
Following the path of least resistance, low costs, looser rules, affluent nations export plastic waste to developing nations under the guise of “recycling” shifts burden onto countries that often lack the infrastructure to manage it. This asymmetric flow is a form of waste colonialism, a logistics that extracts margins and externalizes damage.
This project reverses that flow. It proposes an offshore trans-shipment hub at the New York–New Jersey sea threshold that acts as a spatial switch, intercepting the export stream and recasting the ocean’s legal seam as a civic threshold. Rather than disappearing offshore, exported plastic residues are routed back to the centers of consumption as landfill monuments. Architecture operates as protocol and presence, making the remainder visible and nontransferable. It is a standing manifesto from those who live with the residue: we are not the trash can.
Becoming Ruin
Nick Wang
George Knight, advisor
This thesis redefines the “ruin” not as a static remnant but as an ongoing process of becoming—biological, social, and infrastructural. Using Pompeii as a case, it observes how daily systems—electric cables, scaffolding, drainage, signage— intersect with remnants, creating new frictions and narratives. The project reads ruin as a living cycle between decay and renewal, visibility and erasure. Methodologically, it maps Pompeii through acts of overlap and dislocation, suggesting that ruins are provisional and mutable fields where history, maintenance, and inhabitation continuously rewrite one another.
Archicraft
Tomas Altobello
John Durham Peters, advisor
Archicraft argues that architecture is an elemental human Technik, the craft that turns the raw element of earth into a habitable medium. Drawing on John Durham Peters’s The Marvelous Clouds, the project reframes architecture as an “infrastructure of being,” a Promethean compensation for humanity’s lack of natural adaptation. Like the ship that allows life on the hostile sea, architecture is the vessel that allows dwelling on the hostile land. It makes the ground legible and durable by transforming soil into structure, air into atmosphere, and fire into domestic warmth. Architecture, in this sense, must not mean but be: it is less a language than a life-support system.
This framework is grounded, literally, in the landscape of the First World War. The trench system serves as a case study for Archicraft: a vast, improvised city beneath the surface where the earth itself became wall, floor, and ceiling. Within this network, modern infrastructures, telephone lines, radio stations, drainage channels, electric wiring, roads, and aerial mapping were woven directly into the land, turning terrain into a living medium of habitation and communication. Through this lens, Archicraft exposes architecture’s double condition as both the means of endurance and the agent of order. The invisible craft that turns chaos into ground and holds the ship of humanity fast to the planet.
Hotel at Sea: Designing the Afterlife of an Oil Rig
Marusya Bakhrameeva
Violette de la Selle, advisor
Traditional hospitality is often located in pristine landscapes, promising escape while contributing to their gradual degradation. What if we directed hospitality toward landscapes already shaped by extraction in ways that could benefit them?
This thesis focuses on Platform Holly, a decommissioned oil rig off the coast of California. Oil extraction began here because of fossilized remains of past ecosystems; millions of years later, these traces of life reappear in another form. Since its installation, the extraction machine has evolved into a thriving ecosystem. Its steel jacket now functions as a vertical reef, attracting invertebrates, fish, birds, and marine mammals.
Hotel at Sea engages this industrial ruin as a multispecies hospitality environment. Guests encounter an evolving biome and its layered histories, suggesting that inhabiting industrial ruins may help us understand extraction and practice new forms of coexistence with the life that emerges around them.
Fluid State: A Hydrosocial Vision for Hanoi
Duy Nguyen
Anthony Acciavatti, advisor
Situated between the currents of the Red River and the dikes that separate it from downtown Hanoi, Bai Giua is an urban floodplain caught in the tension between humanity and nature. It is constantly shaped by river currents, monsoon rains, floods, and the socio-economic activities of its residents, resulting in a defining characteristic of impermanence. Recent upstream control of the river has stabilized water levels in Bai Giua, raising questions about its future. However, the resulting top-down master plan neglects the existing social fabric, harms the floodplain’s ecology, and disrupts the natural water cycle. This thesis examines the complex relationship between humans and water, emphasizing the seasonal storms and floods residents endure, as well as the lack of local infrastructure to efficiently manage water. It proposes a hydrosocial future for Bai Giua, where architecture functions as a watershed. The interventions make civic the often hidden water infrastructure while embracing the site transience through rainwater capture, localized water resources, flood reduction, and economic empowerment.