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2020 Student Thesis Showcase - Part I

Have you ever wondered what students design in architecture school? A few years ago, we started an Instagram account called IMADETHAT_ to curate student work from across North America. Now, we have nearly 3,000 projects featured for you to view. In this series, we are featuring thesis projects of recent graduates to give you a glimpse into what architecture students create while in school. Each week, for the rest of the summer, we will be curating five projects that highlight unique aspects of design. In this week’s group, the research ranges from urban scale designs focused on climate change to a proposal for a new type of collective housing and so much in between. Check back each week for new projects. 

In the meantime, Archinect has also created a series featuring the work of 2020 graduates in architecture and design programs. Check out the full list, here .

Redefining the Gradient by Kate Katz and Ryan Shaaban, Tulane University, M.Arch ‘20

Thesis Advisors: Cordula Roser Gray and Ammar Eloueini / Course: 01-SP20-Thesis Studio

Sea level rise has become a major concern for coastal cities due to the economic and cultural importance tied to their proximity to water. These cities have sustained their livelihood in low-lying elevations through the process of filling, bridging, and raising land over coastal ecosystems, replacing their ecological value with infrastructures focused on defining the edge between city and nature. Hard infrastructures have been employed to maintain urban landscapes but have minimal capacity for both human and non-human engagement due to their monofunctional applications focused on separating conditions rather than integrating them. They produce short-term gains with long-term consequences, replacing and restricting ecosystems and acting as physical barriers in a context defined by seasonal transition. 

To address the issues of hard infrastructure and sea level rise, this thesis proposes an alternative design strategy that incorporates the dynamic water system into the urban grid network. San Francisco was chosen as the location of study as it is a peninsula where a majority of the predicted inundation occurs on the eastern bayside. In this estuary, there were over 500 acres of ecologically rich tidal marshlands that were filled in during the late 1800s. To protect these new lands, the Embarcadero Sea Wall was built in 1916 and is now in a state of neglect. The city has set aside $5 billion for repairs but, instead of pouring more money into a broken system, we propose an investment in new multi-functional ecologically-responsive strategies. 

As sea levels rise, the city will be inundated with water, creating the opportunity to develop a new circulation system that maintains accessibility throughout areas located in the flood zone. In this proposal, we’ve designed a connective network where instance moments become moments of pause and relief to enjoy the new cityscape in a dynamic maritime district. 

On the lower level, paths widen to become plazas while on the upper level, they become breakout destinations which can connect to certain occupiable rooftops that are given to the public realm. The bases of carved canals become seeding grounds for plants and aquatic life as the water level rises over time. Buildings can protect high-risk floors through floodproofing and structural encasement combined with adaptive floorplates to maintain the use of lower levels. The floating walkway is composed of modular units that are buoyant, allowing the pedestrian paths to conform and fluctuate with diurnal tidal changes. The composition of the units creates street furniture and apertures to engage with the ecologies below while enabling a once restricted landscape of wetlands to take place within the city. 

The new vision of the public realm in this waterfront district hopes to shine an optimistic light on how we can live with nature once again as we deal with the consequences of climate change.

Unearthing the Black Aesthetic by Demar Matthews, Woodbury University, M.Arch ‘20

Advisor: Ryan Tyler Martinez Featured on Archinect

“Unearthing The Black Aesthetic” highlights South Central Los Angeles’s (or Black Los Angeles’s) unique positioning as a dynamic hub of Black culture and creativity. South Central is the densest population of African Americans west of the Mississippi. While every historically Black neighborhood in Los Angeles has experienced displacement, the neighborhood of Watts was hit particularly hard. As more and more Black Angelenos are forced for one reason or another to relocate, we are losing our history and connection to Los Angeles.

As a way to fight this gentrification, we are developing an architectural language derived from Black culture. So many cultures have their own architectural styles based on values, goals, morals, and customs shared by their society. When these cultures have relocated to America, to keep their culture and values intact, they bought land and built in the image of their homelands. That is not true for Black people in America. In fact, until 1968, Black people had no rights to own property in Los Angeles. While others began a race to acquire land in 1492, building homes and communities in their image, we started running 476 years after the race began. What percentage of land was left for Blacks to acquire? How then can we advance the development of a Black aesthetic in architecture?

This project, most importantly, is a collaboration with the community that will be for us and by us. My goal is to take control of our image in architecture; to elevate, not denigrate, Black life and culture. Ultimately, we envision repeating this process in nine historically Black cities in America to develop an architectural language that will vary based on the history and specificities of Black culture in each area.

KILLING IT: The Life and Death of Great American Cities by Amanda Golemba, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, M.Arch ’20

Advisors: Nikole Bouchard, Jasmine Benyamin, and Erik Hancock / Independent Design Thesis

For decades, post-industrial cities throughout the United States have been quietly erased through self-imposed tabula rasa demolition. If considered at all, demolition is touted as the mechanism for removing unsightly blight, promoting safety, and discarding the obsolete and the unwanted. Once deemed unworthy, rarely does a building survive the threat of demolition. 

In the last decade, the City of Chicago has erased over 13,000 buildings with 225 in just the last four months. Not only does this mass erasure eradicate the material and the spatial, but it permanently wipes the remnants of human bodies, values, and history — a complete annulment of event, time, and memory. 

But why do we feel the need to erase in order to make progress?

Our current path has led to a built environment that is becoming more and more uniform and sterile. Much of America has become standardized, mixed-use developments; neighborhoods of cookie-cutter homes and the excessive use of synthetic, toxic building materials. A uniform world is a boring one that has little room for creativity, individuality, or authenticity.

This thesis, “KILLING IT,” is a design proposal for a traveling exhibition that seeks to change perceptions of the existing city fabric by visualizing patterns of erasure, questioning the resultant implications and effects of that erasure, and proposing an alternative fate. “KILLING IT” confronts the inherently violent aspects of architecture and explores that violence through the intentionally jarring, uncomfortable, and absurd analogy of murder. This analogy is a lens through which to trace the violent, intentional, and premature ending and sterilization of the existing built environment. After all, as Bernard Tschumi said, “To really appreciate architecture, you may even need to commit a murder.”1 But murder is not just about the events that take place within a building, it is also the material reality of the building itself. 

Over the life of a building, scarring, moments in time, and decay layer to create an inhabitable palimpsest of memory. This traveling exhibition is infused with the palimpsest concept by investigating strategies of layering, modularity, flexibility, transparency, and building remains, while layering them together to form a system that operates as an inhabitable core model collage. Each individual exhibition simultaneously memorializes the violence that happened at that particular site and implements murderous adaptive reuse strategies through collage and salvage material to expose what could have been.

If we continue down our current path, we will only continue to make the same mistakes and achieve the same monotonous, sterilizing results we currently see in every American city and suburb. We need to embrace a new path that values authenticity, celebrates the scars and traces of the past, and carries memories into the future. By reimaging what death can mean and addressing cycles of violence, “KILLING IT” proposes an optimistic vision for the future of American cities. 

• Tschumi, Bernard. “Questions of space: lectures on architecture” (ed. 1990)

A New Prototype for Collective Housing by Juan Acosta and Gable Bostic, University of Texas at Austin, M.Arch ‘20

Advisor: Martin Haettasch / Course: Integrative Design Studio Read more: https://soa.utexas.edu/work/new-prototype-collective-housing

Austin is a city that faces extreme housing pressures. This problem is framed almost exclusively in terms of supply and demand, and the related question of affordability. For architects, however, a more productive question is: Will this new quantity produce a new quality of housing? 

How do we live in the city, how do we create individual and collective identity through architecture, and what are the urban consequences? This studio investigates new urban housing types, smaller than an apartment block yet larger and denser than a detached house. Critically assessing existing typologies, we ask the question: How can the comforts of the individual house be reconfigured to form new types of residential urban fabric beyond the entropy of tract housing or the formulaic denominator of “mixed-use.” The nature of the integrative design studio allowed for the testing of material systems and construction techniques that have long had an important economic and ecological impact.

“A New Prototype for Collective Housing” addresses collectivity in both a formal and social sense, existing between the commercial and residential scales present in Austin’s St. John neighborhood as it straddles the I-35 corridor; a normative American condition. A diversity of programs, and multigenerational living, create an inherently diverse community. Additionally, a courtyard typology is used to negotiate the spectrum of private and shared space. Volumes, comprising multiple housing units ranging from studio apartments to four bedrooms, penetrate a commercial plinth that circulates both residents and mechanical systems. The use of heavy timber ensures an equitable use of resources while imbuing the project with a familiar material character.

ELSEWHERE, OR ELSE WHERE? by Brenda (Bz) Zhang, University of California at Berkeley, M.Arch ’20

Advisors: Andrew Atwood and Neyran Turan See more: https://www.brendazhang.com/#/elsewhere-or-else-where/

“ELSEWHERE, OR ELSE WHERE?” is an architectural fever dream about the San Francisco Bay Area. Beginning with the premise that two common ideas of Place—Home and Elsewhere—are no longer useful, the project wonders how disciplinary tools of architecture can be used to shape new stories about where we are.

For our purposes, “Home,” although primarily used to describe a place of domestic habitation, is also referring generally to a “familiar or usual setting,” as in home-base, home-court, home-page, and even home-button. As a counterpoint, Elsewhere shifts our attention “in or to another place,” away. This thesis is situated both in the literal spaces of Elsewhere and Home (landfills, houses, wilderness, base camps, wastelands, hometowns) and in their culturally constructed space (value-embedded narratives determining whether something belongs, and to whom). Since we construct both narratives through principles of exclusion, Elsewhere is a lot closer to Home than we say. These hybrid spaces—domestic and industrial, urban and hinterland, natural and built—are investigated as found conditions of the Anthropocene and potential sites for new understandings of Place.

Ultimately, this thesis attempts to challenge conventional notions of what architects could do with our existing skill sets, just by shifting our attention—Elsewhere. The sites shown here and the concerns they represent undeniably exist, but because of the ways Western architecture draws thick boundaries between and around them, they resist architectural focus—to our detriment.

In reworking the physical and cultural constructions of Homes and Elsewheres, architects are uniquely positioned to go beyond diagnostics in visualizing and designing how, where, and why we build. While this project looks specifically at two particular stories we tell about where we are, the overall objective is to provoke new approaches to how we construct Place—both physically and culturally—within or without our discipline.

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thesis: The Latest Architecture and News

The second studio podcast: preparing for architecture thesis.

The Second Studio (formerly The Midnight Charette) is an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. Hosted by Architects David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, it features different creative professionals in unscripted conversations that allow for thoughtful takes and personal discussions.

A variety of subjects are covered with honesty and humor: some episodes are interviews, while others are tips for fellow designers, reviews of buildings and other projects, or casual explorations of everyday life and design. The Second Studio is also available on iTunes , Spotify , and YouTube .

This week David and Marina discuss undergraduate architecture thesis projects and studios, covering the differences between thesis projects, capstone projects, and dissertations; how to select a thesis topic; how to choose the right studio/professor; the value of doing a thesis; the unique challenges of thesis; and more.

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UnBuilding Building

Our built environment is in a constant state of destabilization by changing environments, influences, and functions. In a landscape where architecture is often pushed to sublimate into other types of creative practices, permanence in architecture is no longer something that can be taken for granted. We confront this question of permanence of buildings through actively constructing

Architectural Thesis Award - ATA2020

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Prize-Winning Harvard GSD Thesis Questions the Skin-Deep Application of Vernacular Design

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Ziwei’s thesis sought to re-approach the typical developer project in China , and demonstrate the capacity of the vernacular image to positively-effect the sequence, perception, and exposure of space. To test this, the project was placed on Chongqing, a typical second-tier city in China with a concentration of XL developer projects.

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Though starting out as a humble thesis , this project is being actualized under the organization, Out of Ocean. From the shores of the Koster Islands in Sweden , plastic samples were collected and studied for their various material performance in areas such as color, texture, light, and translucency.

UnIATA - Unfuse International Architecture Thesis Awards 2018

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"Faith Estates" Proposes a New Approach to Religious Pilgrimage by Excavating Holy Sites

In a time of what seems to be ever-increasing religious and political conflict, Bartlett students Akarachai Padlom, Eleftherios Sergios, and Nasser Alamadi instead chose to focus on collaboration between religions in their thesis project entitled “Faith Estates,” which outlines a new method of mass religious tourism . In an area around the Dead Sea characterized by disputed boundaries and conflicting ownership claims, the group aims to reimagine the relationship between the world’s three monotheistic religions, but also to rethink the relationship between religion, tourism, and the landscape. The design consists of large-scale excavation sites which form tourist resorts along a pilgrimage route with the goal of forming a mutually beneficial relationship.

Self-Aware Nanobots Form Futurist Megastructures in this Thesis Project from the AA

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"Engineered Paradises" Takes an Imagined Look into the Possibilities Between Palestine and Israel

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A4TC 2023 – Architecture Thesis Competition

Submission: 10 January, 2024 Registration: 10 January, 2024 Language: English Prizes: Please see the details below Type: Design

A4TC-2023 is the third edition of Archiol’s architecture thesis competition.

“As an architect, you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown.” – Norman Foster The architecture thesis is the ultimate yet preliminary test of a student; the initial years that contribute to shaping a designer who can blend all the wisdom accumulated over the academic years to create a composition of architectural ideas known as the architectural design thesis. Archiol launched this competition aiming to acknowledge the efforts and creativity of the future of architecture.

A4TC is an international architecture thesis competition that aims to promote innovative ideas developed with extensive research and thought.

Archiol is presenting the youth of architecture with an opportunity to showcase their creativity on a global scale. A4TC is considering the architectural thesis of the past five years (2018-2023).

“Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.” – Le Corbusier

Purpose: This competition aims to promote innovative ideas developed by the future of architecture.

Winners (x3): Bespoke Medal (for 1st Prize), Certificate of achievement + Publication + Interview Honourable mentions (x3): Certificates + Publication Shortlisted entries (x10) : Certificates

>> Go to the competition’s website <<<

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B.Arch Thesis – ARCHITECTURE OF ASSOCIATIONS: PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY – Abhinavv J Singh, L.S.Raheja School Of Architecture, Mumbai

• October 4, 2017

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B.Arch Thesis by Abhinavv J Singh, L.S.Raheja School of Architecture, Mumbai

SITE: UNION CARBIDE FACTORY, BHOPAL

What makes a place memorable? Does activity, ritual, texture, materiality, design or scale make a space memorable? Is memory the difference between dwelling and a building? Do we deflect our own memories onto a place? Is our subconscious constantly searching for relationships between what we’ve seen in the past and what we are seeing now, in the present and what we wish to see in the future?

What if one could design spaces not bound by the limitations of the architectural discourse but only based on how they were remembered? Architecture gets a greater meaning due to Memory. Memory allows for a greater connection between people and place. It’s a question of place over space. It’s about substance over spectacle. Through memory this can be achieved.

MAKING MEANING OUT OF THE MEMORY OF ARCHITECTURE

Memory serves as the foundation for building meaning, regardless of whether it is autobiographical or collective. Every aspect of experience becomes enveloped in the process of memory. It forms our identity as individuals together to form the identity of social groups. Memory is also the thread which links the lived-in now with the past and the future: what I remember of my past has contributed to what I am today and will play a role in defining who I grow to become in the future.

The relationship between architecture and memory is forged in each one’s appropriation of the other to make connection in space and time; the fragmentation between present and past disappears, as one place, through imagery, unites with another.

Memory and architecture complement one another in that they use man’s perception of imagery to recall peculiarities of place. For memory, architecture serves as a point of reference in time – a screen against which one deflects their experiences; in architecture, memory imparts the essence of form which allows the built environment to lend itself to human spatial comprehension.

The study attempts to identify ways in which distinctive types of memory inform the way space is conceived and designed.

It attempts to demonstrate how principles of architecture are manipulated to establish attributes and character of space. Memory is the filter through which humans experience different architectural spaces and has been used by architects to imagine and design and redesign spaces throughout history.

§ The idea is to question how memory may be constructed or influenced by physical space and what some of the implications may be and vice-versa. § To study how people form associations with their surrounding built environment and the role that tangible and intangible elements play in it. § To study the role of memories in the present day urbanscape where development and redevelopment at a rapid pace leads to a decay of associations. § To propose an architectural intervention that actively creates a platform where people can come and express themselves and engage their senses. § To envision a narrative structure that encourages the inhabitants to be spatially active in configuring their environment.

CRITERIA FOR SITE SELECTION:

§ Sites which encapsulate several layers of memory. § Sites which function as mediators in the city, setting the stage for social interaction, exchange of cultures, identities and experiences. § Sites which allow for a multiplicity of functions and effective usage of space, thereby leading to a strong sense of ritual and association. § Sites with potential for revitalization which can contribute to overall urban regeneration of the surrounding under-developed precincts.

FINAL SITE SELECTION: The Union Carbide Factory site shows a strong tangible association –comprising of rusting metal, crumbling concrete, dense overgrowth on contaminated soil, laboratories with instruments, offices with paperwork, machine rooms with warning signs, left behind as they were on the on the night of the Tragedy. What it also displays is the strongest intangible connection, where the identity of the city of Bhopal is inextricably linked to the Tragedy. After effects of the Tragedy continue to linger in the minds and bodies of the city’s inhabitants who have led a 31 year long fight for justice and recognition. The structures remaining on site are a repository of history and memories, yet, the factory lies abandoned. The study concentrates on the possible transformation of the site from an urban blight to an urban resource, from a site that inflicted trauma to one that evokes positive memories for the future generation.

CHALLENGES: Regardless of its cultural value as the physical site of the disaster, the factory precinct, as of now in a genuine condition of decay, is under steady danger of being torn down. A high court order, arranging for the cleanup of the site, has expanded the chances of this occurrence as the executing organizations see the pulverization of the processing plant as essential for purification of the site. The case for its protection needs to first address the clashing perspectives on the manufacturing plant’s place in the cityscape and mindscape of

§ Challenges in perceiving contemporary sites with a clashing past as legacy § Challenges in deciphering and restoring sites with contrasting narratives § Challenges in re-amalgamating such sites back with the urban fabric

DESIGN PROPOSAL: The design proposal, symbolically and functionally, seeks to reconnect the vacant and abandoned site with the urban fabric of Bhopal and make a positive contribution to it. In the context of the Bhopal Gas tragedy, it seeks to communicate a meaningful and relevant narrative to its visitors by addressing the aspects of healing, remembrance and deterrence. The aim is to convert the site from an urban blight to an urban resource, from a site that inflicted trauma to one that evokes positive memories for the future generation. The first phase involves a memorial commemorating the Bhopal gas tragedy and its victims. The design will identify the existing factory structures as a powerful memory of the tragedy – a painful yet integral part of the cultural heritage of Bhopal. The memorial has to acknowledge the past, contribute to the present and stay relevant in the future. The site is around 66 acres of contaminated industrial brownfield land located in one of the neglected yet developing parts of Bhopal, that has been the worst affected by the tragedy. Thus, while the term ‘memorial’ conjectures for many, something smaller in scale like a sculpture, the design aims to visualize it in its urban context.

PROGRAM ELEMENTS

§ The Urban Intervention: Reconnecting the site with the surrounding urban fabric, developing new vehicular and pedestrian linkages and establishing a visual contact with the surrounding area makes the complex a part of the visual and physical cityscape. Boundaries have to be broken down to allow the site to be part of the city, while the city has to reconnect with the factory to be reminded of the tragedy.

§ An Incremental Experiential Museum: Since a museum based on the Tragedy would not have a lot of physical artefacts, like any other conventional museum, but serves the purpose of educating a visitor about the events that led to the tragedy and the continued fight for justice. Since the fight for justice carries on even today,31 years after the Tragedy occurred, the museum will be incremental in nature, setting a precedent for other museums

§ A Resource Centre for the NGOs that tirelessly work for the recognition and treatment of the victims. The resource centre being located on the site that caused the grief to the victims is justified by the same site today being the source of their absolution. The resource centre will house offices for various NGO’s, a community centre for participatory healing, night shelters for the homeless, healing facilities.

§ Public spaces designed using the concept of landscape as healing. Converting the open area into a landscaped plaza pitches the power of nature as a counterpoint against the existing industrial backdrop while inviting a broader audience to the site.

§ A Visitor’s Centre for tourists and visitors to the site who wish to be educated about the site and contribute in any possible way to the Bhopal cause. The functions would be instruments that engender their own evolution guided by time and process and hence the design would materialize in phases. The memorial design, while being the conclusion of one process is envisioned as a catalyst and evolving point for the other functions over time.

DESIGN CONCEPT

LOOKING BACK: Most people across the globe associate Bhopal with the Gas Tragedy. When the factory was set up in the 1960’s, it was considered a magnificent structure, a symbol of ‘modern’ India. It was the largest alpha napthanol plant of this design anywhere in the world. The factory produced agricultural pesticide for a ‘greener and better India’ and held great promise for a fledgling nation struggling to attain self-sufficiency in food production. The plant used hazardous chemicals like phosgene, chlorine and methyl- isocyanate that lay stocked in abundance at the site. Many smaller yet hazardous accidents and warnings prior to tragedy went unheeded. On the night of December 3, 1984, deadly gases escaped catching a city unawares, snuffing out life with silent efficiency. It is difficult to imagine the fear and desperation that would have gripped the people of Bhopal on that fateful night. It is also difficult to comprehend that in 2016, more than 31 years after the event, almost all related issues, from its causes to its fallout and its legacy remain unresolved and contentious.

LOOKING AT: The site of the tragedy itself, the former Union Carbide Factory is contaminated, its structures fast disintegrating, faced with neglect and imminent destruction. Despite its semiotic cultural value as the physical site of the tragedy, the factory precinct today, already in a state of disrepair, is under constant threat of being demolished. Moreover, there is no framework in place for involving and including different stakeholders in the process of commemoration to realize the latent potential of the site and transform it from an urban blight to a cultural resource for Bhopal.

LOOKING BEYOND: The survivors believe that the plant structures are the physical artefact of the survivor movement to preserve the memory and lessons of the tragedy for future generations. Bhopal’s tragedy has also bequeathed the city a legacy that is of enormous significance to the global discourse on balancing development with ecology and equity. The site is a repository of history that remains undocumented and stories that are yet to be told. Whether it is to be retained, dismantled or saved in parts, a structure of its tangible and intangible importance requires significant research.

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• Moscow State University: The tallest of Moscow's Seven Sisters, it's been housing the State University since 1953, being the tallest educational building in the world with its 240m of height.
• Zuev Workers' Club: Projected by Ilya Golossov to be a recreational center for factory workers, its construction was finished in 1929 and it's still a reference in Constructivist architecture.
• Spasskaya Tower: Overlooking the Red Square, this clock tower on the Kremlin's walls was built by Milanese architect Pietro Antonio Solari back in 1491, and once the Kremlin's main entrance.
• State History Museum: The State History Museum complex has been open since 1872, and houses many artifacts, varying from pre-historical relics to artworks acquired by the old royalty.
• Mercury City Tower: The 5th tallest builing in Russia and Europe overall, this 338m tall skyscaper in the International Business Center stands out for its copper glass façade and spiky shape.
• Bolshoi Theater: First opened in 1825, it's home of the internationally renowned classical ballet company, and premiered works of composers such as Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich.

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