If rapidly changing climates, energy flows, material economies, and migratory populations are the emerging challenges of our time, then the design disciplines offer unique insight on how to navigate these complex, open-ended conditions. Distinct from research in the sciences or humanities, the MDes Thesis Program involves highly interactive ways of thinking and learning, through hands-on, cross-disciplinary, multimedia practices that directly engage the technical, material, spatial, ecological, political, economic, thermodynamic, and planetary dimensions of design. Seeking to empower the next generation of designers and urbanists, the program utilizes a set of novel and alternative methodologies in a collaborative, immersive, and multimedia environment. Ultimately, MDes thesis challenges conventional ways of learning—through field work, fabrication, collaboration, and dissemination—through projects whose scope and diversity are unmatched by any other design school in the world.
John May Assistant Professor of Architecture Codirector, Master in Design Studies Program
K. Michael Hays Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory Codirector, Master in Design Studies Program
Heat transfer through building envelopes significantly contributes to overall energy consumption. Owing to the property of having steady melting/freezing heat storage in a narrow temperature range, phase change materials (PCMs) provide a promising solution to improve building envelope energy management.
With the design objective of channeling the force of natural resources, a solar- adaptive, PCM-integrated window system is proposed that can store and utilize “free” heat from solar radiation. The fully charged PCM panels will transfer the stored thermal energy to the cool air by conduction and warm the air. Therefore, the system is designed to passively reduce total energy consumption and improve indoor thermal comfort.
Parametric studies were conducted to maximize the thermal performance of a PCM-contained panel by varying the inlet air velocity, the melting temperature of PCMs, and the shape, allocation, and size of individual PCM cells. The output of the parametric study identified the optimal PCM panel design and was used as the input of the next stage computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. To further evaluate and validate the effectiveness of the proposed system, as well as to visualize the airflow of the passively heated air, indoor CFD simulations were also performed. There were two scenarios: the first was to study the efficiency of heating cool indoor air near the facade, and the second was to investigate the performance of the system to heat the cold outdoor air.
Over the last four decades, the US Department of Defense (DoD) has produced several iterations of military doctrine on the operational environments it functions within, and to no insignificant degree, the increasing relevance of “urban terrain” in its doctrine influences how its military branches operate. The history of urban warfighting doctrine is nascent, considering military strategists have historically avoided cities in wargaming. The defense enterprise has become easily impressionable to forecasting of imminent urban conflict espoused by defense think tanks, private contractors, and policymakers, with little to no regard for histories of urbanization and human settlement that would inform their decisions. These institutions have steered the DoD toward an adamant belief that future conflicts will inevitably be in cities. The result of this assumption has permeated everywhere from the creation of new tactics, techniques, and procedures on warfighting in “dense urban terrain,” to massive investments in virtual and augmented reality industries and the makeshift construction of mock cities and villages across the country and its greater territories. Without a specific enemy, the military constructs one, in technical lands that replicate cities and hybridize cultures for foreign policy objectives. Currently, hundreds of purpose-built artificial cities devoted to simulating warfare in urban areas exist across the United States. This work investigates, through representational simulacra and critical counter-cartography, the emergent urbanizations of the DoD’s synthetic training environment and seeks to broaden the field of urbanism to show the influence that urban warfare preparation produces on the built environment.
This thesis will look at explicating, understanding, and situating three concepts redefined by Gilbert Simondon—information, the relationship between an individual and its milieu, and technics—in the postwar cybernetic turn in the late 1950s and its possible place within architectural history and theory. Gilbert Simondon (1924–1989), though an important French intellectual, was, until recently, relatively unknown to the anglophone world. This thesis begins with a general overview and description of the intellectual terrain that Simondon’s thinking about the concept of individuation grew out of—cybernetics and postwar French epistemology—that led him to the redefinition of these concepts. It then goes on to provide a general overview of the historical intersection of cybernetics and, thereby, complexity sciences and architecture that took place contemporaneously in the mid-1960s, where discourse surrounding information, individual, milieu, and technics enters architecture. This overview traces the shift from a call for holistic systems thinking to one that slips into a later call for formalist, compositional complexity with computational advancements in the late 1980s. Through these two topographies, this thesis finally attempts to speculate an initial stab at a contribution that can be made through Simondon, around the concepts of information, individual, milieu, and technics, to the field of architectural history and theory.
What design tools and strategies can be implemented by cities and NGOs to facilitate Latinas’ journey to the United States? The migration journey from Central America is particularly predatory and violent for undocumented Latinas. According to Amnesty International, six in ten women and girls experience some harassment or sexual abuse throughout their route. They migrate to escape violence but are abused during their journeys; they have fewer chances to survive while crossing the desert. Once in US territory, they are separated from their children. When released from detention centers, they are dropped at bus stations with no belongings or information on how to continue their trip or contact their relatives. At their final destinations, the resettlement process will depend on their support networks, which can help them find housing, a job, or health care and legal services.
Sacred Women analyses the three steps of the journey—the departure, the transit, and the resettlement—and proposes a shared-based system of information to empower and connect Latinas with existing allies en route. Sacred Women is a space of resistance and knowledge that embraces ancestral wisdom and cross-border solidarity toward Latinas. Ultimately, the project challenges the approach to the immigration crisis by highlighting the agency of women who make use of their squalid resources and solidarity with existent activist networks to claim their right to cross borders. These women have the resilience to nourish their communities, heal themselves, heal others, and to heal the world. That’s why they are sacred women.
This thesis looks at the role of Airbnb as a disruptive urban regeneration model in the former French Concession of Shanghai. Compared to traditional urban regeneration projects led by the local government and developers, in this area, Airbnb represents a new model based on global digital platforms and driven by imaginaries constructed by mass and social media. This thesis aims to reexamine how the mediascape creates imaginaries about the history and urban culture of Shanghai and how the imaginaries are used as selling points in urban regeneration, especially for Airbnb. Through exploring the relationship between Airbnb and social media, this thesis tries to explain why media becomes the primary agent in this model, spreading homogeneous tastes and lifestyles in local neighborhoods. The research finally points out that instead of providing tourists with access to “authentic” local communities, Airbnb, as a new urban regeneration model, is changing place identities under the influence of mediascapes and global cultural forces.
According to Giorgio Agamben, Western politics divided the Zoe, the biological fact of life of every living being from the Bio, the social and political life in the polis. Zoe remained secluded to the domestic and private life existing within the Oikos. Agamben argues that refugees have been stripped from the political, public, and social exercise of life, the Bio and, reduced only to the naked life, the Zoe.1 The politics of aid delivery, by design, reduce humans to a condition of bare minimum, basic biological needs, in which they have factually lost their human rights. I argue that the artifacts designed and implemented by refugees to negotiate with the bare life offered in the camps are the exercise of Bio. They are practicing a political agency within the administration of what aims to be a space devoid of any public and political life. The artifacts of negotiation of refugees are deviations within the totalitarian design of camps. These artifacts create actual cities and defy the whole narrative of the ephemerality of camps. The artifacts are exercises of freedom within the enclosure, construction of life, and the agency of those under containment. The thesis will explore how to integrate the agency, Bio, and the desires of the refugees expressed in the artifacts for freedom—looking for a planning process that will allow camps to evolve into thriving communities instead of marginalized populations.
1Giorgio Agamben, Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 11.
Picturesque nature and water pipe evolved in parallel in pre–Civil War New York City to unleash two powerful dimensions of today’s city: land-driven real estate—getting rid of water through good drainage—and water-driven leisure—designed to escape landed real estate. This thesis reveals the role played by one design intervention to further these mutually supportive measures: Central Park. Built around the receiving reservoir of the Croton Aqueduct, it introduced picturesque nature to the city alongside the waterworks. This language of the modern city developed in response to the epidemics and pollution associated with Manhattan’s wetlands. Collect Pond’s transformation into Five Points in downtown Manhattan is one early 19th-century case study of this type of evolution. In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, will the new postwar city alter its picturesque nature and waterworks?
This thesis adds to the postcolonial perspective by using an empirically grounded analysis of the Caño Martín Peña Special Planning District to offer theoretical interventions. The case has recently been celebrated for combining a robust participatory practice and inventive planning strategies that “work with” the community. However, previous scholarship fails to underscore contextual specificity and the complexity of the process. Thus, I propose a critical methodology to engage with and highlight a systemic understanding of “informal” spaces. Following a multidimensional theoretical framework that converges around risk, situated knowledge, and design politics, this thesis reflects on three questions. (1) How can we improve the living conditions of residents in these areas without asking them to become part of the system that causes their “vulnerabilization”? (2) What is the appropriate scale to think about “working with ‘informality’”? (3) Are the “developmentalist” economic and political projects (capitalist, neoliberalist) the cause of “urban informality”? This thesis suggests that even “successful” participatory processes and sensitive projects are skewed by the politics behind government- approved practices that render the impacted populations legible, and technical documents that are incomprehensible to most. Additionally, I contrast the scale chosen for positive implementable infrastructure and design projects to alternative scales of administering policies that work with the continuous urbanization processes that lead to “informality.” The discussion brings forth how these processes were initially provoked by migration into cities due to imported industrialization operations. Finally, the thesis proposes a decentered and repoliticized framework to reflect on how “urban informality” is created, maintained, and perpetuated.
The current prevalence of social rented housing, or gongzufang, varies city by city in China. Most cities’ program has targeted low- to moderate-income urban residents and has excluded low-income rural migrants who do not possess local hukou, the permanent residence certificate, from accessing social rented housing. This thesis analyses Chongqing’s migrant-inclusion policy of social rented housing program, which has made migrants eligible to apply for housing dwellings, and its gap between policy justifications and empirical evidence. Although the migrant-inclusion policy has been justified by achieving rural-urban equality, it has been strategically used by the municipal government as a tool for promoting industrial growth.
By deploying hedonic regression models, the study explores the housing preferences of low-income households from the rental market and then estimates the “market value” of each of the twenty-one social rented housing communities. Next, the study identifies two types of social rented housing communities in terms of their shaping forces: The ideology of equality usually results in a community of higher “market value”, while the ideology of productivism leads to a community of lower “market value”. The study maps out which justification has been the dominant force shaping each of the twenty-one social housing communities in Chongqing. While the two justifications of equality and productivism complete each other in the municipal government’s decision-making of social rented housing, the thesis argues that both two types of communities still form underlying conditions that exclude rural migrants and create inequity issues.
