GSD Theses and Dissertations

In a series of essays critiquing industrialized manufacturing entitled Factory Work: As It Is and Might Be (1884), William Morris elucidated the social underpinnings of the British Arts and Crafts movement, which found in handicraft a philosophy that unified labor, education, and economic production. One hundred and forty years later, the relationship between learning and labor continues to bear relevance, with increasing visibility placed on the nature of work post-Covid, and the four-year bachelor’s degree regularly questioned as the best path to a career. This thesis foregrounds the contemporary importance of Craft as a theory of labor, tracing its educational ideology as it evolved within the context of American craft schools before investigating a manifestation of Morris’s vision for the present moment. Unlike a “makerspace,” “research incubator,” nostalgic craft school, or any other contemporary dilution of craft philosophy, Factory places on the table a method of production which considers the end-product secondary to the empowerment gained through traditions of learning that surround handwork.

Situated in the Hauts-de-France, a region in France grappling with a severe housing shortage, this student housing project services the capital of the region, Lille, a prominent student hub, and its neighbor, Roubaix. In addition to the Nord's industrial history, the Hauts-de-France is renowned for agriculture, being France’s second-largest producer of straw. Straw bales, an agricultural byproduct, are load-bearing modules, exceptional insulators, and when used as a building material, a renewable resource drawing down carbon. Pairing the availability of the material with the region’s housing needs, the project capitalizes on straw bales’ structural, thermal, and ecological properties to expand their use in construction beyond the one-story home and develop multi-story student housing. It seeks to generate a structural and material expression unique to the straw bales to bring greater spatial and sensory diversity to extant, repetitive student housing typologies. As the discipline becomes increasingly concerned with its environmental and social impacts and shifts towards engineering new materials and building systems, there is a unique opportunity to reconsider natural materials long used in construction and address disciplinary misapprehension surrounding biogenic materials such as straw. The project diverges from trends in digital and material fabrication to embrace this hyper-local, renewable byproduct and unite ecological, architectural, and social aims.

This dissertation describes the institutional history of Princeton Architectural Laboratory from 1949 to 1954. While recent scholarship in architectural history and building science clarified the Laboratory’s enduring contribution to environmentally informed design strategies, the circumstances of its establishment remain underreported. This work argues that a closer look at this early history is warranted. It reveals the administrative mechanics and challenges involved in establishing an organizational capacity for experimental design research.

Using maintenance as the governing theme, this account describes the relationship between the Laboratory’s intellectual project, its material expression, and institutional support. Based on archival research, it contends that Labatut’s project and its ultimate failure were necessary preconditions for the Olgyay’s arrival at Princeton and the Laboratory’s subsequent success.

This dissertation elucidates the continuity between the two iterations of the Laboratory. It offers a historical account of how Princeton University’s architecture program established an organizational capacity for experimental research. This work seeks a new audience interested in developing a design laboratory or a research center within an academic institution.

This thesis investigates the reciprocal relationship between architecture and territory. How are discrete architectural instruments shaped by the territories which they inhabit? In what ways do these instruments structure and order the territories in which they are found? How can architecture be conceived as a fulcrum between built and un-built, between object and void, between building and territory? Tuktoyaktuk, NWT was established in the 1950s, around a Distant Early Warning Line station - one in a series of radar stations constructed in the Canadian Arctic to detect incoming aerial threats from across the north pole. These decommissioned artifacts, like other architectures of distance, oscillate between the technical as well as the ordinary and the local and the global. This thesis proposes three buildings for this town at the forefront of an environmentally and spatially changing Arctic: a small airport, a research station, and a road maintenance depot. These instruments leverage a historical analysis of technological and representative tools to imagine new modes of understanding, responding to, and establishing territory.

Marronage, the practice of escaping bondage from slavery, is an inherently spatial practice. Maroons, or fugitive slaves, understood their environments as fluid, multilayered, and inseparable from the land; they superimposed multiple forms of spatial knowledge in order to communicate with one another, find cover for social and spiritual rituals, organize work stoppages and other labor tactics, and to navigate the world both inside and outside the plantation. Historians, geographers, and other scholars have used marronage as a conceptual tool to illustrate the political and topographic importance of spatial autonomy for fugitive groups, both in the context of chattel slavery in the Americas and in other historical and geographical contexts. Understanding marronage as a methodology or mode of inquiry for any discipline means examining inherited tools and methods, questioning who has wielded them to what ends, and learning ways that we might use them differently.

Despite their utility, or perhaps because of it, architectural drawing conventions neutralize the potential political and social agency of architecture as such. If architecture has been acknowledged to be complicit with histories of white supremacy and imperial conquest, architects today require a different set of methodologies to overcome the politically neutralizing function of our inherited drawing conventions. Marronage as methodology opens up the possibility for architects to challenge and subvert the logics of enclosure and domination that inform both drawing and building today.

By examining a firsthand narrative of marronage in Alabama alongside archival building records from 18th- and 19th-century Cambridge, how can we uncover spatialized histories from the margins and reorient architectural practice away from rigid material and symbolic hierarchies and toward mobility, mutualism, and liberation?

Chip-budDing is a horticultural adaptation of Peabody Terrace’s garage, designed by Josep Lluís Sert. In both its concept and its method, this thesis adopts the horticultural technique of 'chip budding' as a model for the ecological adaptation of an existing building. In both public aesthetics — ‘eco-brutalism’ is the most popular architecture-related prompt for AI-imaging technologies—and critical inquiry—the emergence of arguments against the conventional “growth” of the built environment—specific designs are connected to environment ethics. This thesis pursues an 'ABC' of techniques to develop a design intervention into existing urban situation: C) Graphics - Chipping archival stock: Using the digitized drawings from the Sert archive as the site of the project; B) Garden - Grafting metasequoias: Using dawn redwoods as a 'metaphor bud' that spur a modular architecture intervention; A) Garage - Budding new housing: Using modular tiling inspired by both forestation and textile to design an 'eco-brutalist-style' transformation of infrastructure.

Recognizing the impact of image-generating machine learning models on architectural discourse, this thesis offers a fresh perspective on the role of machine learning in conceptual relationships within architecture. The thesis explores ML's capacity to interrelate architecture beyond tradition lineage framework or categorization framework. Structured into three chapters, the first correlates projects from the "five on five" lecture series with large language and image-based models, forming a cloud of relationships. The second chapter delves into machine learning-aided design by relating projects and generating conceptual text. The final chapter investigates the challenge posed to museum design as the traditional architectural history framework is also challenged, proposing a museum embedded within a material reuse center. Through these explorations, the thesis uncovers ML's potential to contextualize and interconnect architecture, highlighting its significance beyond its prowess in generating realistic images and text.

The suburban shopping mall, once a prototypical feature of the American suburban landscape, has been in decline for several decades. Like a whale carcass which is dissected and shared by numerous organisms, the dead mall offers a concentrated opportunity for a new ecosystem through the occupation and transformation of the large structure. Using the Greece Ridge Mall in Rochester, New York, this thesis imagines this ecosystem by redefining suburban everyday practices of sharing into forms of collective living: from potlucks and hosting students to community classes and home businesses. Applying adaptive reuse strategies to retrofit the anchor stores, concourses, and mall architecture, the project questions both the spatial form of increasingly important sharing behaviors and the picture of housing in suburbia. Behaviors, from sharing a fridge to sharing a spare room, gradually create a complex ecosystem to enrich the new residents and surrounding community until the mall is completely shared.

The thesis explores how mixed reality can be employed as an additional layer of architectural elements. The developments in mixed reality have changed the affective relationship between inhabitants and spaces while redefining architectural boundaries. Namely, the embodied interface, which can significantly alter the perceived reality, will become an architectural element inseparable from the rest of the spatial components when deployed in a room. The project explored aged nursing homes to examine the instrumental effect of embodied interfaces as a slice into the discussion of its implications as elements of architecture. Design for aging has been gaining attention within the architectural discourse. Its innate social and spatial specificities offer a terrain to investigate the utility of embodied interfaces, including augmenting spatial qualities and enhancing the connection between the site and its inhabitants. The project designs a prototype that examines the affective impacts of perceived architecture experiences and asserts mixed reality as architecture’s new design paradigm.

Seoul's low-rise residential neighborhood is a prevalent residential typology second to apartment complexes, yet it significantly lacks public space, parks, and biodiversity. How can we foster a multispecies streetscape within these neighborhoods?

Historically, Seoul's urban strategy has oscillated between preserving the existing urban fabric and redeveloping areas into apartment complexes. This project proposes an intermediary solution that enhances biodiversity and nature accessibility without disregarding the established characteristics of the community.

The "Affordance Game" introduces a collaborative framework for city officials, residents, and property owners to jointly cultivate a multispecies environment. This involves the introduction of a multispecies-focused building code and following housing typologies that extend the streetscape and are conducive to biodiversity.

Haebangchon, a neighborhood at the forefront of Seoul's biodiversity conversation, will serve as the pilot site for this initiative. Through increased stakeholder engagement, strategies developed through this thesis will allow for greater adaptability and tailored design across various low-rise residential areas.