Graduate School of Design

This thesis reclaims the "small house," typically excluded from debates on publicness, as an architectural device for rethinking how domestic space can participate in collective urban life. Against the hermetic tendency of housing in Seoul, it proposes an ordinary house combined with small commercial programs as a counter-project that operates not through large-scale planning, but through the precise arrangement of thresholds and everyday architectural elements. This is the third in a sequence of three small house projects: the first in Tokyo, the second in New York, and this in Seoul. Together they form an ongoing investigation into how domestic life may be opened outward through small-scale design strategies, across questions of backyard publicness, living and working relations, and the urban capacity of ordinary buildings. Drawing on an expanded reading of Genpei Akasegawa's "Hyperart Thomasson," a practice of identifying urban remnants that have lost their function yet persist in the city, the project reframes this mode of observation as an architectural method. Where Thomasson locates elements rendered useless, this thesis reads the minor additions of Seoul's domestic fabric (stairs, gates, canopies, appendages, garden patches) as latent devices: peripheral not because they have lost function, but because their potential has gone unrecognized. Through archaeological drawing, this potential is uncovered; through design, these elements are rearranged as small-scale instruments that articulate interior life while constructing a transferable urban logic between house and city, advancing smallness as a method for reopening the boundary between domestic interiority and the public realm.

Twenty-five years after Koolhaas characterized Walden as a “parallel junkspace”—and 172 years since Thoreau’s sojourn into its woods— the Pond is brought into the present, by way of a new DMV.

Though Koolhaas and Thoreau’s conclusions seem diametrically opposed, their cosmologies, cited from everyday encounters, are much alike. Walden is the speculum they share: for Koolhaas, reflecting the junked-up virtual at high speed; for Thoreau, the hyperlocal, slow, and transcendent. Walden’s exceptional status has become its own existential liability: perfectly cast in amber under conservation-minded pretenses, the little pond has been denatured of the politics that so charged either text.

Like an amble with a huckleberry party, going to the DMV should be a routine respite; an anomaly in one’s workaday schedule. The DMV, after all, is where we await the formation of our IDs, where our very means of navigating the world are tested. Why should it stay the punchline for all of society’s bureaucratic ills? Could a building that sees a full cross-section of society, every day, not stoke optimism between a civically-minded person, her peers, and her state? This thesis reimagines the civic building for the 21st-century as a horizontal datum that mixes function with pleasure: call it Civic+. A constellation of landscape pierces universal space, remaking some of what is air, solid. Spaces of waiting and of being-in-motion are formalized through receptacles and paths for man and car. Afloat in the tonic of wildness, the DMV expands the woods from an extended backyard for elite suburbia, to a public utility for all Massachusetts residents. In the driver’s seat, from hasty, rearward glances, we might find in the civic mundane, the sublime.

When demographic information is superimposed onto spatial conditions, legible patterns of dispossession, severance, erasure, extraction, and exposure emerge and persist across many Black neighborhoods in America. This landscape of vacant land, fractured street networks, eroded commercial corridors, and depleted public space is not incidental, but symptomatic of deeper, designed processes of deconstruction. While planning disciplines have begun to address these harms through reparative policy, design disciplines have been slower to acknowledge their role in producing them and to develop spatial remedies.

The Mechanics of Urban Repair defines reparations as the act of reconstruction, where urban design operates alongside public policy, regulation and implementation mechanisms to acknowledge, redress, and eliminate the accumulated harms. The thesis produces a reparative urbanism framework in the form of a spatial toolkit that links specific design strategies to recurring conditions of harm across U.S. cities to be applied where spatial restitution remains unsettled.

Offsite construction, a set of construction techniques involving offsite prefabrication before onsite building assembly, shows promise as a means of reducing housing construction costs and timelines. Yet the sector accounts for a marginal share of the construction sector in the United States today due to a range of barriers preventing many firms from achieving economic sustainability and efficient project performance. As accelerating construction cost inflation undermines the ability of housing markets to supply enough housing to meet demand, state and local jurisdictions throughout the United States have recently begun pursuing industrial policy efforts to address these barriers and catalyze broader adoption of these techniques. This research identifies patterns in these policy initiatives across each stage of their development, progressing from the barriers that motivate them, to their origins, goals, design, and implementation, and concluding with an analysis of Colorado as an advanced case study with sufficient data to permit tentative policy evaluation. This thesis makes contributions across each stage of the policy cycle. It elaborates on previously understudied barriers to offsite construction and argues that the barriers to the offsite construction form an interconnected system with important policy implications. These include that policy must be mindful of unintended consequences, comprehensive across the many domains of the housing ecosystem in which these barriers exist, and address the vicious cycle between the industry’s reputation and its inability to achieve scale. Regarding the policy initiatives themselves, it identifies five broad categories of policy instruments – demand aggregation, regulatory reform, factory subsidies, workforce development, and knowledge diffusion – and identifies three key challenges that have emerged in several policy efforts: achieving regional coordination, sustaining momentum, and opposition from building trades unions. Finally, it finds that firms supported through Colorado’s policy efforts have yielded cost savings and housing unit production below initial expectations. Though robust causal attribution was prevented by a lack of data, it argues that insufficiently comprehensive regulatory reform and demand aggregation provide significant explanation for these outcomes. This research offers both a conceptual framework for researchers interested in analyzing these nascent initiatives, as well as valuable lessons for practitioners and policymakers interested in pursuing similar efforts.

Street vendors in San Francisco have been subject to public space regulations and enforcement justified in the name of improving public safety and health. However, these regulations can negatively affect vendor livelihoods by limiting the territorial location of their activities, leaving policy enforcement largely disconnected from understanding the entrepreneurial aspirations of street vendors. With the emergence of street vendor associations, there is increased push toward creating an equitable planning approach; yet this remains uncharted territory for municipal government, producing new questions about how authorities should interact with street vendors to advance a common good. This thesis examines whether and how organized street vendors in San Francisco might be able to influence regulation to secure more equitable participation in governance and build legitimacy for vending in public space. It argues that without structural shifts in governance, current approaches risk reproducing inequities, calling for new procedures that develop long-term co-stewardship of the public realm.

Latin American cities established around an industry or company present urban patterns shaped by corporate decisions rather than public planning. Chimbote and Talara, two Peruvian port cities, illustrate this phenomenon: both experienced urban expansion driven by industries —railroad, fishing, and steel in Chimbote; and oil in Talara— that in some cases provided housing for workers and in others fueled uncontrolled growth without adequate housing provision. This thesis examines how industrial development is related to current housing quality in terms of physical sustainability, basic services, overcrowding, and tenure, arguing that a path dependency exists between industrial history and present housing conditions. The findings aim to inform the urban development of Peruvian cities facing similar dynamics today, where new economic investments organize territories while urban planning is sidelined and the provision of adequate housing remains absent.

This thesis reads Hallyu not only as a global cultural image, but as an everyday urban practice. In Seoul, cultural life is produced through ordinary routines—eating, shopping, rehearsing, gathering, and moving through the city—and takes root where the built fabric can absorb change. Districts such as Hongdae and Yeonnam show how small parcels, accessible ground floors, and loosened zoning allow residential buildings to accommodate cultural, commercial, and social programs over time. By contrast, the apartment superblock, Korea’s dominant residential body, is organized through large parcels, single-use zoning, internalized circulation, and controlled ground. Through the adaptive transformation of Shindonga Apartment in Seobinggo, this thesis asks how an isolated housing complex can become a more open urban fabric. The proposal reconnects the site to Yongsan Park and the Han River, inserting cultural corridors, landscape, community programs, and adapted residential structures without erasing the apartment body.

This thesis examines how Indian urbanism is structured by caste through planning, policy, and ritual practices that reproduce spatial hierarchies across the city. It shows how Hindu ritual extends beyond temples into streets, festivals, and temporary structures, forming a distributed system that stabilizes dominant social orders. In response, the thesis explores how counter-urban forms can emerge by reworking ritual as a spatial and political tool. It proposes an alternative urbanism through pilgrimage, anchored in the Buddhist 22 vows of conversion. Mapping a network of Buddha viharas and Dalit neighborhoods across Mumbai, the project traces collective movement beginning and culminating at Chaityabhoomi. By reframing ritual as design, the work renders the Dalit city visible, collapsing dispersed sites into a continuous spatial and symbolic network that reorganizes the city’s social and spatial logic, and opens pathways for more just and inclusive urban futures.

Prolonged violence in a city reshapes infrastructural and social systems through cycles of rupture, ruin, and reconstruction, generating unique urban forms of segregation and an architecture of defense that persists long after active conflict ends. While political, social, and economic frameworks are crucial to understanding conflict, they often underemphasize how spatial arrangements shape evolving conflict patterns. My research addresses this gap by repositioning violence as an ongoing process of social and spatial accumulation rather than discrete events. The thesis finds that violence produces distinct epistemic conditions in cities, creating the need for a diagnostic framework that can capture its urban processes by compressing layers of space and time. Through a multimodal methodology of documentation and representation of ethnic conflict in Ahmedabad, India, the project creates a dialectic between dominant narratives and counter memories, thereby expanding the perspectives that give meaning to the spatial knowledge of a place.

Since the early 2000s, Providence, Rhode Island, has seen a proliferation of adaptive reuse projects converting historic industrial and commercial structures into housing, institutional space, offices, and mixed-use development. This thesis asks what Providence demonstrates about the capacities and limitations of adaptive reuse as a mechanism for advancing urban planning goals. Drawing on three case studies, South Street Landing, Paragon Mill, and the Peerless Building, it argues that adaptive reuse can produce planning outcomes through redevelopment financing, preservation review, and the act of reuse itself, but only when exceptional actors are able to activate and sustain the process. These actors activate capital stacks that link financing sources to specific public outcomes. Historic tax credits, Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, public loans, and institutional leases shape outcomes including preservation, affordability, housing production, institutional growth, environmental remediation, and downtown reinvestment. At the same time, these projects depend on actors capable of navigating regulatory review, coordinating public and private partners, and carrying complex projects through long periods of uncertainty. The Superman Building serves as a limit case, revealing the fragility of a model dependent on a single coordinating actor. Ultimately, this thesis argues that adaptive reuse should be understood as a planning instrument and identifies the redevelopment mechanism through which it advances planning outcomes in Providence, a first step toward making those outcomes more systematic, reproducible, and transferable across post-industrial cities.