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2025 Study Architecture Student Showcase - Part X

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Architecture tells a story. The capstones and theses highlighted in Part X of the 2025 Study Architecture Student Showcase use texture, material, and spatial configuration as visual narratives. From short films to renderings, each project uses a unique medium of storytelling. The displayed work ranges from memorials inspired by speculative fiction and design interventions using augmented reality to exhibitions on womanhood and visualizations of poetry.
Scroll down for a closer look!

Thread by Thread by Emily Dross, B.Arch ’25
Ball State University | Advisor: James F. Kerestes

“Thread by Thread” is a short film, created as part of the course Cinematic Environments: Uncanny AI, explores hybridized architectural conditions through a speculative and surreal lens. Set in a richly imagined built environment, the narrative unfolds through the movements and interactions of fluffy, stuffed animal-like creatures—anthropomorphic figures that serve as both inhabitants and interpreters of the space. These soft-bodied protagonists navigate a world that oscillates between the familiar and the uncanny, offering a playful yet critical reflection on contemporary architectural and environmental issues.

The project operates within the “fuzzy space” between realism and speculation, where exaggerated materials, textures, and spatial configurations provoke questions about the future of the built environment. By merging whimsical imagery with architectural inquiry, the film engages themes of technological transformation and post-Anthropocene speculation. The soft, plush inhabitants stand in stark contrast to the often rigid, industrial aesthetic of traditional architectural spaces—suggesting alternative, more empathetic ways of occupying and designing environments.

Through visual storytelling, “Thread by Thread” reflects a critical position on how architecture might respond to pressing global concerns while embracing unconventional narratives and mediums. Ultimately, the film is a provocative gesture—one that reimagines the role of architecture in shaping not only physical space but also cultural and emotional landscapes. It invites viewers to question the boundaries of architectural representation and consider the value of softness, fantasy, and hybridity in the discourse of design.

Instagram: @em.dross, @jameskerestes

Echoes of the Land: A Pilgrimage of Wilderness and Spirit by Andrea Frank, M.Arch ‘25
North Dakota State University | Advisor: Stephen Wischer

This thesis explores how architecture can bridge humanity and the natural world, restoring a connection eroded by technology, overconsumption, and distraction. While cities offer curated encounters with nature, they cannot replace the deep peace found in wilderness. This connection is essential to humanity’s survival. If humanity fails to understand its relationship with the environment and engage with it responsibly, it jeopardizes the ecological balance of the world and humanity’s own existence.

Architecture, once in dialogue with nature, now often serves function, spectacle, or profit. This work reimagines architecture as a mediator that fosters kinship with the earth through a threefold approach: a pilgrimage across city, edge, and wilderness; poetic uncovering of ancient site stories; and sensory engagement with the four classical elements. In doing so, architecture becomes a vessel for atmosphere, memory, and meaning, guiding individuals to a deeper awareness of themselves and their world.

This project received an AIA Medal for Academic Excellence.

Instagram: @andrea.frank10

A Place for Pilgrimage by Andy Packwood, B.S. in Architecture ’25
University of Virginia | Advisor: Peter Waldman

The project synthesizes two years of fascination for and research into the climate-threatened coastal community of Tangier, speculating as to what will ultimately happen to rural, low-income American communities in the wake of inevitable sea level rise. My interest lay not in the proposal of any sort of savior infrastructural solution, not in the proposal of a managed retreat plan, nor in the design of a mainland relocation for displaced refugee residents. I chose to develop a memorialized destination that could still exist on the island long after its ridges have turned to marsh, its homes have been barged away, and normally perceived connotations of inhabitability have all but vanished. I chose to create “A Place for Pilgrimage”, inspired by my own pilgrimage of El Camino de Santiago this past March.

Simply put, the proposal is an adaptive reuse of the tallest structure on Tangier: its water tower. Adding a spiraling staircase and pushing the structure fifty years into the unknown, the design creates a single space in the sky through the removal of half of the tower’s upper dome. The approach is incredibly important; much of the final pin-up focused on rendering this pilgrimage step by step. Starting from the dock of the mainland resettlement, looking out into the Chesapeake Bay, a line of buoys trails towards the horizon. A bird soars toward the tower in the distance, the vestiges of marsh poking out of the water. Cameron Evans, current vice mayor and young watermen of the Island, embarks as this future pilgrim by skiff. He carries with him a gravestone; many cemeteries on the Island are often inundated by tidal flooding, and residents must move these tombs to higher ground, again and again.

What I have proposed is a final resting place, safe from the heights of sea level rise. A place for generations to visit, to bring tokens of remembrance, to occupy overnight, or to even continue their trade as watermen. Up within the dome of the water tower is a cenotaph for the people, memories, culture, history, and beauty of Tangier. We will need one.

This project was awarded High Honors for Thesis.

Ephemeral Spaces — Presence and Absence by Robin Xiao, B.S. in Architecture ’25
University of Virginia | Advisor: Peter Waldman

This thesis explores how architecture can emerge from the debris of the everyday to construct a space of ritual and transition—between life and death, presence and absence, memory and forgetting. 

Situated in the post-industrial landscape of Skaramangas, Athens, the project transforms three abandoned military interchange tunnels into a procession of ephemeral architecture: a crematorium, a columbarium, and spaces for reflection, and spaces of pause/entry/exit. 

Through a series of five conceptual models, material fragments—broken light bulbs, candles, metal tubing, computer chips, wood scraps—become instruments of spatial inquiry, offering alternative ways to think about temporality, transformation, and the sacred. Each model gives rise to a set of sectional drawings, collaged with elemental forces—earth, fire, air, water—revealing a layered architecture of transition. 

The resulting proposal is not a fixed structure, but a choreography of spaces that invite the living to move with the dead, through tunnels repurposed as thresholds. This work situates ephemerality not as loss, but as an architectural condition of becoming—an act of spatial murmuration shaped by light, material residue, and memory in motion.

This project received High Honors for Undergraduate Thesis.

Instagram: @robinxiaostudio

MOVING FUTURES VERTICAL SCHOOL by Alex Hoover & Zach Izzo, M.Arch ’25
University at Buffalo | Advisor: Jin Young Song

Located in Songdo, Seoul, our project reimagines the typical Korean private educational institutions, known as Hagwon, by prioritizing spatial flexibility and community engagement. Traditional Hagwons often feature cramped, efficiency-driven classrooms. However, research shows that children learn better in environments with diverse spatial qualities—high ceilings, minimal partitions, vibrant colors, and flexible layouts. To address this, we designed a highly adaptable building with movable interior and exterior components. Each main floor features partition walls on ceiling-mounted tracks, allowing spaces to transform easily—from small study rooms to large lecture halls or art galleries. This system ensures both spatial diversity for students and long-term adaptability for future tenants or programs. 

The facade similarly emphasizes flexibility, offering a reinterpretation of Korea’s dense, intrusive urban signage. The three-layer facade system integrates architecture, community identity, and student expression. The outer layer consists of LED media panels and sun-shading devices, configurable to display student artwork or community visuals, establishing the building as a neighborhood landmark. The second layer features sliding perforated metal signage panels, subtly blending information with the architecture rather than overwhelming it. The innermost layer wraps the social stair, visible from both adjacent streets, inviting public interaction and showcasing movement within the building. Smaller panels provide localized signage, such as floor numbers and bulletin boards. Together, the dynamic facade and transformable interior create a learning environment that fosters both community visibility and spatial flexibility, promoting a more engaging, human-centered educational experience.

The project was selected for the Cram Urbanism and Vertical Learning Space International symposium

Instagram: @_alex_hoover, @jinyoung___song  

The Market of Joy by Shefa Quazi, M.ArchD ’25
Oxford Brookes University | Advisors: Toby Smith, Alexandra Lacatusu, Toby Shew, Charles Parrack

In a world dominated by seamless digital consumption, where screens dictate desires and algorithms predict movement, The Covered Market in Oxford becomes a site of rebellion—a place where reality is glitched, distorted, and reclaimed from commercial control. Instead of a polished, hyper-commercial spectacle designed to guide users into predictable behaviors, the proposed series of interventions hijack the mechanics of digital consumerism and turns them against themselves to exaggerate them into a physical, pseudo-reality. Attempting to readminister the loss currency of joy.

The market transforms into a disruptive, anti-brand arcade—a physical and augmented experience that interrupts, unsettles, and reawakens users to the absurdity of algorithm-driven life. Augmented Reality, typically a tool for corporate control (filters, tracking, gamified shopping), is instead repurposed to create moments of détournement, where the commercial is undermined, and participation leads not to consumption, but to adding weight to reality and human interaction. Overall revaluing the High Street as a whole. 

Instead of guiding users toward consumption, the market becomes a disobedient space, forcing engagement away from passive scrolling and toward critical awareness of spectacle itself. The interactions don’t feed an algorithm—they break it. The market is no longer a relic of pre-digital commerce but a living, evolving site of resistance against digital saturation and corporate control.

This project received the Oxford Brookes University Reginald W. Cave Award.

Instagram: @sheevz_q, @oxarch

The Inner Mechanism by Jared Roberts, M.Arch ’25
Lawrence Technological University | Advisor: Masataka Yoshikawa

This project sees the physical model and 2D illustration of the hypothetical device abstracted to create architectural forms and spaces. The form derives itself from the concepts dealt with in the inner mechanisms and particularly information storage. The “nested” nature of digital information storage (i.e., nested file folders on a computer) translates to nested architectural forms that sometimes exist within or even overlap other parts of the model. Another concept was that of information’s changes and persistence over time. The form is constructed like a timeline that exists in all three dimensions, inspired by the flow map of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, which charts various different variables including location, population, time, events and more about Napoleon’s Russian campaign. In the same way, the timeline is a two-dimensional visual representation of information gathered about events in history; this model is a three-dimensional representation of the information gathered and stored by the hypothetical device. 

Instagram: @masataka.yoshikawa

Echoes of Home by Zuha Arab Sabbagh & Rana Abdelhadi, B.Arch ’25
American University of Sharjah | Advisor: Gregory Thomas Spaw

‘Echoes of Home’ responds broadly to displacement in our globalised world. Specifically, on the generational displacement of Syrians. Centralised on the intimate and underappreciated labour of homemaking, the project acts as a recognition and celebration of Womanhood as a discipline. It is designed to mark the story of displacement – building and rebuilding – into an inconstant world. The project tentatively approaches the need to capture the complicated ephemerality in our modern understanding of what ‘home’ is.

In designing a secondary residence-exhibition, the studio deployed the renaissance phenomenon of the cabinet of curiosities to challenge us to create spatially charged architecture focused on the exhibition of artifacts. We selected fictitious clients, curated a selection of curiosities to display, picked a suitable site, and decided the extent of distinction between the residence and the exhibition.

Designing a residence required an examination of the notion of ‘home’. Historically, ‘home’ has been explored as a vehicle for living and, with the rise of modernism, critiqued as performative. The programs selected recognise the labour of homemaking and extend to capture the performance of hosting and the pleasure of gathering. ‘Home’ has consistently been placed in women’s domain. The practice of homemaking falls under the discipline of Womanhood. The project adheres to the practice and rejects criticism, accommodating for it spatially. The kitchen, game room, bathing space, bedrooms, bathrooms, and guest room all double as exhibition spaces. The integrated spaces create opportunities for gathering and hakawayti (storytelling). Homes tell a story of past, present and future, and the project acts as a natural extension.

Encouraged to design spaces from the inside out, the client and narrative guided design decisions. The Characters: a mother, daughter and grandmother, based on Syrian women in our vicinity, emphasise the generational distinctions in modes of displacement: immigrant, diaspora and refugee. The clients’ stories resemble those of many diasporas. 

Instagram: @gregoryspaw

An Anchor in Time: A Dwelling Reflecting the Interplay of Time and Space by Salma Hani Mubarak Ali, B.Arch ’25
American University of Sharjah | Advisor: Gregory Thomas Spaw

In the vast stillness of the desert, this residence becomes a compass of time—a place where shifting sands echo the dance of the stars, grounding life within the endless drift of the cosmos. The design emerges from the client’s collection of astrological instruments, shaping spatial arrangements that enhance functionality and interaction. Objects inform the layout, with dedicated areas that invite exploration and observation. Strategic openings frame views of the night sky and desert, enriching the experience of celestial observation. This residence serves as both a home and an observatory, fostering a profound connection to the cosmos while celebrating the beauty of time and change. (Text: Salma Hani Mubarak Ali)

Cabinet of Curiosities: Exploring the Ensemble (aka, house of the collector) is an option studio utilizing the 16th-century-18th-century phenomenon of the Cabinet of Curiosities or Wunderkammers (wonder-rooms) as a point of departure to explore the exhibition of ensembles of artifacts with the goal of creating spatially charged architecture.

Working as individuals or in pairs, students had the opportunity to curate their own collection of curiosities and develop a novel architectural language to facilitate the display of the exquisite objects. Associated with the collection was a real or imagined client that served to further drive a generated domestic program. With the scale of the overall proposals being purposely manageable, students had the opportunity to focus on developing architectural assemblies that directly engage with issues of materiality, connections, and details. As such, physical and digital models were heavily employed as tools to study the interplay of elements at a series of scales

This project won the RIBA Gulf: Future Architects 2024 Overall Best Model Award.

Click here to learn more.

 Instagram: @salma.hani.ali, @gregoryspaw

Evermore: A Cemetery For The City by Mo Karnes, B.Arch ’25
Mississippi State University | Advisors: Jassen Callender, David Buege, Aaron White, Mark Vaughan & David Perkes

My uncle died less than two years before I was born. I never met him, but his death is only an obstacle in my ability to know him. Chris was an artist and poet who left behind many things for me to know him by, including a poem entitled Evermore, written during his struggle with AIDS. The meditation is: 

I will walk unlonely,

Holding me up

As I begin to fall,

You Lead the way

And sometimes follow.

Our passage now is

Evermore.

(To be repeated, Unending).

To be ‘unlonely’ is a profound response to the impending, seeming loneliness that is death. Loneliness for those dying and those left behind. Chris’s poem is not just a meditation for himself, but for those struggling with loss. As a dying man, Chris places himself shoulder to shoulder with the reader; their journey is one and the same.

“Evermore: A Cemetery For The City” is a small cemetery complex adjacent to the Cathedral of St. Peter the Apostle in Downtown Jackson, Mississippi. The complex comprises a crematorium, vertical columbarium, and chapel. The site is rectangular, bound on all sides by concrete walls with only one threshold for entry. Two masses seemingly float behind the concrete boundary walls that veil them, the smaller chapel and the larger columbarium. Both stoic in form, they disguise the intricacies hidden in the interiors of their masses.  

The ambition of this project is to integrate the awareness of mortality into the city, while supplying architectural means to confront it. This awareness is not a means of oppression, but an attempt to convey the gift that is life. This cemetery is intended to be a public space where inhabitants can experience the city with citizens who came before them, inducing a relationship with the past, generating an appreciation of those who came before, and propelling the city forward with the intent to befriend and mentor the future.  

This project received the CDFL Capstone Studio Travel Award. 

Instagram: @mo.karnes, @jassencallender

IMAGINATIVE REALITY: INVENTION OF SYNERGISTIC NARRATIVES by Chey Isiguzo, M.Arch ’25
Toronto Metropolitan University | Advisor: Lisa Landrum

Imagination is both an act and a familiar, safe space, evoking nostalgic feelings rooted in our reality. 

This space can become unfamiliar when cultural expressions changes, leading to multifaceted identities and undeveloped narratives. This dynamic contributes to cultural conflict and highlights the juxtaposition of traditional and contemporary African architectural narratives. As a space, imagination can generate narrative 

characters and elements by creating synergistic stories that incorporate traditional craftsmanship into contemporary African architecture. The imaginative process consists of three components. Imagining while thinking is an act that uses mental images from memories, dreams, fantasies, or visions to create one’s reality. Imagining while making is the act of craftsmanship used to speculate the distinction between traditional and contemporary architectural narratives through the lens of cultural expressions. Imagining while drawing is an act of translation by utilizing narrative characters—building elements like windows and doors—to dissect fragments of both traditional and contemporary architecture to find new narratives. 

These narrative characters work alongside structural elements, such as walls, roofs, layouts, courtyards, and compounds, to convey new stories that showcase materials and design techniques rooted in Igbo craftsmanship. To develop synergistic narratives, one can explore the evolution of traditional African craftsmanship, particularly within Igbo culture, across ancestral, post-colonial, and contemporary contexts. This exploration reveals how the architectural narratives of traditional and contemporary styles are increasingly distinct. Consequently, this imaginative space becomes a reality that examines the relationship between what is real and what is envisioned through architectural craftsmanship.

Instagram: @sumisi000, @ucisi_studios, @tmu_archgrad

When I’m Sixty-Four: Flourishing at Falkland by George Mannix, M.ArchD ’25
Oxford Brookes School of Architecture | Advisors: Melissa Kinnear & Alex Towler

This project proposes a “therapeutic cooperative” that reimagines later life as a time for purpose, legacy, and connection. Designed for people aged 64 and over, the initiative creates a living environment where older adults can flourish by sharing life experiences with younger visitors while contributing to environmental and social regeneration. 

Central to the concept is the cohabitation of residents with Tamworth pigs, which serve both symbolic and ecological roles—facilitating intergenerational dialogue and promoting biodiversity through trophic rewilding.

Located at Kilgour, a Victorian farm steading on Scotland’s Falkland estate, the site carries historical significance and a past tied to pig-rearing and the celebration of endings. 

Accommodation includes accessible apartments, communal gardens, and a biodiversity-rich courtyard. Pigs will live in creatively built “Ad-Hog” styes using reclaimed materials. A chapel-like “Memory Archive” will hold personal stories of residents’ lives, offering a space for reflection and remembrance.

The project unfolds in three phases: first, clearing and revitalising the site with community involvement; second, welcoming the first residents and establishing the Memory Archive; and third, expanding the model across Scotland to transform abandoned steadings and boost natural regeneration.

Younger visitors, whom we have dubbed “biodiversity-backpackers,” can stay in on-site hostel lodgings, with the hope of fostering meaningful interaction between generations. Funding comes from elderly participants downsizing their homes, combined with national grants, giving them control over their later years.

Ultimately, this initiative responds to the growing issue of isolation among the elderly in Scotland. By embedding legacy, memory, and biocentric living into the design, it aims to help people see out their days with dignity whilst living with renewed purpose.

This project received the Ackroyd Lowrie Prize.

Instagram: @georgemannix, @ds3_obu

POLISH PAVILION – RIYADH EXPO 2030 by Oskar Karos, B.Sc. in Architecture ’25
University of the District of Columbia | Advisor: Golnar Ahmadi

Set in Riyadh for Expo 2030, the Polish Pavilion reinterprets the nation’s geography and ecological identity through architecture. Designed as a living map of Poland, the pavilion invites visitors to journey from the southern Tatra Mountains to the northern Baltic Sea, experiencing the country’s topography, climate, and innovation within one continuous landscape. The project explores how architecture can embody an entire nation’s ecosystem, transforming exhibition space into a self-sustaining organism.

Poland’s diverse terrain—from its rugged mountains to fertile plains and coastal winds—inspired a spatial narrative divided into eight regions. Each represents two neighboring voivodeships, blending their natural and technological identities: wind power in Pomorskie, hydropower in Warmińsko-Mazurskie, sustainable farming in Podlaskie, and smart urbanism in Mazowieckie, among others. 

Visitors move northward along a symbolic Vistula River, linking interactive installations that demonstrate Poland’s leadership in renewable energy, circular economy, and ecological stewardship. Constructed with steel, wood, stone, and glass, the pavilion merges material authenticity with sustainability. A closed water cycle system replicates natural evaporation and rainfall, powering greenery and regulating humidity. The accessible green roof offers shaded paths and aerial views of Poland’s “living topography,” blending innovation with environmental harmony.

Beyond a national exhibition, the pavilion is a statement of coexistence—between people and nature, culture and technology. It celebrates Poland not through static displays, but as a breathing ecosystem where every element, from water to wind, participates in a cycle of renewal.

Instagram: @Golnarahmadi

Stay tuned for Part XI!

2023 Study Architecture Student Showcase - Part XXI

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Climate Change is an important issue that impacts architecture in many aspects. In Part XXI of the Study Architecture Student Showcase, the featured student work addresses climate change in innovative ways. Each project highlights how climate change impacts our present—or uses current trends to predict a possible future—while using design to present sustainable solutions. Take a look!

Suspended Culture: Agritecture for a Contemporary Climate by Vincenza Perla, M.Arch ‘23
University of Maryland | Advisors: Lindsey May, Brian Kelly & Jana Vandergoot

This thesis is about how architecture can shape the future of historic coastal agriculture. The site of this thesis sits along the banks of Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay. It shares the benefits of being located on one of the East Coast’s most prominent watersheds. Therefore, this thesis tackles this problem by acknowledging indefinite boundaries. We cannot keep operating in the same ways that got us here, so we must think ahead of the changing landscape, reimagine what the land and water can produce in terms of food, and build in a more sensitive and resilient manner. 

In summary, Suspended Culture acknowledges the immediacy of climate change and how it threatens coastal agricultural practices as we know it. It disrupts the cycle of displacement on the land by planning for the current and future realities through both landscape and building design. The land produces historic local food goods, invites people to interact with the landscape and agricultural practices, and acts as a memorial to the history of the site and climate. The buildings are specific and efficiently designed with attention to historic precedents, durability, thermal comfort, and with consideration for land, people, plants, and animals. All in all, the thesis acknowledges the violent history and future projections of the land to ensure the viability of vital cultural institutions like coastal agriculture and architecture by planning ahead of climate change and designing buildings that consider both the past and future in their design.

This project won the Director’s Award. 

Instagram: @studio.mayd, @buildinghopepod, @vincenzcube

Inhabiting the Uninhabitable by Tyler Renschen, B. Arch ‘23
Ball State University | Advisor: Miguel San Miguel, AIA

In the year 2022, the Earth was comprised of 149 million km2 of land and 361 million km2 of ocean. 19% [28 million km2] of this land was considered barren by desertification, or topographical complexity and 10% [15 million km2] made up the glaciers among the poles. 71% [104 million km2] was considered habitable land. At this point in Earth’s history, nearly half of the habitable land was used for agriculture, and even then, roughly 10% of the human population was undernourished.  

Now it is the year 2240 and the Earth is different. The glaciers have continued to melt, forcing the ocean tides to rise over a foot, swallowing up portions of once-ideal real estate. The human population has continued to grow in reaction to innovations in healthcare and the doubling of human life expectancy. This has dramatically increased the size of Earth’s cities and infrastructure, both densifying and sprawling outward across their surrounding landscapes tripling the amount of developed habitable land. The biggest change is the sand. Since the 21st century, every year, desertification has continued to turn 120,000 km2 of the Earth‘s surface dry, making once habitable land uninhabitable. We now live with sand at our doorsteps and a growing need for space. How does an architect interpret an environment and its role in shaping and scoping a project?

We have begun looking for answers in the sand.  

This investigation was inspired by the work of English architect Richard Horden (1944-2018) and his conceptualization of “Adaptive Architecture.”  Inhabiting the Uninhabitable tells the story of an architectural response to Earth’s continuous desertification in a future time known as The Exhaustive Era (2240) when all “inhabitable” land has been developed and the human race begins looking to territories currently deemed “uninhabitable.”  

The expanding Great Sand Dunes National Park into the San Luis Valley and Alamosa, Colorado was the project site.

The desert may hold the key to a new meaning of architecture and its imaginative possibilities.

This project received the TEG Prize, a two-stage process. A group of 20 finalists were selected by 5th-year students and faculty, followed by a final external review judged by a distinguished panel of designers and architects. 

Instagram: @renschentyler, @txtocajackalope13

Examining Indian Architecture – Design of the Eastern Waterfront Mumbai, India by Ashley Straub, B.Arch ‘23
University of Notre Dame | Advisor: Krupali Krusche

Pedagogical Goals of the Project:

1) Study the effects of rising water levels on the Western and Eastern Waterfront for the city of Mumbai and how to design new development with considerations of climate change.

2) Study population explosion in metropolitan cities and what urban and architectural

interventions can be best suited to create beneficial design solutions for the future urban growth of these cities.

3) Study the language of classical and vernacular of non-western architecture, in this case, Indian architecture specific to the Bora Bazaar and Ballard estate area to effectively allow translation of specific understanding of proportions, design and composition rules.

4) Study the urban factors of foreground and background buildings and how architecture and urban design both play a major role in design decisions.

5) Help students navigate the knowledge of reading architecture of a foreign, lesser-known culture to them. Knowing how to decipher the universality of building typology of unfamiliar places and its application in a variety of indigenous, vernacular, local, and regional settings in terms of their political, economic, social, ecological, and technological factors.

6) Getting practical knowledge to connect with real ongoing complex projects programs.

The Future of Highways: Introducing Localized Logistics Centers with High-Density Housing to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway by Emily O’Connell, B.Arch ‘23
New York Institute of Technology | Advisor: Evan Shieh

The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) of New York City is famously overused, seeing heavy traffic at almost all hours of the day. This expressway is also a significant link for the movement of goods through the region. Single-passenger and last-mile delivery vehicles make a significant contribution to the excessive congestion levels and are leading to infrastructure failure along the BQE, specifically in the Triple Cantilever section of Brooklyn Heights. This section has received a lot of attention and proposals for its repair, most of which focus solely on the maintenance of the expressway as we know it and do not explore approaches that address how we can lessen the usage of this expressway.

This project proposes an intervention along the Triple Cantilever that combines a localized logistics center with high-density housing for employees of the facility and transitory works of Brooklyn to reside. Localized logistics centers combat congestion by decreasing delivery distances for last-mile vehicles, and opens the door for on-foot or bicycle delivery options. Introducing co-living housing into these logistics centers is a unique opportunity to form a valuable work-to-home connection, as well as address the housing crisis that New York City is currently facing. 

Connection to community is seen throughout multiple scales of this project. Three variations of co-living units allow for a sense of community on an individual and private level. These units accumulate in a unique order on each floor and are accessed by bridges through the building’s central atrium circulation space. This allows the occupants to visualize and form connections with their neighbors, not limited to their own floor. The project’s form creates a courtyard space for both occupants of the building and members of Brooklyn to utilize for recreation, amenities, and community engagement. The logistics center is located on the bottom levels of this building, with ground access for trucking circulation from the expressway.

The intention of this project is to showcase the benefit of localized logistics hubs in combating congestion and to highlight their potential to be an asset on many portions of the BQE, but also highways that are faced with similar problems.

This project won the New York Institute of Technology, Faculty Thesis Award 

Instagram: @design.emily, @ev07

Napa Laboratory by Bo Su, Hao Wang & Chenshuo Zhang, MS in Architecture and Urban Design ‘23
University of California, Los Angeles | Advisors: Jeffrey Inaba and Valeria Ospital

Napa County grapples with climate change-induced challenges like wildfires and flooding. However, it offers opportunities to pilot novel hazard management solutions. Canal construction diverts floods and stores water for irrigation, while vineyards are reorganized as firebreaks to mitigate wildfires and trial innovative approaches. 

The primary objective is to utilize Napa County as an experimental site for investigating various aspects of environmental management, including soil mitigation, forest management, flood control, and wildfire prevention. 

The slope design considers local climate and hydrological factors such as rainfall, runoff, sunlight, and wind. It aims to create ideal conditions for grape growth by choosing the right angle to allow water absorption, minimize erosion, maximize sunlight exposure, and reduce wind damage. The angle of the slopes can be modified periodically, to experiment on how different conditions impact in crop development. 

Built on federal land leased to small vineyards, the project is a landscape that works as a mitigation barrier for wildfires and an experimentation field for crop weather adaptation. 

Instagram: @hao_wang97, @bo_suuuuuu, @desistance666, @jeffreyinaba, @valeriaospital, 

See you next week for the next installment of the Student Showcase!

2023 Study Architecture Student Showcase - Part XV

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Welcome to Part XV of the Study Architecture Student Showcase! Healthcare and Well-Being are the central themes of today’s highlighted student work. The projects below demonstrate how intentionality around design and architecture can support the well-being of society, playing an essential role in everyday life. Today, we dive into pieces that reinforce dwelling through spatial culture and reimagine architecture through the lens of a matriarchal community in rural Uganda. Viewers can explore project plans for a site in Puerto Rice that serves as a creative and cultural therapy center. And a classroom designed with adaptive design elements and sensory-friendly features to support neurodiverse and disabled students. Read on for more details!

Made with Matriarchs: Crafting Heritage-Oriented Futures with the Karamojong by Ethan Walker, M.Arch ‘23
Lawrence Technological University | Advisors: Scott Shall (Committee Chair), Joonsub Kim (Member), and Edward Orlowski (Member)

In the rural northeast of Uganda, the ethnic Karamojong are experiencing unprecedented pressures to change their ways of life (Knighton, 2017). As semi-nomadic pastoralists, these peoples are dependent on the health of their herds which is contingent on the health of their ancestral lands. Studies show that land health has deteriorated due to climate change, overgrazing and lack of mobility producing a vulnerability context that has attracted international attention. Interventions by foreign actors and the national government have attempted to improve public health while making recurring calls to transform Karamojong culture away from pastoralism towards sedentism and farming (Dbins, 2013). While appropriate in particular cases, the overwhelming call to cultural transformation could be at odds with the capabilities of the land, potentially undermining the pastoral ways of life. These globalizing influences extend beyond policy-making and have fundamentally altered the process of architectural production and construction in the region.

In response, this thesis proposes an iterative, heritage-based approach to design and construction, crafted to mitigate the increasingly harmful effects of globalization upon the traditionally semi-nomadic societies of northern Uganda. In this approach, alternative futures are imagined by reconsidering the role of the architect in relation to the pre-colonial keepers of the built environment; the Matriarchs. When working within this alternative arrangement, architects would work responsively with Matriarchs, lengthening the process of interaction in favor of a responsive design methodology that strengthens the Matriarchs’ power of architectural self-determination. Strategies to equip pastoralist architecture with greater autonomy are imagined, proposed and filtered through a Matriarch-led process to determine what is appropriated, effective and ultimately in the best interest of their desired way of life.

Instagram: @ewalke_ , @scott_shall

This project was selected for the ARCC King Medal and won the LTU Deans Award – Best Project.

Home Grown: Reimagining Dwelling Through Spatiaculture by Devin Derr, M.Arch ‘23
Lawrence Technological University | Advisors: Scott Shall (Chair), Dan Faoro (Member), and Sara Codarin (Member)

To dwell is to feel at home in a space that: maintains nature (both human and non-human), provides protection, freedom, and peace, and implies a general intent to remain (Heidegger, 1971). To inhabit is to view both house and land as mere assets of monetary value. Without dwelling, people can feel uprooted or disconnected from their homes, and the home itself can disrupt or compromise the ecosystem that hosts it. Unfortunately, home design in the U.S. rarely makes dwelling a priority and often glorifies investment-centric metrics to increase profits and value of the land-stances that encourage inhabitation.

Dwelling not only demands a balance between human-created and naturally occurring environments, but also the simultaneous improvement of both. To achieve dwelling many ancient cultivation practices like permaculture, horticulture, silviculture, and arboriculture are necessary. These practices have a central focus on maintaining and improving natural environments because the benefits they reap directly rely on the natural environment’s well-being. If architecture leverages the 17,000 years of ecological knowledge that these fields have generated, then true protection, freedom, support, peace, and balance may begin to take root (Rasmussen, Wayne D., et al., 2022). Using trees and other living botanicals as a source of structure and enclosure, this thesis aims to trade inhabitation and its associated ailments for an architecture that is quite literally cultivated and alive. There is currently an imbalance of the built and natural environments caused by the commodification of land and architecture, which is best addressed with dwelling reinforced through spatial culture. To investigate this proposition, an extrapolative study of Spatiaculture Dwellings will be applied to several environment and ecosystem types and then analyzed on their performance using the qualifiers that define dwelling.

Instagram: @scott_shall

Newson Conservatory of Music by Jacob Lindley, B.Arch ‘23
Mississippi State University | Advisors: Jassen Callender and Mark Vaughan

I am fascinated with the analytical, poetic, and metaphorical connections between music and architecture. This can only resonate with someone if they understand how to read music. There are so many other connections besides simple scripting, though. Making one of those connections evident to people is important to me: so that more of the world can physically connect something that is so familiar in some genre or another [music] to the way we experience “city,” certainly a city that has a rich history in the blues music. I believe that our world needs more positive influence, particularly in the physical realm. I have and continue to believe that architecture can allow us to aid in the effort to foster positive environments. Architecture should enhance our planet and meet the needs of a society that will make a lasting impression for generations. This is my legacy. In humility, we walk and observe that around us to understand the psyche – that true reflection can be obtained through the simplest of measures.

Architecture should remind you who you are. Architecture is dependent upon the individual and the landscape as its sources of life. It should be a mechanism for empowering, and supportive in its greatest capacity of manifesting life – not only life physically, but life that is generated in the psychological realm too. The rituals of daily life inform the architecture of its role in that support, and, in return, the architecture celebrates the best in life, the individual.

This project was awarded the first place CDFL Capstone Travel Award

Instagram: @jakewlindley, @jassencallender

San・Arte: Art as a Healing Tool by Glorivette Correa, B.Arch ‘23
Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico | Advisors: J. Omar García Beauchamp & Pedro A. Rosario-Torres

The global mental health system is deteriorating, so much so that a large part of the population suffering from a mental disorder does not receive the necessary treatment or any type of help, due to lack of information, insecurity, fear of discrimination or lack of services. While the population served is limited to a general traditional treatment, which in many cases is not the help they need. For this reason, the objectives of this project are to expand the traditional medicine market, by developing new spaces that focus on providing other treatment alternatives (such as artistic-creative therapies), and explore the architectural capabilities that can be achieved together with art and nature, to meet the appropriate conditions in a space to provide these therapies.

This project focuses on the island of Puerto Rico, specifically in the town of Ponce. San・Arte’s proposal aims to develop a center focused on arts, culture and healing. A Cultural and Artistic Creative Therapy Center is then created to positively serve the community and the people. A place that helps raise awareness and educate people about mental health. The center offers four different therapies: art therapy, dance-movement therapy, music therapy and drama therapy. The center also has spaces for artists, theater (indoor and outdoor), and an intensive creative retreat which serves as a safe space away from everyday life and where professionals or those who attend (not necessarily artists) can once again feel inspired, motivated and creative. The center also has different green areas such as terraces and an aromatherapy garden, thus providing different semi-public and semi-private spaces. The number of people who need psychological assistance continues to grow. The arts are an excellent communication tool that also helps us to connect with other people and that is what this proposal seeks.

Instagram: @glorivette_correa

Designing Outside the Lines for Neurodiverse Children by Monica Higbee, M.Arch ‘23
University of Idaho | Advisor: Hala Barakatu

The number of children with developmental disabilities or that are neurodiverse that live within the United States is a rising number. Children aged 3 through 17 are stripped of equitable opportunities within early learning environments and are often filtered through the education system with little to no accommodations for learning or independence in the built environment.

My aim for this project is to systematically identify adaptive design elements and sensory-friendly features that can improve the average classroom and promote independence for individuals with disabilities or who are neurodiverse in the built environment. In doing this, I also aim to find and develop a learning environment that changes the negative attitudes towards disabilities and teaches others how to better adapt the built environment to everyone regardless of ability or disability.

Instagram: @monicahigbee, @halahb2

Architectural Neural Agility: Visions of Architecture through Sensation, Perception, and Self by Skyler Howell, M. Arch ‘23
University of Idaho | Advisor: Hala Barakat

How do we know that our fundamental beliefs of this world are our own? The problem is that the lack of “freedom of will” influences our neurological synaptic pathways; these pathways are strengthened or eliminated passively based of our individual experiences. Frascari was hinting at this notion when he stated, “Just as we think architecture with our bodies, we think our bodies through architecture.” Our vision of reality exists through our nervous systems ability to sense and perceive our environment. Paying attention to perceptions makes way for our nervous system to produce conscious or unconscious thoughts; thoughts can provoke emotions, and exists not only within the present, but memories of the past, and visions of the future. 

This project explores the way our nervous system builds reality through sensations like sight, touch, hearing, and smell while filtering stored object-oriented information known as “schema.” According to Edelman, “Our neural networks are a deeply embodied phenomenon that leads to architectural genesis.”

 

In order to break free from traditional architectural design-thinking, this project proposes a new vision of architecture by actively stimulating neuroplasticity. We need to evoke our nervous systems’ ability to adapt through deliberate actions allowing architects to break free from our existing paths. Translating the architectural design-thinking process by creating new models of an action-oriented “architectural neural-agility” within architectural-genesis.

Instagram:  @ponyboysky, @halahb2

Communal Healing by Tanner Mote, B.Arch ‘23
Ball State University | Advisors: Robert Koester and Sarah Keogh

Younger generations want to live in cities and yet most neighborhoods are afflicted by limited housing choices, disconnection from food sources and public transportation, and often are also dangerous environments for pedestrians. These problems have made existing neighborhoods undesirable. So, how can neighborhoods be systemically redeveloped to address current concerns so that they don’t become exacerbated in the future?

This project proposes the strategic implementation of infill housing and urban food production in the redevelopment of existing neighborhoods. The McKinley neighborhood in Muncie, Indiana was chosen as the location to test this thesis. Initial designs create additional housing that offers different living opportunities, from single-family dwellings to accessory dwelling units. Each design enables
residents to grow their own food via raised beds or vertical towers in an incorporated greenhouse. The ability to be self-sufficient and the visibility of food production will educate and inspire the community and promote continued progression toward sustainable living. Later phases could provide the neighborhood with varying scales of community spaces such as shared gardens, food markets, and education centers to attract and support community members. These latter phases will also have to address existing patterns of public transportation and correlated pedestrian paths for better connectivity.

See you next week for the next installment of the Student Showcase!