thesis precis

Ali Dostoglu semt pazari
Bazaars in Istanbul have been an important part of the inhabitants’ daily life, even before the city was named the new capital of the Roman empire in 4th century. Nevertheless, today they tend to lose their potential as “social activators” distributed within the city fabric, due to the recently adopted strategies by the municipal administration. Under the pretext of being “modernized”, current bazaars are either being relocated to the periphery, regularized within their existing sites or shut down. Even if they can be criticized due to their infrastructural problems (lack of water, electricity, drainage, etc.), the noise they create or their tendency to be left-over except the market days, these temporary open-air markets deserve to be thoroughly analyzed in such a way to develop an alternative approach which will not only deal with their current problems (caused
by external and/or internal factors) but also define and maintain certain existing characteristics which increase their potential as social activators. In order to develop such an alternative, the thesis project takes one of the current bazaar areas spread along the Golden Horn (where the city’s market district developed throughout the centuries because of the region’s potential to work as a natural port) and develops a rule-based design solution which can be adapted to a variety of contexts.

Ankur Verma parasitic intervention
With the advent of time, globalization and modernism and in the span of around 20-30 years India as a country, as an economy, as a system has grown by leaps and bounds. From a third world country it has gone on to become an important growing economy of the world. But Globalization has also widened the gap and created an imbalance between societies within its national boundaries. This gap delves deeper when it comes to the differentiation between the rich and the poor class and stands tall for the same reason in the art world.
Indian Contemporary Art and Architecture has taken major steps to grow out of the shackles of its historic Indian counterpart, that world over is famous for, and risen from its boundaries to a new strong system. The ideology of contemporary art showcases the new thoughts of emerging India but remains obscured to the global audience at large. Thus the need arises to showcase the world the new resurgent Indian art and its ethos.
The focus is to De-contextualize contemporary local art from the Indian Sub-Continent and transform it into a system, a flexible and opportunistic form of organization. The new organization evades the ideas of nationalism, instead aims at emphasizing on international goals. The project aims at using Architecture as a tool and as a foundation to manifest these disempowered artists and their ideologies, morph out of their regional and national boundaries and reveal on a globalized, transnational scale.

Anshu Choudhri echoes of an ecos
July 26, 2005 Mumbai was under water, this catastrophe opened the eyes of an average Mumbaikar to the repercussion of mans “CREATIVE DESTRUCTION”
In today’s developing world neglect and inappropriate development put at stake our ecological heritage. Short sighted commercial decisions in an overpopulated city like Mumbai has lead to the reclamation of large portions of the marshes that were the original fabric of the city. The marsh and its dual nature make it a very interesting context to explore. Its land + water condition is one that cannot be understood from a distance, it can only be experienced by being part of the experiment itself. The intervention in this dual natured context is hence a cultural designed landscape one that offers to the citizens a sense of place and identity and maps the relationship with the land over time; and they are part of our national heritage and each of our lives.This new system that is being integrated into the urban ecology is made up of two basic functional layers
energy production
The architectural intervention is one that desires to harness and exhibit the biological power of existing species of the marsh. These species and their functional strength make them the integral connection between the city and the ecosystem.
water cleansing
Improving the water quality is a critical inherent quality of a marshland one that should be revived to cleanse these arteries of the city. This function does not require any mechanical intervention but can be achieved by integrating the principles of the ‘LIVING MACHINE’.
This system emerges from the school on the site as it’s an extension of the educational experience where one is part of the educational experiment. It is an experimental ground that houses varied spatial and surface experiences and evolves over time. The drivers for programming this urban +ecological hybrid landscape fabric is defined by the principles of Mary Miss’s City as Living Laboratory: Sustainability Made Tangible through the Arts namely
Experimental city
Experiential city
Evolving city
The landscape is like unraveling urban threads into the marsh an articulation of effective strategies of a marsh not a translation. It adopts a module based system as it offers scope for evolving or growth. This measure grafts a new ecology of marsh fingers into the urban setup.
People protect what they love – Jacques Costeau

Asel Yeszhanova gutenberg space
“We cannot remember without architecture” Ruskin
The project is a result of an attempt to meditate on the fate of printed books and a space that stores the civilization’s memory.
Digital inventions are replacing the physical forms. Specialists admit the intellectual discourse has been experiencing shifts from paper pages to networked screens.
The printed books will become a precious relic. In this sense, the concept of a library as an institution and a cultural celebration, will be reconsidered. It will be no longer a space where visitors have access to the books. It will be a cemetery of the books, a shrine that houses the valuable disappearing artifacts.
The last collection of the books. The precious heritage of irrational, naive, and strange dreamers, who wrote about beauty, happiness, grief, misery, hope, delusion, solitude, delight, joy, faith… The last library of printed books. The last trace of the dreams.
The space will be created by the books: the walls made by shelves with the individual boxes that store books. The books will determine the facade/the surfaces of the library, creating an inimitable and unique pattern.
The site is an island in the Aral sea. The disappearing culture is placed at the disappearing sea.
"Manuscripts don't burn' Bulgakov

Deepti Bansal r-e-ickshaw
Homelessness is one of the biggest challenges of the urban world today. The city has responsibilities towards these people as the majority homeless population in India consists of construction workers, rag-pickers, beggars and rickshaw-pullers, who are important layers of the society. They erect infrastructure, clean up the city and form a tertiary transport system which is very important for every Indian city, irreplaceable by monorail or subway systems for they can access narrowest of the streets and are much faster in traffic, cheap and sustainable.
The main focus is to provide housing for the homeless rickshaw pullers. These people are migrant labors, earning $4 a day and prefer sleeping on their rickshaws for security reasons of their vehicle, proximity to working areas and un-affordability of housing and their families end up spending life in deplorable conditions in the inner parts of the city. What if their source of income can serve as their living spaces and be transformed to form legal, legible societies in the grey areas of the city when put together. The mobile and ephemeral quality of customized rickshaws into their homes and the fixed multi-functional plug-in elements can lead to a new urbanism.

Ekin Barlas dance the space
Public spaces have always been an important, essential part of settlements; they have played a fundamental role throughout history. They allow shared experiences such as concerts, political protests, performances and free speeches. They basically build up the basis of metropolitan culture.
However, today it’s no longer possible to make a clear distinction between public and private space. The privatization of public spaces makes the line between public and private blurry.
The thesis will focus on Bryant Park, one of the most striking contemporary examples of privatized public spaces. The challenge was to create a design that will allow Bryant Park to host private events without shutting it off to the public completely. The new parametric layered topography will allow the park to sponsor all kinds of different activities happening at the same time; it will facilitate occupation.
This layered, sequenced structure touches the New York Public Library in a way that manipulates it’s privacy by letting the visitors read their books outside of the building, in between the trees of the Park. With this new design, the visitors can climb into the trees, even walk on the roof of the structure while a private cocktail party is happening underneath. The thesis essentially deals with overlapping of two distinct notions: private and public.

Eleni Karanikola necesCity
400 years ago New York was meant to play a dramatic role on the notion of property. This led to a society fully depended on belongings and subsequently to the majority of people suffering from the unfair classification that this created. A city created upon the necessity of consuming and the importance of belongings may hide a lot of problematic points either for the ones that do “have” or for those who don’t.
As the population in urban areas is increasing the demand of affordable housing is getting more important. NYCHA is the biggest landlord in New York, providing housing to almost 400,000 low income people. If NYCHA was a city it would rank 20th in population size in United States. That would effectively constitute a whole city that exists within New York and has been for long abandoned. Since their creation, over sixty years ago the majority of NYCHA’s projects have never been redeveloped. This has as a result, that a big part of this contemporary metropolis is still living in the 50’s. This shows the level of segregation not only in a spatial level but in a temporal as well.
The goal of this thesis is to take a brave look into this world that has been purposefully left behind, and try to revitalize it. In spite the profound dangers faced in all the efforts that involve themselves with low cost housing (with the most obvious being gentrification), that there are ways to open up these areas, in order to provide a better living and creative environment.
Lebbeus Woods has stated that “Individuals survive only if their community survives, and the community survives only by the concerted effort of all its members.” By applying this inspirational notion to the NYCHA projects better and more productive living environments can be created that are actively part of the surrounding city. This will also help to prevent from the abandonment of low cost housing and furthermore from demolishing them.

Jessica King architecture as empowerment
Can architecture empower people or be used as a tool in the process of empowerment?
The United Nations estimates that in my lifetime 1 in 3 people worldwide will live in informal urban environments under substandard conditions. Space cannot change society by itself. It is not the equivalent of revolution, but architecture is never non-political. Architecture always reinforces a set of social relations. Some issues inherent in informal settlements: density, lack of shelter, cost tensions, materiality questions, construction methods, these are the tools of architects. As architects we are educated to synthesize problems, address multiple tensions, and to be sensitive to aesthetics. These skills can be used to orchestrate the situations as well as the structures. By involving communities of people in the organization, planning, educating, and collaboration that is vital to an architectural design becoming a reality I believe we, as a profession, have the capability to be empowering. What we design will pick a side, will make statements about the policies inherent in a place, and will set up the inhabitants in one way or another to relate to those around them. I want to test the empowering affects architecture can have on those relationships and individuals.
The specific scenario that I chose to test my architectural questions is located in Accra, Ghana. I am creating small, deployable architectures for the women porters of Agbogbloshie Market. The first job of most women as they migrate to the slums of Accra is of a head porter. They earn money by carrying goods through the market on their heads. The women can make up to twice the national daily average in wages but a lack of security and community often puts them in precarious situations safety wise. The goal of my architecture is to create a space for these women, to sleep, to create closer relationships with each other and the community around them, and also to use this space and social platform as a health and hygiene education hub.

Kai-Yu Yu recreational powerplant
As we are facing the economic recession and energy crisis, "Saving" become a issue in our lives, financial and ecological wise. World population is rapidly increasing which leads to more consumption of out limited energy resources. At the same time, we are also generating more pollution damaging the world we inhabit. The limited remaining energy resources we have on the planet are already determinately estimated. we are going use up all of them pretty soon in a large human development point of view. And terrible consequences such as O zone break, sea level rise, global warming and so on come with the way we consume the resources. Therefore we should start to rethink the way we treat the earth. This project is a facility that generates power from nature and the energy we waste during recreational events. The goal is to create a place where people can do recreational activities and generate power at the same time, turning one-way consumption into reciprocal contribution.

Leopold Lambert weaponized architecture
Weaponized Architecture is an examination of the inherent instrumentalization of architecture as a political weapon; research informs the development of a project which, rather than defusing these characteristics, attempts to integrate them within the scene of a political struggle.
The proposed project dramatizes, through its architecture, a Palestinian disobedience to the colonial legislation imposed on its legal territory. In fact, the State of Israel masters the elaboration of territorial and architectural colonial apparatuses that act directly on Palestinian daily lives. In this regard, it is crucial to observe that 63% of the West Bank is under total control of the Israeli Defense Forces in regards to security, movement, planning and construction. Weaponized Architecture is thus manifested as a Palestinian shelter, with an associated agricultural platform, which expresses its illegality through its architectural vocabulary.The shelter constitutes both an architectural design and a narrative whose uncertainty is integrated as a creative catalyst.

Liesl Martinez architecture + consumerism
Modern consumerism is more concerned with feelings of desire rather than established needs, thus directly associating consumption with desire. The present project aims to downsize Soho’s consumerism.
In order to do so, a small percentage of space on the bigger stores in Soho (i. e. Bloomigdale’s, Old Navy) will be reappropiated for creating a network of micro-sized factories sponsored by the attached stores and attended by craftsmen and artisans that will mend/repurpose defective or unused items at no cost. This will expose the importance of craftmanship behind the manufacturing industry and clearly antagonize the consumerist behavior, driving individuals towards sustainability and a more responsible approach towards consumption. This will be further promoted by a new flow of people that will be drawn into Soho expecting this new and free consumption, increasing interactions among people with different interests and of different social backgrounds.

Martin Byrne feral garage
“Better to reject the trappings of culture…if that would leave one a little more honest in one’s nakedness. To discover one’s own spiritual poverty is to achieve a positive conquest by the spirit.” William Barrett, Irrational Man
This thesis is an exploration of the feral potential within architecture. The intention is to liberate the discourse of architecture from the limits of the rational and positivistic into a wilderness of possibility. This is to be achieved through the exaltation of the “humble and dirty little corners” of architecture that may serve as the catalysts by which architecture may become feral. The aim is to discover this new wilderness through the exploitation of the inherent weaknesses in architecture, specifically those the technologies upon which we increasingly depend. The scenario in which this plays out follows the story of the IBM Corporation’s new Manhattan headquarters for their Smarter Planet Advanced Research Facility. We enter the scenario as IBM is forced to grapple within its own internal systemic collapse. Ultimately, the thesis utilizes the deviant possibilities within modern technology to create a series of interconnected micro-environments, unsavory byproducts of positivist progress, in which we find a new ambiguous techno-wilderness filled with architectural and human potential.
“Consequently, we have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him. All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000 and entered in an index; or better still, there would be published certain edifying works of nature of encyclopedic lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will be no more incidents or adventures in the world.” Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

Maryam Fayyaz e-formations
In the twenty-first century, a network society is emerging. Fragmented, visually saturated, characterized by rapid technological change and driven by cyber culture, it is dizzying, excessive, and sometimes surreal. The computer has accelerated the digital electronic communication in the demystified niches of the internet. The internet operates not only on this micro scale but also on a macro scale and transforming our cities into global entities. Situated precisely between the real and the virtual, architecture is challenged, yet resists. The purpose of this project is to examine the matrix of themes to do with the integration of human life and technology and its subsequent translation into architecture. The project proposes a system of data vessels (DVs) where each DV is an interactive application that tracks down information on military conflicts based on Google earth location in accordance with the freedom of information act 1966. They enclose an inhabitable space inside, activated by the user. Together they form a DV field that exhibit a communal/group behavior and make clusters based on location based matching and in this way implicate the social behavior of a networked society with each DV as a node in the network. This system is plugged in the outer ring of the western side of pentagon (US dept of defense) attacked on 9/11/01, an event that triggers another war in the world. On the outer side is the media wall that broadcast the real time activity inside DVs and becomes a loud expression of public opinion on the wars at present.

Nikolaos Patsopoulos parallaxis
J.G. Ballard once stated that the uneasy marriage of reason and nightmare which dominated the 20th century gave birth to an increasingly surreal world. Being part of this increasing madness it should be important for us to re consider things that we have taken as a given up until now. With a fragile, almost collapsing economical structure upon us and a mounting social tension, one comes to question what should the position of architecture be today, as a contributing form of science.
To cut a (really) long story short, the scenario of this thesis is the deformation and substitution of principles that would follow in the aftermath of a systemic collapse and the subsequent evolving process that would arise. Of course despite the immense questions (a.k.a. opportunities) that would come out of a situation like this, we have constrained ourselves only to a small part of the spatial enigma. According to David Harvey, it is easier for people today to conceive a future on Mars than a future not under Capitalism. So we made it our difficult task not only to imagine a different future but also to position architecture in it.
If the creation of the Soviet Union in the early 20’s was equal in importance and magnitude with the discovery of a new continent, then we can safely assume that the pilgrimages of the era were the newly invented Social Condensers. There were supposed to be the most important elements in a society that would not structure itself around the market but around its interrelationships. As we know it didn’t take more than a decade to bring all this utopian thinking and acting to a flaming end.
But this is the point of our departure. We are imagining a world that could come into peace with the Marxist confrontation of the city versus the countryside. In the process of doing it, we are showcasing the re actualization of Manhattan as a contemporary urban intensification node, and main Capitalist stronghold to something completely different. Furthermore we are analyzing the Seagram’s building as an iconic structure, a real repetition devise for most of the modern cities, extracting from it the elements that would help us in creating our new spatial formations.
In order to do so, we are using the same spatial pilgrims the Soviets invented. This time around, they are not the sturdy, uneventful ancestors of their originators but they themselves have evolved. As we argue, the “human condition” is a constantly changing one, and our spatial elements should also be able to follow up. This feature is a key ingredient of our final outcome as a material totality and as a way of thinking.
It is our firm belief that things are a-changing. It falls on us to choose the paths to follow, to be influenced and finally to influence. History has taught us, that we cannot change society through spatial formations alone, but we can still try to influence it. On the other hand, our desired outcome is based on the amazing unpredictability of introducing a new perspective into this world. So in plain terms the end goal here is to come up with a set of tools rooted mostly into the spatial realm, although the influences are coming from a vast variety of sciences (psychoanalysis, history, physics, geology etc), and give the opportunity for a new social order to use it and abuse it for its own scopes and purposes.
After all “freedom can only exist as a necessity”. (K. Marx)

Pablo Castro Guijarro intelligent_territories
Favela Rocinha, the largest in Rio de Janeiro, has a population of 3000,000 informal settlers approximately and it is located in one of the city’s highest hills. In the past few years, some processes have been introduced by governmental entities to fight unemployment and underemployment, such as selective collection of recyclable materials. Also, rock falling, mudslides and flooding often occur in the few existing vacant territories. Due to their steep slopes, favelados do not have the technical or technological ability to build there.
The idea of the project is the insertion of a new system as a (re)mediation structure and (re)activation organism in these empty zones for events empowerment and ground (re)generation with production, education and public spaces. The main concept is to promote the reinsertion of inhabitants into society and a constant communication with the formal city. The development of this system reacts completely to the parameters of the existing settlements and specific topographical configuration, encouraging the active participation of the favelados, where precision and intuition meet for the creation of new spatial and social environments.

Prital Shukla nomadic edge
The NOMADIC EDGE is a distinctive proposal set along the RIM of the mysterious city, TIMBUKTU_MALI in SAHARA DESERT where people have thrown their weights behind in efforts to preserve the PRICELESS TIMBUKTU MANUSCRIPTS (ancient documents that hold the key to some of the secrets of African continent’s history and cultural heritage). Touareg NOMADS inhabiting within the city have adapted their lifestyle in an extreme climate. They live and breathe sand and so this project works with their existing eco-system. The design approach is inspired by the site itself, growing out of existing topographical opportunities found in the DRAMATIC sand dunes and mountainous features which shelters facilities for tourists, nomads and animals. The spaces are connected in series enhancing an open STREETSCAPE experience through valleys in between the dunes, balancing and blurring the distinctions between nature and architecture. By using minimal forms that engage with the action of sand, the design attempts to refine the landscape into something that can be experienced indoors. It also aims to connect the ACTOR (visitors) to the dunescapes by offering them with increasingly unique VANTAGE POINTS, so that they begin to be less about objects frozen in time and space and more about the journey. The inclination of architectural surfaces for walking, sitting, relaxing, working and displaying, would not only aid with the blowing sand behavior but also encourage the actor to pay attention to the articulation of the spaces. The arrangement of programmatic elements such as_the SUPER_ADOBE SHELTERS towards the city side provide an ideal opportunity for large scale tourist/nomad cover while the dunescape ridges towards the desert offer natural location for the smaller scale and contemplative program elements associated with the ancient MANUSCRIPTS. The EXPERIENTIAL MOMENTS throughout the edge are sited within the GRAINS of the landscape resulting into the new architectural interventions growing out of topography_spanning, terracing, breaking, burrowing into and wrapping up… within the existing landscape features. Although SAND flows along certain specific wind direction, there is no front or back to it and keeping this fact in mind, the newly developed EDGE would get covered, uncovered and recovered with sand depending upon the change in the ecological system, such that certain parts of the project DEACTIVATES when covered with sand where as certain parts ACTIVATE when uncovered with sand. The project is not a DIVIDING LINE between the inside (city) and outside (desert), it creates a fluid transition between architectural spaces and LAND/SAND, so that one would always feel connected to the sand…

Simeon Vialva operation grow something
Operation Grow Something is a future scenario proposal set in New York City 2060, on the East River, off the southern tip of Roosevelt Island. This proposal is a direct response to two future crises the World and New York City will face, water and food shortages. With water as the driving force my project strives to use architecture to collect and redistribute water in some innovative and beneficial ways. I am exploring how architecture and water could interface to create more vibrant sustainable communities in a city as dense as New York. The foundation of the project is a Vertical Farm Tower on the East River addressing such issues as water collection, shortage of food, lack of land, and over population. Integrating housing units into the tower allowed me to think of what modern sustainable farming could look like in New York City and also to create a more efficient water use cycle within the tower. The siting of the project on the East River also helps to address the extreme energy consumption a structure of this size would require. By building over the river I will tap into the natural energy of the underwater currents to help support those requirements. I intend for this project to be more than just another tower project, I am attempting to address some future potential of the actual fabric and makeup of the city. This project attempts to lay a new foundation that a future New York can be built upon.

Xinyang Chen
This thesis is a practice of paranoid rejection of commercialism. Presuming that the fewer designers do the less capital forces seduce people’s mind, I pursued methodology of designing uselessness. In other words, I studied how to make without production, develop without progression, and format without expression. As a strategy, I indulged decision making during design drift with random thinking. Here, irrationality be used as trigger of creativity and “coding machine” to cancel designer’s ideology. Through works with a contemporary metropolitan reforming topic, this thesis is more explores a design method rather than solving an existing problem. I call the design method: cut-up (a term borrowed from literature).
First: cut-up as a method makes possible that design fall into the infinity reflection of itself. Whether good or not, it results a design loses the ability to convey any comprehensible idea but only speaks only about itself.
Second: a design could be started with irrational goals or driven by random goals during its formation. But design still a practice can’t carry out without a thoughtful plan.
How non-rational design works for my goals:
repel commercialism from influencing people
hide designer/ merchandiser's intention
let users make their own judgments