Thesis
The Architecture Design Degree Project studio offers two options: 1) an independent design research project (design thesis) on a topic selected and developed by the student, or 2) a graduate research studio. Design Thesis is an opportunity for each student, working with a faculty advisor, to define an individual position with regard to the discipline of Architecture. The graduate research studio, led by a faculty member, will investigate relevant or thematic issues of architecture. All graduating students will be required to present their Degree Project, comprising research, analysis, and creative work, as a book.
Faculty/Thesis Advisors
Joel Lamere (Coordinator)
Juan Calvo
Elizabeth Cronin
Victor Deupi
Dean Rodolphe el-Khoury
Joachim Perez
Glenda Puente
Veruska Vasconez
Time
9:05 am to 7:00 pm
Location
Lakeside Village Event Room
Students (Master of Architecture)
Olawumi Akinniyi, Advisor: Juan Calvo
Maria Cadena, Advisor: Veruska Vasconez
Aleksandra Czaja, Advisor: Joachim Perez
Alexandra Dreyfus, Advisor: Elizabeth Cronin
Alixandra Fleming, Advisor: Elizabeth Cronin
Shane Jezowski, Advisor: Veruska Vasconez
Hali Keller, Advisor: Veruska Vasconez
Olha Khymytsia, Advisor: Veruska Vasconez
Peter Kiliddjian, Advisor: Victor Deupi
Chuchen Liu, Advisor: Joel Lamere
Maha Malik, Advisor: Juan Calvo
Soran Rostami, Advisor: Juan Calvo
Crawford Suarez, Advisor: Joel Lamere
Nathan Sullivan, Advisor: Victor Deupi
Junren Tan, Advisor: Joel Lamere
Han Wang, Advisor: Glenda Puente
Shifan Wang, Advisor: Elizabeth Cronin
Stephen Matthew Wisniew, Advisor: Joachim Perez
Students (Master of Science in Architecture)
Flavia Macchiavello, Advisor: Dean Rodolphe el-Khoury
Thesis Descriptions
AFLOAT:
Revitalization of Makoko Waterfront Community
by Ola Akinniyi
Advisor: Juan Calvo
One third of Makoko residents are surviving in unsuitable housing conditions on water. Overcrowding in the cities has caused slums to spread and shantytown suburbs to emerge in the water. Living conditions hygiene is abysmal, uncontrolled pollution, and the government aims to demolish the shantytown of Makoko in Lagos, Nigeria. Sea level rise is claiming land. While government approach to housing production has been through a provider system, which is responsible for the high cost of finished houses.
The revitalization method is based on a give and take algorithm. First initiative: build modular floating housing structures on outskirts. Decimate structures and rubble to widen waterways and create structure at the urban scale. Create more charging stations and add photovoltaic panels to select structures to introduce power to the community. Select dilapidated houses on stilts replaced with floating frame multiuse structures embodying the three pillars of the community: faith, education, and commerce (shown above).
Cost reduction through implementation of the beneficiaries in all aspects of the project design. Indigenous materials and traditional construction techniques. The culture stays intact, and the dwellers standard of living is raised.
THESE SITES ARE ALIVE:
Creating urban context around drug overdose prevention sites
by Maria Cadena
Advisor: Veruska Vasconez
A record-high of 96,779 drug overdose deaths occurred between March 2020 and March 2021, right during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is an increase of 28.5% from the 78,056 deaths during the same period in the previous years. The increase in these figures is attributed to the loss of access to treatment, rising mental health problems and wider availability of dangerously potent street drugs.
One approach that is proving to reduce the number of deaths from drug overdoses in the implementation of safe-injection sites, which first became popular in the 1980s. The first safe-injection site opened in Switzerland and are now popular in Canada and northern Europe. These sites have proven to reduce overdoses since medical professionals can assist with a possible overdose. Nonetheless, there is a push against safe-injections, as many believe safe-injection sites promote the use of drugs instead of decreasing the use of them.
The aim of this project is to introduce safe-injection sites in a neighborhood of Allapattah, one of the oldest neighborhoods of Miami, FL. This facility will be incorporated within a mixed-income, mixed zoning urban area. By incorporating safe-injection sites in a mixed zoning, mixed income area, it is hypothesized the stigma around the facility will decrease and therefore serve as a typology that can be implement in other urban settings around the United States.
UNBOUNDED: TAXONOMY OF BORDER INHABITATION
by Aleksandra Czaja
Advisor: Joachim Perez
Boundary is essentially a matter of consciousness and experience, rather than of facts and law. When the border is not only a line, but also a zone where geographical, political, and social factors emerge, border habitation can create a common alternative future to overcome the current fragmentation. The thesis questions the usage of borders as a tool of division and segregation, proposing instead a place of encounter. The design aims to changes the concept of boundaries into a tool for connection, through adaptation as a form of sustainability.
Boundaries are currently viewed as formal features that spatially separate states or regions and serve as a means of control. Borders act as a barrier while separating people, within political, ethnic, social, and/or religious contexts. Borders historically were thought of as places. Therefore, what if borders are seen not as that which is either fixed or that as such must be overcome, but as an evolving structure that has practical merits to create a system where groups assemble and cross. Recognizing the strength and effectiveness of boundary consciousness, nationhood, or any other collectivity that claims distinctiveness for itself, State-making process could be based on the experiences of the society either looking to create a new place and identity, or unifying with another cultures. The objective of state-making is to investigate how the border acts as a major feature in bringing disparate areas together rather than dividing them. The unification of two sides is meant to represent optimism for nations destined to become one. Instead of a strict and permanent line that divides nations, state making expresses possibility and demonstrates that it is the people, not the state, who create the desire for peace.
RESPONSIVE PHENOMENA
by Alexandra Dreybus
Advisor: Elizabeth Cronin
Secondary Advisors: Ruth Ron, Indrit Alushani
With the ever increasing relationship between humans and technology and the emergence of virtual spaces, one wonders if an architectural sense of atmosphere can be maintained. Can virtual spaces evoke a sense of atmosphere?
One must first answer the big question: What is atmosphere? By extracting a cohesive definition from leading architects and artists, this thesis first will explore that question and work towards distilling a general consensus of atmospheric criteria.
The exploration of phenomena is not new to architecture, and neither is the human desire to question the relationship between humans and technology, but the next step is to synthesize these two questions by looking at how humans manipulate technology and technology manipulates human behavior. Ultimately, this thesis will use a generative process to make an installation based on this question and the atmospheric criteria: light, tension, embodied experience, and balance.
SPATIALIZING THE BODY:
An Inquiry into De-objectifying the Body in a Spatial Context
by Alixandra Fleming
Advisors: Elizabeth Cronin and Veruska Vasconez
This project is an exploration into built space informed by the human body.
The research presented previously and the continuation of this research includes ideas that are led by feminist concepts and practices or methods of making, largely the feminist practice of collaboration.
By observing the history of feminist objects, we begin to understand the feminist methods of making that are able to inform ideas on the spatializing of the body as a built form. What we can take away from this is that there many different feminist practices that become methods of making. What can be noted about these methods of making is that they are often self-referential, referring to ideas of interiority, domesticity, collaboration, or the body itself. The proposition for this project is that in the process of actively de-objectifying the body, a spatial object can be made to physically represent these ideas. All of the research that is compiled about feminism in architecture and in the built environment, and the human body in space, can be compiled into a conceptual design which aims to spatialize the object.
This information has since led to the experimentation of what it means to spatialize the body, and the built analysis of this idea through a collective style of creation. this research and the continuation of it includes ideas that are informed by the feminist concepts and practices or methods of making, largely the feminist practice of collaboration. Then using this information, the intention is to design and build a full scale occupiable object or that of a piece of furniture.
A LOCAVORE LANDSCAPE AND ARCHITECTURE FOR THE FUTURE OF MIAMI-DADE COUNTY'S HAULOVER PARK
by Shane Jezowski
Advisors: Rocco Ceo, Joanna Lombard and Veruska Vasconez
The barrier islands along South Florida’s eastern coast have been transformed over the last 100 years as dredged fill expanded their borders and mangroves were traded for pavement. This transformation has exposed the coastlines to the perils of sea-level rise.
Miami-Dade County’s Haulover Park is one of a chain of Florida’s east coast barrier islands. Designed by William Lyman Phillips and established in 1948 as a premier beachfront park, Haulover currently provides ocean access to a county of nearly 3 million people some of whom reside as far as 30 miles from the sea. With 23% impervious pavement, 17% tree cover, and few remnants of its historic plant and animal life still present, the park provides an opportunity to investigate the site’s pre-development ecology, cultural history, and present day role in the face of climate change impacts, as a foundation upon which to develop a proposal for its future.
In his influential text, Design with Nature, Ian McHarg describes the evolutionary importance of collaboration – through which a species survives by their merits of strength or cunning, and thrives by teaming up with other species both flora or fauna, to mutually benefit. (McHarg, Ian L. 1971. Design with nature. New York: Natural History Press.) Analysis of this process at Haulover Park informs the development of this proposal. This project seeks to draw upon Florida’s southeastern, coastal ethnobotany as a foundation for a collaborative landscape that enhances the ecological health of the park and its capacities for coastal agriculture through sustainable farming and foraging, providing grains, produce and game for a series of experimental kitchens and a niche restaurant, UMAMIAMI. The project illustrates the potential to advance food-based coastal restorations as an approach to climate change that integrates humanity into its ecology.
CLIMATE-INDUCED MIGRATION:
A Socialized Response
by Hali Keller
Advisor: Veruska Vasconez
Second Advisor: Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk
Climate change is relentlessly diminishing the world’s inhabitable regions and nature’s ability to support humanity as we know it. Rising temperatures, surges in natural disasters, and rising sea levels are a few of the climate issues that will force significant populations of the United States to reconsider where they live. Current climate models predict migration patterns with mass migration to cities, creating rapid urbanization and pushing already struggling infrastructure systems beyond capacity. Cities and many targeted communities will need to prepare for the influx of climate migrants to minimize the impact on existing economic, environmental, and social biases.
This thesis explores how socially vulnerable populations, who are exposed to the most severe impacts of climate change, can be supported when facing forced migration and; how cities can actuate their social responsibility by supporting incoming populations.
Accordingly, this thesis will explore climate migration within the United States by considering both moderate and severe projections for change. The moderate projection will look at Birmingham, Alabama, and the severe focuses on Buffalo, New York. In each city, the project will expand upon existing city-generated master plans and utilize urban infill for the socially vulnerable migrant populations to help integrate them into the communities. In this model, the infill program will be comprehensive with built-in and systematic support, including marketplace and food services, health services, community centers, and employment counseling in conjunction with housing, accommodating different sized families and individuals, incorporating these components within the overall architecture.
THEMPORARY HOUSING DESIGN FOR UNDOCUMENTED TEENAGERS (13-19 YEARS OLD) IN PARIS:
Using Music as Part of Integration Process
by Olha Khymytsia
Advisor: Veruska Vasconez
Housing situation for asylum seekers in Paris is getting worse every year. The more people are coming to the city, the more complicated government makes the process of getting housing for them. Living on the streets is the most difficult for teenagers. Complicated process of getting all the documents and education influences their health and emotional well-being. Implementing common/public spaces in housing where they can learn and practice music will boost their memory, build task endurance, lighten the mood, reduce anxiety and depression they have due to their conditions, stave off fatigue, improve response to pain, and help work out more effectively. The proposed project is a mix-use building consisting of the housing, practice rooms, and public areas, and the heart of the building is the concert hall.
Paris Rive Gaucheis an emerging area known for its contemporary architecture, embodied by the book-shaped towers of Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand. Offices, lunch spots, and chain stores fill state-of-the-art buildings along Avenue de France, while Seineside quays are home to riverboat bars and Piscine Joséphine Baker, a floating swimming pool. Cité de la Mode et du Design is an arts center with a fashion school.Covering an area of 130 hectares including 26 hectares of cover over the railway tracks of the Austerlitz station, Paris Rive Gauche is the largest urban planning operation carried out in the capital since the Haussmann works of the 19th century.
PARADISE MADE:
Urban Manufacturing in a City at Risk
by Peter Ohanik Kiliddjian
Advisor: Victor Deupi
Industry has been gradually excluded from the American city. The role of urban industry in the health of national and local economies, urbanism, social equity and the natural environment has become clear. Advancements in technology and sustainable manufacturing have introduced a “maker-culture” based on 3D printers and digital design. The result is grassroots innovation that happens cleanly and efficiently, allowing small-scale manufacturing to be reintroduced into dense urban centers and engage with the public.
HEALTH BOOTH:
A Care-Platform for the Under Serviced Population
by Flavia Macchiavello
Advisors: Rodolphe el-Khoury and Deborah Franqui
This most recent pandemic has claimed, not only the lives of many, but the facilities that hold those most vulnerable. Hospital overcrowding is slowly subsiding, 28% of health staff has left the field of medicine - meanwhile the population is trying to rehabilitate professionally, financially and mentally. Post-covid has found itself with a major public distrust on a structure meant for healing.
This thesis aims to branch the interrupted relationship between health facilities and the large portion of the under serviced population. The transitory deployable design will emphasize patient dignity and care, health education and maintain the continuance of patient care model. This research attempts to investigate the impacts mobile health can have on communities of people who have been directly affected by the inaccessibility of health and wellness.
AURAT KI ZAMEEN:
A Gender Sensitive Community Campus
by Maha Malik
Advisor: Juan Calvo
According to the United Nations, “Health is a fundamental human right indispensable for the exercise of other human rights. Every human being is entitled to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health conducive to living a life in dignity”. Pakistan is a signatory of multiple United Nations Human Rights treaties, yet it’s fiercely traditional society still upholds rigid social norms that obstruct women’s access to basic rights. While the saying “Women are the heartbeat of our nation” is often heard, gender based constraints on women engrained in the culture and often put women at risk. These constraints are characterized by limited mobility, weak decision-making autonomy, and restricted access to resources.
The proposed project aims to create a gender sensitive community campus in Khushab Forest, a rural part of the country where the traditional conservatism is especially prevalent. Social norms are respected through strategic design choices that ultimately allow for the gender based constraints to be lifted. Through this project, women are able to act independently and without fear. The primary focus is to allow unfettered access to the medical system. This is supported by the secondary focus, enrichment programming. Through architecture, women are able to experience autonomy in a way which fundamentally betters their quality of life.
NEURO-ARCHITECTURE FOR SPIRIT:
Ridership and Nature
by Soran Rostami
Advisors: Juan Calvo, Joanna Lombard and Denis Hector
According to the U.S. Census bureau, over 150 million people commute to work by car; approximately 7.6 million commuters rely on public transportation. Commuting by public transportation comes with a long list of potential stressors. Many of which are out of our immediate control. External stressors include speed and time of commute, noise, the behaviors of other commuters, control and security, air pollution, materials aesthetic qualities, circulation, etc. These stressors can have a ripple effect if an unexpected train delay means you will be late to your morning meeting or to pick up the kids, or have to potentially miss whatever is on the schedule for your evening.
Incorporating cultural, communal and therapeutic elements within the urban fabric, this thesis aims to develop urban happiness through designing a new Metrorail station in Miami city, FL (Dadeland North Station) that injects good mental and emotional comfort through versatile and human-centric designed conditions which creates an infrastructure for respite and source of happiness against the social and urban stress of the city living. A new architecture typology not only in accordance with the aesthetic conceptions of architecture but also with a stress-relieving psychological response to improve the emotional state of residents and increase the sustainability of city development will be the aim of this thesis.
UNAPOLOGETIC:
Considering Urban Environments for Autistic Individuals
by Nathan Sullivan
Advisor: Victor Deupi
Autism Spectrum Disorder is a diverse group of neurodevelopmental conditions that can affect a person’s approaches to socializing, communicating, and learning. While the spectrum comes with its challenges such as executive functioning disadvantages and susceptibility to sensory overload, those on the Autism spectrum are simply individuals that view the world in a different way than others.
Unapologetic presents a criticism of modern day architecture and urban planning practices by exploring the idea of ableism in architecture. Built environments have the ability to provide a space for those who inhabit it to thrive- however, most autistic people will find themselves in an environment that provokes them. This “call to action” on what now needs to be considered when designing urban environments culminates in an unapologetic installation to be constructed on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The installation will take the users through a complex narrative that will pose questions, provides answers, and leave the user reflecting on what they have experienced. By the end of the installation, the visitor will come out with a better understanding of what autism is and what the future for this diverse population needs to look like.
THE ROBOT GROUP
by Junren Tan, Chuchen Liu and Crawford Suarez
Advisors: Joel Lamere and Brandon Clifford
As the ecological crisis deepens, architecture must take a step back and analyze its own role in global resource consumption. In 2018, the US produced over 600 million tons of construction and debris waste - 85% of which is made up of concrete and asphalt.
Architecture and construction must reflect on its wasteful practices, from its use of high carbon footprint materials, inefficient architectural strategies, and its structures that are destined for short life spans. LEED’s incremental shifts in its efficiency standards and quotas are insufficient and don’t truly resolve the urges of our time.
We would argue that a responsible Architecture seeks radical changes, not incremental changes, and imagines itself a positive role force in a post-extractive future. This thesis proposes several strategies toward such an idea within architecture, each enabled by a technology only recently available to the architectural realm: robotic fabrication and automated assembly.
(RE)PLACED PERMANENT HOUSING FOR DISPLACED PEOPLE
by Han Wang
Advisor: Glenda Puenta
In 2020, nearly 41 million people - a record high - were displaced and forced to migrate worldwide according to the International Population Movement Observatory. 75% of those who migrated did it due to an environmental disaster. While the largest vulnerable populations are most heavily in Asia, the United States is home to many high-risk zones along its east and west coast, including Miami - one of 11 sinking cities that could disappear by 2100 with 70% of its residents at risk. The majority are located in high-value real estate areas, which has already started a gentrification process in many low-income neighborhoods located inland.
Miami already experienced devastating climate events and where the future looks risky, many people will not have a choice but to stay. This project aims to provide these groups with an affordable house and create a harmonious and comfortable living environment for them to cope with the possible displacement caused by climate change.
OCEAN PLASTIC EDUCATION SCULPTURE:
Do we remember? What we do with the ocean…
by Shifan Wang
Advisor: Elizabeth Cronin
This thesis proposal creates a new form of series city education sculpture installation. This new sculpture installation will also have integrated with the abstract art form and trigger people’s environment protection motion, especially in the ocean plastic pollution field. In recent years, the overfishing of marine resources, seawater pollution, and garbage dumping are transported to different worldwide regions along with ocean currents, invading marine ecological environments worldwide. The plastics will also be visible or invisible to the naked eye and negatively impact the whole Bioecological environment. Like Plastic particles are found in food eaten by humans, and the marine creature will be wrapped in plastic. So, I want to design a new form of sculpture to mention how terrible the ocean ecological environment is and use the sculpture to evoke people’s moods. We should do something about it instead of ignoring it.
The thesis will focus on amplifying the existence of marine plastic pollution through the reshaping installation space, shape, and visual expression. The people’s emotion of threat to marine pollution will be evoked through their visual observation of the monument, arousing people’s concern about marine pollution and breaking the concept that marine pollution has nothing to do with people’s lives. As the Italian artist Rosana Orlando claims, the plastic itself makes no fault. People’s plastic using methods cause marine plastic pollution. So, on the other hand, the thesis will also explore when people are facing and observing this installation and how it will impact people’s emotions and behaviours.
The project will track the origin of marine plastic pollution and use plastic materials to build sculpture, the marine plastic pollution visualization. First, the installation itself and the surrounding environment of the space attract people close to the installation. The installation’s visual expression of marine plastic lets people feel the rejection emotion of ocean rubbish.
RESILIENT AND HEALTHY RESIDENTIAL DESIGN:
Post Pandemic Preparedness in Miami
by Stephen Matthew Wisniew
Advisors: Joachim Perez and Dr. Esber Andiroglu
The impetus of this thesis was the recent and still present COVID-19 pandemic and the actions that the public made to the residential settings that included self-quarantine at home and home care. The increased risk to life, health, and safety was a cause to determine how architecture might build and design a healthier future for the public, our clients, and our obligation as engineers and architects to re-evaluate life, health, safety requirements regarding proper ventilation for home care, and other requirements for home care when ill or sick with Covid-19 symptoms, or other ailments. In addition, we seek to determine how we might live more healthfully in homes and residences creating isolation zones and areas for home self-care and quarantine using natural and mechanical ventilation for better indoor air quality and protection to infectious disease in Miami specifically.
A cultural shift in staying at home when one is sick became normative in the outbreak of Covid-19. This initiated expanded residential functions, programs, and occupancies during this time-period, and summarizes to the home is not just a shelter. The home, architecturally speak- ing is a significant structure of vital importance to residents and families. Many workers in office and business spaces began to work remotely from home. Children and college students attended classes from home. These changes resulted in different functions and occupancies for residential architecture. Home offices, make-shift remote learning, and isolated areas of the home were used to accommodate a different work-life and ultimately, a new work-life balance. Architects and engineers solve, and design buildings based on occupancy, codes, and standards that exist to protect the public safety and this thesis presents the opportunity to engage with increasing and more effective natural ventilation standards and procedures in Miami to address the multi-functional nature of home-life and home-care accommodation.
