2023 Projects /Master of Architecture Thesis
/CoAD
From Resistance to Resilience: Reinvigorating Wetland Ecology Along the Detroit River
Student: Moussa Aoun
Advisor: Scott Shall
Content Experts: Joongsub Kim , Edward Orlowski
The architectural and engineering goals pursued in most cities along river edges, such as Detroit, during the 19th and 20th centuries, were justified for that time as they supported the rapid growth of those cities. Such goals aimed to provide flood safety, separate sewage, and support trade and transportation. However, the relationship shaped between the Detroit River and the urban form around it during that time presented a conflict between two systems: the natural and the built. Civic needs fueled by the industrial revolution and an economy for growth were favored over the natural system and the ecological services that it offered. Although not without merit, the design of these systems failed to incorporate the dynamic and spatial qualities of rivers, and urbanization during that time was basically “building on top of the environment” (Hajer et al. 2020). Such an approach created issues like the increase of an impermeable footprint that in turn increases polluted runoff that enters waterways, the complete loss of ecosystems and habitats due to extensive armoring of the river edge, and the erasure of wetlands, which constituted the first nature of the Detroit River prior to settlement. Nowadays, the vulnerability of those engineered systems is starting to show as they reach a tipping point where they are failing in front of natural forces due to climate change.
These climatological shifts have made it necessary to foster a more ecologically sensitive and sustainable relationship with the Detroit River and to build resiliency along the edge through a framework of social-ecological resilience, where treating nature as a stakeholder and an ally is an inseparable part of thinking about cities, and where nature-based solutions, where the power and intelligence of nature are taken as a starting point for finding solutions. (Hajer et al. 2020) To test this claim, this thesis proposes to reimagine the design of a mixed-use riverfront development present along the edge of the Detroit River, through a framework of social-ecological resilience and urban form resilience, that will be achieved by the tools of landscape ecology and spatial morphology.
Passing Permanence: Reversible Building Practices in the U.S.
Student: Aaron Baldwin
Advisor: Scott Shall
Content Experts: Sarah Codarin , Dan Faoro
The construction and demolition industries generate abhorrent amounts of waste through the inefficient generation and unplanned removal of permanently intentioned buildings that cannot last forever. Current strategies of material construction often consume, permanently alter, or degrade materials being used, resulting in the inability to wholly reuse valuable building components. As a result, existing unused structures will often become waste, or require resource intensive recycling or remanufacturing to salvage portions of material (USEPA 2018).
Buildings are not permanent. The current lack of life-cycle design and expectation for buildings to last indefinitely leads to a loss of “technical nutrient” potential (Braungart 2002). The reduction of waste, the continued reuse of materials and designing for component longevity can achieve a fundamental level of sustainability, as the concept of waste is antithetical to ability to maintain a process over time. To recapture the potential of a building and remove the ecologically harmful effects of permanence that occur after the building is no longer needed, the production, construction, use and demolition of architecture should ‘leave minimal trace’ on its building materials and site.
A current lack of reversible and circular practice in the US exists due to many existing social, cultural and economic factors. The focus on tradition, risk aversion, and bountiful space for new development allows the country to remain stagnant and reliant on existing building methodologies without the push for change. Initial reversible architecture located in the US will not be made out of newly developed components, but primarily of existing standardized materials joined in newly reversible methods.
Architecture should not be destructive. An architecture that leaves minimal trace does not have to employ highly engineered componentry and new modular solutions that restrict design outcomes, but rather can modify existing techniques and tectonic understandings to remove wasteful practices that intentionally degrade or destroy material resources. Minimal trace architecture simultaneously upholds the health of its materiality through the redefinition of connection types while supporting its site and larger context through the removal of systemic inefficiencies and unnecessary permanently-intended change.
Pluggable Homes: Addressing America’s Housing Crisis Incrementally
Student: Kirsten Crawford
Advisor: Scott Shall
Content Experts: Anirban Adhya , Eric Ward
Millions of Americans today are under-housed and over-leveraged. Many of these people are trapped in a never-ending cycle of dependent rentership, where most of their money that must be spent in order to rent a structure impedes the ability to save the necessary funds to buy their own homes. This creates an increasingly growing gap between homeowners and non-homeowners in the US and traps more and more Americans each year within this cycle. More than a third of Americans rent their homes, ultimately leading to a dearth of attainable housing (Harvard 2020). The demand for rental housing is growing faster than the supply, with the number of renter households increasing by 870,000 from the first quarter of 2020 to the third quarter of 2023, leading to a decrease in the overall rental vacancy rate, which dropped to 5.8% (Harvard 2023). As the demand for rental properties increases and the supply remains constant, the cost of rent will increase, likely continuing to inflame the situation in the future.
The exponential increase in housing prices and building sizes has proved to be harmful to those not able to afford a roof over their heads. The current average square footage per newly constructed home is 2,561 square feet, which is a 78% increase over a 20-year period (US Census). The growing size of homes has led to a corresponding increase in the cost of housing. This is a problem that must be addressed, as it is making it harder for people to afford a home.
Some architects and others involved in the housing industry have approached housing in a more thoughtful manner, embracing an incremental manner of construction where a family can build as they are able. This in turn prevents homeowners from over-leveraging themselves and promotes a sense of stability. Incremental architecture has the capacity to alleviate the symptoms of the current housing crisis by allowing families to build as they can afford through the agency and freedom of pluggable housing modules. Incrementality will be achieved through modular components that form pluggable connections, facilitating the ability for one to build their housing configuration as they truly can afford to do so. The pluggable nature will not only facilitate the ability to grow their homes but also to subtract from them to leverage profitable investments.
To investigate this concern, this thesis will develop a series of homes located in a low to middle-income neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan, known as East Village, where 64% of the residents rent their homes. Detroit is among the many American cities that offer minimal housing options for middle and low-income families. This housing scheme will test the incremental strategies outlined above through the design of pluggable housing modules. If successful, this thesis will show architects an alternative way to approach housing by leveraging new technologies to solve the persistent housing crisis within the United States.
Home Grown: Reimagining Dwelling Through Spatiaculture
Student: Devin Derr
Advisor: Scott Shall
Content Experts: Sarah Codarin , Dan Faoro
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 of 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 spatiaculture. 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.
Assembling Reinvestment: Emerging Construction Technologies and Their Effect on Cost-Effective Housing in Detroit
Student: Eli Forta
Advisor: Scott Shall
Content Experts: Anirban Adhya , Eric Ward
Detroit, like many American cities, has faced years of disinvestment. This has led to a severely underpopulated urban fabric containing oversized infrastructure, which can no longer be supported through the ever-shrinking tax base. The disinvestment occurred for a number of reasons, including discriminatory policies, single industry economical reliance, and mass flight of residents, but the outcome was the same: Detroit could no longer sustain itself.
One often-recognized contributing factor to this issue is the cost of housing (Cassidy 2019). Solutions have been posed, including housing towers and the townhouse typology, but none were successful in alleviating the misalignment of housing costs and valuation. These previous attempts at providing housing within the remaining Detroit resident’s means were often well-intentioned and, accurately, they identified the cost associated with housing as an issue. However, they did not possess a means of radically decreasing costs, and so the only available option for affordability was making cheap homes, characterized by low-quality materials and construction, and poor living conditions (Arnold 2018).
Emerging construction technologies, both physical onsite machines and Artificial Intelligence programs, can disrupt this state of affairs, offering the capacity to greatly reduce the costs associated with housing without compromising quality or design. These tools gain accuracy of output, become simpler to operate, and are more affordable with each iteration. Such technologies can be made accessible to home builders in Detroit to execute acts of cost-effective housing, which will revitalize disinvested neighborhoods, and which can also respond to the shifting context the environment poses.
To investigate this claim, a series of digitally fabricated home designs will be posed, focusing on the present and near future of onsite autonomous construction machines, including a detailed cost breakdown to understand to what degree such methods can effectively contribute to cost-effective housing production. These houses will then be compared to current affordable building processes and standards, primarily through the lenses of cost and quality in order to determine the quantifiable degree by which such technological leverage improves the making of cost-effective housing.
Work-from-Home Vantage: Responsive Spaces for Disadvantaged Personality Characteristics
Student: Carmen Gibes
Advisor: Scott Shall
Content Experts: Karl Daubman , Roxana Jafarifiroozabadi
Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, there has been a significant increase of time spent working from home and the concept of working-from-home is a growing phenomenon. Even two years since the pandemic’s onset, 59% of the population was still working from home, a trend that is expected to continue (Horowitz, et al. 2022). This has imposed working needs into dwelling spaces, which are environments that may not be spatially, cognitively, or technologically fabricated for that purpose. In fact, according to a recent study, 68% of people who work from home do so from undesignated working spaces who now must adapt to this new junction (Crawford, 2021).
This thesis examines the contrast between these undesignated work-from-home spaces and intrinsic needs of certain personality characteristics. Research of the environmental impact on brain functions suggests that perception of spaces is highly subjective to personality traits (Abu-Obeid, et al. 2011). The measure of this perception is examined further, specifically personality characteristics that are disadvantaged by work-from-home conditions in contrast to their needs. In response, this thesis will investigate these trait characteristics in relation to their intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and suggest spaces that are responsive and adaptive to conditions in the home. Flexible workspace interventions can better support the Big-Five personality characteristics of those high in Extroversion that are disadvantaged by work-from-home conditions by responding to spatial needs and optimizing undesignated work-from-home environments through kinetically deployable spaces.
The beneficial success of model spaces is measured through investigative study designs advanced by qualified and quantified metrics according to the specific spatial and personality needs. This thesis seeks to examine personalities and explore ambient, spatial, and material characteristics of work-from-home space interventions that will best support the needs of those personality characteristics most disadvantaged by work-from-home environments.
An Architecture of Decay: Addressing Building Waste Through Biologically Integrated Architecture
Student: Carson Stickney
Advisor: Scott Shall
Content Experts: Sarah Codarin , Dan Faoro
There is a dissonance within architectural practice between buildings designed to be permanent, and the inevitability of building impermanence. This produces unusable waste at the end of a building’s life cycle. Materials are designed to become obsolete and replaced over time, leading to additional waste during a building’s inhabitance. Construction conventions value the low-cost consumption of resources such as concrete and metals over their effect on the environment (McDonough, Braungart, 2002). The current model of construction, maintenance, and demolition that most buildings go through ignores the resources and materials that are used and discarded, creating by-products that can never be used again by humans or the natural environment.
In order to align programmatic lifecycles with building creation and material decay, architects must incorporate decay in design, allowing building materials to continuously support human and biological use when a building is abandoned or demolished (figure 0.1). All buildings must die, but their material by-products do not need to be wasted. Incorporating decay is an opportunity for the future growth of architectural spaces and realigns the buildings that we make with the natural cycles that affect them. Therefore, to explore this potential, and minimize the waste associated with a buildings decay or demolition, architects need to design buildings and urban landscapes with the eventual decay of products in mind, to eliminate wasted resources, and reinforce the existing natural cycles impacting our work.
To investigate this claim, this project will design a 2-story mixed-use structure, using fully biodegradable materials. This development type has a legacy in architectural practice and is a staple construction type of most major US cities. It also acts as an advantageous operating system relative to this thesis due to its cyclical resiliency to programmatic cycles and its need for continual replacement and maintenance of materials. This investigation is intended to relink human spaces with natural ones fostering the perpetual growth and balance of both systems with each other.
Unintended Permanence: Mass Customized Housing for Protracted Statelessness
Student: Micheal Tokarz
Advisor: Scott Shall
Content Experts: Karl Daubman , Roxana Jafarifiroozabadi
There are currently 100 million people worldwide that have been forcibly displaced from their homes. According to the Institute for Economics and Peace that number is expected to reach 1 billion by 2050 (Staff, W.E.F., 2022). The average length of stay in refugee camps in 2015 was only around 4 years. In more recent years we have seen that average increase to around 15 years. While not everyone in the camps has been there since their inception many of the camps themselves have been in existence for 20-30 years, raising generations of refugees.
The current approach to refugee sheltering is to provide materials that are often foreign to the region and to impose these materials and construction methods on the refugees. The capabilities of these temporary shelter products are being far exceeded by the length of time they are expected to last. Current solutions have a life expectancy of 1-5 years. Refugees remain in these shelters for periods lasting 15 years or more. Temporary shelter materials also rapidly deteriorate under the extreme environmental conditions common to the camp. Emerging technologies provide architects with the opportunity to design at an unprecedented scale and to develop a process which can engage the refugees with contemporary construction methods.
This thesis proposes to design a building process that merges ancient vernacular building knowledge with contemporary technology. Digital fabrication will enable rapid mass customization of designs at a scale necessary for a refugee camp size. Contemporary construction methods can be used to build key components of shelters providing a level of precision and accuracy while other components can be assembled by refugees allowing them to remain engaged in the process.
Building an Architecture of Non-Displacement: Preserving Community through a Revitalized Construction Process
Student: Allyza Danica Valino
Advisor: Scott Shall
Content Experts: Joongsub Kim , Edward Orlowski
Architects, as professionals, are tasked with adding value through their designs by renovating buildings and revitalizing cities. These tasks are in services to their clients, who are powerful patrons who wish to leverage the architecture produced to strengthen prestige, valuing development above other stakeholders like the community (Crawford, 1991). As a result, architects often become unwitting agents in gentrification, a process of culturally and economically transforming a historically disinvested neighborhood. Although the role of the architect in gentrification is incontrovertible, the architect does have the ability to minimize some of the harmful effects of gentrification, one of which is displacement, where communities are physically or culturally erased from a neighborhood.
There are many tactics that have the potential to minimize displacement that can be used by architects, including project delivery, cost management, and participatory design, but the most effective tactics are often reinforced through governmental agencies. One example is the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative, where the U.S. Department of Urban Housing and Development promotes neighborhood-scale revitalization without the direct displacement of low-income residents - a goal that is achieved through temporary relocation during construction. Unfortunately, these tactics have proven ineffective with only 30% of residents returning after relocation (University of Illinois Chicago, 2021). However, new technology is emerging that may allow for a more radical approach, specifically an in-place construction process that eliminates the need to relocate households, thereby preventing displacement. This thesis will re-evaluate design practices by eliminating the process of temporary relocation within revitalization projects, which will preserve both existing culture and original housing during construction without disrupting the lives of residents.
In order to investigate this strategy, this thesis will focus on the redevelopment of Clement Kern Gardens, an existing affordable housing project located in Detroit, Michigan. Clement Kern Gardens is part of a larger-scale vision encompassed by the Greater Corktown Framework Plan, funded by the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative grant. The proposed design investigation will be compared to the current redevelopment plan of Clement Kern Gardens and the precedent study of Grove Parc Plaza in Chicago to evaluate whether or not a reformed construction process might help to eliminate displacement. If successful, this thesis will offer a way in which architects might add value relative to the disenfranchised within the construction process, in a similar fashion to how architects and clients add value to cities.
Made with Matriarchs: Crafting Heritage-Oriented Futures with the Karamojong
Student: Ethan Walker
Advisor: Scott Shall
Content Experts: Joonsub Kim , Edward Orlowski
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 which 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 undermines pastoral ways of life and 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.
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