Historically, architectural form and thermal ventilation systems have developed in concert. This thesis traces their shared evolution, beginning with ancient Persian wind catchers and David Boswell Reid’s 19th century hybrid ventilation system for the Houses of Parliament, and argues that their 20th century divergence, catalyzed by the invention and proliferation of mechanical air conditioning, represents a productive problem for contemporary design to address.

The first chapter establishes a historical context in which form and thermal function were inseparable. The second chapter examines how the modernist movement, and the desire for a universal set of architectural rules that demanded a climate-neutral interior, severed this relationship and resulted in knowledge siloes that limit innovation in the interdisciplinary space between architecture and engineering. The contrasting fates of the Cité de Refuge and the UN Secretariat demonstrate how the glass curtain wall, an icon of modern architecture, was made possible by offloading climate mitigation entirely onto mechanical systems.

The third chapter discusses recent buildings by Alan Short and Salmaan Craig that offer a renewed integration of passive ventilation and architectural form by reviving and adapting proven traditional systems. These projects are situated within adaptive comfort theory as a regulatory framework that facilitates use of passive systems today. The thesis concludes by proposing a workflow in which passive systems come first in design and mechanical systems are used as complements where necessary.

Global commodity systems connect Global South hinterlands to metropolitan markets in North America and Europe through peripheral infrastructures that remain almost entirely unmapped. The roads, clearings, and settlement patterns that sustain these flows fall outside both state monitoring systems and open spatial records, and no publicly documented methodology exists for inferring them from satellite imagery at the cadence and coverage that systematic observation requires.

This thesis adopts what Eyal Weizman terms architecture in reverse: rather than designing the built environment, it reads the built environment forensically, inferring structures from their spatial effects on the surrounding landscape. At 4-meter satellite resolution, individual facilities sit below Weizman's threshold of detectability, but the roads that supply them, the clearings that accommodate them, and the settlement patterns they reorganize do not. Drawing on William Cronon's theorization of how commodity flows produce interdependent landscapes that obscure the connection between extraction hinterlands and metropolitan markets, the thesis operationalizes informal transportation networks as the measurable proxy for value-chain logistics. Applied to a peripheral region of Colombia, the pipeline integrates road extraction from satellite imagery, spatial-graph construction, network-analytic inference, geospatial-embedding change detection, and a human–AI validation interface.

By rendering the geography of peripheral value-chain infrastructure spatially explicit, the thesis provides a replicable basis for tracing the entanglement of hinterland and metropolitan economies. More broadly, it argues that architecture practiced in reverse—as spatial investigation rather than spatial production—can reveal the territorial organization that global commodity systems are structured to conceal.

Fashion and architecture share a similar problem: how to prove that they have value beyond tangible or material use. This paper focuses on how spaces made to display fashion garments (runways, luxury stores, and museums) use different techniques in order to seduce customers into perceiving value in fashion and then again in architecture. Part I focuses on how spaces of fashion display emphasize value in viewing fashion, through appropriations of art and activations of melancholic feelings, while Part II focuses on how these spaces create fantastical environments that make it desirable to participate in fashion, through proposing ideal, fashionable lives by creating homely fantasies but also through providing safe yet transgressive spaces through the use of spectacle and the uncanny.

This thesis critiques the dominant model of standardized social housing in Mexico and proposes an alternative framework rooted in temporality and social responsiveness. Tracing the evolution of Mexican housing from the cultural vecindad typology to neoliberal mass-produced suburban developments, the research reveals how state-led and privatized housing initiatives have prioritized efficiency, scale, and profit over residents' lived realities. The result has been widespread spatial inadequacy, infrastructural isolation, and, thus, the abandonment of millions of housing units. In response, this thesis reconsiders housing not as a fixed product but as an evolving social process. In analyzing Mexican vernacular traditions, informal settlements, and contemporary architectural practices, it argues for a redefinition of density that privileges adaptability and sustained long-term habitation over rigid standardization, deemed temporal density, which ultimately creates a true socially responsive framework to social housing. Through case studies of recent Mexican housing prototypes, the research demonstrates how flexible design strategies can accommodate diverse family structures throughout Mexico to make housing desirable and sustainable over generations. This thesis advocates for a shift in how social housing is conceived: from a static, top-down provision of shelter to a dynamic system that evolves with its inhabitants. By foregrounding the relationship between architecture and everyday life, the thesis proposes a temporal framework for housing that aligns design with the social, economic, and environmental realities of contemporary Mexico.

This thesis argues that the film set in Mexico's Golden Age cinema was not a passive backdrop but a primary ideological agent in the construction of Mexicanidad — the state-sponsored national identity forged in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. Through a spatial analysis of the collaborative work of director Emilio Fernández and art director Javier Torres Torija across three canonical films: María Candelaria (1943), Río Escondido (1947), and Maclovia (1948), this study demonstrates how designed cinematic environments actively materialized a hyper-real vision of the nation, engineering a collective social fantasy for a post-revolutionary population. Drawing on Giuliana Bruno's theory of the “inhabitable image,” Ulrike Kuch's concept of architectural montage, Renée Tobe’s spatial imagination, and Stephen Prince's notion of the hyper-real, this thesis repositions art director Javier Torres Torija as a co-author of national consciousness rather than a decorative technician. Each film operates through a distinct mode of spatial fantasy: María Candelaria constructs a pure, pre-modern Eden in Xochimilco’s floating gardens, staging indigeneity as a mythic and untouchable origin point; Río Escondido deploys architecture as a didactic tool, encoding the state’s civilizing mission in the contrast between a crumbling village and a solid schoolhouse; and Maclovia transforms the island of Janitzio into a folkloric, export-ready spectacle, packaging an idealized vision of Purépecha culture for mass consumption across Latin America. Together, the films reveal the precise mechanisms by which cinema participated in a broader cultural project, architecturally forging an inhabitable Mexico.

The Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, New Hampshire is an outdoor, waterfront history museum on the site of what was once the original English colonial settlement and the neighborhood of Puddle Dock established in 1623. Today’s museum occupies the infilled colonial dock neighborhood, much of which was bulldozed as part of the urban renewal project from which the museum was born, and represents an eclectic collection of preserved historic buildings from the colonial period which have, for one reason or another, been deemed important to the local culture. Issues of creation and control of cultural significance, memory, and perception lie at the heart of the historic preservation at Strawbery Banke. This has in turn allowed the museum to mobilize the surrounding community to its benefit on several occasions, both for its initial creation and today to combat the threat of rising sea levels at the constructed site of the museum and historic Puddle Dock neighborhood. The museum’s unusual origins in an urban renewal project make it noteworthy. In addition, the threats facing this museum represent an increasingly common consequence of climate change within vulnerable coastal communities, and as such make this case study generally applicable to development of future preservation practices.

This thesis explores the role of architectural hybridization in shaping the postcolonial landscape of Nigeria. By engaging with the indigenous architectural traditions of the Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo people while also analyzing the lasting effects of British colonialism, this thesis argues that Nigerian and West African architecture has developed a third architectural paradigm that is neither fully indigenous or colonial. Through extensive analysis of three major buildings-CMS Grammar School, Lugard Hall, and the First Storey House-this research traces the evolution of hybridization across three sectors–education, legislation and government, and residential. In doing so, it reveals how architecture has been used to push back and adapt existing power structures. Furthermore, this work broadens the existing conversation of hybrid architectures to include modern applications as a method of creating contemporary designs rooted in indigenous traditions. Ultimately, hybridization emerges not only as a reflection of Nigeria’s history but as a tool that can be used to elevate Nigeria, West Africa, and the Global South onto the global stage.

This thesis investigates the use of culture as a tool of urban development in the rapidly urbanizing cities of the Middle East, focusing on two countries: Oman and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). As Gulf cities have undergone dramatic transformation in the post-oil era, questions of cultural identity, heritage, and modernity have become central to how these cities are planned and represented. In Oman, cities like Muscat and Nizwa, demonstrate an urbanization approach that focuses on the preservation and marketing of traditional culture. This projects a coherent national identity rooted in heritage. In Abu Dhabi, the relationship with culture is more complex. Traditional culture is intertwined with Westen modernity to produce a new strategy of cultural development, one defined by the deliberate curation of culture. Through an analysis of architecture and urban planning, this thesis argues that culture has emerged as a primary instrument of Gulf urbanization, one through which competing claims of national identity, sovereignty, and global modernity are actively negotiated.

This thesis concerns itself with the use of photographs to construct narratives regarding cities and urban change through an examination of W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh photographs. In Chapter I, I examine Smith’s photographs in the context of Stefan Lorant’s illustrated history book, Pittsburgh: The Story of an American City. This chapter looks at the photos through the lens of portraiture, arguing that Lorant uses images to contribute to an overly simplified progress narrative of Pittsburgh’s postwar urban renewal. Chapter II looks at Smith’s own photo-essay of his Pittsburgh work, entitled “Labyrinthian Walk,” suggesting that the piece pushes back on the progress narrative of Lorant and attempts to characterize the city in a more nuanced way, particularly through the formal effect and structure of contrast. Here too, the images operate in a less rigid documentary manner. Chapter III considers the omissions from these two presentations of Smith’s Pittsburgh photographs, which are made visible by the archival record. I then delve into a discussion of my own curation of Smith’s omitted Pittsburgh photographs, seeking to produce a more abstract, non-narrative sequence which draws from a sense of collective memory and personal experience. Together, these chapters contribute to our understanding of the malleability of these photographs and how they are made to fit differing perspectives on the meaning of this transformational period in Pittsburgh’s history.

This thesis draws on the limits of constructing religious cosmology into physical space. Why might one want to make such a translation, and what might be the consequences—political, social, and spatial—of such a mapping? I argue that it is possible to chart a cosmological path through structure, tracing performances of power and politics through architecture. There exists a relationship between cosmology and one’s right to rule, and architecture becomes a medium reflecting a monarch's greatest ambitions, anxieties, and fears. Charting a path through Wat Arun, the City Pillar Shrine, the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, the Grand Palace, and the Thai Parliament, this thesis begins with the assumption of planar interference, that one may claim their right to rule through cosmological spatial positioning alone (“I am the rightful monarch”). It is revealed, however, that as rulers are faced with new constraints, such a reliance shifts. In the face of Westernization and changing political ideas, this thesis reveals that legitimization through purely ‘planar’ forms spatial organization decreases as attention becomes directed to the elevational and symbolic projection of messages. I argue that there exists a transition from architecture as legitimization (“I am the rightful monarch”) to architecture as colonial defense and protection (“We are civilized”) to finally an architecture that aims to reclaim and re-entrench prevailing institutions of power (“Even in the face of changing political ideals, power belongs to me”). Taking the ethnographic approach as a method, this thesis presents how lived experience allows us to draw a different set of conclusions than a solely textual analysis, stressing the importance of employing the theoretical and experiential in tandem. It is through immersing oneself in the architectural experience that the politics of cosmological representation can be felt.