Architecture School, 1968-2026

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.

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.

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.

Construction remains one of the least automated industries in the global economy. While manufacturing and logistics have undergone profound transformation with robotics, most building sites are still largely dependent on manual labor, often under precarious and physically demanding conditions. Across logistics, manufacturing, and service industries, advances in artificial intelligence and robotics have intensified public anxieties about the future of work, raising questions regarding job displacement, economic restructuring, and the role of human labor in increasingly automated systems. Warehouses staffed by autonomous robots, algorithmically managed workflows, and machine-learning systems capable of decision-making once reserved for humans have begun to redefine labor across entire sectors. Construction appears paradoxical: an industry still heavily reliant on manual labor, facing many of the same pressures driving automation elsewhere.

The built environment sits at the center of another urgent crisis: housing affordability. As demand for housing continues to rise globally, construction productivity has failed to keep pace, constrained by labor shortages, rising costs, and fragmented production systems. The result is a widening gap between the need for housing and the industry’s capacity to deliver it. In this context, emerging technologies such as robotic fabrication, prefabrication, and AI-driven construction systems are increasingly framed as necessary solutions. Simultaneously asking ourselves, if digital technology replaces manual labor in the construction of our homes, offices, and cities, what becomes of the workers whose knowledge once shaped them? What are the social consequences when technologies designed to solve crises reshape the very labor that underpins the built environment?

This thesis argues that the building envelope can be reconceived as a spatial and ecological interface that actively supports avian-human coexistence. While existing scholarship on birds and architecture tends to frame buildings as hazards to be mitigated or only focuses on a broader urban scale, the architectural potential of the envelope for supporting bird life remains underexamined. Drawing on historical precedents, cultural analysis, and contemporary case studies, this thesis positions the envelope not as a thin boundary, but as a thickened, inhabitable system capable of accommodating nonhuman life. The first chapter analyzes pigeon towers and Ottoman bird palaces, and explores birds’ incidental occupation of historic facades, to demonstrate that birds have long been integrated into the built environment. The second chapter examines the cultural and architectural conditions that have led to the contemporary exclusion of birds, linking sealed building envelopes and bird-deterrence technologies to broader Western frameworks of human-nature separation and control. In response, it proposes a conceptual shift toward understanding cities as ecological habitats and buildings as participants in dynamic environmental systems. The third chapter analyzes recent architectural projects that engage birds at the scale of the envelope, identifying a range of interrelated spatial, material, ecological, and formal strategies for offering birds spaces of nesting and refuge. The thesis ultimately demonstrates that small, repeatable interventions in the building envelope can produce significant spatial capacity for avian life, both supporting bird populations and enriching human experience. By reframing the facade as a site of coexistence rather than exclusion, this work contributes to a broader rethinking of architecture as an interspecies practice.

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 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.

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.

This thesis begins with a provocation: What happens when we stop understanding the city as a horizontal surface and begin conceiving it as a vertical construct? Historically, cities have been imagined in plan—as networks of streets, plots, and voids stretched across the ground. The ground plane has long defined urban life, serving as the primary site for social interaction, ecological intervention, and architectural expression. But in the face of intensifying urbanization and ecological crisis, the horizontal ground is no longer sufficient.

This thesis explores how the vertical dimension—the section—can be reimagined as a site of ecological, social, and infrastructural possibility. Focusing on the vertical forest as a typology, it analyzes how projects like Stefano Boeri Architetti’s Bosco Verticale and WOHA’s ParkRoyal Collection Pickering fragment, replicate, and redistribute the ground across multiple levels. While these buildings function and even flourish, they remain exceptions. Drawing on the metaphor of the neural network—not as a literal analogy, but as a conceptual framework—this thesis proposes a shift: that vertical forests operate as nodes in a global ecological infrastructure, with artificial intelligence functioning as synaptic tissue. These are not static objects, but responsive agents—architectural interfaces where climate, species, and data converge.

By reconceiving vertical forests as ecological-computational hybrids, this thesis challenges traditional notions of architectural form. It argues for a design language rooted in porosity, feedback, and metabolism. Architecture becomes less about the production of form, and more about the cultivation of systems. When linked by AI, each vertical forest becomes a sensor, an actuator, and a learning system—contributing to an urbanism that is adaptive, multispecies, and distributed.

Ultimately, this is not only a design proposition but a philosophical one. It asks us to rethink form not as fixed, but as emergent. Not as a product, but as a process—responsive to environmental inputs and capable of evolution. A new urbanism begins to take shape: not a city that contains nature, but one that becomes nature—alive, intelligent, and interconnected.

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.