Architecture School, 1968-2025

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.

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 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.

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.