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Emerging Public: The Public Library's Role in Building Community

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Design Thesis - Public Library - B.Arch - May 2011

Architectural Design Thesis - 10 Semester

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The Architecture Library is a branch of the Hesburgh Libraries of Notre Dame and is located within the Matthew and Joyce Walsh Family Hall of Architecture. The library is comprised of over 36,000 volumes and hundreds of periodicals on the built and planned environment. Collection strengths include  classical & traditional architecture ,  American architecture ,  Italian architecture ,  Latin American architecture ,  New Urbanism ,  sustainable design & planning , and  urban planning . The Architecture Library supports the research and instructional needs of the School of Architecture's NAAB-accredited programs including the five-year undergraduate program and its two- and three-year Master of Architecture and Master of Architectural Design and Urbanism programs. 

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public library architecture: Architectural Impact of Public Library on Users’ Mental Health

2015, JK Welfare & Pharmascope Foundation | International Journal of Review in Life Sciences, International Journal of Review in LifeSciences(IJRLS)

ABSTRACT This paper examines the architectural effect of Public libraries’ areas on users’ mental health. This study also in- troduces appropriate criteria and patterns, to recognize environmental stimuli in life space and their effects on human beings and to identify and evaluate environmental indexes. Present research study was conducted in all depended public libraries in Tehran (Capital city) of Public Libraries’ institution of Iran. A 41-item checklist is de- signed by the research, which provides standards, criteria and patterns for indoor and outdoor space of public libraries. This study carried out via descriptive-survey method and two types of quaternaries were used as as- sessment tools including General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) and researcher-made questionnaire based on archi- tectural theories. The results show that dependent variable (architectural space of public libraries) is effective on independent variable (users’ mental health). This study confirms that a significant relationship exists between ar- chitectural elements of public libraries and users’ mental health. Keywords Public Library; Architectural Spaces; Mental Health; Environmental Psychology.

Related Papers

5th International Conference on Health Care and Life Science Research (ICHLSR) , Istanbul (Turkey)

shahnaz Javdani

Abstract This paper focuses on the architectural impact of also investigates appropriate criteria and patterns and identify environmental stimuli in life space and their effects on humans and then evaluate environmental indexes. Present study was conducted through unique and innovative research method and mental health in all depended public librariesin Tehran (Capital ran. A 41-item checklist is designed by the researchers, which provides standards, criteria and patterns for indoor and outdoor space of public libraries. Thisstudy examinesvia descriptive-survey method and two types of quaternaries were used as assessment tools: General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) and researcher-made questionnaire based on architectural theories. The results indicate that architectural research study confirms that there is a significant relationship between architectural implications and characteristics of public Index Terms Public Library, Architectural elements, Mental health, Environmental health careHealth Seeking Behavior, Adolescents, Students, I ndia

Shabestan research center

socio-spatialstudies journal

Today, the quality and quantity of urban spaces has become one of the most important developmental indicators in the cities. The management of citizenship relations and increase of social interactions level and presence of people in urban spaces have been considered as the backbone and capital of a dynamic and vibrant community. The purpose of this study was to determine and evaluate the effective indicators on promoting social interactions in urban spaces with a happy city approach. Sampling method was determined by multi-stage comparative stratified sampling and the number of samples was determined by using Cochran formula about 384 people in Qaemshahr. Data collection tool was a research hypothesis questionnaire. Descriptive statistics were used to describe the data. Inferential statistics were used to analyze the hypotheses by SPSS and LISREL software. Four effective factors for promoting social interactions were extracted. These factors are as follows: the first priority is the sense of belonging to the place (5.10), the second priority is security (3.95), the third priority is the urban pedestrian (3.67) and the fourth priority was urban furniture (3.60). The results show that all the components affect the promotion of social interactions in the city's public spaces.

shabnam sina

Parks and urban green spaces, have always been a places to spend hours away from the bustling life and its numerous problems. In the meantime, elderly people also have the same share of uses from such spaces as other people. Elderly including social groups that due to their age and decreasingly activities, have very leisure time And the possibility of their use of the urban park for voluntary and community activity is more than other society's members. In this regard, This paper has been developed aims to improve the environmental quality of such spaces for the presence ability of vulnerable elderly population And therefore by Collecting the indicators and criteria of elderly's presence ability at Laleh park of Tehran city, that have been one of the oldest parks in the 6th district of Tehran with the highest elderly populations, were studied And then the quality of park was assessed. The Research method is descriptive analytical and gauging. And resulting of interviews with 384 elderly people over 60 years who were present in the park. Data were collected by using questionnaires and analysis was performed by using statistical software. It has been confirmed that According to (p_value <0/05), there is a significant relationship between different levels of proposed model and dependent variable

Financial Research Journal , Arezou Kotnaei

Resumen: Hoy en día, es necesario utilizar bibliotecas sin libros debido a la adición creciente de nuevos artículos y documentos científicos a fuentes anteriores y otros problemas relacionados. Por lo tanto, el presente estudio tuvo como objetivo proporcionar un modelo para la introducción de los índices de arquitectura interior en el diseño de tales bibliotecas para las facultades de arte y arquitectura a través de un estudio de caso, es decir, la biblioteca de la Facultad de Artes y Arquitectura, Universidad Islámica Azad, Sur Rama de Teherán El estudio es un estudio cuantitativo en términos de su naturaleza, sujeto y objetivos con un enfoque positivista. La población de estudio incluyó a los estudiantes de la facultad. El método de muestreo es muestreo aleatorio estratificado. El estudio se realizó en ocho pasos. En el primer paso, las fuentes de la biblioteca se usaron para recopilar los datos, incluidos libros y artículos científicos confiables. El segundo paso incluyó fuentes de Internet tales como revistas científicas líderes para identificar los índices de diseño científico para bibliotecas sin libros. En el tercer paso, se seleccionaron 39 índices para desarrollar un cuestionario. En el cuarto paso, la validez y confiabilidad del cuestionario se midieron a través de la validez del contenido usando la opinión del profesor supervisor y el alfa de Cronbach, respectivamente. En el quinto paso, los cuestionarios se distribuyeron entre los estudiantes para buscar sus comentarios sobre la aceptación o no aceptación de cada índice. En el sexto paso, los datos obtenidos de los cuestionarios recolectados se dividieron en tres grupos: psicología ambiental, arquitectura interior, y equipo y mobiliario digital. Los datos fueron analizados usando SPSS. En el séptimo paso, las hipótesis del estudio se analizaron mediante la prueba de Kolmogorov-Smirnov, la prueba t de 1 muestra y la prueba t independiente. En el octavo paso, los resultados finales se obtuvieron para priorizar los índices de diseño de interiores. Según los resultados, los índices con una media superior a 4 tienen el valor más alto y se reconocieron como los índices de diseño más importantes en la categoría principal, y los índices con un valor mayor a 3.5 se introdujeron como los segundos índices más importantes. Finalmente, se podría concluir que los índices mencionados proporcionan un espacio apropiado para los estudiantes en la forma de una biblioteca sin libros.

portal.usb.ac.ir

Asghar Zare chahouki

Socio-spatial studies journal

Regarding the increasing presence of women in the community as a result of higher education developments, urban spaces have become more feminine and the significant influence of women in urban spaces and landscape is rapidly increasing following the impacts of lifestyle phenomenon, media and globalization. The increasing influence of women on urban spaces and landscapes intensifies the necessity of deep scrutiny. Recently, security is being considered as an important issue for women and women tend to be present at urban spaces more; however, all different types of space are not considered secured enough for women. The absence of women architects and urbanists in the professional community despite the large population of women graduate from Iranian universities accentuates the problem. This research seeks to understand whether urban spaces and landscapes can be regarded as feminine spaces. This paper a review research and the literature and the research problem are described by emphasis on library documentation research method.

1st International Academic Conference on Civil Engineering, Rome, Italy

Mahsan Ostadnia

Urban spaces are the place of social life of the community, based on rational thinking values, civic participation of the community and social behavior based on human values. Urban spaces are the context of the formation and strengthening of social communication in order to establish a sense of security and trust in the public space, on the other hand, public places are important for the formation of ritual events, which help to establish social interaction in these spaces. Space and behavior, due to factors affecting each other, they affect the presence of individuals and the occurrence of social activities. Urban design can be done in a way to occur easy communication and greater trust between acquaintances and strangers. Urban spaces have an important role to create a happy city. These spaces can provide different variety of opportunities for citizens to experience joy and happiness. There is a close relationship between personal happiness, social happiness, and a happy city. Considering the importance and emphasis on social interaction in happy urban spaces, this paper seeks to achieve the qualitative criteria, which can influence on promotion of social interaction in happy urban spaces. Regarding to the subject of this study, descriptive-analytic research method has been used for this article. This research recognizes the relationship between happy urban spaces and social interaction, it is based on a theoretical framework that will be useful for measuring the indicators of a happy city to promote social interaction in urban spaces.

Bagh-e Nazar

Bagh-e Nazar Journal

In landscape architecture, the concept of landscape has always been linked to two facets namely objectivity and subjectivity, and it has shown an inseparable bond between human and the environment. The tight-knit and intertwined relationship of the qualitative and quantitative issues makes it difficult to understand and, consequently, to evaluate the landscape concept. During the history of landscape, and especially in recent years, many efforts have been made to assess the landscape and its various aspects. Most research has attempted to separate objective aspects from the subjective ones and numerically evaluate each one separately in a landscape assessment. Previous studies have evaluated the physique of environment , and human perceptions of the environment, some strands of studies have assessed the landscape assessed from the environmental aspect and investigated it ecologically , Some researchers have considered it objectively regardless of humans and their minds while , some have s viewed it as merely subjective issue . To assess the concept of landscape, it is necessary to simultaneously evaluate the objective and subjective process and discover the relations between them. Therefore, this research is an attempt to collect and organize library documents, including different methods of landscape evaluation in various objective and subjective fields, and to analyze them deductively and, and to study the existing methods, and suggest a model for landscape assessment.

reza ghanbari seyedkolaei

Construction of administrative parks aiming at alleviating the traffic, fuel consumption, and saving time, etc., is of great importance in the world, so that with the increasing growth of population and development of urbanization, it has set the stage for numerous studies to enhance the efficiency of such sites through recognizing the issues and problems of clients and their satisfaction. This article is formulated taking a descriptive-analytic approach, and aiming at measuring the satisfaction of citizens with the performance of administrative park in Gorgan. The populations of this project were the citizens who referred to this park to do their administrative affairs, of whom 384 cases were chosen through Cochran and randomly using questionnaire. The information was gathered under SPSS and statistical test and the results indicated that Gorgan citizens did not find the construction of this park appropriate for their life trend, so that the abundance of answers for lower than average were 235 (65%), and abundance of answers for influence higher than average were 129 or 35 percent. Considering the level of significance lower than 0.05, the difference between the abundance of both groups of answers at the level of 99% were significant. Hence, the hypothesis zero “the construction of administrative park in Gorgan influenced positively on life enhancement” is rejected, and the opposite one (researcher’s assumption) is admitted.

Farzane Gohari

— as a basic concept, sustainability is a holistic theory for all the living affairs including economy, community, and environment that provided the basis of the sustainable design. Sustainability is an interdisciplinary concept which entangled with considerable efforts of many specialists, movements, and specialized disciplines. Therefore, as one of the most significant human settlements in modern metropolitans such as Mashhad city some majors including architecture, urban design, and urban development have pivotal role in providing appropriate setting and high quality and quantity standards for the residents of housing complexes. In line with the principles of sustainable development, the current study seeks to introduce and analyze the affective factors of residents' satisfaction in housing complexes. As descriptive-analytic and position paper and by evaluating the main theoretical models presented by local and foreign scholars for realizing the most effective factors in housing complexes, the present article was performed an analysis for the relationship of residents' satisfaction with the concept of sustainability. Finally, the effective factors of this area were suggested in an analytic-theoretical framework. The obtained results indicate that the effective residents' satisfaction factors in housing complexes of this common area can be classified into three dimensions, namely structural, environmental, and sociocultural. Suitable arrangement of blocks, occupancy level, proper density, scale, and human proportions from spatial-structural aspect, absence of various pollutants, existence of suitable nature and green space from ecological aspect, and finally family and neighborhood relationship, amount of participation in social activities, and management satisfaction from sociocultural aspect are considered as effective factors of this area.With regard to the increase of level of residents' satisfaction in housing complexes, we hope that this article could help the designers recreate a sustainable setting.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Library architecture. Library architecture College buildings'

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Johannesson, Krister. "I främsta rummet : planerandet av en högskolebiblioteksbyggnad med studenters arbete i fokus." Doctoral thesis, Högskolan i Borås, Institutionen Biblioteks- och informationsvetenskap / Bibliotekshögskolan, 2009. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hb:diva-3529.

Magliozzi, Wendy. "A library as a temple." Thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/53265.

Sheeleigh, Mark Robinson. "An idea for a library." Thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/53273.

Barlow, Rachael Elizabeth. "Stakes in the stacks library buildings and librarians' professional identities /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2008. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3331265.

MENDELL, ERIC NICHOLAS. "ARCHITECTURE ALIVE: BUILDINGS THAT EVOLVE IN RESPONSE TO CHANGING NEEDS." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2005. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1116000373.

Beecher, Ann B. "Wayfinding tools in public library buildings: A multiple case study." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2004. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4470/.

Washington-Blair, Angela. "The scope and methods of citizen participation in planning and designing public library facilities." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1992. http://books.google.com/books?id=UcngAAAAMAAJ.

Flathman, Jennifer L. "Rereading the Library : a cultural conservation approach to determining the architectural significance of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, Maryland /." Thesis, Connect to online version of this title in UO's Scholars' Bank, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/5994.

Dahlbäck, Eva. "Att bygga ett bibliotek : En studie av funktion och rörelse i tre nyinrättade biblioteksbyggnader - Kungliga tekniska högskolans bibliotek, Sambiblioteket i Härnösand och Vitterhetsakademiens bibliotek." Thesis, Uppsala University, Department of ALM, 2009. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-106143.

A large part of research about libraries and library buildings in Sweden has been focused on how the building looks not how it functions with the library. The aim with this master’s thesis is to study how a library building is functioning and how its users are experiencing it. This is studied in three libraries, Kungliga tekniska högskolans bibliotek, Sambiblioteket in Härnösand and Vitterhetsakademiens bibliotek. With the questions of how they were planed, what did the libraries want from the new building and which of these demands were realized. The theory and method will are inspired from Daniel Koch and Inger Bergström.I have visited these libraries and also have read the few published articles about them. I have, too, interviewed librarians and users in the libraries. These libraries have all established a new library building in the 2100th century. The study shows that is not always easy to build a new library. There are a lot of actors involved in the planning, and that effects how the library will function in the building as well how the users move within and experience the room.

Louviere, Gregory Paul. "Denotation: a literate institution for a small southern town." Thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/52108.

Stewart, James Bennett. "The book of stone: a library for Blacksburg, Virginia." Thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/53303.

Swanson, Franklin Barringer. "A theological library and scholar's complex for Roosevelt Island." Thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/53276.

Cooper, Lou Ann. "A wall for books." Thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/74545.

Gallo, León José Pablo. "Forma y función de los edificios de bibliotecas universitarias: herramientas para su evaluación." Doctoral thesis, Universidad de Murcia, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/80598.

Pourbabai, Farahnaz. "A museum of books." Thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/53154.

Sgoda, Cleverson. "Arquitetura de bibliotecas universitárias: diretrizes de projeto para edifícios mais sustentáveis." Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná, 2016. http://repositorio.utfpr.edu.br/jspui/handle/1/1845.

Forbes, Angela. "Information and architecture : the synthesis of information and architecture in KwaZulu-Natal." Thesis, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10413/9416.

Bunn, Dumont C. "Architectural features of contemporary academic libraries four case studies /." 1989. http://books.google.com/books?id=GLHgAAAAMAAJ.

"Central reference library: Hong Kong international information center." 1997. http://library.cuhk.edu.hk/record=b5889076.

Vavra, Trinity H. "The Indiana State Library : a testament of history thru architecture." 2010. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1612298.

Mallen, Peter J. W. "A hybrid commercial/library building for the resort town of Whistler." Thesis, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/7956.

"Reading space in the city." 2003. http://library.cuhk.edu.hk/record=b5891805.

Minnaar, Philmar. "Biblioteekgeboue van inrigtings vir tersiêre onderwys in die RSA, 1946-1983 : 'n histories-bedryfskundige ontleding." Thesis, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10210/9880.

"Montage city." 2011. http://library.cuhk.edu.hk/record=b5894552.

Grillová, Jana. "Nerealizované stavby knihoven - vliv situace na provoz a služby." Master's thesis, 2014. http://www.nusl.cz/ntk/nusl-336632.

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• Center for Research Libraries (CRL) Foreign Dissertations Search the CRL Catalog for dissertations already held at the Center. If a foreign dissertation is not at CRL, UCLA's Interlibrary Loan Service will request that CRL acquire it for your use. This special issue of Focus on Global Resources describes CRL's extensive collection of foreign dissertations.
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• The search for a theory in architecture : Anglo-American debates, 1957-1976 / Louis Martin. Thesis--Ph.D.; Princeton University, 2002.
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A thesis is typically the culminating project for a master's degree, while a dissertation completes a doctoral degree and represents a scholar's main area of expertise. However, some undergraduate students write theses that are published online, so it is important to note which degree requirements the thesis meets. While these are not published works like peer-reviewed journal articles, they are typically subjected to a rigorous committee review process before they are considered complete. Additionally, they often provide a large number of citations that can point you to relevant sources. 

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Reimagining 448 Local Libraries in Moscow, One Space at a Time

• Written by James Taylor-Foster
• Published on October 03, 2014

SVESMI , an unassuming studio based in central Rotterdam , is at the center of a dauntingly complex project that may eventually see the renovation of 448 dilapidated and disused branch libraries in Moscow . Architects Anastassia Smirnova and Alexander Sverdlov balance their time between Rotterdam, which acts as their design studio, and Moscow from which, alongside architects Maria Kataryan and Pavel Rueda, they oversee the project at large. Faced by the potential challenge of reimagining over 450 public 'living rooms' spread across the Russian capital and demanding unusually high levels of spatial articulation and social understanding, the Open Library project is also unwinding the hidden narrative of Moscow’s local libraries.

The project began in 2012 with an idea formulated between the part-Dutch-part-Russian practice SVESMI , urban designer Paola Viganò , and a Muscovite bibliophile described as an ‘island of literary independence’ called Boris Kupriyanov (of Falanster) . Sverdlov and Kupriyanov took the lead, assisted by a group of thirty-five multidisciplinary minds engaged in the production of a provocative research document which boldly called for the restoration of Moscow ’s vast network of small-scale libraries. This field research was followed by the thesis of Giovanni Bellotti and Paolo Ruaro , under the supervision of Paola Viganò and Alexander Sverdlov , at the Università IUAV di Venezia . The foremost goal of this research as a whole was to explore what libraries were, are and should be in order to prove that a dose of fresh ambition could shock the system into rapid reform.

Bellotti and Ruaro’s Moscow Library Atlas analysed a proportion of the city’s libraries in fantastic detail. The publication exposed the complex individual relationships between these public nodes and the wider urban context, bringing the characteristics of certain library types to light. Interestingly, the number of libraries per capita in Moscow rivals other European cultural capitals yet, prior to the inception of this project, were unpopular and disproportionately underpopulated public places. The vast majority of them remain dense with unfulfilled potential and, according to SVESMI , "do not play any significant role in the shaping of the city’s cultural landscape." Armed with a research document demonstrating, among other things, that Moscow spends €43 per visitor per year compared to Amsterdam which spends €4,50 per visitor per year, the team had a degree of leverage to convince Sergei Kapkov , Moscow’s Culture Minister, to help set the project in motion.

According to Sverdlov, “it is impossible to count on consistent reform” in Russia . They needed to demonstrate that the research they had labored over would produce an outcome which could spearhead further development – and fast. SVESMI selected seven libraries from across the city to act as pilot projects and within the space of only twelve months could boast of two complete renovations. One of these, the Dosteovsky Library, saw anecdotal reports of visitor numbers rise from around three hundred in six months to three hundred per day, with lines out of the door.

As with most spaces that appear aesthetically ‘simple’, the social, strategic and spatial complexity in the background of these projects is enormous. Conversation with SVESMI ’s Alexander Sverdlov uncovered interesting observations into the design of the libraries. Rather than describing them as introverted spaces they are, for Svedlov, “spaces of elevated neutrality.” “People can be engaged with themselves whilst also being observant of the city around them, just by being beautifully disconnected.” Neutrality – “a political project in itself” – is a difficult state to attain and then maintain. “To not be colored left or right, but to just be there in a state of silence and concentration, gives independence.” In this sense, the designers saw the windows as “completely crucial”, not only for those looking into the libraries but also for those readers looking out towards the street from the comfort of a beautiful, calm, well-lit space.

The libraries have since kick-started the creation of a new creative body called the Centre for Moscow Libraries to develop a more concrete agenda for the (re)programming of the system in line with SVESMI ’s prototypes. Sverdlov describes it as the dialectic of hardware (the library buildings themselves) and software: the intangible integrated system of people and commitments that creates and maintains the library network. It is the service that supports the structures which allows the Dutch public library system, for example, operate so fluidly.

With such a vast collection of small spaces across Moscow ready for renovation the practice is now prioritizing the creation of a set of guidelines which clearly explains, for example, the correct layout of furniture (designed in-house due to the incredibly short construction period). In such didactic designs there is significance in the arrangement of space on all scales. The tables in Library #127, for example, are positioned in a way which engages library dwellers in a new dimension. It facilitates social incidents within public space.

Alongside this publication SVESMI are also eager to develop a supplement which examines the state of European welfare and, in turn, extend the reach of the project to other European countries. “We all know that libraries are a universal good,” Sverdlov acknowledges, “but the topic is soaked with banality.” Embedding the project into a wider discussion about declining welfare will add a new level of currency to the debate.

Sverdlov recollects Umberto Eco's This Is Not The End Of The Book , where he stated that "the book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, and the wheel: once invented, it cannot be improved." In the same way, as digital readers come and go, the physical book will remain the constant thread that ties generations together through knowledge and ‘spatial neutrality’. It is even possible to argue that these kinds of spaces are not merely a privilege but fundamentally necessary to the healthy functioning of a community. In Moscow , the branch libraries ultimately provide a point of consistency throughout the history of the city. SVESMI have audaciously “injected bubbles of oxygen” in the form of select pilot projects which demonstrate a combination of skill and tenacity that lends this overarching scheme exceptional significance.

Browse the gallery for more before and after images, as well as images of the forthcoming Iskander Library (#185) which will be led by Alexander Sverdlov alongside a team including Maria Kataryan, Pavel Rueda, Danir Safiullin, Artyom Olkhovky, Marco Cimenti, David Koezen, Giovanni Bellotti , and Xiaoting Chen.

Teams behind completed renovations

The team behind the Dostoevsky Library (#8) was led by Alexander Sverdlov and included Maria Kataryan, Pavel Rueda, Artyom Olkhovky, David Koezen, Ahinitze Errasti, Lina Intaite, Elisabet Barceló, Francesco Vedovato, Guillaume Guerrier, Francesco Visco, Paolo Ruaro , Simone Ierardi, and Lorena Valero Miñano with the participation of Buromoscow .

The team behind the Prospekt Library (#127) was led by Alexander Sverdlov and included Maria Kataryan, Pavel Rueda, Artyom Olkhovky, David Koezen, Ahinitze Errasti, Lina Intaite, Elisabet Barceló, Francesco Vedovato, Guillaume Guerrier, Francesco Visco, Paolo Ruaro , Simone Ierardi and Lorena Valero Miñano. It was also realised with the participation of Buromoscow .

At SVESMI Moscow Maria Kataryan and Pavel Rueda have been managers and contributors to the project through all phases of the built projects.

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Reimagining the Public Library as Public Space

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Once regarded as the public’s center of knowledge and information, public libraries today are challenged by the rise of mobile technology and the Internet. Information behavior of everyday library patrons have transformed to rely on instant access of information through Google search instead of the resources housed in their local libraries. The focus of public library design is shifting from storing & protecting valuable resources (books) to the experience of an active public space of learning, engaging and reading.

This thesis reimagines a public library branch in East Baltimore City by evaluating the architecture of public library examples of the past and of today. By understanding the user experience of the three key elements of public library design – procession, services & flexible space - a new public library design that engages and responds to the local community can be proposed.

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Having renounced his typical creative production for political action in his twilight years, canonical French writer Jean Genet was invited by both the Black Panther Party and the Palestine Liberation Organization to their decisive sites of struggle in 1970. During his time with the BPP as well as with the PLO, Genet both documented and sparked documentation: from his detailed account of these revolutionary days in the posthumously published Prisoner of Love to the myriad images, moving and otherwise, that his attendance occasioned. ‘Saint Genet,’ as Sartre dubbed him, became a visible comrade and compatriot to those engaged with the foremost liberatory struggles of the time.

Yet do these mediatized moments and rhetorical flourishes constitute action or artifice? Through reading Genet as a scion of revolutionary cosmopolitanism, situating his textual and mediatic production within the PLO and the BPP’s larger media strategy, and considering the shortcomings of such deterritorialized approaches to fights for territory, this thesis contends with limits of contemporary solidarity through the late life and work of Jean Genet.

This thesis seeks to offer an account of the pharmacological as a mode of American mid-century modern design. Through an exploration of media published by the field of pharmacy, a visual study of pharmaceutical design, display, and distribution yields an understanding of a sequence of effects and interactions with consumption. Starting with the pill—an object that dissolves into us—we encounter new systems and regimes of mass production and its psychoactive futures that shift us toward new modes of perception, which are in turn shaped through the invention of corporate identity, public exhibitions, and new heights of marketing. These social and technological assemblages attending the pharmacological are a lens through which chemical effects become perceivable on the scale of design. Atom by atom, the pharmacological summons us through limitless molecular allure, reframing the “self” and its environment for our current pharma-society.

The extant history of pharmaceuticals, in many ways, is a history of use—of the functions and abilities of consumable products and their role in our domestic or professional lives. Twentieth century pharmacy histories primarily revolve around successes and failures in the domains of discovery, marketing, and mergers. By contrast, through an investigation of the pharmaceutical industry not solely as a medical field, this thesis examines a mode of consumer design. Attendant to the pharmaceutical product, its receiver as well as interior architecture. The industry’s effect on the built environment and daily life is considered by focusing on the pill at different scales—the manufactory, the drug store, and the consumer—across a case study of the pharmaceutical manufacturer, Upjohn from 1946 to 1961. Looking at these sites of interaction, this thesis attempts to trace the technical aesthetic history of the pharmaceutical from the creation of the physical pill to the proliferation of the field’s graphic representation, and to the behaviors which have given rise to the pharmacological as a realm of design.

The complexities of sex work in the United States are deeply enmeshed with the county’s relationship to morality and control. While our collective cultural understandings of sex and work are tied to complex histories of labor economies in the US, their commercialization has been central to the mythology of the American dream. False associations between frontier freedoms and sexual liberations were birthed in the boom towns of the West, where the sexual labor of women became the “backbone” of an emergent urban landscape that is spatially entangled with a new form of libidinal economy.

This thesis interrogates the physical and imaginary formation of the American West through the reading of Virginia City, a late 19th-century mining town in Nevada, and the extractive industries that played a central role in its formation, namely sex work and mining. Through the lens of exchange, the thesis examines the urban and economic formations of Virginia City and its close associations with the mythologies of the West and their deep associations with the town’s literary origins. Built on industries of extraction and tourism, boom towns in Nevada actively used myths and stories of the West to create and maintain a workforce and a prospering economy. Excitements of what could be in these towns were weaponized and spun into a complex web of gendered relations to labor.

A naked game of tag in a former Nazi gas chamber. IDF combat training within a Palestinian cemetery. Captivity training and simulated interrogation. Imagining a golden shower, sex, and suicide with Hitler.

“Shooting and Crying” examines mediatic environments of enactment that destabilize categories and constructions of subjecthood as a means of working through past and present trauma for Jewish and para-Jewish subjects. In order to detect and read structures of complicity and victimhood, this thesis stages an encounter among three projects that perform and document scenes of genocidal enactment: Roee Rosen’s art installation Live and Die as Eva Braun (1997), Artur Żmijewski’s film Berek (Game of Tag) (1999), and Yishai Sarid’s novel Victorious (2022). Staging together embroiled and transdisciplinary histories of psychoanalysis, memorialization, curation, and military training in this thesis activates these practices, in turn producing synchronous and diachronous resonances among them. At the core of this research are two genocides, the Holocaust and ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine, both intimately bound to one another beyond history and through their practices of identity and memory. The trauma these structures produce and resurrect form relational identities vis a vis Jewish and para-Jewish subjects, relations this thesis unravels and re-tangles. Reading environments which work through victimhood and memory uncovers a complex, boundless network of theories, histories, and practices of psychological conditioning and preparation. To engage in these discourses is to voyage to unexpected places—film, museums, literature, military training—where trauma oozes, escapes, and constantly jumps mediatic and temporal registers. As an interrogation of discomfort and its manifold projections, this thesis looks to practices that suspend, if not supersede, cultural sanctions to actively confront and challenge the viewer: the museum visitor, the historian, survivor, and you, the reader of my thesis.

This thesis examines the tensions between labor and leisure in the post-World War II period, which led to radical utopian projects of the 1960s and 1970s. This period presents various conditions and authoritative strategies that led some in society to react to the crises of their time, dreaming of change and the means to better themselves. This project collects, retells, adjusts, and sets forth elements of leisure, labor, the spaces of imagination, and otherness created under these conditions, allowing for the investigation into modes of collective isolation, imagination, and tensions under a tripartite conceptual framework of comparative binarism, concrete utopia, and heterotopia. By understanding various movements, technological innovations, and socialpolitical crises, this project theorizes heterotopic and utopic projects and cyclical events to bring forth questions about how society manufactures leisure, how cultural production aids its proliferation in connection to labor, and where freedom exists within the realm of necessity.

As a primary case study, a platform in the Adriatic Sea—Rose Island—exemplifies otherness and exudes the power to spark governmental action against it within the tensions of emplacement, land, and placemaking. The geopolitical tensions blur our vision of what labor and related leisure took place on the platform, and more questions arise as the project unfolds to look at, into, and through the space of reality and the imaginary. The interrogation of the tensions between labor and leisure, how labor’s significance persists in its entanglements with leisure through the analysis of heterotopia, and the forces that drive society toward collective isolation in the name of freedom allow this thesis to become a launch pad to clarify the notion of leisure enmeshed within utopian impulses, dreams, crises, and labor. Architecture & Leisure: Heterotopia, Freedom deploys techniques of adjacency and inquiry to expand a base setting for social-political ramifications of building a heterotopia for a claimed freedom and argues that leisure and labor’s hidden attributes are tethered with standard society even today.

You are cordially invited to join a night of toasts, good cheer, and gourmet delights.

What makes the dinner party? This thesis investigates and dissects the operations—the physical, political, and social constructions—of the dinner party, by tracing the iconography of the Presidential State Dinner. Recognized as the “People’s House,” the White House embodies a representative force for the American people. Thus, White House State Dinners set an example as the cultural tastemaker for the country and their allure is used to affect politics at home. The Nixon Administration, in particular, employed the imagery of State Dinners and diplomatic travels of the First Family to influence the American domestic dinner party, most notably the Nixons’ trip to China. Here, the Administration’s use of changing media technologies and even censorship shifted the narrative into a crafted viewpoint. Utilizing the theatricality of the dinner party, the President performs at the table and in front of the television camera to infiltrate American domesticity and diplomacy, influencing the choices at the dinner table and the ballot box.

So how are dinner parties produced? The Performative Meal: Nixonian Dinner Theater attempts to seek out new imaginings of the dinner party and asks how these subjects, brought on by the Nixon Administration, of social, media, and gendered politics situate around the dinner table. The thesis examines the usage of the dinner party through the White House during the Nixon Administration, where new strides in television and media technologies enabled the dinner to become a more performative experience. By focusing on the welcome and reciprocal dinners thrown in Beijing, the thesis marinates on what makes the dinner party through the event’s archival documentation. It whets the appetite through investigations of printed and visual media to complicate the palette of dinner norms, uncovering the underlying political minefield the President and the First Lady staged through dinners and their relationship to food more broadly. The Performative Meal traces the usage of the dinner party and food through this era of representation in the changing media landscape, constructing a performance of this gustatory event.

Dinner will be served. Regrets only, please.

This thesis presents facts on, and interpretations of, spaces and systems of dairying in the United States. It focuses on both the built infrastructures of 19th-century dairy farms as well as on federally-funded dairy dissemination programs of the 20th-century. I argue that those earlier spaces facilitated the later development of the nationwide dairy surplus, transforming dairy’s status from agricultural to institutional.

The purpose of acquiring such knowledge is manifold, though three points are especially critical. First, this thesis uses the dairy industry as an example of the long-term role architecture plays in socio-political relations. The built environment does more than simply mediate ecologies in its immediate vicinity, but it plays an indispensable role in the production of consumable goods at every phase. Second, this thesis serves as a counter-history to positive narratives regarding the efficiency of mechanization. Rather than finding freedom through technological advancements on the farm, hyper-efficient dairying practices instead created an overwhelming burden, oppressive subsidization laws, and, ultimately, radical inefficiency. Third, this thesis intends to reveal an insidious mode of United States governance, socially and fiscally. Dairy, something outwardly simple and seemingly insular—a commodity branded into the U.S.-American subconscious (think “got milk?”)—is an industry that extends beyond milk, cheese, and yogurt to impact environmental policies, race relations, spectacle, health standards, and beyond. Reading the production and dissemination of dairy, this thesis posits, helps to reveal techniques of deception, exploitation, expropriation, oppression, and extraction at work within U.S. culture; these techniques are read, that is, as symptoms of the United States.

My thesis argues that these strategies should be examined in the wake of an overwhelming dairy surplus born of technical and economic decisions. The central investigation of this thesis, then, is architecture’s role in creating such a surplus. It studies how modes of dairy production were constructed through architecture’s limitations and abilities, and how architecture itself was constructed as a tool for efficient means of dairying. This thesis sheds light on both the individual and entwined political ecologies of architecture and dairying, as well as on logics of capitalism and nationalism more broadly.

A stair that leads nowhere, a chimney without its bathhouse, an imprint of a sealed-up door—doorknob still intact. These were just a few of the architectural relics, or Thomassons, that were captured by conceptual artist Genpei Akasegawa and his students who took to the streets to carefully survey the neighborhoods of Tokyo in the late 20th century. Akasegawa claimed them as an example of Hyper-Art, an unauthored artform rooted in discovery and whose only method of production can be its own recognition and registration—a self-perpetuating archive of photographs and data. Formally published as an artistic concept in the magazine Photo Times in 1982, Thomasson-hunting became a niche pastime for many across Japan. Collecting submissions through a detailed report form (including space for general information as well as personal accounts, hand-drawn maps, and photographs), and categorizing them with witty names, these street observers were able to assemble a wide-spread documentation of Japan focused at the margins.

Centralizing a particular Thomasson—a chimney from a demolished bathhouse—this thesis excavates all sorts of deviant sites, characters, and histories within postwar Tokyo and around the artwork itself. It follows the chimney through multiple lenses: as a vestige caught up in the politics of urban redevelopment, as a trigger for the revival of a fieldwork-based ethnographic study, and as a record exposing the inefficient, un-commodified underbelly of the city. Through this evolution, a complex assemblage of architecturally-based narratives begins to appear. “Guiding Thomasson” offers new techniques, documents, and contexts to read the Thomassonian construct, historically dependent on diagrammatic imagery and accounts written by Akasegawa despite its collectivist foundation. Departing, moreover, from the shadow of his purely aesthetic lens, the guide emphasizes assistants to the Thomasson project—subjects such as the Mori Building Company, Bigakkō art school, and Iimura Akihiko—that helped form the practice as it is known today. Tracing Mori company histories alongside residential maps and personal narratives, I reveal how this particular chimney-turned-accidental-obelisk embodies grand urban transformations related to the 1964 Olympics and 1969 New City Planning Bill. I then follow a Hyper-Art hunt involving the chimney alongside Akasegawa’s syllabi at Bigakkō to theoretically frame within the project the notion of the architectural uncanny and a pedagogy called “Modernology.” Alternatively, through an analysis of the chimney’s visual record in prints, paintings, and fish-eye photographs, I demonstrate its primacy in Thomasson history through the figure of Iimura and within an exhibitionary history. Through the selection of significant “sites”—a play on the typical tourist itinerary to monumental “sights”—the guide extends new ways of looking—at a peculiar artistic practice, at the problematics of a city in a fragmented modernizing state, at the architectural lifespan, and at seemingly unexceptional everyday objects.

Anthropogenic carbon is everywhere. Currently, carbon not only circulates through infrastructures where it continues to be mined, extracted, burnt and emitted, but also through another emerging complex encompassing a vast network of operations where it is observed, measured, regulated, capped, traded, exchanged, offset, captured, transported, sequestered and re-utilized. An endless sequence of processes resulting from the anxiety to control its gaseous accumulation in the atmosphere are producing new territories where carbon circulates today.

This thesis deals with those territories. But also with a problem: the complexity derived from the variety of scenarios that conform the new territories of carbon, which vary from remote places where carbon dioxide is being captured and geologically sequestered, to conventions where intergovernmental treaties and protocols regulating the functioning of carbon markets are produced. It entails grasping complex networks of scientific observation and CO2 measurement techniques in the air and the subsoil, and identifying the territories where the emerging carbon capture and sequestration industry’s architectures, infrastructures and machines are being deployed. Throughout, it also involves identifying the production of discourses, ideologies and imaginaries mobilized and enacted by a whole new set of experts, institutions and corporations that the gaseous carbon economy creates and interconnects in various and complicated ways—an intricate spatiality of carbon that this research unpacks.

Consequently, the task of this thesis is also to capture carbon, but otherwise. Conducting a process of semantic engineering on the (technical, violent) connotations of the term within the carbon capture industry, I instead understand capture as a research tool. This thesis is an exercise of locating, indexing, mapping and spatializing carbon and its new territories from the aboveground to the underground, as well as the new forms of labor, property acquisition, dispossession and scenes of exploitation that emerge on the ground. Through this process of compilation and analysis, this thesis (naturally) came to be an Atlas of (emerging) Carbon Territories, a means for seeing what otherwise seems ungraspable, elusive, or is even obscured.

Agnes Denes, a Hungarian-born American artist, was one of the first to address the intersection of environmental concerns, artificial intelligence, and interdisciplinary studies in her practice. To highlight Denes’ foundational role in broadening contemporary discourse on interdisciplinary research, this thesis analyzes her concept of “eco-logic.” Denes developed eco-logic as a method to bridge her ecological and logical modes of working—between thought and life and theory and praxis. One of Denes’ first projects exploring the concept of eco-logic was her seminal text, Book of Dust: The Beginning and the End of Time and Thereafter. The book provides a critical lens into the acceleration of environmental concerns, information technology, and specialized disciplines in the late 1960s. In the book, Denes posits dust as a material and conceptual vehicle for understanding the tensions between biology and technology that emerged with the information age. She explores these themes by cataloging the corporeal, conceptual, and cosmic dimensions of dust between 1972 and 1989.

Through analyzing Book of Dust, this thesis outlines the tools, methods, and models that shape the infrastructure of Denes’ eco-logic. The framework for this field guide consists of three parts. Part one, Research Tools, explores Denes’ use of numbers, containers, diagrams, and images in both the book and her practice. Part two, Research Methods, examines how Denes employs interdisciplinarity, paradox, fiction, and visualization strategies in her process. Part three, Research Models, situates eco-logic in conversation with ecological epistemologies put forth by Donna Haraway, Timothy Morton, and Bruno Latour. This section examines how each scholar aims to reconcile science with ecology and how these ideas map onto and build tension within Denes’ notion of eco-logic. The conclusion looks at how Denes’ notion of eco-logic opens up new avenues for understanding the stakes of interdisciplinary research, artificial intelligence, and ecological concerns today.

This project explores the creation of the artisan in the space of the village in the Indian subcontinent as a product of colonial modernity. It investigates nineteenth-century theorization of the village, its spatial reorganization and reforms meant to support the aesthetic and political economy. The relationship between artisanal work and the village was drawn through historic narratives of ancestral and religious ties as well as the native’s instinct towards craft. Studies were conducted on the artistic behavioral patterns of the villagers which were then documented in various reports and publications of the time.

These written documents create an episteme that justifies violent interventions on the bodies and spaces of native communities. Exhibitions were also implemented to present an ocular demonstration of the impact of colonial rule in this successful transformation. These Reforms were meant to subjugate the communities and render them productive to the economic framework by creating cycles of dependency through financial reforms and artisanal training.

I explore these reforms through journals and reports in an attempt to re-examine the violence of the document through a series of pamphlets. This format was used by resistance movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in their struggle to fill the gaps of history left by the dominant narratives.

The ‘Codex of Revolt’ is a parafictional archival collection. It aims at resituating the colonial knowledge -knowledge produced by official records and anti-colonial materials controlled in formal archives- for the purpose of constructing counter-knowledge about the history of interwar Palestine, with a specific focus on the Palestinian Revolt between 1936- 1939 and the practice of violent resistance. It seeks to bring to light questions about the revolt and the practice of sabotage that have long been in the shadow of colonial narratives.

While seeking to question the genealogy, ontology, and epistemology of the practice of sabotage, the question of the archive and its capacity to control indigenous knowledge and its reproduction through fiction figured prominently in this project. In that sense, the fictionality of the archive is not limited to eradicating the Palestinian position and its perspective. In fact, the codex does not argue for the phinomythology of the archive. On the contrary, it seeks to demonstrate that official colonial and Zionist records controlled in the archive, in the majority, are facts. However, through a developed methodology for reading colonial facts-that consists of a practice of photo-text montage through which official colonial records are supplemented with the subaltern voice of the revolt-the very fact of archival fiction is materialized through the presentation of the facts and their interpretations. Against this backdrop, the codex comes to problematize facts and argue for their employment in an ideological framework that is often methodologized to serve the agenda of colonial forces.

This thesis attends to the desert: a terrestrial biome named for its inhospitable conditions and defined by what it lacks. Despite the inherent association of desolation, the desert has inspired a myth of an abstracted and unspoiled landscape. To challenge both the etymology and imaginary, my project surveys physical objects, rhetorical accounts, and mediated references littered across a singular region, the Mojave Desert. This named landscape is at once the smallest American desert and the bearer of multiple superlatives: from holding the records for the hottest surface and air temperatures ever recorded on Earth and lowest point in North America to containing the largest national park in the contiguous USA and more endemic plants per square meter than any location in the country. Moreover, the Mojave, according to the World Wildlife Organization, is classified as roughly half-conserved and half-altered by human settlement. This classification, indebted to the California Desert Protection Act of 1994, provides artifacts of wilderness and of a productive landscape.

Numerous systems of knowledge exist in the Mojave which together paint a fractured and complex picture, and codify our understanding of the desert. This list includes federal histories provided by the Mojave’s dominant proprietors: the Department of the Interior (National Park System, USGS, and Bureau of Land Management) and the U.S. Armed Forces (Air Force and Navy). Against the backdrop of these multiple epistemic and governing frameworks, and against the impulse of romanticism or conservation, my thesis proposes an investigation of a series of artifacts that illustrates how federal authority and legislation are prolific forces through which the desert’s ambiguity is conserved and sustained.

This is a project about the spatiality constructed around the human body and the crime scene. In contrast to superficial readings of the crime scene as a static space, Scenographics of Crime seeks to uncover the instability and temporality of the crime scene—a scenographic space charged with opportunity and danger for judicial narrative-making in its reclamation of power.

In the late 19th century, police detectives and examining magistrates, who used to mostly write and only occasionally draw, suddenly found themselves holding a shining new camera. Faced with a new media tension between drawing and photography, early criminologists invented a new set of judicial-visual rules, under which spaces, bodies, and their intermingled biological residues (blood) were not simply captured by a forensic way of “seeing,” but dissected, distorted, and re-distributed.

Scenographics tracks the emergence and evolution of crime scene documentation into the twentieth century, as well as the impact on the manipulation of spatial evidence by competing media—particularly drawing and photography—which inflected and to a degree determined the meaning of crime, its interpretation, and implications. By returning to the original question of vision and spatiality at key scenographic moments in the history of crime media, my thesis addresses how criminal spatial evidence at the crime scene gave rise to a range of secondary spaces and situations—from police photo studio to crime museums. In turn, the work generated by these spaces and institutions has contributed to the mediatic tension between drawing and photography. Lastly, the thesis seeks to expose the mechanism of power behind the production and dissemination of crime media knowledge, made explicit by the Scenographics of Crime .

Upon the first recorded forced transverse of Black slaves across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas, the exchange of these bodies and future generations to the Environment was fundamentally upturned and exploited. From the holds of the slave ships to the cells of modern prisons, this pattern of inequity, loss and slow violence persists today as millions of men, women and children of colour sit in jail cells coast to coast.

Akin to the study of geological stratigraphy, the stratum of carcerality in America’s history that has led us to the state of mass incarceration can be read through lines of systematized racism, inequality, and myriad forms of injustice. These oppressive systems are not only upheld but, they are built of, upon, and through them.

This thesis begins to unearth this compounded material through the development of an expansive prison abolition framework which executes a tracing of Black Bodies in America from its Middle Passage origins, to its legacies of incarceration lived at Angola, Louisiana’s State Penitentiary, during the Covid-19 pandemic, to the creation of an active, community-based clay arts program for formerly incarcerated persons in Brooklyn, New York under the title Wedging Forward .

The project is defined by the ways in which secondary, non-hegemonic, Bodies have been produced through centuries of subjugation, systems of containment, and different forms of enslavement lived in the wake of a collective history of unknowing and fragmented ways of being. Equally underpinned in theories of criminal (in)justice and racial justice, this work sheds light on the complex, entrenched relationship of carcerality to race and discrimination in the United States over time, through a curatorial perspective.

Spanning chronologies and geographies, the three distinct carceral moments visited in this work constructs a collective model to investigate the praxis of prison abolitionism in America today in response to the residues of slavery and inter-generational injustices of incarceration which have long-defined the Nation, producing a lens to understand the historical legacies of being locked in, on the outside of society. This conceptual document is positioned within a larger discourse of knowledge that directly works to construct alternative narratives surrounding marginalized, vulnerable, and forcibly confined people through new forms of critical engagement and creative encounters.

What happens when the food we eat breaks?

By focusing on food recalls — the moment where a process meant to seemingly flow endlessly in one direction is suddenly (and voluntarily) tasked to reverse course — this thesis will explore how within such a phenomenon our food transforms: it becomes news, it becomes trash, it becomes corporate risk. Our food becomes the record of overproduction, monopolization, and exploitation. These are more than just media moments, however, as with each recall one is compelled to look in the fridge to see what was recently bought and from where. Has my food suddenly become non-food? Food recalls remind us that we exist at one end of a chain of mass production that is not only prone to fail but is often, in fact, expected to. This thesis will focus on the specific mechanisms surrounding recalls of romaine lettuce. Within a package of romaine lettuce, traces of an entire agri-industrial chain can be excavated. A recall allows us to follow that chain backwards, stopping at each station of production along the way as we search for the culprit of the product’s contamination. At the same time, through its exploration of romaine lettuce, this thesis will act reflexively in an attempt to understand a recall as a methodology in itself. In other words, by referring to the thesis itself as a recall, issues of memory and circularity, for instance, will be evaluated as critical tools of exploration.

The early twenty-first century has witnessed heightened conflict of territorial claims in the South China Sea, a stretch of waters known to be half-enclosed by an auditorium of sovereign lands: the south shore of China, Malay and Indochinese Peninsulas, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Bangka Belitung Islands, among many others. On July 12, 2016, the arbitral tribunal at Hague concluded the tedious dispute between China and the Philippines in hope of settling belligerence in the Spratly Islands. Under the auspices of the United Nations Convention of the Law of Sea (UNCLOS), the final award ruled in favor of the Philippines, refuting China’s unilaterally claimed historic rights to the water regions encircled by the “nine-dash line.” Even though the tribunal was a compulsory instrument authorized by the UNCLOS, of which China was a ratifying member, Beijing refused the arbitral process which jeopardizes its sovereign pretense. The case remains irresolved.

Setting sail from the juridical unsettlement of the South China Sea, this thesis proposes to read this maritime zone as a space of irresolution, for not only the persistent agitation of its jurisdiction but also the ever-profound unsettlement and displacement of the hydro-ecologies indigenous to the Austronesian waters. Accounting a history of technologies and media, it argues that the development of seismological exploration in the early twentieth century ushered into being the seismic aesthetics, a sensibility of the sedimentary which was brought to proliferation by the industry of offshore drilling after World War II. This thesis contends that the arrival of the seismic aesthetics has exacerbated the prolonged process of the territorialization, if not terrestrialization, of the ocean, which was manifested in the Truman Proclamation of the Continental Shelf in 1945 and codified by the United Nations in 1982.

“How do we create an alternative future by living both the future we want to see, while inhabiting its potential foreclosure at the same time?”

“Listening to Images,” Tina Campt

“While questioning such received notions as the organic unity, autonomy, and purity of the modernist work of art, the Duchampian paradigm—inserting a readymade object within an art context—exposed the legitimizing function of the institution, its crucial role in the definition of what should be considered as art. At the same time, it also revealed its own discursive limitations, since the significance of the readymade was entirely dependent upon the institution as a context.”

“Michael Asher and the Transformation of “Situational Aesthetics,” Claude Gintz

The task at hand for my project was to be less recursive. I’m not interested in the more contemporaneous stagings of Blackness or the banal politics and the “discourse” and performance of what we have come to know as “representation” over the past three decades. My thesis specifically names and deals with challenging the presupposition of what the performance of race (Blackness) should look like conceptually, linguistically, and visually in an institutional context. For my project, I wanted to displace (remove) the body and body the material. I’m trying to deal with the philosophical aesthetics of architecture which permeate and manifest in the form of language, in visual material, the archive, documents, and performance and better understand our relationship to it. I wanted to think through the production of knowledge and the varying infrastructures that further produce and recontextualize the possibilities and beingness of a person. Architecture to me isn’t about the past necessarily (and our understanding of it, which we know as History) but is about a commitment to practicing a presence/present and produce scholarship and criticism that’s reflective of our time. Knowledge shouldn’t be exclusively produced in a canon or a specific field, it should be engaged cross-field and culture, and move past occasionally self-permitting itself to look upon a past and engage itself in a staging of the performance of criticality. I wanted to live in and further expand this hypothetical third space that utilizes what I know, what I’ve learned, and where I’m going by melding it into something that can serve as a tool or tunnel to further siphon someone else’s desires, that challenge the legibility of a prescribed selfhood and the performance or enclosure of it. I wanted to search for a freedom and I’m close to finding it.

This thesis investigates spatial concepts of the self in the realm of popular psychology in the 1970s. As ecological, financial, and political insecurities prompted a retreat inward, a culture of seeking cures for societal ills in the self emerged. The spaces collected in this thesis are once psychical and psychic, contained by architectural boundaries of walls and ceilings, but reliant on the sensory as a form of ambient spatial control. Beyond the forms of atmospheric climate-control of the well-tempered environment, in these environments of temperament, affect and behavior become the primary spatial concerns.

Environments of the Self is formed around three main case studies across disciplines and media: a body of psychology experiments, a series of ambient sound recordings, and an architectural exhibition. Each case study foregrounds a particular setting (the laboratory, the home, the museum, the city), a perceived subject (the test subject, the consumer, the urban public), tracing practices where the mind becomes a space of negotiation between individual and environment, from scientific studies in environmental psychology, through popular psychology, into forms of entertainment. These episodes of environmental mood alteration and behavior modification are test cases for thinking about the thresholds between body and environment, interior and exterior. Through the figure of the self, I endeavor to ask where apparatuses of power emerge in a complex of bodies, spaces, sensory engagements, and architectures of mood.

On the 8th of February, 1985, the first geostationary communication satellite, Arabsat-1A, was launched with the Ariane 3 flight from Korou, France. The 1A communication satellite would then support an array of projects centered on advancing a Pan-Arab terrestrial telecommunication network, and would operate using C-band frequencies for its two-way communication: 4 GHz for reception and 6 GHz for transmission. The application of automated transceivers coupled with the international administration of satelitte bandwidths, invisible forces centrally encoded within technical standards, were rendered visible in juridical-political practices, and echoed in conflicts over ordering territories of the Arab region

This thesis departs from an examination of the Arabsat-1A launching to rethink the political strategies considered for extracting, managing and ordering unfamiliar frontiers. In process of interrogating vertical spatial dimensions, my thesis, which takes the form of a book, consists of three sections that visit different strata of infrastructure spaces bound within the politics of verticality. To do so, each section acts as a cartographic device to navigate across different sites of mediation that channel the vertical domain. These ubiquitous sites, in their technical and invisible characteristics, vary to include the satellite orbit, the electromagnetic spectrum, down to the air space around us. While each has their own legal definitions and histories, in this book, each is brought into existence through a specific event, tracing the lines of governing institutes and the narratives of the individuals who were entangled, but also disappeared from visibility, within these lines. These protagonists and their experience were crucial –although excluded from official institutional narratives– in the operations for and against the state exploration of invisible frontiers.

This research pays close attention to the Marginal de la Selva, a colossal 1,500-kilometer highway imagined by Peruvian president and architect Fernando Belaunde in the 1960s. Cutting through the Andean eastern margins, Belaunde envisioned this project to promote the geographic, politic, economic, and social integration of South America’s tropical territories, while establishing a continental-scale infrastructural connectivity network.

Though academic architectural studies about him mainly focus on his years as professor and designer, this research deals with the intersection between his modernist and nationalistic ideologies and his fascination with the Amazonia. By using the Marginal de la Selva as the core of analysis, the thesis suggests how infrastructure, development, nationalism, and governance became rooted in landscapes and bodies, consolidating new social and political subjectivities while producing extreme changes in the Amazon’s ecology.

A line in the Rainforest explores how Belaunde’s line drawn into Peru’s map became a symbol of his administration and ideological imperatives. Once it hit the Amazon, it accounts for how the line expands and contorts when challenged with the difficulties of imposing the very logic of development, making the Marginal a complex site of negotiation between different political, territorial, ecological, cultural, and social regimes.

This thesis draws inspiration from a woman walking over a concrete dome. Alia Farid’s work for the 32nd Sao Paulo Art Biennial was recorded on the Rashid Karami International Fairgrounds, in Tripoli. Those watching the video on the occasion of the Biennial have experienced the feeling of an estranged familiarity, for the dome in Tripoli is in direct tension with an important form of the Brazilian architecture imaginary—one that not by accident also appears instantiated right outside the same Biennial pavilion. Farid’s video explores the semiotic resonance of those two sites through close-ups and carefully positioned shots that make one question whether that scenery is familiar or not. The walking over the dome incites a familiarity to those who already know by heart the curvature of that architecture.

Farid’s video returns to Brazil a form that traveled to Lebanon in 1962 together with the architect Oscar Niemeyer. Between temples, museums, theaters, and political stages, the spaces created by these domes are endowed with an uncanniness from their form. These semiotic resonances establish a connection between them—a horizontal dialogue that arises from architecture and surpasses it. The dome’s travel, I want to argue, can be read as a symptomatic episode of the post-war developmentalist agenda in the Global South. Taking the Experimental Theater in Tripoli in conversation with the Palace of Expositions in Sao Paulo and the National Congress building in Brasília, this thesis understands travel as the repetition of a formal solution and its mediatic dissemination, which allowed this architecture to reach territories beyond its original locations.

Niemeyer’s Brazilian and Lebanese domes are, therefore, interconnected by ideas of progress, modernity, nation-building, and failure. While in Brazil, the fiction of democratic consolidation with the inauguration of Brasília in 1960 was postponed by the 1964 Military Coup, in Lebanon, the national sovereignty and cultural emancipation represented by the Fairgrounds was suspended by the Civil War in 1975. In the promise of infrastructure as a guarantor of development, architecture has been entrusted with a central function, closely tied to a powerful state constitution. States change faster than constructions, and the gap between the fluidity of ideologies and permanence of buildings allows that certain spaces produced through specific claims ended up being occupied with conflicting goals. 

An Accidental Archive catalogues material from Frank J. Thomas’ commercial career as an insurance photographer in Los Angeles from 1950-70. The publication makes meaning of the photographer’s archive, and considers what is at stake in the large collection of images of stairs, floors, ramps, and landings. These images— records of sites where accidents took place—anchor a broader inquiry into the spaces of slipping, tripping, and falling. In the catalogue and accompanying text, this thesis traces my experience of researching minor accidents and their mysterious absence from the American historical and cultural record. 

To make sense of the insurance images and the scant scholarship on minor accidents, I highlight fragmented moments of American national concern over domestic accidents and home hazards in the period from the 1910s to 1980. I examine the rise of cultural and government projects incorporating injury prevention into the canonical knowledge of the model American citizen, spouse, and worker. I argue that programs intended to tackle accidents from the National Bureau of Standards, the National Safety Council, and the American Museum of Safety ultimately fail to adequately address the everyday reality of minor accidents in the built environment. Instead, they leave behind a thick soup of anxiety around bodily accidents and personal safety. Conflicting ideas of culpability in slips, trips, and falls highlight the risks attached to being a modern and productive body, as well as the social instability contained within those risks. As a collection of material that hasn’t quite fit in elsewhere, this thesis makes room for accidents within the architectural imaginary, and invites you to fall in. 

In universities, natural history museums, and government departments across the world, xylaria occupy an unusual and often overlooked space where science, industry, and colonial legacies intersect in an archive. Derived from Greek — xylon for “wood” and Latin — arium for “separate place” — xylaria are collections of wood specimens cut from trees and shaped into blocks or sectioned for microscopic slides. They range in scale, design, and ambition, from the Baroque, book-like collections of Enlightened German foresters, to the utilitarian, climate-controlled storage rooms of London’s Kew Gardens, to the jungle-enclosed cabinets of Yangambi research station, an ex-Belgian agricultural outpost in the DR Congo.

Xylaria register a wealth of anatomical information about woody environments and are commonly used by archeologists, paleontologists, forensic scientists, forestry researchers, wood chemists, and lately, climatologists and geneticists. But they are also sites where the production of scientific knowledge has been, and continues to be, enlisted in service of governmental regimes. Conceived in eighteenth century Europe, when the systematic production of knowledge about the “natural” world helped empires expand–– enriching understandings of new subject landscapes––xylaria remain sites where research, tools and forestry products are leveraged to exert control over access to natural resources.

There is a paucity of critical literature on wood collections, even in the history of sciences, perhaps because their modern iterations appear so prosaic (so wooden). How might we appraise the work they do for different actors at different levels of government? This thesis zooms back and forth from the cellular to the macroeconomic. It will focus on three aspects of xylaria: archival practices, architecture (including landscape), and the operationalization of wood science. It will trace how wood collections and their attendant spaces have registered, or been mobilized in support of, imperial ambitions of European colonial powers, specifically the British and Belgian, focusing on The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, U.K., and the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium. The weaponization of wood in the USDA’s Forest Products Laboratory, Madison, Wisconsin, is the third case study.

The “event score” — a conceptual model of artistic practice developed by artist George Brecht (1926-2008) — was a linguistic proposition designed to mediate the relationship between subject and object through a simple white card and a few lines of text. By scripting certain actions in a guided but open-ended way (generally using familiar and readily-available objects), these event scores marked a new artistic practice that turned the attention to the details of everyday perceptual experience and opened a new field for curatorial practices. This new conceptual foundation was fast incorporated in the new art movement led by George Maciunas called Fluxus: a new form that rejected the conventional mediums of art and its distribution mechanism. In 1974, Maciunas helped a group of artists to buy the 537 Broadway Cast Iron Building through his Fluxhouse Cooperative project. Since then the 2nd floor loft at 537 Broadway was (and still is) the base for an artist’s community that working outside of the borders of the art system converged in a space, some kind of a Salon for the Fluxus diaspora, a place for experiments, where music, poetry, performance, and video could be seen and heard. This site and the events that took place in it form the archive that this thesis explored.

How might we capture the traces of the artistic experiences that took place within a space and preserve them through an architectural form? Can conceptual art models like the “event score” be repurposed as operational methods for tracing curatorial relationships between art pieces, everyday objects, ephemera, and space?

The blurred division between art and life, the impossible permanence of certain artistic works in designated physical spaces during the late 20th century avant-garde practices, and the early experimental composition and events were used as departure point to examine past and current artistic practices at the 537 Broadway loft.

Scoring objects focused on two parallel concepts: Score and Object. The tool of the score (a linguistic notation that inherently offers up multiple temporal continuums, interpretations, and outcomes) delimits a field for the investigation as well as a methodological tool for activating material objects and the performative quality of certain architectural spaces.

Overlooked America is a new series of books devoted to exploring little-known architectural projects throughout the United States. Formatted as guidebooks and written for readers of all backgrounds by similarly diverse authors, each of its volumes brings the history of a single, previously obscure project to light and life through compelling prose and visual materials. Covering a wide range of locations, dates, and project types, the series’ architectural subjects are united in their ability to reveal new information about the forces and actors who have constructed America as inhabited today. Read singly, the guides are absorbing worlds unto themselves. Read as a set, each of their histories becomes a key point tracing a larger topography: a human-made landscape in perpetual formation, in which architecture operates as sites of particularly perceptible activity and therefore of particular scholarly, poetic, and popular interest.

This understanding of America and its architecture is conceived in critical dialogue with that of the nation’s most famous guidebook publication project, the American Guide Series. Produced between 1935–1943 by the New Deal Federal Writers Project and comprising more than 90 volumes, the series’ mission was to create and circulate a definitive vision of a unified, culturally-mature U.S.—a mission its directors pursued using strict measures of editorial and administrative control.

Overlooked America sets out to share a very different vision than the Guide Series’. Rather than smoothing or suppressing difference, its books relate histories that highlight conflict and unevenness, their variety of authors seeking to challenge readers’ perceptions rather than control them. Ultimately, the series aims to demonstrate that America is open to reconstruction— physically and ideologicallly—and that architecture provides a vital way to speak of and to power.

The series’ first volume is the primary deliverable of this thesis. It will explore the Tower of History, a 21-story concrete observation tower and museum in Sault Ste Marie, Michigan, completed in 1969. Drawing on personal interviews and previously unstudied archival documents, the book will unpack the unexpected architectural lineage of the project as well as its relationship with deindustrialization, the Second Vatican Council, and the Cold War.

Software as we know it today most often has its origins in analogue technique that has been transformed, expanded and supercharged through code, before becoming an everyday design tool. The proliferation of digital drawing tools has produced a number of challenges for both practitioners and critics: a knowledge gap has formed where analogue know-how is lost while digital technique is not just widely used, but taken for granted. While many younger architects have never seen a darkroom, they certainly have used Photoshop to manipulate images. Similarly, without ever learning the basics of projective geometry, designers are able to operate with complex forms they would not be able to draw on paper. Designers are accepting the biases and limitations of software, while critics are lacking conceptual knowledge to assess computational design.

The focus of this thesis was software originally developed outside the discipline of architecture, with examples ranging from Rhino, Photoshop, Processing to Maya. The development and links between the analogue and the digital of each program are traced, ranging from the late 1980s to today. The second aim of this thesis was in identifying and describing the layers of mediation and translation occurring when using a particular software. A number of representative buildings, carrying traces of their digital forming through software were included to illustrate the relationship of these techniques to the built environment. The understanding of the heritage and interface of software becomes an analytical tool for both designers and critics.

Crow’s Eye View: The Korean Peninsula—an exhibition of Korean Pavilion during the 14th International Architecture Exhibition–la Biennale di Venezia in 2014—travels different cities upon its closing in Venice, Italy.

Crow’s Eye View: The Korean Peninsula introduced the architecture in Korean territory–including the Republic of Korea (South) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North)– as both agent and symptom of the modernization in each state. The exhibition emblematically borrowed its term from a Dada-influenced poem Crow’s Eye View written by a poet with his unfulfilled aspiration for becoming an architect during the Japanese colonial rule. In contrast to a universalizing bird’s eye view, the exhibition chose to create a particular and cacophonous view to destabilize the clichés and prejudices that obscure the complexity and possibilities that lie in the divided Korea.

In the light of the exhibition’s transformative opportunities, the thesis aimed to speculate on how the projective attribute of the exhibition–initiating the architectural dialogue between the North and South Korea–can evolve when encountering different audiences in new locations and institutional contexts, and as such to inquire how an architecture exhibition becomes a bearer of political activation. The author being the Deputy Curator of this travelling exhibition, the thesis sought to reanimate some of the diplomatic endeavors conducted during the inception of the curatorial process, examining how the failed scenarios of joint exhibition between the two states had affected the de facto Plan B exhibition Crow’s Eye View: The Korean Peninsula, and further can contribute to its development in the future. Dissecting various curatorial processes of the exhibition into pieces, detailed decision-makings were put into inspection, to analyze and deconstruct, thus to curatorially reconstruct the Crow’s Eye View.

There are at least eight public universities in Malaysia offering architectural programs. Each school distinguishes themselves through different approaches, giving options to prospective students. Yet, the objective of these schools is the same, in which the institution becomes a preparatory site for would-be architects. To further this practice, the architectural schools undergo a period of self-criticism and creative renewal every five years, to which purpose is mainly to attain or maintain accreditation from various statutory bodies. This leads to a curriculum leaning towards the profession as an architect.

The University of Islamic Science (Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia, USIM), a public university, recently established their architectural program in 2012. For a new institution, the borrowing of both faculty members and syllabi from other institution is inevitable, but may lead to problems of piece-meal of a program and vague course objectives. One way to counter this problem is for the school to have a strong direction or a “school of thought.” Because institutional identity is partly done through the curriculum and syllabus, the design of effective syllabi is important in creating an ideal “school of thought,” that reflects both departmental aims and visions of the university. To begin, it is imperative to critically examine the current courses available and understand the gaps present in the curriculum. Being a fully funded government institution, there is a possibility for an authoritative form of knowledge or history that could prevail as dominant forms of learning and analysis. An encompassing syllabi can break up this dominant systems of knowledge and avoid falling into a one sided narratives of fixity. The ambition of the project was to design hypothetical syllabi that could open up the scope of the discipline as well as illuminate the direction of the new architecture school. The project focused on the history theory courses, to critically look at the existing framework of Islamic Architecture, Malaysian cultural and national identity, tropical architecture as well as the current pedagogical methods of institutions in Malaysia.

Club Mediterranean developed over the early 1950s a model of rudimentary communal vacationing accessible to the middle class. The company that would later become a paradigm in French consumer culture had been constituted as a non-profit organization. The Club rapidly spread out through a series of villages in countries like Greece, Spain, and Italy. The villages were conformed by a group of canvas tents around a communal space with a restaurant and communal amenities. Although the social aspirations of the Club failed, and the company had to be restructured in 1957 we can still consider it a crucial moment in the history of holidaying.

Using Club Med as a case study, this research is intended to understand the relation between holidays and the way in which we live the rest of the year. We propose that holidays are in fact the test ground for experimentation and transformation of the domestic realm.

The research took the form of a written essay organized in three parts. The first part describes the myth of Tahiti, a common place in French culture that also shapes the imaginary of the early villages of Club Med. The second part describes the singular social and architectural features of Club Med. The last part traces the influence of the Club in the work of 1960s French theorists that establish a clear relation between holidays and domestic life.

Biosphere 2 (1987, completed in 1991) in Oracle, Arizona was a “materially-closed, energetically-and-informationally- open” research facility. This experimental, atmospherically-sealed greenhouse contained mini-biomes: desert, ocean, rainforest, savannah, marshlands, plus a “human habitat” and 2,500 square meter farm. It was first managed by an eight person crew who lived sealed inside for two years to test the viability of this model space colony. Its operators situated it as a closed-system research facility, operating in parallel to NASA. However, the project’s aspirations were far greater—to construct a working model of the planet, a metabolic system of human, animal, plant, machine and building into an integrated whole. It was not just a “machine-for-living-in,” but a “living machine.” Biosphere 2 carried with it many (sometimes contradictory) ideas and inspirations, arriving as a very late entry in the architectural synthesis between cybernetic-ecological systems theory, and the counter-cultural interpretations of Cold War technological imaginaries. Its “patron saints” range from figures like R. Buckminster Fuller, Norbert Weiner, and Stewart Brand to Vladimir Vernadsky and G.I. Gurdjieff.

Biosphere 2 brought together permaculture activists, cybernetic acolytes, ecologists, climate scientists, and free-wheeling fellow travelers and in its short life captured the imagination of the general public. It quickly became seen as a failure for both social and technical reasons and this stigma continued to haunt its legacy. This research focused on the history of this facility under each of its three management regimes: the Institute for Ecotechnics (1983-1994), Columbia University (1995-2003), and University of Arizona (2007-Present), and constructed a genealogy of the project’s singular nexus of space colonization, ecological consciousness, American counter-culture, cybernetic and technological innovation. The building becomes both a conceptual filter and symbolic monument for these frameworks.

On April 17th, 1975, after weeks of artillery shelling and mortar bombardment of its capital city Phnom Penh, Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge, a military insurgency that had gained support more through the popularity of its ranking members than through the self-sufficient, agro-utopian vision those ranking members would later impose on the country. Almost immediately, individuals considered modern–teachers, doctors, lawyers, etc.–were stripped of political rights and executed, while countless others added to a growing diaspora of displaced urban Khmer laborers in the countryside.

Left behind were ghost cities and architectural shells that would become the repurposed sites of oppression and torture. Embarking on a campaign to rid Cambodia of its former histories, the Khmer Rouge destroyed archives, libraries, select relics of the past, and declared a year ‘zero.’ Taking the place of those destroyed documents were a set of replacements archiving crimes against humanity: dossiers of detailed bibliographies, portraits and confessions that the regime used to legitimize the entries filling its execution logs.

In the absence of a people, the radical politicization of these reprogrammed buildings and the city would begin to dismantle early 20th-century architectural ideals of social progress imported in the 1950s from native Cambodians studying architecture in Europe. Years of military miscalculation and the proxy war in neighboring Vietnam had brought to power an ideology that would later lead to the deaths of 1.7 million Cambodians by way of disease, famine, and genocide.

“Paradise on earth”, “Buy a flat-get a city free”, “Live a luxurious life”- scream the billboards advertising for the townships and gated enclaves that proliferate along the highways across cities in India. They promise a new and improved lifestyle that is defined by luxury and convenience targeting specifically the new consumers of these spaces-The Indian Middle class. The paradox of the dense urbanity of the traditional Indian city against the backdrop of the utopian landscape of these private enclaves alludes to a change in the perceptions of this community and their aspirations.

The architecture, however, of these spaces is unique, and in many ways it connects to global trends of gated communities as well as India’s own historical lineage of gated-ness and exclusion in cities. The peculiarities of these enclaves are revealed through the built architecture- the high rise vertical model, large suburban utopias, the gated-ness and its celebration, the enforcement of the gates , the urbanized landscapes, construction of nature, swimming pools, gyms and manicured lawns, organized labor, the relationship to the informal and the exceptions and inequalities in land laws and zoning regulations.

I examine these objects through advertisements, news items, interviews, images, letters, maps, legal documents and the histories of land laws and housing policies to seek intertwining narratives of infrastructures, imaginaries and spatial politics that give shape to this development.

The ambition of the thesis is to put together a montage of realities and experiences in these urban spaces that are read in conjunction with the top down infrastructural policies to reveal a larger story of social exclusion and urban asymmetry. The focus is mainly on Integrated Townships in the periphery of Pune. The project will be a graphical journey through these narratives as a document with a collection of the images, advertisements, the lived experiences and my own critique.

I heard the rhythm. As I navigated through hundreds of people rushing between the trading stalls and the spazza shops on the narrow streets of Johannesburg’s Central Business District (CBD) only one sound rose above the hum of the traffic and the street traders. “Ayah ayah.” Three women dancing and singing at the busiest intersection on Bree Street. They seemed to stop people for a moment, captivating passerby’s with their energy and spirit. I stood and watched the entire performance not able to move as their music filled the surrounding blocks and their song and dance had their own sense of power over the space that they occupied. These women were artists, seasoned performers, full of passion for their craft. As everyone dispersed, I asked a man what the foreign lyrics meant. He paused and replied, “they are singing about laundry detergent.”

While millions of rand a year is channeled into capital art projects with the aim of transforming Johannesburg’s highly contested inner-city, the artists and agencies falter in their objective by not weaving their projects into the existing communities and vibrant beat of street in the CBD. While large squares and parks remain vacant, the street maintains a vibrancy and energy that pulsates throughout the day reinforcing the sidewalks and street corners as the real public space in a city wrought with a tumultuous history of spatial politics. How can we harness the talents of street performers to create community in areas that they already reside? How can we use their knowledge of the city to create more meaningful site specific interventions rather than perpetuate fragmented “public” infrastructure? What platforms can we use to highlight the vibrancy of public performing art that can instigate change in the long-standing perceptions of the CBD to native Johannesburgers and the international community?

This thesis uses the notion of human to explore and elucidate the underlying infrastructural condition of the presumably impending global state— surveillance and dataveillance—and observes this condition as a spatial context in which to understand the status of the human.

Thesis defines the accumulative ubiquity of surveilable mediums and their interconnected agglomeration, as the infrastructural condition of surveillance and dataveillance. It views this condition as a continuous context surrounding humans, which encloses and mediates all spatial relations between humans. Using concepts of medium, observation, interface, control and convergence, it elucidates on synergic spaces fusing humans and the surveillance infrastructure, as well as the interdependent progression of humans and the infrastructural condition of surveillance and dataveillance. This reading externalizes a hierarchical order of the created context in which the disposition, reconfiguration and segregation of humans takes place.

The evolution of governmental and corporate surveillance and dataveillance as regards the U.S., will be used as a case study.

Auralization connotes the imagining of an aural event, distinct from sonification as a process of mapping datum to audible signifiers, or the modulation of sound on a multidimensional axis of compositional techniques for representation. As a set of practical and conceptual tools, these systems are built upon advancements in psychoacoustics and our sonic imaginary evolves with these applications. The integration of artistic processes in computer music and data visualization offer specific communicative capacities, and their intersection implicates new notions of transmission, translation, and fidelity. Operating on the thresholds of perception and calculation, the efficacy of these strategies are tested within various spatial design practices, and are augmented by artistic practices contextualized within a discourse of ‘glitch’ aesthetic and methodology. Glitch refers to an unpredictable error, but it has become increasingly unclear if that error resides externally or occurs internally. A perceptual hiccup that occurs due to methods of compression could as easily be a computer error as a demarcation of our individual threshold for measuring difference. White noise is seemingly the most unique sound in its complete variety, but to our ears its nuance is imperceivable. A critical narrative aims to make noise legible and productive in new ways, expanding aesthetic discourse within sonification to inform both design and curatorial practice.

Hyper-minimalist work by composer Ryoji Ikeda is taken as a case study of techniques that push popular notions of glitch and information aesthetics to their perceptual extremes within a trajectory of noise and data-based practices. Noise here is the malleable material of theories of information and performative art practices, as an indicator not simply of entropy but of embedded, masked meaning. This project cultivates a critical language and taxonomy for expanding notions of auditory display to examine the productivity of these noise-based methodologies—glitch being the referent and object for the perception of difference. How are we to understand the cross-disciplinary influence of auralization on the social aspects of perceptual capital and cultural capital? What are the functional implications of an immersive aural architecture embedded and encoded within the institutionalized museum and the urban stage of the city? on representation and interactive design? Striving for a lossless society is impossible due to an architecture modulated ontologically by filtering and error. As both steganographic and unintended interferences are unavoidable characteristics of globalized information flow, cultural politics, and spatial perception, the lossiness has become a source of production. Application of these notions to scientific and artistic practice is paramount if we are to decode the future city.

Shahid: Could you point out on this map where Taksim is Tafokoon: Right about here (point to a spot on the map) Shahid: Oh, I missed it. Wait, it says something else, in Arabic. It does not say Taksim on the map. Tafokoon: Yeah, it does not. Shahid: Where is this map of Istanbul from? Tafokoon: I found it in a book, a collection of maps of Istanbul at the University of Virginia. Shahid: Do you know how old the map is? Tafokoon: I do not remember exactly, but 1907 I think Shahid: That’s decades before the Gezi uprising Tafokoon: Yes

Every time we refer to the Occupy Gezi Movement in Istanbul, it seems some discursive precautions need to be taken, due to the sensitivity of the topic. The project aims to elucidate the side of the city produced through Occupy Gezi by positioning the politics of memory, history and urban imaginaries of Istanbul in its globalizing context and the global rise of the memorialization industry. Within this context, the project traces the conception of the ‘other’ neo-‘Orientalist’ framing of the subject and its ‘representation’, and presents a counter-method of history practices.

“Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014” is the theme that Rem Koolhaas has proposed for the national pavilions participating in the upcoming 2014 Venice biennale. This biennale advances the provocation that under globalization national characteristics are being eroded in favor of the almost universal adoption of a single modern language in a single repertoire of typologies. Taking their own national perspective, each pavilion must contribute to the creation of a global overview of architecture’s evolution over the course of a century into a single, modern aesthetic, while uncovering unique national features and mentalities that continue to exist. In words of Rem Koolhaas:

In 1914, it made sense to talk about a “Chinese” architecture, a “Swiss” architecture, an “Indian” architecture… One hundred years later, under the influence of wars, diverse political regimes, different states of development, national and international architectural movements, individual talents, friendships, random personal trajectories, and technological developments, architectures that were once specific and local have become seemingly interchangeable and global. Has national identity been sacrificed to modernity?

This exhibition deals with the absorption of modernity in Spain. Contextualizing the historical, social, political and economical situation of the country, it makes use of the film technique as a tool to display how that absorption has been blended with remains of national identities through a particular case study: the twin houses that Javier Carvajal built in Somosaguas in 1967. As Koolhaas recognizes, the transition to what seems like a universal architectural language is a more complex process than we typically acknowledge, involving significant encounters between cultures, technical inventions and ways of remaining “national”.

Contemporary architectural projects are almost entirely conceived in the virtual realm of 3d modeling. Long the standard medium, it facilitates the implementation by offices of digital renderings—the animated variety of which allows for the building to be not only understood, but also experienced by an audience untrained in reading traditional architectural documentation. With current technologies, an entire environment can now be imagined, realized, and recorded by virtual means with increasing ease and expertise. This, along with growing expectations by both clients and the public, has resulted in a rising amount of animated visualizations executed by both designers and developers throughout the building practice.

This thesis aims to dissect both the strategy of documenting projects through digitally constructed narratives and the space of production surrounding it through an online, interactive platform. By establishing a lexicon of both visual and descriptive terms through an intimate examination of their construction, this thesis will create an alternative index to both read and analyze this growing form of representation and its impact on the architectural practice. Through a rigorous exercise in cataloguing, the goal is to unveil the peculiarities and complexities behind this growing medium as well as chronicle the media in which it is both disseminated and preserved.

The Cultural Park for Children in Cairo, a project sponsored by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture and designed by Egyptian architect Abdelhalim I. Abdelhalim, won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1992. Located in the historic district of Sayyida Zaynab, a “poor and underdeveloped” area in Cairo, the park was hailed by the jury as a “three-dimensional history lesson,” and the architect was praised for his innovative approach to community development. Subsequently, the project became a showpiece for “modern Islamic” architecture and “community-based” design processes for many Egyptian and international architects and critics.

The history of the park, from its inception, has been written in the struggle between the local community and the state. Abdelhalim intended for the cultural park to be a catalyst for urban transformation and social change within the “underdeveloped” and “alienated” surrounding community. Against forces of exclusion by the authoritarian and bureaucratic state, seen as an accomplice to western modernization and global forces, Abdelhalim aimed to include and empower the local community by connecting them to their “Islamic” past, built environment, and park. By evoking “Islamic” imageries from the surrounding historical sources, and activating local participation through community rituals and festivals, the architecture of the park produced forms, which stood for distinct cultural identity, and visual patterns, which guided the organization of the park. The ensuing failure of the project’s intentions has been attributed to the power of the centralized state at preventing the community from engaging with the cultural park, both in its production and appropriation.

I argue that Abdelhalim’s attempts to engage the local community did not pose a challenge to the state, but were part of the changing nature of the state itself. Experimenting with issues of decentralization, which sanctioned the state’s withdrawal from its hitherto role in providing social services and downward wealth redistribution, the state considered delegating control to local communities. Empowering communities was part of the emerging logic of the neoliberal state. In addition, the claim for community’s inclusion, inadvertently, legitimized the exploitiv e dynamic of the state’s system of control and capital accumulation, by attributing the “underdeveloped” status to being excluded from such system.

Architecturally, Abdelhalim’s attempts hinged on a dialectic of Naturalization and Denaturalization that led concurrently to the commodification and dematerialization of the local residents’ conditions. The Naturalization of the community as a coherent living organism, connected to the past and capable of emitting historical meaning upon activation in rituals and festivals, is simultaneously Denaturalized through extracting abstract and dematerialized visual patterns. Devoid of antagonistic social relations, and deprived of its material conditions, the community in Abdelhalim’s approach became susceptible to capital accumulation and the state’s expansive control. In the park’s architecture, the dialectic of images, standing for distinct and local cultural identity, and patterns, standing for abstract universal order, worked to screen the advancement of capital dynamics and state’s hegemony within the community. As such, Abdelhalim’s assertion for the community’s rootedness in its local and “Islamic” past did not impede such state’s hegemony, but enabled it. The state’s domination over the community was sustained by the appeal to the phantasmagoric architecture of distinct cultural identity — which acted as a dream world of a collective, classless, and lost past, that in turn worked to obscure the violence dynamic of the emerging neoliberal state. Furthermore, through community participation, the architecture of Abdelhalim worked in tandem with the state, and its Ministry of Culture, to incorporate the “minds” and “souls” of the community into the state’s domain of influence. Through both its forms and organizational capacities, the architecture of Abdelhalim at the Cultural Park for Children did, indeed, act as a catalyst for social change. But, it was a change aligned with the logic of the neoliberal state, and not against it.

In 2006, only eleven days after taking office, Mexican president Felipe Calderon announced the Operación Conjunta Michoacán, a strategy that would derive in the so-called “War on Drugs”, transforming the cities and towns along the north of Mexico into perpetually contested places.

It is the argument of this work that the evident failure of the war on drugs has provoked a change in strategy; from a battle against drug trafficking to a battle for the way this moment is going to be portrayed and understood in the future independently of its outcome. It is an ongoing war for territory, not just in its physical form but also in the media, the society, the academic world, the international community, and the future. All the actors in this transformed war are displaying actions that involve more pressing matters than just the commercialization or distribution of illegal drugs.

The territory, the images, and the bodies, are symbols that narrate a complex structure of violence. The “war against the Narco” has become the “war against violence,” though it is not clear who is the perpetrator, who are the responsible parties, and who are the victims.

The aim of this thesis is to uncover and question the changes in the discourse and portrayal of this conflict. In order to accomplish this task I will analyze the effectiveness of a number of “actions” common to this war through what I have identified as the representative “sites of violence” knitting in this way a complex spatial matrix over the Mexican territory.

Architecture can cast predictable characters. Territory can be a familiar stage. Narrative can fall into line. The border between the United States and Mexico is a space whose script is as entrenched as the walls that limn it, the tunnels that circumvent it, and the codes that interdict or enable passage across it. So, what can a space that doesn’t fit this bill tell us about the nature of borders and their relevance today? How does the making of a transbounded territory reinforce, circumvent, and throw into relief politics of space and nation-state, ideologies of land management, and the scales—from supranational to local—at which territory is produced? What spatial possibilities are opened up if we recast the protagonists and antagonists of conflict and contestation?

Transbounding territory and history, this thesis will destablize notions of borders, access and transnationality through a close-grained examination of three contiguous national parks: Big Bend National Park in Texas, Cañón Santa Elena in Chihuahua and Maderas del Carmen in Coahuila. By assembling a constellation of historical moments (1935-1945, 1971-1981, 1992-2002) archival documents, and contemporary voices the thesis will trace the emergence and implementation of a scientific method in the management land, from the nation-building projects of post-progressive pre-war years, to NAFTA-underwritten research ventures. Resource extraction, infrastructure development, and population distribution on national and supranational levels are written into the landscape here, and always subject to the micro-movements of local communities—from coveys of yellow-billed cuckoos to trespass cattle, from fluoride miners to geology students.

This is a history of shared economies and created capital, revealed in frontier myths or rhetorics of environmental sovereignty. It is a counter-narrative that draws the border not as a static line of collision, but rather an active force with physical properties mobilized or dispensed with to construct national identities, logics of conservation, and capital extraction. With agendas at times congruent and at times conflicting, presidents and park planners, UNESCO policy makers and research scientists, park rangers and local residents, experimented on the land, testing territory-making according to a narrative of scientific inquiry.

As architects, we are moved by a genealogical inertia that drives us towards doing. Our tools –the few that we may share as a discipline– are thought to be the means to build-up, to design, to construct, to draw, in the end, to do. We are taught to conceive something where there is none, to give it form, to materialize it, to fill the white and empty paper, this is, to make. One might say, following the principle of doing, that we build our disciplinary knowledge in the process while we “do”.

The Latin dō, serves as the root to a series of words that are related to the notion of accumulating and accumulated knowledge, but also to docilis, our docile. With this, my interest is to challenge the notion in which the built and accumulated disciplinary-knowledge (not just knowledge) of our discipline –the doing– is also the basis to produce docility, this is, a state in which we diminish our political self in favor of the discipline.

Gordon Matta-Clark, the artist of the well known piece Splitting (1974), was taught as architect in Cornell University prior to jumping over his career as artist. Matta-Clark, essentially, kept working with the tools learned in the school of architecture, but instead of doing, most of his work is dedicated to undo, to un-build. For him, the architecture tools were instruments to undo, contrary to the basic principle of, to do. By this, he aimed, among others things, to expose and make visible what can be called as the entrails of the architectural accumulated knowledge-in the form of building.

This thesis, considers the making-process of the work of Gordon Matta-Clark as a tool for interrogating the formative moment and the processes of learning architecture. With this, I intend to show, first, the conflictive triptych of docility-discipline-knowledge and second, to develop conceptual tools to un-dō by carefully reading Matta-Clark’s projects, as evidence of building up knowledge by un-dō-ing. The result of this thesis aims to explore the possibilities of non-disciplinary knowledge, and thus, suggesting a path for the re-launching of the political self.

The architectural profession in Iceland represents an extremely rich and diverse, yet small community that derives its’ character from a dispersed presence in the larger global sphere. A post-national architectural identity results from the education of an architect, which has only occurred internal to Iceland in the last decade. Students are still required to obtain professional degrees outside of Iceland, a requirement that implicitly promotes a global understanding of the architectural field.

This unique condition of dispersal provides for an interesting problematic, one that impacts the greater Icelandic public in a particular way, namely that, given the young presence of architecture within Icelandic academia, there are no research funds available to scholars or practitioners. The impact of this lack of research funds extends beyond the domain of strictly scholarly pursuits, for, as this thesis hopes to demonstrate and in turn address, it creates a void in discursive dialogue within the architectural community.

In response, this project proposes establishing a program to foster the scholarly and intellectual development of young architects with terminal degrees, to promote research at a local and global scale, and to simultaneously establish networks between existing practitioners in the Reykjavik context and students in the global context. In doing so, it will further provide access and insight into the architectural community of Iceland, acting as a bridge between the education and practice of architects.

In a career marked my many feats of great verbal acrobatics, it was on February 12, 2002 that marked what could easily be called Donald Rumsfeld’s magnum opus. At a Department of Defense press conference answering questions pertaining to the buildup of the war with Iraq, and the then possible existence of weapons of mass destruction, Rumsfeld uttered his now famous maxim: “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

It is within the territory of the known unknown that this project sets out to explore. The focuses of inquiry are “black sites,” an international, and highly classified, prison network established by the U.S. government shortly after the September 11th attacks. Even the name suggests the known unknown. The means of investigation depends on interrogating redacted documents, newspaper clippings, NGO reports, public satellite imagery, court documents—all incomplete in and of themselves, yet when pieced together allow for the black sites network to emerge. This emergence cannot just be located within the context of the so-called “war on terror” for it relies on a much more sophisticated reasoning and nuanced linguistic reading of national and international laws involving the conduct of war and international relations.

At the center of this discussion is the sovereign, and how the manifestation and implementation of sovereignty has evolved from its earliest conceptions at the beginning of the modern nation state to something that has morphed into an assemblage of complex relationships, the least of which are the traditional notions of power and territory. These relationships are interrogated and examined through various media. Key to this investigation is a methodical unpacking of the various spatialities the war inhabits. Spaces of politics, economics and nation-state interrelations mix with spaces of confinement, interrogation and the intimate space of the body.

What is known about the black sites is scattered across the internet and published in books and reports by enterprising reporters and human rights organizations. This project attempts to deploy the method of critique as a process for organizing this vast quantity of information. The assemblage operates as both the critical action and its organizational representation, disassembling government documents to understand how these new forms of power operate, and then reassembling the evidence of what this power has wrought.

This thesis is developed under the assumption that the institutional working models of architectural education do not reflect the social demands of our time. It presupposes that due to their institutional condition, complex sociopolitical events that shape our contemporary global context are seldom taken into account. This thesis contests the stringent infrastructures of learning institutions and attempts to present an alternative and responsive working model where contextual issues are addressed and introduced into the larger discourse network of practice through the development of a flexible operating framework.

For a grounded perspective, this thesis will be developed in the Mexico City, a place with an active community of professionals but with a limited access to platforms that foment alternative practices. Through a two-stage process, this thesis will first survey and analyze a selection of present-day learning institutions as well other non-institutional networks and organizations in Mexico and abroad, to consequentially draft an informed proposal for an alternative working model for architectural education, titled: Central de Arquitectura de la Ciudad de México.

Central de Arquitectura’s ambition is to operate as an intra-institutional center for architectural activities—a bridge linking the insular nature of institutional work by offering a dynamic and flexible program. Moreover, it attempts to put forward a possible new format of architectural education that aims to diversify the practice of architecture.

Interpretations and Interventions: Tulshibaug Temple and Market Complex, Pune aims to make a physical and operational assessment of the architecture and historical urban fabric of the Tulshibaug temple and market complex in the city of Pune, India, in order to develop a critical discourse that in turn directs new development in these areas. The research looks at the site as an example of an “indigenous modernity”, and interpreting the local opinions and issues, aims to propose a format for physical and cybernetic interventions by the continuous collaboration of local students of architecture colleges and the user group.

The research acknowledges the possibility of new development co-existing and integrating within existing traditional urban fabric, and shall make critical recommendations as to the future of architectural development in the core of these cities. This research will investigate the contention that “glocal” urban intervention, coupled with transportation infrastructure, is the future of development of architecture in the core areas of Indian cities.

The 1977 opening of Leo Castelli’s group exhibition Architecture I marked the moment at which a New York private art gallery presented works of architecture as art pieces for the first time. The next year, close to Leo Castelli’s gallery, Bernard Tschumi opened in a non-profit organization gallery called Artists Space an exhibition titled Architectural Manifestoes. Those two exhibitions show the genesis of a polarized production of architectural exhibitions in its multiple versions and formats during the late seventies and early eighties.

The final form anticipated for the research is an atlas of the exhibitions of architecture opened in New York from 1977 to 1987. The project has the aspiration of unveiling the crucial importance of the exhibition practice for the theory and the production of architecture during the last 25 years. Specifically the study will be focused on the controversy established in the inception of the discussion: on the one hand the understanding of the documents of architecture as an artistic matter from the art world and art market and on the other hand the architectural field absorbing art languages, formats and platforms as part of the discipline.

The result will be a print-based material research in which three principal issues will be addressed: the importance of the institutional role in the controversy; transdisciplinarity versus autonomy in the exhibition realm; and the physical and theoretical space of the gallery as architectural battlefield.

The research is an attempt at understanding the complex and multifaceted relationship between art and architecture and how this connection had a significant turning point in the 1980s in New York City.

Other Architectures will research and analyze the mechanisms of translation within the architectural discourse. Based on those findings it will propose an apparatus to facilitate improved translation at multiple discursive scales. Beginning with an ethos of texts as always incomplete, the project asks how translation, as a productive reopening of information to shifting geopolitical, multicultural, and socioeconomic terrains, may contribute to a reinvigorated and multifarious exchange in architecture by sparking dialogue around specific, novel, and hitherto unknown contexts that are nevertheless worthy of discussion.

The process will include research of seminal translations within the discipline as well as investigations of more contemporary cases in order to locate problematic junctures that will themselves be relayed into the theoretical and programmatic underpinning for the final format: a peer-driven website which will be forever-in-flux and provide resources for architectural practitioners and theorists of all types – whether they be sourcing or offering translation services, suggesting texts worthy of translation, or discussing translations in progress. Of primary importance is the establishment of a sustainable base from which Other Architectures may continue to operate long after the thesis has ‘come to an end.’

J.L. Austin first used the term ‘performative’ in the mid-1950s as a component of his speech act theory. Since then, the term has mutated at a rapidly increasing speed, especially throughout the 1990s. This has caused scholars such as Erika Fischer-Lichte to expanded on the idea of a ‘performative turn’ in society as a whole, understanding the terms ‘performative’ and ‘performance’ as neither exclusive to language studies nor performance art, but as a new interdisciplinary and societal paradigm.

Various fields and actors have picked up the notion of ‘performativity’ as a subject for attempted deciphering, including architecture. The reiterations of the term in relation to architecture have, however, usually been complicit in reducing performativity to a phenomenological ‘effect’ on the subject/user. This is an approach that re-actualizes the status of the subject in relation to architecture, but that in insisting on a trans-historical relationship between the two falls short of any critical investigation of the processes that shape this very subjectivity (and its relationship to architecture) in the first place. A critical response to how performativity translates to architecture is thus still called for.

One of the ambitions of this thesis is thus to identify the various specters of performativity, and how these can be understood in relation to the production and reception of architecture. Trying to rephrase the discourse on ‘performative architecture’ from an insular relation between architecture and user, I will attempt to formulate the parameters through which performativity can be applied as a productive terminology and apparatus for interpretation and analysis in relation to the field of architecture and architectural discourse.

“We should have to study not only the history of space, but also the history of representations, along with that of their relationships—with each other, with practice, and with ideology” argued Henri Lefebvre in his seminal book The Production of Space, and it is under such premise, that this investigation takes its foundational stance. In a contemporary society in which we are bombarded with information and visual representations of events such as the war on terror, natural disasters, new state formations, and other such events, the architect has been called upon to be an active participant in the social and political reinvention and “projection” of the world; but how are such “projections” and more often representations, responding to the immediacies of everyday life and represented/re-presented to a public? .The thesis will use as a resource, the four institutions listed below and the mentioned competition/exhibitions/archive and the works that were associated with such, to investigate above mentioned idea of representation in contrast and in conjunction to its re-presentation.

-MOMA: Small Scale Big Change - CCA: ACTION competition and exhibition -Storefront for Art and Architecture: Call for entry- Strategies for Public Occupation -Creative Time-Living as Form: Archive for Socially Engaged Practices

The investigation will culminate in the production of an “exhibition”; one that as Robin Evans argues, will aspire to not simply present an expose of the findings of an investigation in the form of “image”, but rather utilize them explore the re-presentational act of the exhibition within the architectural/public/ social space it would appropriate

The research comprises a historic study on the conformation of public support structures for design disciplines in the US.

It focuses on the processes of formation, development and dismantling of the National Endowment for the Arts, over its 45 years of existence, through the analysis of a series of institutions, programs, organizations and projects related to its different developmental stages and politic administrations.

As conceptual practices of design disciplines inhabit an institutional framework strongly defined by cultural and economic policies, the thesis states that through the historic analysis of support structures for design and architecture, is possible to recognize and characterize different modes in which design and architecture relates with policies and politics.

Furthermore, since the processes of formation, consolidation and dismantling of the NEA design programs express the history of how a Neoliberal State defines and uses policies to support design projects as cultural industries, the research hypothesis states that the study of the American experience on the definition and development of public policies for design is a keystone for the enunciation and implementation of public policies for design in developing countries based on a Neoliberal State.

In order to explore this hypothesis, an historical approach is build towards the development of design programs developed by the public sector in conjunction with private and third sector agents in the US. After its analysis through a series of case studies, the research aims to enunciate a set of models for institutional development. Models intended to be considered in further developments of institutional frameworks, institutions, organizations and programs devoted to the support of design disciplines in Neoliberal States of developing countries.

An online magazine of Art, Architecture, Media, Culture, Sounds, Territories, Technology)

The Lenin Institute for Librarianship by Ivan Leonidov (1927)

October 30, 2018 by Fosco Lucarelli 1 Comment

Ivan Illich Leonidov (1902-1957) designed the Lenin Institute for Librarianship (the collective scientific and cultural center of the USSR) in 1927 as his thesis project at the VKhUTEMAS, the art and technical School of Moscow, with Alexander Vesnin as his tutor.

The Institute is made of a series of individualized shapes embodied by clear geometrical forms – mostly rectangular boxes and a sphere – which are boldly composed together. The three main buildings of the institute are a massive library with five million books joined by the Institute of librarianship, both contained in a high-rise building; the auditorium which also functions as a planetarium and as a speaking platform for mass demonstrations, located in a huge glass sphere elevated from the floor through a metallic structure; and the actual research institute hosting the research labs, a horizontal slab, suspended, which also connects the two other buildings. The single volumes are related through the composition of two asymmetrical axes on a decentralized circular platform where both the auditorium and the library are located. The library axis is also prolonged by a straight suspended roadway leading to the city center.

An important feature of the overall design is the presence of steel cables with the double role of guy-wires in tension and radio communication antennae. The cables counterbalance the anti-gravitational effect of the highest buildings and especially that of the auditorium which appears as a hot-air balloon ready to take a flight. They also underline the idea of communication among the people working together in the institute and in the whole country.

The center was supposed to be located in Moscow, on the Lenin Hills, the highest spot in the city, just a few kilometers southwest of the Red Square. An aerial tramway with a central aerodrome and suspended roadway would have connected the institute with the center of the city while the radio station would have put it in communication with the whole country.

As to underline an era of unlimited faith in an upcoming technological world, the role of technology is formally and functionally expressed throughout the whole project, especially in the library where an automated book-delivery system with a vertical and horizontal conveyor system delivers the books directly from the stacks to the reading rooms.

The sphere is the most evolutive area: as an auditorium, it can host up to 4000 people, but it can be repartitioned through mobile suspended walls in order to contain smaller audiences. When half of the sphere is opened, and all the seats are withdrawn into the remaining half, it can also be used as a speaking platform for mass gatherings. The sphere of the Planetarium can turn into a science theater after projection screens are installed along the inside skin. A system of elevators provides access to the auditorium.

The whole institute is equipped with communication technology like telephones, radios, and remote televisual pieces of equipment so that the whole staff can work together at the same time.

Further reading : https://thecharnelhouse.org/2014/03/21/ivan-leonidovs-proposal-for-the-lenin-institute-in-moscow-1927/

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June 29, 2020 at 6:27 pm

Hi there! Great essay and fantastic illustrations. I’d be keen to re-use some of the Leonidov ‘Lenin Institute’ images in academic publications. Would you be able to let me know where you sourced them from? I want to confirm that they are indeed free of copyright (or to find out who holds the copyright, so I can apply for permission/license to reproduce). Many thanks!

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