In conjunction with the exhibition A World of Many Worlds, and in keeping with annual tradition, the outgoing Master of Architecture II students in The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture will present their thesis projects to the incoming graduate class. The presentations will be followed by a conversation among Cooper Union students, faculty, alumni, and invited guests.
Though it marks the end of the 2019-2020 academic year, this event begins a new dialogue with the incoming graduate class—one of the first encounters with the School’s academic and social culture. For a one-year program, this tradition has proven critical to its continuity, and despite the ongoing pandemic, this event will ensure that the incoming class has access to this experience.
This diverse group of local and international students—representing eight individual perspectives—has explored Thesis topics ranging from disciplinary constructions of context, the queering of space, and cultural appropriation to memory and destruction, the relativity of bodies, and the disruption of normative perceptions.
Presenting students: Sally Chen, Yingxiao Chen, Nien Ying Lin, Jamie Lindsey, Austin McInnis, Roni Schanin, Doosung Shin, and Qicheng Wu.
Respondents: Virginia Black (feminist architecture collaborative), Marina Otero Verzier (Het Nieuwe Instituut), and Sumayya Vally (Counterspace).
Opening remarks: Dean Nader Tehrani, School of Architecture Archive director Steven Hillyer, and Graduate Thesis faculty Nora Akawi and Anthony Vidler.
In conjunction with this presentation, an Anti-Racism in Thesis Workshop will be held on Saturday, February 27, 2021 from 10:00am to 4:00pm. This event will continue ongoing work at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture to decolonialize the curriculum and advance an anti-racist pedagogy at the school. To learn more about this event, please click here.
Yingxiao Chen
Advisor: Lauren Kogod
Comfortable environments have become the default aspiration in the design of our daily experience. This Thesis visualizes how modern standards in architecture control the body through the design of comfort, manipulating perception, attention, and consciousness.
Anesthesia in architecture would be the numbing of sensation, rendering spaces comfortable but also invisible. By contrast, acupuncture in architecture would cause discomfort, but also activate the body and stimulate consciousness and presence of the mind.
By using acupuncture points and meridians as a body template and scaling device in architecture, this Thesis documents and spatializes the kinesthetic experience required by various kinds of topographies and thresholds, and proposes a design tool focusing on the intersection of the body, consciousness, and architecture.
Jamie Lindsey
Advisor: Michael Young
Critical Disruption: Between Image and Experience is a speculative investigation into how materiality can generate spatial and representational ambiguity, probing the potential of uncertainty to challenge conventional design processes, institutions, and systems.
In today’s world of engaged digitalism, image forgery has already shattered the indexical link between photography and reality. Altered and fraudulent images are widespread and often indistinguishable from photographs. Ultra-black, a new material with unprecedented light-absorbing properties, extends this distrust of the image to a skepticism of the physically constructed world. By visually redacting light and the information of our physical world, ultra-black creates perceptual holes in space.
Probing the museum as a case study, Critical Disruption uses visual absence to expose and challenge latent systems governing how we design, occupy, and conceptualize space.
Qicheng Wu
Advisor: Austin Wade Smith
骐骋 (phonetically “Ki-Chung”) is an unusual, unfashionable men’s Chinese name that translates to “Horse.” 马马 (phonetically “Mama”) is a more common men’s Chinese name that also translates to “Horse Horse.” In fact, the names are related - the characters of Mama are a simplified version of the characters of Ki-Chung. And, thus, Mama has become a nickname for Ki-Chung. But in English, Mama does not sound like a man’s name at all...
The simplification from Qicheng to Mama which happens in a different linguistic context (Chinese to English) changes the semantic meaning of “Mama” and its perception. The translation unveils a concealed nature of a homonym which is defined by its context. The revelation of “Mama” has two characteristics associated with it. First, the change of context is the alchemist, and second, the result is humorous. The translation of “Mama” generates a playful double of its origin, resulting in humor from contextual defamiliarization. This thesis considers contextual manipulation as trigger of translation, which evokes a distinct perception for the original form. This occurs in architecture as well.
The Chinese Theater in Hollywood, California is arguably a result of such translation. By altering contexts, traditional Chinese structural elements find their translated doubles being decorations attached to a Hollywood-style theater. The original volumetric elements get de-characterized and flattened. Through transplanting decorative elements of Hollywood’s Chinese Theater back to the structure of Taihe Palace in Beijing, this project takes on a second decontextualization, bringing out the playfulness of the Hollywood Chinese Theater by unveiling an intentional double of it. The performance of decorations to act as origins echoes the flattening that occurs in the design of the Chinese Theater.
The de-characterization as a result of (mis)translation is further explored in the format of a play inside of the translated theater. Based on the same script, the reconstruction of the entrance of the Hollywood Chinese Theater takes place simultaneously on two stages in the show titled Found In Mistranslation. One stage replicates the entrance of the Chinese Theater, while the other discloses the playful double of it by allowing architectural mistranslation of the script and reversing the relationship between structures and decorations, flatness and depth. This architectural (mis)translations reveals the entertainment industry’s culture of flattening and its (mis)appropriation of “exotic” cultures.
Doosung Shin
Advisor: Steven Hillyer
What is the future of queer performance space?
This project is a process of self-expression, navigating my own queer aesthetic as an architect and artist. As an architectural storyteller, I researched and represented the narratives of queer performance spaces. Through drawings and sculptures, I explored my queer aesthetic and proposed possible queer architectural components.
The Thesis proposes a queer performance theater inspired by Cherry Grove, located on Fire Island, New York. The Grove is America’s first gay and lesbian town in the United States, renowned historically and culturally as a one-of-a-kind place for the LGBTQ+ community. The theater would alter conservative perceptions in places where the queer community is still not welcome: utilizing performance as a means of fostering acceptance. Making inclusive space in our society is making things right.
Austin McInnis
Planners routinely propose methods to understand the site and conditions to justify their designs. This process produces an inherent resolution; for inscribing the context, but also a qualification for the architectural response. This thesis is concerned with the fidelity of acceptable devices used to research context and the latent constructions of subject and fitness embedded in them.
In Philadelphia, this can be followed through the 1947 proposals to bring automobile access downtown and “liberate” colonial civic monuments. Convincing the public of this undertaking had planners carefully calibrate a vision of universal access, at the expense of those drawn out and denied from these plans. Ultimately, this played out through the images, surfaces, and streets of the city.
The politics of separation have so far defined the current century; my goal is to work toward a concept of architectural design which does not neatly resolve, but embraces the uncertainties of its limits, constituents, and proclivities.
Roni Schanin
Advisor: Lorena Del Río
The built environment absorbs the events of our lives. Architecture can generate occurrences, encounters, and memories. Sometimes architecture itself remembers what we have long forgotten. As architecture has a prominent role in forming a memory, what happens to the memory once the architecture no longer exists? This project searches for remains and traces left after thedestruction of architecture in its variable configuration.
In July 2019, one of the most massive demolition projects in human history began in New York City, and by 2021,JPMorgan Chase Tower on 270 Park Avenue is expected to become the tallest building ever to be voluntarily demolished. This historical event is not only a monumental operation in a hyper-dense urban environment but also a rare opportunity to take a closer look at the very moment where memory leaves its physical ground and transitions into its next metamorphosis. In this temporal transition moment, earlier historical transformations can be re-read and reflected. By observing moments of destruction, I am asking questions regarding memory and commemoration, narratives of history, the representation of temporal moments in space, and the forces driving demolition and construction rituals in an urban environment.
The demolition operation entails a spilling over into external spaces from the demolition site such as landfills, the surroundings, and the atmosphere by clouds of dust and toxic substancesthat disperse and wander uncontrollably; therefore, the demolished building does not disappear but rather, it is displaced.
Sally Chen
Advisor: Diana Agrest
The Thesis began from three objects in one observable phenomenon: the sky, a plane, and its trace. The trace is proof of the plane’s existence. Through the lens of relativity, the trace becomes proof of our existence. Between the sky and the earth, a passenger and an observer exist in relative distance, speed, and time. As Peter Galison writes in Einstein’s Clock and Poincaré’s Map: “In looking down, we see up; in looking up, we see down.”
This Thesis visualizes and conceives of the meridians as sections that register within them the intersections of cultures, environments, and politics. When the plane travels through a meridian, an imagined archive of the globe, it becomes a moving witness. Everything becomes relative. Everything is subsumed in one picture.
Nien Ying Lin
Advisor: Tamar Zinguer
This project explores the literal and psychological cracks of a house and considers seeds as a metaphor for registering the lost connection between cracks of different scales. Following the traces of cracks, seeds infiltrate boundaries and open space for memories to reinhabit. The crack can be seen at the level of an individual house in Taitung County, Taiwan, where I once lived but cannot return to. It is haunted by layers of cracks, from objects to spaces. With absences in between, the cracks register breaks in time, distance, material, memories, generations, land, and ocean. Drawing them trains our imagination about formation and destruction. They are the thresholds between past and future.