Relate, Relate, Relate: In the Age of Machine Learning

This thesis explores machine learning as an association machine, revealing its potential to historicize, contextualize, and generate architecture through relationships rather than categories. A book-manifesto anchors the work, archiving a semantic map of architecture: 28 GSD “five on five” lectures, 241 precedents, and 420,000 words analyzed to produce a cloud of relationships. Instead of hierarchies or lineages, this high-dimensional landscape blurs boundaries — pairing projects based on conceptual similarities and imagining entirely new architectures born from those pairings. It proposes a text-driven framework for understanding architecture beyond appearances — uncovering unexpected connections and offering an alternative way to produce and navigate architectural knowledge in the age of AI. The book presents 100 pairings and their imagined architectural descendants — an open-ended exploration of design through relationships.

Flip through the book at this link , or browse some excerpts in the image gallery below.

The Weight of Rubble

Juan Fernández González (MArch I ’25)

The Weight of Rubble proposes a structural system to build with rubble from demolished buildings in its granular material form. The project redistributes materials within an urban site through a gravity-powered system of cables and buckets to create a new architecture. A tensile catenary structure, which reimagines the gabion wall, uses the weight of piles of rubble to anchor and stabilize itself.

The construction system takes inspiration from the mining industry’s aerial ropeways, used for transporting granular materials across landscapes. Rather than using such technologies for material extraction, the project argues that they could raise the quality of material waste in urban contexts.

Mexico City’s Plaza Condesa, a performance space damaged by the 2017 earthquake, is transformed into the Theater of Rubble. A light structure aims to create beauty from the remnants of a demolished building, honoring the city’s collective memory. Piles of rubble form the stages’ backdrop, and the first performance is the construction of the theater itself.

Geometric studies, carried out both digitally and physically, explore the properties of granular materials. These materials exhibit self-organized criticality, a property in which stability is continuously restored. Since many buildings begin and end their lives as piles of rubble, The Weight of Rubble questions how architecture could embrace granular materials and their formal language.

Tectonics of Tenure: Public Infrastructure for Collective Housing

Maggie Musante (MArch I ’24)

Since the 1980s, New York City’s commitment to the construction of decommodified housing eroded in favor of a neoliberal strategy—enticing private developers to build affordable housing through the disposal of public land. This tactic often relies on the longstanding, yet short-sighted practice of marginalizing critical urban infrastructure to maximize space for profitable land uses at the center. Under these conditions, affordability remains insufficient and available city land dwindles.

The thesis asserts architecture’s agency to act within and against capitalism’s tendencies through alternative financial models. While conventional trajectories of privatization and peripheralization persist, this thesis advocates for an alternative symbiosis: a model of public-collective co-ownership. An expanded infrastructure for housing is made possible through the maintained location and capital investment of a garbage truck garage in Astoria, Queens. Embedded in architectural form, this mutually-reinforced hybrid prioritizes durability, self-determination, and generosity—values absent today in conceptions of housing and public infrastructure.

Plot Zero: Sensing the Landscape to Map the Dynamic Atmospheric Environment of the Urban Fabric

Introduction

Working at the nexus of the social, ecological, and technological in the built environment the project explores remote sensor technologies capable of continuous in-operation monitoring to measure atmospheric conditions at a hyper-local scale in the landscape. This approach seeks to make visible and reconstitute the urban landscape as a complex temporal and material manifold of differential space shifting across multiple scales in a constant state of flux. The research explores how a sensor network may be deployed to measure and describe airborne territories that might augment and challenge traditional concepts of site in which air is a matter of entanglement and interconnection.

Description

A great deal has been invested into significant advances in energy conservation and sustainability in building design, construction, and management. This also includes the time of their subsequent occupation and operation through the continual monitoring of building performance involving sensors and computational simulation to optimize energy efficiency and comfort. Sensor technology can change the way we understand and potentially radically transform the urban environments that are our cities. The technology augments the human perceptual field and enables a “dynamic, flexible and interactive mapping of reality, fueled by the staggering amount of data we produce” (RATI 2019) and ways of visualizing the data in real-time to inform better design and management of cities.

The research considers how this technology might enable ways to analyze and visualize the multiscalar, dynamic, and elusory matter of air and utilize it as a measure in, and of, the constructed landscape environment. How might we explore and speculate on our capacity to inform its continual becoming and its reciprocal effect as a part of an ecology upon which humans and more-than-humans might survive and prosper? How might this approach create different forms of valuing, assessing, and designing the urban landscape?

The physical composition of the urban fabric acts to absorb, produce, and trap heat, resulting in higher sustained temperatures 1-3 degrees (Celsius) warmer than neighboring rural areas. Heat generated in the city, including waste heat, is trapped along with airborne pollutants generated by vehicles, transport infrastructure, commercial enterprises, and industry. Subsequently, this condition adversely affects water and air quality and the health and well-being of its citizens. Energy demands simultaneously rise due to the prolonged and increased use of mechanical ventilation and air conditioning in response to the hotter temperatures that strain energy resources and further contribute to the production of global emissions.

The premise for the study is House Zero, a model house, facility, and laboratory. The building is a pre-1940’s typical suburban Cambridge “triple-decker” house retrofitted into an ultra-efficient, healthy, positive energy structure. The building contains “nearly five miles of wiring that capture 17 million data points per day. Some sensors are critical to the operation of the building: for example, controlling the system of windows and shades in response to inputs about temperature, rain, wind direction, and indoor CO2 levels and airflows.” (MALKAWI 2019). The house “promotes holistic change within the built environment, namely through the creation and continued improvement of sustainable, high-performance buildings and cities.” (MALKAWI 2019)

Method

To support and augment the aspirations of House Zero the research seeks to expand the active sensor network outside the building envelope to the extent of the home’s plot boundary. The intention was to gather data specific to dynamic environmental parameters (e.g. solar and infrared radiation, air temperature, humidity, wind speed, carbon dioxide levels and significant air pollutants) that dynamically shape the network of outdoor urban spaces that envelop the building. This sought to understand the impact of the composition of outdoor spaces on the energy efficiency of the House Zero building operation. The enquiry asked how the landscape might support, or hinder, the efficient heating and cooling of the building, and how the building control system could be further augmented to act more carefully and efficiently with the external air qualities. This might include, for example, the utilization of optimal external conditions that may vary around the building at different times, and the identification of hazards that might alert and prevent venting the house from windows exposed to poor air quality that may arise, such as high levels of vehicle pollutants at peak traffic times on the street front.

The work also intended to make it possible to analyze and visualize the complexity of the atmospheric landscape system and identify its propensities in the form of its key operational characteristics. With this understanding, the research aspired to understand the atmospheric agency of the landscape to inform the design of spaces that contribute to the sustainability of the city and improve the health and well-being of its citizens. Given that the air in any one space and moment is a product of upstream conditions that shift and evolve through the outdoor urban landscape network in conjunction with the locally produced effects, and one that simultaneously informs downstream circumstances, the agency of designing an ‘air-scape’ is simultaneously local, territorial, and global.

Walnut Park Place: Affordable Ownership Opportunities for the Egleston Square Community

Aaron Smithson (MArch/MUP ’25), Cat Chen (MArch ’25), and Maggie Weese (MUP/MPH ’24)

Walnut Park Place is a 29-unit affordable homeownership development in the Egleston Square area of Roxbury. Designed with sensitivity to both its physical context and the stated needs and desires of local residents, the project leverages both public sources and residential cross subsidy to provide middle-income Roxbury families with an increasingly rare opportunity to establish enduring roots in a fast-changing community. Walnut Park Place utilizes a family-centered design approach, incorporating a ground-floor daycare, a protected play space, larger units, and open-unit floor plans to better serve the needs of residents. The site’s “disguised density” approach strategically distributes the project’s massing to increase affordable ownership opportunities in Roxbury while ensuring the project remains contextual.

Rockaway’s Housing Superstorm: Between Rising Waters and Climate Gentrification

The course focuses on the design of a new public realm and the future of housing on New York City’s Rockaway Peninsula. For over a century, the Rockaways have been defined by displacement of residents from their homes, from eminent domain wielded by Robert Moses to the tidal surge of Superstorm Sandy. Displacement from the peninsula’s housing has also accelerated since 2012, due to homes damaged and destroyed during the storm, uneven support to repair and rebuild, and rising rents and real estate prices.

As relations between coastal waters and lands change through rising sea-levels, cloudbursts, and storm surges, life on the Rockaways will become increasingly challenged. The course recognizes that the peninsula will be inundated by 2100 and that inventive housing strategies of adaptation are needed, including repair, elevation, and even relocation. An expanded and resilient public realm will be essential to address decades of uneven development and to place community and climate justice at the heart of future designs.

In this two-part course, students will firstly research the histories and plans of New York City’s Rockaway Peninsula, relations between the public spaces, dynamic waterfronts, and housing challenges. They will use this knowledge during the course trip to work closely with residents to co-design a new public realm, connecting housing with community spaces, public beaches, coastal defenses, and metropolitan transport. In the second part, students will develop long-term strategies of repair, elevation, and relocation for the Rockaway Peninsula — working between the contexts of rising waters and climate gentrification while carefully responding to the aspirations and concerns of residents.

The beaches, parks, and public housing of the Rockaway Peninsula have a strong presence and long history. However, they have also been used in the past to divisively disconnect neighborhoods and residents. A new public realm across the Rockaways will become more important in the coming decades as housing is repaired, elevated, and relocated. It will provide a consistent ground of spaces, buildings, policies, and actions that put concerns for residents at the core of Rockaway’s future.

This interdisciplinary course will develop proposals that employ digital drawings, mappings, and modelling, as well as short written texts — working from the scale of public spaces, building massing, and coastal sections to regional topography and bathymetry. Projects will reflect on the initiatives of city and state agency programs, supported by FEMA. These include the NY Forward proposal to revitalize Far Rockaway with new urban developments elevated beyond the height of Sandy’s storm surge.

The course is generously supported by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and RISE (Rockaway Initiative for Sustainability and Equity). It also involves international guests and New York City designers and agencies (DEP, NYCHA, and DDC).

The course is open to students in all disciplines but a design background is strongly recommended.

Students enrolled in this course will travel to Rockaway Peninsula, NY.  The cost will be $100 (term-billed) plus meals and incidentals. Travel will take place September 30 – October 4. 

Connecting Gilman Square: A New Housing and Green Space Development

Chandler Caserta (MArch I ’25), Austin Sun (MLA/MArch I ’24), Kei Takanami (MArch I ’25), and Amber Zeng (MArch I ’25)

This project proposes a 196,020 sq ft transit-oriented mixed-use building and public park in Somerville, Massachusetts. Given the current limited amount of open green space in Somerville, Connecting Gilman Square envisions a revitalized identity for Gilman Square through a new public landscape and building. It aims to create a community identity around a new transit station by introducing market rate and affordable housing, a public outdoor park, a grocery store, cafes, restaurants, artist workshops, and non-profit offices on two underutilized lots adjacent to the new Gilman Square Station.

We will introduce 150 new units of housing with 20% at affordable rates (50%, 80%, and 110% AMI). This project aligns with Somerville’s Somervision 2040 plan to increase housing and stimulate the commercial sector in Somerville. By configuring the housing block to a L-shaped stack on the southwest corner of the site, the building is able to shield the public park from railway disturbances. This project targets young professionals in the Somerville area through a mix of studio and two-bedroom units. The building opens its corner to the Somerville Community Path to give generous access to outdoor activities for both residents and park-users alike. Through the transit-oriented development, the revitalized site becomes a gateway connecting this public green space to the greater Boston area.

The strategy to pair a housing project with a public park considers both the financial viability and social benefits for Somerville and the Greater Boston area. Using a capital stack of equity and grants to support the new green space and infrastructure, Connecting Gilman Square will transform this previously underutilized industrial site into new transit-oriented housing and a publicly accessible landscape.

Monterrey’s Urban [River] Forest: Improving Microclimatic Conditions through Public-Private Partnership Vertical Development

Miguel Lantigua Inoa (MArch II/MLA AP ’24), Jaime Espinoza (MRE ’25), and Chris James (MRE ’25)

Design Challenge-Opportunity

Monterrey, Mexico, a desert metropolis nestled against the backdrop of the Sierra Madre Oriental mountain range, has experienced rapid urban development in recent decades. This development, however, has unfolded within a complex socioeconomic and environmental context that poses unique challenges to the city’s sustainable growth. Monterrey’s economy, powered by a strong industrial base, has attracted a diverse workforce, leading to significant urban sprawl. Yet, this economic prosperity has not been evenly distributed, contributing to stark socioeconomic disparities. The city grapples with issues of affordable housing, where a booming population and rising real estate prices have pushed lower-income families into cramped and poorly serviced neighborhoods, exacerbating social inequities.

Response to Climatic Vulnerabilities and Open Space Needs

The environmental challenges facing Monterrey, particularly those related to climate change, are equally pressing. Water scarcity has emerged as a critical concern, exacerbated by the city’s semi-arid climate and extreme weather events, such as droughts and floods. These climatic vulnerabilities have underscored the need for sustainable urban planning practices that prioritize water conservation and innovative management solutions. Moreover, the rapid pace of Monterrey’s urban development has led to a reduction of open spaces, further straining the city’s ecological balance. The lack of open spaces not only impacts residents’ quality of life but also diminishes the city’s ability to mitigate air pollution, regulate temperatures, and provide recreational spaces for its inhabitants.

Harness Financing for More Sustainability and Inclusivity

In response to these challenges, the proposed development project in downtown Monterrey seeks to address these multifaceted issues by revitalizing the Santa Catarina River. This ambitious initiative aims to harness financing from the construction of mixed-income residential developments, thereby tackling the affordable housing crisis while simultaneously creating valuable public spaces. By integrating open spaces, the project aspires to foster a more sustainable and inclusive urban environment. This approach not only aligns with Monterrey’s socioeconomic needs but also sets a precedent for addressing urban development in harmony with environmental sustainability and social equity.

Catalyst for Broader Revitalization

Additionally, the proposed development along the Santa Catarina River is envisioned as a catalyst for the broader revitalization of Downtown Monterrey. By increasing the residential base with mixed-income housing, the project seeks to infuse the downtown area with a vibrant, diverse community, thereby enhancing its socio-economic fabric. This influx of residents is expected to further stimulate economic growth, attracting businesses, retail, and services that cater to a revitalized downtown core.

The Santa Catarina River

Rio Santa Caterina is a paradox for Monterrey. For a city with severe water scarcity, the river accommodates the episodic influx of water from several hurricanes which occur every 10-15 years. While the river hardly contains water, it is an essential infrastructure. In the process of the most recent storms, a robust ecological habitat has formed within the predominantly dry riverbed. It is within this dynamic condition that El Gran Río de Bosque (Urban River Forest) advocates for the importance of microclimatic environments which can combat Monterrey’s urgent heat and water crisis, create equitable cross-city access to a robust ecological habitat, and increase housing within the heart of the city. These three primary objectives are achieved through strategically leveraging the river’s ecology, its primarily low-density adjacencies, its increasingly flourishing habitats, and its potential east-west connectivity. In this way, the Rio Santa Caterina is an episodic urban forest in the river capable of setting the tone for how to work with water, enabling responsible developments, and expand the Urban Street Foresting of the city for climatic comfort.

Downtown Monterrey Context

With historical significance, political representation, and rich cultural heritage, Downtown Monterrey is a microcosm of the city’s identity. However, despite being the heart of Monterrey, the downtown area has faced a severe challenge – a significant decline in population density.

While Downtown Monterrey was once a bustling hub with over 100,000 residents, the population within the 1,000-hectare area has shrunk to a mere 23,000. This demographic shift over the last several decades has led to a significant degradation of the urban fabric.

In response to the severe decline of Downtown Monterrey, the local municipality has prioritized revitalizing the city’s core into one that may become a compact, dense, and sustainable urban model. Such revitalization efforts include plans for repopulation, environmental restoration, and a renewed sense of community. Indeed, these revitalization plans are informed by engagement with existing residents, ensuring their vision for the future reflects their collective aspirations.

To this end, the proposed project for Monterrey’s downtown draws inspiration from successful revitalization efforts in other North American cities. These initiatives demonstrate the power of public sector investment as a catalyst for broader development. The place-based strategy prioritizes public infrastructure upgrades, such as improved streetscapes, revitalization of underutilized open spaces, and investment in housing projects to foster a sense of community and address population decline. This multi-pronged approach aims to generate newfound demand for living and working in the downtown core, sparking a wave of community and economic development.

SILVERLINE: A New Model for Data Centers in the Age of AI: Verticalities at the Edge of the Cloud

Ben Parker (MAUD ’24), Christopher Oh (MAUD ’24), Ziyang Dong (MArch ’25), and Jasmine Ibrahim (MRE ’25)

Data centers underlie all the most important technological developments of the past three decades, and emerging innovations like generative AI rely even more heavily on the remote storage and computing that data centers provide. Yet for all their transformative impact, data centers are remarkably conventional buildings. The typical model of data center development holds the same pitfalls and consequences of most construction: degraded water quality, habitat destruction, car dependence, failing power grids, unchecked sprawl, visual monotony, increasing wealth disparity, and accelerated climate change. This need not be the case.

Silverline: Positive Potential at the Edge of the Cloud

As a design-driven real estate startup, we bring to data center buildings all the transformative aspiration that technologists bring to the servers within it. We propose a new model of data center development that preserves land, minimizes fossil fuel emissions, respects cultural context, and invests in disadvantaged communities, all within an attractively profitable financial model made possible through a new product type.

Silverline Edge-Colo data centers are medium-sized, 8-28 megawatt data centers that support low latency applications. They utilize a series of technological innovations to bring increased energy efficiency and better price-to-performance compared to traditional data centers. Immersion cooling and robotic operations reduce MEP costs through minimizing building HVAC and lighting requirements, resulting in competitive construction costs and hyper efficient power use (PUE). A system of nested modularity creates economies of scale and connects into an integrated system that starts with the microchip. This uninterrupted modularity, from chip to server to rack to building, creates the possibility of streamlined procurement, cutting construction time to further save on cost. Finally, biomethane fuel cells replace diesel fuel as the power source for the data center’s backup generators, a significant sustainability improvement.

Silverline’s Thin, Vertical Typology Addresses Land Constraint Issues

The data center industry has made great strides in power use efficiency and renewable fuels but has yet to consider land as a sustainability issue. In contrast to the traditional, land-hungry approach, Silverline proposes a vertical model: each data center tower holds 4-24 levels of server racks with mechanical equipment above and below. In urban areas where land is expensive and parcels can be small or unusually shaped, this provides more flexibility to locate near customers. In rural areas, where agricultural and ecological land preservation is a core issue, a tower solution disturbs less land and can minimize regulatory hurdles regarding zoning changes.

Colo-Edge Data Centers: Digital Proximity is the New Industry Buzzword

The proliferation of low latent technologies involving AI has become a strong tailwind for building urban data centers. The benefits of locating close to the end consumers of data outweigh the construction premium, which is absorbed via higher rents charged to tenants. Investment grade cloud providers like Google and Amazon are willing to pay a premium to be closer to the end consumer and ensure high customer retention.

Blue Ocean Strategy: First Mover Advantage in a High Growth Market

Digital consumers and businesses are pushing data closer to end users, where industry research has noted higher growth rates compared to the established “hyperscale” in the mid-to-long term. Despite this demand for expanding edge infrastructure, cloud providers are deterred by the high barriers to entry in securing downtown land and seeking permitting approval for data center development from the local authorities in both urban and rural locations.

Bridging the Digital Divide with Decentralized Colo-Edge Data Centers

Access disparity between urban and rural internet users remains an important issue for digital infrastructure. As an incentive for local governments to lease land in dense urban cores for data center developments, Silverline will cross-subsidize data centers for underserved rural populations, allowing these communities to access high speed internet. Rural data centers also support 5G connection, an infrastructure upgrade that would increase demand density in rural areas to achieve competitive market rents in the near future.

Modular Core, Adaptive Shell: Contextualizing an Anonymous Box

Local public opposition has halted recent data center projects in Ireland, the US and other countries, with moratoriums on some data center construction in Singapore and the Netherlands. Such community concerns have the industry rethinking its traditional approach to data centers as large, anonymous, unidentifiable boxes. With each data tower, Silverline pairs a modular core with a contextually adaptive shell that incorporates aesthetic and ecological considerations. The core is identical in every project, while the shell is the product of local architectural competitions sponsored by Silverline. The core holds all of the technological components of the building, while the shell addresses outward considerations of structure, façade, circulation, and how the building meets the ground. This opens a dialog between infrastructure and design that could manage the tension between ubiquitous use of the cloud and a similarly ubiquitous opposition to its physical presence.

To test Silverline’s globally adaptable core + shell strategy, we will first develop Silverline in paired urban/rural locations in Ireland, a strong market with mature planning practices and significant sustainable power. We then envision a scenario in Malaysia, a leading growth market with starkly different environmental, cultural, and regulatory conditions. Silverline would then continue expanding globally as the product is tested and refined.

Independent Study by Candidates for Doctoral Degrees

9502 must be taken for either 2 or 4 units. 

Under faculty guidance, the student conducts an independent reading program and formulates a thesis proposal. The course is intended for doctoral students. 

In addition to enrolling in the course, students must download and fill out the independent study petition, which can be found on my.Harvard. Enrollment will not be final until the petition is submitted.