PhD Dissertations

Advisor: Antoine Picon, Sarah Whiting

Abstract

World War I shattered millions of lives and left much of Europe in ruins. In postwar Germany, artists, architects, politicians, and industrialists cultivated utopian visions of the future that were motivated by hopeful optimism for renewal and redemption despite a degraded reality. Weimar never became what its greatest visionaries hoped, but the impulses for these imaginary pursuits were nonetheless real. Importantly, postwar architectural currents converged with the rise of rationalization in Weimar Germany. This dissertation contends with the “constructed meanings” of rationalization after World War I and examines how this concept came to encompass much more than a technical doctrine. Rather, rationalization is investigated as a complex cultural and technical terrain that saw the embrace of science, technology, and industry by architects, in parallel with reinvigorated beliefs in social transformation as the ultimate objective of art. Rationalization was inflected by, and also hybridized with, other cultural and artistic concepts. The legacy of older artistic ideals, such as the Romantic Gesamtkunstwerk, remained pivotal even as rationalization ascended to epistemic dominance. In turn, the concept was directed toward numerous purposes of politics and social reform. While the Gesamtkunstwerk ultimately comprised a failed framework for artistic and social renewal—what Andreas Huyssen describes as “a false totality and … an equally false monumentality”—it nevertheless exerted a powerful influence in cultural discourse after the cataclysm of the Great War and profoundly shaped the subsequent rise of rationalization in architecture. This study defines a culture of reason that was specific to architecture in Weimar Germany, plural in its manifestations, and unresolved in its ideological ambitions—a complex of thought and practice that embraced industrial techniques, state interventions, and scientific management just as fervently as it did idealist aspirations of utopian renewal and Romantic conceptions of spiritual and communal redemption. Considering historical developments as varied as colonial building, wartime resource management, state-led housing initiatives, and industrial psychotechnics demonstrates how rationalization was often taken as the means to ends not reducible to reason alone. Rather, Weimar rationalization enjoined science, technology, and construction to numerous purposes that were variously pragmatic, artistic, political, or militaristic. Historicizing rationalization as an elastic concept opens the door to a richer understanding of its multiple configurations as well as its participation in a multitude of historical domains. The dissertation pursues this project across five chapters that examine the negotiations of German Kultur and industrial Zivilisation in Weimar Germany.

Advisor: Antoine Picon

Abstract

Focused on the period between the United States’ entry into the Second World War and the surrender of the Axis Powers (1941-1945), this dissertation investigates the entanglement of US wartime governance and global geopolitics, racial tensions, and design expertise that led to the invention and proliferation of military “mock villages.” As so-called “laboratories of war,” mock villages were (and continue to be) replicas of foreign and domestic cities, constructed on US soil, where the US military simulated urban warfare operations. The first examples were overseen by the US Army and the US Office of Civilian Defense in collaboration with architects and staging experts from the Broadway theater industry, the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and Hollywood film studios like Walt Disney and Twentieth Century Fox. Together, they produced hundreds of cityscapes representative of Germany, Japan, China, the Pacific Islands, and even the US itself.

Each chapter investigates one example of what I have identified as four distinct ways that the US military used these initial mock villages: as instruments of visual deception; as public propaganda; as military-scientific objects; and as mechanisms for psychologically conditioning troops. As I show, with mock villages, the US military manipulated the built environment to perform less like buildings and cities and more like immersive forms of propagandic media. These implements not only empowered the development of illicit chemical weapons like napalm, for example, but they were also armaments themselves: architectures made to disorient, disinform, and control both soldiers and civilians, foreign and domestic. But while mock villages arose during the Second World War to stop the spread of fascism, they have since become the very tools of imperialism and empire, mirroring US-occupied territories from Korea and Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. That is, from World War II to today, these imitations have been continuously altered and aestheticized to represent new adversaries. What has remained the same, I contend, is the production of a visual field in which foreign nations are parodied as inferior and inherently hostile environments worthy of US military intervention and control.

At the heart of this dissertation, then, are two overlapping lines of inquiry that weave American military, political, and urban history with global studies of media, conflict, and empire. I show how, as products of the American entertainment industry and the military gaze, mock villages figured centrally in the visual and material culture of the mid-twentieth century United States and the nation’s rise as a global superpower. At the same time, I show how the invention of these military tools demanded novel ways of envisioning, constructing, and instrumentalizing the built environment that coincided with the production of new and persistent forms of state-sanctioned disinformation, oppression, and violence.

Advisor: Diane Davis

Abstract

This three-study dissertation explores policy and practice logics of trying to exert multilevel governing influence over transboundary infrastructural and territorial systems, and the ecological underpinnings on which they depend, in contexts of emerging market territories of production, agro-industry, and trade. Across the three studies, in different registers and modes, the project centers the active search for alternative institutional and infrastructural configurations that more frontally grapple with the multi-scale and multi-level entanglements of such regional industrial development projects. To this end, it variously engages with ideas of regionalism and negotiation as motors for cross-scale “creative institutional thinking” as part of broader climate and resource transition planning efforts, themselves taking shape amidst debates about changing industry-society-environment relations. Collectively, the studies are concerned with two broad questions: 1) how are diverse ideas about environmental crisis conditioning the ways in which dilemmas of regional climate transitions are understood and structured in territories of production, agro-industry, and trade; and 2) how do/how should fluid and multi-level ideas of scale, boundary, and subjectivity shape what we think is possible regarding physical/infrastructural interventions, professional practice, policy actions, and the inclusion of relevant stakeholders and affected/responsible parties in response to such transitions? The dissertation pursues these questions via engagement with two regional cases in Mexico, the first concerning policy, planning, and design responses to regional water scarcity and ecosystem degradation in an agro-industrial territory on the very far outskirts of the Mexico City urban agglomeration in Hidalgo state, and the second focused on the nationally-led development of a global trade transshipment and industrial manufacturing corridor project on the Tehuantepec Isthmus in southern Mexico, spanning the states of Oaxaca and Veracruz. Critical socio-legal analysis, integrated with territorial systems governance analysis, is an important component of the broader dissertation frame, specifically in its role as a combined hinge lens for variously broaching structure/agency dilemmas across local-to-global institutional and infrastructural reformulation imperatives amidst cascading climate crises.

Advisor: K. Michael Hays

Abstract

Pedagogical experiments played a pivotal role in shaping architectural discourse and practice across Latin America and the Caribbean during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. “Counter-narratives of Architecture: Pedagogies, Practices, and Participation in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1970-2022” offers an architectural and cultural exploration of counter-narratives within architecture as a collective experience. It examines three pedagogical experiments in Chile, Mexico, and Puerto Rico: a Chilean school intertwining poetry and architectural thought, a Mexican school combining autogobierno and architectural writing, and a Puerto Rican collective blending co-design/build and archipelagic thinking. Through interdisciplinary analysis of objects, methods, media, and sites, the book sheds light on experiments like ludic games, travesías, poetic infrastructures, performance activism, and design-build, which have been insufficiently studied despite their valuable insights into teaching methodologies. How did these methodologies challenge traditional teaching and learning paradigms? What enduring relevance do they hold for contemporary artistic and pedagogical practices, and what is their legacy? By posing and addressing such inquiries, this research establishes links between architecture, education, and territory, synthesizing them through a concept termed the spatial imaginary. This concept encompasses not only the practical and technical aspects of architecture and art but also epistemological considerations and fundamentally altered perceptions of architectural and spatial encounters. In alignment with critical educational perspectives such as Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) and Ivan Illich’s notion of deschooling (1971), this study explores counter-narratives within the postmodern landscape. These narratives manifest as curricula, poems, actions, site-specific installations, and travel narratives traversing the landscapes of America to shape transnational Latin American and Caribbean identities.

Counter-narratives leverage counter-discourses’ cultural resources to empower students to challenge master narratives, creating room for alternative forms of personal and organizational “emergence and becoming” (Vaara et al., 1996). According to Foucault, it is through this “local, popular knowledge that criticism performs its work” (1980). These counter-narratives, as Lyotard (1984) explains, are typically “little stories” – the narratives of individuals and groups whose knowledge and histories have been omitted or overlooked in official narratives. Therefore, counter-narratives challenge not only grand narratives but also “official” and “hegemonic” narratives.

One research line focuses on decolonizing architectural education and practice by prioritizing pedagogical approaches from the ‘Global South,’ particularly the Caribbean, to cultivate emancipatory learning environments (Crespo, 2023). This initiative aims to challenge prevailing design pedagogy and practices by embracing perspectives from the Global South, grounded in theories like decolonial thinking, unlearning, ecologies of knowledge, and the pluriverse, as well as indigenous cosmovisions such as sentipensar and Pachamama, among others. Within this framework, the chapter titled con·fer: pensar la historia de la arquitectura desde El Caribe / to Think Architectural history from El Caribe delves into environmental histories and postcolonial disaster narratives through the lens of the Caribbean, highlighting the enduring impacts of colonialism and slavery on environmental landscapes. The chapter proposes the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC) as a digital humanities project, offering cross-disciplinary lecture materials for teaching about/from/with El Caribe.

The architectural heritage of the Caribbean Antilles reflects the legacies of European colonization, the African diaspora, and migration patterns, revealing a complex tapestry of power dynamics, resistance, and cultural hybridity. By exploring the political, cultural, and social landscape of Puerto Rico, the chapter, presented as lectures, examines new material practices through the conceptual framework of archipelagic thinking (Glissant, 1997). Archipelagic thinking presents a counter-narrative of spatial equity, illustrating how archipelagos foster bonds of solidarity among diverse islands and societies, demonstrating how disparate entities can establish meaningful connections. Why focus on architecture’s environmental pedagogies and histories, and why Puerto Rico? By using Puerto Rico as an archipelago-experiment and island-laboratory, this approach advances interdisciplinary conversations across fields such as Architecture, Design, Urban Studies, Pedagogy, Latin American, Caribbean, and Puerto Rican Studies, Visual and Cultural Studies, History, and Theory.

Advisor: Diane Davis

Abstract

Carbon accounting is typically used to express climate change progress and assess the potential impact of new policies. Yet as critical accounting scholarship already contends, carbon accounting is just one epistemological lens through which we might understand society’s complex relationships with climate and imagine alternative energy futures. In this dissertation, I explore the development of bottom-up methods for carbon accounting used at the local level, drawing attention to the nature of assumptions and exclusions that have gone into establishing a common framework to compile local territorial accounts of carbon. I then introduce a new phenomenon emerging amongst municipalities referred to as carbon accountability. Carbon accountability is about more than measurement: it is premised on institutionalizing a carbon lens in local governance, where the limited world of the carbon accounting framework more directly shapes everyday decision making in municipalities. This accountability project emerges from a new relationship between scientific expertise at the global level and local territories, mediated through the recent development of internationally standardized urban accounting protocols. Data-driven climate governance is now assumed to involve the direct application of global scientific expertise in urban planning and policymaking. Yet these accounting frameworks struggle to represent how local projects intervene in much wider urban energy processes that are the basis of global climate change.

The dissertation explores carbon accountability politics in two Canadian case studies, the cities of Toronto and Edmonton. Both have recently pursued international leadership by adopting new carbon-based governance tools. In 2022, Toronto was the first City worldwide to independently commission an in-house energy-economy optimization model to lead implementation of its climate action plan, TransformTO. That same year, Edmonton released North America’s first Carbon Budget as a framework to integrate carbon into the annual financial budgeting process.

Grounding the research in these case studies, I draw from interviews with municipal actors and relevant technical experts, as well as analyses of climate action planning and implementation challenges, to examine the contradictions of offering management solutions to overcome enduring local climate action constraints. The dissertation finds that expectations urban systems can be rigorously quantified to direct local action often do not align with the limits of emissions quantification and the complex nature of urban politics. I take the example of waste-to-biofuel partnerships in Toronto and Edmonton to illustrate the possible system-level contradictions of local emissions-reducing projects, emphasizing how and why urban energy processes often elude quantitative representation. In its normative goal to entrench and naturalize a carbon accounting framework, carbon accountability not only poses new democratic legitimacy concerns, it also misdirects action away from more systemic transformations of urban energy systems.

Advisor: Erika Naginski

Abstract

This dissertation examines the integral role played by military engineers, and the state institution that deployed and oversaw them, in the making of the British Empire. The second half of the seventeenth century was a formative moment of English imperial expansion. As England accumulated a growing number of colonies and extended its claims farther into indigenous territories, the state simultaneously sought to centralize the empire’s administration from London. In this contradictory moment of expansion and consolidation, military engineering emerged as a means of imposing English power on distant and diverse colonial territories. To trace this history, the study focuses on a single government institution, the English Ordnance Office. Traditionally charged with the supply of arms for the army and navy, between 1660 and 1714, the Ordnance Office became the institutional center for fortification building both within England and throughout its empire, and it established and oversaw a cadre of engineers who managed building projects from Tangier to Ireland, Newfoundland to Jamaica. This profound transformation depended on complex negotiations among engineers, officials, and laborers with distinct fields of expertise, working across unfamiliar and unpredictable geographies far from the metropole. The dissertation toggles between England and its colonies to trace this growing, if tenuous, centralization of colonial fortification. Examining projects in North Africa, Ireland, North America, and the Caribbean, it reconstructs how the English state used engineer training, bureaucratic systems, visual representations, a global trade network, and the expertise of engineer-agents to weave together an engineering apparatus capable of defending—and constructing—an empire.

Advisor: Antoine Picon

Abstract

In the 1990s, an Anglo-American digital avant-garde discourse emerged in architecture. This discourse narrowly defined digital avant-gardism through a set of theoretical explorations and formal experimentations and popularized a narrative of a young generation of architects—mainly white male architects affiliated with Anglo-American institutions—leading the discipline into a new digital age. This discourse’s narratives have been widely circulated, documented, and reproduced and often presented, unqualified, as the story of the digital revolution or the digital turn in architecture. This dissertation defines the boundaries of this discourse, rooting it in an Anglo-American institutional context, and studies the cultural, economic, and disciplinary conditions and discursive constraints that led to its emergence and prominence. Instead of an avant-garde that challenges the status quo, the Anglo-American digital avant-garde was a product of the status quo of Anglo-American architectural culture. As this dissertation argues, unlike the historical avant-garde that has been defined through its movement against the institution, the Anglo-American digital avant-garde was an institutional construct. It was a concept that was devised by architectural publications, universities, and cultural institutions as a promotional and branding tool that allowed these institutions—through association with a vague notion of the “new” and “cutting edge”—to thrive in an increasingly competitive and privatized higher education market and architectural cultural industry. In its redefining of the Anglo-American digital avant-garde as an institutionally constructed concept instead of an architectural movement or revolution, this dissertation traces the emergence and development of the Anglo-American digital avant-garde discourse, not in specific groups of architects or works of architecture, but in a series of institutional and discursive moments: the emergence of the discourse from within a US neo-avant-garde discourse in which high theory debates were prerequisite for avant-gardism, the publication of the Architectural Design special issue “Folding in Architecture” in 1993 and its subsequent branding as the manifesto for the digital avant-garde, Columbia University’s Paperless Studio experiment launched in 1994 and its branding as the birthplace of a new digital architectural style, and a number of publications and exhibitions that popularized and disseminated the discourse’s narratives such as the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s Archaeology of the Digital project launched in 2013. Through its analysis of the discourse, rendering its boundaries visible, situating it with its institutional and regional context, and identifying its network of actors, this dissertation sheds light on the mechanisms of discourse-building and the cultural and disciplinary conditions that privileged the Anglo-American-affiliated architects and the narratives of the Anglo-American digital avant-garde discourse and marginalized more diverse yet less publicity-driven digital discourses.

Advisor: Ali Malkawi

Abstract

Indoor airflow distribution holds significant importance in evaluating the natural ventilation conditions of buildings. Conventionally, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is used for evaluating airflow patterns in a multizone space layout during the early design phase. While CFD can provide accurate airflow information, its adoption requires substantial computational resources and considerable running time, which limits its application in the fast pace of early-stage architectural design. With the recent rapid advancements in machine learning techniques, data-driven surrogate models have emerged as a potential alternative to CFD solvers for fast prediction of flow fields. While delivering promising performance on generic boundary geometries, machine learning approaches on multizone indoor airflow are less explored due to its inherent complexity and limited availability of high-quality datasets. This dissertation introduces a new machine learning framework designed for the fast prediction of CFD-generated airflow fields in multizone space layouts and the optimization of space layouts based on airflow distribution. The framework consists of three components: a data generation module, an ensemble learning framework, and a model predictive optimizer. The data generation module randomly generates multizone space layouts and populates their 3D flow patterns using conventional CFD techniques. The ensemble learning framework leverages multiple machine learning models to collectively predict multizone airflow fields, surpassing standard machine learning approaches in terms of accuracy. The framework also demonstrates robust functionality by incorporating physics-informed loss functions and exhibits adaptability for predicting more complex scenarios beyond the training dataset. The optimizer uses the framework as a predictive model to minimize the portion of undesired indoor air velocity with optimal window positions. Furthermore, a design tool is implemented using the methods presented in this research to facilitate early-stage natural ventilation design.

Advisor: Eve Blau

Abstract

What role could a medieval city reconstructed under bourgeois imperialists play in the construction of a modern socialist utopia? And what happens when the socialist future disappears, but the narratives and practices animated by it persist? Through an analysis of the Georgian capital city Tbilisi, this dissertation examines how and why architectural conservation became integrated into the Soviet planning apparatus—what historian R. Antony French described as “the relationship between the past and the plan”—and traces those legacies into postsocialist practice. This project aims to situate Soviet architectural conservation within the context of a broader transnational movement to incorporate heritage into urban planning and national cultural policies. In adopting the perspective of design professionals rather than policymakers or local elites (although there was certainly some overlap), this dissertation offers a much-needed reassessment of cultural heritage scholarship in the region, which has historically privileged the role of internal nationality or religious policies. A state- or nation-centric focus operates entirely within the logic of the Soviet system and often overlooks transnational developments and networks. That Soviet cities like Tbilisi ultimately developed parallel conservation planning practices to those found elsewhere in Europe and America, despite profoundly different economic and political regimes, underscores that traditional understandings of preservation’s role and significance within urban planning history remains incomplete. This dissertation proposes that, contrary to scholarly emphasis on revolutionary iconoclasm, Soviet architects did not necessarily view historic buildings and modern planning as mutually exclusive. In fact, professional discourse increasingly framed urban heritage as an essential component of the modern socialist city, a formulation that was distinctly Marxist and yet entirely in keeping with international conservation trends. Through professional debate and practical experimentation in an arena increasingly mediated by transnational networks of expertise, Soviet Georgian architects and planners generated a distinct model of urban heritage conservation that continues to shape Tbilisi today. And yet this Soviet perspective remains largely absent from heritage conservation scholarship, which more often attributes the field’s development to nationalist revivals and local activist cultures, all later subsumed within a global conservation ethos canonized by international (but predominantly Euro-American) bureaucracies. Understood in the context of transnational urban planning discourse, the Soviet reconstruction of Old Tbilisi illustrates that conservation represented more than nationalist impulses or state propaganda—it was also a generative practice, contributing to a set of new expectations for urban life that both reacted to and drew upon modern planning approaches.

Advisor: K. Michael Hays

Abstract

NASA’s Apollo lunar program, which saw twelve humans occupy a new world, revealed at once that the Earth is a finite resource, and that humanity has no realistic alternative. The existential impact of this revelation on architecture has yet to be fully addressed in discourse. This dissertation contends that precisely this impact was captured in practice by inflatable architecture produced in Europe and the United States between 1965 and 1974. Inflatable structures are creaturely, habitable plastic environments that are animated by continuous air flow from a connected fan. Architectural historians have recognized that inflatables borrowed the aesthetics of the Space Age, but studies largely generalize them as playful bubbles that embraced mobility, impermanence, and expendability vis a vis the cultural turmoil of the 1960s. This study is the first to examine inflatables in tandem with the apogee of the two-century negotiation with air in spaceflight that began with manned ballooning in 1783 and culminated in the 1969 lunar landing. During this period, understanding of physiology and enclosed systems improved enough to protect the body from hostile space environments. This project argues that, at the pinnacle of developing enclosed systems of life support, the porous, leaky inflatable architecture insisted on the entanglement of the human subject with the Earthly environment. Through this, inflatables offered a critical reflection about the durability of life on a limited Earth. This dissertation is organized around two case studies through which it develops the notion of the “post-lunar imaginary” as a habitable model of symbiosis by design, which illustrates how architecture can better cohabitate with the systems and organisms of Earth. Informed by interviews and analysis of drawings, images, and videos, as well as recent studies of non-human phenomena, the project theorizes the work of English artist Graham Stevens and the American architecture collaborative Ant Farm. It closely studies the media of the inflatable—its plastic membrane and air— and its operations as a social actor to reveal the inflatable as an agent that resists, invites, or otherwise mediates between the human and their surroundings. Together, the assemblage of human, membrane, and exterior becomes the more-than-human subject central to the post-lunar imaginary. The domain of architecture shifts from being an extension of the ground, or the constructed figure in the dyad figure-ground, to an articulated area of the atmosphere. Architecture is no longer mere structure, but a form of biological being, life itself.

Advisor: K. Michael Hays

Abstract

Most historical studies of the Lower Nile in the nineteenth century focus largely on the ways in which expert engineers dominated the river through large-scale public works like barrages and dams. This dissertation asks the reverse—how did the Nile landscape demand and produce different methods of knowing? And how did knowing the Nile in these ways require assembling its past? Drawing together agricultural almanacs, surveying manuscripts, printed treatises, and drawings, the study examines the encounter between a set of artifacts and three knowledge communities in Ottoman Egypt—peasant farmers (fellahin), Muslim scholars (‘ulamā), and state engineers (muhandisin). It argues that these actors reckoned with the limits of their own land literacies as they collided and collaborated to form a knowledge system based on the particularities of the terrain. Each chapter revolves around one method of knowing the Nile: cultivating, surveying, translating, and engineering the past. Under eighteenth-century Ottoman rule, peasants practiced cultivation through filaḥa, a term meaning both agriculture and success, which involved a set of sensory techniques that complemented the seasonal rhythms of Nile time. Meanwhile, scholars at the mosque and madrasa of al-Azhar in Cairo copied, verified, and circulated popular manuscripts in what they termed the “uncommon science” of land surveying (misaḥa) which supported a logic of decentralized landholding in the Egyptian countryside. This rich scholarly manuscript culture served in turn as a knowledge infrastructure for the Ottoman-Egyptian viceregal state founding of the Muhandiskhana, Cairo’s school of engineering, in 1816, whose primary aim was to train a new class of engineers in surveying. Former director of the school and an influential figure in Egypt’s industrial projects, Ottoman-Armenian British-educated engineer Yusuf Hekekyan Bey spent years surveying the geography and geology of the Nile landscape. His encounters with local classification and measurement systems, as well as his close study of ancient instruments including the Nilometer river gauge, inspired an elaborate theory of history based on what he called a “monumental system” in the Nile Valley. Across the first half of the nineteenth century, the dissertation shows how the convergence of existing and new surveying methods, media, and actors constituted a complex economy of technical knowledge specific to the Nile landscape. It concludes at a moment just when that landscape was beginning to confront its own attenuation.

Advisor: K. Michael Hays

Abstract

Designers use semiotics to create visual artifacts. The design for a flight attendant’s uniform may be modified to look more “alert,” less “austere,” or more “practical.” The form of a house may be modified to appear more “futuristic,” a car more “friendly,” and a pair of sneakers, “evil.” This process depends on a designer’s existing visual and conceptual vocabulary. This thesis develops a computational approach to augment a designer’s visual form-finding process and enables the designer to discover visual forms beyond her explicit visual and conceptual repertoire. It shows that visual semiotics can be learned by a neural network which can then be used to explore the latent space of a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). Simultaneously it shows that exploring the latent space of a GAN using abstract language expands the range of visual possibilities.

Advisor: Eve Blau

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how energy extraction since the 1970s enabled the birth of market-based policies for environmental protection. Through an investigation of surface mined land reclamation programs in Canada and the United States, I draw a connection between coal and oil extraction and larger shifts in environmental-economic thought. Scholars in critical geography have increasingly critiqued the capitalist motivations behind market-based environmental protection measures, however they have not addressed in detail the processes through which these measures emerged. My work contends that post-extractive land reclamation programs created a new political understanding of nature fundamental to the implementation of market-based environmental policy practiced today. This dissertation uses mined land reclamation programs in North America as a historical practice through which to explore long term changes in the capitalist construction of nature over the latter half of the twentieth-century. As the only form of regulation for surface mining today, land reclamation is the act of restoring and rehabilitating environments destroyed by mining to a state equal to or better than their pre-mined state of productivity. These programs transformed the political conception of nature from an assemblage of natural resources to one consisting of “natural capital,” in which qualities like aesthetics, ecosystems, and biodiversity imbue the environment with value. This process rendered landscapes amenable to new forms of market-based policies and regulatory instruments. My research necessarily emphasizes interdisciplinary connections, requiring investigations of economic theory, ecological techniques, and landscape design. I analyze the methods employed by reclamation professionals as political instruments used to enact legislative changes, develop new land uses, and undermine unionized labor practices. While this work is important to histories of environmental policy, my investigation also reveals how spatial and material histories are essential to understanding the politics of the environment.

Advisor: Erika Naginski

Abstract

This dissertation examines three case studies–a natural grotto, a church, and a book–that catalyzed discussions surrounding the interplay of space, architecture, and the oneiric in the Enlightenment. Each case foregrounds a site, whose reality became contested, and whose textual and visual representations reflected the spatial expression of sacred and secular visions in the course of the eighteenth century. My narrative begins with the discovery of the “marvelous” Grotto of Antiparos at the homonymous island of the Aegean archipelago at the end of the seventeenth century; it then turns to the miraculous episodes that were reported at the cemetery and church of Saint-Médard in Paris, from 1727 onwards; and it concludes with the eccentric architectural dreamworlds staged in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a book originally published in Venice in 1499, which enjoyed a long afterlife in France through a series of reprints, commentaries, and creative adaptations.

Deceivingly singular, the “dream” (both rêve and songe in French) encompassed during this period a wide range of spatially articulated phenomena that weaved the dual heritage of antiquity and the Bible into the scientific vocabulary of the Enlightenment. Thus, the oneiric appears in this dissertation in two ways: on the one hand, it becomes enmeshed with the subject matter, whether it be the astounding experience of the marvelous Grotto of Antiparos, of the miraculous cemetery of Saint-Médard, or of the dreamworld in which the protagonist of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili wanders. In all three cases, it becomes a vehicle to explore how intricate, visionary experiences were articulated spatially, comprehended aesthetically, and, to an extent, repurposed ideologically in the course of the eighteenth century.

On the other hand, the oneiric emerges in this dissertation as a powerful arbiter in the architectural negotiation between a euphoric, late eighteenth-century progressivism and the centrifugal forces of the past. Each of the three episodes my dissertation considers foregrounds a decisive, seemingly rationalizing reframing of historical precedents that brought architecture into uncomfortable proximity with marvelous, miraculous, and licentiously imaginative forces. The aim here is to highlight not only the apparent collision of pre-modern metaphysical attitudes with late eighteenth-century rationalism but also,– and most importantly– their coalescence, as architecture became increasingly the medium for the reshaping of esoteric dreams into republican visions.

Traditionally considered a period of radical secularization and material monism, the Enlightenment has been for the most part overlooked or bypassed by historical surveys of dreaming as the cold, jarring, and uninspiring progenitor of the fervent Romantic fixation with the oneiric subjectivity. Bringing together a wide array of primary sources -from travel accounts and construction registers, all the way to philosophical, religious, and literary works- my dissertation presents an alternative, autonomous and multifaceted understanding of dreaming as an integral and indispensable component of eighteenth-century socio-political processes, highlighting its value as an analytical tool in the study of collective representation, experience, and practice.

Advisor: Erika Naginski

Abstract

This dissertation examines the architectural and infrastructural transformations that followed the rise of coal use in Britain, surveying a period in between coal’s initial adoption in the seventeenth century and the industrialization of the later nineteenth century. At the center of the study is the formation of the world’s first market for fossil fuel in Britain’s central metropolis, London. By examining the spaces of supply, transport, exchange, and consumption that were connected to this market, the dissertation reveals the material, cultural, and ideological consequences that emerged in the process of constructing a world with the surplus energy of coal.

The project proceeds through four chapters, each addressing a different scale of analysis: household, infrastructure, marketplace, and monument. This arc begins with a reexamination of the effects of coal on the design of the domestic fireplace, where the greatest part of London’s fossil fuel was first burned. Next, it considers the connections and dependencies that formed between mine and metropolis, from the construction of large-scale transportation networks that supplied the city with fuel, to the unexpected consequences of coal use on the early modern built environment—its role in propelling London’s unprecedented physical growth and the novel, corrosive pollution that resulted from its widespread consumption. The third chapter examines the development of an urban market for fossil fuel, leading up to a series of commercial and political debates that gathered around the first London Coal Exchange, a building constructed in 1769 to house the trade’s merchants and middlemen. The dissertation concludes with the opening of the second London Coal Exchange on October 30, 1849, following a period of intensive growth in coal-fired steam power and iron production. In this culminating structure, the social, cultural, and economic significance of fossil fuel was transfigured into monumental, architectural form.

In contrast to the sweeping views offered by many histories of energy, the designs discussed in this project turn towards the tangible and specific: a fireplace, a coal wagon, a trade card, or an exchange building. By placing these artifacts within their larger social and natural contexts, the dissertation reveals how the adoption of coal not only affected material conditions, but also began to shape fundamental concepts around household comfort, the growth of commerce, and the unstable boundary between human and natural history. During most of this transitional period, coal use was still understood as a regional peculiarity, rather than a model to be adopted by or imposed onto others. As London’s streets, waterfronts, and buildings became part of an unintentional experiment in creating an energy-intensive urban society, coal reshaped space at multiple scales, from the social construction of bodily expectations to the expansive potential of infrastructures and economies. Taken together, these episodes describe the emergence of a new kind of culture that was founded, in part, on the specious belief that fossil-fueled societies had begun permanently conquering the uncertainties of the natural world.

Advisor: Eve Blau

Abstract

In my dissertation, I study the role of nature in spatial, landscape, and urban planning. The main actor in this investigation is the Danube River: a watershed of 300,000 square miles, the infrastructure of myths since the Argonauts, and a defining geographic feature of the European Southeast. As a watershed it covers a vast space; its scale allows a synoptical view that reveals, rather than abstracts, the underlying ecological contingencies and environmental entities. It flows through the complex political geography of southeast Europe, a space of unresolved tensions that the river was often enlisted to resolve. As a myth, discourse, and identity, the Danube is burdened by these expectations and unrealized plans, furnishing a history of large ambitions, slow changes, and frustrating failures.

The Danube also serves as a methodological proxy for nature. Imagined as a route, a resource, or a rationale, the nature of the river’s unintentional environment – its material, non-human existence – commands, prompts, and authorizes our interventions, and at the same time resists our intentions. How were these multiple understandings of the river and its landscape used to support, challenge, or oppose ideas about spatial order? How was the relationship between the ecological and political orders that the Danube sets up negotiated through the environment? To answer these questions, I study infrastructural projects and plans of various scales that attempted to make political sense of a natural region or used nature as a rationale to justify political goals in a region that, while often fragmented by volatile nationalism, was also used as a testing site of international cooperation and collaboration.

I study the river itself as infrastructure: an environment that enables operations and activities, that encroaches upon vast areas of physical space, that spans time and political changes, that is inextricable from political power, and that, crucially, provides both the model and the canvas for further infrastructural imagination.

I focus on the period between the 1850s and 1970s, during which environmental issues were brought to the fore of political thinking in the move from nature conservation to environmentalism. It was also the age of exponential acceleration in global communications, trade, migrations, colonization, and decolonization. Calibrated by two world wars, it was a period of frequent environmental destructions and reconstructions. I look at the river as a facilitator of the 19th-century free trade, an enabler of National Socialist autarkic and colonial visions, and a hopeful guarantee of postwar technocratic prosperity. Within this general frame, I trace a trajectory of changing projections of the Danube River on the space of southeastern Europe, of the various ways that the Danube River was thought of as the region’s physical and metaphorical infrastructure.

The episodes of engineering and planning that I investigate engage landscapes of various sizes and scales: the construction of jetties in the Danube Delta in the mid-nineteenth century, the planning of the city of Vienna by the National Socialist regime, and the building of the Iron Gates Powerplant in the 1960s on the Danube between Yugoslavia and Romania. I home in on these specific points and explore how these local interventions enter the plans to overhaul the river’s physical environment at different scales. I pan along the river as an artery calibrated by these sites and zoom out to see the Danube Basin emerging as a hydrological entity, a conceptual and political unit, and a planning space.

Advisor: Neil Brenner

Abstract

African urbanization is often understood in an exceptional light. Africa-focused work within the field of urban studies emphasizes the distinctiveness of African cities through their growing populations and generative informal social and economic spaces. Such work often highlights the exceptional local nature of African cities and urbanization ‘beyond’ the Global North. While recognition of the heterogeneous nature of African cities, populations, and cultures is necessary, such exceptional arguments risk obscuring the profoundly global histories embedded within African urbanization and its implications for global capitalism. These obstructions prevent urban studies scholars from acknowledging the salience of African urbanization to the broader field.

Since the Berlin Conference on West Africa in 1884-1885, African urban transformation has been fundamental to the history of global capitalism. The General Act of the Berlin Conference divided the colonial control of Africa across European powers and determined the terms of labor, land access, and trade within and beyond the continent. The lineages of this spatial transformation continue to structure current labor regimes, economies, cities, and spaces in Africa, which, in turn, shape social and economic processes on a global scale. Colonial state strategies of dispossession, informalization, racialization, and political subjugation utilized urban space as a mechanism through which to establish and sustain a broad range of inequalities. Such inequalities include access to employment and land, exposure to infectious disease risk, and inadequate housing and infrastructure. The historical creation of these disparities has emerged at the fault lines of current challenges across urban Africa.

This dissertation consists of five chapters addressing African urbanization and its implications for global capitalism through a theoretical and empirical lens. The first chapter interrogates the historical structure of informality in Zambia through the transforming colonial labor regimes in the Copperbelt. The second chapter addresses how urbanization and urban segregation for the purposes of mining labor and pandemic control were used to define and reify the concept of ‘race’ in South Africa. The third chapter demonstrates the global economic prominence of Lubumbashi, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, through its resource extraction since 1885. The fourth chapter returns to South Africa, addressing the country’s contention with post-apartheid democracy, protest, and popular sovereignty. The fifth and final chapter covers ground more broadly, as it revisits the topic of urban informality and its legacies by considering it in relation to climate change, a key issue facing Africa and the world today.

Themes of this dissertation are considered both historically and contemporarily and include urban informality, the purposeful manufacturing of impoverished workforces, the racialization of people through spatial strategies, and the socially produced nature of health and disease. This dissertation thus tackles core African urban issues which are present in and critical to global discourses on spatial inequality and the continent’s theoretical and empirical position in relation to colonialism and global capitalism. This analysis of African urbanization invites readers to rethink concepts such as ‘informality,’ ‘race,’ the ‘global,’ ‘sovereignty,’ and ‘agency’ within the field of urban studies, demonstrating the salience of African urbanization to the field.

Advisor: Antoine Picon

Abstract

In this dissertation, I examine the historical relationship between quantitative data, economic models, and the urban development process in the United States. For centuries, local and national governments have recorded information about buildings, land values, and property transactions for the purposes of tax collection. Beginning in the final decades of the 19th Century, the building professions – architects, construction engineers, property developers, and their financial backers – began to significantly expand the scope of numerical information collected about the world of buildings, in order to guide decisions about what, where and how much to construct. This dissertation traces the history of data collection and analysis by the American building trades from the earliest statistical surveys of construction and property markets at the turn of the 20th Century to the rise of “big data” today. Throughout, I examine the ways in which the resulting datasets have been incorporated into models of urban change by the real estate development community, government policymakers, and scholars of the city. The data these actors collect does not merely reflect the present conditions of a given city’s built fabric or capture a snapshot of the “property market” at a given point in time. Rather, data collected about buildings, cities, land values, and construction transforms the urban development process: both by altering how builders conceive of the market for urban space, and by enabling new and more complex forms of construction and finance. The twinned history of data and urban development is necessarily also the story of finance and its particular relationship to property. Numerical information about the built environment is the interface between the building trades and the institutions that finance them, a common language for the transmission of market signals from local actors – architects, developers, and brokers – to capital markets, and vice versa. Each wave of intensification in the collection of property and construction data has coincided with a revolution in urban development patterns. This dissertation proceeds through four historical episodes, each defined by a significant expansion in the methods and purposes of data collection about buildings, construction and property markets: the turn of the 20th Century, in which the New York real estate community pioneered new analytic techniques to field capital for the first generation of steel-reinforced skyscrapers; the 1920s, culminating in the great building boom in American cities in the latter years of that decade; the Depression and post-war decades, in which property market data was put to new purposes of public planning, private development, and scholarly analysis; and the digital era beginning in the 1980s, in which computational methods were applied to property market analysis and investment, providing a basis for the “globalization” of real estate finance and development in the present day.

Advisor: K. Michael Hays

Abstract

This dissertation investigates historical formulations of the white cube as a link between European modernism and Mediterranean vernacular. Architectural history consistently presents white and cubical modernist designs as resulting from the gradual erasure of ornaments as marks of pastness. The first two chapters of this dissertation shift this paradigm by reframing the historical appearance of bare volumes as resulting not only from the removal of ornament but also from the introduction of Mediterranean vernacular as a shared modernist reference. For this purpose, this dissertation locates the origin of white and cubical designs by seminal architects Adolf Loos (1870-1933), Marcel Breuer (1902-1981), and Le Corbusier (1887-1965) in their encounters with vernacular buildings in Mediterranean countries. Upon their return to Northern Europe, they re-introduced the white façades, flat roofs, and modularity they observed in Greek island villages and North African medinas into their own architectural proposals. This first pair of chapters argues that these architects’ designs for modernist white cubes stem from a primitivist gaze upon the work of vernacular builders.

Parallel this demonstration, the third and fourth chapters of this dissertation measure this modernist gaze against discourses formulated by localized Mediterranean figures invested in vernacular traditions. These protagonists of agency critically responded to modernists’ appropriation of Mediterranean built patrimonies. They include the Palestinian ethnographer Tawfiq Canaan (1882-1964), French-Algerian novelist Akli Tadjer (b. 1954), and French-Algerian artist Kader Attia (b. 1970). These alternative figures also approached the white cube as the location of encounters between tradition and modernity, yet on their own terms and as an instrument for self-determination rather than fetishization. Their dissentient gestures conclude this dissertation’s narration of the white cube through a 180 degrees reversal, from primitivist object to expression of grassroots agency. The overall structure of this inquiry is thus a full circle: first examining how European modernist architects approached Mediterranean vernacular, then investigating how localized Mediterranean figures countered this modernist vision. This dissertation concludes with methodological reflections on reciprocity in transcultural architectural objects.

Advisor: K. Michael Hays

Abstract

Half a century after the last explicit attempt to theorize the phenomenon of the “avant-garde” in art (Peter Bürger, Theorie Der Avantgarde 1974), the production of the so-called “historical avant-gardes” has been well documented historically but remains only partially theorized. Founded on an extensive survey of the history, theory, and criticism of the concept of an artistic avant-garde, its terminological trajectory (Chapter 1), the debates which have shaped its historiography (Chapter 2), the discourse around its emergence and exhaustion (Chapter 3), this research centers on a philosophical and theoretical negotiation of the complex notion of artistic combativeness from the perspective of affect studies and critical poetics. Historically focused on the expanded Interwar Years in Europe (1909-1944), the hypothesis is that beneath their stylistic diversity and sociopolitical incommensurability, the forms (objects, texts, events) produced by the self-proclaimed comrades of historical Futurism, Constructivism, Dada and Surrealism were symptomatic of an internally chiastic mindset of revolutionary impulse (agon) and emotional struggle (agony), which fueled their fiery declarations and guided their formal experimentations.

Following Fredric Jameson’s example in the Political Unconscious, the semiotic square introduced by A.J. Greimas for the analysis of complex terms, is here employed for the further subdivision of the initial affective pair (agon – agony) into four specific constituents of combative action (Chapter 4), namely activism, antagonism, nihilism, and agonism, in accordance with Renato Poggioli’s seminal typology of avant-gardism (Teoria, 1962). The performative concept of ‘Gestus’ (gesture), originating from Bertolt Brecht’s theorizations of modern dramaturgy, is mobilized to facilitate the examination of the objects of the avant-garde as material embodiments of the combative attitudes under investigation (Chapter 5). Reduced to ground form-making gestures, the Interwar movements are then inserted into the affective ontology and scrutinized for their level of attraction to the four attitudinal poles, in a way which further granulates Interwar avant-gardism into an ideological counterpart (Chapter 6) and a dimension of drives (Chapter 7). Ultimately, the production of action-centric accounts for Interwar artworks is expected to grant an otherwise classicized production with renewed theoretical relevance, while the proposed “virtual map” of combativeness offers a pedagogical tool for instructing the European avant-garde across media and disciplines in a decentered and inventive manner.

Advisor: Diane Davis

Abstract

How do communities find residential stability in an unstable world? This question—central to the field of urban studies—is even more urgent in relation to groups who have experienced turmoil and displacement in their immediate past. In the recent history of Colombia, a decades-long civil conflict has produced more than 6 million internally displaced persons (IDPs). They have followed a migration pattern from rural areas—disproportionally affected by conflict—to urban centers, echoing cases in many nation-states where civil conflicts or climate change increasingly displace families to a multiplicity of urban centers. My study based on Granada—a small Colombian city of about 80,000 inhabitants that has absorbed tens of thousands of IDPs over the last three decades—examines different processes of neighborhood creation among displaced persons and argues that these experiences affected the means available for displaced residents to make claims on the city. It shows that subtle differences in neighborhood sponsorship, or neighborhood enablers (e.g., the state, a local patron, local clientelistic leaders, armed actors, self-organized residents), can affect the strategies residents use to gain access to housing. In the process, it also explains why different displaced neighborhood communities develop different collective capacities to make claims on the city.

Based on one year of fieldwork—through interviews, participant observation, and extensive review of City Council Minutes—I examined neighborhood formation processes retroactively in two free housing projects, one land occupation, and one land subdivision by a pirate developer in Granada. Building on an inductive logic and using a comparative method to contrast these different resettlement types, I identify similarities and differences within and across vulnerable populations and spaces that are rarely disaggregated. In addition to detailing how and why communities of displaced neighbors pursue different housing acquisition strategies, assess the impact of their efforts on degrees of self-organization among neighbors and post-conflict reconstruction more generally.

Advisor: Erika Naginski

Abstract

This project investigates the connection between the 18th-century British landscape tradition and the representation of colonial contexts in the Americas, especially the way foreign sites were rendered to seem aesthetically familiar and spatially contiguous with Britain. The project’s organization is based on the Scenographia Americana (1768), a folio of twenty-eight engravings that brought into view the expanding landscape of Britain’s transatlantic frontier in a period marked by the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763). Projecting a cohesive view in preparation for war over territory was of utmost importance, and the Scenographia Americana accordingly brought together “Drawings taken on the spot by several Officers of the British Navy and Army.” Their ranks included a cohort of statesmen, royal military engineers, political thinkers as well as artists, draftsmen, and printmakers; the topographical records, field notes, tactical descriptions, and picturesque scenes they contributed to the project produced nothing less than Britain’s first coherent prospect of the North American landscape and the Caribbean. A close analysis of these views as well as the technical, artistic, and ideological mechanisms that underlay their composition will reveal the ways in which landscape can serve as a narrative framework for shaping a historical consciousness and materializing the space of empire.

Advisor: Antoine Picon

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation at a time inaugurates the field of architectural irenics and rewrites the architectural history of Italy’s First Republic. It accomplishes both by depicting that history as a succession of compromises brokered around buildings and urban plans with the purpose of settling ever-changing democratic conflict. It claims that architecture was in part responsible for sustaining the sociopolitical comity that blessed Italy, like most of Western Europe, between the end of the Second World War and the 1980s. Architecture contributed to that endeavor by spatially and materially inflecting the egalitarian and stabilizing ambitions of the welfare state, that is, of the organizational apparatus set up to underwrite that comity.

Almost unheard of in architectural history and undertheorized even in political philosophy, compromise sits nevertheless at the core of democratic practice. Compromise is both a method of governance and its outcome; a process aimed at excluding violence from the resolution of conflict that brings contending parties to willingly meet halfway. Often discussed as a function of parliamentary arithmetic or of ruling coalitions, this thesis posits that cultural products intervene in its actualization, architecture notably. How may architecture catalyze compromise? How does it codify it? How is compromise achieved when the object in dispute is architectural? The dissertation addresses these questions through the detailed examination of three significant cases.

During reconstruction, between the mid-1940s and the mid-1950s, historicism in architecture and the visual arts was the correlative of political moderation, which all parties embraced on subscribing the Constitution. The Florence Commodities Exchange, by architect Eugenio Rossi, built between 1949 and 1953 in an area razed by war, was a triumph of that twofold compromise: between tradition and modernization, and between labor and capital. Through the building, Florentine Christian Democrats sought to redeem the damaged city and the broken civitas by constructing a commonwealth on the reliable foundations of the city’s glorious past and of social-Christian values.

The research then moves onto the Appia Antica lands between the 1950s and the 1970s to assess the endless succession of clashes and compromises around their protection. Urban explosion endangered well-being in the city and accordingly called for a more proficient welfare paradigm, which the center-Left alliance between Christian Democracy and the Socialist Party introduced from 1962. That paradigm was planning. In their transparency and verifiability, democratic town plans vowed to be the acme of compromissionist methods. The Appia greenbelt’s peripeties in Rome provide a concentrate of planning’s slow emergence in Italy as the best guarantor of new-generation, sociospatial rights.

Finally, the summer festival Estate romana between 1977 and 1985 crowned the creative unfolding of welfare architecture with neorationalist edifices paradoxically fitting for wondrous experiences. Rome’s city hall organized the egalitarian celebrations to wrest the public sphere from speculators, from terrorists, and from abducting mass media. Salvaging Italian democracy and securing civil togetherness was what with irenic bona fides the Italian Communist Party pursued when it offered to consociate with conservative forces under the Historic Compromise. But because the city was the place of strife, only architecture could supply the aesthetic concretion that that grand strategy otherwise lacked.

In the conclusion to the dissertation, I claim that the Western European welfare state was the historical formation that came closest to realizing a “beautiful democracy.” Such culmination was possible then due to the sustained practice of compromise. I call beautiful democracy the social state that as a matter of course procures its citizens aesthetic pleasure in the form of irenic bliss –the irenic bliss of compromise. As this dissertation shows, welfare-era compromise was a combined aesthetic and irenic practice that found a privileged site in architecture. On the sporadic occasions that it came into being, the beautiful democracy did so through the juste milieu architectures of the welfare state.

Advisor: Antoine Picon

Abstract

The concept of mass-produced housing occupies a prominent position in the modern architectural discipline. For many decades, architects have persistently attempted to devise residential designs that can be quickly and cheaply manufactured on a large scale. Architectural historians have meanwhile frequently studied such designs. Yet existing scholarship has so far overlooked a key chapter in the architectural quest for mass-produced houses. With an emphasis on the French context, this dissertation uncovers how the Great War of 1914 to 1918 shaped architects’ pursuit of mass-produced housing while elevating this pursuit into a centerpiece of their discipline.

From about 1916 to 1926, the repercussions of the Great War forced architects all over the world to rethink the junction of housing design and building technologies. Faced with a surge of efficient military engineering and rapid construction exploits, the proliferation of demountable huts addressing emergency wartime needs, and the widespread destruction of towns along the front lines, architects in various nations turned their attention to residences that could be reproduced serially. War-aggravated shortages of affordable housing, building materials, and manpower stimulated designers to think creatively. To surmount these challenges, some architects seized upon technical inventions that had been developed as part of the race to wage an all-out war of attrition.

France around the time of the Great War constituted a particularly active locus of architectural proposals for serial housing. It became such a locus because it harbored a potent cocktail of skyrocketing wartime industrialization, a dauntingly mammoth reconstruction process, and frequent exchanges between men of different nationalities. By repeatedly seeking to participate in rebuilding French regions ravaged by fighting, Germans and Americans contributed to transforming France into a crucible of architectural ideas about mass-produced housing. The accompanying geopolitical tensions, as well as internal French politics and ethical dilemmas concerning the military toll of new technologies, influenced how architects and non- architects of that time conceptualized mass-produced housing. Analyses in this dissertation reveal that a share of architects’ present-day assumptions about mass-produced housing are actually ingrained vestiges of the Great War, which profoundly altered the architectural discipline in the same way that it profoundly altered world history.

Advisor: Ali Malkawi

Abstract

Natural ventilation reflects an emphasis on self-control in architecture: it is a crucial aim in the creation of healthy, comfortable indoor environments with low energy consumption. The design of naturally ventilated buildings and their control algorithms signifies the extension of design boundaries to stochastic elements in the natural environment. Unlike the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system, the driven forces of natural ventilation, such as the wind and the temperature difference, are not reinforced by a mechanical fan. In buildings, the only controllable component of natural ventilation is the operable window. Conventional natural ventilation control strategies lack the capacity fully to use weather information (e.g., outdoor temperature, wind direction and speed) or rely on rule-based control. Therefore, such strategies typically do not fully achieve the goal of high energy performance.

This research developed a controllable natural ventilation system (CNVS) to co-optimize the occupant’s thermal comfort, indoor air quality and building energy efficiency, as well as its supportive Internet of things (IoT) research platform. The seasonal CNVS is a 2-layer modular structure. The three CNVS systems (summer, winter, spring/fall) used a combination of a daytime module, a nighttime module, and an occupancy module. The development of the CNVS framework relied on the data-driven predictive control. The evaluation of CNVS was realized in the lab of Harvard HouseZero building.