Selected Doctoral Dissertations from Architecture Ph.D. Graduates

Spatializing the Knowledge Economy: The Campus as a Discursive Project, Parallel Project, and More-than-Institutional Project

By Bader Albader

In contrast to the normative scholarly and professional expectation that the university’s spatialization be tightly coupled with its institutional purposes and prerogatives, this dissertation posits that the institution and the campus may purposively be loosely coupled. Employing a multimodal research design that incorporates interpretive, historiographical, and qualitative strategies to bear upon textual, visual, and spatial data, this dissertation can be understood as a multipronged study that nuances the campus-institution relationship and challenges a straightforward indexicality between them. Guided by this overarching objective, this dissertation comprises three distinct core chapters, each with its own focus under the larger umbrella of the campus-institution nexus. This set of approaches allows me to parse both the conceptual context of higher educational spatialization as well as specific instances of this spatialization at the intersection of the institutional, the national, and the global.

The first core chapter takes up the campus as a discursive project, surveying the range of campus planning and design monographs to trace the ways in which scholars, practitioners, and other authors have written the campus into existence as a spatial concept, rather than an institutional metaphor. Showing that variant understandings of the campus’ orientation towards its institution animate this discursive production, this chapter posits what might be called ‘the discursive campus’ as a conceptual assemblage of these different epistemic logics.

The second core chapter elucidates the relationship between institutional and spatial form during the rapid founding of an elite graduate research institution, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), in Saudi Arabia, a wealthy absolute monarchy. This context – where both the institution and the campus started out as blank canvases for founders to aspirationally shape – shows that their formation were parallel projects, with the campus project ultimately serving as a Saudi-based anchor for the globally-oriented institutional project.

The third core chapter focuses on the masterplans of Sabah Al-Salem University City (SSUC), a new campus for a preexisting but spatially-fragmented public university in Kuwait, a parliamentary emirate. Here, campus design had to contend with institutional and contextual pressures, such as the need for additional space and to heed a new segregation-of-the-sexes law; this chapter shows how two successive masterplans in turn engaged and addressed concerns much broader than the institution’s. Though ostensibly products of specific campus design commissions, these masterplans constituted more-than-institutional documents.

These three core chapters substantiate my affirmation of the viability of a discursive and designerly understanding of the campus that is not in lockstep with the university institution. This examination of the discourse alongside two projects in relatively understudied Gulf countries demonstrates that the planning and design of campuses entail much more than simply responding to given institutional data and desiderata. Campus projects are means of working through a broader cacophony of desires, and serve as records of their management, reconciliation, or obfuscation.

Economic Feasibility of Achieving Net-Zero Energy in Residential Buildings in the USA

By Hyeonsoo Kim

Over the past few decades, residential buildings have been one of the major sectors responsible for a large share of energy demand in the United States (EIA, 2020). However, such high energy demand from residential buildings will cause economic and environmental problems, eventually leading to the growing expectations for implementing net-zero energy buildings (NZEBs) in the near future.

Therefore, this study provides a financial framework for implementing NZEBs in the United States residential sector by utilizing two popular renewable energy systems, solar P.V. and geothermal heat pumps. A two-story single residential building in Ann Arbor, Michigan was simulated using the TRNSYS software tool. Specifically, this study analyzed the discounted payback periods of the following four different heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems; these are:
(1) air-source heat pump (ASHP)
(2) PV-integrated ASHP (PV+ASHP)
(3) ground-source heat pump (GSHP), and
(4) PV-integrated GSHP (PV+ GSHP).

In addition, each building’s HVAC system has been subdivided into multiple scenarios
based on the level of technological (i.e., P.V. energy conversion rate) and institutional (i.e., CO2 equivalent price of ETS) improvements required to achieve the net-zero emission target by 2050.

First, this study reveals high expectations for installing PV-integrated GSHP in residential buildings because PV+GSHP generates electricity using solar and geothermal heat sources. The results clearly show that technological advancements, such as improving the performance of solar panels, have a much more significant effect on reducing the payback periods of heat pump systems compared with raising the CO2 equivalent price of the emission trading scheme (ETS).

More specifically, installing a PV-integrated GSHP enables the implementation of NZEB with a payback period of fewer than ten years when the technology reaches a P.V. energy conversion rate of 32.5%. Second, this study highlights the growing demand for renewable energy sources by supporting the broader application of investment tax credits (ITC) to the United States residential sector. Specifically, this study presents reasonable tax credit rates that should be supported by the U.S. federal government when applying solar and geothermal heat sources to residential heat pump systems. Results show that the current 26% solar tax credit rate is reasonable under today’s technological and institutional context. Meanwhile, the high investment cost of GSHP does not ensure economic investment but requires government subsidies that far exceed the current 26% geothermal heat pump tax credit rate.

In conclusion, this research framework clarifies the ambiguous issues related to technology and policy that must be addressed to allow NZEBs to become more economically feasible in the United States residential sector. Furthermore, implementing NZEBs with reasonable payback periods requires significant improvements in technology and policy. This goal can hardly be achieved with short-term efforts. Therefore, many building engineers, technicians, and policy makers are required to play the role as a frontier of this challenge and actively contribute to achieving the net-zero emission target by 2050.

Age, Place, and Health: Understanding the Role of Environmental and Technological Innovations in Enhancing Older Adults’ Quality of Life

by Kimia Erfani

‘Aging-in-place’ as a widely adopted global policy has sparked environmental and technological innovations that aim to enhance the quality of life (QoL) of older adults. While these innovations offer safe living arrangements enabling older adults to remain in their homes for longer, they often fall short in addressing increased social isolation and loneliness among seniors, which in turn can substantially reduce their QoL. Investigating the engagement of seniors with these techno-spatial responses and the capacity of these innovations in enhancing their social connection needs are at the center of my research. I focus on understanding non-institutionalized seniors’ behavioral dynamics while engaging with social information and communication technologies (social ICTs), as well as investigating the physical attributes of their home environments conducive to enhanced social engagement.

I employ a mixed-methods research design utilizing two phases: correlational design that incorporates a survey questionnaire as the initial tactic for data collection, followed by a second phase of qualitative design that utilizes in-depth interviews. This research will inform built environment designers about the importance of prioritizing social connectivity for older adults’ enhanced QoL and well-being. I will outline equitable design strategies that can protect the health and well-being of older adults against the detrimental consequences of social isolation, including strategies such as incentivizing and subsidizing access to social ICTs, especially among marginalized populations and during public health crises. In addition, the broader role of the economic, and systemic stressors in older adults’ social life, as well as in seniors’ access and engagement with Social ICT technologies, will be discussed.

Situated at the intersection of environmental design research and public health, this research informs equitable environmental and technological design interventions that encourage healthy aging.

The Stasi as an Architectural Producer: Surveillance and Scientific Management in the East German Built Environment 1961-1989

by Emine Kayim

This dissertation uncovers the largely overlooked architectural history of the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) Ministry of State Security (MfS)—commonly known as the Stasi. The East German state security apparatus took over many architectural roles. It acted as—what I term—a building agent, surveilling the GDR’s industrial labor force and monitoring the productivity and efficiency of the centrally regulated building economy. The ministry was a building developer and managed construction firms to realize numerous structures in the service of its employees and East German functionaries. The Stasi was also a building user that analyzed and documented the built environment to devise secret policing methods. To establish the security of its premises and maintain the secrecy of its undertakings, the Stasi ran an extensive bureaucratic operation, and processes, protocols, and techniques of architectural and spatial production prominently figured into the Stasi’s roster of scientifically determined surveillance and policing functions. As a result, I argue that architecture and surveillance were mutually articulated within the Stasi’s networks of knowledge and power between 1961 and 1989.

To study the relationship between architecture and surveillance in the GDR, this dissertation explores the Stasi as an architectural producer, asking: by what means did state surveillance influence the production of the East German built environment and—in turn—by what means did architectural spaces and processes affect the methods and end goals of state surveillance and state power? In response, I include surveillance agents among the constellation of architects, engineers, administrators, and policy makers partaking in the production of the East German built environment. I treat surveillance as both information collection and a spatial practice, requiring the analysis, reconfiguration and (re)production of the built environment according to surveillance objectives. And lastly, I examine architectural knowledge obtained through surveillance and produced for surveillance, both of which had ramifications for the organization and use of the East German built environment.

Investigating architecture as the means, site, object, and subject of state surveillance and state power, the dissertation makes a series of interventions to the historiography of the Stasi and the GDR. I demonstrate that, while the Stasi acted as a control mechanism overseeing the compliance establishment of the Soviet-socialist building economy, it grew increasingly knowledgeable and critical of the roadmaps devised by the GDR’s center of power. The ministry tried to implement these insights to its own enterprises’ production schemes. The efforts to scientifically advance technologies and management of building, however, was conflicted by the bourgeoning surveillance bureaucracy over the Stasi building industry, which paradoxically was a response to the Stasi’s inability to establish supervisory capacities through visual-spatial means. The surveillance organization’s involvement in industrialized building production, especially in the 1973 Housing Program, gave it access to an intimate knowledge of the East German built environment, nonetheless. The Stasi diligently read, registered, and reproduced architectural spaces according to surveillance objectives, but the replicability of typified housing structures did not translate into the replicability of policing measures.

Examining these recursive and yet incompatible chains of operations that characterized the mutual articulation of architecture and surveillance in the GDR, the dissertation ultimately discusses the ways totalitarian police states render themselves indispensable but also dysfunctional—and what role architecture plays in it.

Aural Architecture as Affect: Understanding the Impact of Acoustic Environments on Human Experience

By Alaa Algargoosh

Architectural design plays a significant role in shaping human experience in buildings through the perception of space. However, architectural characteristics not only result in visual attributes that affect how the occupants see the space, but they also create auditory environments that impact what the occupants hear based on sound propagation and reflections from surfaces. Yet, architectural acoustics’ physical measurements do not precisely reflect the human acoustical experience because other perceptual and cultural aspects contribute to it, as the aural architecture approach suggests. The perceptual aspect deals with the psychological and physiological effects of sound and its relation to human cognition and emotions, while the cultural aspect focuses on the role of cultural background in sound perception.

This research offers a comprehensive approach that allows for a deeper understanding of such experience by studying the interaction between the physical, perceptual, and cultural aspects of acoustics. Since worship spaces offer an example in which the spiritual experience is dependent on the acoustic environment, this study adopts them as case studies aiming to answer the following questions: how does an acoustic environment influence human experience and emotions? What are the acoustic characteristics and parameters related to that emotional impact? What are the links between the acoustic characteristics and the emotional impact?

This research analyzes the experience by recreating acoustics using virtual reality technology and subjective methods that include self-report in addition to objective methods that include physiological measurements (i.e., heart rate and skin conductance), to validate the results. The results demonstrated that the acoustic environment amplifies the intensity of the emotional impact depending on the building’s architectural design and that familiarity with sound and acoustic characteristics can increase this impact.

Then, the research proposes a method to investigate the response of the room to the excitation by the sound source considering its architectural characteristics through frequency-domain analysis based on auralization. The auralization-based method named (multiple convolutions) proved its ability to identify room modes that create resonance for spaces with complex geometries, such as worship spaces, taking into account the architectural surfaces’ materials and the source location.

Finally, the study analyzes the room acoustics’ parameters and includes a correlational analysis to develop indicators for studying the auditory experience and to establish guidelines for designing spaces that enhance it. The correlation between the emotional impact of spaces and their acoustic parameters illustrated the significance of low frequencies in the emotional impact of worship spaces and raised the issue of considering these frequencies when analyzing and designing such spaces. Consequently, the research calls for further studies on the architectural characteristics of acoustic environments that impact emotions and enhance well-being.

Speaking, Gesturing, Drawing, Building: Relational Techniques of a Kreyol Architecture

By Irene Brisson, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, Louisiana State University

The vernaculars and creoles—architectural and linguistic—used to produce most of the global built environment continue to be delegitimized as ways of knowing, building, and inhabiting. This dissertation recuperates these voices in an ethnohistorical examination of building practices in Leyogann, Haiti in the 2010s. Shared mediums of communication provide an inclusive lens through which to analyze the design practices of architects, builders or bòsmason, and residents. I ask how such diverse actors communicate design ideas within and across social hierarchies. While using media in common, the enunciation of design ideas via hand drawn plans or digitally drafted drawings, via French or Kreyòl, via justifications of normativity or aesthetic quality correlates with the class position and training of architects, bòsmason, clients, and self-builders. Communication is relational and mediated, in this case, by speech, gesture, drawing, and building; therefore, it manifests differentials of power often marked by nationality, language, gender, and race. I theorize Kreyòl architecture as a process of on-going creolization that encompasses difference and contradiction to produce a more inclusive narrative of building culture. Architecture in Haiti, often figured as absent or scarce by international observers, has a long history of indigenous, colonial, postcolonial, modern, and neoliberal building practices informed by social and political phenomena. I begin to fill this lacuna without replicating historic forms of exclusion by considering, at once, the house building practices of university-educated architects, of contractors with vocational and jobsite training, and of self-building homeowners. This dissertation draws on field notes from ethnographic observation, audio recordings, interviews, reports, photographs, online media, text exchanges, and documents from libraries and personal papers to interrogate how people produce residential architecture in western Haiti. I situate my study in Leyogann, a city peripheral to the capital of Port-au-Prince but at the epicenter of the 2010 earthquake to destabilize preconceived narratives of architecture as restricted to a cosmopolitan elite. The analysis of quotidian building practices reveals a more fluid field of relational and contingent design practices than those codified by the discipline of architecture. Haitian architects, like their international colleagues, face contradictions between professional ideals of serving the public good and daily practices occupied with instrumental drawing and coordination. They experiment with different forms of communicating their value and expertise to clients but serve a minority. In turn, bòsmason become designers in practice as they build houses for clients designing in-situ as they resolve client imaginaries with project constraints. Misalignments in design intentions and expectations arise when actors communicate in disparate registers marked by their social positions. The negative outcomes of such miscommunication are demonstrated in the design and redesign of post-disaster housing. Intentional or not, design imbues symbolic meanings in houses communicating both belonging and exclusion. At its best Kreyòl architecture describes the liberatory function of home as people are related through complex topographies of land, history, politics, and ancestry. This dissertation elides typical categorizations of style or pedigree and to legitimate the design practices of people historically excluded from, or marginalized within, the discipline of architecture. Understanding how architects, engineers, contractors, and residents in Leyogann conceive of houses and how they communicate their priorities elucidates the fraught relationships in design and construction. Apprehension of creolized bodies of knowledge and design strategies also establishes a base from which a safe, joyful, and dignified built environment can be imagined.

Reimagining Shenzhen Urbanism: Villages-in-the-City, Architecture Biennales, and Modern City-Building

by Jieqiong Wang

This dissertation tells an alternative story of Shenzhen’s emergence as one of the world’s great manufacturing cities by focusing on the transformation of over one thousand former farming and fishing villages within the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone into Villages-in-the-City [ViC] that today house about 10 million out of Shenzhen SEZ’s 14 million people. Instead of showing these villages as places of scarcity, precarity, and conflict, I approach them as critical sites of production and supply, providing sites for small-scale manufacturing, local retail, and above all, affordable housing for newly arrived migrants. Yet, these ViCs are not only visually concealed between hypermodern urban structures but also omitted in the dominant narrative of Shenzhen’s model-city building process. With historical materials and ethnographic observations, I identify three prominent sets of actors: (1) urban planners (concretizing central plans and visions); (2) architects (representing the global imagination); and (3) local villagers (as bottom-up forces), in shaping the ViCs’ spatial evolution and their relationship to the larger urban transformation. As I show, this complex top-down/bottom-up formation of the ViC’s is very different from the more familiar model of informal settlements in the global South.

My analysis of maps, planning atlases, government reports, and photographs reveals that the spatial transformation of ViCs was not outside of planning. Instead, from the 1950’s socialist ideal of perpetuating villages as cooperative production sites through the 1980s’ and 1990s’ development strategy of supporting village manufacturing industries and affordable rental housing for migrant workers, planning played a guiding but not controlling role in the process. My participation in an urban renewal project/event (architecture biennale) targeting ViCs further unveils the expanding agency of the architectural imagination during China’s ongoing modernization process. Global architects operating mostly through the Shenzhen Biennales turned creative power into political and market power through their partnerships with local architects and with the local government. In addition, through extensive interviewing and other fieldwork in a selected ViC, I reveal a growing gap between the original local villagers and their descendants who collectively own the ViC land and the migrant workers who constitute the majority of ViC occupants. Local villagers’ collective land ownership allows them to partner with the local government in attracting foreign investment for rapid growth and increased rents. While the original villagers have profited greatly from Shenzhen’s rise, the migrant workers who provided the labor-power to build the new city have nevertheless become a vulnerable group subject to displacement in Shenzhen’s ongoing effort to build a modern, progressive, and innovative global image. This study of Shenzhen’s ViCs sheds light on the evolving process of city-building in China, which adds local complexities to current debates in globalization and urbanization studies.

Model Predictive Control-based Surface Condensation Prevention for Thermo-active Building Systems (TABS): in regard to the partial theoretical model approach

By Deokoh Woo, Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering, Lawrence Technological University

The potential risk of developing surface condensation keeps thermo-active building systems (TABS) from being applied in buildings located in partly warm and humid climate regions. This study presents a framework for model predictive control (MPC)-based surface condensation prevention that can avoid the surface condensation during the cooling periods when the TABS is in operation. Because MPC determines the input signal for the system not only based on the current states but also on the impact that the actions will have on the future states, it is suitable for anticipatory surface condensation control that must respond to both dynamic indoor condition changes and the time-delay in hygrothermal transfer in advance. Heat and moisture transfer dynamic models were developed for prediction of future states and these dynamic models were calibrated with the measured data to improve the surface condensation prediction accuracy. Based on future states predicted by the calibrated dynamic models, the MPC-based condensation prevention framework adjusts the surface temperature for the TABS in ways that ensure indoor thermal comfort and energy efficiency without the development of surface condensation. The proposed MPC-based surface condensation prevention framework reduced the surface condensation occurrence risk as well as the cooling energy even when the TABS is in operation under warm and humid climate regions. Given the growing demand for the TABS, the proposed MPC framework meets a critical need. By controlling the potential risk of surface condensation development, it can extend TABS use to an area in which climate conditions had made them infeasible.

Testing the Establishment: Authorial Signature and Professional Method in the Architecture of Gunnar Birkerts, 1958–81

By Michael Abrahamson, Assistant Professor (Clinical), School of Architecture, University of Utah

Though he was once among the most recognizable names in American architecture, Gunnar Birkerts has largely been overlooked in the historiography of late modernism. Birkerts was an unusually introspective and self-reflective architect and his collections, therefore, offer a view into the complex intertwining of the personal and the professional for entrepreneurial architects with eponymous firms. Through analyses of Birkerts’sprojects, practice, and pedagogy, the dissertation narrates the confluence of two realities: the persistence of a belief in the artistry of architects and the emergence of conditions that stretched their model of production to its breaking point. Consisting of intensive analyses of four key projects across the US by the firm Gunnar Birkerts and Associates (GBA), the chapters outline the ideas about artistry that continued to shape this firm’s working methods even as large projects prompted Birkerts and his employees to take on new management protocols. Archival records of these projects illustrate the ways Birkertsassured that his authorial signature matched the output of GBA, and vice versa. The dissertation shows how architecture’s turn toward Postmodernism directed architects to fashion themselves as distinctive personalities with signature approaches to design, and that for Birkerts, this self-fashioning was accompanied by a rejection of more bureaucratic working methods and by increased focus on, and specialization within, the more obviously artistic domains of architectural practice.

Programmatic Design Methods in Architecture (GA+TRIZ Solution Search Method)

by Anahita Khodadadi, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, Portland State University

When an architectural design problem is stated, it may take several iterations to evaluate the design alternatives, modify the problem statement and the corresponding solutions and make the final decision. The recursive essence of an architectural design procedure and the designer’s tendency to explore further possibilities increases the use of iterative programming search methods to find suitable solutions. Although there have been successful accomplishments in parametric modeling and evolutionary form exploration methods, the prior step of problem structuring has been developed less. We can still solve the wrong problem correctly. Thus, the step of problem structuring has a significant effect on the final design outcome.

A common challenge in the application of computational design methodology is to discern the parameters that influence the project outcome. Sometimes the solution may be found around a design parameter that is not included in the parametric model and form exploration procedure. This challenge is more likely when contradictory design objectives exist in a project. Then, the designer may favor one design criterion over the others, or compromise (trade-off) and choose a solution among a group of suitable ones. In such cases, the corresponding Pareto front may be studied to find the best trade-off solutions between two or more performative design objectives. A third approach can be the attempt to eliminate the contradiction innovatively. Accordingly, the designer may apply data mining techniques or clustering and classification algorithms to achieve higher-level information or implicit search goals to make a final decision. In this dissertation, I intend to introduce a design search method that a designer unspecialized in the field of data mining can understand and employ in both the formulation of a design problem and in the exploration of generated solutions.

The main goal of this dissertation is to introduce a method which provides better problem structuring and decision making. This computational search method is expected to provide the benefits of the application of a genetic algorithm (GA) and the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) at the same time. The TRIZ Inventive Principles and the associated Matrix of Contradiction are combined with a Non-Destructive Dynamic Population Genetic Algorithm (NDDP GA) used in the ParaGen method, initially developed by Peter von Buelow, to develop the GA+TRIZ method. The GA+TRIZ method helps the designer build a better parametric model where pertinent variables, not all possible ones but those which will more probably be dominant, are included. Furthermore, following the map of the GA+TRIZ design method can provide higher-level information which is useful in making better decisions when conflicting design objectives exist.

To examine the suitability and benefits of the application of the GA+TRIZ search method, four design case studies are carried out using the GA+TRIZ map of work. The cases are chosen from design explorations previously solved using only the ParaGen method. In each design case, the design process and the outcome of the explorations are compared with the corresponding results from in the previous trials with the ParaGen-only procedure. The following four metrics are used to evaluate the application of the GA+TRIZ method:

• Diversity and particularity of solutions
• Performative cost
• Time efficiency
• The amount of data provided for decision making

The outcome of this research is the description of the GA+TRIZ search method along with examples of its application and all the required codes, scripts, and components.

The Effect of Architectural Culture on Client Engagement

by Jennifer Morris

Design studies researchers often agree on the importance of the first stage of the design process and the prominence of the architect and client relationship within this stage. Yet little seems to be known about the early interactions of architect and client. There is also no agreement on when the design process begins: programming, schematic design, or design development.  Some refer to the stages prior to design development as “predesign”, a term suggesting things that come before design. But what is predesign if design takes place whenever someone “makes plans about the future environment” (Cuff 1991, 61).

This dissertation poses the question: how does architectural culture effect client engagement? This question defines culture as a pattern of basic assumptions that a group developed in coping with problems that have worked well enough to be valid and taught to others through socialization (Schein 1984).  It also adopts the term “client engagement” from marketing, where customers are more prevalent than clients and customer engagement is defined as “psychological process that models the underlying mechanisms by which customer loyalty forms for new customers of a service brand, as well as the mechanisms by which loyalty may be maintained for repeat-purchase customers of a service brand” (Bowden 2009, 65).

Qualitative research methods with ethnographic and case study tactics were used to answer this primary research question. Over a total of nine months, the researcher conducted ethnographic observations at three large (over 50 employees) Michigan-based architecture firms that competed with each other for workplace clients.  While at these firms, field notes were taken, ten face-to-face interviews were conducted, a total of 1,112 documents, and 779 hours of audio recordings were collected. Audio recordings were made of meetings internal to the architecture firms as well as with employees of client companies and others in the building industry.

This fieldwork draws on literature from different fields: design studies for architects and facility management for clients.  In addition to the psychological, there is also a mechanical process of client engagement. The mechanical process includes the names and descriptions of each stage that the architect and client encounter.  Architects begin this process with strategic planning while clients begin with the formation of an idea that change needs to happen. The mechanical client engagement process ends with what architects call “programming”, a confusing term since it is also used by clients.

Documents collected from both clients and architects show that this process is primarily motivated by money, observations show that it is more commonly motivated by what organizational studies researchers call positive connections. These are connections that lead “to feelings of inclusion, a felt sense of being important to others, experienced mutual benefit, and shared emotions” (Baker and Dutton 2007, 10). Studies have shown that positive connections lead to greater comprehensions by listeners (Krauss and Fussell 1991), a decrease in interpersonal conflict (Williams 2011), healthy team functioning (Baker and Dutton 2007), cooperation (Cooper and Sosik 2011; Rogerson-Revell 2007), and increase business profits (Spreitzer and Cameron 2012). This dissertation suggests that such findings are also true for positive connections between architects and clients.

The contributions of this dissertation cover many fields, therefore the primary limitations are a matter of depth. Future research could be conducted with smaller firms, more firms, other building typologies, or from the perspective of the client.

Behind the Facade: Evaluating the Effect of Facade Design on Daylight Admittance and Perceptual Assessments

By Azadeh Omidfar Sawyer, Assistant Professor in Building Technology, School of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University

Creating and evaluating architectural spaces is a mixture of art, science and engineering. We know how to make spaces functional in terms of intended use, temperature, light levels, security, and energy efficiency, but our understanding of the qualitative aspects of spaces remains limited. Our knowledge regarding the relations between subjective reactions (sensory/perceptual experience) and physical stimuli is incomplete, with a disconnect between environmental values measured through simulation and users’ sensory and perceptual experiences of the environment. It is critical to address how green design does not necessarily result in comfortable or aesthetically pleasant design.

The proliferation of digital tools for analysis and design has changed how buildings are created and their performance optimized. This shift in design thinking, in parallel with improved fabrication techniques, has created new opportunities for integrating complexity in response to building performance, thus radically reinventing architectural systems. For more than a decade, designers and architects have relied on performance criteria, such as light levels or energy demand, to assess the performance of their design, including the design and performance of building facades.

Building facades are undoubtedly one of the most challenging architectural elements to design, as the issues of aesthetics, performance and functionality must be integrated. A successful building interior depends heavily on the design of the facade, and on a juxtaposition of different spatial volumes and light conditions. Some buildings stimulate feelings of happiness, interest, excitement, while others stimulate disturbance, gloom and discomfort. Factors that strongly affects such feelings is the presence of natural light and darkness, which are the most difficult elements to design for.

Natural light has been one of the critical aspects of valued architectural spaces; it influences the ambiance and the overall atmosphere of the space and how occupants perceive the interior environments. Many of the current lighting metrics focus on quantifying the amount of light on horizontal work surfaces, thus overlooking the importance of daylight perception, ambiance and the dynamic nature of natural light, as affected by facade design.

The focus of this study is on the design of building facades, their pattern, complexity, and effect on daylight distribution and occupants’ visual impressions. The objective is to find ways to enhance the experience of built environment inhabitants through the integration of building science, technology and design.

Through a comprehensive study of current methods for perceptual assessment of light qualities, this research study introduced the application of a new approach from Environmental Psychology to architectural research—Conceptual Content Cognitive Mapping (3CM)—to find attributes that might provide better insight into the questions of light qualities. The 3CM method was used to survey the concepts people find relevant to their experience of daylight in an office environment. The attributes most commonly used to describe why respondents like natural light in their work environment were characterized by emotions, which are ambiguous and tremendously challenging to design for and assess.

To understand the effect of facade design geometry on daylight ingress and distribution, a novel simulation method is introduced in this dissertation. This method calculates the annual spatial illuminance and luminance distribution through building facades, providing hourly light values for a full year. Additionally, a feedback loop is designed, whereby simulation data can be traced back to the building facade, allowing further geometric improvement. This method of designing and evaluating functional building facades promotes the integration of formal building design with sustainable practices.

Lastly, an experimental study using 360° HDR renderings of office environments was conducted to gain insight into the effect of facade design and light distribution on the participants’ subjective impressions. The effect of simulation choices such as, scene materials (color, grayscale, default materials) and level of detail related to the presence of furniture was evaluated in virtual reality (VR). The results indicate that the effects of both color and furniture are statistically significant on numerous attributes about the qualities of the interior and participants’ perception of brightness. The overall preference for a space is related less to actual measured lighting values and more to the overall design of the environment.

The results of this research study highlight the importance of occupants’ visual perception alongside current sustainable energy considerations. The desire to bring natural light into spaces is not merely to support tasks; it is also essential to human comfort. Therefore, we must recognize the importance of finding metrics and indices to evaluate daylight as it relates to the perceived brightness, spatial distribution, mood, and ambiance of a space.

The methods discussed in this study allow designers and architects to differentiate the performance of complex and intricate facade systems, to evaluate their effect on the spatial distribution of daylight, and consequently, the quality of architectural spaces. This research contributes a new way to create and evaluate building skins and allows designers to understand the effect of facade design on natural light propagation, so such designs can be adjusted for improved performance. This research pushes boundaries and engages in dynamic new debates regarding qualitative assessment of architectural environment in VR by creating three-dimensional scenes rendered in VR for user preference studies.

Decadence: An Architectural Genealogy of Material, Lateness, and Style

By Lori Smithey

As the antithesis of Western rationality, mastery, and progress, the concept of decadence has a long yet obscure relationship within the modern discipline of architecture. Its use in the field often carries a negative connotation as it tracks across historical, aesthetic, social, economic, and ecological territories of meaning. This dissertation constructs a genealogy of decadence within architecture by tracing its appearance within architectural discourse at the time of disciplinary formation in the late-eighteenth century, its role in shaping nineteenth-century buildings and architectural theories, and its later extension into postmodernism. In addition to revealing the conceptual contours of decadence within a modern discipline that often sought to rout it out, this study argues for the possibility of an operative engagement with the term. Unique within the history of decadence is the fin-de-siècle decadent literary movement. Many of the authors shaping this genre use the built environment to highlight the physical, historical, and subjective connotations of decadence as they explore the concept. I take their work as a productive example of constructing a non-oppositional engagement with decadence, and I extend their thematic framing as a means to track the concept transhistorically to the analysis of architectural projects. Through the themes of material, lateness, and style, this dissertation traces three built works: the Sacré-Coeur basilica (1871-1914), Charles Moore’s Centerbrook house (1969), and the Crystal Cathedral (1980). Together, these structures link questions of material networks, historical narrative, and identity to design strategies that oscillate between the formal and the representational. Ultimately, the study of decadence in architecture is as much about unearthing examples of critical practice that fall outside of the aegis of autonomy as it is about revealing the suppressed underlayers of a modern discipline.

Plans, Plants, and Sense of Place: Urban Greening Across the USSR, 1932-1964

by Maria C. Taylor, Emerging Educator in Design, Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Washington

This dissertation grows from recognition that abundant urban greenspace was an iconic feature of Soviet urbanism, proving resilient across political and aesthetic rifts that otherwise transformed Soviet built environments. In histories of socialist urbanism, these outdoor spaces are often treated as context rather than content, or their aspired-to functions dismantled and assessed separately within studies of Soviet communal hygiene, recreation and sport, or political-aesthetic culture.  The blind spot thus produced distorts understanding of Soviet urbanisms’ holistic aspirations, and impoverishes our sense of twentieth-century society-nature relations.

How did Soviet specialists envision the quintessentially modern nexus between urbanism, industry, and changing environmental attitudes? How did the theory and practice of urban greening and beautification develop in relation to other iconic elements of Soviet urbanism, from factories to civic ensembles to mass housing districts? Finally, how did specialists in greening engage with the socialist realist doctrine of ‘socialist in content, national in form’ when developing norms and models to be realized in cities across the USSR, particularly in Siberia?

To address these questions, this research focuses on the history of the Soviet design-planning subfield known as the “greening of cities” (ozelenenie gorodov), incorporating a broad range of professional literature, archival sources, and site-specific evidence. It examines the evolving theory and reception of greening during the two most formative periods of Soviet built urbanism: the Stalinist period of “empire” style ensembles, 1932–1953, and the “laconic” industrially-produced modernism dominant following Nikita Khrushchev’s speech at the 1954 Builders’ Conference.

Evidence of how urban greening was conceptualized, standardized and circulated is drawn from the specialist handbooks, textbooks, and published conference proceedings though which Soviet urbanists communicated with each other across regions, a neglected source type. Chapters focus in turn on the greening of industrial territories and enterprises in the 1930s, of postwar civic ensembles and spaces of national display, and post-Stalinist mass housing districts or mikroraiony. Interwoven with these “typically Soviet” phenomena is the specific history of city-nature relations as they developed in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, both public portrayals and professional ‘backstage’ involvement in shaping the form and reception of city-nature relations. The final chapter considers the agency of urban trees in relation to the emergence in the Cold War-era of a Soviet mass environmental movement.

I find that urban greenspace was durably envisioned as an infrastructure of socialist modernity. By rotating the bundle of functions associated with urban greenspace, and linking greening to larger political-national projects, practitioners weathered shifts that disrupted other aspects of Soviet architecture and urban planning. Ultimately, I argue that it was Soviet urbanists’ over-estimation of urban greenery’s agency, rather than their reputed disregard or antagonism to nature, that contributed to the Soviet city’s iconic spatiality. Lacking effective agency to constrain urban hazards more directly, Soviet architect-planners turned to spatial- and phyto-mitigation measures.