Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Page 233 blank. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 228-232). / The following thesis explores two central hypotheses. On the one hand it introduces the idea of performative architecture (performance in design), and has done so with the desire to contribute directly to the expansion of design education and practice. It proposes stretch the boundaries of the discipline by challenging current paradigms on architectural theory and practice by conveying an axiom of active engagement between artifacts and their environments with human users/inhabitants forming part of such an environment. Performance is here proposed as the action that mediates the two forces of artifice and environment. The second hypothesis of this thesis has been to offer a distinct point of view regarding analogue relations-as asserted by this work-between the design process-as it relates to pedagogy and practice-and the performance of design (considered through that which is built, materialized and produced) as it engages with its surroundings. Designing requires fundamental ambiguity, imposing both theoretically and empirically, a methodological systematization of two recurrent and consequent processes: mergence and emergence. I will describe how both, explained by Shape Grammars design theory, are complimentary and interdependent processes, mergence in order to produce the essential ambiguity required and emergence in order to embed and operate, and that this processes are present both during the design process (designing) and during the experience of design (inhabiting/using). These two hypotheses temporarily blur the distinction between environment and design artifact, or between natural and artificial, and propose a displacement of these distinctions towards the performance of the interfaces between such conditions, independent of their "natural" or "artificial" transient connotations. I will describe how this manifold notion of performance can be used to understand this displacement in architectural discourse, and its practical implications towards a performative architecture. / by Sergio Araya. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 485-531). / This dissertation examines how Bosnian Muslims construct their identity through the lens of rebuilt or newly built mosques following the systematic destruction of religious architecture during the 1992-1995 War. The stylistic diversity of contemporary mosques in the region, I argue, reflects competing visions of how contemporary Bosnia should deal with its own history of coexistence and war. By examining different identity formation processes on three scales (the building process, the regional, and the global scale), the dissertation argues that, aside from its religious functions, the contemporary mosque has become the primary locus where the emerging Bosniak nation can visually and symbolically shape and express its visions of itself. I begin by outlining how the cultural and political history of Bosnian Muslims has been "written" and "rewritten" through religious architecture since the fifteenth century. I then investigate how during the war of the 1990s the nationalist extremists instrumentalized religious architecture to facilitate the realization of their expansionist projects. While all ethno-national groups in Bosnia experienced significant war losses, Bosnian Muslims suffered the greatest human and architectural casualties. I argue that the extent and the genocidal nature of war violence against them has transformed the meaning of the mosque from that of a place of worship and of a signifier of religious-ethnic identity to that of the ethnic body of the Bosniak nation. The notion that the mosque stands in for the human body was internalized by Bosnian Muslims in the form of two novel and programmatically delineated mosque genres defined here as the Inat Mosque and the Memorial Mosque. The first results from identity construction in response to the national myths and territorial claims of the Serbs and Croats, while the second represents identity creation that is linked to the community's own internal processes of commemoration. These regional negotiations of identity are challenged by two competing global imperial ideologies introduced to Bosnia by the Saudi and Turkish donors and manifest in monumental mosques they finance. As local builders compete with these supra-national Islamic networks, contemporary mosque architecture in Bosnia has become a site of negotiation and frictions between global and local interests. Throughout, the analysis highlights the significance of ethnic symbols, long-term cultural factors, and global cultural flows in the creation of contemporary nations. / by Azra Aks̆amija. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 279-297). / This thesis presents a computational framework for the automatic recognition and prediction of different kinds of human behaviors from video cameras and other sensors, via perceptually intelligent systems that automatically sense and correctly classify human behaviors, by means of Machine Perception and Machine Learning techniques. In the thesis I develop the statistical machine learning algorithms (dynamic graphical models) necessary for detecting and recognizing individual and interactive behaviors. In the case of the interactions two Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are coupled in a novel architecture called Coupled Hidden Markov Models (CHMMs) that explicitly captures the interactions between them. The algorithms for learning the parameters from data as well as for doing inference with those models are developed and described. Four systems that experimentally evaluate the proposed paradigm are presented: (1) LAFTER, an automatic face detection and tracking system with facial expression recognition; (2) a Tai-Chi gesture recognition system; (3) a pedestrian surveillance system that recognizes typical human to human interactions; (4) and a SmartCar for driver maneuver recognition. These systems capture human behaviors of different nature and increasing complexity: first, isolated, single-user facial expressions, then, two-hand gestures and human-to-human interactions, and finally complex behaviors where human performance is mediated by a machine, more specifically, a car. The metric that is used for quantifying the quality of the behavior models is their accuracy: how well they are able to recognize the behaviors on testing data. Statistical machine learning usually suffers from lack of data for estimating all the parameters in the models. In order to alleviate this problem, synthetically generated data are used to bootstrap the models creating 'prior models' that are further trained using much less real data than otherwise it would be required. The Bayesian nature of the approach let us do so. The predictive power of these models lets us categorize human actions very soon after the beginning of the action. Because of the generic nature of the typical behaviors of each of the implemented systems there is a reason to believe that this approach to modeling human behavior would generalize to other dynamic human-machine systems. This would allow us to recognize automatically people's intended action, and thus build control systems that dynamically adapt to suit the human's purposes better. / by Nuria M. Oliver. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 124-133). / by William Tafel Freeman. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 147-163). / by Isaac Llewellyn Jackson. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references. / This research explores the associated effects of policy tools employed to promote sustainable building materials. By comparing the original motivations and intended effects of these policies and their actual outcome, and subsequently understanding the reasons behind any disparities between them, we suggest ways by which future policy planning can be improved. This research is based on seven detailed case studies. They cover the applications of virgin material taxes in Denmark and Sweden, forest management and biodiversity legislations in United States' Northwest and its coupling economic adjustment initiative, legislations/public outreach/demonstration projects on the use of substitute fuels for cement manufacturing in United States and the United Kingdom, and economic incentives to promote afforestation/reforestation in Chile. Each of these cases is attended by negative, unanticipated outcomes. By analyzing these outcomes, we observe that a negative and unanticipated policy outcome occurs when a sustainability indicator/issue is either completely ignored by policymakers, or the policymakers fail to identify intrinsic but inconspicuous links between seemingly disparate indicators. / (cont.) These unexpected outcomes can be reduced, or avoided, if policymakers conceptualize policies more broadly, for which purpose we propose the concept of integrated policymaking. This concept promotes the idea of co-addressing, or even co-optimizing, a wide range of eleven to sixteen sustainability indicators covering all the three domains of sustainability - economy, environment and employment. Furthermore, in doing so, policymakers must promote interactions among the different levels of governmental agencies (i.e. horizontal and vertical integration) and between the governmental and non-governmental stakeholder groups (i.e. time horizon integration and integration across stakeholder groups). We emphasize the significance of five different but interrelated types of feedback loops in supporting these different types and goals of integration. Finally, we applied this concept to the seven cases and proposed a series of innovative integrated policy strategies to address the negative, unanticipated outcomes observed. / by Harn Wei Kua. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 227-261). / This dissertation proposes that architectural photography-which became an independent genre in twentieth century Germany-was a primary route along which the cultural and political conflicts of modernization were addressed within the contested space of public discussion, and that these photographs helped produce the political and cultural changes driving major developments in German architecture and urbanism since the 1920s. My study explores the history of the representational and disciplinary ambiguity between the house photograph and the portrait, with particular attention to political and social connotations in the work of four German practitioners whose photographic oeuvres are more closely related than is commonly understood: Paul Schultze-Naumburg (1896-1949), Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897-1966), August Sander (1876-1964), and Bernd Becher (1931-2007).My study of these figures' architectural photographs highlights their participation in broader debates on architecture and public space, specifically through the overarching metaphor of the "face" of the German building. I argue that the work of these photographers, as well as their circumstances of production, epitomize the concurrent and colliding forces of modernity and industrialization. / (cont.) The understanding of the historical precedents and construction of the genre of German architectural photographs demonstrates the contentious issues surfacing in these four figures' work: Paul Schultze-Naumburg's obsession with facial and racial characteristics in portrait as well as architecture photography, Albert Renger-Patzsch's modernist attempt to purge these unsavory ideas by professionalizing architecture photography into an "objective" practice, the analogies to caricature and taxonomy seen in the ubiquitous systems of identification by August Sander, and, finally, the practice of Bernd Becher whose use of the rhetoric of standardization in his photographs of houses appears as a postmodern acknowledgment of the hegemonic achievement of modernization-of both Germany and architectural photography. Spanning the 20th century, the work of these four figures is anchored in a deep anxiety regarding the pace and culture of modernization in Germany; this dissertation challenges the boundaries set up between their respective bodies of work and charts a new history of architectural photography in Germany as a driving force of the volatile history of modernity. / by Kirsten Weiss. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references. / Architects use concepts about space to solve problems and to form designs. A design concept is the manifestation of the basic instability of our mental performance: it is a makeshift that provides general direction for exploration. In synthesis architects explore concepts by inventing transitions that conclude to the description of artifacts. This study suggests that the process of synthesis, which is an act of human imagination, can be approached by the means of a calculus, as calculation. Taking into account the nature of design concepts and practices, as well as the developments in the field of shape computation, the study explains why and how computational methods can be applied in the process of synthesis of architectural form. Through a theoretical analysis, and actual design paradigms, it shows that shape computation can undertake conceptual and execution tasks in the studio. / by Sotirios D. Kotsopoulos / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [365]-382). / The idea of a "historic city" is a rather recent phenomenon. As a conceptual framework, it evolved over the course of the 1970s and 1980s from the intellectual foundations of modernist urban design. This is especially well illustrated in East Berlin, where a heterogeneous group of politicians, architects, and scholars called for an urban environment that provides the individual experience of historicity. Their ideas were most prominently infused in a series of showcase projects built during the 1980s. For the celebration of Berlin's 750th anniversary in 1987, some of the long-despised late-19th-century tenement neighborhoods were remodeled and fitted out with the insignia of historic every-day life. In addition, a number of representative architectural ensembles were built that made use of different historic styles. The invention of the historic city collapsed the memories of different historic periods into a generic notion of "the past." This process relied on a specific elasticity of the language employed by designers and theorists. Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, terms such as preservation or reconstruction retained a positive connotation while simultaneously time undergoing a radical change in meaning. In the same way, the quasi-biological conception of the city as a body with a life cycle, where "obsolete" neighborhoods had to be regularly demolished, was gradually suspended. Through both remodeling and new construction, the East German leaders and their collaborators initiated a renaissance of once neglected neighborhoods, which after the German reunification became prime locations for upscale housing and retail. / (cont.) Construction policy before and after the German reunification therefore has to be seen as a continuous development rather than a break. Despite the different political and economic system in the German Democratic Republic, East Berlin design politics during the 1970s and 1980s paralleled the approaches in Western countries, where real and imagined urban history was increasingly commodified and marketed to local elites and tourists. The historic city also became the conceptual background for a widely practiced exegesis of historic residues, through which Berlin's middle classes claimed social and political legitimacy. / by Florian Urban. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 232-245). / This dissertation examines how the architectural culture of postwar Romania participated in the socialist regime's attempt to construct a new and collectivist environment. The dissertation works from a close reading of examples drawn from three different domains of architectural practice: the architectural and urban design of the Floreasca housing district in Bucharest; the writings of the architectural historian Grigore Ionescu; and the photography of architecture in the magazine Arhitectura. A consistent set of aesthetic and discursive practices emerged from the interrelation between words, images, and actual buildings in each of these examples: the city as new unit of production, standardization, an attack on subjectivity and individualism, technological essentialism, and abstraction were all attributes of the architecture enlisted by the socialist regime in order to establish and consolidate its ideological identity. The dissertation challenges the received descriptions of the postwar artistic context of the Soviet Bloc as one dominated by anti-modernist tendencies, as well as the complementary assumption that, in Romania, the thriving modernism of the interwar years was brought to an end by the postwar socialist regime. / (cont.) On the contrary, this dissertation shows that many practices characteristic of the Modern Movement and Soviet Constructivism not only persisted, but also reached an unprecedented scale and intensity in the architecture of socialism in the late 1950s and 1960s. By considering the processes through which specific modernist tenets of the 1920s and 1930s migrated or persisted inside socialist Romania, the dissertation highlights the paradoxical condition of socialism's architectural culture: on one hand, socialism required its culture to be revolutionary, and therefore unprecedented; on the other hand, it heavily relied on undesirable capitalist precedents. The dissertation investigates how the tension between old and new was negotiated, thus exposing the ways in which aesthetic meaning was produced and controlled under totalitarian socialism. / by Juliana Maxim. / Ph.D.