No description available.

No description available.

This thesis investigates how architecture engages with the natural landscape through iterative designs of exhibition space. Proposals of architecture adjacent to Smith Mountain Lake as well as along the Cascade Falls Trail in Virginia were considered. The design proposals led to a resolution that particular considerations are critical in relating architecture and nature, specifically a building's spatial organization and orientation, its materiality and tectonic assembly, and the bounding thresholds differentiating between inside and outside. / Master of Architecture / The central idea of my exploration is to engage with nature and create a building that relates to the Virginian landscape consisting of mountain, forest and water. The design exploration began with a site at Smith Mountain Lake and then a site at Cascade Falls Trail. To make the architecture, many aspects were considered - how to place the architecture in the landscape, the choice of the building's materials, how the building is constructed, the use of walls versus windows, and finally, not only creating a relationship between architecture and landscape, but also determining nuanced ways to connect the two.

The connection between our body and mind is integral in the way we perceive and relate to the world that exists around us. Our perceptions and emotional responses to those spaces can influence and become a powerful tool for design. In turn, architecture can encourage active and mindfullness in a person's everyday life. The architectural project is a mixed-use development consisting of a multi-family residence, hotel, coffee shop, and spa located off of 14th Street in the Columbia Heights neighborhood in Washington DC. The program provides spaces for dwelling, both temporary and permanent, to encourage both physical and psychological wellness. / Master of Architecture

Encompassed between the Potomac River, the Washington metro line and train bridges at 14th Street, the proposal is a phenomenological study choreographing between site, volume and material to enhance the moment of the aficionado. Exterior and interior spaces become unique stages for patron and performer alike to embellish at the onset of inspiration. Collectively, the journey through the stages of spaces becomes an introspective opportunity for all to experience. / Master of Architecture

There are contradictory thoughts associated with ruins. Mainly when we hear the word ruin, it reminds us of glorious ancient structures that evoked an aesthetic pleasure and inspired artists and philosophers throughout the history. But it also has a negative feeling, it means to destroy to turn into decay. The former is the way that we feel about ancient ruins but our way of thinking about the ruins of modern times is different. There are different reasons for this duality and this thesis firstly attempts to explore the reasons behind this ambivalent attitude. Secondly to answer why ruins of our own time are considered invaluable, why they deserve our attention, how their qualities can offer different ways of remembrance and challenge the common perception of history and how their existence can arouse the topic of otherness in the urban context and provide a physical space for alternative cultural activities. The design project focuses on an early twentieth century ruin in Baltimore, Maryland. The former theater building had a relatively short period of splendor followed by several alterations and decades of abandonment and decay. Through an architectural intervention, the project aims to understand and appreciate the history and qualities of the ruined theater and integrate these qualities into the atmosphere of the new space, binding the old and the new together and at the same time, retaining the incomplete character of the ruin. / Master of Architecture / Mainly when we hear the word ruin, we think of famous ancient ruin sites like the Colosseum, Acropolis or Angkor Wat. It reminds us of glorious ancient structures that evoked an aesthetic pleasure and inspired artists. But the word ruin is also associated with negative feelings. It means to disintegrate, to reduce to a state of decay, to collapse. The way we feel about the ruins of our own time is mostly associated with the latter. Modern ruins are mostly seen as unpleasant. Places that provide a space for undesirable activities and are linked to crime and, thus, threatening the safety of the residents in that area. As a result of this attitude, they become an ignored and marginalized part of the cities. Although ruins have some of the mentioned negative possibilities, they also contain positive qualities and potentials that I explore in this thesis. There are different reasons for these ambivalent feelings about ancient and modern ruins and this thesis studies the reasons behind it. This thesis provides answers to questions of why ruins of our own time are considered invaluable, why they deserve our attention and how their existence can arouse the topic of otherness in the urban context and provide a physical space for alternative cultural activities. The design project focuses on an early twentieth century ruin in Baltimore, Maryland. The former theater building had a relatively short period of splendor followed by several alterations and decades of abandonment and decay. Through an architectural intervention, the project aims to understand and appreciate the history and qualities of the ruined theater and integrate these qualities into the atmosphere of the new space, binding the old and the new together and at the same time, retaining the incomplete character of the ruin.

What does it mean to truly dwell within a city marked by the cycles of political turnover? How does one carve out for himself a unique sense of belonging in a city with such a grand history? Martin Heidegger suggests that in building "nests" for ourselves, we begin to build our lives. We build our own stories into the traditions and myths of a place. This thesis proposes four unique stories, or four dwelling typologies, stitched together by a common alley site. Each dwelling typology finds its primary expression in one of the Four Classical Elements — Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. The four are intended to be read as distinct artifacts within the urban fabric of Washington, D.C., yet also as siblings of the same architectural family. The four dwelling typologies include (1) a studio for an artist, (2) a residence above a small business, (3) loft apartments and (4) a boutique hotel. Each occupies an infill site along the District of Colombia's historic Blagden Alley. / Master of Architecture

Thesis advisor: Marjorie Howes / Focusing on elegiac dimensions of the museum, Reinventing the Museum: Textured Materiality in Modern and Contemporary Women’s Elegies contends that Eavan Boland, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gwendolyn Brooks help us conceive a new spatial imaginary, which addresses traditionally underrepresented subject matters and historiographies with ethical alertness. Reading their works and their affective-experiential modes through an interdisciplinary feminist lens, this dissertation explores the ways in which the four women poets revise and update Julia Kristeva’s foundational concept of women’s time. Their decision to draw from museums—both physical and metaphorical—foregrounds woman’s embodied self and its relational ontology, ultimately to challenge the dominant dynamics of historiographical, literary canon formation. Functioning as bookends are my chapters on Boland and Brooks whose writings about Irish and Black experiences respectively explore tactics of space-making at the face of postcolonial, post-slavery displacements and diasporas. Taking Boland’s museum elegies as a point of departure, I move on to Plath’s plastic self-elegies where an inquiry into the plasticity of the self and theatrics of self-exhibit happens. Next, I examine Bishop’s shift from Enlightenment taxonomization to love as a possible antidote to enlightenment culture. Straddling between love poetry and elegy, Bishop’s prismatic love elegies often cast a discursive journey to proto-museums with the beloved as a figure for love. Her occasional superimposition of the lover on the racial other gestures towards Brooks’s necropolitical elegies and elegies of necropolitics, the latter of which resonate with the mission of Black neighborhood museums. Each assigned with a textured materiality—textile, plastic, light, and firmness, respectively—the chapters are divided into three sections that proceed from the poets’ problem posing to their attempt to think through the identified problem. On a broader scale, the chapters progress from the most concrete, fungible, and tangible materiality to the least, which points to a way of being, an attitude towards life. Assigning textured materialities to each chapter additionally draws attention to the interstices between the formal materiality of poetic language and nonlinguistic gestures and speech sounds. In this manner, my project actively builds on the momentum of and expand current debates in and around genre theory, phenomenology, affect studies, a version of historical materialism, postcolonial/Black studies, and museum studies. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

This practice-led thesis explores ways in which to integrate art and material culture studies as a manifestation of philosophy’s process thread. In doing so, its goal is to generate a praxis which is able to come to holistic terms with the fragmenting dualism of subject-object binaries. By seizing my own subjectivity in its representation of this problem, the thesis develops a performance-led practice which seeks to overcome the barriers that its divisive ‘I’ presents to process. This interdisciplinary project is an explicit response to the figure of Friedrich Nietzsche; his bearing helps to constitute its methodology and repertoire as his presence is creatively teased from the pages of his own books. Part One of the thesis discusses how the mimetic aims of artistic representation were harnessed to challenge my own subjectivity’s singular sense of authority. Thereafter, Nietzsche’s pre-modern temperament comes to enable a holistic consideration of the perceptual ambiguity within Jacques Lacan’s geometric model of ‘seeing things’. Part Two engages with representation as a method of making difference for the bridging of subject-object divisions. This occurs as subjective experience and is extended to some inorganic others, producing creative outcomes which aim to access a cosmological principle of affect that is identified with Nietzsche’s thesis of will to power. The third part of this thesis aligns the research aim, of making apparent the oneness of the cosmos, with the shamanic dimensions of some vintage slapstick cinema. In its development, it comes to terms with the subjective gaze and identifies process-led strategies for challenging and changing its outlooks. This provides a background for Part Four, which marks the beginning of my attempts to engage the gaze of other people in processes that procure and ideally affect their perspectives. While the first four parts of the thesis demonstrate the progress of the research project through the deployment of art and its affecting capacities, its final two parts put the work of philosophy into aesthetic effects, and represent artworks that constitute elements of the thesis itself. Part Five evidences my art practice re-engaging with the world through a project which holistically involves the outlooks of subjects, whilst nevertheless challenging their perceptual precepts. Part Six discusses a performative experiment that consolidates and tests the research findings in a potentially affective structure, expressed through Laurence Halprin’s RSVP cycle. Finally, as it reflects on the potential healing capacities of my practical research and the possibilities for ‘doing’ philosophy, the thesis details how an art-making that embraces both visual and material cultures through the eventness of performance might be able to overcome the problematic perceptual divides that limit the progress of process logics.

This thesis looks at the function of signatures in visual art using the theory of Jacques Derrida and a series of paradigmatic historical examples. Specifically, it departs from ‘Signature Event Context’ (SEC) to establish signature outside the idiom of visual art as a social process. Having established signature as process designed to guarantee presence, it suggests that signature should be considered a method of production. As a method of production, signature has a significant contemporary relevance for dematerialised and Relational Art practices which are frequently held to be ‘unsigned’. This thesis suggests grounds for questioning the unsigned quality of Relational Art, and looks at what signatory production means for it. Until the 1990s, signature was mostly ignored as a subject for serious art historical scholarship. It is still rarely indexed as a subject even when it warrants a mention in the body of a text. Although a clutch of recent studies have addressed its occurrence in the work of individual artists, or within the boundaries of narrowly defined eras, there is little work - if any - which attempts to connect these pockets of knowledge with a conceptual grounding of what signature does in order to develop a connected narrative and broad understanding for its place. As a result, there is little interrogation of signature’s mechanism alongside historical examples, and scholarship is instead focused on its appearance. This thesis attempts a broad, conceptually informed, historical survey, using examples that date as far back as the sixth century BC. The aim is to unpack the signature-form ‘R. Mutt’ which appears on Marcel Duchamp’s Readymade, Fountain (1917), a work with great conceptual importance for contemporary dematerialised and Relational Art practices. In bringing SEC into close 3 proximity to Fountain, the thesis establishes potential grounds for reading a significant theoretical relationship between Derrida and Duchamp, a pairing which has been neglected by scholars despite conceptual sympathies between them.