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This thesis is an exercise in responsibility regarding my actions as an architect. It is based upon the belief that architecture is a product conveying culture. While architecture can convey culture, it also has the potential to shape and facilitate change q in culture. Therefore, one can view the architect as more than a technician, making architecture stand and work properly, or an artist, concerned with the aesthetic/architectonic qualities of architecture, but rather as an active entity who can both convey and change cultural values through the built environment. The struggle in this thesis regarding responsibility has been to make my role more than an active entity in culture, but a consciously active entity in culture. Since I have long viewed culture as a political product and one's existence in culture as a political act, then one’s responsibility as an architect could be to make architecture as the conscious embodiment of a political ideology. For me, feminism is the political ideology, and Liberative Architecture is the conscious embodiment. / Master of Architecture

This thesis focuses on a few of the different possibilities for an infill housing project. The site is located in Queens, New York, adjacent to the East River. The site is an old railroad yard. The surrounding neighborhood is a mixture of commercial and residential areas. The linear axis of the site offers the possibility for a strong horizontal object for the city. / Master of Architecture

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University. / Typescript. Sponsor: Karl W. Bigelow. Dissertation Committee: R. Freeman Butts, Ralph R. Field, . Type C project. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 419-437).

Post-World War II public schools in Harlem, New York were segregated, under-resourced and educationally inequitable. Addressing disparities in education was of paramount importance for the socioeconomic mobility and future of the neighborhood. In an effort to understand how race, religion, community, and education intersected in this context, this dissertation answers the following research question: How did St. Philip’s, the first Black Episcopal church in the city and one of the most historic churches in Harlem, participate in education during the post-World War II period? Responding to and preventing inequities in the neighborhood, including the substandard state of the public schools, St. Philip’s served as an educational space and organizational base for the community. St. Philip’s participation accounts for the way a Black church emerged as a space for education when the public schools were foundering. The church’s ethos of education - community engagement - reframes traditional frameworks of teaching and learning beyond schoolhouse doors. During the postwar period, St. Philip’s expanded its in-house programming for Black children, youth and adults, constructing a new community youth center, where classes, tutoring, after-school activities, college counseling, career guidance, day-care, recreation and clubs were community staples. Understanding the importance of inclusivity, continuity and consistency, programming was accessible to the entire neighborhood, regardless of membership with year-round services such as summer camp and career counseling. As an organizational base, the church hosted education talks and committee meetings, facilitating a forum for the community to engage in critical conversations about the state of education. It was a safe space for transparency and troubleshooting. Concerns about education expanded beyond conversations in the church, however. St. Philip’s corresponded directly with city governance, petitioning school-makers with recommendations and demands. This dissertation broadens the traditional civil rights narrative of Black religious activism, which has the tendency to dichotomize who participated and how they participated. This polarization includes regions: North-South, religions: Christian-Muslim, figureheads: Martin Luther King, Jr.-Malcolm X, and strategies: peaceful-militant. Historians Charles Payne and Nikhil Pal Singh push back on this oversimplified interpretation as “King-centric.”* St. Philip’s educational activism foils this paradigm as a Black Episcopal institution in a northern city. St. Philip’s brings nuance to categorizations of Black churches as either being focused on the far-reaching goal of social transformation or compliant with conservative social philosophies based on respectability politics. Its participation was both radical (such as establishing educational programming at the Community youth center that was open to members and non-members alike, regardless of class, age, political or religious beliefs) and conservative (such as sitting out of the 1964 citywide school boycott, while the majority of the Black community participated). In this way, St. Philip’s educational activism in Harlem calls into question criticisms of the Black Episcopal Church that position it as elitist and accommodationist to white values and white power, hence, apathetic to the challenges facing the Black population in cities during the post-World War II period. *Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 6; and Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 419.

There has been an increased push away from the traditional combustion-engine powered vehicle due to environmental, health, and political concerns. As a result, alternative methods of transportation such as electric vehicles (EVs) have gaining popularity in the market. However, the EVs are not penetrating the market as quickly as expected, due in part to a combination of range, charge anxiety, and their financial costs. EVs cannot travel far due to limited driving range and require longer charge times than combustion-engine powered vehicles to recharge. Coupled with a lacking infrastructure for charging, the feasibility of an all-electric transportation market is still not possible. We propose a novel system in which we study and characterize the feasibility of increasing the effective driving range of a battery electric vehicle by utilizing inductive charge transfer to create an ad-hoc charging network where vehicles can “share” charge with one another. The application of wireless charge transfer from vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) is the first of its kind and does not require any changes to current metropolitan infrastructures. Through the use of computer networking and communications algorithms, we analyze real-world commuter and taxi data to determine the potential effectiveness of such a system. We propose a participation and incentive mechanism to encourage participation in this network that enables the system to be functional.To illustrate proof of principle for V2V charging at traffic lights, we simulate a simplified model in which vehicles only exchange charge at traffic lights without coordination with other vehicles. Using a greedy heuristic, vehicles only exchange charge if they happen to meet another vehicle that has charge to share. The heuristic is greedy since decisions are made at each iteration with longer optimality not being considered. We are able to demonstrate an increase in effective driving range of EVs using these simplistic assumptions. In this thesis, we develop and quantify a complete simulation framework, which allows EVs to operate using charge sharing. We analyze data from the United States Department of Transportation, New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, and Regional New York City data sources to understand the cumulative driving distance distributions for passenger/commuter vehicles and taxicabs in large metropolitan areas such as New York City. We show that the driving distributions can best be represented as heavy-tail distribution functions with most commuter vehicles not requiring additional charge during a typical day’s usage of their vehicle as compared to taxicabs, which regularly travel more than 100 miles during a 12-hour shift. We develop and parameterize several variables for input into our simulation framework including driving distance, charge exchange heuristics, models for determining pricing of charge units, traffic density, and geographic location. The inclusion of these parameters helps to build a framework that can be utilized for any metropolitan area to determine the feasibility of EVs. We have performed extensive evaluation of our model using real data. Our current simulations indicate that we can increase the effective distance that an electric vehicle travels by a factor of at least 2.5. This increased driving range makes EVs a more feasible mode of transportation for fleet vehicles such as taxicabs that rely heavily on commuting long cumulative distances. We have identified areas for future improvement to add further parameters to make the model even more sensitive. Finally, we focus on the application of our charge sharing framework in a real-world application for utilizing this methodology for the New York City bus system. In partnership with the New York City MTA, we launched a feasibility study of converting the currently majority hybrid bus fleet into a complete electric bus fleet with charging available at bus stops during scheduled bus stops. Unlike the earlier charge sharing framework, this simulation focuses on discrete distances that are traveled by the bus before having an opportunity to charge at the next bus stop. In this scenario, a large source of variability is the amount of time that the bus is able to stop at a bus stop for charging since this is determined by the amount of time needed to successfully embark and disembark the passengers at the given bus stop. This particular variability impacts how much charge the bus is able to gain during any given stop. We conclude with a list of opportunities for future work in expanding the model with additional parameters and conclusions of our work. Further, we identify areas of further research that outline the potential positive and negative outcomes from a charge sharing system that can be extended to various other applications including micro-mobility applications such as electric scooters and bicycles.

The creative submission for my dissertation includes two of my documentary works: They Will Take My Island, a thirty-minute multimedia collaboration with filmmaker Atom Egoyan for amplified string octet, electronic track, and film, commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Paper Pianos, a ninety-minute staged collaboration with director Nigel Maister and projection artist Kevork Mourad. The written submission for my dissertation is an examination of the ways in which experiences around transgenerational trauma inform and manifest in my creative practice. I offer a summary of my own family history of survivors of the Armenian Genocide and Lebanese Civil War, as well as a survey of displacement amongst the Armenian community in the past century. Furthermore, I discuss identity processing as diaspora and the act of cultural preservation, as inspired by genocide survivor, composer, priest, writer, and musicologist, Komitas Vardapet. I later examine these ideas in the context of creating They Will Take My Island and Paper Pianos, both of which were constructively motivated by transgenerational survivor’s guilt and draw from extra-musical documentary and horror genre practices.

This dissertation examines experimental dance in New York City in the 1990s. Earlier periods of American concert dance have received significant scholarly attention to the historical, political, and aesthetic aspects of dance practice. Moreover, certain periods of modern dance — especially the 1930s and the 1960s — have been analyzed as moments of significant change, and the artists that emerged from the Judson Dance Theater in particular have held a significant place in the theorizing and historicizing of dance in the United States. However, experimental dance practices of the early 21st century demonstrate dramatically different aesthetics, approaches, and circumstances of production than those of earlier periods, including their Judson forebears. This project argues for understanding the 1990s as a period of significant change for dance, one with continuing resonance for the decades that follow.This project uses the term "downtown dance" to situate experimental dance in New York City as a community of practitioners, rather than as a particular set of aesthetic or artistic practices. Each of the four chapters focuses on an aspect in this period that would define how dance looked, how dancers practiced, and what shaped the artistic values and priorities of this community. The first chapter presents a history of the dance-service organization Movement Research. Tracing the history of the organization from its founding in 1978 through the establishment of its most influential programs in the 1990s — including the Movement Research Performance Journal and the performance series Movement Research at the Judson Church — the chapter locates Movement Research as a central entity in building the community and shaping theaesthetics of downtown dance. The second chapter examines the effects of the AIDS crisis on dance in the 1990s. As AIDS entered its second decade, it collided with and magnified downtown dance's complex relationship with emotion. This chapter draws on scholarship of AIDS' relationship to visual art, theater, and activism, as well as close readings of several works — by artists including Donna Uchizono, Neil Greenberg, John Jasperse, RoseAnne Spradlin, Jennifer Monson, and DD Dorvillier — most not generally understood as "AIDS dances," to argue that AIDS' impact generated a fundamental shift in the role of emotion in downtown dance. The third chapter examines how shifts in arts funding in the 1990s connected to a major restructuring in production models for dance. This chapter connects the history of the modern dance company with both aesthetic and economic developments over the course of the 20th century, arguing that the company should be understood as a combined economic-aesthetic system. Furthermore, the chapter demonstrates the new model for dance production that began to take hold in the 1990s in the wake of widespread funding and economic shifts: the project model. Teasing out the complex web of funding for dance, this chapter makes extensive use of dance periodicals; several funding trend analyses from organizations including Dance/USA, National Endowment for the Arts, Dance/NYC, and private corporate and foundation reports; and the archives of the presenting institution Danspace Project. The final chapter looks at how the shifts in economic models for dance discussed in the previous chapter connected to changes in training and bodily technique of dancers and performers. Specifically investigating the history of "release technique," this chapter examines how attitudes toward technique and training in downtown dance in the 1990s shifted the connection between movement practices and creative output, reconceiving the role of the dancer in the dancer-choreographer relationship.

A vertical world The connection between worlds is a layer of time The city contains many of its vessels The vision, the vessel, a tall building / Master of Architecture