Graduate School of Design

As waters rise and sediments shift, individuals and communities must connect with their coasts as stewards of cherished yet changing landscapes. In a moment when tools for monitoring and measuring frequently distance designers from the environments in which we live and work, “Coastal Tools” deploys existing and imagined tools to foster landscape engagement. This thesis focuses on sound as a means of engaging with the elemental through close listening and meaningful interactions with soundscapes of the harbor in South Boston. How do the tools landscape architects carry, physical and cognitive, affect our perception of sound in the landscape? The design, deployment, and performance of environmental instruments animate fieldwork and introduce aids in navigating constantly moving human-environment relations. Soundwalks serve as both a descriptive and prescriptive process, where design proposals draw on sensorial phenomena to craft new tools and landscape interventions to engage the shifting sounds of the shore.

This thesis is a proposition for a new turn in the architectural pedagogy of Brazil, with a focus on addressing the curricula found in schools in the country’s heartland. The prevailing educational model is the continuation of a colonial project, reflecting its xenocentric premise — the devaluation of local culture in favor of foreign values. As a result, the dominant current pedagogical frameworks are misaligned with the specific demands and disciplinary realities of Brazil, especially its mid-sized cities, its heartlands. This project introduces the concept of Architectures of Relation, developed after Édouard Glissant’s epistemology. Glissant defines Relation as a break from models of alterity, offering a way to understand cultural identity as “not made up of things that are foreign, but of shared knowledge” (Glissant, 1997). While the Western worldview tends to impose transparency, Relation embraces opacities: the untranslatable and culturally specific. This proposition is informed by a study of the professional context of architecture in Brazil’s mid-sized cities, which are currently the fastest-growing urban centers in the country. To further the studies of pedagogical realities, Escola da Cidade, an independent architecture school in São Paulo, serves as a case study for its pedagogical model tailored to the city it operates within. Building on the insights from the case study and field analysis, the thesis interprets the parameters of the UNESCO-UIA Charter for Architectural Education under the lens of Glissant’s thought, addressing core architectural realities such as labor, materials, cultural elements, spatial occupation, and climate-responsive design. The final proposed framework is based on pedagogical devices meant to be merged with the core curriculum of schools, aiming to educate architects and urbanists capable of designing cities that are culturally, socially, and ecologically sustainable.

The way we design architecture today is teleological in its approach. Architects face a crisis of relevance in an era of uncertainty and climate change, where rigid design processes fail to engage with ecological crises and material realities. This thesis critiques the discipline’s short-sightedness and reliance on predetermined standardization, proposing an alternative design methodology that embraces inherited, irregular conditions and designs for geologic timescales—working with surplus materials, composing rather than dictating form, and allowing longevity to drive architectural response. Using the post-strip-mining Appalachian landscape and discarded stone as fodder, Reshaping Remnants explores how hyper-local, material-driven sequencing and land-based timescales can redefine architectural practice. The project stitches waste rock and debris strewn in the aftermath of strip mining into a field of structures that restore the watershed while addressing immediate human and non-human needs. At the same time, it challenges architecture’s conventional temporality by designing for earthly timespans, suggesting that true sustainability emerges when architecture outlives its short-term purpose and transgresses the limited purview of teleological thinking. Architecture, like all terrestrial life, is not static. How can it transcend the hubris of immediate authorship and instead transform through time, accommodating emergent futures and contextual abundance? By designing for longevity and leaving space for contingency, this approach resists the notion of fixed form, arguing that architecture becomes truly sustainable when it shifts from imposition to orchestration—choreographing the conditions it inherits rather than forcing material to obey a predetermined vision.

The fragmentation of Mumbai’s rivers through the pressures of continuous development and engineering control demands an urgent paradigm shift, one that reclaims riverscapes as living infrastructural systems that are more than mere conduits of waste. Using the case of the Dahisar, the thesis positions the river within a complex gradient of “socio-natures” that form an interconnected ecological system. The thesis proposes that in Dahisar’s contested aqueous terrain, multi-scalar systems are necessary for holding, permeating, and circulating waste and water. Beyond creating hydraulic synergies, it facilitates the creation of new publics through decentralized governance, polyfunctional typologies, and place-based planning. The manifesto designs a series of scenarios centering Mumbai’s rivers as infrastructural systems that catalyze spatial justice. Using these as instruments of advocacy, the thesis argues that designing for resilience in the era of climate flux requires integrating ecological systems, public stewardship, and spatial multiplicities to collectively shape urban futures.

The Hine’s Emerald Dragonfly, a key ecological indicator of groundwater-based ecosystems, faces extinction in the United States. Its most genetically diverse remaining habitat - the Des Plaines River watershed in Illinois – is experiencing significant groundwater depletion and encroachment through urbanization, thereby threatening the species’ survival. This proposal reimagines single-minded infrastructure easements as shared commons for people and wildlife, and operates at three layers: point, repurposing groundwater wells into dragonfly habitats; line, transforming transmission corridors into flight pathways; and field, integrating these elements into a systemic urban framework for long-term coexistence.

Over time, the return of the dragonfly would mark the site’s transformation into a new kind of public space, offering a cultural identity shaped by confronting insect agency. Each summer, swarms of dragonflies would become a celebrated spectacle, signaling restored balance between human infrastructure and the natural world. By centering more-than-human perspectives, this vision challenges conventional infrastructure design, advocating for landscapes as adaptive commons—spaces of ecological reciprocity rather than extraction and control.

This thesis tackles Ireland’s national housing crisis through the redesign of the lakeside demesne of Glenade House in the Northwest of Ireland. The project subverts the inherited picturesque landscape, while blurring the boundaries of landscape and architecture through inhabiting a communal garden. Demesnes were untenanted pleasure grounds retained by the aristocratic landowning class during the English plantation of Ireland from the 17th to the 20th century. Responding to the demesnes’ legacy of land confiscation and propriety, a compulsory purchase order will be served on the 6,000 demesne parklands. These demesnes will function as a network at a local and national scale, promoting local food production, sustainable building practices, and rural recreation. By concentrating dwelling on designated ‘sub-rural’ sites, the proliferation of urban sprawl into green belts can be halted, while meeting the cultural desire to live in the countryside. In short, this project institutes a housing cooperative rooted in communal landscape practices.

Contemporary building and design practices suffer from an inherent detachment from the harmful extractive processes that sustain them. To transition away from a carbon-based economy, architecture must become an active agent in narrowing the gap between itself and these hidden externalities elsewhere. The Center for Accountability seeks to address the issue of elsewhere by offering a new model for hyper-local mine governance in Minnesota’s Arrowhead Region, where several harmful copper and nickel mines await regulatory approval. It functions as a regulatory facility that incentivises best practices, centers local and indigenous knowledge, and challenges the neoliberal underpinnings of contemporary extraction.

The center not only employs a Federal Land Trust model as its conceptual framework, but it architecturalizes the many regulatory and supporting bodies within it in functional and perceptual ways. Regulatory bodies shift, rotate and float around the user, who is given open access to the facility through a pedestrian circuit. Visitors may visit the Center to protest mine operations, collaborate with activists and scientists, or simply eat a meal alongside mine workers, all while bearing witness to the transforming landscape around them.

The Center’s largest components - its structure, cladding and foundation

• reuse elements from the abundant shuttered mine facilities that dot its immediate site, allowing the building’s form to act as a floating datum against which the landscape might be measured.

Dissertation Advisor: Jerold S. Kayden Author: Kristen Lee Hunter

Bridging the Divide: Policy Prospects for Addressing Regional Disparities in Affordable Housing Funding Under the Massachusetts Community Preservation Act

The Massachusetts Community Preservation Act (CPA), enacted in 2000, provides a dedicated funding source for local open space and recreation, historic preservation, and affordable housing initiatives. CPA authorizes local governments to impose real estate tax surcharges to fund eligible programs and projects, with the state offering matching funds from its Community Preservation Trust Fund to incentivize participation. In its 22-year history, the CPA has generated $3.15 billion in total funding for participating municipalities, with over $1 billion allocated to affordable housing activities, resulting in more than 10,000 new housing units and an additional 16,500 units subsidized by CPA-funded programs. While some CPA jurisdictions have effectively utilized the program to make significant investments in affordable housing, half of participating municipalities are consistently unable to appropriate even the minimum required percentage for this purpose. Drawing on insights from an empirical analysis of more than 1,000 affordable housing appropriations funded by the CPA from 2018 to 2022, the dissertation outlines municipal affordable housing strategies that offer viable funding options for diverse local CPA budgets and community contexts. It also highlights the flexibility of CPA funding to cater to a broader range of household incomes than other municipal, state, and federal affordable housing programs. It further emphasizes the critical role played by municipal CPA funding awards in demonstrating the local financial commitment required to leverage additional state and federal housing subsidies needed to undertake more ambitious affordable housing projects and programs. In light of Massachusetts’s escalating housing crisis, the dissertation advocates for enhanced state oversight of local CPA programs as well as policy reforms than can enable CPA municipalities to achieve greater impact with their affordable housing appropriations by funding regional projects. Pursuing these strategies could bolster the Community Preservation Act's capacity to subsidize an even greater number of affordable housing projects and programs than it has to date.

Dissertation Advisor: Jerold S. Kayden Author: Kristen Lee Hunter

Bridging the Divide: Policy Prospects for Addressing Regional Disparities in Affordable Housing Funding Under the Massachusetts Community Preservation Act

The Massachusetts Community Preservation Act (CPA), enacted in 2000, provides a dedicated funding source for local open space and recreation, historic preservation, and affordable housing initiatives. CPA authorizes local governments to impose real estate tax surcharges to fund eligible programs and projects, with the state offering matching funds from its Community Preservation Trust Fund to incentivize participation. In its 22-year history, the CPA has generated $3.15 billion in total funding for participating municipalities, with over $1 billion allocated to affordable housing activities, resulting in more than 10,000 new housing units and an additional 16,500 units subsidized by CPA-funded programs. While some CPA jurisdictions have effectively utilized the program to make significant investments in affordable housing, half of participating municipalities are consistently unable to appropriate even the minimum required percentage for this purpose. Drawing on insights from an empirical analysis of more than 1,000 affordable housing appropriations funded by the CPA from 2018 to 2022, the dissertation outlines municipal affordable housing strategies that offer viable funding options for diverse local CPA budgets and community contexts. It also highlights the flexibility of CPA funding to cater to a broader range of household incomes than other municipal, state, and federal affordable housing programs. It further emphasizes the critical role played by municipal CPA funding awards in demonstrating the local financial commitment required to leverage additional state and federal housing subsidies needed to undertake more ambitious affordable housing projects and programs. In light of Massachusetts’s escalating housing crisis, the dissertation advocates for enhanced state oversight of local CPA programs as well as policy reforms than can enable CPA municipalities to achieve greater impact with their affordable housing appropriations by funding regional projects. Pursuing these strategies could bolster the Community Preservation Act's capacity to subsidize an even greater number of affordable housing projects and programs than it has to date.

Dissertation Advisor: Jerold S. Kayden Author: Kristen Lee Hunter

Bridging the Divide: Policy Prospects for Addressing Regional Disparities in Affordable Housing Funding Under the Massachusetts Community Preservation Act

The Massachusetts Community Preservation Act (CPA), enacted in 2000, provides a dedicated funding source for local open space and recreation, historic preservation, and affordable housing initiatives. CPA authorizes local governments to impose real estate tax surcharges to fund eligible programs and projects, with the state offering matching funds from its Community Preservation Trust Fund to incentivize participation. In its 22-year history, the CPA has generated $3.15 billion in total funding for participating municipalities, with over $1 billion allocated to affordable housing activities, resulting in more than 10,000 new housing units and an additional 16,500 units subsidized by CPA-funded programs. While some CPA jurisdictions have effectively utilized the program to make significant investments in affordable housing, half of participating municipalities are consistently unable to appropriate even the minimum required percentage for this purpose. Drawing on insights from an empirical analysis of more than 1,000 affordable housing appropriations funded by the CPA from 2018 to 2022, the dissertation outlines municipal affordable housing strategies that offer viable funding options for diverse local CPA budgets and community contexts. It also highlights the flexibility of CPA funding to cater to a broader range of household incomes than other municipal, state, and federal affordable housing programs. It further emphasizes the critical role played by municipal CPA funding awards in demonstrating the local financial commitment required to leverage additional state and federal housing subsidies needed to undertake more ambitious affordable housing projects and programs. In light of Massachusetts’s escalating housing crisis, the dissertation advocates for enhanced state oversight of local CPA programs as well as policy reforms than can enable CPA municipalities to achieve greater impact with their affordable housing appropriations by funding regional projects. Pursuing these strategies could bolster the Community Preservation Act's capacity to subsidize an even greater number of affordable housing projects and programs than it has to date.