Having renounced his typical creative production for political action in his twilight years, canonical French writer Jean Genet was invited by both the Black Panther Party and the Palestine Liberation Organization to their decisive sites of struggle in 1970. During his time with the BPP as well as with the PLO, Genet both documented and sparked documentation: from his detailed account of these revolutionary days in the posthumously published Prisoner of Love to the myriad images, moving and otherwise, that his attendance occasioned. ‘Saint Genet,’ as Sartre dubbed him, became a visible comrade and compatriot to those engaged with the foremost liberatory struggles of the time.
Yet do these mediatized moments and rhetorical flourishes constitute action or artifice? Through reading Genet as a scion of revolutionary cosmopolitanism, situating his textual and mediatic production within the PLO and the BPP’s larger media strategy, and considering the shortcomings of such deterritorialized approaches to fights for territory, this thesis contends with limits of contemporary solidarity through the late life and work of Jean Genet.
This thesis seeks to offer an account of the pharmacological as a mode of American mid-century modern design. Through an exploration of media published by the field of pharmacy, a visual study of pharmaceutical design, display, and distribution yields an understanding of a sequence of effects and interactions with consumption. Starting with the pill—an object that dissolves into us—we encounter new systems and regimes of mass production and its psychoactive futures that shift us toward new modes of perception, which are in turn shaped through the invention of corporate identity, public exhibitions, and new heights of marketing. These social and technological assemblages attending the pharmacological are a lens through which chemical effects become perceivable on the scale of design. Atom by atom, the pharmacological summons us through limitless molecular allure, reframing the “self” and its environment for our current pharma-society.
The extant history of pharmaceuticals, in many ways, is a history of use—of the functions and abilities of consumable products and their role in our domestic or professional lives. Twentieth century pharmacy histories primarily revolve around successes and failures in the domains of discovery, marketing, and mergers. By contrast, through an investigation of the pharmaceutical industry not solely as a medical field, this thesis examines a mode of consumer design. Attendant to the pharmaceutical product, its receiver as well as interior architecture. The industry’s effect on the built environment and daily life is considered by focusing on the pill at different scales—the manufactory, the drug store, and the consumer—across a case study of the pharmaceutical manufacturer, Upjohn from 1946 to 1961. Looking at these sites of interaction, this thesis attempts to trace the technical aesthetic history of the pharmaceutical from the creation of the physical pill to the proliferation of the field’s graphic representation, and to the behaviors which have given rise to the pharmacological as a realm of design.
The complexities of sex work in the United States are deeply enmeshed with the county’s relationship to morality and control. While our collective cultural understandings of sex and work are tied to complex histories of labor economies in the US, their commercialization has been central to the mythology of the American dream. False associations between frontier freedoms and sexual liberations were birthed in the boom towns of the West, where the sexual labor of women became the “backbone” of an emergent urban landscape that is spatially entangled with a new form of libidinal economy.
This thesis interrogates the physical and imaginary formation of the American West through the reading of Virginia City, a late 19th century mining town in Nevada, and the extractive industries that played a central role in its formation, namely sex work and mining. Through the lens of exchange, the thesis examines the urban and economic formations of Virginia City and its close associations with the mythologies of the West and their deep associations with the town’s literary origins. Built on industries of extraction and tourism, boom towns in Nevada actively used myths and stories of the West to create and maintain a workforce and a prospering economy. Excitements of what could be in these towns were weaponized and spun into a complex web of gendered relations to labor.
A naked game of tag in a former Nazi gas chamber. IDF combat training within a Palestinian cemetery. Captivity training and simulated interrogation. Imagining a golden shower, sex, and suicide with Hitler.
“Shooting and Crying” examines mediatic environments of enactment that destabilize categories and constructions of subjecthood as a means of working through past and present trauma for Jewish and para-Jewish subjects. In order to detect and read structures of complicity and victimhood, this thesis stages an encounter among three projects that perform and document scenes of genocidal enactment: Roee Rosen’s art installation Live and Die as Eva Braun (1997), Artur Żmijewski’s film Berek (Game of Tag) (1999), and Yishai Sarid’s novel Victorious (2022). Staging together embroiled and transdisciplinary histories of psychoanalysis, memorialization, curation, and military training in this thesis activates these practices, in turn producing synchronous and diachronous resonances among them. At the core of this research are two genocides, the Holocaust and ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine, both intimately bound to one another beyond history and through their practices of identity and memory. The trauma these structures produce and resurrect form relational identities vis a vis Jewish and para-Jewish subjects, relations this thesis unravels and re-tangles. Reading environments which work through victimhood and memory uncovers a complex, boundless network of theories, histories, and practices of psychological conditioning and preparation. To engage in these discourses is to voyage to unexpected places—film, museums, literature, military training—where trauma oozes, escapes, and constantly jumps mediatic and temporal registers. As an interrogation of discomfort and its manifold projections, this thesis looks to practices that suspend, if not supersede, cultural sanctions to actively confront and challenge the viewer: the museum visitor, the historian, survivor, and you, the reader of my thesis.
This thesis examines the tensions between labor and leisure in the post-World War II period, which led to radical utopian projects of the 1960s and 1970s. This period presents various conditions and authoritative strategies that led some in society to react to the crises of their time, dreaming of change and the means to better themselves. This project collects, retells, adjusts, and sets forth elements of leisure, labor, the spaces of imagination, and otherness created under these conditions, allowing for the investigation into modes of collective isolation, imagination, and tensions under a tripartite conceptual framework of comparative binarism, concrete utopia, and heterotopia. By understanding various movements, technological innovations, and socialpolitical crises, this project theorizes heterotopic and utopic projects and cyclical events to bring forth questions about how society manufactures leisure, how cultural production aids its proliferation in connection to labor, and where freedom exists within the realm of necessity.
As a primary case study, a platform in the Adriatic Sea—Rose Island—exemplifies otherness and exudes the power to spark governmental action against it within the tensions of emplacement, land, and placemaking. The geopolitical tensions blur our vision of what labor and related leisure took place on the platform, and more questions arise as the project unfolds to look at, into, and through the space of reality and the imaginary. The interrogation of the tensions between labor and leisure, how labor’s significance persists in its entanglements with leisure through the analysis of heterotopia, and the forces that drive society toward collective isolation in the name of freedom allow this thesis to become a launch pad to clarify the notion of leisure enmeshed within utopian impulses, dreams, crises, and labor. Architecture & Leisure: Heterotopia, Freedom deploys techniques of adjacency and inquiry to expand a base setting for social-political ramifications of building a heterotopia for a claimed freedom and argues that leisure and labor’s hidden attributes are tethered with standard society even today.
You are cordially invited to join a night of toasts, good cheer, and gourmet delights.
What makes the dinner party? This thesis investigates and dissects the operations—the physical, political, and social constructions—of the dinner party, by tracing the iconography of the Presidential State Dinner. Recognized as the “People’s House,” the White House embodies a representative force for the American people. Thus, White House State Dinners set an example as the cultural tastemaker for the country and their allure is used to affect politics at home. The Nixon Administration, in particular, employed the imagery of State Dinners and diplomatic travels of the First Family to influence the American domestic dinner party, most notably the Nixons’ trip to China. Here, the Administration’s use of changing media technologies and even censorship shifted the narrative into a crafted viewpoint. Utilizing the theatricality of the dinner party, the President performs at the table and in front of the television camera to infiltrate American domesticity and diplomacy, influencing the choices at the dinner table and the ballot box.
So how are dinner parties produced? The Performative Meal: Nixonian Dinner Theater attempts to seek out new imaginings of the dinner party and asks how these subjects, brought on by the Nixon Administration, of social, media, and gendered politics situate around the dinner table. The thesis examines the usage of the dinner party through the White House during the Nixon Administration, where new strides in television and media technologies enabled the dinner to become a more performative experience. By focusing on the welcome and reciprocal dinners thrown in Beijing, the thesis marinates on what makes the dinner party through the event’s archival documentation. It whets the appetite through investigations of printed and visual media to complicate the palette of dinner norms, uncovering the underlying political minefield the President and the First Lady staged through dinners and their relationship to food more broadly. The Performative Meal traces the usage of the dinner party and food through this era of representation in the changing media landscape, constructing a performance of this gustatory event.
Dinner will be served. Regrets only, please.
This thesis presents facts on, and interpretations of, spaces and systems of dairying in the United States. It focuses on both the built infrastructures of 19th-century dairy farms as well as on federally-funded dairy dissemination programs of the 20th-century. I argue that those earlier spaces facilitated the later development of the nationwide dairy surplus, transforming dairy’s status from agricultural to institutional.
The purpose of acquiring such knowledge is manifold, though three points are especially critical. First, this thesis uses the dairy industry as an example of the long-term role architecture plays in socio-political relations. The built environment does more than simply mediate ecologies in its immediate vicinity, but it plays an indispensable role in the production of consumable goods at every phase. Second, this thesis serves as a counter-history to positive narratives regarding the efficiency of mechanization. Rather than finding freedom through technological advancements on the farm, hyper-efficient dairying practices instead created an overwhelming burden, oppressive subsidization laws, and, ultimately, radical inefficiency. Third, this thesis intends to reveal an insidious mode of United States governance, socially and fiscally. Dairy, something outwardly simple and seemingly insular—a commodity branded into the U.S.-American subconscious (think “got milk?”)—is an industry that extends beyond milk, cheese, and yogurt to impact environmental policies, race relations, spectacle, health standards, and beyond. Reading the production and dissemination of dairy, this thesis posits, helps to reveal techniques of deception, exploitation, expropriation, oppression, and extraction at work within U.S. culture; these techniques are read, that is, as symptoms of the United States.
My thesis argues that these strategies should be examined in the wake of an overwhelming dairy surplus born of technical and economic decisions. The central investigation of this thesis, then, is architecture’s role in creating such a surplus. It studies how modes of dairy production were constructed through architecture’s limitations and abilities, and how architecture itself was constructed as a tool for efficient means of dairying. This thesis sheds light on both the individual and entwined political ecologies of architecture and dairying, as well as on logics of capitalism and nationalism more broadly.
A stair that leads nowhere, a chimney without its bathhouse, an imprint of a sealed-up door—doorknob still intact. These were just a few of the architectural relics, or Thomassons, that were captured by conceptual artist Genpei Akasegawa and his students who took to the streets to carefully survey the neighborhoods of Tokyo in the late 20th century. Akasegawa claimed them as an example of Hyper-Art, an unauthored artform rooted in discovery and whose only method of production can be its own recognition and registration—a self-perpetuating archive of photographs and data. Formally published as an artistic concept in the magazine Photo Times in 1982, Thomasson-hunting became a niche pastime for many across Japan. Collecting submissions through a detailed report form (including space for general information as well as personal accounts, hand-drawn maps, and photographs), and categorizing them with witty names, these street observers were able to assemble a wide-spread documentation of Japan focused at the margins.
Centralizing a particular Thomasson—a chimney from a demolished bathhouse—this thesis excavates all sorts of deviant sites, characters, and histories within postwar Tokyo and around the artwork itself. It follows the chimney through multiple lenses: as a vestige caught up in the politics of urban redevelopment, as a trigger for the revival of a fieldwork-based ethnographic study, and as a record exposing the inefficient, un-commodified underbelly of the city. Through this evolution, a complex assemblage of architecturally-based narratives begins to appear. “Guiding Thomasson” offers new techniques, documents, and contexts to read the Thomassonian construct, historically dependent on diagrammatic imagery and accounts written by Akasegawa despite its collectivist foundation. Departing, moreover, from the shadow of his purely aesthetic lens, the guide emphasizes assistants to the Thomasson project—subjects such as the Mori Building Company, Bigakkō art school, and Iimura Akihiko—that helped form the practice as it is known today. Tracing Mori company histories alongside residential maps and personal narratives, I reveal how this particular chimney-turned-accidental-obelisk embodies grand urban transformations related to the 1964 Olympics and 1969 New City Planning Bill. I then follow a Hyper-Art hunt involving the chimney alongside Akasegawa’s syllabi at Bigakkō to theoretically frame within the project the notion of the architectural uncanny and a pedagogy called “Modernology.” Alternatively, through an analysis of the chimney’s visual record in prints, paintings, and fish-eye photographs, I demonstrate its primacy in Thomasson history through the figure of Iimura and within an exhibitionary history. Through the selection of significant “sites”—a play on the typical tourist itinerary to monumental “sights”—the guide extends new ways of looking—at a peculiar artistic practice, at the problematics of a city in a fragmented modernizing state, at the architectural lifespan, and at seemingly unexceptional everyday objects.