The Masters of Science in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture (CCCP) offers advanced training in the fields of architectural criticism, publishing, curating, exhibiting, writing, and research through a two-year, full-time course of intensive academic study and independent research. The program recognizes that architectural production is multi-faceted and diverse and that careers in architecture often extend beyond traditional modes of professional practice and academic scholarship, while at the same time reflecting and building upon them.

ERIC CHEN

Advisor: Mark Wasiuta

Habitus is All You Need: The Dilemma of Architectural Postcoloniality in Taiwan

The decolonization of architecture in postcolonial societies requires the development of a unique architectural vocabulary that encompasses a large variety of architectural experiences to suit different building and spatial types. However, two primary factors prevent the realization of this goal: first is the global homogenization of tastes caused by the omnipresence of the visual vocabulary of consumerism spread by globalization; second is the logic of modernism which expects “consistent output delivering acceptable results.” To overcome the aforementioned dilemma, I argue that the decolonization of architecture must take place at the cognitive level. This view propelled me to look into a variety of fields outside of architecture, including linguistics and musicology, to look for answers. For instance, from the perspective of implied harmony, chords operate in the perceptual background, chords are an abstraction of the surface melody that lurks in the listener’s unconscious perceptual background; thus, the use of the IV–V–iii–vi progression in Japanese pop music, as opposed to the I–V–vi–IV progression that is most common in western pop music, allows Japanese pop music to be recognizably unique. I further identified that the failure of postcolonial architects to decolonize architecture in their societies is due to their inability to design with higher levels of creativity, because instances of higher creativity are usually results of “inconsistent output delivering exceptional results.” This explains why the most creative thinkers in western civilization are often aristocrats or had aristocratic patrons. Thus, I identified the dilemma of architectural decolonization as a “habitus” problem and cited examples of unprivileged individuals who demonstrated exceptional levels of creativity to show how postcolonial architects who were not born into privilege may still be able to unleash their full creative potential. Using the aforementioned theories as an overarching framework, I diagnosed how decoloniality is manifested in Taiwanese society and the built environment of Taiwan.

ARIA EKASILAPA

Advisor: Alexandra Quantrill

ATOPIA: The Bathroom is Not a Room

What remains to be said of the bathroom?

So ordinary, repetitive, and technically resolved, the bathroom appears to resist inquiry. Within architectural discourse, the bathroom is often conceived as banal: a sanitary room over-specified in technicality and under-theorized in discourse. And yet, behind closed doors, bodies leak, cleanse, hide, perform, desire, and decay. It is here that architecture confronts the inevitabilities it most often attempts to deodorize: excretion, odor, moisture, contamination, maintenance, and excess. Despite its recurrence across nearly every building typology, the bathroom remains structurally marginalized within architectural thought, reduced to technical compliance, aesthetic afterthought, or infrastructural concealment. This thesis begins from that contradiction.

ATOPIA: The Bathroom Is Not a Room interrogates the bathroom as a space whose apparent stability is continuously threatened by the body it accommodates. Plans flatten it into compliance. Renderings sanitize it into pristine stillness. Architectural discourse renders it odorless. Yet the body leaks, ages, desires, and resists, exposing the bathroom precisely where architecture attempts to contain instability within systems of order, hygiene, visibility, and control.

Rather than accepting the bathroom as a discrete architectural room, this thesis reads it as an unstable convergence of objects, systems, atmospheres, images, and bodies. The bathroom oscillates between object and infrastructure, utility and ritual, intimacy and exposure, concealment and display. It is simultaneously a technical apparatus, a biopolitical instrument, a representational construct, and a contested site of identity formation.

Drawing from the Greek a-topos, meaning “out of place,” atopia names not placelessness, but the impossibility of being fully situated within a stable conceptual order. The bathroom is materially fixed yet theoretically elusive; ubiquitous in everyday life yet persistently unresolved within architectural thought. The body occupies a similarly unstable condition, continually exceeding the static systems that seek to regulate it. As both theoretical lens and methodological position, atopia names the failure of alignment between competing regimes of intelligibility.

Structured through disciplinary entries across exhibition, science, cinema, and queer theory, this thesis attempts to classify the bathroom through distinct epistemological lenses while simultaneously acknowledging the failure of those boundaries to hold. The cinematic contaminates the architectural. The scientific becomes aesthetic. The queer becomes spatial.

None of this may be architectural, or all of it is.

The bathroom is everywhere.

And yet, it remains out of place.

In exposing the bathroom as a site where architecture and the body fail to fully coincide, this thesis reinterrogates architecture through the spaces it has learned to deodorize.

IDA MARIE LYTH HANSEN

Advisor: Felicity D. Scott

The Hole in the Ground: Cryolite Mining & Danish Empire

“The Hole in the Ground: Cryolite Mining & Danish Empire” investigates the former mining town of Ivittuut, where Danes quarried the rare mineral cryolite for over 130 years. Located on the southwestern coast of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), the town was a Danish enclave, detached yet impactful, and mostly lost to international history. This critical reading of Ivittuut positions Danish mediatic representations of the town in their political and colonial context, arguing that Ivittuut is both a literal site of extraction and a mediatic tool used to reassert Danish historiographical control. Putting into tension various documented histories of the town, this thesis interrogates how Ivittuut’s identity for Denmark has morphed to suit various eras and political climates. In writing a new critical account of Ivittuut and its representations in Danish media, I problematize the colonial gaze and motives prevalent in the town’s existing historiography. Surveying the prior depictions of the mine, particularly in Danish popular culture, I interrogate how benefactors have shaped public ideologies that contribute to the empire’s legacy. Each time Ivittuut resurfaces on television sets and in newspapers across Denmark, it signalled a point in the ongoing yet continuously morphing imperial project.

At the crux of abstraction and extraction, the historical analysis positions the mineral cryolite, and thus its sole major deposit in Ivittuut, within important contexts of geology, military strategy, empire building, and media, in order to question how an area can transform from a nexus of economic and geomilitary importance to a forgotten “ghost town”? How was its importance manufactured, maintained, and why? How does a raw material once vital enough to shape geopolitical alliances simply cease to matter once depleted? What media apparatuses shore up this narrative of centrality and irrelevance and how does the town’s suspension in a state of abandonment aid Danish power? To answer these questions, the thesis identifies misguided narratives of temporality and debt that linger in Danish visions of the Arctic, where a colonial amnesia centers “modernization” as its impact rather than extraction or occupation. The current Danish perception of Greenland as an “expense state” was forged through decades, even centuries of selective memorialization and storytelling.

MAII H. HASSAN

Advisor: Felicity D. Scott

The Misfit Continuum

“You don’t care about your Egyptian pride?” he asked. I asked “if I am a party pooper in a way? Misfit in a way? I felt alienated at some point in my life.” … “Same!” … “I am basically revolving around the same themes. And specifically أغتراب [“ightirāb,” translates to alienation] is the word”

That is the self-description through which many Egyptian urban youths situate [our] their place in the socio-political and temporal fabric of today’s Egypt.

Against this backdrop, the thesis examines how misfitting materializes across Egypt’s urban fabric, investigating how it negotiates regimes of visibility and deviant social forms under socio-political pressures. Traversing misfitting in Egypt through theory, Zar ritual, street life, and intimacies of the Egyptian home, the research haunts boundaries between theory, ritual, and lived experience. At times, the Misfit is a name, me, a sacrifice, a space, the commune. In doing so, it produces a synthesis of misfitting in contemporary Egypt as a liminal condition bridging theoretical and philosophical understandings of othering with its aesthetic and architectural manifestations as a lived emic phenomenon.

The research unfolds within the Misfit Continuum, a dissociative continuum. Dissociation is approached not only as temporal but also spatial, examining how Zar’s vernacular mythic spatial logic sets the “vibe” in space to host the passing of time, of hard time, and afflicted bodies in time. Through this reading, vibes act as spatial traces of friction between the individual and the dominant social and temporal order within a location. They are not a designable parameter within architectural production, yet setting a vibe can transform space, producing architectures within architectures. By mobilizing architectural drawing and techniques as sensorial recording devices, the research culminates in an experimental trace, The Misfitting Vibe-Infra, and a stratum of writing that together capture how vibes inscribe themselves within Egypt’s urban fabric, traced as carved slices in time and space.

My current geopolitical circumstances, preventing my return to Egypt, situate the research within a condition of both fitting and misfitting. This embodied positionality informs the methodology, shaping how I document these coded forms from afar. I approach Zar from an insider–outsider perspective, conducting a grassroots reading of misfitting by misfits, creating a manifesto of what it means to misfit in today’s Egypt —theoretically, aesthetically, and spatially. In doing so, the research captures and performs the aesthetic growls of the alienated—“the misfits.”

ANDREW HÉBERT

Advisor: Felicity D. Scott

Tracing Occupation: Documentary Life in Baghdad

This thesis examines filmmaking within political and artistic discourse before, during, and after the 2003–2011 American occupation of Iraq. Iraqis documented and responded to life under siege using emerging digital technologies, circumventing traditional barriers to information exchange via Internet blogs and satellite links. Anti-occupation media developed as a distinct front in the asymmetric “War on Terror,” frequently incorporating the material struggles of filmmaking into its rhetoric. In this period of informational profusion, these words, images, and videos coming out of Iraq proved impossible to suppress, destabilizing Western strategies of media hegemony. Considering the production and distribution of these new media, this thesis focuses on documentary films from this period and their subjects.

These films raise many questions that speak to our own urgent times. Were these films a novel strategy for documenting Iraqi lives under occupation, and what external factors shaped their development? Ranging from Hollywood-backed productions to Al-Qaeda propaganda videos shot on camcorders, can these fragments constitute a circumstantial archive for this period of destruction and loss? Considering documentary media in this period and today–as an urgent means of documenting war and as a historic testament to survival–Tracing Occupation explores the livestream of atrocity and outrage that has continued to the present. Reassembling these works as an evidentiary archive aims to contextualize them within ongoing networks of solidarity against hegemony and military occupation today.

CAMILLE MCGRIFF

Advisor: Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa

SATYAM MISTRY

Advisor: Amelyn Ng

Metadata Milieus: On Remembering, Searching, and Being Lost

This thesis examines metadata as a mode of memory: a set of technical, descriptive, and standardized practices that determine what can be recalled, searched, linked, and made visible across books, architectural drawings, and archival systems. Rather than treating metadata as a neutral support layer, the project argues that metadata functions as an active memory infrastructure—one that both enables historical continuity and generates new forms of anxiety around loss, misrepresentation, invisibility, and attention scarcity.

Through a series of historical case studies, and prose the thesis traces how metadata encodes power, authorship, and historical legibility. It analyzes Library of Congress Subject Headings as a bureaucratic memory system whose standardization simultaneously facilitates retrieval and reproduces racialized, colonial, and outdated classifications. It examines the internet as the contemporary site for convenient image retrieval. It situates nineteenth-century architectural treatises as early experiments in proto-metadata, where indexes, plate numbering, and cross-referencing emerged in response to fissures of navigability and produces colonial imaginations and finally a mediation on footnotes and referencing as a curatorial strategy.

The project further investigates archival finding aids, digital collections, and informal archives such as cloud folders and para institutional practices, revealing how visibility and recall are contingent on descriptive systems that are often incomplete, fragile, or platform-dependent. Across these sites, metadata emerges as both a technology of preservation and a generator of affective and infrastructural anxiety particularly in moments of obsolescence, compression, or algorithmic attention economies.

By framing metadata as a cultural, technical, and political apparatus of memory, this thesis brings forth reframed narratives within media and architectural histories alongside a series of objects, figures and sites that together become a method for understanding how contemporary systems of knowledge organization shape not only what is remembered, but how memory itself becomes a site of tension and uncertainty, asking who, how and what has failed, and that which becomes the friction for these knowledge conditions.

YVONNE MPWO

Advisor: Mabel Wilson

ENCODED MEMORY _MOTHERBOARD _NYC

Motherboard_NYC was developed as the inaugural research publication for lóbí press, an independent publishing platform dedicated to research and cultural memory. Conceived as both an archival interface and serial publication framework, the project positions cartography and visual culture as interconnected methods for examining Black spatial realities across the Atlantic world. Motherboard is an iterative project that calls on artists, researchers, scholars, and architects of memory to build an archive of the Black Atlantic.

This thesis begins below ground, beneath the rocks and stones where, compressed by the weight of time and highrise buildings, lies evidence of a colonial history that continues to disrupt present-day narratives of land and value. Across Lower Manhattan and central Brooklyn, African burial grounds remain embedded underneath the contemporary cityscape. Initially situated along the margins and outskirts of colonial settlements, these sites have gradually disappeared through processes of urban expansion, hydropolitical tension, landfill, and real estate development. Today, the process of displacement can be traced back to the financial district and residential neighborhoods that now occupy these landscapes shaped by the commodification of Black bodies.

The African burial ground near Wall Street and the Flatbush African burial ground serve as spatial records of this transformation. The significance of these burial sites are often obscured within dominant narratives of New York City but excavation records reveal a relationship between racialized death and the production of urban value.

Building on these two burial sites, I begin by situating them within a broader spatial and historical system that connects the Congo to New York City. Encoded Memory is an archival project that engages Black spatial reality. Motherboard is an iterative digital memory interface informed by the cartographic logic of an Indigenous Congolese mnemonic device known as the Lukasa. Motherboard_NYC examines how land accrues value through the displacement and burial of Black life in New York City.

Historical cartography is layered with GIS to develop a multi-scalar mapping interface that connects transatlantic slave shipping routes to specific burial sites in present-day New York City. The workflow integrates multiple datasets, including census demographics, zoning shifts, land use, environmental conditions related to hydropolitics, and historical records, revealing how excavation disrupts sanitized land value narratives. This research positions African Burial Grounds as infrastructural nodes within a broader system in which Black death and land speculation intersect, performing a spatial autopsy of racial capitalism.

OLÍMPIA SOLÀ INARAJA

Advisor: Mark Wasiuta

Archiving the Nation: The Reinstatement and Expansion of the Catalan Archival System

This research examines the creation and development of the Sistema d’Arxius de Catalunya (SAC) during Spain’s democratic transition, situating it within the broader process of political, legal, and institutional renegotiation following the death of Francisco Franco in 1975. After the approval of the 1978 Constitution and the 1979 Statute of Autonomy, the newly reinstated Catalan administration obtained exclusive competence over archives. This shift enabled the restored Generalitat to design a comprehensive archival system that both revived and expanded the project initiated during the Second Republic and dismantled under Francoism.

The reconstruction of the SAC was not merely administrative; it constituted a political and symbolic intervention within an unstable context marked by the redefinition of Spanish sovereignty and the rearticulation of Catalonia’s status between “nationality” and “nation.” Within this framework, the archive emerges not as a passive repository but as an active agent in the production of historical narrative and collective identity. By reclaiming, reorganizing, and redistributing documentation—particularly materials confiscated during the Civil War, such as the so-called Salamanca Papers— the SAC functioned as an implicit form of reparation while simultaneously challenging centralized models of archival control. Its territorial logic, grounded in proximity and local belonging, further contributed to the spatial construction of Catalan national narratives. This geographical dimension materialized through a decentralized network of archives, many of which were established in pre-existing buildings—often former religious or historic structures that had been abandoned, transformed, or desacralized during the dictatorship, reinforcing the architecture’s role as additional signifier of national discourse.

By analyzing the SAC as a legal, territorial, architectural, and symbolic project, this research argues that archives played a constitutive role in shaping Catalan identity during the transition. It further interrogates the political project embedded in these institutions and their buildings, examining how they operate as sites where power, memory, and nationhood are actively produced and negotiated. The Catalan case thus demonstrates that archives are not neutral infrastructures, but strategic instruments in the construction of collective memory and national imagination.

EMILY MEI-MEI TAW

Advisor: Mark Wasiuta

Lost: A Hell Scroll

This project is a Hell Scroll. What began as a critical mapping of seemingly disparate landscapes of the colonial imagination has unfurled into a frenzied journey through a series of interconnected and seemingly endless hells. Borrowing from the narrative logics of the 12th-century Japanese Hell Scrolls—each panel beginning with the phrase “There is yet another hell”—my research traces multiple continuums of apocalypse and survival across seemingly disparate landscapes of the colonial imagination to understand how these imaginaries become implicated in both the production and destruction of worlds. Reading Western landscape imaginaries alongside the hellscapes they often anticipate—from the Garden of Eden to the Western Frontier, from the palm tree in the Tropics to the orange grove in the desert, from exotic fantasies to militarized terrains—I trace recurrent hells across geographies—Burma/Myanmar, Vietnam, California, and Palestine—across generations, across media, and across compounding colonial occupations and ongoing imperial projects. The geographic scope of my research follows the connective threads across various institutional archives, my own family history, and contemporary artistic practices to understand the ways in which the production, circulation, and consumption of landscape representations continue to shape contemporary imaginations, the contested territories of this world, and the conditions of relation within them.

PAULA VOLPATO

Advisor: Mark Wasiuta

Toxic Traces: Locating Evanescence in the Amazon

On a day like any other in 1947, my then eight-year-old grandmother entered the Amazon River accompanied by her cousins and neighbors. Instead of the expected daily encounter with clean water, they submerged under a pool of toxic chemicals. All of the children exposed to the water that day developed eye infections. My grandmother, the only one to be struck with disability, permanently lost sight in her right eye. More than a decade later, she left the Amazon in hopes of finding a nonexistent medical cure. The event that shaped the trajectory of her life by the spillage of toxic substances into the Amazon river is also the story of the ongoing environmental crisis in the Amazonian region, led by industrial, agricultural, and extractive operations.

Development has moved through the Amazonian region cyclically and so has toxicity. Attempts of control over this ecology have imposed on it foreign expectations, chemicals, and methods, along with a long trail of irremediable effects. This research uses the account of my grandmother’s exposure as a possibility towards reconstruction of an obscure flow of chemicals and their effects, especially in bodies deemed more porous or less precious. The ever-moving flow of the river and its impossibility of total capture parallels the evanescing quality of this account, existing only in this oral history passed on to me, and already fading within my grandmother’s memory. Making use of the lack of certainty inescapable when narrating from memory, from oral history, and from intoxication altogether, this project dwells in its allusiveness, its disappearance, its spiral.

The body, the river, the archive, and the city, are sites of encounter and contagion. These sites, each narrated and meditated upon, are positioned as brackets in between an accumulation of episodes that emerge from close readings to archival artifacts. The episodes convey narratives of neglect, tentatives of deception, and reveal built infrastructures as instruments of separation. Many of them are construed as evidence for success, profit, or control within their own projects, but are inevitably also evidence of atrocities, although not categorized or paid attention to as such. Together, this constellation of sites and episodes expose what is overlapped and what is omitted within different techniques of evidence making.

JINGRAN IRIS WANG

Advisor: Jordan Carver

Making Publics: Exhibition Practices and Spatial Politics in Early Reform-Era China

This paper investigates how public-driven exhibitions in post-1978 China collectively produced alternative public spheres during China’s brief window of political openness between 1978 and 1980. The post-reform era was the most open for public discourse, experimentation, and grassroots cultural practice when compared to both the Maoist years before and the tightening that followed in 1989. After Mao’s death in 1976, China encountered an intense period of political uncertainty known as the Beijing Spring. Deng Xiaoping started his leadership. China launched the policy of Gaige kaifang (改革开放, “Reform and Opening Up”). This time frame marked a transition away from Maoist isolation and Cultural Revolution orthodoxy (1949–1976) toward a mixed socialist-market model. While the state retained strict control over culture and ideology, the late 1970s and 1980s saw the emergence of new spaces for intellectual and artistic experimentation. The shift from revolutionary orthodoxy to reform-era pragmatism created a fragile but significant opening in which citizens, intellectuals, and artists could renegotiate their relationship to political authority. These groups began to manifest their own discursive space through three interconnected acts of spatial appropriation: the Democracy Wall (1978–79) turned a Xidan brick wall into an open-air reading room where citizens gathered to debate handwritten posters; the unofficial journal Today (1978–80) created a portable exhibition space through mimeographed pages passed from reader to reader; and the Stars Art Exhibition (1979) occupied the museum fence as an unauthorized threshold between official art and the street…Emerging in the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution and amid the ideological uncertainty of the Beijing Spring, these movements transformed walls, printed pages, and museum fences into improvised exhibitionary structures through which citizens and artists reasserted visibility, speech, and political subjectivity.

Several theoretical frameworks illuminate how these exhibitions functioned as counterpublics, spaces where groups excluded from official discourse create alternative publics. Building on Habermas‘s foundational concept of the public sphere, Negt and Kluge reveal how marginalized groups create alternative spaces for discourse. Lydia Liu’s theory of translingual practice shows how “the public” itself was negotiated through translation in the Chinese context. Perry Link and Merle Goldman capture the unique conditions of reform-era China, where cultural spaces operated neither fully within nor entirely outside Party control. Together, these frameworks demonstrate how public-driven exhibitions functioned as counterpublics, negotiating both the possibilities and limits of expression during regime transformation.

Through architectural analysis, visual studies, and close reading of archival materials, the thesis argues that the wall, the printed page, and the museum fence briefly became curatorial infrastructures for collective subjectivation. Although each movement was quickly suppressed, their tactics of self-organization, spatial intervention, and aesthetic dissent shaped subsequent cultural movements, including the ’85 New Wave and the 1989 Democracy Movement. These early experiments show how, in a moment of political transition, ordinary citizens and artists temporarily reconfigured the spatial, aesthetic, and discursive conditions of public life.