The Finishes Workshop provides students with skills to survey, identify and produce a conditions report on architectural finishes. Students learn how to research architectural finishes and then how to find and sample these finishes in a building. Samples are then taken back to the laboratory for analysis. The field work in this course helps prepare students for professional work in the field of preservation whether as a designer, administrator, conservator or preservationist. This semester, students worked at a house museum, the Dyckman House, under the supervision of the Historic House Trust. The Dyckman House is the oldest remaining farmhouse in Manhattan, reputed to have been built in 1785. Located in what is now Inwood (Broadway and 204th Street), the house stayed in the family for several generations until they sold it in 1868. By the beginning of the 20th century, the house was in disrepair and in danger of being demolished. In 1915-16, two sisters of the Dyckman family bought the house back. Mary Alice Dyckman Dean and Fannie Fredericka Dyckman Welch, then restored the farmhouse and in 1916 transferred the ownership to the City of New York. The class has been asked to undertake some investigative work by the Historic House Trust to answer questions regarding the house and its finishes: (1) Can we find the location of an opening from the parlor to lost addition? (2) Is there any original plaster in the first f loor rooms or was it all replaced in the early twentieth century? (3) What were the original colors in the first floor rooms? Can we f ind any original finishes? What type of finishes are on the wall? Can we find early 20th century finishes? (4) Why is the paint failing on the walls of the first floor bedroom?

Heritage places are complex areas characterized by intricate spatial relations. Effective preservation, planning and management of these sites require a systematic approach to deriving, storing, structuring, analyzing and presenting spatial data. A robust heritage recording and information management system plays a vital role in ensuring a sustainable future of these sites. The course is designed to provide comprehensive knowledge of various techniques and tools for heritage recording and information management. It also focuses on transforming complex data into engaging narratives for targeted audiences through digital storytelling. This collection includes StoryMaps created by students of the Digital Heritage Documentation Course, Spring 2026, taught by Bilge Kose. Each storymap is loaded onto a different tab. Please feel free to click through all five storymaps:

ANNIE (XIAO RUI) AN
Advisor: Norman Weiss

Architectural Gilding in Gilded Age America

What can an architectural scale gilded surface reveal beyond its brilliance? This paper examines architectural gilding as both a technical practice and a cultural instrument within the socio-economic context of late nineteenth-century America. Between the 1860s and early twentieth century, the United States underwent rapid economic expansion that reshaped its cultural landscape. This period, termed the “Gilded Age” by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, was marked by extreme wealth alongside social inequality. Within this context, interior finishes became tools through which elites asserted cultural authority, drawing on European precedents to construct narratives of lineage and permanence. Architectural gilding stands as a material witness to shifting taste and cultural aspiration under the rise of the American nouveau riche, who turned to grand architectural expressions to emulate European aristocratic life.
Focusing on the Gold Salon of Marble House in Newport, designed by Richard Morris Hunt for the Vanderbilt family, the study investigates the unprecedented scale of gold leaf application in American domestic architectural interiors. Partially due to new social practices – including competitive estate-building, or “mansion mania”, conditions were created in which gilding migrated from palaces and churches into private homes, transforming the social function and visibility of gilded surfaces.The Gold Salon represents this rare instance of near-total spatial enclosure in gold at the domestic scale. Through its materials, techniques, and visual effects, architectural gilding revealed the social hierarchies it was designed to stage, the labor systems that enabled its production, and the cultural ambitions embedded within its execution. Gilded interiors of this period can be read as artifacts of the Gilded Age, encoding relationships between patrons, designers, craftsmen, and broader economic networks. By offering in-situ readings of the gilded surfaces and cross-sectional sampling, the study demonstrates how gilders manipulated surface qualities to achieve specific optical and atmospheric effects ranging not only from burnished to matte finishes, but also tonal, textural, and lighting differences affecting how it is perceived by the viewer and also its influence on surrounding gilded surfaces.
The paper also examines labor and knowledge transmission, considering the roles of immigrant craftsmen, trained gilders, and decorative painters within transatlantic networks of expertise. By comparing historical treatises, archival drawings, and contemporary practices, it identifies a gap in scholarship: while object gilding is well documented, architectural gilding remains under-examined. It further acknowledges that the spaces we encounter today are not exact replicas of their original conditions; time, changing lighting technologies, and preservation frameworks inevitably alter their appearance. Yet, through close analysis – particularly a renewed reading of gilded surface finishes – this study proposes a method for reconstructing how such interiors were once perceived and understood.

YIXUAN CHEN
Advisor: Carol Clark

The Marginalization and Reintegration of Traditional Craftsmen in Suzhou’s Architectural Conservation

This thesis examines the institutional marginalization of Xiangshan Bang traditional craftspeople within China’s heritage conservation system. Drawing on Laurajane Smith’s Authorized Heritage. Discourse framework and Foucauldian power/knowledge analysis, it argues that qualification certification requirements, tendering procedures, and the administrative separation between tangible and intangible heritage governance systematically exclude embodied craft knowledge from heritage decision-making—producing restorations that are visually convincing but culturally impoverished.
Through comparative analysis of two Suzhou heritage projects—Nanbanyuan Garden (2016–2021), where Xiangshan Bang craftsmen participated in restoration, and Taohuawu Historic Cultural District (2010–2015), where they were excluded—this research demonstrates that craft integration produces measurably different outcomes in material retention, construction authenticity, and cultural continuity. The Taishun covered bridge reconstruction (2016–2017) serves as proof-of-concept, demonstrating that craft-centered conservation is achievable within China’s existing institutional framework. The project’s contribution to the December 2024 UNESCO transfer of “Chinese Traditional Architectural Craftsmanship for Timber-Framed Structures” from the Urgent Safeguarding List to the Representative List—the first such transfer in UNESCO history—provides international validation of this approach. The thesis proposes reforms addressing regulatory integration, apprenticeship mandates, economic incentives, and accountability mechanisms. With master artisans averaging 57.5 years of age and minimal youth recruitment, the research concludes that the window for meaningful reform is narrowing. Heritage conservation that excludes traditional craftspeople severs the living processes through which heritage is constituted, preserving material form while losing the knowledge that gave it meaning.

MATT GOFF
Advisor: Erica Avrami

Learning from the Arcade: Reimagining Preservation through Magic Circles of Play

This thesis argues that the American video arcade should be understood as a significant heritage environment: a designed, technologically mediated, and socially produced interior whose cultural value lies not only in its surviving material artifacts, but in the sensory, behavioral, and operational systems that made it meaningful. Although the arcade has increasingly been recognized within game studies and public history as a formative site of digital culture, it remains undertheorized within preservation discourse, where existing methods have struggled to account for places whose significance is distributed across objects, atmospheres, embodied interactions, maintenance practices, and public use rather than stable architectural fabric alone. The arcade thus presents a productive challenge to preservation practice, forcing a reconsideration of what constitutes authenticity, integrity, and character-defining features in heritage environments. This thesis addresses this gap through a mixed historical and field-based study of the American video arcade as a socio-spatial heritage type. It first reconstructs the longer lineage of arcade space, tracing the evolution of public amusement from its nineteenth-century coin-operated predecessors through the sportlands and playlands of the early twentieth century and into the video revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. It then identifies the historical character-defining features of the video arcade as a “total environment,” showing how cabinets, lighting, sound, floorplans, interior decoration, social ecologies, and operational governance combined to produce a distinct form of immersive public play. To analyze how such environments are preserved in the present, the thesis develops a new methodological framework—a nested “magic circle” model adapted from game studies and reframed for preservation analysis. This framework maps authenticity as a scalar condition produced across multiple overlapping zones, from the machine-player interface outward to the social, environmental, operational, and urban contexts that sustain arcade experience. Through case studies of two arcades in the Chicago area, Star Worlds in DeKalb, Illinois, and Galloping Ghost Arcade in Brookfield, Illinois, this research demonstrates that arcade authenticity is not singular or fixed, but ecological and relational, capable of being maintained through different preservation logics. In doing so, the thesis positions the arcade not as a marginal curiosity, but as a critical test case for the future of preservation methodology, particularly for environments whose significance lies in use, spirit, feeling, and technologically mediated public life.

LIZA HEGEDUS
Advisor: Paul Bentel

Constructing Identity: Vernacular Earthen Farmstead Architecture in Szarvas, Hungary

This thesis examines vernacular earthen farmstead architecture in Szarvas, Hungary, dating primarily from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, as an underdocumented and increasingly endangered component of rural heritage. Existing scholarship on earthen architecture in Hungary often separates technical and material knowledge from cultural and spatial interpretation: local histories and oral accounts describe settlement life, agriculture, and everyday practices, while broader technical studies of earthen construction rarely address the specific domestic, social, and environmental conditions that shaped these buildings in Szarvas. This research brings those isolated bodies of knowledge into conversation in order to develop a more holistic understanding of how these farmsteads were constructed, inhabited, maintained, and adapted over time.
Using Szarvas as a case study, the thesis investigates how local soil conditions, material availability, agricultural life, and environmental constraints informed the form and performance of vernacular earthen architecture. The methodology combines site surveys, field documentation, interviews with local residents and craftspeople, archival research, and comparative analysis with other earthen building traditions historically associated with the Kingdom of Hungary. It also synthesizes local historical texts collected and translated during fieldwork, many of which have remained inaccessible outside the immediate region, alongside broader literature on earthen construction, climate, and preservation. Through this interdisciplinary approach, the thesis identifies recurring patterns in farmstead layout, construction methods, maintenance practices, and spatial organization.
Ultimately, the thesis argues that the earthen farmsteads of Szarvas should be understood not only as practical structures built from local materials, but as a vulnerable cultural and material knowledge system embedded in landscape, labor, and everyday life. This project is also personally significant to the author: Szarvas is close to where her father grew up, and it is a place with which she has long been familiar. As such, the research serves both as an academic investigation and as an effort to document and support the preservation of a rapidly disappearing architectural tradition.

MUHAMMAD FIKRI RAJAL (FIKRI) IZZA
Advisor: Jorge Otero-Pailos

HISTORIC SOUNDSCAPE PRESERVATION : Interpreting The Lost Soundscape Through Auralisation Experiment In Tin Pan Alley, New York City (1893 - 1910)

This thesis examines the ambiguous role of sound within contemporary preservation practice, where sonic conditions are frequently acknowledged but rarely treated as interpretable evidence. Using Tin Pan Alley in New York City (1893–1910) as a case study, the research proposes a method for interpreting lost historic soundscapes through auralisation. While the identity of Tin Pan Alley was fundamentally shaped by overlapping piano sounds, its soundscape survives only through indirect archival traces such as designation reports, newspapers, and historical narratives. The thesis develops a preservation-oriented workflow that integrates archival research, spatial analysis, and sound production techniques. Sound-producing activities are identified from historical sources, categorized using soundscape theory, and translated into proxy sound elements labeled as documented, inferred, or contextual. These elements are then spatially organized through sound mapping, temporally structured through graphic scoring, and rendered audible through impulse response–based auralisation. The resulting reconstruction is presented as an interpretive model rather than an exact reproduction of the past.
A listening-session experiment evaluates how the reconstructed soundscape communicates spatial, temporal, and interpretive qualities to audiences. The findings indicate that the method effectively conveys density, simultaneity, and soundmark identity, while revealing limitations in temporal specificity and spatial clarity. The results also suggest that perceived realism does not necessarily increase with auralisation and that the interpretation relies significantly on contextual framing to establish historical and spatial meaning. The thesis argues that auralisation can function as a transparent and repeatable tool within preservation practice when understood as a context-dependent interpretive method, expanding interpretation beyond visual and material dimensions to include sound as a critical component of cultural heritage.

ELIZABETH KOSTINA
Advisor: Françoise Bollack

Soviet Silhouettes: World Heritage in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan

As of 2026, Uzbekistan has inscribed five cultural sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List (WHL), all as ensemble listings, large-scale territorial inscriptions of historic urban cores. Kazakhstan, which borders Uzbekistan to the north and shares a closely related architectural, political, and colonial history, has never inscribed a comparable ensemble; its cultural heritage inscriptions have consistently taken the form of standalone monument designations. Both countries, at Soviet dissolution in 1991, inherited the same federal heritage management frameworks, legal codes for monument protection, property regimes maintaining state ownership of cultural heritage, and professional communities trained in Soviet conservation methodologies. A cursory explanation might attribute the divergence to civilizational difference: Uzbekistan’s precolonial history was predominantly urban and sedentary, organized around Silk Road cities, while Kazakhstan’s was primarily nomadic, producing architectures of mobility rather than settlement. This thesis argues that attributing the divergence to civilizational patterns alone is insufficient.

Drawing on archival material, close readings of nomination dossiers and ICOMOS evaluations, Soviet-era architectural surveys and heritage legislation, and Russian-language primary sources spanning the Russian Imperial period through 2025, this thesis traces the institutional genealogy of both countries’ divergent WHL engagement across three registers. First, a historical analysis demonstrates that Russian colonial documentation practices and decades of Soviet heritage management produced asymmetric heritage capacities between the two republics, despite their other similarities. Second, a comparative site analysis of the Historic Centre of Bukhara (Uzbekistan, 1993) and the Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi (Kazakhstan, 2003) examines how Soviet scholarly categories of “ensemble” and “monument” were established through a deliberately secularizing interpretation of Islamic architecture in the region and how this reading has persisted into present-day UNESCO nomination language, criteria selection, and boundary definitions. Lastly, a legal analysis demonstrates that post-independence heritage inheritance was unequal. The divergence in WHL strategies is therefore not a story about ‘civilizational difference,’ but about the unequal investments produced by a colonial empire that continues to shape what each country claims as its heritage today.

CONGYIN LI
Advisor: Sarah E. Sher

Reframing American Hospitals in Zhejiang, China: The Case of Fukang Hospital, Shaoxing

This study examines American-founded hospitals (hereafter “American hospitals”) in Zhejiang Province, exploring the factors that have contributed to their marginalization in heritage designation practices. It also critically reassesses conventional interpretations of “Western hospitals” within the Chinese context. Adopting a context-based, institution-centered approach, the research moves beyond traditional building-focused heritage analysis. Instead of starting from individual architectural objects, it reconstructs a broader regional and historical framework.

Focusing on Zhejiang Province, the study analyzes the distribution, development, and institutional networks of American hospitals in early twentieth-century China through comparative methods. By reviewing relevant policies, heritage designation procedures, evaluation criteria, and existing narratives, it identifies key institutional factors that have led to the misclassification, misinterpretation, and marginalization of these sites.

The paper further investigates the case of Fukang Hospital in Shaoxing. Rather than emphasizing architectural style alone, it examines the processes of fundraising, design, and construction, as well as the hospital’s institutional roles in medicine, religion, and education. In contrast to previous studies that frame such sites as symbols of generalized Sino-Western exchange or focus narrowly on individual missionaries, this research proposes a more nuanced interpretation.

It argues that American hospitals should not be reduced to generic “Western hospitals,” symbols of diplomatic relations, or residences of notable figures. Instead, they should be understood as hybrid medical institutions with complex architectural and social functions. Based on this perspective, the study reconstructs a more contextually grounded heritage framework, aiming to address and correct their long-standing marginalization within existing heritage systems.

HEATHER OAKLEY
Advisor: Andrew Dolkart

Housing the Single Woman: Preserving and Interpreting Gender, Labor, and Autonomy in Manhattan’s Working Women’s Homes, 1890-1913

At the turn of the nineteenth century, women moving to New York City in search of work had limited housing options. Religious groups started opening “working women’s homes” to address this issue. In 1890, these homes became purpose-built, designed by well-regarded architects and financed by generous philanthropists. This thesis addresses the following research questions: How did early purpose-built residences for working women in New York City reflect differing perspectives about women’s growing urban independence, and how can recognizing these distinctions inform the interpretation and preservation of these buildings today? As a typology, these residences are rarely recognized as significant within historic preservation frameworks, which have often prioritized monumental or high-style architecture. Yet, they represent a critical social and architectural response to the presence of working women and serve as physical records of gendered urban space.
By examining these buildings through both historical and architectural lenses, this thesis illustrates how differing perceptions of women were expressed spatially, enabling or at times disenfranchising female autonomy in negotiated space. Within the historic preservation field, preservation frameworks have a greater role to play in acknowledging housing types that reflect social change, gender dynamics, and evolving urban life. Through an analysis of selected case studies, this thesis examines the organizational responses- religious, commercial, and philanthropic- to the growing visibility and independence of women in the modern city.

ASHLYN PAUSE
Advisor: Mary Jablonski

Material of Abundance: High-Pressure Decorative Laminate in American Architecture

As a physical representation of polymerization history and thermosetting plastics, high-pressure laminate (HPL) plays a significant role in both the design and development history of modern and contemporary building materials. Often referred to as “Formica,” although the product has been historically produced by numerous companies, HPL became commonplace in American residential spaces by the early 1950s. In recent decades, with the growing popularity of house renovations, HPL has increasingly been removed and replaced due to aesthetic preferences and a lack of preservation awareness. Considering the growing threat to HPL, this thesis asks: “Given the significance of high-pressure laminates (HPL) in American technological advancements and architectural design, what are the choices that can be made in the face of preservation and demolition challenges?” Examining HPL from a performance-based perspective and evaluating its durability as a synthetic material through historical research, case study observations, and materials testing, this thesis provides recommendations for the care and maintenance of HPL.

YUHAN(ALEX) SHI
Advisor: Erica Avrami

Mapping Patterns of Survival and Erasure in New York City’s AIDS Heritage

This thesis maps 156 AIDS-related heritage sites across New York City’s five boroughs, analyzing why the formal preservation system has largely failed to engage with this history. Drawing on the 1989 NYC Department of Health AIDS: A Resource Guide as its primary source, supplemented by organizational archives at the New York Public Library, NYU’s Fales Library, and the NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project database, the study codes each site across four analytical dimensions — Site Typology, Preservation Status, Recognition Type, and Erasure Category — to produce the first comprehensive, site- level analysis of preservation outcomes across the AIDS heritage landscape of New York City. The study uses AIDS history as its organizing category rather than LGBTQ identity. The two overlap substantially but are not coextensive. The epidemic affected gay men, intravenous drug users, immigrants, and low-income communities of color in ways that preservation frameworks organized around LGBTQ identity alone cannot fully capture. This framing shifts the analytical burden from individual sites to the preservation system that has failed to recognize them. The central finding is empirical. Preservation outcomes across the 156-site dataset have been determined by structural conditions — property ownership, resident legal rights, affordability covenants, and institutional scale — rather than by historical significance or formal preservation system engagement. The housing and hospice sector retains a 93.8 percent functional survival rate without a single landmark designation for its AIDS-era history. The community services sector retains only 15.6 percent. The difference is not a difference in historical significance. It is a difference in tenure structure. The maps also reveal a pattern of recognition failure. Of 156 sites, 76 carry no recognition of any kind. Fifty-two functionally active sites carry no documentary record that would survive their institutional closure. Twenty-three sites exist only in digital records maintained by organizations whose funding is itself precarious. The preservation emergency this thesis documents is not demolition. It is the historical irrecoverability that accumulates in buildings that are still standing and institutions that are still operating, without any mechanism in the formal preservation system to interrupt it. The study further identifies a categorical gap in existing AIDS preservation frameworks. Sites whose significance is defined by epidemic burden among Black, Latinx, and immigrant communities — rather than by LGBTQ identity — fall outside the scope of all existing documentation infrastructure. The outer- borough healthcare and community services sites that served these communities during the epidemic’s peak years carry the lowest recognition rates in the dataset and face the most acute risk of irrecoverability. The thesis proposes a four-part framework of structural interventions: a systematic oral history and archival deposit program targeting the 52 sites in the Functionally Stable but Documentarily Invisible category; use protection instruments calibrated to the structural vulnerability the Rivington House case exposed; a dedicated outer-borough documentation initiative with community organizations as co- producers; and the development of an AIDS Historic Context Statement for the full AIDS-affected public, distinct from existing LGBTQ heritage frameworks, as the foundational instrument for future preservation advocacy across the landscape this study maps.

YUHAN (JUDY) WANG
Advisor: Kate Reggev

From Preservation to Translation: I.M. Pei and Cultural Continuity in Modern China

This thesis examines I. M. Pei’s Fragrant Hill Hotel in Beijing, completed in 1982, as a case study in modern architecture, cultural identity, and preservation in post-Mao China. Designed during the early Reform era, the hotel was expected to represent China’s reopening while maintaining a recognizable connection to Chinese architectural tradition. Instead of creating a monumental high-rise or copying historical forms, Pei proposed a low-rise hotel organized through courtyards, landscape sequences, restrained materials, and references to traditional spatial experience.
This thesis argues that the Fragrant Hill Hotel should not be understood as preservation in a conventional sense. It did not conserve an existing historic building or reproduce traditional architecture directly. Rather, it operates through cultural translation, reinterpreting spatial principles, material associations, craft practices, and relationships between architecture and landscape within a modern hotel program. Through archival research, interviews, visual analysis, and comparison with later projects such as the Suzhou Museum, this thesis examines both the ambition and the limits of Pei’s “third way” between Western modernism and Chinese tradition. It also traces the hotel’s later neglect, showing how changing market conditions, weak authorship recognition, maintenance problems, and limited protection for modern heritage contributed to its marginal position.
Ultimately, the Fragrant Hill Hotel reveals the difficulty of preserving modern architecture whose value lies not only in physical fabric, but also in cultural memory, spatial experience, and unresolved historical meaning.

CHUYAN ZHOU
Advisor: Amanda B. Trienens

A Critique of The Ningbo Museum of Education: Preserving Women’s Intellectual Heritage Through the Riverside Girls’ Academy in Ningbo (1844-1951)

This thesis examined the historical, architectural and cultural value of American missionary girls’ schools in Ningbo, with particular focus on Riverside Girls’ Academy. The academy itself was founded through the integration of other Protestant girls’ academies in 1923, thereby marking an important stage in the history of institutionalized schooling for women during the Republican period. Using archival data gathered from various archives in China and the United States combined with spatial analysis and fieldwork, this research traced the development of the institution within its broader context of mission schools in China. Through this, it was demonstrated that the Riverside Girls’ Academy was both an educational facility and a cultural institution in which certain elements of the Western model of education were integrated into a Chinese milieu. Moreover, this thesis delved into the architectural design and layout of the university focusing on how it diverges from the style of the missionary architecture, characterized by excessive stylization to a soberer, institutional one. This particular approach in spatial planning is indicative of a teaching method centered around discipline and reason. Moreover, besides the architecture itself, this thesis shed light on the institution’s role in forming a community of educated women through networking and civic involvement.
With regards to the existing conditions of the site within the Ningbo Museum of Education, several areas have been highlighted in this thesis where there is a need for improvement in terms of conservation and interpretation, especially the lack of representation of women’s intellectual history. The inclusion of the historical site within a modern-day urban setting, such as its linkage to commercial buildings nearby, makes it difficult to conserve its heritage. As a solution to this, the thesis offers a number of approaches that could be employed ranging from the reorganization of exhibits, creation of a memorial wall for alumnae to enhanced storytelling. Through the combination of architecture and its history, this thesis provides insight into the process of preserving and exhibiting the heritage value of missionary educational sites.