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.

ADRIANA CASTRO LIZARBE

Advisor: Emanuel Admassu

Curating the Field: The National Museum of Peru at the Intersection of Construction and Archeology

Imagine being in a place where excavation frequently leads to archeological discoveries. Consider that this region resembles a vast archeological site, continuously inhabited by diverse cultures for over 5,000 years. In such a context, construction plays a pivotal role—perpetually evolving through encounters with history. If every construction site can be seen as a curatorial site, this presents a fundamental challenge for curatorial practice. Museums are typically imagined as spaces of preservation—institutions that safeguard heritage. But what happens when the act of building a museum becomes an act of destruction? What does it mean to construct atop an archeological site? This research explores case studies across Lima, tracing how museums and other cultural institutions have historically emerged through—and often at the expense of—material heritage. A key example is the National Museum of Peru (MUNA), proposed in 2014 and built within the Pachacamac Archeological Sanctuary. Framed as a flagship of national heritage preservation, MUNA also reveals how archeology has become instrumentalized to serve broader economic and political agendas. Its construction—legally and symbolically justified—raises questions about the redefinition of archeological sites as zones of projection rather than protected terrain. Through these case studies, with MUNA as a central lens, this research examines how curatorial, archeological, and construction practices intersect in construction sites—as spaces of power, destruction, economic leverage, and political influence. What is the role of a curator in a context where museums are built atop ruins? And how might we reimagine heritage in places where construction not only reveals history, but also reshapes it?

YAPEI RAVEN ZHANG

Advisor: Jordan H. Carver

Died in the USA: A Spatial History of Mortuary Practices in the Manhattan Chinatown

A parade of carriages or limousines; a large photograph framed by flowers; an Italian brass band playing dirges; a coffin carried out of the funeral home; a grieving family; a procession passing through places significant to the deceased’s life—this is a typical scene of a Chinese funeral in Manhattan’s Chinatown. As one of the most important rituals in Chinese tradition, the funeral serves as a threshold between the living and the dead, between this life and the afterlife. This thesis treats funerals and the physical spaces they involve as vital sources for understanding the urban development, culture, and social history of Manhattan’s Chinatown. The egalitarian nature of death—it falls equally on the poor and the rich, the nameless and the prominent—allows this study to portray a comprehensive picture of death for different groups in Manhattan’s Chinese community. The hierarchy of death—some were buried hastily without any proper rituals, while some had lavish ceremonies and send-offs from almost the entire neighborhood—makes it possible to examine complex social issues such as wealth disparity, intra-ethnic exploitation, and organized crime. This thesis traces the historical development from the 1870s to the present of Mulberry Street, which is known for the concentration of funeral businesses. It started with Irish and Italian dominance and eventually evolved into a landscape where all funeral homes are Chinese-owned. This trajectory reveals how ethnic histories, cultural practices, and racial barriers have shaped the composition of the funeral industry. The thesis also includes several case studies that delve deeper into specific topics such as obituary writing, funeral and procession customs, exhumation and reburial practices, and ongoing veneration of the dead. The ultimate goal of the study is to apply death as a method of viewing the various aspects of the living society.

TINA TSAI

Advisor: Mark Wasiuta

Bio-Responsive Design: Cybernetics, Spacesuits, Architecture, and Beyond

From static to interactive, the earliest vision of responsive architecture, shaped by cybernetics in the 1960s, set the foundation for spaces that adapt to the changing needs of their occupants. Bio-responsive design begins with the idea that environments can “come alive” by responding to human presence, behavior, and psychophysiological states. Woven into the 20th-century discourse of cybernetics, this design approach emerged as interactive systems formulated through feedback, adaptive control, and sensory input, evolving from ideas like Gordon Pask’s interactive environments. With cybernetics as both influence and method, bio-responsive design offers a lens for understanding how the built environment synchronizes with human biological feedback, bridging the body and architecture, system and form.

Spacesuits, developed through decades of rigorous experimental testing at NASA, demonstrate a personal form of adaptive design in a closed-loop environment, sensing, regulating, monitoring, and responding to the wearer’s physiological needs. Informed by archival documentation, the thesis dissects impactful components, sorting them into five themes: “Manual and Autonomous,” “Pressure Control,” “Heat Regulation,” “Radiation and Protection,” and “Material and Layering.” Each tells a story of how spacesuits regulate physiological and environmental conditions in real-time, revealing a biosensor-equipped prototype for adaptive design evolved into a form of architecture scaled to the human body, beyond life-supporting garments driven by technical necessity.

Expanded across scales and environments, from the body to architecture, bio-responsive principles are amplified in NASA’s testing chambers, simulation facilities, and the regulated systems of the International Space Station. These environments extend the suit’s closed-loop logic into shared spaces, reconfiguring architecture as a bio-responsive shell. Furthermore, the cybernetic loop continues. It resonates and extends as nested ones. NASA’s current research, from sensor-woven, haptic-integrated textiles to brain-computer interfaces, envisions bio-responsive design not as a metaphor but a framework for responsive, sensory, and alive applications, leading to the future integration into broader spatial and bio-responsive design in everyday life.

SHUYUE PAN

Advisor: Craig Buckley

Writing From Fragments: Hubert de Cronin Hastings’s Media Practices 1962-1971

This study examines the photographic practices of Hubert de Cronin Hastings in the British periodical The Architectural Review (AR), focusing on three key projects: The Italian Townscape (1962), Manplan (1969-70), and Civilia (1971).

Since the post-war era, the AR has been devoted to a conflicting model, which aimed to promote cultural continuity, but at the same time rejected the uniformity brought by modernism. Hastings introduced his neo-humanism by developing this model as the acceptance of a unifying principle while ensuring differentiation. While these projects share a conceptual grounding of a neo-humanist approach, they adopt distinct visual strategies that transform the role of media in architectural discourse. In The Italian Townscape, photography functions as a tool of visual planning; in Manplan, the use of photojournalism as a manifesto; and in Civilia, the adoption of photomontage as a speculative projection. At the same time, projects like The Italian Townscape and Civilia were authored under the pseudonym ‘Ivor de Wolfe’, a constructed persona that allowed more experimental modes but with implicit authority in AR. It was not only the name of one person (Hastings), but also Nikolaus Pevsner, Ivy de Wolfe (Hastings’s wife), and Kenneth Browne. As a contrast, in the Manplan (named under Hastings), the authorship was dispersed to street photographers, shifting the critique from the speaking subject to the visual itself. This enables images to have a potential that constructs partial autonomy, which escapes, deceives, and subverts the endowed discourse.

By analyzing photographic images, unpublished archives, and letters, this thesis argues that through the double fragmentation of visual narrative and authorship in his photographic practices, Hastings destabilized the traditional textual foundations of architectural criticism and redistributed its author-function. Positioned between the conventions of mainstream architectural journalism and the provocations of the avant-garde, his work developed a hybrid mode of criticism. They exemplify a broader shift in postwar British architectural criticism’s discourse: from verbal to visual, from individual to collective.

SERENA STEDEFORD

Advisor: Mark Wasiuta

The Prison-Museum Complex: Curating Spectacle Commemoratio, and Aestheticization of Carceral Punishment

This thesis argues that the transformation of decommissioned prisons into museums reconfigures carceral violence rather than memorializing it. Through the concept of the prison museum complex, developed in this research, it exposes how confinement, erasure, and punitive control are sanitized, aestheticized, and commodified. These institutions convert the ongoing atrocities of the American prison system into consumable narratives presented as tourism, entertainment, and education. Engaging with frameworks such as the prison industrial complex and military industrial complex, the prison museum complex exposes how state violence is preserved and repackaged as cultural memory. It is offered for education and spectacle while being framed as a relic of a bygone era.

This project’s core is the Guide’s Guide, a critical methodology and publication that embodies this intervention. By recontextualizing images, artifacts, spatial arrangements, and institutional narratives, the Guide’s Guide challenges how prison museums mask the brutality of carceral history through the curation of the museum. It reveals how violence is aestheticized and institutionalized through design, narrative, and space, transforming systemic oppression into a palatable cultural experience that distances visitors from the realities of punishment and state control. This argument is grounded in case studies of Old Idaho Penitentiary, West Virginia Penitentiary, Brushy Mountain Penitentiary, and Wyoming Frontier Prison. The analysis focuses on four critical registers: the hidden archive, the narrative of the tour guide, the framing of signage, and the presentation of artifacts. These mechanisms structure how visitors encounter carceral history, shaping narratives that obscure ongoing systems of punishment, through the omissions, contradictions, and design strategies displayed in the prison-museum complex, present incarceration as a resolved past while reinforcing the ideological foundations of punitive control.

Through the preservation of these sites, carceral violence is transformed into mediated fascination, embedded within collective memory, and legitimized as an enduring structure that shapes how punishment is remembered, normalized, and extended into carceral futures.

RENA OKAMOTO

Advisor: Karen Wong

The Creep: Unsettling the Boundaries

The Creep is not a glitch in the system — it is the system’s byproduct, tactic, and mirror. This thesis defines the creep as a cultural sensibility that lingers in the almost-real: not monstrous, but almost beautiful; not violent, but eerily precise. It describes that slow, ambient discomfort that arises when a mannequin looks too alive, when a robot says the right thing in the wrong tone, or when a digital lover performs intimacy too well. Unlike horror, which shocks, or the uncanny, which unsettles through strangeness, the creep unsettles by making familiar structures visible — systems of objectification, simulation, and desire that have always been present but are rarely confronted.

This project is not an etymological study of the term “creep.” It is a re-theorization. Drawing from psychoanalytic theory, feminist technology studies, and speculative fiction, the thesis situates the creep as a tactic of cultural exposure — a way to render uncomfortable truths about human-machine relationships, artificial personhood, and normative identity construction. Through case studies including Balenciaga’s hyper-real mannequins, AI figures like Bina48 and Sophia, virtual influencers like Shudu Gram, animatronics at Disney, and intimacy-simulation projects like Tax Heaven 3000, the thesis investigates how artificial bodies provoke unease precisely because they reveal the mechanics of our own projections.

What emerges is not just an aesthetic category, but a method: The Creep is a way of reading cultural artifacts, a framework for interpreting the social choreography of desire, labor, and surveillance. It implicates the viewer — not because the object is strange, but because it is too familiar. The Creep demands that we reckon with the ethics of looking, the commodification of care, and the automation of emotional labor.

Ultimately, this thesis argues that discomfort is not a failure of design — it is a tool of critique. The Creep reclaims that which is too often marginalized, sanitized, or rendered invisible, and in doing so, offers a new critical language for thinking about identity, personhood, and the uneasy futures we are already inhabiting.

But this is not just a theory — it is a tactic.

Because the Creep doesn’t scream — it lingers.

It doesn’t destroy boundaries — it smudges them.

And in that smudging, it reveals who drew the lines — and how we might draw them differently.

LORENZA SIERRA SALAZAR

Advisor: Wonne Ickx

Urban Canvas Stories on (a) Chromatic Event(s)

Mexico hosted the 19th Olympic Games in 1968, a pivotal event for the global perception of Mexican identity. Together with the sports program, Mexico offered the first Cultural Olympiad, a pioneering effort inspired by Ancient Greece that helped establish the country as a global cultural reference and set a new standard for future host nations. Urban Canvas argues that the use of chromatics in constructing the country’s image has never been incidental—it has long conveyed cultural and political messages, exemplified explicitly in the strategies deployed in Mexico 68. During this time, under the direction of Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, the International Olympic Committee mobilized design, culture, and media to layer a color veil to cover the city’s dark landscape consequent to the moment’s deep-rooted tensions. Amidst local and international socio-political conflicts, the Games staged a chromatic spectacle that blended tradition with modernity, realism and abstraction, and aesthetics with diplomacy.

Moreover, this research frames Mexico 68 as a symbiotic and chromatic collective memory—it was symbiotic because the echoes of the local tensions and global skepticism intertwined with its impact, and it was chromatic as an account of a world sensitizing to color while transitioning to color broadcasting media. The transformation of Mexico into a vast canvas during 1968 raises critical questions about the influence, sustainability, and outturns of a meticulously crafted modern national image. Thus, this publication situates the Olympics within broader global movements in design and media, exploring how figures like Josef Albers, Emilio Ambasz, William Eggleston, and Beatrice Trueblood have informed local visions and how ephemeral solutions became vehicles to reinforce enduring national narratives. By narrating seven untold stories, this thesis invites the reader to visualize an event that continues to span screens, borders, and time.

KANCHAPORN KIEATKHAJORNRIT

Advisor: Mark Wasiuta

The Politics of Touch: Architecture, Power and Boundaries of Wellness

Thai massage has never been just a practice. It has always been a negotiation—between healing and commerce, tradition and adaptation, wellness and entertainment. During the Vietnam War, that negotiation became geopolitical. As Thailand supported the U.S. military’s Rest & Recreation (R&R) program, massage was drawn out of temple courtyards and into an urban nightlife economy. What had once been a sacred act of care became part of a larger Cold War infrastructure—where touch was commodified, gendered, and globally consumed. In the decades that followed, this entanglement left behind a reputational residue. Thai massage became known not only for healing, but for its blurred proximity to sex work and spectacle. In response, the Thai state launched a three-part cultural strategy in the 1980s: tourism rebranding, the Thai Massage Revival Project, and formal standardization. But this was not a simple return to tradition—it was a spatial and political restructuring. This thesis examines that restructuring through the lens of architecture. It argues that the revival was not only cultural—it was architectural. Through zoning laws, licensing, spatial typologies, and symbolic cues, the state used architecture to sort what had once overlapped. The same gesture—a massage, a stretch, a press—could now mean healing, seduction, or heritage, depending entirely on the room it happened in. This process, which I term spatial differentiation, produced three architectural typologies: the Entertainment Complex, the Luxury Spa, and the Institutional School—each translating politics into built form. By tracing the evolution of Thai massage across three periods—the heritage era, the Vietnam War, and the revival—this thesis reveals how architecture has not merely housed tradition, but actively shaped it. In doing so, it shows how built space has been used to legitimize, contain, and redefine touch—ultimately transforming Thai massage into a tool of national identity, global diplomacy, and cultural governance.

HIMIL RAMANI

Advisor: Andrés Jaque

Interrogating Plants: Backster’s Environmental Media Practice

On February 2nd, 1966, retired CIA agent Cleve Backster in his research lab in Times Square, New York, decided to attach his dracaena plant to a polygraph machine, known as a lie detector, to check if the plant responds to his act of watering it. The polygraph tracing recorded a short term change in contour similar to the reaction pattern of a human subject who might have been briefly experiencing the fear of detection. Backster responded, “if this plant wants to show me some people-like reactions, I’ve got to use some people-like rules on it and see if I can get this to happen again.” Through Backster’s experiments, this research investigates the logics of experimental media practices that emerged from cybernetics, shaping the social structures of built domestic environments.

Backster in his experiments uses plants as a screen to project messages and knowledge by using media and technology. A relationship that not only creates a deeper damage to a more intelligent species, but also uses the system’s epistemology of machines to drive the force in building the interspecies built environment. The research investigates the role of interdisciplinary media practices emerging from cybernetic communication systems, and the shifting image of environmental consciousness during the Cold War in the United States. Understanding Backster as a figure of failure symptomatic of the hard times of new age cosmology, the research follows Backster to narrate the shift from CIA interrogation techniques of the Cold War in the United States to environmental consciousness. The polygraph chart in this project becomes a site of information, interaction, similar to architectural drawings, with the presence of bacteria involved in his experiments changing and decaying the surface of the tracings; into translation, and manifestation of a new form of knowledge in relation to its architecture.

MENGYAO CHEN

Advisor: Reinhold Martin

Concrete Memory: Reading Chinatown Through 133 Canal Street

Beginning as a settlement for Chinese immigrants and later becoming an Oriental-themed attraction for tourists, Chinatown has been continuously shaped and transformed by both America and China, as well as the exchanges between these two nations. Memories, identity and narratives of “Chineseness” from different eras intertwine within this limited urban space. Its history blurs the boundaries between revival and fabrication, native and imported, and genuine and insincere, making its identity difficult to define. This thesis takes 133 Canal Street—which has dramatically transformed from a Hong Kong-style theater into the largest Buddhist temple in Manhattan’s Chinatown and a landmark symbolizing its Chineseness—as an architectural lens to decipher Chinatown’s hybrid identity and reveal the overlooked histories embedded within its built environment. This study analyzes the typical Chinatown stylistic elements embodied in 133 Canal Street. Through the biography of Chinese American architect Poy Gum Lee (1901–1968), who significantly contributed to both Republican China and Chinatown, this research traces the narratives that still haunt Chinatown today: the Oriental fantasy rooted in chinoiserie and the indigenized style promoted by the Chinese Nationalist government (1911–1949). It also revisits how, under the influence of these historical styles, 133 Canal Street has naturally evolved over the past forty years alongside shifting waves of immigration and changes in collective memory. Through the lens of 133 Canal Street, this thesis argues that Chinatown’s architectural identity is neither fixed nor authentically Chinese. Rather, it is an ongoing negotiation and a series of adaptive reinterpretations shaped by cultural imagination, political ideology, commercial demands, and local agency. Although some histories have been forgotten or deliberately erased, they still remain inscribed on these silent buildings and continue to shape what is yet to come.

CALLUM GAUTHIER

Advisor: Lucia Allais

Rideau Upper Canada: Media, Techniques, Ideologies of British Settler Colonization 1817-1841

This thesis searches documents made around the construction of the Rideau Canal (1826–32) for techniques and ideologies of settler colonization in the nineteenth century British Empire. Built in the North American colony of Upper Canada as a military infrastructure in the aftermath of American Independence and the War of 1812, the Rideau Canal was a testing-ground for the continued viability of the settler colonial model within the British Empire. This experiment is expressed in the media of Rideau-era Upper Canada, as will be explored in this thesis through three genres of documents, each expressing a distinct technique of colonization and revealing an aspect of colonial ideology. Chronologically, the first genre, the Statistical Account, is analyzed through a single example of this proto-census format: Robert Gourlay’s Statistical Account of Upper Canada (1822). Gourlay’s three volumes contain vital maps and correspondence with settlers and draw on long-established British ideologies of improvement to position the colony in a state of faltering improvement while calling for renewed improvement at the scale of infrastructural investment. The second media are the depictions of the canal itself as made by the supervisors of the waterway’s construction: military officers and civil engineers and surveyors. These depictions, both measured (plans, surveys) and scenic, rely heavily on the medium of watercolor and present an aspirational subjectivity of colonization embodied by the professional officer-administrators viewing and making these works. This subjectivity embraces the risk of surveying and subjugating water as stream, rapids, and marsh and aspires to pioneering, improving settlement by idealized gentleman farmer-professionals. The final genre consists of advertisements for a land company, the Canada Company, chartered the same year canal construction began. These advertisements deploy the ideological assumptions of the previous genres to hail the would-be-settlers to their place in a systematic colonization enabled by capital speculation and financialized settler-land relations. Through these media, this thesis encounters a colony re-asserting its importance to an empire debating the need to continue the settler colonial model.

AISTYARA CHARMITA

Advisor: Mark Wasiuta

Televisual Regime: Media Apparatus, Architecture, and Domesticity in Indonesia’s New Order

What happens when a single image is perpetually viewed by millions, all at once?

During Indonesia’s New Order era (1967–1982), everyday life throughout the archipelago was coordinated by a single, state-run television channel. Television changed from being a form of amusement to a means of enforcing national discipline and obedience since it had a single schedule, message, and voice.

This media infrastructure, which arose in the entanglement with Cold War and the aftermath of one of the deadliest political conflicts in Indonesian history, served a deeper political function by uniting a geographically divided country and standardizing, homogenizing, and silencing opposition through spectacle and repetition.

This thesis examines how the state’s televisual infrastructure, portrayed as a modernization project, subtly reorganized space and subjectivity by following the media complex from the horizontal scale of national broadcasting and cultural unification to the vertical penetration of satellite into the living room.

It offers an alternate interpretation of Indonesia’s media complex under the New Order as interrelated ways of projecting ideologies into the body, familial structures, and the home through screen visuals. A critical examination of the spatial politics of televised modernity, where infrastructure functions both operationally and symbolically, is necessary for such a reading.

In the end, the televisual project shows how television influenced society and culture, contributed to the creation of the New Order’s concept of the “Whole Indonesian Human,” and had a long-lasting effect on the definition of home and domesticity.

ALHANOUF ALMOGBIL

Advisor: Mark Wasiuta

Sounding the Archival Machine: A Codex for Sonic Excavation