School of Architecture Symposia

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School of Architecture Symposia

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College of Design

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 36

Terminology and Geometry: Evolution of Chinese Traditional Architectural Drawing

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-02) Sun, Lina

Chinese traditional architectural drawing possessed a unique set of terminologies and geometric principles that were entirely distinguished from the Western Euclidean geometry, under the category of tu (the Chinese character for drawing). This paper etymologically and geometrically investigates the evolution of Chinese traditional drawing, from around the Tang (618-907 CE) and Song (960-1279 CE) Dynasties to the early modern period in the twentieth century. The etymology analysis centers on the terms di pan, shi and yang. The geometrical analysis deconstructs the composition of a selected drawing in the Yang Shi Lei tu archives in the Qing Dynasty (1636-1912 CE). By doing so, this research reveals that the terminologies corresponding to different geometrical forms respectively indicate associations between architectural drawing and the philosophy of Chinese cosmology, and the arrangement of the geometrical forms in the visual picture plane facilitates expressions of the concepts of space and position in geometrical cosmology. Moreover, the architectural tu itself as an entity situating in between the technical tu tradition and painting tradition, developed architecturalization of pictorial languages.
Postcolonial Possibilities of Architectural History: Questions and Concerns in Reading the Urbanisms of the Global South

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-02) Dasgupta, Soumya

As the twenty-first century unfolds before us, the megacities of Global South experience unprecedented urbanization characterized by informalizations of urban spaces. While several new theoretical perspectives from fields such as geography, sociology, and urban planning are contributing heavily in understanding and explaining these mega-urbanisms of the Global South and their complicated and contested narratives, Architectural History, as a discipline, still struggles to articulate these transformations meaningfully. In the context of this epistemological dichotomy, this paper delves into an academic multilogue between architectural history as a methodological apparatus to read and understand space, recent theoretical insights from related built-environment disciplines that reflect on the Global South, and critical theories that help us understand socio-spatial processes, productions, and practices. In doing so, this paper first critiques the role of architectural history in its inability to include much of the spatial narratives of the Global South and questions the canonical understandings of architecture that most of its present academic pedagogy perpetuates. Second, it discusses the potentials of how and what architectural history and theory can learn from contemporary discourses in neighboring subjects. Third, it calls for a postcolonial intervention into architectural history and theory to enunciate the spatial narratives of the understudied Global South. Further, by configuring a critical conversation between theoretical perspectives such as Bhabha’s ‘hybridity’, Lefebvre’s triad of spatial productions, Certeau’s ‘strategies and tactics,’ Bayat’s ‘quiet encroachment,’ and Harvey’s ‘insurgent architect’ this paper proposes an analytical framework that might help us read the complex, entangled, and contested urbanisms of the Global South and the history of their architectural productions.
The ‘Unintended’ City: A Case for Re-reading the Spatialization of a Princely City Through the 1898 Plague Epidemic

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-02) Dhanpal, Sonali

Cities have witnessed a surge in attention from urban scholarship in what is now referred to as the ‘urban turn’ in South Asian studies. In recent years, colonial Presidency capital cities such as Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi and their mutually constitutive architecture and urban history, have received significant recognition. The urban history of nominally sovereign, princely states and their respective capital cities, however, have been relegated to regional histories, sustaining limited inquiry. This paper, therefore, focuses on colonial urbanism in one such understudied princely city, Bangalore, the administrative capital of the princely state of Mysore. Through the plague of 1898 and the extraordinary intervention measures it occasioned, the paper investigates spatial patterns in parts of the city that fell under British jurisdiction, during a critical period in the state, between when princely rule was reinstated in 1881 until the aftermath of the bubonic plague that struck the city in 1898. The British controlled parts of the city had been envisioned to reflect order and authority but also difference from its native counterpart. Such vision, became a means of and reason for social control in the British controlled areas, resulting in urban segregation that often overlapped with religious, ethnolinguistic and caste segregation prompting the creation of the metaphorical ‘unintended city’. By examining these unintended pockets, this paper seeks to demonstrate ways of thinking about architecture and urbanism, beyond social privilege and aesthetics of envisioned, formal, master plans. It will reveal a more complex story than that of a partitioned original settlement or Pettah, and the European ‘white city’ that colonial administrators commonly ascribed to its spatialization.1 After the plague, “improvement” projects became central to the imagination of the city, twinning as both sanitary and moral reform. But capitalist imperatives and laissez- faire economics compromised planning measures, making available such improvements to limited populations, resulting in paradoxical outcomes. Instead of focussing on these improvement schemes, this paper questions imposed paradigms in architectural history by reconstituting the object of investigation and recognizing ephemeral spaces, such as segregation camps and hospitals, both “temporary” and “permanent”. It argues that the spaces conceived from these momentary exchanges caused by disruptions such as the plague, are key to understanding space making in Bangalore city, before formal improvement schemes were introduced. There exists a lacuna of unadulterated self-representation of marginalised, non-local, migrant inhabitants. This paper, by following the plague, allows examination of their lives to some extent, through the spaces they inhabited, were limited to, and those that were excluded from, in this process. Employing a wide variety of unexamined archival sources that range from gazetteers, plague reports and sanitary regulations that have hitherto not been used for the purposes of a spatial enquiry to examine the city, it provides a rich depiction of the ‘unintended’ city and its inhabitants.
Shape-changing Architectural Systems: A Bottom-up and Top-down Approach for Developing Responsive Building Skins

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-02) Vazquez, Elena

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in shape-changing smart materials in architectural research and practice. Research into responsive building skins with shape-changing materials has argued that the advantage of such systems relies on their potential for improved performance of buildings. However, few studies have proposed methods for developing responsive skins using shape-changing materials with the target of optimizing environmental performance. This paper discusses the methodological approach of a doctoral research agenda that aims to create a framework for developing a responsive shading system using shape-changing materials with the target of optimizing environmental performance. The methodology has two complementary approaches: a bottom- up study that deals with the development of shape-changing prototypes and top-down research that models the overall configuration of the responsive skin system. The paper discusses the two complementary approaches in terms of a case study.
Developing ‘Urban Jungle’ as an Integrated Model of Survival: Learning from Nature in War Zones

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-02) El Masri, Yasser

This paper explores the relationship between conflict in the urban environment and natural systems of resiliency found in forests and jungles. Studying the different accounts of inhabitants of cities under siege during the Syrian Civil war, indicates that various sustainable practices were implemented within the built environment that helped inhabitants survive the devastating process. The innovative, circular economy allowed the inhabitants to survive their plight and lessened the intended effects of the destructive sieges. Drawing parallels with how forests and jungles utilize different natural systems, such as mycorrhizal networks, to increase resiliency, many lessons are inferred about sustainable resource management and efficient allocation in the face of different threats. The “Urban Jungle” is thus synthesized as a model that attempts to augment and maximize the practices inhabitants had devised through mimicking the model found in the natural jungle. Applying this model to conflict zones allows the evolution of survival tactics into a form of insurgent resilience, with wider socio-political ramifications on the survivability of the inhabitants, their political will, the effectiveness of the conflict, and sieges as a political tool.
Changing Waterscapes: The Dichotomy of Development and Water Management Surrounding the East Calcutta Wetlands Since the British-colonial Era

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-02) Bera, Abhinandan ; Wu, Hong

The deltaic region of Bengal is known for its riverine networks and fertile soil. The capital of former British- India, Calcutta, was a swampy region with small canals connecting the land with the river Hooghly in the west and to the saltwater lakes in the east, now known as the East Calcutta Wetlands (ECW). The eastern canals carry the city’s wastewater to the ECW for treatment using sewage-fed fisheries and farmlands and then released it into the Bay of Bengal via the Kulti River. In the early British colonial period, the salt lakes were depicted as hindrance to the health and well-being of the city’s inhabitants because of high mortality in the region, presumably caused by miasmic diseases. Part of these marshes, the ECW now acts as a giant sink for this dense post-colonial urban settlement, helping to drain the land, providing food and employment, and saving costs for artificial wastewater treatment plant. This hydrologic system is now at risk due to encroachment from real-estate development and pollution in the adjoining canals, posing an immense threat to this critical human-water relationship. In this paper, we examine the dichotomy of urban development and water management since the colonial era to assess the temporal nature of the human-water negotiations behind the changing waterscapes.
Rival Geographies: Race-relations, Power, and National Planning in Postwar America

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-02) Albahar, Shahab

The following article is a critical, historical study of national planning interventions in the United States between 1945 and 1964. Drawing from race-radical scholarship, it reinterprets the national urban renewal movement at the end of WWII as a racial project that exercised a ‘color-blind’ rhetoric to legitimate the expansion of government police powers and help pave the way for the spatial specifics of global neoliberalism. It uses the case of Southwest Washington, DC, to explore the intersection of social identity, the law, and spatial policy during the early Cold War years. It views planning as a settler colonialist project, subservient to dominant systems through sustained racialization. It analyzes modernist planning at the nexus of state-society-space power relations to elucidate the dialectic of ‘planning as social oppression.’ By critically examining the landmark decision in Berman, I conceive planning as mediating the “social production of space” at the disjuncture of legal interpretation and urban transformation. I speculate that court legitimations of overtly racist urban policies are reflective of an epistemic lag between the American judicial branch and rapidly shifting discourses on urban development. Using a historical- materialist lens Jodi Melamed reinterprets U.S. literary studies as a “key site of geopolitical struggle around the meaning and significance of race” (Melamed 2011, xv) and goes on to argue the entrance of official antiracisms into American governmentality at the end of WWII and the new world-historical formation that ensued was conducive for U.S. global ascendancy and leadership of transnational capitalism. In her developed genealogy of “race-liberal orders”, Melamed distinguishes three successive antiracist regimes. By linking the first antiracist regime, “racial- liberalism” (1945-1964) with the national urban renewal movement, this essay critiques institutionalized planning praxis through the lens of antiracisms. I argue that national planning efforts constituted a form of antiracist negating mechanisms. Whereas official antiracisms engaged the discursive spaces of the public sphere by explicitly locating race “as the central problem – the crux of everything wrong and unequal in governance, economy, and society,” (Melamed 2011, x) antiracist negating mechanisms endorsed a ‘color-blind’ rhetoric to further obscure the workings of heteronormative hegemony in physical space. Therefore, I do not conceive antiracist negating mechanisms dialectically as antithetical to official antiracisms; rather they function in synergetic complementarity. In an effort to illuminate the silencing discourses in modernist planning projects, I conclude by proposing a queer-of-color framework towards advancing a critical planning theory.
How Energy Makes a Difference on the Morphology of Space

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-02) Balzar, Mark

In today’s sciences we pay a great deal of attention to the complexity of biological form and ecological formation. Analogies in urban research refer to cities as living (eco)systems, organisms or technological artifacts, which follow the rules of an urban metabolism. All these narratives seem to suggest that all matter (acting and interacting) on earth belong to a complex whole and their physiological characteristics share common organizational physical laws, which are rather dynamic and formless by their nature. A quantitative and qualitative theory for understanding these complexities and the dynamics of such a condensed organization of urban organic and inorganic materialization remains elusive, however, its impact on our planet is explicit and evident in various forms. Currently, most of humanity lives in cities. Their organization of human society and the tendency of cities to grow put ecological pressure on the global environment. The urban realm is an ever-unfolding amalgam of the biosphere and the techno-sphere within a dynamical system of materiality which threatens the concept of static form as an expression of physiological states. This formlessness is rather an expression (and empowering) of emerging patterns than an ambiguous loss of control. This paper argues that developing a new theoretical measure of understanding the materiality of forms, and the formation of the urban realm(s) as the effect of a complex information system of interrelations seems to be necessary. The following text will discuss the trajectory through three major approaches: The philosophical concept of (New) Materialism in relation to discursive formations (a terminology developed by Michel Foucault), the scientific concept of Systems Ecology of Howard T. Odum and the theoretical concept of individuation by Gilbert Simondon (1992). Systems ecology grants a view to dynamism of the physical, chemical, economic, and social forces in the field of urban morphological ensembles—the passive potentialities (energy storage) and the active transgressing forces (energy transfer) governed by the second law of thermodynamics. Odum’s understanding of urban energy cycles bears the potential to unravel the information patterns of an urban organism controlled by time.
A Campus Biography

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-02) AlBader, Bader

The university, as an institution and as a space, is complex. A middle scale outside the comfort zone of architects, the campus bridges between the architectural and the urban. In response to professional pressures on architects, the study of campus planning emerged in the mid-twentieth century as a technocratic concern. The campus became a spatial type worthy of analytical attention and epistemic production. The functionalist approach to campus studies eventually gave way to more academic and less instrumental interests in the subject. To take stock of the development of the conceptualization of the campus as an object of analysis, I utilize the biographical method as a lens through which to read the differentiation within the field. This essay vicariously traces the contours of the campus’ discursive landscape by focusing on the oeuvre of the discourse’s prime inciter to discourse, Richard Dober. Through a close reading of his monographs, a textured picture of campus studies emerges; the discourse first coalesces around modernist, functionalist, and subsequently international concerns about the efficacy and adequacy of the spatial provisions accorded to rapidly expanding higher education. This is followed by a discursive turn towards more humanistic concerns like history and art, ushered by the publication of Paul Turner’s seminal history of the campus in the United States. Dober was not immune to this discursive shift, but took it in stride, producing many books attempting to reconcile his rationalist, modernist predilections with the ascendance of lyricism and beauty as core analytical concerns. His oeuvre developed and expanded, incorporating campus history and aesthetics as primary interpretive threads. The ardent functionalist of yesteryear had to adapt and assume a humanistic outlook in his later years. In sum, campus discourse’s story is a bipolar one, jumpstarted by modernist concerns spearheaded by Dober only to later be inflected by the Turner plot point towards scholarship in the vein of that produced by historian-aesthetes. Because Dober lived, worked, and wrote prolifically through all this, his collective works serve as an index of the evolution and differentiation of the campus discourse, and his books as lampposts along the shifting discursive landscape of campus planning and design. This deep dive into Dober’s oeuvre and its interfaces with discursive developments illuminates how his oeuvre is reflected in and inflected by the evolution of the campus discourse. Uniquely intertwined with the discourse, Dober’s biography is an opportune proxy through which to sketch a biography of the discursive campus.
Designing ‘Safe’ Schools: Identifying Areas of Research in Achieving School Safety and Security

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-02) Nowak, Michael S.

Multiple stakeholders have an interest in making our schools ‘safe’ places to learn and work. Among these are students and parents, law enforcement officials, school administrators and teachers, code officials, and architects. Each party approaches the concept of ‘safe’ from varying institutional logics defined by their professional culture or place in society. Institutional logics represent frameworks for how people in society can frame an issue and help guide them to solve problems. These logics can be complementary or competing. One issue is finding common ground defining the problem and finding a common language with which stakeholders can communicate and work together. Another is understanding how practices and customs differ between stakeholders. Knowing how each party frames the issue of ‘safe’ or ‘secure’ schools’ aids in finding solutions to impasses where logics conflict through more holistic definitions. It also allows us to empirically know varying approaches to problem solving and where research is being conducted on the issue. The American Institute of Architects has lobbied the US government to establish a “Safe Schools Clearinghouse”. Conceived as a repository of best practices for ‘safe’ school design, this clearinghouse encourages experimental research by design schools. Research would be the foundation for decision-making by local school districts and would encourage the development of new technologies in school safety. However, there currently appears to be a lack of safety or security research within our architecture schools. To understand where academia is on the issue of school safety research, this paper explores, through a contemporary literature review, the areas of peer-reviewed research on four key terms: “safe schools”, “school safety”, “school security”, and “school shootings”. The results indicate that the topic of school safety is absent in architecture academia, and most prevalent in the fields of psychology and education. While there is much literature on school safety outside academia sharing ideas, opinions, and case studies of design practices, no rigorous research appears to be being conducted in our design schools offering the validity necessary to make prudent decisions. If architects are expected to act as arbiters of best practices to guide and educate society on the design of ‘safe’ schools, then research within our design schools must begin now.