2022 Post-Professional M.Arch Thesis Exhibition
April 1–22, 2022
Seven projects on Edge Effects
Architecture is on edge, architecture is the edge. Far from the utopian visions and formal bombast of the early 21st century, these projects offer no easy solutions to urbanism, infrastructure, or environment. Instead this architecture offers spaces of safety and succor for adolescence and convalescence. It offers simple shelter to both the human and non-human. It saves both factory and fresco alike, inviting memory back into public life. It looks into emptiness with empathy for those technical things which toil tirelessly for us. This is architecture on edge, fragile in its systemicity, as we are and have been and may continue to be.
The seven projects exhibited are conducted in the context of the Post-Professional M.Arch program at Princeton University School of Architecture where there is a unique opportunity for professionally trained architects to return to the university to pursue a two-year program culminating in a year-long thesis.
The 2022 Post-Professional M.Arch Thesis class is coordinated by Assistant Professor V. Mitch McEwen.
The Joyful Landscape: Elderly Care Facility
Ai Teng
Advisors: Paul Lewis, Michael Meredith
The Joyful Landscape proposes a new paradigm of elderly care facilities in China, balancing between efficient care and joyful experiences, suggesting a positive attitude towards life while facing one’s inevitable aging process.
Secularized Spirituality
Beidi Zhang
Advisors: Cameron Wu, Michael Meredith
By establishing spirituality within secular space, the project aims to open up new ways of worship and contemplation, incorporating spiritual customs and rituals into the mundane everyday activity. Spatially, the project seeks to create sacred space within the framework of secular architecture/ from the seriality of manufacturing space to the centrality of sacred space/ mass expandable storage versus placeful spirituality.
Nine Classrooms
Daniel Hall
Advisor: Cameron Wu
Nine Classrooms aims to produce new methods of drawing as the basis for expanding conceptions of both the built and non-built environment and their formative roles in early childhood development. The project addresses the urgent need for five million additional seats to achieve universal access to pre-k by producing nine prototypical one-room classrooms, located across the United States.
A Model For Housing
James Wood
Advisors: Stan Allen, Michael Meredith
This prototype for collective housing focuses on the negotiation between time, labor, and the rituals of domestic upkeep. The structure leverages the dimensional sympathy of standardized material systems and the dry formal language of the early 20th century to produce an open stage for various forms and organizations of domestic life. The drama of the project plays out between the rigidity of structure and the variety of the internal organization, using the scale model as a tool to represent the building not as a fixed object but as a spatial mediation of time.
More Than Human
John Mikesh
Advisors: Mónica Ponce de León, CEMEX Global R&D
Through utilizing the ecological systems at Pfister’s Pond in Tenafly NJ, the design changes the role of nature in the project, from one that is viewed as adversarial to one that is cooperative. This design will push back on waste and excess, through embracing time as a design tool.
GRANDES MEDIOS
Manuel A. Zermeno
Advisors: Marshall Brown, Stan Allen
GRANDES MEDIOS is a proposal to salvage Mexico City’s historic murals and repurpose them into a 1930’s prototypical public market.
DELIVERY!
Tyler Armstrong
Advisor: Paul Lewis
DELIVERY! is both an everyday pizza delivery gone bizarrely awry and an accidental “great American road-trip” across a mythic Southwest. Driven (both literally and figuratively) by the cartographic concept of points of interest the project presents the unlikely visitor with a chance series of peculiar places that together speculate on the instrumental and symbolic possibilities of novel technical objects and environmental infrastructures.
Public exhibition hours
April 1–22, 12–6pm (Wednesday–Sunday)
83 Grand Street New York, NY 10013
University policy requires visitors to wear a mask indoors and to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19. Proof of vaccination will be checked at the door.
