Date of Submission

Spring 2023

Academic Program

Architecture

Project Advisor 1

Thena Tak

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Western colonialist architecture has a long and complicated relationship with its materiality and the surrounding ecosystem. For the past millennia, buildings and structures have permanently altered the landscape. These changes are not always bad. An ecosystem is constantly evolving, and sometimes these changes allow for growth and metamorphosis. In other cases, however, these colonialist structures can bring about ecosystem destruction and deterioration over time. Materiality and change are approached in this project as they relate to architecture. In Western architecture, materials are almost always new and standardized and have exact lengths and widths that can be ordered to certain dimensions. The project explores the concept of standardized materials and unchanging, perfect buildings that have existed in this idea of architecture. This thesis argues that architects and architecture should embrace the lifecycle of a building and design for adaptability, reuse, and even unraveling, rather than pushing these realities to the side and assuming that buildings will last forever.

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Open Access

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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