Dissenters unfettered: The Making of Contemporary Chinese Architecture in the Sino-German Exhibitionary Contact Zone

My dissertation critically interrogates the widely-acknowledged concept of “contemporary Chinese architecture (當代中國建築)”, not as a faithful reflection of the architectural production in China, but rather as a discursive construct privileging a small group of independent architects primarily established through overseas exhibitions in the early twenty-first century. Tracing its origins in a set of Germany-based architectural exhibitions displaying and defining contemporary Chinese architecture, this dissertation investigates the institutional intentions and curatorial narratives through which Chinese architects were selected, marshaled, and presented. Through this research, I unpack the Sino-German cultural encounters and alterations in the transnational exhibitionary contact zones that implemented the mutual construct of contemporary Chinese architecture, which further informs us of the status of the design industry in China during the early 2000s that continues to shape the cultural landscape and urban realities in China today.

Dijia Chen is currently working as a Lecturer in Architectural History & Theory at the University of Melbourne. Her research critically examines the architectural production of the developing world as a form of mediated knowledge under asymmetrical power dynamics, bringing together the study of contemporary Chinese architecture, transcultural communication studies, and curatorial studies. She has accepted over ten fellowships and grants from organizations including the American Society of Learned Studies (ACLS), Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), Visual Studies Association (VRA), etc. She has co-authored a book and her papers are published in Architectural Theory Review, Log, Histories of Postwar Architecture, GTA Papers, Architecture & Culture,etc.

Flattering the View: Photography, Synoptic Vision, and the Making of Landscape

Scott Mitchell is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Landscape Architecture. His research interrogates the entangled visual and cultural histories of photography and the making of landscape. His dissertation explores this through visual historical analysis of the entangled public histories of post-war 20th century American photographic and landscape practices, particularly through the networked relationships and photographic archives of landscape photographer Morley Baer (b. 1916 – d. 1995), whose career spans the period of growth of photographic practice and technology, shifting aesthetic and political culture of its production, and the growing availability of media spaces related to the production and reading of landscape. Recognized by the American Institute of Architects in 1966, Baer’s architectural work has been widely published though rarely scrutinized in visual scholarship. Furthermore, his personal work, primarily produced over the decades he resided in California, has long been overlooked. An exploration of Baer’s commercial practice in the post-war construction boom, his practices in fine art and commercial landscape photography, and careful study of his works’ sustained legacy in representation and publication, seeks to uncover possible new understandings of the role of the synoptic image and the way we understand the American landscape, revealing the unique features of the changing relationship and lasting impact of the American experience and cultural reading of landscape.

After the Whitney: Temporality and Identity in the Space of the Museum

Lauren McQuistion is a PhD Candidate and designer working in the Architecture Department. Situated within a multidisciplinary framework, her proposed dissertation focuses on the spatialized history of the Whitney Museum of American Art and its unusual relationship with its architecture since its founding in 1930. Unique among its peer institutions which have embodied their stability through their architectural presence, the Whitney has relocated not once but multiple times, leaving fragments of its history across Manhattan. In focusing on the physical change in the space of Whitney over time, Lauren’s research engages the theoretical, historical, and critical discourses of art museums, raising questions regarding the relationship between the museum, its mission, and its changing architecture. Prior to pursuing her PhD, Lauren worked professionally as an architectural designer, experience which informs her approach to research and teaching. She graduated from the University of Virginia School of Architecture with a Bachelor of Science in Architecture and a Minor in Architectural History and the University of California Berkeley with a Masters of Architecture.

Building Danwei Abroad: Chinese Contractor-Compounds in Kenya
 

Cheng's dissertation investigates the contexts, space-making, exchanges, and operational mechanisms of Chinese construction contractors’ compounds in Kenya. Focusing on the procedural, productive, and transnational compound space, this research formulates a danwei abroad concept to unravel how and why Chinese contractors deliver Chinese infrastructure projects and Chinese-style socio-spatial enclaves in the field. Empirical evidence from these compounds and comparative analysis with other foreign compounds offers a bottom-up understanding of the objectives, challenges, and responses of Chinese construction contractors, state-owned enterprises (SOEs), expatriates, and state capital abroad. 
Anchoring on the temporal, productive, and immigrant compound space, the dissertation bridges African post-colonial urbanism and Chinese post-reform development within a politicized global system. Two 4-month fieldwork in Kenya in 2022 and 2023 facilitated this research. It spatializes and models the unique Chinese state capital in a globalizing era. Furthermore, the research develops its extensions like "Public-Private Partnership for Infrastructural Development", "Chinatowns in Africa", and "Tension between Chinese Real Estate and Kenyan Urbanism"

Cheng Chen is an architect, historian, educator, and interdisciplinary researcher of global built environment. He is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia, where he held a lecturer position teaching global urbanism and architecture. His research investigates systems and agents of urban development schemes with diverse interests in transportation infrastructure, transnational dynamics, and immigrant urbanism. His scholarly work engages political economy, resilience, stakeholders, migration, enclaves, business, and design strategies of contemporary urban complexes, while his design practices address settlement revitalization, social restructuring, and technological innovation.
Cheng explores the interdisciplinary and innovative dialogue between research, teaching, and design practice. At UVA, Cheng taught two foundation architecture studios and developed one lecture-based seminar, Built Contemporary China. He works with the Darden School of Business faculty on stakeholders in infrastructural Public-Private Partnerships. He is now an Adjunct Professor of Architecture at Kean University where he teaches architectural history and theory lectures and M.Arch design studios, a visiting scholar at the United States International University - Africa, and a faculty of urban planning and design at Columbia University. 
Before joining the University of Virginia, Cheng gained his Master of Architecture degree from Tsinghua University and a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Southeast University. He is also an active architect practicing in China, South Asia, East Africa, and the U.S.

Responsive Interfaces in Landscape Architecture

The advancement and availability of the off-the-shelf tools have increased accessibility to designers to hack and re-purpose as their customized tools, and to prototype innovative design strategies. The increasingly powerful computing capacity and ubiquity of networked and open-sourced technologies has expanded the definition of interface as computer display to a broader meaning: a shared boundary where independent systems interact, communicate and exchange information. The exchange can be between software, hardware, human, environment, and combinations of these, and can be controlled as either linear open-loop system or responsive closed-loop system. This broader definition of interface applies to various types of dynamic interactions between the physical and digital world across scale. As for landscape architects, the act of adaptive response across scale is inherent in our discipline, we can see the potential impact of responsive technologies in shifting the design methodologies and providing new perspectives of understanding landscape.

Grounded in the interdisciplinary field of Human Computer Interaction and landscape architecture, the dissertation focuses on the four key processes in the design of interface: sensing, processing, actuating and response. Each process also associates with multidisciplinary knowledge, such as computer science, data science and robotics. The research borrows from the innovations and concepts from these disciplines to discuss the possibility to hack, integrate and customize design tools, with specific focuses on three properties of the interface: materiality, intelligence and human-factor. The potential influence will be mutual to both disciplines. Coupling the key properties in the responsive interface and the core themes in landscape architecture, there are three values of this “new paradigm”. On the face of it, the customized tool can improve efficiency and performance. It provokes inspirations for new adaptive methodologies and also potentially new aesthetics. There may be a third value in understanding the concepts behind the technologies and algorithms and the implications of a shift in perspective to understand the construction of dynamic systems in landscape.

Lastly, the dissertation will experiment with customizing responsive interfaces on specific projects in academia and landscape practice. The four technical processes and the response to the three properties will be illustrated in detail under the discussion of augmented hydrodynamic simulation interface, automated urban massing interface, and cognitive landscape image interface, etc. The customized interface aims to critique current linear and static workflow. The goal of customizing our own responsive interface of design tools is to envision and invent the future. Hopefully, the dissertation will not only provide insights in design methodologies for landscape architects, but also the methodologies of designing the design.

Models of the Past, Visions for the Future: Explicating Resilience, Racial Capitalism, and Place Attachment through Adaptive Cycles in Norfolk, VA

Place attachment – the positive affective bond between a person and their desired environment – has been hypothesized to lead to place-protective behavior in circumstances where a community or environment is threatened with change. However, in coastal Norfolk, Virginia, destructive historical policies urban planning and development have not been mitigated by residents’ place sentiments and protective behavior. Today, the urban planning policy discourse in the City has become fixated on climate change and sea level rise. Climate effects and adaptation in the City are inequitably distributed among communities, reprising earlier displacement and maintaining segregation. 21st-century planning initiatives of climate adaptation and resilience leave minoritized residents to again face the gentrification and displacement generated by 20th-century urban planning. While wealthy areas of Norfolk also face sea level rise and flooding, the repeated waves of destruction and removal give the appearance of a pattern that can be modeled by ecological resilience theory: an adaptive cycle of racial capitalism. Drawing from this panarchy model of systems change developed by CS Holling and others, this dissertation develops a more complex framework of the adaptive cycle which better approximate the repeated losses of capital affecting low-income and minoritized Norfolk communities. Findings from this study indicate that racial capitalism in Norfolk operates as a continuous cycle made of repeated phases of loss of capital; that climate adaptation and sea level rise resilience stand as the most recent phase of this modified adaptive cycle; and that residents’ place attachment, protective behavior, and other place sentiments are spread across a much wider range of issues than sea level rise and development alone, breaching issues from community identity to the future of their families in Norfolk. Theories and practices of place attachment, coastal and ecological resilience, and racial capitalism can be synthesized to address the following questions: ‘How do the climate change discourse and the planning discourse inside and outside the City of Norfolk VA conceal and foster displacement policies in the City? How does place attachment interact with displacement pressure from current climate policies and historical planning policies in the City?'

Luka Hamel-Serenity studies sea level rise, planning policies, and place attachment in coastal cities at the UVA Constructed Environment PhD program. He currently works as an Instructor on the faculty at the Hampton University Department of Architecture, teaching first-year design studio and the Coastal Community Design Collaborative seminar series. He hopes to rank up to Assistant Professor with the acquisition of his doctoral degree. Luka has spoken, shared his experience, and presented his research around the Mid-Atlantic area, from the 2022 Keeping History Above Water conference to events with the Elizabeth River Trail, Community of United Focus, and the Chesapeake Studies conference at Salisbury University in 2022 and 2023. Luka has a passion for mentorship, teaching, and justice which carries and sustains him through the unique destiny of the current moment.

Luka Hamel-Serenity moved to Norfolk, VA from Charlottesville, VA in order to carry out his studies on flooding, displacement, gentrification, and climate change in this lower Chesapeake city. He still lives in Mermaid City with his small nuclear family, going on walks in the evenings after commuting over the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel.
 

Disequilibrium design: Natural infrastructures as climatic experiments

The Tree at the Center: Reconstructing Landscape History and Analysis in the American Landscape's Periphery

The American landscape is fundamental to American identity. America’s national security is predicated on its natural security. The landscape is the grounds to which democratic ideology is tested, reiterated, enforced, and remade. Practices of landscape architecture and the discipline has been active in this process of nation-building and nation-dreaming. For the discipline and profession of landscape architecture to radically accept its role in the creation, expansion, and maintenance of the American landscape is for it to interrogate and recontextualize landscape history and the roles it has played in the country’s successes and failures. 

This dissertation is framed within the American periphery, where the frontier is constantly being remade. Focusing on Hawaii provides the space to evaluate plantation histories, struggles of Hawaiian legitimacy, white supremacy, and assimilation into the active democratic project of America. Further, the dissertation positions culturally and ecologically significant species as a means to nest competing approaches and frameworks together, highlighting the transdisciplinary power of landscape history and analysis. ‘Ohi’a Lehua (Metrosideros polymorpha) becomes the focus of the project, alongside other key species, to ground multiple topics. The tree is both the first pioneer species after lava flows, establishing and dominating Hawaiian forests, but also a deep component of Hawaiian cultural identity and folklore. Yet the stability of these forests and broader cultural landscape is at risk with the emergence and spread of a new aeolian pathogen killing the trees: Rapid ‘Ohi’a Death. 

Multiple methods are interwoven into the project. First are primary sources in American and Hawaiian environmental history alongside landscape history and theory. Second is the assembly of archival imagery including maps, photographs, postcards, travel posters, and fine art. Third is fieldwork photography taken on trips from 2021- 2024. Lastly are multimedia geospatial and abstract drawings made with available data through analogue and digital drawing tools.

 Together, the dissertation projects the role of landscape architecture, its histories, and analysis in the (re)making of the American landscape in the 21st century. The project provides a means to critique current trends of solutionism like mass tree plantings in an era of a destabilized climate. Additionally, it offers a synthetic approach towards understanding the United States as a biopolitical project. As Rachel Carson writes, “It is one of the ironies of our time that, while concentrating on the defense of our country against enemies from without, we should be so heedless of those who would destroy it from within.”

TACTICAL GROWTH: BIODIVERSITY, ATTENTION, AND TRANS-SPECIES ARCHITECTURE IN A K-5 VIRGINIA SCHOOLYARD

Global biodiversity is undergoing a 6th mass extinction event—an ominous trend of the Anthropocene. Meanwhile our understanding of biodiversity and biodiversity-human interactions in built environments is poorly understood. These interrelated trends have significant implications, particularly for children and the spaces of education; childhood is a critical developmental period when engagement with nature, a broader concept than biodiversity, promotes numerous developmental benefits such as health and well-being, learning, and pro-environmental values. The role of biodiversity as a core component of nature is less clear in these processes. At the same time, U.S. public school infrastructure—the space of education for most U.S. children—is largely lacking in ecological complexity including biodiversity for a range of reasons including resource limitations, information gaps, and stakeholder buy-in.

This dissertation investigated Biophilic Tactical Urbanism (BTU)—temporary, low-cost biodiversity interventions—as a methodological innovation to interrogate these twin challenges through a systems thinking framework. BTU, a novel intersection of biophilic design, multispecies design, and tactical urbanism, aimed to 1) generate new knowledge at the human / biodiversity / built environment nexus in schools, and 2) serve as an applied ecological “stepping stone” strategy towards more biodiversity-integrated public spaces. This transdisciplinary, scaffolded research explored BTU through design, ecological, and psycho-social lenses.

James Barnes is an Assistant Research Professor in the NC State University College of Design, Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, and the Natural Learning Initiative. His research has been published in peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Digital Landscape Architecture, ACADIA (Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture), and Divergence in Architectural Research. He has received national fellowships from The U.S. Geological Survey, The National Audubon Society, and Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens.

Craft Consciousness: Learning to Design for a Posthuman Public

Sasson Rafailov is a theorist and designer whose scholarly work contributes to ongoing debates in new materialist philosophy, craft theory, and philosophy of education. His teaching spans the breadth of course offerings at the School of Architecture, including foundational courses in design for both undergraduate and graduate students, thesis studios for the Master of Architecture group, and lectures on modern and contemporary theory across a variety of degree programs.

Through his research and service, Sasson aims to orient schools of architecture and design around the United States towards innovative educational models which encourage students to leverage their relationships with the natural world to overcome challenges unique to our discipline in the 21st century. His PhD dissertation proposes a new approach to craft in these educational contexts, bridging concepts from environmental and technological philosophy to redefine the term as a mode of consciousness, or being, instead of a particular set of skills or material processes. He attempts to elicit this type of awareness in his students through novel, place-based design exercises, as well as through experimental approaches to perennial features of architectural education, like juried design reviews and peer-to-peer collaboration. Sasson's innovative pedagogical approach has been recognized by the University with honors including the Class of 1985 Fellowship for Creative Teaching and the School of Architecture's New Faculty Teaching Award for the 2024-2025 academic year. He also pursues "craft consciousness" in his own design work, which explores human-material relationships in sculpture, tool-making, and furniture.

Sasson graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University in 2018, where he pursued research in architectural pedagogy through several independent studies and a capstone thesis project. Upon graduation, he was offered a faculty position at the University at Buffalo's School of Architecture and Planning, where he taught foundational design studios and a course in modern theory from 2018-2019. He subsequently enrolled in Harvard University’s Master in Design Studies program, where he was a Dean's Merit Scholar until his graduation in 2021. Sasson has presented his research in a variety of international venues, including conferences hosted by the Society of Architectural Historians and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, as well as in exhibitions of his craft work in the United States, Germany, and Switzerland. He has also contributed to contemporary research in design through his appointments to the selection committees of institutions like the Design Akademie Saaleck, where he was also a fellow in 2020, and the University of Virginia's Michael Owen Jones lecture series in 2023-2024.