Completed Theses

How can individuals organize co-operation today for the city as a project and what could be the role of architects into this process?

Jingru (Cyan) Cheng is a transdisciplinary design researcher. The wide-ranging themes include, non-canonical histories and socio-spatial models, diverse ways of cultural knowing and being, aesthetic agency, and modes of co-existence and affinity between human and non-human. She is currently developing RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING towards a methodological framework of articulating non-discursive bodily knowledge at the intersection of […]

Today we are familiar with definitions of architecture as an integrated, multidisciplinary “networked practice,” which takes its cognitive potential from a “diffused design intelligence.” These definitions were introduced to counter an individual, authorial approach to design which allegedly characterized modern architecture since its beginnings: this thesis aims to overcome such a distinction.

This thesis puts forward the idea of the city as a Public Frame. The architecture of the public frame not only build the prospect of enclosing communal, natural, and artful life within the city, but at the same time it also regards a certain degree of organization, of management; with the aim of having an […]

The last fifty years of theory have not managed to produce a consistent body of knowledge about the street and its architecture. On the contrary, human and urban geographers have discussed the street as arendtian space of public appearance, railing against the contemporary disregard for streets as citymaking elements […]

The central argument of the thesis is that the ‘informal’ urbanization that characterizes the contemporary Greek cities is an immediate derivative of a complex political project with numerous branches, displayed accordingly and primarily by architectural and urban typologies and protocols. As a case-study, the Greek cities and particularly Athens, offer a valid critique on the recent conceptions regarding the distinction between ‘informal’ and ‘formal’ urbanism […]

Despite reading the city through its complex layers and diverse metaphors, this project engages with the city on a theoretical level; it chooses a grand narrative to formulate a coherent (hi)story of Tehran in a meta-critical framework. The complexity of the spatial structure of Tehran is not only the physical outcome of the delicate interactions between land markets, topography, infrastructure, and regulations, but it has also been shaped by the overlaying of various political layers, of various political projects […]

Contents 1 The development of the ‘Idea’ of Type 2 Durand: the systematisation of architectural knowledge and procedural differentiation 3 Seriality, Deep Structure and the Diagram 4 Dominant Types and the Ideas of the City 5 Singapore: Dominant Types and the Asian City of Architectural Modernism Christopher C.M Lee is the co-founder and principal of […]

[…] Under the guise of a PhD by Design, the dissertation showcases an extensive production of authorial drawings to discuss these propositions through a genealogy of historical chapters, intermediated by site-specific design strategies […]

Labour is the conditio sine qua non of the City. It is not possible to elaborate a Project of the City without conceiving the City itself as an expression of production. Architecture always reflects the general conditions of economy through its own objecthood, by means of plans and sections. Any pressure of the Labour force engendered a different mode of production and, consequently, a different configuration of the territory and the urban fabric

The thesis investigates the project of Housing as a governance strategy and an instrument for initiating social, political and economic reforms in Iran.