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Following the Thesis Seminar in the Fall Semester, Design Studio VI offers students the opportunities to answer the questions posed by their own research prompts. In the Spring Semester, students make the architecture that supports and is supported by the thesis statements and studies that they formulated in the Fall seminar research. Students work within the structure of the studio environment under the advisement of their instructors, but the flexibility and the independent nature of a thesis project allows students to pursue their individual topics and representational modes. The issues relating to the critical practice of architecture that were raised in the Fall Seminar are still discussed in the Spring Studio, but the focus shifts to the production of buildings and architectural studies that resolve formal, programmatic, and technical requirements posed by a complex urban building.
A design thesis is a proposition and provocation about the conceptual and professional state of the discipline, a questioning about what is at stake in architecture today, to be explored in and tested through a specific design project. This mutual interaction between concept and project is what distinguishes a design thesis project from a capstone design project or from a conceptual project. Distinguished from a capstone project because a design thesis proposes to investigate, beyond the functional and formal resolution of a project, a broader disciplinary question regarding the design field, precisely to push into deeper poignancy the matters and modes of function, form, and atmosphere. And it is distinguished from a purely theoretical project because an architectural thesis seeks to test out its proposition in and through a specific design project, as a tool of investigation and articulation within the cultural material of architecture. The discipline of architecture has an extended history of both engaging with, and distancing itself from, such matters of concern.
These relationships between what has been called architecture “inside” (inclusions) and its “outside” (exclusions) have been the subject of both architectural thinking and making in ways that continually place into question the nature of the discipline’s agency in the broader social and environmental contexts within which it operates. In our contemporary context this year of the Master of Architecture thesis was an opportunity, during a pandemic, to establish the agency of our profession, to discover what – in this present and our impending future – architecture can catalyze.
As designers we are in a very difficult moment. The pandemic has thrown an intense uncertainty on top of an already volatile and economy-dependent profession. While our city will continue to change in response to this crisis our population remains in dire need of housing solutions, of humane design responses to environments for learning, for public space, for health, for design concepts confronting inequities in access to technology and infrastructure. The COVID-19 disruptions will likely wane, and while the crisis will dissipate over time it has already catalyzed changes in how we experience and design our cities. We will quickly begin to see how urban design, architecture, and the policies of our city are capable (or incapable) of addressing structural inequities. Instructively, the propositions made in the present, in real time, in the thesis sequence, can inform the future of our metropolis.
This concern for the role of architecture in affecting positive change in the world is the subject of individual, private, and intellectual reflection as well as collective, public action. It is within the academy - where we have the freedom to research, program, and vision an architectural project - that a project of deep aspiration can manifest. This opportunity, to think in an untethered fashion, to create a project framed by one’s own voice and one’s own critical and focused research, will remain unparalleled as inquiry. The 2020-2021 thesis sequence asked students to consider the “public health” of our city, its spatial access, and how architecture – as both a profession and as a social art – has been exclusionary. Students questioned what happens if we - as designers of the built environment – cease being passive in the face of these issues and pivot to become eager, inclusive activists in support of our metropolis and our cultures.
At Parsons School of Constructed Environments design is understood as being in a unique position to respond to some of the most pressing issues of our time and that addressing complex problems requires expertise that spans across traditional disciplinary boundaries. From multidisciplinary coursework across the curriculum to the sharing of studio space, students in Parsons’ Masters programs in Architecture, Interior Design, and Lighting Design learn and are exposed to the issues and processes of varied design disciplines throughout their graduate study. Although the benefits and insights of interdisciplinary thinking are evidenced throughout the SCE, the student work included in the Interdisciplinary section of this document was completed in thesis labs structured to support cross disciplinary problem solving. With student researchers from SCE hybrid degree programs, thesis work features a shared topical framework centered on the integration of lighting design and architecture and lighting design and interior design respectively. This thesis work engages these fields against the boundaries of current practice, while simultaneously questioning the assumptions upon which these professions operate. The quality and understanding represented in this thesis research affirms the SCE belief that addressing the most complex problems of today and tomorrow demands a willingness to engage in critical thinking across disciplinary boundaries.
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