Strange Bedfellows

Princeton School of Architecture is pleased to announce Strange Bedfellows, an online exhibition by the 2021 Post-Professional M.Arch Thesis class, coordinated by Professor Jesse Reiser. The website showcases seven projects by nine students: Nathaniel Banks and Yidian Liu, Emmanuel Osorno, Jeff Yinong Tao, Zaid Kashef Alghata and Minglu Wei, Tiantian Lou, Piao Liu, and Kaitlin Faherty.

Plastic, Plastic
Nathaniel Banks & Yidian Liu
Advisors: Paul Lewis, Guy Nordenson, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Nanako Umemoto

This thesis speculates upon architecture’s ability to address the growing challenge of aquatic plastic pollution. Situated in the mouth of the LA river, this intervention operates at a macroscopic and microscopic scale, to the extract and store plastic pollutants, locking them away within the thickness of the city.

On Softness: Images & Preservation
Emmanuel Osorno
Advisor: Erin Besler

Borrowing from photography, marketing, and propaganda, this thesis proposes to create a media campaign to advocate for the preservation of endangered civic buildings. It does so by insidiously, if not forcefully, inserting the image of the buildings into existing forms of media through which our buildings circulate and gain value, ranging from social media ads and magazine covers to well-known films and toys.

Evaluating Trees
Jeff Yinong Tao
Advisor: Erin Besler

This thesis speculates an alternative view that facilitates nature's interest in the human's value system. A project is proposed in aspects of industry standardization, the economy of assembly, and graphic identity through a home shelter for forest rangers.

A Dream for a Techno-Natural State
Zaid Kashef Alghata + Minglu Wei
Advisor: Jesse Reiser  

A Dream for a Techno-Natural State proposes the transfer of a Chinese economic model and mountain to Bahrain. The landmass is produced in the form of a twin-island by grafting the picturesque with existing water technologies to operate like a giant pseudo-natural desalination and distribution plant. Taobao’s decentralized logic is installed to tackle Bahrain’s mono-programmatic planning. Each 600 x 600m pixel is allocated a specialty and has living and industrial spaces, in addition to a public arcade.

Weaving as Metaphor
Tiantian Lou
Advisor: Stan Allen

This thesis probes textile in architecture through both its materiality and its logic of assembly. This experiment intends to initiate an intimate relationship between body and the built environment through textile.

Urban Cinematics: Design of the Eastern Parkway at 5/10/15/50 FPS
Piao Liu
Advisor: Stan Allen

This thesis explores infrastructural designs based on multiple speeds and architectural designs from views on the road, to create multiple sets of urban cinematic experiences from different movements. 

Future Flush: Eco-Social Infrastructure for Emergent Public Space
Kaitlin Faherty
Advisor: Liz Diller

Future Flush is a proposition for the public bathroom that works across scales—from infrastructure to the fixture—to shift our relationship to our bodies, other bodies, and bodily products through waste-to-energy cycles, expanded programming, and shared fixtures that provoke interactions in the daily life of the city, situated in the space of a car lane on our near-future urban streets.