Category: ARCH 502A: Adaptive M isuse

The U.S. and Mexico border wall is a mechanism of separation and control, and this thesis proposal playfully challenges the wall’s intended impermeability through a series of insurgent design operations. Such interventions of resistance will use architecture to activate binational human exchange, both tangible and intangible, at the border.

Contextualizing the border wall as an existing kit of parts, insurgent interventions include a playground, taco spot, library, amphitheater, mini golf course, and butterfly refuge. Each independently responds to the border through a unique action strategy, such as intersection and rotation of the existing wall.

As Taipei faces land shortages, the proposed 3-dimensional transportation system – the rooftop activators – will renovate the existing urban situation, which weaves various parts together to form a secondary cityscape that reactivates the rooftop area buildings to ease existing congestion. The activators allow dense cities to reimagine rooftops as habitable spaces.

The infrastructure of a community thrives in “Extra-Socio-Catered” organization of spaces and zoning, countering the influx of “Intra-Home-Catered” lifestyle trends.

Interspace recharacterizes the neutral privately owned public space into a Plug‘N’Play of agency and interactivity to achieve a concentrated social web of vitalization and belonging gluing together infrastructure and activity.

This project transforms four abandoned longlines microwave towers into unique recreational spaces by revitalizing them with the addition of contextual programs, resulting in fused spaces that attract visitors with their uncommon spatial qualities. This showcases the potential of imaginative adaptation, while also promoting building material reuse and the remembrance of historical infrastructures.

This project reinvigorates the underappreciated and omnipresent essence of Los
Angeles’ strip malls. By redefining strip malls as a connected network of public spaces, the
proposal shows the possibility for street vibrancy in the future while preserving the allure and life
of LA’s strip malls through the construction of a new third space and architectural interventions.

Existing libraries resist disorder, failing to subvert banality in their spatial offering to visitors. The book’s identity serves purely as Macguffin and the libraries’ circulatory space drives discovery, employing a modular curation system that encourages novelty of experience and exploration of knowledge. New Alexandria reinterprets history’s symbol for record and scholarship through the lens of a modern world that has little need for the physical storage of information.