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Ibn Khaldun and the city : a study of the physical formation of medieval Cairo
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1989)
This essay is an application of Ibn Khaldun's theories of culture and civilization to a study of the physical formation of medieval Cairo . The study is based on the premise that the city is an historical process governed ...
Great expectations : provisional modernism and the reception of J.J.P. Oud
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004)
My dissertation analyzes the reception of the work of J.J.P. Oud (1890-1963), the modern Dutch architect, by examining the systems of dissemination and reception of modern European architecture from 1910 to 1953. Reception ...
Music-listening systems
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2000)
When human listeners are confronted with musical sounds, they rapidly and automatically orient themselves in the music. Even musically untrained listeners have an exceptional ability to make rapid judgments about music ...
Disturbance grounds : an inquiry into non-equilibrium architectural states
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2015)
Fundamentally, this project pursues the concept of construction from destructive forces. It presents architectural opportunity at the physical scale of the mega-city and the time scale of the geological, advocating for a ...
State of roads : public works as research, India circa 1960
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009)
That the road is a symbol of the prowess of the nation-state seems tautological, a uni"ed phenomenon of political symbolism that manifests as an infrastructural network. When subjected to a close historical examination, ...
The people in the city of the nation : re-viewing Islamabad's fifth function
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009)
This thesis is about Islamabad's center. Islamabad is a city built from scratch. It was the "dream" of Ayub Khan-Pakistan's gregarious and globe-trotting general-cum-president-and the product of its chief master planner, ...
Lifecycle of viral YouTube videos
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014)
YouTube was founded in 2005 as a video-sharing website. Today, it's a powerhouse social media platform where users can upload, view, comment, and share content. For many, it's the first site visited when looking for songs, ...
The jungle in the clearing : space, form and democracy in America, 1940-1949
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001)
Combining aesthetic theory with theories of the public sphere, this dissertation examines the brief appearance of a publicly empathetic civic realm in the United States during the 1940s. The argument begins with a reevaluation ...
Performative monuments : public art, commemoration, and history in postwar Europe
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009)
The performative monument, as I term an emergent genre of interactive public actions, rests on a new notion of agency in public space, in which political responsibility is performed by historically aware individuals in ...
After the copy : creativity, originality and the labor of appropriation : Dafen Village, Shenzhen, China (1989-2010)
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2010)
Since 1989, Dafen village in Shenzhen, China, has supplied millions of hand-painted oil-on-canvas paintings each year to global consumer markets. Accused of copying Western masterpieces, and spurred by the Chinese party-state's ...