Architecture

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/handle/10012/9902

This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's School of Architecture.

Research outputs are organized by type (eg. Master Thesis, Article, Conference Paper).

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A Game of Urban Resilience: Playing the Social-Ecological System of a Rapidly Developing Caledon, Ontario, Canada
(University of Waterloo, 2026-01-21) Zheng, Catherine
Considerable land in the Town of Caledon, located in Ontario, Canada, is protected by the Greenbelt including sections of the Niagara Escarpment and the Oak Ridges Moraine. Caledon is also subject to an expected rapid population increase, which is at the expense of cultural landscapes and ecosystem functions. As a rural town with agricultural industries and conservation authorities, provincial urban development pressures present Caledon as a case study for engaging with complex and interconnected social, ecological, and planning problems. Through the design of a serious game as a tool for community education and engagement in urban planning, this thesis investigates the relationship between sprawling urban form, ecological illiteracy, and the growing acceptance of environmental degradation. A board game modelled on Caledon’s social-ecological systems, titled Paving Paradise, has been developed to generate dialogue and address the central conflict of urban sprawl, and positions social-ecological urbanism (SEU) frameworks as a solution. SEU is a method of urbanization that applies concepts of systems resilience against urban design, where social-ecological systems are maintained and supported through social institutions and built environments to enhance a city’s resiliency. Paving Paradise functions as a speculative planning model, where urban form is influenced by top-down policy, but transformed by community resilience, adaptation, and ecological stewardship. Designed for community members, the game assigns players distinct roles and asks them to balance individual objectives with collective success to build a socially and ecologically resilient Caledon. Through play, participants engage in dialogue that fosters empathy and encourages new perspectives on the many dimensions of resilient urban growth. Games can serve as a medium to communicate and link complex ideas in accessible ways, giving agency to individuals not specifically trained in various aspects that impact their community. The designed game leverages the educational and engaging properties of game mechanics, acting as a method to communicate social-ecological systems while simultaneously fostering discussion, negotiation, and collaboration. Within this research, mapping is used to synthesize and extract Caledon’s existing social-ecological conditions, and SEU design proposals are illustrated and applied to a neighbourhood in Caledon to show improved human-nature connections, ultimately forming the narrative and logistical foundation of the game. The game’s core mechanics are adapted from an existing tile-laying board game centered on territorial expansion, but they are further informed by game theory and refined through multiple rounds of playtesting and participant interviews. Paving Paradise creates conditions for players to imagine and collaborate on a shared landscape, becoming an effective tool for collective learning and social mobilization. Paving Paradise does not aim to provide solutions or design guidelines. Rather, it simplifies complex and interlinked ideas of policy, urban form, and social-ecological systems to offer a platform for engaging willing participants, in and out of Caledon, on creating and nurturing a resilient urban environment.
Mass Timber High-Rises: Integrating Form, Structure, and Dwelling Typologies
(University of Waterloo, 2026-01-21) BABALOLA, OLUWATOBILOBA OLUWASEUN
This thesis explores mass timber not only as a sustainable material, but as a spatial and conceptual framework for reimagining vertical urban housing. It treats mass timber as massing, a modular and volumetric system that organizes structure, form, and inhabitation through stacking, subtraction, and spatial play. Moving beyond material or structural efficiency, the project frames mass timber using a grid and modular based kit of parts as both constraints and opportunity as an architectural language for adaptable, community-oriented high-rise housing that responds to the environmental and social challenges of urban living. Drawing inspiration from Adrian Wong’s explorations of modular systems and spatial adaptability, the research adopts a process of modular arrangement, like assembling and rearranging blocks, where modular volumes are assembled, layered, and reconfigured to generate diverse typologies and shared communal spaces. The project asks: How can the modular logic of mass timber inspire new forms of high-rise housing that balance environmental responsibility with social and spatial richness? The study focuses on how a repetitive volumetric modular unit can be transformed into lively, varied living environments through deliberate acts of aggregation and void-making through subtractive and additive massing. In addressing Canada’s housing crisis and the global demand for low-carbon, rapidly deployable construction, this thesis positions mass timber’s prefabricated modularity as a key strategy for delivering affordable, efficient, and low-embodied-carbon housing construction that also inspires diverse spatial possibilities. Its lightweight nature reduces on-site labor, and the capacity for off-site fabrication enables faster assembly, minimal waste, and lower emissions compared to conventional concrete or steel systems. Through digital modeling and speculative design studies using Autodesk Revit, the research develops a catalogue of spatial strategies that demonstrate how mass timber’s modular volume can act as both structure and medium for spatial play, producing architecture that is sustainable, adaptable, and deeply human, uniting environmental performance with expressive form and social value.
Beyond the Frame: Culture, Identity, and the Caribbean Sea Diaspora in Canada
(University of Waterloo, 2026-01-19) Espinoza, Ricardo
The Caribbean Sea is a complex landscape that holds a storied past and a palimpsest of identities. Indigenous, colonial, and modern traditions shift like tides, and their relationships shape the collective identity of the Caribbean Sea’s inhabitants. Migration from European settlers, the colonial slave trade, and modern refugee crises have created a creolization of cultures and customs. Flows of migration by members of these community have thus created a global archipelago for the Caribbean Sea diaspora who are in constant dialogue and in search for community and representation in their respective exclaves. These migratory flows have allowed Canada and the Toronto area to become a region which welcomed this diaspora, establishing culture and community. Globalization and the internet have connected us, but in many ways also divided this diaspora from traditional cultural and artistic community activities that must be experienced physically. “Beyond The Frame: Community, Identity, and the Caribbean Sea Diaspora in Canada” attempts to restore the flows of these connections by means of artistic expression and by establishing a central place of community for the Caribbean Sea diaspora in Canada. Approaching culture and identity from a relational sense, the design for an arts-based centre for immigrants of the Caribbean Sea in Toronto that is rooted in the typologies surrounding the Caribbean Sea takes shape. Cultural institutions are typologies where new relationships are constantly forged between artifacts, people, and space, creating new meaning based on past experiences. This thesis argues that architecture is a tool that helps establish and democratize connections, exploring firsthand accounts from immigrants and their views on identity and culture, leaders from organizations within the Greater Toronto Area, and responsive design concepts in order to produce a representative architectural snapshot of the Caribbean Sea diaspora today.
Reimagining High School: A Guide to Renewing Post-War Secondary Schools in Waterloo Region
(University of Waterloo, 2026-01-19) Roberts, Meaghan
Ontario’s public education system is in a state of crisis; this is evident in the architecture of schools. Many of Ontario’s secondary schools were built during the post-war era (1955-1975), and education continues to operate within buildings that reflect the values and priorities of that time. Education during this period was highly institutionalized, and buildings were designed with the intention of enforcing rigid standards of learning and behaviour. Classrooms prioritized control and uniformity to administer required tests and performance assessments effectively. While funding has been directed towards additions and band-aid solutions, these schools have become crowded over time, consequently relying on portable classrooms. Despite shifts in educational values and pedagogy, the architecture of secondary schools has remained largely unchanged for the past fifty years, failing to meet the priorities and evolving pedagogy of today. Since the post-war era, educators and policymakers have acknowledged that each student and school community has unique needs. While recent pedagogical advancements have been successfully integrated into well-funded, progressive, and newly constructed schools, there is still a gap in understanding how existing infrastructure, particularly post-war schools, can be upgraded to support these educational principles. The thesis research proposal seeks to develop a framework for reimagining secondary education by renewing an existing post-war secondary school in the Waterloo Region, Ontario. The proposal aims to support modern educational practices, embracing 21st-century learning, diverse learning styles, and community-based education. To guide this research, three interconnected scales are examined: the classroom, the school building, and the surrounding urban context. The research objectives are to assess the current state and future vision of public education in Ontario, understand the evolving needs of 21st-century learners, and explore how schools can support both student development and community well-being. The research culminates in a set of design guidelines that outline strategies for renewing existing school buildings into inclusive, adaptable, and community-oriented environments that reflect contemporary educational values. The primary guiding questions are: How can post-war secondary schools, originally designed under outdated educational philosophies, be adapted for 21st-century learning? In what ways can spatial design foster a sense of belonging, engagement, and well-being among students? How can the schools establish a closer connection with their surrounding communities?
Transcending the Settled Ground: Mapping Obligations of Settler Architects in Canada
(University of Waterloo, 2026-01-16) Hu, Anita
This research begins with the recognition that architecture, as both a discipline and a practice, has never been neutral. The design process has long been entangled with histories of colonization, where land was surveyed and transformed into property. In Canada, these processes were instrumental in establishing a settler-colonial relationship to land, one that privileges extraction and productivity over reciprocity and care. This study asks how the architectural design process reproduces these colonial structures and how settler architects might begin to take responsibility for the histories that shape their work. In the outskirts of Sarnia, Ontario, an area known as Chemical Valley sits on the traditional territory of the Chippewa, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples, collectively known as the Anishinaabeg. It is home to the Aamjiwnaang First Nations reserve and a dense concentration of petrochemical refineries. The term “Chemical Valley” dates back to 1947 as a symbol of national progress, but is now used by Aamjiwnaang First Nations and activists to draw attention to the negative impacts of this industrial corridor. The proximity between the two landscapes exposes how colonial systems of land use and resource extraction persist in shaping environmental and social conditions today. By tracing the evolution of architectural and planning tools, from early land surveys to contemporary zoning and professional standards, this research uncovers how these systems continue to define who has access to land and who bears the burden of its consequences. Through archival analysis and an examination of city planning and architectural practice, this work delineates how the design process itself has been used to legitimize and justify land dispossession. Acts of measuring and drawing are political gestures that determine what is seen, valued, and remembered. Confronting this legacy requires a reorientation of architectural practice, one that shifts toward methods grounded in care and reciprocity, prioritizing relationships with the land.
A Sanctuary inspired by Gurbani in Gati Harike, Punjab: A Spiritual Journey of Awakening
(University of Waterloo, 2026-01-16) Devgan, Jasmine
This research investigates the profound connection between spirituality, architecture, and urban design, aiming to create built environments that express spiritual values and evoke deep presence, meaning, and emotional resonance. Drawing upon the universal teachings of Gurbani, the project translates the Elements of Creation and the energy of Chakras into a transformative spatial design language for a "Journey of Awakening." The thesis posits that humanity should strive for total consciousness, or Mukti (liberation), by transcending Trigun Maya to realize divine truth, emphasizing "truth in design" over mere aesthetics. The study explores how metaphysical principles can imbue built spaces with meaning, facilitating a journey from an "enslaved (under the impact of five vices: Lust, Anger, Greed, Attachment, and Ego driven by desires) to a free (filled with Divine Virtues) person" through experiential understanding of the five elements of nature and the practical implementation of divine wisdom. It argues that architecture plays a pivotal role in shaping emotions, behaviors, and consciousness, and that a lack of spiritually attuned design contributes to modern societal issues. Employing an interdisciplinary methodology spanning cultural history, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and phenomenology, this research examines the reciprocal relationship between human neural processing, architectural stimuli, and spiritual experiences. The proposed ISHQ-E-SAT (meaning "Love is Truth") sanctuary, an eco-sensitive retreat within the Harike Wetland, Punjab, exemplifies these principles. Its design organizes the site into seven chakra-aligned nodes, integrating the Five Elements, sacred geometry, Punjabi vernacular architecture, and symbolic elements. This fosters spiritual resonance, cultural rootedness, and community empowerment through sustainable, inclusive practices. Ultimately, this work seeks to enrich architectural practice, guiding individuals toward self-reconnection, spiritual awakening, and harmonious living with nature and humanity.
Negotiating Restoration through Representation: The role of visualization in the public process of Riverside Dam
(University of Waterloo, 2026-01-14) Polera, Jordana
As climate change intensifies ecological uncertainty and infrastructure risk, low-head dam removals have become sites where environmental, cultural, and political tensions converge. This thesis examines the case of Riverside Dam in Cambridge, Ontario (2008-2019), to explore how visualization acts not only as a tool of communication but as an active agent in shaping negotiations over the whether to remove, rebuild Riverside Dam. The Municipal Class Environmental Assessment (EA) for Riverside Dam including consultant drawings, City reports, and community responses based on eight “preferred alternative” designs for the dam. Visual materials play a decisive role in how potential futures are understood, aiding in understanding, participation, and decision-making. Drawings are political tools that can include or exclude voices, clarify or obscure impacts, and build or erode public trust. By closely studying the Municipal EA process for Riverside Dam, this thesis examines how values, trade-offs, and potential designs are communicated through visualizations and contested. Drawing from literature on landscape architecture visualization studies, Indigenous knowledge systems, and environmental design, the thesis proposes a framework for negotiated design to better support engagement with the community. Negotiated design in this thesis is an approach to environmental planning and restoration that prioritizes structured dialogue and collaboration among diverse stakeholders with often competing interests. This framework is a call for transparency, accessibility, and legibility in architectural drawings in so that the public is aware of what is at stake with each “preferred alternative” within the Environmental Assessment process. Within the proposed framework, this thesis lays out four visualization principles including: 1) contextual clarity, 2) embodied perspectives, 3) temporal layering, and 4) making conflict visible. Engagement principles also emphasize the use of physical space, co-creation, and writeable, decision-oriented drawings. Rather than producing an original design proposal, this thesis reinterprets three existing shortlisted design options (or “preferred alternatives”) for the Riverside dam: rebuilding, removing and naturalizing, and building an offline dam and naturalizing the river. Through different forms of visualization, the framework developed in the thesis are applied to visualize trade-offs, reveal biases, and imagine the realities of each design to best engage and educate the public. These River drawings are not final answers but rather invitations for further negotiation. By centering legibility over resolution, this work positions visualizing ecological projects as a collaborative and evolving act. It contributes to broader conversations on climate resilience and adaptation, decolonial landscape practice, and the role of design in environmental governance.
Sanctuaries of the Heart: Perception, Phenomenology and the Architecture of Salutogenic Healing
(University of Waterloo, 2026-01-13) Ahsan, Rabbiya
The thesis investigates the role of architecture as an active agent of healing by redefining salutogenic design through the lens of spatial phenomenology. It draws from the author’s own lived experience with mood disorders as well as extensive interdisciplinary research. The paper critiques historic, as well as modern healthcare approaches and treatment methods for mental health, with case studies such as Bethlem Royal Hospital and more sterile hospitals of today. In contrast, it studies the ancient healing methods that integrate the mind, body and spirit through spatial symbolism and rituals. Additionally, the project incorporates Maggie Keswick Jencks’ diaries through the lens of Critical Discourse Analysis, to understand a patient’s perspective when they navigate healthcare facilities. The thesis further studies the impact of the diaries in the form of a detailed case study of the Maggie Centre. Other case studies also contribute to understanding nature, materiality and sensory experience which combine under the umbrella term of spatial phenomenology and often nurtures positive recovery. Central to this research is salutogenesis, an idea that can be reframed to fit in the architectural narrative. This results in a proposed design of a mental wellness facility, located on the banks of the Grand River, a site with rich history and ecological vitality. The design serves as a manifesto for salutogenic design, choreographing light, sound, scent, texture and time, it dissolves the Cartesian split between mind and body and creates a space which contributes actively in the healing process.
Pretending Architecture: The Journey Towards Verne Station
(University of Waterloo, 2026-01-07) Ferreira, Jamie Verdell
This is a record of pretend architecture, a journey of fabricating fantasy in the form of a virtual environment that is an authentic fake. This is an exploration inspired by the many fictional stories that I have encountered in order to create an interpretation of a space station. Framed by the harsh reality of space and contrasted by idealistic viewpoints in film, literature and video games, the end result presented is a far cry from initial expectations. It is a means to an end; a way to explore architecture in outer space with the use of constructs. Verne Station exists as fragments of experiences; attempts to understand and discover the intoxicating ideals of a limitless frontier ruled by the harshest of living conditions. By use of the machine, one has the ability to create complex virtual environments to simulate and visualize space architecture concepts; a field that has historically been inaccessible to many. By simulating different scales of artificial gravity design, the real-time exploration of designed spaces can facilitate a clearer understanding and more effective visual feedback of potential space architecture designs. This is a thesis about coming to terms with not arriving at your original destination, the one you imagine and expect to reach, but instead, the real one which you never quite anticipated.
Static-to-Kinetic Solutions in Adaptive Reuse: Mechanisms for Transformation
(University of Waterloo, 2025-12-19) Farmer, Theresa
Public library branches stand as vital social infrastructure, yet their physical forms increasingly struggle to keep pace with technological, social, and environmental change. While their programs now support many different modes of making, learning, and gathering, the buildings remain static, limiting adaptability and user agency. Demolition and rebuilding are often treated as the only solutions, but such approaches are financially unsustainable and environmentally destructive, erasing buildings that embody local identity and collective memory. This thesis explores an alternative path: the use of responsive architectural additions that extend existing libraries without compromising their structural integrity or cultural meaning. It argues that preservation today must move beyond maintaining appearance or form toward sustaining continuity through active use and adaptation over time. Building on William Zuk and Roger H. Clark’s theory of kinetic architecture, the research explores a kinetic exhibition scaffold system composed of adjustable floors, walls, and furnishings as a way to achieve responsiveness and enable the public to shape and experience space. The Pleasant View Branch (1975) in Toronto, Canada, serves as the test site. The proposal introduces a lightweight overbuild addition, a new structure that appears to hover above the existing library while remaining structurally independent. This approach allows the original building to remain operational during construction, maintaining community access as transformation occurs above. Together, the elevated addition and reconfigurable interior scaffolding establish a practical model of adaptive reuse, where space can expand, contract, and transform in response to evolving patterns of use. The result is an extendable strategy for renewing the functional, civic, and environmental lifespan of public library branches without sacrificing the histories they hold.
Manila's Other City: Toward a Counter-Relocation Approach
(University of Waterloo, 2025-12-01) Reyes, Mary Angeline
This thesis explores the spatial and economic dynamics of informality in Barangay 105, Tondo, Manila, one of the most densely populated informal settlements in Metro Manila. Located along the industrial edge of the city, the barangay is shaped by rural displacement, state-led resettlement efforts, and infrastructural neglect. At the heart of the site are 25 warehouse structures, originally constructed as temporary relocation housing. Over time, these buildings have been incrementally transformed by residents into permanent live-work spaces, generating a distinct informal morphology that mirrors broader patterns of adaptation across Manila’s socioeconomic landscape. Informality, in this context, is not peripheral but central to the city’s functioning. Approximately 20–35% of Metro Manila’s population resides in informal settlements, many of which operate as self-sufficient ecosystems in the absence of state support. In Barangay 105, waste picking and small-scale recycling form the core of the local economy. Each day, informal workers collect, sort, and resell large volumes of waste, integrating themselves into larger material flows that connect domestic labor to regional and global waste economies. Despite their critical contributions, these workers remain structurally excluded from planning, labor protections, and service provision. To analyze these dynamics, the research draws on large-scale cartography, detailed studies of urban vernaculars, comparative case studies, and the documentation of daily routines. Government housing responses have historically relied on mass relocation, often displacing communities to distant peripheries. Programs such as those led by the National Housing Authority (NHA), the Community Mortgage Program (CMP), and the Zonal Improvement Program (ZIP) have repeatedly failed to address the needs of informal residents, instead severing their access to livelihoods and social networks. This thesis critiques these relocation paradigms and proposes a counter-relocation approach: one that strengthens communities in place rather than removing them. The design focuses on reimagining 15 of the existing warehouse structures as a distributed network of community depots: multi-use infrastructures that embed housing and economic production into the urban fabric. The project centers incremental, solidaristic, and community-led spatial strategies that reflect and strengthen the informal socioeconomic landscape of Tondo.
Decolonizing Disability: access without erasure
(University of Waterloo, 2025-11-24) Musa, Kenyo
This thesis rethinks disability in the Global South by turning to Nigerian open-air markets, rather than institutional settings as primary sites of inquiry. More than points of exchange, these markets are cultural and civic arenas where economic activity intersects with social connection, mutual care, and collective identity. Marketplaces often function as “third places,” sustaining relationships, preserving communal memory, and hosting the negotiation of public life alongside commerce. Within this context, disability is framed not as a fixed biological deficit but as a condition shaped by environments, social structures, and cultural narratives. Drawing on critical disability studies, African epistemologies, and the concept of relational access, the project positions design as a continual negotiation between bodies, space, and practices of care, challenging functionalist approaches that reduce access to technical compliance. A central critique advanced in this research is the co-option of accessibility language to legitimize exclusionary development. In postcolonial African cities, modernization projects often promise accessible infrastructure while simultaneously displacing those most reliant on markets for survival. Under the banner of “ultra-modern” shopping complexes, elderly traders, people with impairments, and low-income groups are frequently priced out, excluded from decision-making, and stripped of long-standing spatial and economic networks. In such cases, access becomes a rhetorical tool for privatization and displacement rather than a pathway to justice. This thesis argues that genuine access must go beyond token infrastructural features to address the deeper social, economic, and political systems that sustain participation. Methodologically, the study combines critical literature with graphical anthropology, using mapping and diagramming to interpret the spatial conditions of Nigerian markets. This approach, informed by Jos Boys’s “Having a Body” framework, highlights how non-normative bodies engage space, revealing barriers such as uneven ground, sensory overload, or disorientation, alongside supports like shared seating, mutual caregiving, and assistance from load carriers. Through this iterative method, the research develops strategies grounded in lived realities rather than abstract standards, emphasizing collective arrangements that sustain participation. The design proposal focuses on Jos Main Market, a once-celebrated hub now in disrepair after arson and neglect. The intervention introduces a spine that organizes utilities and circulation while embedding care nodes for prayer, rest, sanitation, and basic medical support. A market workshop provides space for repair, fabrication, and low-cost assistive devices, affirming resourcefulness and local skill as vital forms of access. At its center, a market plaza serves as a commons, enhancing visibility and offering social services such as collective childcare, community kitchens, thrift collectives, and meeting areas. Together, these spaces strengthen support networks and ensure vulnerable groups remain active within the civic life of the market. Ultimately, the thesis positions open-air markets as sites that resist the misuse of accessibility rhetoric by grounding access in reciprocity and collective care. Rather than treating informality as disorder to be erased, it demonstrates how markets themselves model alternative approaches to spatial justice. By centering lived experience, this project advances a decolonial vision of disability design, one where access is relational, negotiated, and inseparable from economic survival and community life.
Healthy living by design : Exploring the blue zones as a framework for a multi-generational housing typology
(University of Waterloo, 2025-10-20) Ali, Syed Bahroz
This thesis begins by examining the pervasive urban sprawl in Toronto, analyzing the profound health impacts associated with suburban living—challenges such as social isolation, poor walkability, and a general decline in well-being. While the city has responded to housing pressures with mid-rise densification, many existing problems persist and are often intensified: smaller living spaces and inadequate community infrastructure continue to undermine both physical and mental health. In response, the research turns to the Blue Zones—regions where people consistently enjoy longer, healthier lives, largely free from the chronic health issues prevalent in suburban and urban environments. By closely investigating the architectural and spatial qualities of these communities, the thesis explores the fundamental role of design and space in fostering well-being. The study identifies key overlaps between the principles found in Blue Zones and the recommendations outlined in age-friendly and World Health Organization guidelines. These shared values inform strategies aimed at addressing the underlying health concerns of both suburban and densified urban contexts. Central to this approach is a re imagining of housing: specifically, promoting multi generational homes and neighborhood designs that support aging in place, encourage social cohesion, and create opportunities for intergenerational connection.This thesis advances alternative models of housing and community development—drawing on co-housing and co-living precedents from Canada and the Nordic countries—that respond more effectively to Toronto’s climate and cultural context. Instead of pursuing density as an end in itself, the proposed designs emphasize creating environments where people of all ages can flourish, maintain strong social connections, and lead healthier, more fulfilling lives.
Reparative Infrastructure: Reimagining Water Kiosks in Ulaanbaatar’s Ger Districts
(University of Waterloo, 2025-10-17) Liu, Yiqing
Over half of Mongolia’s population lives in Ulaanbaatar, with many settling in ger districts on the urban periphery. These areas, where some residents still live in traditional gers on self-claimed plots, resemble other informal settlements lacking basic infrastructure. Following the political reforms of the late twentieth century, many rural migrants relocated here seeking better opportunities, yet their living conditions remain poor. This thesis investigates how architectural interventions can enhance daily life, public space, and a sense of nomadic identity within these rapidly urbanizing areas. Focusing on the water kiosks system, it explores how these kiosks can serve as social and spatial anchors for future development. Based on literature review, secondary data, and remote site analysis, the thesis proposes two architectural upgrades in Bayangol District. The study ultimately frames a community-driven approach for informal settlements that promotes local agency and spatial justice through reparative infrastructure.
IN BETWEEN LAND AND SEA: Adaptive Redevelopment of the Indigenous Fishing Villages at Mumbai’s Coastal Fringes
(University of Waterloo, 2025-10-17) Dasgupta, Ahan
Architecture is often understood through the spaces it produces, but its more significant role lies in framing the relationships between people, economies, and environments. When these relationships are disrupted by ecological change and urban expansion, the focus of architecture shifts from form to the conditions that allow communities to endure. In the city of Mumbai, this shift is most visible along the coastline, where reclamation, large-scale infrastructure, and speculative real estate have steadily eroded ecological systems. Within this changing landscape, the fishing villages of the Koli community, the city's native inhabitants, continue to function as active settlements that support both livelihoods and cultural practices, even as they are reclassified as informal and placed under pressure from redevelopment. This thesis proposes a framework that responds to the challenges faced by the Koli community through an integrated approach. Ecological restoration is established as the foundation, focusing on mangrove regeneration, wetland protection, and the preservation of tidal flows. Economic resilience is addressed through cooperative infrastructure, including fishing hubs, repair yards, and storage facilities, which strengthen small-scale fishing practices. Cultural presence is supported through plazas, markets, and promenades that keep Koli life embedded within the public realm of the city. Through this lens, the thesis reframes the coastline of the Khar-Danda Village as a shared edge where ecological systems, livelihoods, and cultural practices are sustained together.
PIECE IT TOGETHER : Rebuildable Homes for Post-Disaster Resilience
(University of Waterloo, 2025-10-17) Akhtar, Areeba
In an era marked by intensifying natural disasters, no one is immune to the risks of displacement and loss. Climate change is exacerbating extreme weather events, leading to more frequent and intense disasters that affect millions globally, with an average of 25.3 million displacements per year from sudden-onset disasters alone. While government-led disaster recovery efforts aim to restore stability, they often rely on short-term shelter solutions that leave individuals with little control over their futures. These shelters, intended as temporary, frequently become long-term residences, as seen in Haiti and Florida, where FEMA housing remained in use for over a decade. As the climate crisis increases the frequency of such events, the question is no longer if, but when, and what happens next. This thesis addresses the critical challenge of how to transition from shelter to home. It responds to two core problems: the disposability of temporary housing and the disempowerment of those who live in them. The research proposes self-build, incrementally adaptable housing systems that give displaced individuals agency over their environments. These structures can be assembled in emergency conditions and later deconstructed to support the rebuilding of permanent homes - turning what was once a temporary fix into a meaningful foundation for recovery. By leveraging Design for Disassembly (DfD) principles and flat-pack strategies, the project offers a system that is not only responsive to immediate needs but also materially and socially regenerative. Unlike standard modular pods, which are costly to store or reuse, these homes are designed as kits of parts that evolve with their users. CNC digital fabrication is used not to mass-produce standardized units, but to enable localized, rapidly deployable systems that support self-building and reduce dependency on centralized supply chains. The thesis employs iterative prototyping, drawing on literature review as a theoretical foundation, to develop a timber-based modular housing system suited to North American climates.Applying the design in post disaster scenario of Jasper Wild Fire and Florida Hurricane to evaluate how the prototypes perform under these recovery conditions - assessing adaptability, reusability, and user empowerment across both interim and long-term use phases. This research reclaims post-disaster housing as a space of autonomy, love, and growth - one where people rebuild not just structures, but lives. In doing so, it legitimizes the nonlinear, personal, and often prolonged process of healing after disaster, proposing a housing framework that is adaptable, enduring, and deeply human.
Rethinking Waste(d) Realities
(University of Waterloo, 2025-10-16) Jain, Vanshika
Historically marginalized in urban consciousness, waste in the Global South occupies a complex and layered terrain visible in its overwhelming presence, yet systematically excluded from narratives of progress, design, and planning. In New Delhi, this contrast is embodied in Ghazipur’s so-called “trash mountain” - a towering monument to systemic negligence and infrastructural collapse. A measure first conceived as a temporary solution has evolved into a permanent fixture, reflecting the city’s dependence on centralized, extractive waste systems. The precarious and undervalued labor of informal waste pickers, the toxicity of the air, and the stagnation of land without a future all demonstrate how the silence around waste is not only logistical but deeply spatial, ecological, and political. This thesis reframes waste as a spatial urban condition and explores overlooked opportunities for renewal. It proposes a decentralized, multi-scalar system where linear waste streams become circular and burdened sites become catalysts of transformation. The transformation of the Ghazipur trash mountain is envisioned as a gradual unmaking rather than erasure. Through temporal and ecological interventions, the site shifts from dumpsite to regenerative landscape. Currently a monument to systemic failure, Ghazipur is reimagined through a multi-scalar strategy consisting of citywide zoning and redesigned waste infrastructure with localized material recovery facility, a neighborhood pilot combining waste infrastructure and public commons, and site-specific remediation of the 70-meter-high landfill through bioremediation, phytoremediation, and constructed wetlands. Together, these interventions restore ecology, recover resources, and reinsert the site into public life, while making visible the labor that sustains it. Rethinking Waste(d) Realities builds on currents already visible in Indian cities beyond Delhi. Biomining initiatives, decentralized collection systems, and growing legal and civic pressure to remediate landfills point to a real appetite for systemic change. This thesis positions design within that momentum, showing how architecture and landscape can help reorganize waste from crisis to resource.
Multisensory Immersion in Architectural Virtual Reality: Effects of Visual and Auditory Cues
(University of Waterloo, 2025-10-16) Jeon, Jikyung
The evolution of architectural representation has progressed from traditional analog methods such as hand-drawing to contemporary digital technologies like Virtual Reality (VR) which emerges as the latest architectural representation in spatial visualization and client communication. However, current implementations of architectural VR heavily focus on visual presentation, potentially underutilizing the capacity for comprehensive multisensory experiences that could significantly enhance users to have comprehensive understanding and more engagement within proposed space. This paper investigates the role of spatial auditory effects in enhancing architectural VR experiences and examines how multisensory (particularly visual and auditory cues) design approaches can improve user engagement and spatial communication effectively. Through a comprehensive three-part methodology, this research addresses critical gaps in current architectural VR representations which visual-only approaches represent partial utilization of the contemporary potential of technology. In PART 1, through trend extrapolation from historical evolution, ‘what’s the next?’ was predicted that architects should utilize architectural VR representation to prepare for emerging technological paradigms. The analysis of various contemporary precedents in the architectural field shows that current architectural VR implementations primarily focus on providing better visualization and virtual experiences to clients and stakeholders, while insufficient attention is on multisensory architectural VR applications. PART 2 introduces the cognitive foundation for sound integration in architectural representation and explains the necessity of applying spatial audio to architectural VR presentations for enhanced communication. This part outlines specific acoustic properties such as attenuation, overlapping, and diffraction and shows their potential applications in architectural design visualization. This foundation demonstrates how these properties can enhance the awareness of relationships in spatial hierarchy, active zones, and connectivity. PART 3 presents experimental validation through repeated measures with 38 participants experiencing three conditions: PC-based non-VR, visual-only VR, and both visual and auditory VR. The results demonstrate progressive increases in participants’ voluntary engagement, with multisensory VR achieving 198.1% improvement in play time compared to traditional PC-based presentation. These findings provide architects experiment results based on numerical evidence and encourage them utilizing multisensory integration as fundamental to effective VR representations rather than optional enhancement. This research contributes to architectural practice by providing measurable advantages of comprehensive sensory experience in VR-based communication and spatial understanding.
A Seat at the Table: Placemaking in the Hong Kong-Canadian Diasporic Landscape
(University of Waterloo, 2025-10-15) Yu, Alison
Gathering is present in every aspect of Chinese culture - its customs, traditions, and celebrations. This act of gathering provides community, a shared strength in celebration, but it also reveals the social nuances of the community. In the North American diaspora, it provides protection against prejudice, community, and the tools to teach and grow, offering opportunities for grandparents to teach grandchildren about their culture. Food accompanies this crucial act of gathering as a vehicle for cultural transfers of knowledge. Bringing a group of people of different ages and lives together over food and conversation is an act of solidarity, of sharing, and an expression of care. It has provided the very foundation for the formation of Chinatowns and their surrounding ethnoburbs, as places to keep an eye out for one another amid exclusion, and it is this very act of gathering over food specifically that provided the first stepping stone in the Canadian acceptance of Chinese culture. The Chinese restaurant provides the arena for food and gathering to take place, a key player in the transfer of cultural knowledge between the generations of Hong Kong-Chinese immigrants that reside in the Greater Toronto Area - namely in Markham, Richmond Hill, and Scarborough. Restaurants are known to adapt and shift with the current times, but in the recent years, through modes of gentrification, an influx of anti-Asian racism following Covid-19, and the aging of the first-generation Chinese immigrants that had in Canada in the late twentieth century, the traditional and beloved Chinese restaurant typology that has anchored neighbourhoods for decades face a much more rapid and drastic change. Through analysis of Hong Kong settlement patterns across the Greater Toronto Area, this thesis reveals the integral role the restaurant plays in the Hong Kong-Canadian diaspora and its network of businesses. It investigates the often unsaid part of Chinese culture that is intergenerational knowledge sharing, and speculates on what tools may be carried down to the second and third-generation Hong Kong immigrant to imagine what the Chinese restaurant can become. This thesis uses analysis of placemaking and memory, accompanied by interviews and ethnographic drawing studies to come to a written projection of the trajectory of the Chinese restaurant, understanding the ways in which culture defines space and how space can, in return, preserve culture. The research provides an analytical approach to understand the Hong Kong culture that has stood the test of time, through the movement across continents and political upheaval, and speculates on what is needed to maintain its ground against rising threats of financial instability, gentrification, and change in the customer landscape. The Chinese restaurant, a silent yet crucial contributer to the community, may be considered a regular spot today, but is a pillar of Chinese culture, specifically Hong Kong culture, that stands to be preserved.
Artisanship in a post-industrial present: A physio-biological framework for restorative design artifacts
(University of Waterloo, 2025-10-08) Clouthier, Derrick
Over billions of years, organisms have evolved from single cell organisms into the human species of today. That process shaped the physiology and psychology of the human species. While each person is unique, a product of each individuals experiences and specific genetic endowments, there exists universal features that are innate in the biology of humans. One aspect of this is our brain, a unique organ which has evolved through thousands of generations, and through countless interactions with our environments into a mechanism for our species survival. This evolutionary process created a deep innate relationship between humanity and our natural environments. When modernism emerged at the turn of the 20th century, it fundamentally changed architecture. The economics of mass production mingled with advancements in medical reasoning to produce an architecture of efficiency. Architects such as Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, and Alvar Alto translated the sterility and medical principles of the sanatorium into housing and beyond, producing an architecture founded on the principles of air and light as essential elements to health, while peeling architecture away from the “humid ground where disease breeds” as defined by Le Corbusier. Large windows, rooftop terraces, and spotless interiors crafted light filled spaces and spotless environments, perfect for the air and sun cure against tuberculosis, but which increasingly separated individuals from the ground humans have evolved to thrive in. Architecture shed the rich visual complexity, naturalistic illusions, and fluid interior exterior relationships of historic architectures, replacing it with a sterile incubator, targeted toward contemporary concepts of health. Modernist architectural advancements led to a sterility that has permeated modern architectures, producing a cognitive discord that is actively harmful to individuals. Researchers in neuroscience and environmental psychology have sought to understand this discord, producing studies which seek to better identify the underlying cognitive mechanisms that inform these interactions. Designers in turn have developed frameworks for applying this research to design for well-being. This thesis proposes a framework for restorative design principles, and advocates the harnessing of digital fabrication technologies to produce restorative artifacts for well-being. Through the development of a framework specifically tailored to the production of digitally fabricated artifacts, this thesis proposes a methodology for generating restorative environments through informed design. The artifacts presented in this thesis demonstrate the application of restorative principles through digitally fabricated artifacts, advocating the adoption of a new architectural language for restorative, evolutionarily informed design.

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