Browsing by Author "Friedman, Nathan"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    [ ] In Progress - An Incremental Degrowth System
    (2025-04-25) Park, So Min; Friedman, Nathan; Jimenez, Carlos
    The prolonged vacancy problem in post industrial cities of the rust belt has been uprooted by numerous factors including deindustrialization, white flight, and suburbanization. Surmounting in communal, societal, and legislative pressure, the city of Detroit saw decline in population since the mid 20th century, which continues to disproportionately affect historically marginalized communities within the city limits. Since the beginning of industrialization, growth has become an expectation. This thesis explores how the community can maintain, retain, and repair some essence of the existing condition by prioritizing a system to manage a shrinking city. By reinforcing the local, contesting urban growth, and redefining ownership, the plethora of city owned parcels are incrementally collected and consolidated across multiple residential blocks to restructure areas of growth and provide a public space that gives back to the community. In the vicinity of the consolidated block, underutilized infrastructure and homes are deconstructed with the help of permanent and temporal built interventions. A series of lightweight modular buildings stretch across the central residential block, promoting communal activity and incentives for degrowth while alleviating maintenance efforts and costs to benefit nearby residents.
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    Living with Trash
    (2025-04-24) Kim, Dohyung; Friedman, Nathan; Jimenez, Carlos
    “Living with Trash” explores the possibility of a new waste treatment system that integrates trash infrastructure into Seoul’s residential and commercial districts, strengthening the urban fabric as an interconnected ecosystem. This new typology aims to enhance the city's resilience to waste crises by decentralizing waste management into a more intricate network, restoring shared responsibility between the city and its residents.
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    Loose Adaptations: A New Strategy for Parkland and Cooperative Housing in Austin
    (2023-04-21) Tudor, Margaret; Finley, Dawn; Jimenez, Carlos; Friedman, Nathan
    This thesis responds to the housing in crisis in Austin, TX by proposing a new urban and architectural strategy for cooperative housing. Defined as a renter controlled and consensus-based housing system, the Co-Op provides a structure for not only living at an affordable rate but living within social systems that offer additional support and care through shared domestic labor. In order to promote or mirror the shared, collaborative lifestyle of the Co-Op within the urban fabric, this thesis proposes a new collaboration between the city’s Parks Department and a non-profit co-op developer, Community Housing Expansion of Austin (CHEA) to create the City Park Co Ops. This new strategy targets open lots within the Park’s Departments proposed greenbelt zones for development. An architectural strategy that uses a repeatable footprint and basic plan diagram allows users to control how much or how little of their space is shared with fellow residents. The effect of all of these choices aims to produce both variety and comfort. In doing so, the City Park Co-ops hopes to encourage its users to engage with their surroundings, invest in their place of living, and strengthen their communities.
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    Power Stack
    (2023-04-21) Schneider, Michelle; Jiménez, Carlos; Friedman, Nathan
    This is an urban project that seeks to redesign the value of energy infrastructure. The obsolescence of oil and gas in Pasadena, Texas provides an opportunity to critically examine how energy infrastructure might be used as a net-positive urban agitator. How might we use infrastructure as a medium for progress? By considering not only what the infrastructure does as a precise utility, but what it means in urban space. The thesis integrates sustenance, with utility. In the future of energy production, consider not having one that supplies many, but nodes of power storage and supply that serve the local context. The thesis proposes a distributable architecture with an encoded ethical ideology within an urban scheme. A store of value for energy, but contrary to current industrial zones, also serving as a value to its proximity. Gravity-based energy storage, Power Stacks, store surplus energy, which is made available in times of supply fluctuations. The energy infrastructure is bolstered by floodable landscapes that also mitigate toxicity, remediating the ground upon which the energy infrastructure stands.
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    The Edge of Infrastructure: Reclamation Strategies for the Yangtze River
    (2024-04-19) Wang, Yufei; Friedman, Nathan; Finley, Dawn; Jimenez, Carlos
    The thesis is situated on the bank of the Yangtze River in Wuhan, China, and proposes a new layer of inhabitable infrastructure responding to the contemporary and future water crisis, including flooding, drought, and pollution. It argues for an ecological way of cohabitation with water, especially in a compromised climatic future. It attempts to explore the tension between built and unbuilt (city and river), stable and indeterminacy (building and landscape), and macro and micro (infrastructure and human activities). On the urban scale, the proposal is to create a new type of water treatment system with the existing ones to form a network that would increase the water treatment ability. The integration of infrastructure and ecological factors will create a resilient environment strategically.