Browsing by Author "Utting, Brittany"

Now showing 1 - 10 of 10
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    After Beaches: Designs for Unstable Grounds
    (2024-04-18) Brancaccio, Anna Sophia; Utting, Brittany; Finley, Dawn
    Beaches are highly dynamic, shifting hourly, and seasonally with changing tides and weather. This relative instability poses issues for coastal development which relies on fixed ideas of land ownership and construction. As a result, massive coastal defense infrastructures, such as sea walls, jetties, dikes, and bulkheads, have been deployed across these shorelines to fix the ground in place. Rather than preventing change, these fixed or fixing infrastructures accelerate certain kinds of movement, drawing distinct patterns of erosion, flow, and sedimentation into the grounds they occupy. Set in Galveston Bay, on the northeast Texas Gulf Coast, After Beaches: Designs for Unstable Grounds is a proposal for alternative methods for designing and constructing coastal ground based on movement rather than fortification, imagining how a dynamic understanding of ground could shift strategies of coastal development towards more seasonal and provisional approaches. Sediment is borrowed for the construction of temporary public beaches and recreational facilities.
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    An Infrastructure for Aging: Multigenerational Housing at Houston's Park & Rides
    (2021-04-30) Gullick, Kati ann; Utting, Brittany; Finley, Dawn
    Aging is inevitable; it comes with changes not just physical, but also social. Networks of informal care become critical for the wellbeing of the elderly and increasingly challenging for the young. Risk of isolation and loneliness are exacerbated by ageism, segregated housing typologies, and limited mobility. This thesis seeks to address these challenges through a new type of multi-generational suburban housing located at existing commuter transit hubs in Houston, TX. The project centers on the needs of both the elderly and people who make up the networks of informal care that they are a part of. Age-segregated housing models represent one third of the housing units for people over 55 in the US. These developments range in scale from the assisted-living home to entire suburban developments like The Villages in Florida. Deed restrictions and community by-laws keep the young out, while a decreased mandate for equally accessible outside spaces keeps the old in. In addition to this spatial divide, age-segregated housing drives social and economic wedges. The effectiveness of informal care networks is limited and the burden on caregivers is increased. In many cases, hired domestic care becomes necessary - something that the vast majority of America’s elderly cannot afford. This project exists in opposition to these housing types. Occupying the Park & Ride flat lots dotting Beltway 8 in Houston, TX, it proposes an intentionally multigenerational development. Private units center around shared amenities while also offering privacy and independence for individual residents. Spaces for planned activities, childcare, and work activate outdoor areas and provide opportunity for consolidation of domestic labor and community building. The entire project is elevated above a level of parking to both preserve the existing functionality of the Park & Ride, and in response to Houston’s propensity to flood. With 300 units of varying sizes, it introduces diverse density to the existing suburban fabric. The site - an existing commuter hub operated by Houston METRO also allows for the potential of car-free living in an otherwise car dominated suburban landscape. An Infrastructure for Aging does address the physical realities of aging through grab bars and elevators, but more importantly it exists as a piece of social infrastructure - supporting not just seniors but also those who care for them.
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    Black Bridge: Reclaiming the Public Ground
    (2022-04-22) Cui, Jianing; Utting, Brittany; Finlay, Dawn; Geiser, Reto
    The construction and the removal of big urban forms are operated by massive quantities of human labor and material movement, but their presence in the city has been mostly erased. The workers often live in these uncharted grey zones at the city’s periphery. In return for their labor and production, what the migrant workers get in their temporary shelter is urban debris - landfill, sand mining pit, or a makeshift coal yard. It is where the city dumps its dirt. Studying Black Bridge village, a “work-site” that has been removed, and following the trace of the dirt, might reveal an alternative imagination of what urban life could be. Taking inspiration from the communal experiment at Black Bridge, the project imagines a heterogeneous community consisting of layers of occupiable structures of different permanency that supports programs including permanent collective housing, workspace, and public space of various enclosures that would recognize the marginalized people’s unmovable place in the city and become a space of resistance.
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    HOME WORK: Perspectives on Care
    (2021-04-30) Bien, Kayla; Utting, Brittany; Finley, Dawn
    Reproductive labor, which encompasses all the work within the raising of a child, is endemic to the human condition - we do not exist without it. The production of the capitalist state depends on the reproduction of the human body. And yet, while the labor of industry is legitimized through remuneration, the labor of reproduction often remains subordinate. This work- the work of care- demands and deserves political and spatial valorization. This thesis imagines a center for children and working parents to render visible the unseen performance and performers of reproductive labor. Performing carework is feeding a baby and changing dirty diapers, but it is also soothing a baby’s cries and offering tenderness and affection. Carework subsists on both material and immaterial labor, and this thesis places carework’s manifold forms in juxtaposition with other types of labor. The proposed project is a cooperative 24/7 childcare center for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) local outpost in Houston. The headquarters will be reimagined with a foregrounding of childcare. SEIU represents the constituency whose remunerated labor is based around service and care. A reimagined SEIU outpost that includes childcare considers what can happen for its members when childcare becomes a common good? Having a space for this reproductive labor increases the accessibility of working parents and amplifies their agency. Having a space for the children means there can be space for gathering, assembly, and organizing as a collectivized body. By employing the practices of prefigurative politics, this project speculates upon an architecture of a social, political, and economic future where childcare is a public common.
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    HOT WALL. From Trending Tropical Plants to Technologies of Care
    (SciELO, 2021) Utting, Brittany; Jacobs, Daniel
    Confinement made us addicted to houseplants. But, what seems to be an inclusion of vegetation in the domestic space, sets in motion an extensive production industry of indoor plants that, transplanted from their original habitats, require different care and treatments to adapt to artificial nature. As a result of an exhaustive investigation, this project materializes a problem of both domestic and global scale.
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    Lingering
    (2022-04-21) Okimoto, Mai; Utting, Brittany; Finley, Dawn; Geiser, Reto
    This thesis explores what it means to address a space of lingering through a former industrial site and its surrounding neighborhood in Houston’s Greater Fifth Ward. Addressing the discomforting or unwanted lingerers as well as the innocuous and overlooked lingerers – ranging from the toxic industrial waste that persists in the groundwater to the residents who continue to live above the waste -- the lingering patch pays attention to and offers space for the things that have been shaped by but forgotten by a society driven by accumulation, speed, and instantaneity.
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    Perpetual Care
    (2023-04-21) Van Velden, Jane M; Utting, Brittany; Finley, Dawn
    Cemeteries are spaces where life and death are rendered materially. Despite death’s omnipresence, American burial customs are rooted in outdated traditions that push burial spaces to the outskirts of our cities and the grievers into spaces of isolation. Attitudes toward death have changed radically, and we need more democratic practices and new spaces for grief. This thesis imagines a new architectural typology and department within the Boston city government, the Department of Death, to provide an expanded set of death-related services.
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    Please Watch. A proposal for the Dept. of Interior
    (2023-04-21) Martin, Maggie Louise; Utting, Brittany
    Please watch is a park and reclamation proposal, in light of the western drought and the irreversible water loss in the colorado river and specifically lake mead. The proposal asks for the decommissioning of the hoover dam, a renovation and adaptation to the support infrastructure of the lake mead recreation area, and the addition of accessible infrastructure to allow all to witness the newly recovered landscapes of the drying west.
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    Suture and Estrangement in Architecture
    (2020-04-20) Xu, Tiffany L; Utting, Brittany; Colman, Scott
    This project investigates a filmic technique—the production of moments of absorption and estrangement—and its translation and provocation to architecture with attention to private life and residence. The design research explored a set of formal, material, tectonic, programmatic, and temporal qualities, and a series of operations and presentation of these qualities that produced or irrupted continuity and cohesion. The thesis argues that this technique can be one framework for articulating contemporary subjecthood and architectural experience.
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    The Sixth Sphere
    (Rice University School of Architecture, 2024-10-28) Utting, Brittany
    Entangled within the Earth's five natural spheres-the atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere-is a sixth: the technosphere. Identified by geologist Peter K. Haff as an emerging paradigm of the Anthropocene, the technosphere includes the sites, institutions, and infrastructures of industrial production and extraction. Architecture is part of the technosphere, hardening its systems and proliferating its forms. Encompassing factories and farmlands, ports and telecommunication networks, mines and landfills, highways and suburbs, the technosphere is more than just the accumulated material of the built environment. It is a planetary enmeshment of physical infrastructures, geopolitical relations, and digital networks, enabling the continuous movement of matter, energy, and information. While many aspects of everyday life depend on the technosphere—such as clean water, waste systems, and electrical grids—the technosphere's exponential growth is actively destabilizing the Earth system. Its logic of extraction and expansion produces runaway planetary effects that exceed our capacity to control or alleviate, threatening not only our species but also the possibility of all forms of life to flourish. Despite its accelerating momentum, significant rifts exist within the technosphere. A system that cannot sustain its own processes without destroying the worlds upon which it depends demonstrates an underlying fragility. When we reconceptualize the technosphere as one of several entangled and coexisting worlds-rather than a global hegemonic order-new forms of spatial and environmental agency arise. The Sixth Sphere exhibition and accompanying catalog, curated by Brittany Utting, explores how design can participate in systems of planetary interdependence and reciprocity. Gathering the contributions of eighteen practices from around the world, The Sixth Sphere positions the technosphere as a collective site to reconstruct our social, technical, and climate futures.