THESIS
RESEARCH
PROCESS
-Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Self-Reliance 1841
This project aims to utilize materiality as a means through which memory is referenced, understood, and expanded. Using the concept of materiality, I aim to utilize these metaphysical and physical qualities as narrative devices to elucidate a disposition within the frames of both architectural industry and domesticity. Frontier
The project is structured in three parts: Deconstruction, Construction, and Residency. The project is intimately tied to place throughout all three parts. Place is seen through the lens of artifacts, land, and culture.
The project prioritizes process as paramount. There is an intentionality that the built construction be successful in the claims of function, but what it is, is tertiary in comparison to the means by which it is constructed and subsequently how it is inhabited.
As part of the deconstruction process, I am creating an archive and catalog of not only the materials I deconstruct from sites, but also the stories I am able to accumulate, such that the final built project serves not only as a resource library, but also a symbol of narrative itself. Each item will be a testament to a previous life and intention.
I am advocating for a revision of accountability within design and building practices in both academia and industry. The connection and follow-through required of true accountability in project design has continued to wane since the late twentieth century, due to the increasing corporatization and compartmentalization of architectural practice. The rise of developer-driven projects, standardized procurement systems, and the prioritization of efficiency and profit over the long term (social and environmental?) impact has diluted the designers’ agency and therefore the considerations of the inhabitants of these spaces. The fragmentation in academia similarly exists between conceptual design and material realization, fostering a culture of abstraction where the responsibility of the lived consequences of building are deferred. Designers are allowed a certain freedom in the claims they insist, but risk remaining incredulous as to whether such assertions affect occupants in their intended manner. (talk about numerical data of POEs in the US and then the north texas region) Though we may acknowledge the intimacy in the relationship of occupant:occupancy in built environments, such a dynamic as designer:resident seems to be willfully fell by the wayside. In a practice that is monumentally intertwined with the physiological state of residents, We must ( what must I do, what is of necessity in this project). These problem areas extend beyond that of just the embedded norms of industry, traceable even to the failure of academic curriculum in prioritizing such relationships (maybe numerical data here as well?). Rather than attempting to course correct, we are actively contributing to the wanton egotistical drive toward the self-satiated relationship of designer:device.Reestablishing accountability, then, requires reengaging with the histories of making and restoring the responsibility of designers to innovate and sustain a continuity of craft, material knowledge, and human presence in the built environment.
What was especially profound in the regionalism of the early twentieth century was its devotion to truth. It was an attempt to not only truly depict the nature of a place but to incorporate and address the conflicts of the environment in said place. I am
My intention at the conclusion of construction is to extend an invitation for a residency within the project. Throughout and following the residency, I will document their anecdotal experiences within the space in an attempt to create a post-occupancy report that constitutes the success of the project. Despite relying on a singular source for such a significant judgment, I intend to use it as a representation for a larger conclusion.
, and can even accentuate those metaphysical problem areas which are not immediately apparent in distracted environments (example of ‘distracted environment’? densely populated or heavily trafficked areas not examined by designers but rather given a repeatable template)
Summary:
This project aims to utilize materiality as a means through which memory is referenced, understood, and expanded. Using the concept of materiality, I aim to utilize these metaphysical and physical qualities as narrative devices to elucidate a disposition within the frames of both architectural industry and domesticity. This will be done in three stages and be accompanied by a book that further illustrates the conceptual intention of the project. The project will begin with deconstructing a series of existing structures. The materials accumulated from these will serve as the palette for which the subsequent house will be built. It is important to note that the house is first and foremost a library and studio combined to function as integrated into the occupant’s lifestyle, resulting in a slightly more traditional residential orientation. Following completion of the construction, students from neighboring universities will be invited to occupy the space in a three-month residency. This will result in a post-occupancy report that will determine the efficacy with which the design was intended.
Introduction and Bio:
The idea behind this work was originally developed following my time studying at the University of Texas at Arlington. I had recently finished my degree in architecture, and I was beginning to wrestle with some of the inconsistencies between academia and industry.
I begin with a simple idea for a studio space and a library space, articulating them as identical in nature but differing in materiality and necessitating a forced break between the spaces in an attempt to delineate the creative process into two chapters. Forcing users to functionally inhabit each space for a specific purpose, creating a space for knowledge and a space for creation.
Background and Context and Bio:
The general thesis of this project is structured as a series of critiques of the status quo within architectural curriculum and practice. Using the blanket term of materiality, there is a disconnect between the scale of design and that of the act of building. Within architectural curriculum, there is a theoretical understanding of real materials and their connections; however, the application of this understanding never extends to a tactile reality. The few cases in which students have the opportunity to work at the full scale are typically limited either by funding or space. What is more common is that students engage with materials at the representative scale in the form of models. This being said, these models and excess materials are rendered useless after the completion of a semester and are typically discarded. These projects remain only ever representative and, therefore, are inherently limited in how they are understood. Designs necessarily make a claim; they claim to impact or affect in a certain gestural way. This claim, however virtuous, is not attached to an accountability, to the detriment of the process. As students, and also practitioners, this disconnect between the declaration and the efficacy of said declaration allows for a position lacking checks and balances, a self-regulated road with no guardrails. Continuing this line of logic to that of industry, there should be a more stringent expectation that architects and designers are held to following the completion and inhabitation of a built project. A post-occupancy report is the only means by which we, as designers, might glean the reality with which our drawings imply. Inhabitation is the culminating quality of this profession. We often romanticize geometry devoid of those that it is intended for. Photographs of high design rarely exhibit the space as it is occupied. The character and honesty of a space, in how designers speak about it, only ever describes the material qualities. This willfully ignores the soul that defines a space which can only be created through human intervention and inhabitation.
Place:
DFW construction, growth, waste,
Environment and agriculture, rural understanding
Methodology and Process:
Goals of the Project:
The primary goal of the project, which also stands as the most substantial undertaking of the project, is the built structure. The success of the project hinges upon the construction of this building.
Outcomes:
The
Timeline and Budget:
Conclusion:
Ideally, this project, when completed in its entirety, will serve as a case study for others to reference. To show that this degree of project is an accessible one to students, despite their status. I hope that through my claims, this will serve as the first step toward a material reform, not just within my own practice, but also those that come in contact with this project. In a much larger sense, I appeal to the ethics of consumptive culture and strive to elucidate others in appreciating the history and soul
This project is structured into two primary concerns, one of which being the material reality that defines how small scale domestic architecture is predominantly articulated with the U.S. The other attempts to pronounce a sense of regional aesthetic through the use of historic vernacular form as a means of
In terms of materiality, the history is sparse, almost minimal. This modesty is fitting in such a bleak nature. It allows what little remains there are to become almost celebratory, a testament that has withstood an onslaught of relentless weather. Approaching these remnants with an archaeological eye reveals not only man’s intervention and usage, but also the environmental fingerprints that have eroded the sites. What is especially compelling is that nearly all built structures in this time period fall into characteristic typologies centered around various industries. The subsequent structures become symbols of function synonymous with their respective intentions. Contemporary design has eroded such explicit symbols or has sought to intentionally manipulate them. The house, the home, or residential design has largely remained intact, despite this.1 This project positions itself within that continuity, using the act of deconstruction as method and critique. By dismantling existing structures and reassembling their components into a new domestic form, the work engages directly with the physical and symbolic residues of building. Material reuse becomes a way of tracing lineage due to their surface carrying evidence of prior labor and environmental exposure. The project reconsiders regional typologies as an evolving documentation of collective and material memory.
Design is always a tabula rasa, even in the context of a historic preservation. Virgin materials do not carry an imbedded memory that is indicative of memory. No matter the care or intention placed into creating a historically sensitive proposal, it is restricted by the latent characteristics of standardized genericism.
What is particularly compelling is that within the context of deconstruction or adaptive reuse, materials are treated with the same sanitization that new materials are. The nested account, as a result of placed existantance, is largely reduced to ‘site history’ or a much more general history independent of individual materials.
gesamtkunstwerk
Thesis Refinement Final
The crux of the idea is applying a novel methodology to design specifically within the context of deconstruction.
The process is broken into 3 sub-categories relating to the chronological order of
- Decontruction
- Material Archive
- Design
The Deconstruction phase is a stratigraphic approach to demolition. Borrowing from archaeology, the idea is to purposefully treat built structures as a series of layers. Demolition typically relies on efficiency, which demands an aggressive approach to removal. The stratigraphic method requires the same intention that constructed the structure.
The Material Archive phase is a poetic approach to indexing and cataloging each individual piece that comes off a building. Rather than reducing materials to their dimensional characteristics, they are simultaneously described by their original location. This is done both objectively and figuratively. A siding member might be described by the neighboring building it faced or the roof beam by the fact that it faced the sun's path. These qualities are typically stripped from the material's history in the case of reuse. This would be an attempt to interact with the intimacy of these micro-histories as they translate to a designed function.
The Design phase is akin to a palimpsest where iteration is never fully erased. Relying on the meticulous deconstruction phase, the design phase would follow the chronological order by which materials were removed. The methodology is oriented toward a series of study models that are limited, materially, to the layers that were removed. For example, the structural rationale for the design would be modeled using wallpaper from the original building. This works in conjunction with hand-drafting a series of layers with the presupposition of the material quantity restrictions.
The three processes culminate in a construction that is indicative of the chronological layers, material histories, and layered iteration. The result is a space with a tangible understanding of process.
Thesis Refinement: Stratigraphic Deconstruction as Design Methodology
Core Proposition
This thesis proposes stratigraphic deconstruction as a design methodology that reverses the temporal logic of building. By treating demolition as an archaeological excavation, cataloging materials as carriers of spatial memory, and designing in chronological reverse through the layers of removal, the project generates architecture that embodies its own becoming. The result challenges the construction industry's culture of erasure and proposes that buildings can carry the intimate histories of their materials into new life—not despite their constraints, but because of them.
Methodology: Three Sequential Phases
The process unfolds in three interdependent phases that mirror the chronological order of deconstruction itself:
Phase 1: Stratigraphic Deconstruction
The deconstruction phase borrows directly from archaeological methodology, treating built structures as a series of readable layers rather than obstacles to be efficiently removed. Where conventional demolition prioritizes speed and aggression, stratigraphic deconstruction requires the same intentionality that originally constructed the building—working backwards through its assembly sequence.
This approach employs archaeological documentation techniques: context sheets for each layer, Harris Matrix diagrams mapping relationships between building assemblies, and photographic records at each stage of removal. The process reveals what aggressive demolition obscures: how buildings age unevenly across their surfaces, evidence of repairs and modifications over time, the original construction logic, and the relationships between structural and finish systems.
By treating the building as an archaeological site, deconstruction becomes an act of reading rather than erasure—understanding the structure as a temporal document before it is disassembled.
Phase 2: Material Archive (Intimate Cataloging)
The material archive phase develops a poetic approach to indexing each element removed from the building. Rather than reducing materials to purely dimensional characteristics, each piece is simultaneously described by its original location, orientation, and experiential context—both objectively and figuratively.
The archive employs a dual notation system: one set of identifiers for physical properties (dimensions, condition, material type), another for contextual and phenomenological qualities (orientation, adjacencies, weathering patterns, evidence of use).
Example entry: "Pine 2x4, 92" long, south-facing wall stud, bore marks from picture hanging, faced morning light, separated bedroom from hallway, removed Day 3, Layer 2"
A siding member might be cataloged not only by its dimensions but by the neighboring building it faced for decades. A roof beam might be described by its relationship to the sun's daily path. A floorboard records the weight of someone's habitual movement through space. These qualities—typically stripped from materials in conventional salvage and reuse—constitute an intimate micro-history that the archive attempts to preserve.
The archive itself becomes an artifact: a documented collection where materials are tagged, photographed in their original context, and mapped to their former positions. This collection can be consulted during design like a library, where each material carries the memory of its former life into new functional possibilities.
Phase 3: Design as Reverse Palimpsest
The design phase operates as a palimpsest where iteration is never fully erased, and each layer of thinking remains legible in the final work. Crucially, the design process follows the chronological order by which materials were removed—working backwards through the building's assembly.
The methodology manifests through a series of constrained study models, each limited to the materials from specific removal layers:
First iteration uses only finish materials removed last (wallpaper, paint, trim)
Second iteration adds cladding and insulation
Third iteration adds interior framing and partitions
Fourth iteration adds structural framing
Final iteration adds foundation materials
This creates productive tension: structural thinking must be expressed using materials that were never structural. A wallpaper study model considers the logic of load-bearing while a trim piece explores spatial partition. This constraint forces design intelligence to emerge from limitation rather than abundance.
These iterations are developed through hand-drafting in layers, each drawing corresponding to a material layer, with the presupposition of material quantity restrictions. The accumulated graphite becomes its own palimpsest—a slower, more intimate form of iteration that matches the deliberate pace of stratigraphic deconstruction.
Synthesis: Architecture as Process
The three phases culminate in a construction that is indicative of chronological layers, material histories, and visible iteration. The resulting space offers tangible understanding of its own becoming—simultaneously functioning as:
A memorial to the demolished building
A critique of wasteful construction practices
An experiment in constraint-based design
A meditation on time, memory, and material agency
A habitable space where process remains legible
The final building embeds its design thinking in its physical construction. Exposed connections reveal construction sequence. Material juxtapositions reference former lives. Details—whether through plaques, embedded photographs, or mapped locations—make the archive accessible to inhabitants.
This is architecture that doesn't merely occupy space but testifies to time—where every element carries witness to its previous existence and the careful process of its transformation.
The Problem:
The construction industry operates through a culture of erasure, treating existing buildings as obstacles to be efficiently demolished rather than repositories of material memory and spatial history. Conventional demolition prioritizes speed and aggression, reducing complex assemblies with intimate histories—marked by decades of weathering, use, and human inhabitation—into undifferentiated waste or generic salvage stripped of context. This approach not only perpetuates wasteful practices but forecloses the possibility of architecture that carries the temporal depth and experiential richness of its materials into new life. Buildings are dismantled without being read, and materials are reused without their stories, severing the connection between past and present that could generate more meaningful, constraint-driven design.
“It is as the centralization and protectress of this sacred influence, that Architecture is to be regarded by us with the most serious thought. We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears! – how many pages of doubtful record might we not often spare, for a few stones left upon another! … there are but two strong conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecture; and the latter in some sort includes the former, and is mightier in its reality: it is well to have, not only what men have thought and felt, but what their hands have handled, and their strength wrought, and their eyes beheld, all the days of their life.”
-John Ruskin,
The Lamp of Memory, The Seven Lamps of Architecture 1849
Introduction
This is, above all else, a work in progress, albeit one that has been completed in its entirety per the goals set out for the project. The intention, however, is less about a conclusion. If I consider myself a practitioner of design, however ignorant and inexperienced, then this is but simply an ideation that requires reflection and, therefore, continual iteration.
I hoped that I might avoid being hypocritical, but I am sure to slight myself or fall short of the ethical intention undergirding this project. But such is the human condition, and no undertaking is devoid of existing within a system that necessitates its construction, despite the critical eye with which I deconstruct it.
“Rather than suggesting that we have access to an objective universal experience, or even that such a thing exists, [I] invite you to read the text as a product of the context in which it was written, and hope that you can freely reject or productively compare, contrast, or critique the ideas as they relate to your own position and perspective.”
The idea behind this work was originally developed following my time studying at the University of Texas at Arlington. I had recently finished my degree in architecture, and I was beginning to wrestle with some of the inconsistencies between academia and industry. I had just completed my final semester with a studio headed by Donald Gatzke, FAIA. He had required that we remove the digital means of designing that we had grown accustomed to in education in favor of the sketch, asking us even to avoid straight edges and glue. This search for purity within the process allowed an almost uninhibited iterative result. We did not present final plots and perfect models, but rather the soul of our projects. I chose to take it a step further and limit myself to using only found materials to construct my study models. This limitation began to frame my own ideals of practice.
Having grown up in rural north Texas, I have been fortunate to have a unique perspective on land and utility from a young age. Within rural and specifically agrarian lifestyles, there exists a direct relationship between land and resource allocation and functional service. This generates an ongoing act of maintenance, directly tying the efficiency of equipment to that of livelihood. This perception generates an intuition toward the longevity of all material and physical aspects of life. Not only this, but the act of almost primitive utilization of objects creates a restructuring of the designed intention of these objects. By this means, an object is not simply restricted to its original purpose. This restructuring of one’s worldview creates an infinite palette of potential. This is particularly relevant within the environment of the American West. The bleakness of such a space and the minimal human intervention in it are uniquely poetic. Embodying the ethos of American independence or the ideal of the cowboy, there is a tension of man versus nature. Scattered throughout north Texas, these archaeological ruins slumber, lacking their once tangible aptitude of utility; they have been eroded to exist in an eternal autumn. The stories embedded within them still long to be told as the character of each develops deeper and deeper wrinkles, hinting at a wisdom forgotten. These monoliths are not fortunate enough to be carved in marble and stone, and therefore, will not be celebrated in five hundred years time, but they are not yet buried either. This historian's approach to design is a personal ethos with which I have begun to refine my own interests.
I began with a simple idea for a studio space and a library space, articulating them as identical in nature but differing in materiality and necessitating a forced break between the spaces in an attempt to delineate the creative process into two chapters. Forcing users to functionally inhabit each space for a specific purpose, creating a space for knowledge and a space for creation. The idea existed largely as a conceptual intention with little regard for function, prioritizing poetic gestures and idealized geometry. As I toiled over the massing and materiality, I realized the fault within the parti itself. This design served more as a psychological experiment, almost clinical in nature. I had stripped the process and domestic softness from it, effectively reducing inhabitants to lab rats. I revisited the core of what the project was attempting to claim. The thesis was not the space, and therefore, I had to generate my own proverbial ‘verb list’.
Creation,
Pure,
Memory,
Landscape,
Materiality,
Artifact,
Narrative,
Process,
Found,
Tangible,
Deconstruction,
Longevity,
Place.
This refinement of intention led to a restructuring of my own understanding of the project itself. The space is a byproduct of the act. I am the act; this project is fundamentally an action, not a product. This, therefore, necessitates that the process become paramount.
Each guiding element of the process serves as an extension and understanding of memory. This project aims to utilize materiality as a means through which memory is referenced, understood, and expanded. Using the concept of materiality, I sought to utilize these metaphysical and physical qualities as narrative devices to elucidate a disposition within the frames of both the architectural industry and domesticity.
The thesis of this project is rooted in the systematic efficiency with which builders paste ‘½ acre lot houses’ into any environment, uprooting the existing landscape and eroding the virtue of the immaterial within the built reality. Every city in the United States is girded by a barrier of suburbs, nearly synonymously monotonous. These spaces and places have no regard, outside of what a limited code requires, for the environmental reality in which they are placed, let alone for the more aetheral qualities such as character and pride. There is no regional dialect that defines these communities. This might easily be attributed to the lack of homogeneity that exists within the U.S.’s urban demographics; however, this produces an increased opportunity for said builders to specify and characterize this locale.
Oftentimes, materials are transported
A New Vernacular
Historically, built structures were dependent upon the availability of resources within direct proximity. Houses relied on this localization and, therefore, had a distinctly regional aesthetic character. Technological innovation and global economic infrastructure have largely eradicated the necessity for hyperlocalized construction practices, leading to an increasingly uniform style. And now “... any claim to regional specificity in contemporary building technology is little more than a weak formal echo of what went before.”
Deconstruction
A new vernacular, as I have defined it, necessitates a careful deconstruction. I have approached this process as a form of amateur archaeology. Each building is carefully unearthed and documented in a way that indicates as much of the life of its previous inhabitants as possible. I have two primary sources for the majority of the deconstructed palette. Case study #1 was originally built as a federal post office, believed to have been constructed in the late 1950s or early 1960s. Archival information regarding rural post offices is limited, and pinpointing the exact construction date is purely an estimate.
Materials were predominantly sourced from two sites. One is a home built around 1900 and inhabited until the mid-1960s. The other is a federal post office built in the late 1950s or early 1960s, which was most recently converted into a beauty salon until 2022. Each site represents a completely different function, era, and history. Through both buildings, there are 120 years of inhabitation and history. Various construction methods and multiple renovations, along with an evolution of material usage, revealed subtle difficulties throughout the deconstruction process. I have broken this chapter into two sections, outlining each as a case study and attempting to chronicle the history with as much accuracy as possible.
“The power of each material, and the difficulties connected with its treatment, are not so much to be taught as to be felt; it is only by repeated touch and continued trial beside the forge or the furnace, that the goldsmith can find out how to govern his gold, or the glass-worker his crystal; and it is only by watching and assisting the actual practice of a master in the business, that the apprentice can learn the efficient secrets of manipulation, or perceive the true limits of the involved conditions of design.”
-John Ruskin,
The Lamp of Memory, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1849
The State of Our Work
“The vast majority of design work is carried out digitally using highly controlled and proprietary software. Direct contact with materials and component manufacturers has become a facet of highly refined or luxury architecture. A visit to a tile maker, a brick factory, a stone quarry, or a carpenter’s workshop is the domain of the privileged few, while most designers specify from catalogues and industry-standard commodities, often only having contact with digital representations of the materials they are buying.”
North Texas
“To describe ranch architecture in terms of utility or function ignores the craftsmanship that is exhibited in many of the log or stone ranch buildings. A ranch or farm needs to be viewed as a cultural landscape. Instead of separating components – the corrals from the outbuildings, the house from the use of the fields, the irrigation ditches from the barn – the land needs to be viewed as an architectural whole.” (Eileen F. Starr, Architecture in the Cowboy State, 1992)
Whether because of familiarity or because of functional efficiency, the forms of historic North Texas barns and homes are nearly ubiquitous in form.
The history of North Texas is less tangible than that of the East Coast. Its story is not told through stone and skyscrapers, but rather in fences and trails. There is a certain impermanence to the narrative that built the environment there. Agricultural necessity and subsequent economy shaped and defined this territory. The open plains and their harsh wind-swept horizontality afforded a certain livelihood that is not purely western in nature, but uniquely itself.
In terms of materiality, the history is sparse, almost minimal. This modesty is fitting in such a bleak nature. It allows what little remains there are to become almost celebratory, a testament that has withstood an onslaught of relentless weather. Approaching these remnants with an archaeological eye reveals not only man’s intervention and usage, but also the environmental fingerprints that have eroded the sites. What is especially compelling is that nearly all built structures in this time period fall into characteristic typologies centered around various industries. The subsequent structures become symbols of function synonymous with their respective intentions. Contemporary design has eroded such explicit symbols or has sought to intentionally manipulate them. The house, the home, or residential design has largely remained intact, despite this.