Date of Award
Spring 5-22-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master in Interior Architecture
Department
Interior Architecture
First Advisor
Jeffrey Katz
Second Advisor
Francesca Liuni
Third Advisor
Can Altay
Abstract
Birdwatching, typically framed as a leisure pursuit removed from everyday life, becomes here the organizing logic for a three-site campus route of restorative pause. The thesis departs from the assumption that nature must be sought out and instead asks what happens when the birds already present in urban space are made legible through design.
Three existing RISD buildings anchor the project, each organized around a distinct mode of encounter. At Carr Haus Café, a furniture-scaled insertion creates conditions for attentional reset through passive listening rather than active looking. At North Hall, a semi-open balcony garden introduces incidental, distanced contact with bird life into residential space, while an open lounge for mediated viewing and a window-side edge for casual observation extend that encounter into everyday dormitory life—encounter without capture, presence without performance. The Met’s double-height dining hall is the most architecturally transformed: inserted rooms and a suspended catwalk reorganize the section into a protected viewing condition, slowing movement and redirecting attention outward.
Underlying all three interventions is a quieter argument about cohabitation. Bird-safe glazing, patterned film, screened layers, and native planting are not applied as afterthoughts but embedded into each scheme as primary design decisions, reducing collision risk and resisting the tendency of designed environments to treat wildlife as decoration. The route connecting the three sites reframes birdwatching as something more modest and more serious than recreation: a form of attention that is restorative precisely because it asks something of the person doing it, and protective because it asks something of the building.
Recommended Citation
Zeng, Katherine, "The Birdwatching Pause: Reframing Campus Life Through Everyday Bird Encounters" (2026). Masters Theses. 1641.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1641
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