On was an interdisciplinary graduate periodical established by RISD graduate students in 2006. It featured essays and student work that related to a general issue theme. On was intended as a quarterly publication, but it is unclear if further issues beyond the first were ever published.
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Land, labor, water: an agricultural commons in the Central Valley of California
Jacob Lightman
An Agricultural Commons in California's Central Valley examines the spatial and structural relationships between food systems, the ecologies that support them, and the unincorporated farming communities in The Central Valley. Current industrial practices in The Central Valley deplete water resources, deplete topsoil, create toxic living conditons for local communities, and undervalues farmlabor. Further pressures from climate change will inevitably cause greater instability in this food system and greater injustices towards the local communities and ecologies. The Central Valley is already a commons for Americans, as it supplies the majority of our year-round produce. Through a reevaluation of the idea of the agricultural commons as both a practice and principle, new models of management, relationships between economy and landscape, and values can begin to formulate more a equitable and just food system. In this thesis, I research utopianism design, case studies on agricultural commons, and the three systems of agriculture, ecology, and community in The Central Valley. The design proposal, is a set of time-based strategies that aim to achieve the commons.
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Post-industry brownfield renewal system: precision strategy and design via the new methodology
Sirui Li
Industrialization has brought economic development, but industrial zones can also bring depression if the opportunity for transformation is not seized. Industrial areas in the post-industrial era are often referred to as rust zones, which not only hinder urban development but also bring a series of problems. This thesis book wants to explore the problems brought by post-industrial land, to find possible directions for post-industrial industrial land through new methodologies, and also to guide landscape architects to have clearer design goals and methods.
This project focuses on the Allegheny area of the American Rust Belt, where the city of Pittsburgh was once the steel center of the United States, and where industrial and mining areas intersected. This area has a large industrial heritage and many different types of industries, which requires a systematic approach to the different site types. This project aims to refine the methodology to find a direction for designers to address such issues, and to advance the design program on a more scientific and rational basis.
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Inside out: rethinking contemporary Chinese art and global creative economy
Tiange Li
This thesis is to destabilize the Western dominant understanding of contemporary Chinese art when it circulates on the global art market, such as the all-to-common narratives only celebrating Chinese artists who are politically criticizing or resist the Chinese authority. Meanwhile, I also question the authority control inside of China, especially the mainstream criteria of aesthetics and art. Cultural anthropologist Aihwa Ong observes that some Western scholars believe contemporary Chinese art to be “crass opportunism with reduced aesthetic value.”Chinese American artist and art critic Chen Danqing criticizes contemporary Chinese art from the last ten years as too utilitarian: “During the Cultural Revolution, all [Chinese] artists worried about their artworks not being ‘revolutionary’; today, I see they only worry about their ‘tricks’ are not ‘contemporary’ enough.” He critically argued that Chinese art today is a consequence of learning Western art due to a lack of cultural confidence.
I argue that contemporary Chinese art is not market-driven or simply copy Western arts. It has been shaped by the context of its particular socio-political and economic condition since the middle of the twentieth century. I also emphasize the specialness of “contemporaneity” in contemporary Chinese art.
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House of reincarnation
Xinyu Li
In this book, I will introduce my practice as an artist interested in nightmares, monsters, and abandoned places. My works are personal, so I have designed a character as a guide for the book; the creature is another version of me. This book will describe the adventures of the creature as the main storyline; the stories run through Hakka cultures and my personal experience, and gradually explain the source of my inspirations and design process. With the creature as company, readers won't feel lonely while reading the book.
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Live-work autonomy system on Mars: China's collective living onto Mars
Lishunxiang Luo
Our Earth is in big trouble; Our Mother Nature is in big trouble; We humanity are in even bigger trouble. The resource shortage is not an unfamiliar word to most people in the era of social media. As many ecologists and environmentalists have shouted out, we are in a time when some of the significant resources are getting consumed and wasted quickly and it will eventually being used up and lead us to nowhere if no replaceable resource has been found. Simply saying, there are just never enough resources to meet all our needs and desires and this condition is known as scarcity. At any moment in time, there is a finite amount of resources available. Even when the number of resources is very large, it is limited. Then a direct and simply question came up: what can we do to deal with it? Plans like zero-energy are no doubt the efforts to solve the problem, but in the meantime, more and more people start to consider a more sustainable but also crazier possibility: what if we have another “earth”? To colonize or to create a settlement in other planets have long been described and commonly used as a sci-fi concept. But at this special moment that involves in the continuity of the humanity, we should take it as a serious and pragmatic proposal.
In regardless of the scientific and technical challenges unresolved yet, the first question we need to ask is: how do the humanity survive in the outer space? The solution to this problem is open and will not have a definite answer shortly, but China’s application in collectivization may be a possible option to explore and this project is designated to test and prove the viability of this option. Collectivization is a controversial production policy in China’s history: on the one hand, it did increase the production rate of many agricultural crops and objectively saved millions of lives from hunger and poverty; on the other hand, it did not follow the scientific rules on how to develop the agriculture and industry in a correct way and thus resulting in unnecessary waste of resources, which makes the economic condition of the reborn China even worse in the 1950s. The Great Leap Forward, the most famous collectivization campaign in China’s history, is no wonder a failure as an economic and social activity. But the core concept that collect all the strategic resources and invest them into certain industries or areas to maximize the usage efficiency is worth exploring and developing in certain conditions. Gansu, one of the poorest and least developed provinces in 1950’s China, is in an appropriate condition that collectivization can work effectively. Before the largest iron mine in China has been found in Gansu in 1970s, the collective farming has helped increased the output of the crop production in Gansu by 75% in less than ten years. It soon made Gansu a self-sustained province that can support the growth rate of the population and added to the industrialization later along with the finding of the new iron mines.
As a result, the goal of the design project on Mars will be creating a live-work autonomy system/community derived from the idea of collectivism and self-sustainability. Specifically, multiple production and living programs, including green houses, industrial factories, dense residential areas, etc., will be introduced to support the basic living supplies in this newly settled outer-space city. However, instead of making a replica of a typical Chinese city on Mars, the regularity of each individual’s life will be interesting to look at and eventually our expectation for this settlement/city is to help it on the right track to develop in a natural and organic way after our initial intervention. China has successfully done it in Gansu, and it should also be positively welcomed on Mars too.
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Beacon Public Library: expanding radical civic care for an uncertain future
Katrina Machado
Stressors like climate change will put strain on our communities, making them more vulnerable. I am asserting and expanding the role of the public library as a civic space for radical care and community resilience. This work explores the ways in which the public library, as an existing institution, could adapt to the needs of its changing environment and community. Interventions are visualized by a librarian’s jumpsuit and library apron, an adapted library book cart, public signage, and a re-imagined library card.
I imagine a public library that pushes the bounds of its physical building and actively and compassionately serves residents in and across spaces. Sited in Providence, RI, this work explores Providence’s climate change future and the public library’s role in building more resilient community in uncertainty.
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Authenticity, Universality, and Expression in Song: The Case of Flamenco
Peter Manuel
This article explores questions of aesthetic expression and meaning in song, focusing in particular on the enigmatic dynamics involved in song’s combination of abstract and lyrical dimensions of import. These questions are especially overt and actively debated in flamenco, where an ideology of authenticity and suffering, akin to that in African-American genres such as blues or rap, implies that a singer must draw on certain profound biographical experiences rather than universal emotions. However, the accounts of various performers suggest alternate expressive processes in which singers of any background can use a certain sort of role-playing to generate actual emotions that are transmuted into aesthetic expression.
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An interplay: biomimetic exploration of systems in architecture
Sanjana Masurkar
How can we use nature’s way of building and designing and apply this knowledge in a progressive, and innovative way? Can scouring the biosystem be an effective way of finding inspiration?
Art, in the broader sense, is anything produced by humans rather than nature. Through nature, the ultimate source of knowledge and wisdom, is where we eventually draw inspiration from. By manifesting the environment, humans are able to respect and look into nature in a new light. Interaction with nature helps better understand and value the natural themes. The relationship between design and the built environment opens up the politics of space and place.
The challenge remains, to bring nature to civilization on a scale that correlates to the growing urbanization. Honoring nature while letting it flourish with the same momentum, by looking to science and art we find new and grounded tactics. This thesis considers bio-mimesis as a methodology to create a material to become a part of nature and live in harmony with the world again.
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Eco-waste: household waste material flows in a circular economy
Erqi Meng
The thesis aims to contextualize household waste on the more complete material flows it belongs to, including reciprocal relations between its landscapes of production and landscapes of landfill. Current one-way processes of waste treatment are repositioned within more circular economies which, it is argued, may also bring ecological benefits to our cities. The study focuses on a local community at Mount Hope district in Providence, RI. As part of a wider landscape framework that includes a study on consumer behaviour, a series of modular strategies are developed based on this community’s main characteristics, with an eventual goal of integrating community participation and awareness in the decision making process.
Relying on public engagement as a form of raising collective awareness, the work suggests that well-integrated bottom-up strategies operating between the scales of the household, the street and the neighborhood, may affect people’s consciousness and behavior, change the way people use materials and generate waste, and eventually try to change the structure of how we operate in society in relation to waste and lead us closer towards a waste-free future.
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Jettisoning the frame: strategies for designing at the threshold
Will Mianecki
Jettisoning the Frame: Strategies for Designing at the Threshold explores graphic design’s capacity for facilitating critique and understanding of accelerating systems of technological control and complexity. Working across archives, architectures, and infrastructures, designing at the threshold is an approach that takes the opacity of systems and subjects alike as a starting point from which new possibilities, configurations, and relations emerge. It is a loose methodology predicated on shifting, jettisoning, and reorienting the role and frame of the designer from objectivity to subjectivity. From neutrality to implication. From scientific to messy. From solutionism to something else.
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Negative Aesthetics In Art, Environment, And Everyday Life: Arnold Berleant’s Theory And The Novels Of Kirino Natsuo
Mara Miller
Arnold Berleant’s valuable analysis of ‘negative aesthetics’ in his 2010 book Sensibility and Sense: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World provides an analytic framework not only for general investigation of negative aesthetics but for understanding their extension into daily life and literature. It illuminates the work of Japanese novelist Natsuo Kirino (1951- , 夏生桐野), just as her novels illustrate Berleant’s negative aesthetics. In Kirino’s narratives, negatively aesthetic landscapes determine characters’ mindsets, even as they mirror the moral and aesthetic bleakness of society at large, revealing characters’ internal dynamics and the larger social world with the same destructive efficacy Berleant points out—an efficacy we ignore to our peril.
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Regeneration with Melita Morales
Melita Morales and Edna W. Lawrence Nature Lab
May 20 hosted the eighth and final conversation in the Regeneration series with Melita Morales, an artist, educator, and researcher focused on implementing transdisciplinarity and decolonial practices in learning environments. Take a look at this document with resources that were mentioned during the conversation to further your learning.
During her presentation, Melita revisited the topics of the previous Regeneration sessions, weaving their themes together through an exploration of “regenerative knowledge in learning and education.” Her talk became an inspiring example of transdisciplinary thinking in and of itself: Melita connected ideas from scholars, scientists, artists and researchers from a diverse range of identities and fields of study to showcase the possibilities of a pluriversal world.
Melita explained how the four epistemicides of the 16th century— the takeover of territory from Muslims and Jews in the Iberian Peninsula, the colonial take over of America, the development of the transatlantic slave trade, and the burning of Indo-European women— resulted in a narrowing of knowledge and “expertise” that favors a single perspective in the westernized university. This mass destruction of knowledge and ways of being engendered the discipline-focused, hierarchical western education systems we have today, where science and objectivity is valued and art and subjectivity is not.
Naturally, disciplinarity does not exist for us as children— science exists intertwined with art and is experienced in everyday life. But in today’s dominating learning environments, “students have minimal opportunities to connect what they learn to their real worlds and communities.” Melita explained that the division of disciplines does not serve us. It limits our capacity to learn and prevents us from building regenerative knowledge. We need to shift how we value various fields of study and ways of knowing and critique the organizational hierarchy and structure of learning.
Melita concluded by asking a series of questions: “What worlds, what ways of being, are written through our work that can exceed the bounds of what is valued in a western knowledge system? What sort of relationships to each other and the more than human world does this art/science/innovation set into play? How can we restore the false binary of art-science through the projects we undertake?” Melita encouraged us to imagine a world beyond disciplinarily by sparking unique collaborations and exploring polylithic knowledge in our own creative practices. She said, “When we speak about knowledge, we speak about worlds.” -
Reinforcing connection within collective housing: a new vision of Red Steel City
Guangyi Niu
Red Steel City is a historical residential complex built 64 year ago for the first workers of the Iron & Steel Complex in Wuhan, China, under the help design guidance of the former Soviet Union. Equipped with educational and medical facilities, this “City” nearly meets every need of the residents. Where residents worked boosted the development of steel, which is considered a prerequisite for industrialization, and where they lived became the template for the era when China was finding its footing in its incredible drive to industrialization.
The original plan of Red Steel City did not consider practical conditions like varying family structures and the oversized courtyard space, which could be interpreted as a waste in a high-density city. The old workers have moved away, and it is proposed to be young professionals housing. Due to the shifting of users, sensitive intervention is needed to meet new demands. By proposing modular plug-in building units that better accommodate changing user needs, in addition to the separated buildings operating as loops to complete the enclosure of the courtyards and the modification of residential units to a proper scale, living spaces for various sized families are created, playground toolkits are also presented in the courtyards to activate this community. The new skin added to the existing facade offers alternative circulation and different scale shared space for residents, while the old facade surfaces become flexible walls.
The intervention informs an organic system for collective living, the connections are made both physically and mentally, which would trigger spontaneous contributions by residents.
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Commencement 2021 Lynn Nottage | Honorary Degree Recipient
Lynn Nottage and RISD President
Award-winning playwright Lynn Nottage tells RISD’s Class of 2021 the story of the day after her own graduation and how the challenges of moving forward inspired her to work with bravery and inventiveness.
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The non-traditional student enrolled full-time in art school
Sarah Kathryn O'Brien
The unique needs, experiences, and contributions to the classroom of non-traditional students enrolled in a full-time undergraduate art program have been under-addressed in academic research. In this thesis, the author surveys existing research and reports on a series of surveys and some follow-up interviews conducted with both students and their professors. This thesis aims to identify the unique circumstances of non-traditional students in higher education and particularly in art school. The author identifies specific opportunities for fruitful continued research and application.
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Affordable Green: what cause landscape gentrification and how we deal with it
Siyu Pan
The topic of this thesis is to figure out how landscape gentrification happened and what we can do to decelerate the process. The first phase of this thesis includes a brief introduction and definition to the term “Gentrification“, its history and the process. Discussions about how such a situation would influence communities and related people would also be mentioned in this part. The last part in this phase is the analysis of some recent research about gentrification world wide. The second phase is a transition from gentrification to landscape gentrification. This part analysis of the cause and effect of landscape gentrification, listed several recent approaches that were accomplished by workers from various disciplines. The final part is an attempt to come up with a new evaluation system. The third part began with using the previous system to test and analyze a few communities. Then we proposed a design strategy based on the research. The last part would be some specific design movement. Finally, this thesis came to a conclusion that we as landscape architects, could only do things that within our discipline to raise people’s awareness towards landscape architects. It is better to let the people choose what is best for them and their neighborhoods.
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The beauty of collision
Yixuan Pan
As a Chinese artist living in the United States, I’m researching the integration of Eastern and Western aesthetics, as well as the loss of identity that can occur when visual cultures begin to assimilate. My work endeavors to locate the connection between Eastern and Western arts through my own memories and experiences. From the age of five, I have studied calligraphy and traditional Chinese painting with my grandfather, who was a calligraphy professor. Today, I use the shapes of traditional Chinese hand fans as symbols of youth, drawing from memories of my mother and grandmother brandishing the fans to help me fall asleep and dream. I paint American coastal landscapes on the fans in a Chinese ink style, combining two aesthetics and places. Manipulating these memories of childhood while negotiating my adult life in the United States is how I question a sense of home and place in a multi-centered society. I also used various subjects from differing class, gender, disability, occupation, age, and religious expressions of Asian immigrant groups for my painting. This allows audiences to access the often divergent and complex ways Asian Immigrants live in the states during this period of discrimination.
In this thesis, I will discuss whether Chinese painting can break thousands of years of tradition in terms of materials, expressions, forms, painting language, painting themes, and maintain relevance in today's art world. I will also study the rapid development of science and technology and the background of this era in the information age and make individual judgments and innovation requirements for traditional Chinese painting's future development.
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Nossa quadra, nossa historia: the power of collaborative and communal outdoor spaces as a tool for belonging & agency
Rebecca Maria Pepl
Brazil - a country with a history of colonization, slavery, precipitated industrialization, rapid urbanization, superimposed european modernism (architectural and ideological), unstable politics, growing inequity, socio-economic stratification and overpopulation combined with a lack of adequate housing for the wider population. The government has been trying to solve these issues with standardized, unsuccessful social housing projects along the periphery of the city, disregarding the population’s lifestyle and neglecting their visions. This perpetuates existing discriminatory divides, enforced through architecture and infrastructure.
This thesis attempts to improve the quality of life of the residents in the Cohab Neighborhood in Recife, which is one of the social housing projects developed in the 1960s and 1970s. As they stand, we are left with scars of the past. How can we modify what we already have through thoughtful adaptive reuse?
The project relies on ‘Quadras’ - open public squares that are surrounded by mostly residential buildings. These quadras can be found throughout the Cohab neighborhood and have already functioned as a gathering place for the residents in the past, but are now neglected and under-utilized. The inhabitants of these communities are included in the design and development process through conversations, surveys and, in the final implementation, through local craftsmanship and design choices. By using these spaces to revive urban dead spots, residents are able to deter crime through an active streetscape.
The proposed design is a network of interventions that work as tools that can be adapted by the community according to their needs. Customization and the co-creation of one‘s environment lie at the core of this thesis. The intervention is a critique on the original masterplan, with the act of claiming space as a protest against something that the community had been neglected in the past - agency and their voice. The set of guidelines for the intervention can be applied to every Quadra in the entire neighborhood, generating a network that not only activates COHAB but eventually also reaches beyond and reconnects it back to the Recife’s larger social context.
