Post-Professional Thesis
Students in the MArch II Post-Professional degree program now have the opportunity to engage in extensive independent work during their time at YSoA. The program has been an important opportunity for architects who already have a professional degree, and in many cases are already licensed, to consider their role and agency within the profession in innovative ways. It allows them to explore how they can reposition themselves in the field and stake a leadership trajectory as they consider new forms of inquiry through design research projects.
The Post-Professional program is directed by Bimal Mendis (BA ’98, MArch ’02). Over the past year he has refined and augmented the existing curriculum, working with Sunil Bald, associate dean and head of the Curriculum Committee, and various other faculty members integral to the program. In the new sequence, the first year will focus on research through two preparatory design research seminars, led by Anthony Acciavatti, Diana Balmori Assistant Professor, in the fall, and Aniket Shahane and Ana María Durán Calisto, Daniel Rose (1951) Visiting Assistant Professor, in the spring. Students will identify their sites and subjects, test methods and media of inquiry, and develop abstracts and detailed project proposals. The second year will facilitate exploration, design, and dissemination through a yearlong design research studio allowing students to develop their subjects in greater depth. Within this common framework first-year students will take advanced design studios together with a broad range of elective seminars at and beyond the school in support of their projects.
The incoming MArch II students (class of 2025) will follow the revised curriculum, and the yearlong studio will be offered for the first time in 2024–25. Students currently develop their projects over the program’s four semesters, beginning with two preparatory seminars and culminating in an independent studio in the final semester. Last spring each student worked with a faculty advisor within the framework of the design research studio coordinated by Bimal Mendis, together with Emily Abruzzo and Brennan Buck, assisted by Iris Giannakopoulou Karamouzi (PhD ’25).
The independent projects ran the gamut from Deconstructivist academies on the Tiber to deep mappings of Bedford-Stuyvesant and from the future of fish hatcheries to spa architecture. A new graduation prize, the Independent Design Research Award, recognizes an outstanding independent project. The inaugural award went to Nohar Zask Agadi (MArch ’23) for Blue Zone—Contact Zone, advised by Ana María Durán Calisto. The following is his description of a process for mapping longevity:
In 1973 National Geographic named Vilcabamba, Ecuador, a ‘Blue Zone’ and an epicenter of longevity. The town has since fostered a self-sustaining migration stream of curious individuals seeking spiritual rebirth. Rather than being politically extractive, foreign residents in Vilcabamba have integrated with the local community via Contact Zones—rituals or places where expatriates and local populations converge while ecologies coexist. Such confluences or cultural-exchange junctions in Vilcabamba are aligned with the social practices of community-making, nutrition, and rituals, manifesting a contemporary reflection on sacred traditions. The project unfolds Andean landscapes to reveal the sources of reemerging cultural mythologies. To facilitate an understanding of the cross-cultural exchange, the thesis presents a contact zone of scholarship drawing the cartographic encounters of technocratic choreography and native communicentric intelligence. This documentarian analysis of territorial relationships along the Andean mountain range sets Vilcabamba as a model for community resilience and a testament to cultural genealogy. Traditions are reimagined here by lifestyle migrants who perform a symbiotic integration with the local community and wish to understand and implement the Andean way of life. I will argue that the migrant’s ability to use communicentric languages while engaging with foreign communities keeps legacies alive and shapes a profound definition of longevity. The technocratic definition of Blue Zones is thus challenged by understanding cross-cultural communication as a threshold to admitting both Eurocentric and Indigenous ideas of well-being, building on the binary of nature and culture to propose an alternative public connection with territorial heritage.
