Join us for this week’s Fridays@1 in Shattuck Hall, Room 212, where students and faculty are invited to explore an exhibition of emerging thesis work.
Our graduating Master of Architecture students will present the beginning stages of their thesis explorations, featuring 14 exciting projects that reflect a wide range of architectural questions, ideas, and perspectives.
Come explore their work, exchange ideas, and join the conversation!
About the Projects
Isabelle Jones: Phoenix firefighters spend their shifts fighting heat. What if home was the one place that took it away? My thesis asks how prefabricated, modular multifamily housing can use courtyard planning and passive desert strategies to reduce heat stress for the firefighters of Station 9. The courtyard is the heart of it: shared outdoor space cooled by shade, water and night air rather than by air conditioning alone. It gives crews and their families a place to recover, gather and build community. Building it modular makes it faster and more affordable to build, and easy to repeat. The goal is housing that’s livable, resilient and sustainable, built for the people who take on the desert’s heat for the rest of us.
Natalie Reeder: Interested in how we have become disconnected from natural materials and what we lose when we no longer understand where things come from or how they are made. Craft offers a way to understand the world through our hands, connecting us to materials origins, patterns of nature, and our place within the universe. Craft is a universal link in the human experience and is how we connect to land, materials, and living things. Making reflects how we understand our place in the world. Looking at Portland’s industrial landscape, I want to explore how architecture might reveal these connections again and allow us to reconnect with fibers, earth, and the universe.
Nati Ochoa
My thesis explores how architecture can create refuge and belonging for immigrant families through collective making, materials, and landscape. Rooted in the idea that we do not arrive empty-handed, it recognizes inherited knowledge, traditions, and memories as sources of cultural continuity and agency. Amid discrimination and fear of family separation, it envisions places where identities are valued and histories are not erased. Drawing from the origins of architectural enclosure, I investigate how bamboo weaving and earth construction can connect ancestral knowledge with contemporary building technologies, forming spaces of protection, intimacy, and connection to nature. Situated on a disturbed auto-salvage site adjacent to the Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge in Sherwood, Oregon, the project proposes an architectural foundation for making, cooking, gathering, and learning that can evolve through community participation. Ultimately, can weaving architecture also weave people, memories, materials, and landscape into a shared sense of belonging?
Chelsea Loh: How can architecture mediate both the physical and mental processes around death as an ongoing spatial, social, and ecological relationship? I’m interested in exploring the intersection of the material body, memory, ritual, mortality, and the passage of time. This investigation will inform an architecture that reimagines memorial sites and burial practices with a new vision for how the living deal with what remains after death.
Eleanore Provencher: For 93 years, Columbia Pool was where North Portland learned to swim, gathered, and organized. Its demolition this winter leaves the peninsula nearly a decade without year-round swimming and leaves an undecided void in Columbia Park. My thesis will investigate the pool’s decline, the neighbors’ own technical advocacy to save it, and the city’s equity-driven choice to rebuild a mile away. My goal is to develop a community-grounded proposal for Columbia Park that honors the neighborhood’s identity and the site’s historical intent when the original program can’t return.
Noora Al Manea: Living Against the Rhythm-This thesis explores housing for overnight healthcare workers in Portland, whose patterns of rest and daily life move against the rhythms of the city and of their bodies. It The project explores how architecture can accommodate changing needs for solitude and belonging. How can housing support those living against the city’s clock while giving them the freedom to establish their own rhythms of rest, recovery, and connection?
Mar Callender: In this thesis, I am examining the relationship between art and architecture, specifically through the lens of ornamentation and its role in engaging the public to foster a sense of identity, belonging, and community. Art has the ability to communicate, inform, and educate; my exploration seeks to understand how these aspects relate to architecture and ornamentation. Through my design, I aim to illustrate what such spaces can look like within a specific community and how this approach can be adapted for various community-based architectural projects.
Razan Hussein: Rooted in Return
Rooted in my Palestinian identity and an inherited connection to a land I have never visited, this thesis responds to the ongoing genocide in Gaza by exploring architecture as an act of resistance, care, and reclamation. Located in Rafah, Palestine, the project proposes a network of community-led agricultural mutual aid spaces that foster food sovereignty, cultural memory, and intergenerational connection through gardens, greenhouses, communal kitchens, and gathering spaces. Beyond rebuilding what has been destroyed, this thesis seeks to reclaim relationships to land, restore collective agency, and create the conditions for Palestinian life, belonging, and future generations to flourish on their own terms
Marty Dane: It took intention and imagination to make Ladd's Addition one of the most eurocentric neighborhoods in Portland. The wagon wheel urban plan, an idea conceived in the19th century, still works to protect and serve the select few who live in its edges. My thesis explores how emerging, infill architecture can permeate the container of Ladd's Addition and provide housing, education and more access to nature for the growing missing middle of Portland.
Casper Skinner: In 1916, John D. Rockefeller became the world's first billionaire. In the century since, the oil industry has enabled the proliferation of automobiles, interstates, and... gas stations. It has also transformed our relationship with food, industrializing and centralizing its production and distribution, distancing communities from the systems that sustain them. My thesis asks: how can infrastructures of extraction become the substrate for regeneration? Using Appalachia as a testing ground, I am exploring how communities might reclaim and adapt gas stations into decentralized food infrastructure in the transition toward an oil-scarce world. Rather than simply replacing obsolete structures, the project imagines a gradual decomposition and transformation: existing structures yielding materials and space for new forms of cultivation and exchange.
Ron Acob: How to Live with Water: Re-imagining Resilience in West Kaua’i
What if we designed with water instead of against it? As climate change intensifies flooding, tropical cyclones, and sea level rise across the Pacific, colonial infrastructures have left communities increasingly vulnerable. This thesis explores how architecture and landscape can reimagine resilience in West Kaua‘i by drawing on Indigenous ways of knowing and restoring relationships with water as an ecological force.
More project descriptions to come…
What is Friday@1?
On most Fridays at 1 p.m. during the academic term, PSU School of Architecture students and faculty gather to hear from professional designers and architects, academics, visiting artists, innovators, and students in the program. Friday@1 is a perfect way to wrap up each week of intense creativity in the studio and get inspired for the productive weekend ahead.
Free and open to the public. All are welcome.