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Post Ocean
No full texthttps://digitalcommons.risd.edu/colorlab_exhibitions_postoceanmaxpratt/1024/thumbnail.jp
\u27manch\u27 beyond - museum
Full text linkIn contemporary India, the museum remains a symbol of cultural prestige, yet according to national cultural surveys, fewer than 1% of Indians visit museums annually, a statistic that reflects not only structural and spatial exclusions, but also psychological barriers shaped by class, language, and institutional codes of conduct. These institutions are far from neutral: they embed expectations about how to see, move, and behave, privileging a didactic framework. In the absence of intimacy, dialogue, and belonging, the museum becomes a space visited, not inhabited.
Rather than viewing space as a container for artifacts, this thesis reimagines space itself as an artifact that unfolds gradually, through movement, pause, and return. It challenges the limitations of institutional typologies through strategies of decentralization. How can museums be reimagined as porous spaces that invite dialogue and embed themselves within communities?
Inspired by the conception of museums as “looking glasses” for wonder and emotion, this thesis is situated within a two-story vernacular bungalow in Bandra, Mumbai. Embedded in a neighborhood shaped by migration, artistic practices, and layered identities, the bungalow offers more than just a site—it offers a social network. Its transitional edges, fragmented volumes, and lived-in spatial structure resist institutional formality, allowing the museum to unfold not as a place of authority, but as a space of relation.
By adapting the existing structure, this thesis explores design strategies centered on soft thresholds, blurred boundaries, and spatial porosity. It develops a spatial language that holds, frames, and reveals meaning through detail—composing relationships between rooms, courtyards, and passages. This language is built on gestures of joining, layering, concealing, and opening—subtle acts that shape the relationships between people, space, and cultural narratives
Gust, Stroll, Veil
Full text linkI witness the unsettling and chaotic moments of everyday life:
blood clots in fried eggs, a dead rat on my porch, mites crawling on our skin . . .
These quiet tragedies exist with almost brutal indifference!
We eat, digest, excrete. We menstruate. We parasitize. We coexist.
I seek the intersection of repulsion and wonder in my daily experience and body sensations, visualizing unseen stimuli. I employ veil as a strategy. It conceals yet reveals. Sometimes, it acts as a transparent layer, sharpening what lies beneath. Other times, it blurs colors and forms, rendering them ambiguous. Veil transforms, entices, and allures with its innate charm, and ultimately, it forces confrontation with discomfort
Exploring Al Balad
Full text linkAl Balad is a well-known destination for Jeddah’s visitors. With its inclusion in UNESCO World Heritage, the site has been transforming to fit the standards and become a more tourist destination. The reason the site is included in UNESCO is due to its diversity and unique architecture and sense of place. Preservation of this type is problematic because it threatens to suppress the dynamics that gave rise to Al Balad, freezing it in time. This thesis asks: How can landscape representation capture agents of change, the present moment, and the past so that the forces that breathe life in historically preserved areas are identified and these sites don’t lose their sense of place
Plural Vistas
Full text linkPlural Vistas introduces an expansive spatial dimension to the practice of graphic design. Through emotive means and embodied experience, each vista engages the potential for design to negotiate the intertwined relationship between the built environment (structured language and hierarchical systems), and the reciprocal demands of the natural world (interdependency and entanglement). This approach offers new ways for design to operate and extend into the world and our communities.
Not bound to one singular path or point of view,
Plural Vistas invites you to think spatially.
Space and time are active—engaging the body and considering the complex and subjective relationship between subject and place; reciprocal exchange is encouraged.
Plurality decenters—fragmenting meaning into multitudes to be experienced from various positions and perspectives, inviting complication as a path to radical change.
The vista considers the long view—imagining a horizon that is wild and abundant, and a future that cultivates a fertile exchange between the natural world and the built environment
Windbound
Full text linkCan we navigate reality outside the constraints of chronological progression? As beings seemingly chained to linear time, can memory become a way to transcend this structure—to resist it, to time travel? What if time, instead of a line, is like the wind—non-linear, unpredictable, and both a force of creation and destruction?
Structured around three interwoven notions—the impulse to preserve (why), the forms that time takes (what), and the gestures through which we intervene (how)—this thesis explores how graphic design engages with the mutable, non-linear nature of time. The first notion, memory labor, considers the poetic and emotional desire to hold onto the ephemerality. The second, intentional spontaneity, investigates how linearity can be embraced, bent, or broken as a narrative and structural device. The third, progressive nostalgia, reframes archiving as a creative act that resists erasure while acknowledging its incompleteness. Together, these elements form a methodology for designing with and against time, where the past is neither fixed nor lost, but continually rewritten through aesthetic and conceptual practice.
Ultimately, this thesis doesn’t seek to conquer time but rather to reimagine our relationship with it, and to invite reflections on the transient, unreliable nature of memory and forgetting. It invites both confrontation and reconciliation, offering a space to imagine life beyond linearity and embrace the unpredictability of the winds of time
Building Ecologies: Maintaining Land, Working with Wood
Full text linkThis thesis critiques contemporary architecture and building practices for their fundamentally unsustainable and place-less assemblies that rely on extracting finite resources that generate significant emissions while simultaneously neglecting to consider the needs and existence of humans and non-human species with in the built environment. Through experimental material research that diverts “wood” waste streams and integrates land and multispecies care, this work demonstrates how maintenance-based approaches to construction can transform built assemblies into ecological systems. By deconstructing wood to its cellular components and recombining these elements in novel ways, this research reveals possibilities for collaborative, materials-driven, place-based building practices. This thesis proposes that maintenance of ecological systems is not only necessary but inherently non-hierarchical, positioning humans as collaborators rather than managers. It suggests that by making visible our participation in landscape maintenance and building ecologies, we can create habitats that support complex multispecies futures, ultimately challenging natureculture binaries and reimagining the built environment as an integrated ecological system rather than an isolated artifact. The resulting material assemblage is a place-based architectural wall membrane including insulative, structural, and ecological components
The Limits of Knowing: Determinism, Uncertainty, and What’s Beyond the Human Gaze
Full text linkThis essay traces a personal philosophical and artistic journey from rigid belief in scientific determinism to an evolving embrace of uncertainty, subjectivity, and computational perception. Raised in an atheist, scientifically grounded household in China, the author initially adopted Newtonian determinism and Laplace’s thought experiment of a fully predictable universe as guiding principles. These beliefs informed early artistic practices rooted in Constructivism, geometry, and rule-based aesthetics. However, a failed attempt to fully optimize life through deterministic control led to physical and mental collapse, prompting deeper exploration into Cartesian dualism, quantum mechanics, and the limits of reason. Through Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the observer-dependent reality revealed by the double-slit experiment, the author reevaluates their worldview, finding resonance in Taoist fluidity and John Dewey’s pragmatism. The essay then expands into existentialism and the role of human perception in constructing reality, culminating in artworks that juxtapose structured forms with improvisational gestures. Further reflections on AI, particularly Latent Diffusion Models, reveal alternate, non-human modes of perception. Through projects like Cryptic Synthesis and Codex Temporalis, the author explores how machine vision reconfigures notions of authenticity, identity, and meaning, ultimately suggesting that alternative perspectives are necessary to probe the limits of reality
Post Ocean
No full texthttps://digitalcommons.risd.edu/colorlab_exhibitions_postoceanmaxpratt/1013/thumbnail.jp
Post Ocean
No full texthttps://digitalcommons.risd.edu/colorlab_exhibitions_postoceanmaxpratt/1022/thumbnail.jp