This architectural thesis began as a means of exploring the role of ruination and decay in
the shaping of the future built environment. Global issues of pandemic and war may cause one
to ponder how architecture responds to forces outside human means of control. Such events
suggest the beginnings of the post-Anthropocene, a future era during which human efforts no
longer dominate the shaping of the globe. An architecture of the post-Anthropocene will do
away with typical anthropocentric scales of time and usher in flatter hierarchies of design
agency. Languages of anthropocentric decay and ruin will collide with both environmental
reclamation and machine intelligences to form new constructs, free from human intention and
temporal scale. The human condition, then, may become merely an adjacent spectator of this
architectural evolution.
33 Thomas Avenue in New York City was chosen as a site of particular interest due to
its atypically high concentration of de-anthropized features and capacity for post-Anthropocene
“occupancy.” The building was documented through the fabrication of an abstracted, physical
model featuring plausible zones of material shearing, which was then 3D-scanned using LiDAR
and Photogrammetry. These images were input into a generative adversarial network and
object detection network which presented computer-vision based interpretations of material
placement and experience. A next-frame prediction model was then used to interpret video
footage and predict future methods of decay. The outputs from these computer-vision systems
were used to generate new representations of architecture which more closely depict how
nonhumans might view their future environment. Final images were then created which
reestablished a human perspective onto the resultant objects, raising questions of how the
human might fit back into the post-Anthropocene world.Honors CollegeThesis (B.?
