RISD Undergraduate Thesis Project
View the thesis book
Spring 2026
Site
Sliver sites
New Haven, CT
Category
Architecture
Thesis Advisor - Emily Ezquerro
Building Less: As-Needed Architecture argues that building is a social practice, activated by use and reuse rather than completed at handover. Its proposal became a heightened testing ground for that argument.
New Haven’s sliver sites, narrow remnants of zoning, subdivision, and infrastructural alignment, are deemed too small to develop, yet distributed evenly enough to form a latent citywide network. This project achieves maximum activation of these sites through minimal construction.
On each site, a four-foot-thick wall of prefabricated wood framing and standing-seam steel, anchored by reversible ground screws, consolidates water collection, power, storage, and seating into a single infrastructural element. One eight-foot segment already sustains gathering, rest, and exchange, so completion is measured by use rather than enclosure.
Everything that follows extends the project rather than completing it: lightweight walls and roofs fasten to the wall’s notched upper edge when winter demands enclosure and detach when it no longer does. Cleaning the water system, adjusting attachments, deciding each season what the site is for—this ongoing labor becomes construction in its own right, distributing authorship from the architect to everyone who sustains the wall.
Building Less: As-Needed Architecture argues that building is a social practice, activated by use and reuse rather than completed at handover. Its proposal became a heightened testing ground for that argument.
New Haven’s sliver sites, narrow remnants of zoning, subdivision, and infrastructural alignment, are deemed too small to develop, yet distributed evenly enough to form a latent citywide network. This project achieves maximum activation of these sites through minimal construction.
On each site, a four-foot-thick wall of prefabricated wood framing and standing-seam steel, anchored by reversible ground screws, consolidates water collection, power, storage, and seating into a single infrastructural element. One eight-foot segment already sustains gathering, rest, and exchange, so completion is measured by use rather than enclosure.
Everything that follows extends the project rather than completing it: lightweight walls and roofs fasten to the wall’s notched upper edge when winter demands enclosure and detach when it no longer does. Cleaning the water system, adjusting attachments, deciding each season what the site is for—this ongoing labor becomes construction in its own right, distributing authorship from the architect to everyone who sustains the wall.