UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Chowdhury Imam and Arjun Kizhakkemarakkattil Janardhanan, both architecture master's students in the College of Architecture’s Stuckeman School, are working to improve different facets of the architecture industry and the built environment. As such, they were both honored in recognition of their work with the 2024 Distinguished Master’s Thesis Award from the Graduate School.
Chowdhury Imam
Originally from Bangladesh, Imam came to Penn State after earning his bachelor of architecture degree from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology with an interest in advancing his knowledge of design computing, which is where he is focusing his graduate studies in the Department of Architecture's Design Computing research cluster.
His research interest involves improving design technology to enable people to actively participate in the design process of their own homes. To do so, Imam has explored the design tool of shape grammars — which is a specific class of production systems that generate geometric shapes — in a new way.
Shape grammar is a rule-based system where different sequences of rule applications generate different design options. However, according to Imam, the generated design is difficult to understand for non-experts because the description of the grammar is encoded using mathematical functions. In addition, the current state of shape grammar implementation works in a way where people living in a home cannot participate in its design process. Imam incorporated different shape grammar implementation strategies where users can actively participate in the design generation process and understand the meaning of the generated designs through plain text.
“To implement shape grammar, we need to go through computer programming, but most homeowners are not designers,” said Imam, who is a researcher in the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing and is pursuing his master of science in architecture. “Shape grammar works in a way where you need to provide a rule sequence and come up with a design and it doesn’t make any sense to a layperson to work that way.”
Imam’s research utilized voxels, or three-dimensional pixels to implement shape grammar. There are very few instances of 3D shape grammar implementation due to the computational complexity, so Imam has used voxel for encoding functional architectural spaces in 3D.
“My research combines color grammar, voxel grammar and description grammar in a user-friendly way where it enables the users to directly and actively participate in the design generation process,” Imam said.
To make the design more user-friendly, Imam’s thesis proposes encoding the system using color. For example, each programming step in a house design uses different color cues for the user. Users will be directed to specific areas of a design, and they will be able to generate designs according to the grammar. Programmed questions guide the user through designing their house. Users will participate in the design by providing text responses to determine the size, space and placement of different programmatic parts of the house.
“People can participate in customizing their own house through easily understandable text,” Imam said. “They have better control over the design. Here, the architect is providing a system, and the homeowner is driving their own design.”
Simultaneous to being user-friendly, the program could also help architects by reducing cost and complexity in mass housing projects. Architects often create one house design for a mass housing project to be cost and time-efficient, but Imam’s new program helps alleviate that burden.
“If the provider needs to give individualized designs for every household manually, it requires a lot of time and money. The provider isn’t often willing to go through that process, hence the one cookie-cutter design,” he said. “[The new program] does not cause the provider to go through that burden, and the user will get the freedom of customizing their home through a systematic process.”
As part of his thesis, Iman developed a prototype for the program by encoding a house using voxel grammar and showed how a building can be encoded using voxel grammar. The next step involves receiving approval to work with human subjects who will use the prototype and answer questions to improve the software.
“[Users] will be able to customize their design, but it will also be guided,” Imam said. “It will establish their individuality, ownership and their identity to their house.”
Arjun Kizhakkemarakkattil Janardhanan
Kizhakkemarakkattil Janardhanan, who was a practicing architect in Mumbai for two years before coming to Penn State, studied energy poverty for his thesis, asking why certain populations have to pay more for electricity than the national average. He is studying in the Penn State Sustainability research cluster within the Department of Architecture.
“I’m very interested in social justice and sustainability, so I was trying to understand the connection,” said Kizhakkemarakkattil Janardhana, who is originally from Kerala, India, and earned his bachelor of architecture degree from National Institute of Technology, Calicut. “We cannot achieve sustainability without being just.”
Kizhakkemarakkattil Janardhanan decided to focus his research on the city of Baltimore. According to the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) and PSE Healthy Energy, nearly 30% of Baltimore residents pay more than 6% of their income on energy bills.
Kizhakkemarakkattil Janardhanan’s research started with the hypothesis that Baltimore faced energy injustice due to its citizens dealing with three key issues: low income, lack of quality housing and health issues.
“These three issues become the nexus: you can’t really talk about energy poverty without considering all three factors simultaneously,” he said. “We need to have more policies considering health, income level and housing quality.”
To assess the city’s energy poverty, Kizhakkemarakkattil Janardhanan worked with a collective of researchers based at Johns Hopkins University called the Baltimore Social-Environmental Collective (BSEC). The BSEC mission, according to its website, is: “to create a truly community-centered urban climate observatory — based not just on theory but in real neighborhoods — to contribute to climate action plans that make environmental justice a priority.”
The BSEC engages with the community about the group’s research and provides updates in person. Kizhakkemarakkattil Janardhanan took part in this community engagement process by asking the community questions and speaking with them directly.
“Energy poverty can affect your learning capacity, every aspect of your life,” he said. “Energy is crucial to every human being and why certain populations don’t have access or have difficulty is just pure injustice.”
Kizhakkemarakkattil Janardhanan also used spatial statistics, or spatial data science, to assess the city’s condition. He collected data from the U.S. Geological Survey and the Center for Disease Control among other census data statistics provided by government agencies. However, he said that his engagement with the community had a strong impact on his feelings toward the topic.
“All of these research groups working together to actually make a change in a city was really inspiring,” said Kizhakkemarakkattil Janardhanan, who is a researcher in the Resource and Energy Efficiency Lab within the Stuckeman School’s Hamer Center for Community Design. “We were able to have community engagement and talk to the community. We could actually see the emotions of people, and that really helped me push through my progress.”
Kizhakkemarakkattil Janardhanan’s research confirmed the hypothesis that Baltimore was dealing with energy poverty, and he said he hopes that legislation and policy will consider social justice as part of sustainability.
“We must ensure that justice has been achieved before making any changes related to sustainability. Justice should be at the forefront of sustainability because a lot of people don’t have access to these sustainability measures like solar energy, or their building doesn’t have the technical capacity to have those advanced systems,” he said. “We have to ensure that all sections of society have access or benefit from sustainable measures.”