RISD Architecture

Almost Architecture, Almost [other]
Recipient of the 2025 Graduate Thesis Award
Pateton Gonzales (MArch ’25)

Advisor: Jacqueline Shaw

This thesis examines the water crisis surrounding Gallup, New Mexico, and the Navajo Nation through the lens of “approximation” — an architectural method that rethinks existing systems without fully erasing or replacing them. Grounded in the ritual of water collection, the thesis studies the social, spatial, and infrastructural relationships tied to Gallup’s water filling stations, proposing a series of small-scale architectural interventions that blur the boundaries between infrastructure, ritual, and public space. Through drawings, artifacts, and speculative station models, the project reframes water infrastructure as both a technical and cultural system, asking how architecture can respond to conditions of scarcity while remaining deeply connected to community practices and lived experience.

RISD Architecture Graduate Biennial
Apr 3-19, 2026
Sol Koffler Gallery

Opening reception: Apr 9, 7-9PM

To RE:PRESENT is to shift perspectives, to present the familiar within the unfamiliar. At a time when architecture is pressured to produce new forms and narratives, RISD Graduate Architecture doubles down on its own conventional tools — drawing, modeling, imaging — utilizing what we are familiar with outside our typical boundaries. The show’s decontextualization moves away from the arduous task of constant reinvention, but rather presents the viewer with new questions. We hope that you come in asking, “How is this architecture?” and leave with a different notion of what architecture can be.