Masha Hupalo

is a researcher and architect who writes and teaches in Los Angeles. Her current work focuses on the way policy and high-frequency data inform planning and design, the legal construct of territory and borders, and new forms of governance and ownership. 

Proto thinking on are.na
Calculative Logics: Housing and New Property Relationships
     Enriched with proprietary algorithms, data dashboards, and blockchain-powered transactions, real estate platforms determine geographies of urban investment. Within these geographies, a house becomes a logistics unit that gets subdivided, grouped, and traded. 
  • Type: Public Lecture
  • Location: MAK Center for Art and Architecture
  • Year: 2024 
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Map-able/Visible
  • The historical continuity of our cartographic culture parallels the rapid change in mapping technologies and forms of visualization. Using archival and technical research, machine vision, and intelligent agents to analyze, represent and manipulate infrastructure at the urban scale, students created a historically situated, technologically literate and data-driven representation of six areas in Los Angeles.
  • Type: Summer Program for High-School Students
  • Together with: Laure Michelon
  • Location: Design Immersion Days at SCI-Arc, Los Angeles
  • Year: 2023

SB9 Guidebook for Community Land Trusts (CLTs) in California
  • The guidebook is a product of a series of conversations with CLTs, lenders, and city planners in California that were held to learn about SB9 and how it can help CLTs grow a supply of permanently affordable housing in California. It provides visual tools to facilitate discussions about spatial opportunities of SB9, describe and clarify implementation problems, and inform potential advocacy strategies.  
  • Type: Research Project
  • Together with: California Community Land Trust Network
  • Research assistants: Benjamin Jepsky and Alyona Savelyeva
  • Location: Los Angeles, CA
  • Year: 2022-2023 
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Temporal Vectors
  • The design studio investigated infrastructural corridors of Vienna, point and linear city cores, and transit-oriented communities before bringing acquired knowledge to Soren Frichs Vej in Aarhus.  
  • Type: Graduate Design Studio
  • Together with: Jens Christian Pasgaard
  • Location: Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark
  • Year: 2017


Iduun Hylland and Mathias Rieland Kanstrup
Unruly Data and Regulated Cities
  • The course examined measurement, assessment, and calculation techniques that set off noticeable effects in the built environment. Each student created one dataset by using available digital means and one based on their on-site observation and documentation.
  • Type: Graduate Seminar
  • Location: Design of Cities Postgraduate Program at SCI-Arc, Los Angeles, CA
  • Year: 2023 
  •    Chen Qiyu



The Carrier Bag of Tools
  • Throughout the semester, students drew previously invisible connections between different sources of information and created collections of concept tools that helped them support their theoretical and pedagogical claims. By treating a syllabus as a carrier bag of concept tools [Ursula K. Le Guin, 1986], we questioned and discussed its linear structure, itsstatic format, conventional and new parts like protocols of online behaviour, self-evaluation, and others.  
  • Type: Graduate Design Studio
  • Location: Design Theory and Pedagogy Postgraduate Program at SCI-Arc, Los Angeles, CA
  • Year: 2021 


James Piccone
Itinerant Platform
  • Two workshops with students from SCI-Arc, Abaarso Tech Univeristy in Somaliland, KADK in Copenhagen and Copenhagen University were dedicated to changing housing typologies in each respective location - Hargeisa, Los Angeles, and Copenhagen. The multimodal research investigated the evolution of dwelling patterns and preferences, conducted primary research and explored media representation of contemporary housing.
  • Type: Student Workshops
  • Togetther with: Emil Seehusen 
  • Research Assistants: Lance Arevalo, Malvin Wibowo, Artem Panchenko, Esin Karaosman, Emily Dinnerman
  • Location: Los Angeles, CA
  • Year: 2020-2021 
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The Politics of Zestimate: Merging Technology and Real Estate Industries
    The article centers the role of Zillow, an American real estate platform, and its home valuation tool, Zestimate, in the commodification of housing in the last decades. The massive amounts of data collected since 2006 have enabled Zillow to train its predictive algorithms that determine Zestimates and enter the real estate market as a house-flipper. In this update, I aim to illustrate the radical changes brought by the digitization of the housing marketplace.
  • Type:  Publication
  • Location: Radical Housing Journal, Vol 3(2): 215-219
  • Year: 2021
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Constructing Narratives
  • The seminar introduced students to narrative techniques in urban landscape projects. They explored the contemporary commodification of cities and the flattening of urban experiences before creating visual and textual fiction by mixing recognizable signs of two cities.  
  • Type: Undergraduate Seminar
  • Together with: Nacho Ruiz Allen
  • Location: Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark
  • Year: 2017


What is Cityness?
    The seminar explored a planetary-built environment and frameworks of understanding shaped by numerous factors including the formation of new border territories, extraction economies, digital platforms, and building standards.Globalization and increased mobility stand behind both – an uneven spatial development of hinterlands and a simultaneous homogenization of densely built environments. 
  • Type:  Graduate Seminar
  • Location: Design of Cities Postgraduate Program at SCI-Arc, Los Angeles
  • Year: 2018


Marine Lemarie
Strategic Stillness: Urban Configurations Achieved Through Parking
    The dissertation is an examination of the parking phenomenon that is indicative of broader strategies in urban transformations - large-scale zoning changes, preservation of historic neighborhoods, housing affordability, commercial heterogeneity, and resident demographics. Throughout this analysis, parking remains a physical counterpart of immaterial negotiations between business owners and residents, car manufacturers and city planners, drivers and pedestrians, traffic engineers and architects. 
  • Type: Dissertation
  • Location: Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark
  • Year: 2016-2020
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Adaptive Reuses
  • The research initiative was an exploration of a complex process of adaptive reuse of obsolete buildings to accommodate affordable housing. The main challenges include historic preservation, seismic retrofitting, environmental remediation, labor, material, and planning requirements attached to different funding sources.  
  • Type: Research Project
  • Together with: Case Miller
  • Research Assistant: Hannah Mann
  • Location: Los Angeles, CA
  • Year: 2022 


Proptech and Housing Policy 
  • This ongoing research explores the contemporary assetization of housing and its effects on land-related value and socio-spatial aesthetics of the home. It can be attributed to three mutually reinforcing factors: changes in the housing finance markets since the 1970s, a persistent fantasy of ownership’s connection to individual freedom, and technological advancements in software development and machine learning. 
  • Type: Research Project 
  • Research Assistants: Ari Diamond-Topelson and Reed Donaldson
  • Location: Los Angeles, CA
  • Year: 2023 - ...


Homelessness Charrette
    Our collaborative efforts with faculty, students, alumni, and key voices from around Los Angeles led to the identification of a set of crucial questions about houselessness, housing policy, services and public perception that guided an all-school (500 students) four-day charrette. On the fourth day, in the spirit of the design charrette tradition, the products of this short and intensive process were showcased in a comprehensive uncurated exhibition of all projects, fostering further discussion. The results were published in a report.  
  • Type: All-school Workshop
  • Together with: Erik Ghenoiu, Andrew Chittenden [SCI-Arc] and Goethe Institut
  • Location: SCI-Arc, Los Angeles
  • Year: 2019
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Data-driven Inclusionary Zoning Ballot Measure
  • The Neighborhood Protection and Affordability Initiative was a ballot measure in development that proposed an ordinance to increase the base density and permissible floor areas next to transit and services. Inclusionary requirements were supposed to vary in each census track depending on the proportion of rent-burdened residents. We were invited to visualize and analyze the implications of such measure and submit suggestions on how to increase fine-grain responsiveness to the variety of needs in the city.  
  • Type: Consulting 
  • For: Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce
  • Together with: Erik Ghenoiu, Andrew Chittenden and Case Miller 
  • Location: Los Angeles, CA
  • Year: 2019