Your job is to pitch creative, sometimes looney ideas.  Their job is to challenge you across a range of topics, from the looney to the pragmatic.

Alternative: save all that tuition and kick around creative, looney ideas with your mates, for free (except for the cost of beer).

send your resume to BIG. looney idea are easy, i have one like every 5 minutes, i spend most my time trying to staying grounded.......Superrstudio stuff was appropriate and cute 40 years ago, you have to understand many versions of Super Studio and Archigram fantasies have become reality in one way or another, creating laws and rules that govern the previously unexpected outcome of such fantasies........you need yo catch up on your history first and then re-enter your fantasies more grounded, otherwise its just another concept not thiught through.

It's easy to fall into the aesthetic and political mold of Archigram and co. I was guilty of that to some extent when I began my thesis some 10 years ago, but it's one thing to duplicate a style and then another to expand on the reason why they did what they did back then.

Frame your project(s) in a way that shows you understand history and the forces that shaped the ideals of your precedence/inspiration. Hard to say any more without an example. 

Definitely gave you guys the most simplified and watered down version. This is not the copy and pasting of an aesthetic and ideology onto some random location and calling it a day. It's a topic that has been researched and developed on my end for close to 9 months.  

The question / issue im struggling with is, if the project is technical in tectonics and articulated in defining spaces, is it totally inappropriate / illegal / out of bounds to hijack a large portion of a neighborhood to test the idea.

This is the theoretical component. The use of private land to build a mega structure. I don't want discuss procurement. I just want to enter at the point where this is the strategy that has been accepted, now what does it look like and how does it function. 

You need heavy fire support. Go find thesis advisers who will back the work.

When I originally selected my thesis topic, I got a lot of blowback about it. It was an "inappropriate subject," it wasn't "purely architectural," it was "too ambitious," etc.

Ultimately, I got a couple of professors on board with it as my advisers, and it all worked out great. They understood it and went to bat for it when it went before committee. Got top marks for it and graduated at the top of my class.

Set up those parameters early on and state that the site is just a medium to test ideas. I had an identical strategy where I tore apart most of old historic-Montreal for the sake of testing my work. You just have to explain what your rules were before allowing people to form opinions on the work.

^my experience is the same as gwharton describes. Many students hated my approach because it flew in the face of the easy/safe thesis options most took. Plenty more hated the work after it got top grades and became a staple in the rotating example of successful thesis 1st year master students are required to read/reference.

I think its great advice to think of a studio presentation like a mathematical proof. If all of these parameters than.... my design. As Non said, lay down the parameters first. This is your chance to insert the fantasy and set the criteria by which the project should be critiqued. So if you were to state at the beginning that the project is in a zero gravity environment it's hard to have a conversation about typical gravity driven structures. In your case make the entitlements a non issue by addressing it first. Beat them to the punch. I find that when discussions run off on tangents like that its because you missed something early that allows you to control the later conversation. 

Good architectural presentations provide the ground work for the discussion that follows by narrowly constraining the criteria by which they are to be judged.