Architectural History and Criticism Commons^™

An Analysis Of The Physical And Cultural Landscape Of Grand Isle, Louisiana, Alexis Thomas

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The town of Grand Isle, Louisiana, and its rich geographic history, can offer insight into the early history of the State of Louisiana and the establishment of the United States as a country, as well as the study of the formation of barrier islands and methods of land use with such areas. The following thesis presents a geographic, as well as a historical, analysis of Grand Isle’s history. It attempts to answer the following questions: What is the shape, form, and origin of the physical landscape of Grand Isle? How have humans interacted with the land and surrounding areas of …

Collaborating With Catastrophe | A User's Guide To Post-Apocalyptic Farming, Patricia Cafferky

Architecture Senior Theses

“Collaborating with Catastrophe” contends that architecture has the capacity to visually manifest unseen forces through design’s reaction to them, allowing people to more fully comprehend and engage the intangible. Climate change, arguably the largest threat to modern day humanity, is not visible, existing only as a collection of data and patterns in a statistical construct. Taking stock of the present day failings of society in the face of crisis, this thesis then extrapolates a potential future dystopia precipitated by man-made pollutants in order to engage the problem at its most severe. Architecture is then able to make the toxic visible …

The Foreign Complex | A Cross-Cultural Vernacular, Dexter Cicchinelli

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis investigates transforming a decommissioned military site into a productive part of its host nation’s context. Okinawa consists of a group of islands that make up the southern-most prefecture of Japan. MAP It is situated midway between Tokyo and Manila, and called the “keystone of the Pacific” by military planners because of its strategic location. AERIAL FLIGHT MAP It was the site of the devastating Battle of Okinawa in WWII which prompted an ongoing history of military intervention and occupation. TIMELINE Immediately after the war, displaced Okinawans were put in camps while the military claimed land for bases. Some …

Redefining The Constraint | Designing Control To Support Rehabilitation, Jessica Borri

Architecture Senior Theses

The concrete lined cells of a contemporary prison do not lend themselves well to processes of rehabilitation. This thesis contends that it is time for architects to rethink the architecture of the prison. When an inmate knows he is being watched, he tends to exhibit positive behavior out of fear of the consequences of any action deemed to be negative. This thesis contends that by incorporating the apparatus of surveillance seamlessly into a prison's architecture it may be possible to provide spaces that feel more open and less oppressive.

One way to generate a feeling of openness is to create …

Free Encounters | Giving Form To The Informal Workplace, Ryan Williams

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis contends that the "office" as a solely economic construct is no more: Its utility as an engine driving productivity and the accumulation of capital has stalled in our present age of information where value is constructed through knowledge exchange and interaction.

Via the use of new technologies, millennial workers' transition from the college campus to the office has become more seamless and, this thesis argues, it is in this paradigm shift that it is possible to identify a blurring of the public and private spheres. The millennial worker-turned-freelancer's life exists forever suspended between work and play, place and …

New Beijing | A Renewed Vernacular, Bowen Victor Zhang

Architecture Senior Theses

What does the term "vernacular" means? In an increasingly flay world, this thesis seeks to define the essential elements of the vernacular architecture of Beijing in order to propose a contemporary residential archetype.

In the past century, China has experienced unprecedented economic growth and development. Along with the many influences introduced by cross-cultural interactions, the phenomenon of architectural and social gentrification has begun to affect many of the populations living in urban centers. The same gentrifying forces that have drastically changed Greenwich Village and other New York City neighborhoods has rapidly moved to China and has replaced centruries-old vernacular communities …

Uncreative Construction | Domestic Mutations In America, Sean Morgan

Architecture Senior Theses

A shift in residential patterns in American cities have fostered a breeding ground for mutant buildings. Owners split, manipulate, and expand their houses as they create idiosyncratic constructs of great visual and spatial complexity. Originally developed for a middle class population, single-family homes have become mixed-use or multi-family complexes thanks to the resourceful implementation of commercial materials.

This thesis aims to develop a new strategy for transforming the normative American house by using the conventions of platform frame construction. Variations will emerge from a set of design constraints, which—unlike that employed for typical houses—are based on data that disregards style …

Another Milstein Hall, Daniel Lin

Architecture Senior Theses

A certain Chinese encyclopedia wrote: Animal are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor (b) embalmed (c) tame (d) sucking pig (e) sirens (f ) fabulous (g) stray dogs (h) included in the present classification (i) frenzied (j) innumerable (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush (l) et cetera (m) having just broken the water pitcher (n) that from a long way off look like flies. –– Jorge Louis Borges

Jorge Louis Borges’ list of animals supposedly drawn from his fictional Chinese Encyclopedia the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, highlights the potent absurdities and lacunae to be identified in …

A Mat Response To Deinstitutionalization | A Model For Spatial Medicine, Dominic S. Lipuma

Architecture Senior Theses

In an attempt to salvage the institution, this thesis adopts the Mat-building strategy and typology, coined by Alison Smithson in 1974, exploiting its inherent qualities as a minimal, flexible, and temporal framework, which best supports the unique program of a Community Mental Health Center (CMHC).

This is in response to the severed and contentious relationship between architecture and mental health, in regards to psychopathology. The two fields were estranged with the onset of deinstitutionalization, beginning in the 1960s, and the consequent abandonment of architectural issues has prevented their reconciliation. As a result, further social issues have manifested, with higher proportions …

Hijacked | Reclaiming Legislative Loopholes, Lara Moock

Architecture Senior Theses

ARTICLE 1: GENERAL PROVISIONS.

SEC. 100. PURPOSES.

San Francisco’s current political legislation has critical loopholes that have constructed a predominant shift in the city’s identity and urban fabric, as well as an obvious neglect of the public realm and social agenda. The recent move of the Silicon Valley tech headquarters to the city’s center has dramatically changed the architectural landscape as well as reinforced a growing push for corporate privatization. This thesis aims to expose and confront the hidden political and social dynamics of the constructed environment and reclaim the existing loopholes in order to propose a project without major …

Memory + Architecture | The Act Of Forgetting, Mariel Mora Llorens

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis proposes the activation and repurposing of buildings associated with traumatic memories as a means of studying the ways in which architecture embodies memories and aids in the process of forgetting. Architecture and the built environment are linked to the creation and recollection of memories because they trigger four of the senses that are related to memory.

To forget is an active, not passive endeavor. Conscious forgetting is not an act of erasing memories, but transforming them by removing the emotional responses that are produced by our recollection of these memories. Like memories in our brains, buildings that have …

Green Blot District | Considering Low Density Neighborhoods, Tom Arleo

Architecture Senior Theses

By adjusting the texture of now declined early 20th Century outer-urban neighborhoods to adopt low density blocks, new zoning and its resultant architecture can produce an intricate spatial fabric that mediates between individual customization and collective suburban image essential to American detached dwelling. Overlapping functions, spaces, and surfaces offer a new cohesion necessary for developing physically and socially tight-knit communities in a thinning, object-made fabric.

This thesis rethinks suburban practices at the scale of the house, lot, and block, in order to speak directly to issues of building autonomy, non-spatial surface and volume conventions, and residential-program-only zoning. Creating the scheme …

Never-Land | A Parasitic And Accumulative Approach To Urbanization In China, Xiaoyan Dong

Architecture Senior Theses

Ever since 1960s, European situationist and Japanese metabolist architects constantly reject the uniformity and totalitarian of modern architecture/urban design, seeking parasitic and dynamic approaches to post-war urbanization. Projects such as the Plug-In City and the Tokyo Bay dream of alternative urban scenarios by reversing traditional perceptions of infrastructure’s role in the city, combining architecture, technology and society together. However, these megastructure projects not only neglect the existing urban context but also lack political and economic driving force. As a result, they are considered utopian by many contemporary critics.

Fifty years later in China, fast urbanization process creates problems for both …

Total Fiction | The Artifice And The Armature, Anrai Pearson

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis views architecture as a total fiction. It aims to explore the representational and communicative qualities of the architectural surface. Architects have always abstracted raw materials in order to create a larger conceptual basis for architecture but the relationship between abstraction and reality has not always been concrete. In the past, ideals of “truth” and “authenticity” have played a central theoretical role in defining how architects approach building. For example, John Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc decry various forms of material deceit, in favor of an authentic and truthful architecture. Alternately, architects interested in the communicative agency of architecture have questioned …

Absorbency In Tidal Resiliency | The Thickened Pier, Shauna Strubinger

Architecture Senior Theses

The inevitable truth of climate change has placed coastal cities at great risk. Past natural disasters in the United States such as Hurricane Sandy and Katrina, displaced many people because these communities’ only protection was their failed infrastructure.1 Although hard and soft infrastructure strategies have addressed the rising sea level, architecture at the building scale creates static surfaces and divisions that are slow to adapt to flooding and leave little to no room for the ambiguity of tidal flooding and storm surge. Though numerous areas are at risk of sea level rise across the globe, the Chesapeake Bay area is …

A Shifted Perspective On Affordable Micro Housing, Jonathan Reisman

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis contends that growing cities around the world are out-pricing the younger demographic from the urban fabric. It recognizes that constantly rising real estate markets are forcing millennials outside of city centers. It understands that socially, the younger demographic provide the energy and atmosphere required to keep the city alive, and ultimately believes that in order fro young professionals to reclaim their position int he hosing market, a new typology of hosing need to be established.

Such housing takes increasing urban density into consideration, and provides an appropriate dwelling supply for expensive cities moving forward. It is a typology …

Occupy Pomo | A Citizen's Guide To Urban Excavation, Kriti Garg

Architecture Senior Theses

Traditionally, architects' definitions of solid-void conditions create a dichotomy between private, or built matter, and public, or void, spaces. Yet, this notion is a missed opportunity to understand the complex society of the twenty-first century that no longer operates within the realm of open, public space nor acts as a point of primal cohesiveness for culture and community. Rather than aggregating at instances of density, it is lost within a new ghostly cosmopolitan substitute of mass consumption and globalized culture. This new public realm is a "phantom public sphere", one comprised of "sub-publics", tailored to the demands of a mass …

Deployable Domesticity, Daniel Hopkins

Architecture Senior Theses

Deployable homes have characterized the survivalist origins of our species, the lifestyles of disenfranchised populations, and the luxurious retreats of others. Still, a predominance of contemporary domestic space relies on the ‘permanently’ stationary and situated object. As the social and ecological conditions of our society are rapidly and continually fluctuating, we must reaffirm our association with deployable culture and expand the utilization of mobile and adaptable unit. Further, architecture must negotiate the contrasts between ephemerality and permanence.

Through speculation of the social and sustainable implications of the deployable unit, issues of flexibility, material selection and afterlife, economics, ecology, and efficiency …

Innie/Outie | Renegotiating Figure And Structure, Maxwell Rosner

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis contends that in order to sustain its claim to be socially progressive and accessible enterprise, the discipline of architecture must resist the divorce of figure and structure.

Innie/Outie considers Architecture as a simultaneously typological and teleological proposition. Architects exploit typology as a means of classifying, diagramming, and ultimately flattening and iconicizing ideas about Architecture so as to place them within a broader cultural context, thereby making them intellectually accessible to their audiences. By contrast, architects from the advent of Modernism onwards have displayed a critical preoccupation with the discipline’s teleological potential, the creation of form that follows function …

Incision Of Division, Nicoletta Kyverniti

Architecture Senior Theses

Conflict is a timeless topic of conversation, rising and recurring in various parts of the world. Whether active or dormant, the conflict exists within our urban environments in multiple forms and scales. A border that cannot be crossed. A building that cannot be accessed. A view that cannot be seen. It defines how we move within our cities and creates distinct boundaries. Architecture can diverge form its current use of division to instead exhibit the potential for mediation. It can confront the divide through incisions into the existing site thus exposing the need to intervention. It can cerate a wall …