Digital Commons Network^™

Abyss Without Vertigo, Jack Madden

Masters Theses

Science has difficulty changing the way we think because it takes us beyond our natural perception. To scales and phenomena that we are unaccustomed to, that are instinctively inhuman.

To fundamentally change the philosophy of our species there needs to be a bridge or, more presciently, an emergency ladder for the human mind to science.

As we are inclined to logic yet inherently emotional, the importance of the scientific cannot be understood using science alone.

Significance must be felt, feelings are the foundation of art, and validation the consequence of the artifact.

Regenerative Residences: Shrinking Stress Levels In The Sky, Peter De Lande Long

Masters Theses

Issues of overcrowding and overstimulation plague urban environments, which exacerbate social isolation and, in turn, heighten city dwellers’ levels of stress and anxiety. How can architecture mediate stimuli to be positively conducive to mood, behavior, and overall health? Given that social isolation is an intrinsically spatial issue that design can address, this thesis proposes a small-scale community living model with the intent of improving mental health and clarity for a user group of young, mentally vulnerable professionals in New York City.

16 E 16th Street becomes the architectural framework for addressing these issues. Moving away from the capitalistic endeavor of …

Space In Sound, Gidiony Rocha Alves

Masters Theses

Due to its strategic location between Africa and the Americas, Cabo Verde became a major hub for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade where millions of slaves were transported across the Atlantic. The interaction of slaves and merchants saw a racial emergence that gave rise to a mixed culture rich in both European and African traditions. Towards the end of the 1800s, Drought, plagues, poverty and poor colonial rule resulted in forced migrations Westward which still affects the archipelago today. There are more Cape Verdeans living abroad than there are living in the islands. Immigrants in turn have had a major influence …

A Thesis On The Entanglement Of Art And Design, Racquel Clarke

Masters Theses

Design exists in the realm of functionality while art is used to invoke creativity heightened by one’s passion. Rather than perfect art and design as separate entities, we should find ways to entangle art, design, and visual graphics to create new languages that solve problems. Addressing color, and hybridity as it relates to form and identity allows for one to come to a foreground that heightens their experience to elevate. Utilizing the entanglement of art and design can birth a new language while altering the paradigm of how one receives and conveys an idea. Using graphic design as a tool, …

A Digital Surreal, Michael Garel-Martorana

Masters Theses

As architects, much of our work lives within our various computer softwares. Rendering within architectural practice allows us to fabricate highly calculated, realistic representations of our work- a method by which we place ourselves within a space, inhabit it, or make it familiar.

“A Digital Surreal” seeks to explore how rendering can be employed as a space for the production of narratives that instead challenge our perceptions of space. Drawing from artwork from the Surrealist movement, the project considers the characteristics of work by artists including Rene Magritte, Kay Sage, and Conroy Maddox, amongst others, along with contemporary architectural precedents, …

Home: A Landscape Of Narratives ; Spaces Through Story Telling, Tania S. Estrada

Masters Theses

Adaptation looks different depending on the person. Regardless, people gravitate toward others whom share the same culture. What does this say about the way people find comfort? How does this a effect the way in which they adapt and to the culture, language, and dietary barriers it brings? This thesis looks at Latin American immigrants that come to this country in search of a more prosperous future. Many immigrants find themselves looking for spaces that allow them to find the comforts of their countries. Businesses created by Latin Americans for Latin Americans like markets, bakeries, and pharmacies; as well as …

Notes On Institutional Architecture ; Towards And Understanding Of Erasure And Conversation, Liam Burke

Masters Theses

Material Conversations /məˈtirēəl/ /ˌkänvərˈsāSH(ə)ns/ noun 1. derived from an early memory of forming relationships to objects, a way to understand the physical environment through a scaling down process that follows, but is not limited to, space, element, material. 2. the way in which material components are tectonically related 3. a process which would inform one to work with materials in a way which is conceptually informed by both aforementioned definitions 4. an integral aspect of architectural design, Material Conversations enable the architect to establish a language with which to relate to the components of their work, to better speak to …

Caregivers As Worldbuilders, Caitlin Dippo

Masters Theses

Caregivers as Worldbuilders explores architecture as the relationship between people and the space that surrounds them, looking to memorials, quilts, and forms of gathering to understand how communities use care to shape their built environment. A table was built to host gatherings over the course of the spring semester. Each week new prompts, props, and prosthetics transform the table to meet the needs of those who gather. With the table as a proxy, this thesis considers the in-between spaces that relate and separate us and speculates on how architects can work with communities to gain trust, listen to what is …

Cloak Wood, Thomas Brett

Masters Theses

Over the last two years, I have been developing films and video games that hybridise techniques of live action and animation. This has primarily been done by reconstructing and modifying scenes from 3D photogrammetric scans that I make of objects, people, and places, allowing me to assemble new, imaginary spaces informed by the actual architecture and dimensions of my surroundings.

The film Cloak Wood was entirety is shot on 16mm Kodak stock. The physicality of this analogue technique confers the modified virtual space and its inhabitants with the aesthetic integrity of the actual. The virtual space, constructed from real objects …

Remember Me: How We Can Modify The Home For People With Dementia, Wenjin Wang

Masters Theses

More than 50 million people live with dementia worldwide. For reasons of familiarity, affordability, and psychological comfort, the home is uniquely preferred by people with dementia (PwD) and their caregivers for aging in place. Ample studies show that built environmental features (e.g., furnishing, lighting, layout) influence the daily lives of PwD. These features can be modified easily and with fewer disruptions to daily life at home. However, most PwD and their caregivers usually have little knowledge of what can be achieved through simple interventions to environmental features.

There is a great need for an exhibition to explain the dementia-friendly home …

Whores, Sluts, And Bitches; The Perceived Limits Of Sexualisation And The Affects On Space, Chloe Jenny Bennie

Masters Theses

Perceived sexualisation changes depending on multiple factors, this thesis is looking specifically at how tools and accessories are used in conjunction with altering power dynamics within a carefully orchestrated space to change how a person wants to be looked upon.

In Service Of _____; An Inclusive Architectural Collage Practice, Blair Ramsey

Masters Theses

This Thesis asks these questions: who do we serve as architects, what does engagement with marginalized communities look like, what tools and methods are used to represent this process and these communities, and overall, how can architects create safe and inclusive space?

Collage is the critical mechanism for how this work is done and how I wish to practice in the future. Collage is used for documentation, representation, communication, and participation. All in the hope of designing a space with and for the queer community. Vital to the work is the idea of sampling from an existing image-based media that …

A Better City For Her: Design Safer Public Spaces For Women In The United States And China, Geruihan Xu

Masters Theses

Gender dynamics in public spaces are important issues to study. Here, I challenge the patriarchy in the built environment because it intensifies the oppressed status of women in modern cities. Listening to women’s concerns is the first step of doing so. Meanwhile, I am aware that different socio-cultural backgrounds would affect women’s attitudes, preferences, and other aspects of public spaces. Thus, the thesis will be discussed in the contexts of mainland China and the United States due to the limitation of my experience.

In this thesis, I want to find out what are the needs of women in public spaces …

Healing Through Architecture: Role Of Architecture In Promoting Healing In Cancer Care Settings, Vrindha Vijay

Masters Theses

Architecture creates the ambience and frame of mind for the carer, who then passes it on to the patients. It is the physical space that provides us to feel a certain way or experience a set peacefulness. Humans tend to react to spaces around them to connect emotionally and physically. And in that sense, Architecture is key. The focus, thus far, in most healthcare centers have been on clinical care rather than the soft services. Today, Architecture is striving to make a better environment that can contribute to patients’ healing, recovery, and well-being.

The goal of this thesis is to …

I Think We Have Some Connection Difficulty: A Review Of Architectural Vocabulary And Representation In Our Condition Of Remote Communication, David Waite

Masters Theses

The distance required to slow this pandemic created a need for Zoom technology in maintaining our economies of mental production and social closeness. Just like scientists examined the COVID-19 virus globally in its petri under the electron microscope, Zoom exposed our domestic interiors. This platform stitched together our personal existence into an infinite interior. To some extent this places Zoom attendees into a new space of vulnerability where the platform turns passive observers into active participants in a hyper self-aware virtual world where all are forced to share their fragile environments of everyday life.

While videotelephony software thankfully facilitated communication …

Inclusive Multi-Sensory Landscape: Directing Visually Impaired People In A Perception World, Tianqi Chen

Masters Theses

_{This thesis explored the use of inclusive landscape design to provide visually impaired people and normal people with enhanced multi-sensory experiences, and for recognizing space, navigating move through spaces. Inclusive design is human design, inviting people in and giving the communicative power to space through stimulating one’s intuition and senses by repetition, sequencing, or patterning in design that signals time, space, and movement through the layouts of walking trajectories between important nodes or places of refuge. Through the visually impaired issue studies, solutions, and methods exploration, I developed principles as a solver, applied them on one site to transform space …}

Translated Architecture, Ruiqi Zhang

Masters Theses

“Translated Architecture” is an unique psychological implication space that is translated from the spatiality camera language. Its significance lies in the ability to better approach and understand the psychological condition brought by the living environment.

To better understand what the camera language could lead us to, this thesis chooses to take phobias as an entry point to analyze the subtle changes in human psychology under different camera views.phobias like social phobia, Claustrophobia, Agoraphobia on a certain level is a form of mental illness that is related to architectural space. Take Claustrophobia as an example, Claustrophobia is a situational phobia triggered …

Living Under Surveillance, Fan Jia

Masters Theses

Our first impression about surveillance will always likely relates to with advanced technology. However, advanced technology is the means that only awakens our consciousness of surveillance but is not the birth of surveillance. It has been embedded in our lives in our lives all the time for generations. Before the age of technology blooming, surveillance was carried out by the human eye, and this mode continues always. My thesis starts from our daily relationships, and analyzes how surveillance happens around us within those relationships and people interactions.

This thesis proposes a surveillance system in a specific city: —Washington D.C., which …

Transform Through Architecture : A Journey Of Discovery At The Providence Place Mall, Haoning Li

Masters Theses

Changes can be subtle, but nevertheless they are ever lasting. When one encounters the other, the experience of the encountering changes us. It not only happens with people but also with spaces. Each space tells a story of it’s own, and when we encounter each space we are changed by it. Each space carries with it different imprint and shows different personalities. Therefore, when we encounter them, we are all listeners and transmitters to carry those stories onwards.

Seeing architecture as fertile and breeding ground to welcome, transmit and exchange ideas, the hidden potentials in common building types and structures …

The Official Showreel Companion To Framed Familiarity In 4 Acts : A Defamiliarization Of The Tropes Of Architectural Practice, Through An Expanded Frame Of View And Frame Rate, Julie Kress

Masters Theses

In the spirit of Resier and Umemoto’s Atlas of Novel Tectonics, this work does not propose solutions to a stated problem in the field of architecture. Instead it provokes an entry into subjects that are taken for granted, yet are in dire need of re-framing in a postdigital age of architecture.

This proposal for speculative architectures that are only possible through animation, is antithesis to the format of the printed book. The format of this document assumes that it is not viewed alone but is treated as a behind the scenes companion to the 3 minute showreel “Framed Familiarity in …

Distance Is A Place, Zhiqing Guo

Masters Theses

Distance is a Place documents a body of work and a process — a journey in translation, where a quality of feeling becomes an effort of physical capture in jewelry.

The desire to reveal how a deep responsiveness to the atmospheric distance of the sky is associated with an innermost nonverbal place of refuge motivates me to make perceptible this awareness for contemplation. Incorporating photographic images of the immeasurable dimensions of sky within translucent resin, a spatial distance collapses into wearable, tangible stillness to be worn on the body as an eternal present. 8