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The Passing Intensities Of A Neighborhood. Sensing Atmospheres In La Boca, Gabriel Tomas O'Rourke

Theses - ALL

The neighborhood of La Boca, located in the city of Buenos Aires, is an urban space burdened with a story and a unique aesthetic that differentiates it from other barrios in the city. In 2022, I visited this area to walk its streets, with the goal of understanding what elements marked this urban area as a distinctive place in the city. Situated within the rhetoric of space and place, this study relies on the concept of atmospheres developed by Gernot Böhme to account for the way the experience of place is constituted by an interplay between bodies, materiality and spaces. …

Occupy, Nitya Charugundla

Architecture Senior Theses

Union Square, originally called “Union Place,” was a former site for public forum, parades, public addresses and much more. However, the newest design of the park that can be seen today has attempted to make a space that is far less conducive to public forum and assembly than it once was. This thesis seeks to change that and allow for Union Square, as well as a news media center, to be a vehicle for public forum once again. The public space will be used as a vehicle for different types of forums, protests, and even public address in conjunction with …

Continuous Interior Space Architecture, Natasha Liston-Beck

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis speculates a changed relationship between bodies and information access, mediated by an omni-orientable, continuous spatial information-interface. The closed world of the spacecraft is a digiphysical reality where these two spatial experiences are utterly entangled such that a person’s movements and engagement with and within this space is defined by the two simultaneously. In preference of depth and specificity of the thesis, this work is not focused on the mechanics or engineering of a spacecraft. But instead it focuses on the spatial and experiential environment, augmented with information.

Fantasy Park: Mode Of Reality, Sai Lyu

Architecture Senior Theses

In the book Privacy and Publicity, Beatriz Colomina (1994) states that with the development of railways and photography, travel culture - as the beginning of mass media - has changed the relationship between people and urban space, making the place into non-place. Place then becomes a commodity to be consumed by the masses, breaking the relationship between people and urban space into fragments, replacing the linear relationship that existed in the Renaissance period.

Moreover, with the beginning of mass media, advertising architecture has had a significant influence on the urban fabric and on the relationship between people and the urban …

Speculations On A City For Mars, Edouard Terzis

School of Architecture - Theses

This thesis proposes the reinterpretation of architectural forms as the index of the constitution of the idea of the city. “Speculations on a City on Mars” is paradoxical in a sense as it superposes both the managerial representation of a city, that is Zoning, along with the speculative aspect of an extra-terrestrial city.

Urban Amnesia, Teriya Lee

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis is a response to Kevin Lynch's claim that "in the process of way-finding, the strategic link is the environmental image, the generalized mental picture of the exterior physical world that is held by an individual." Specifically, the thesis deals with those parts of the urban fabric which are imageless - the unidentified, or, the forgotten. It asks the question: what can architecture do to clarify spatial identities? The thesis will explore Hong Kong's identity as it relates to memory and space.

Imaging The Near Future, Fang Fan

Architecture Senior Theses

Instead of critiquing the danger of globalization, it propose a rather positive and Utopian version of it. The role of architecture and infrastructure being ambiguous in a future world after globalization, in which infrastructure is heterogeneous and inhabits a global space.

Also it response to the issue of cultural identity in a globalized world, believing that technological interventions will not only adapt to the needs of traveling and migration for a dense population, but also making infrastructure as a space for entertainment and a place celebrates both global and local cultures in a constantly changing world.

Pedagogy, Social Transformation, And Space: Toward A Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy For Space, Derek R. Ford

Dissertations - ALL

Building on the work of Peter McLaren, Henri Lefebvre, and David Harvey, this dissertation develops a revolutionary critical pedagogy for space. I begin with a historical and theoretical survey of the roots critical pedagogy, a pedagogical orientation that is often called upon but rarely situated deeply. I then break down revolutionary critical pedagogy into seven components. I elaborate the dominant trends in the current social-political moment. I introduce two terms here, neoliberalism and the global class war. I argue that the former is a necessary but ultimately insufficient framework for understanding the present moment, and that the latter provides a …

Sights And Spaces Of Moving Memory: The Public Memory Work Of The Women's Rights National Historical Park, Alia Renee Bellwood

Theses - ALL

This project analyzes the rhetoric of the Women's Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, New York as it expresses the historical context and effects of the 1848 Women's Rights Convention. With an eye towards feminist possibilities, the project traces the politics of emphasis and erasure by accounting for material, spatial and visual strategies in the Visitor Center and historic buildings. I argue that the park influences and reflects public memory of the early American women's rights movement that has rhetorical implications for modern iterations of the movements that follow.

Alongside archival research, I critically analyze the experience of the …

Opp: Id, Marcus Johnson

Architecture Thesis Prep

Because embassies increasingly function as symbols instead of diplomatic outposts it is necessary to question their effectiveness as diplomatic tools in a global society. If the United States intends to maintain physical diplomatic outposts as part of its foreign policy, then it will require reducing the collateral that is associated with such dangerous missions. While security enhancements have improved the safety and welfare of the Foreign Service in the past, persistent attacks question the relevancy of this approach. Architecture and Urbanism should be included in as possible, if not probable and appropriate, solutions to this difficult problem.

Dead Space, Aimee Michele Hultquist

Architecture Senior Theses

Deadspace might seem like it would refer to a sequestered location, but it is more of an ephemeral idea. The universality of death as a condition of life means that deadspace exists across all cultures and even transcends human creation. Deadspaces can be for no one and for everyone, or they can be open only to particular constituencies. A cemetery may be open to everyone, or it may be accessible only to those who practice a certain faith; it may even be a place so feared that no one is to be there except for the dead. A nuclear contamination …

The Tectonics Of Turning The Corner: A New City Hall For Boston, Massachusetts, Hillary Barlow

Architecture Senior Theses

The corner is a unique architectural condition that serves as a rhetorical device through its role in the configuration of space. How architects "turn the corner" or the "problem" of the corner has long been rooted in architectural discourse however as Eisenman notes, "corners are elusive and thus rarely thematized in architecture. For example, when Rosalind Krauss said that architecture will always have four walls-that is, an enclosure-she never said that architecture has corners, either external or internal." The corner specifically can produce multiple layers of meaning since the corner can define form either as a series of edges, surfaces …

Transforming The City. An Ethnography Of Contested Public Space In Venezuela, Ana Servigna

Anthropology - Dissertations

My research falls within urban anthropology, as it examines how supporters and opponents of the Venezuelan government have manipulated symbols in attempting to control certain public places in Venezuela's capital city, Caracas. My thesis is that by using public places to advance their respective agendas, President Chávez' supporters and opponents have struggled for power and have exacerbated the country's social segregation, territorial division and political intolerance. My study reveals that despite its particular topography and socioeconomic structure, Caracas has a characteristic cartography of political segregation. This cartography has been created by groups of government opponents and supporters that want to …