Architecture Commons^™

In Search Of Play, Margaret Saunders

The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal

This thesis addresses the existence, inclusion, and access to play spaces in the built environment. It proposes that play is fundamental to the wellbeing of people of all ages, not only children, and analyzes how play spaces are or are not inclusive to people of all ages, then further addresses this in regard to gender, race, and socioeconomic class. This project presents the perspectives of social theorists such as Johan Huizinga, Guy Debord/ SI International, and Henri Lefebvre to analyze the role of space and social production of play. Additionally, it looks at historical case studies like New Babylon, Modellen …

Continuous Extremes: Architecture Of Uncertainty In Poland, 1945—, Cayce Davis

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

In this thesis, architecture situates between extremes. The dichotomies of destruction and construction, mobility and fixity, performance and reality, inside and outside, and form and time frame architecture and the processes through which it is made. The context is Poland in the fallout of the year 1945, when Warsaw’s unique, nearly total destruction and the ascendance of a new communist regime raised the political stakes of architecture. The thesis focuses on a cast of characters in architecture and related artistic disciplines—individuals haunted by the traumas of their own pasts, negotiating a Polish state that created oppressive limitations through artistic mandates …

Space-Praxis: Towards A Feminist Politics Of Design, Mary C. Overholt

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

Outside of the academy and professionalized practice, design has long been central to the production of feminist, political projects. Taking what I have termed space-praxis as its central analytic, this project explores a suite of feminist interventions into the built environment—ranging from the late 1960s to present day.

Formulated in response to Michel de Certeau’s theory of spatial practices, space-praxis collapses formerly bifurcated definitions of ‘tactic’/‘strategy’ and ‘theory’/‘practice.’ It gestures towards those unruly, situated undertakings that are embedded in an ever-evolving, liberative politics. In turning outwards, away from the so-called masters of architecture, this thesis orients itself toward everyday practitioners …