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Articles 1 - 29 of 29
Full-Text Articles in Architecture
The Shenzhen Activist Program`, Hyunggyu Kim, Jae Hyun Kim
The Shenzhen Activist Program`, Hyunggyu Kim, Jae Hyun Kim
Architecture Senior Theses
There is a gap between being an architecture student in western countries and working as an architect in underrepresented communities. Architect Teddy Cruz defines the role of an activist architect as "expanded mode of practice", and the task of "deigning the protocols or the interfaces between communities and spaces".
This thesis contends that architecture schools need to continue to embrace the widely-accepted norm of studios studying abroad and working in an international studio. Current study abroad programs tend to skew towards being touristic field trips and there is not a curriculum or programmatic investment in cultivating relationships between the visiting …
The Foreign Complex | A Cross-Cultural Vernacular, Dexter Cicchinelli
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 …
Where Wellness Begins, Chelsea M. Wheeler
Where Wellness Begins, Chelsea M. Wheeler
Architecture Senior Theses
A public need for improved health has called into question the manner in which one's built environment has the ability to affect a person's health and well-being. Recent studies have revealed a correlation between health and residence, suggesting that the built environment has a significant influence on occupant health and well-being. As a result of such studies, Delos Living, a well-building consulting firm, has proposed a set of deign standards that can be used to promote occupant health. The problem with such methods is that there are processes of certification relying primarily on post-deign evaluations. This thesis seeks to align …
Imaging The Near Future, Fang Fan
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.
It's Not Easy Being Whole | Reevaluating The Relationship Of Part Whole In Pursuit Of A New High-Rise Vernacular, Josh Bransky
It's Not Easy Being Whole | Reevaluating The Relationship Of Part Whole In Pursuit Of A New High-Rise Vernacular, Josh Bransky
Architecture Senior Theses
Architecture has the power to structure societal relationships. Specifically, architecture's form can bring the balanced relationship between community and individual identity, as exhibited in vernacular single-family homes, to the housing tower. This thesis plans to achieve such a social orchestration through a nuanced understanding of formal part-to-whole relationships, or "differentiated" parts within the whole, exhibited in a 300' housing tower in Seattle, WA.
By carefully balancing the relation, material, scale, and form of each part, this project will achieve this difficult whole (of differentiated parts). Mining this middle ground will produce a housing tower in Seattle, which actively balances the …
Unreal Urbanisms | A User Guide To Engagement Gaming For Community Planning, Temitope Olujobi
Unreal Urbanisms | A User Guide To Engagement Gaming For Community Planning, Temitope Olujobi
Architecture Senior Theses
The virtual environment is the digital manifestation of user’s transnational image of the city. It is an image conceived through small scale and short term interventions that prompt experimentation and iteration. Its development is implemented solely through active participation, community engagement and crowd sourcing. Adversely, planning experimentation in the built environment is a climate that conceives slow, costly and often unimaginative progress. Unreal Urbanisms contends that cities in the built environment can use the User Generated image of city created in virtual environments to collaboratively reinvent and re-imagine the design of the urban environment. In the absence of reality (ie. …
Memory + Architecture | The Act Of Forgetting, Mariel Mora Llorens
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 …
Absorbency In Tidal Resiliency | The Thickened Pier, Shauna Strubinger
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
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
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
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 …
Phasing Permanence Through Flux, Estefania Maldonadov, Andrew Filkoff
Phasing Permanence Through Flux, Estefania Maldonadov, Andrew Filkoff
Architecture Senior Theses
The "post-industrial revolution" has, in its wake, given rise to a swath of cities suffering economic decline and social deterioration. These "shrinking cities" have experienced a loss in population to their surrounding suburbs and other dormitory settlements. Once thriving cities have been reduced to functioning as overdeveloped business parks where people come to work for five days a week - but then leave each evening to return to suburban ideal. It is unreasonable to assume that any masterplan alone can promote the future success of a shrinking city. Rather, this thesis contends that by dissecting the historical narratives and spatial …
The Seed | Urban Vertical Farming Germinated, Michael Lima
The Seed | Urban Vertical Farming Germinated, Michael Lima
Architecture Senior Theses
A city works as an ecosystem in many ways. However, we currently do not live within that ecosystem, as the difference between an ecosystem and a city is the waste output and food input . Nature and society do not exist independently because there are no spaces of nature unaffected by man. With this in mind we need to reestablish our relationship with nature. Architecture and engineering can be used to create buildings that will allow humans to turn cities into ecosystems. This thesis argues that Urban Vertical Farms will produce social and economic hubs that will be a new …
Redeveloping Commerce | Comuna 20 As The Commercial Gateway Of The City, Carlos Restrepo
Redeveloping Commerce | Comuna 20 As The Commercial Gateway Of The City, Carlos Restrepo
Architecture Senior Theses
Colombia has long been suffering a debilitating civil war. Lasting more than 51 years, this continuing conflict has brought suffering and hardship to millions of people. Indeed, countless civilians have been forcefully displaced from their rural homes into informal settlements on the outskirts of major cities. These densely populated, ad hoc constructions surround the cities as unstructured enclaves festering with crime and disease exacerbated by isolation and government indifference. The vast social, economic, and cultural divide between these settlements and the contiguous cities pose a major problem for contemporary Colombia that must be addressed. In spite of these conditions, the …
Philep | A Self-Sufficient Pod, Brenna Merola
Philep | A Self-Sufficient Pod, Brenna Merola
Architecture Senior Theses
Since 2011 civil war has erupted in Syria causing many Syrians to flee the county. About 9 million people have been internationally displaced causing disruption to the surrounding countries, which have had to create new accommodations. Primary issues have been shortage of basic such as shelter, food and water. Through analysis of disaster situations and refugee conditions, the types of infrastructural systems needed for survival can be better understood. This analysis can determine how to integrate systems into an architectural solution to this global issue: temporary housing pods.
Michael McDaniels, EXO Reaction Housing founder, has created a prototype of a …
China's New Weird, Bangyuan Shi
China's New Weird, Bangyuan Shi
Architecture Senior Theses
This thesis offers a critique of the diminishing communal life int he contemporary Chinese city which is created by the gap between large-scale master planning strategies and the contemporary need to focus on the individual instead of the structure of communities.
China's New Weird proposes an alternative to large-scale urbanism through the use of micro-urbanism strategies that preserve the relative scale and character of traditional urban settlements, like those of the "hutong", while also addressing the contemporary need to increase inner city population densities. The intention is to adapt the patterns of space and use that are found in these …
Two Lands, One System | Redefining The Border Crossing, Matthew Trulli
Two Lands, One System | Redefining The Border Crossing, Matthew Trulli
Architecture Senior Theses
The Israeli and Palestinian populations each have their own distinct infrastructural system, which operates independently and fails to connect the people in this region. This thesis contends that if a two-state solution is implemented under the guidelines of the 2003 Geneva Accord, new connections can stitch the populations of Israel and Palestine together through a reimagined border system.
These divisive infrastructural networks, which are a result of tense relationships, have also sparked increased violence throughout the region, particularly in Jerusalem. The French Hill, located north of the Old City in Jerusalem, is positioned at a critical point in the infrastructural …
The Ottoman Han: Recovery Of A Lost Typology, Asli B. Germerli
The Ottoman Han: Recovery Of A Lost Typology, Asli B. Germerli
Architecture Senior Theses
Developing countries around the world are coping with rapid population growth, the negative effects of globalization and the resultant political stress. Many of these cities have unique historical heritages and cultural identities that are being compromised by the monoculture and sameness of architecture that has come along with globalization. To preserve this historic fabric and cultural legacy, these cities must be willing to shape their future through self-expression driven by the local context. Yet, change is inevitable. The challenge is to find a balance between safeguarding the historical heritage while building new layers of history. In brief, the challenge is …
Hijacked | Reclaiming Legislative Loopholes, Lara Moock
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 …
Other Wildernesses, Other Realities | A Framework For Shrinking Cities, Alyssa Goraieb
Other Wildernesses, Other Realities | A Framework For Shrinking Cities, Alyssa Goraieb
Architecture Senior Theses
This thesis is an experiment to imagine the possible realities that emerge from a redefining of the "idea of wilderness".
Wilderness is an idea.
Its definition is slippery. It is neither a physical place nor a state of being (as the "-ness" suggests). Wilderness is a human construct defined by varying cultural and social attitude. This fluid meaning drove numerous paradigms throughout American history - from eighteenth century romanticism's sublime doctrine to today's environmentalism.
Inspired by past American paradigms, this thesis invents five other wilderness ides that exist as a parallel alternatives to our own. Each produces a …
The Internet Of Things User Interface | Navigating Physical And Virtual Information Spaces, Nhan Bui
The Internet Of Things User Interface | Navigating Physical And Virtual Information Spaces, Nhan Bui
Architecture Senior Theses
It is projected that the boundary between our physical and virtual environments will be further blurred through the emergence of the "internet of things" (IoT). The IoT is a network of physical objects embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity that enables its objects to collect and exchange information on the internet. The most prevalent example of IoT today is your mobile phone. The mobile phone is an electronic device with software that tracks your location via GPS and your preferences based on your interactions on the internet. The collecting and exchanging of information in today' centralized internet infrastructure …
A Mat Response To Deinstitutionalization | A Model For Spatial Medicine, Dominic S. Lipuma
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 …
The Synchronous City, Patricia Olivera
The Synchronous City, Patricia Olivera
Architecture Senior Theses
Architects’ conceptualizations of cities reference and reflect trends in contemporary culture. During the early 1900's, architects such as Ebenezer Howard, and Tony Garnier speculated on modernist visions of cities, while in the mid-late 1900's radical visions of cities by Archigram, and Archizoom emerged. This project will operate along the framework of previous visions of cities by architects and envision a city rooted on the use of digital information and communication technologies (ICTs).
In order to best engage the provocation of a city based on ICTs as the primary means of exchange and interaction between citizens (as opposed to cars, pedestrians, …
Never-Land | A Parasitic And Accumulative Approach To Urbanization In China, Xiaoyan Dong
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 …
Green Blot District | Considering Low Density Neighborhoods, Tom Arleo
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 …
Private Room Of The Wheel | A New Form Of Transient Dwelling, Kathy Teng
Private Room Of The Wheel | A New Form Of Transient Dwelling, Kathy Teng
Architecture Senior Theses
The cross-country highway and road trip are deeply rooted in the American psyche, supported by the rapid growth in ownership of automobiles by American families since the 1940s, establishing a sense of freedom and leisure in their mobile lifestyles. However, other highway users have less control and freedom over their daily routine. These users are part of a vast network of international commerce reliant on the long haul.
The time long-haul truck drivers are away from home is prolonged, with the end of each day spent sleeping in fixed truck cabins and eating at banal truck stops. “ ‘I can …
Incision Of Division, Nicoletta Kyverniti
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 …
Collaborating With Catastrophe | A User's Guide To Post-Apocalyptic Farming, Patricia Cafferky
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 …
New Beijing | A Renewed Vernacular, Bowen Victor Zhang
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 …