Architecture Commons^™

Fluid Futures: The Revitalization Of Yangzhou Through Its Historical Waterways, Feiyang Wu

Masters Theses

In China, cities such as Yangzhou, which in pre-modern times played central roles in the political, cultural, and economic functioning of the country based on their geographic location, proximity to water-based trade routes, and connections to the imperial court, are today facing uncertain futures due to waterways no longer being critical to trade, and government-driven development being focused on first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou. With this, the working-age population migrates from smaller cities toward these urban giants, leaving behind aging relatives, a less robust and diversified economic base, and few attributes other than cultural tourism that …

Living Surfaces, Ryan R. Sotelo

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the role of architectural surfaces as a staging ground for personal objects that carry with them aspects of memory, narrative, and personal histories. The lived experience within architecture is often dismissed with the architect’s role in a building’s life ending at its physical conception. Architectural representations are often devoid of time, motion and personal histories in sake for spatial clarities. With precedent representations such as period room drawings, motion studies, and photographic guns, there was an interest in developing a representation to better examine the lived experience within our architecture.

By incorporating personal testimonies, accurate bedroom documentations …

Detroit Jazz Geographies: Marronage And Speculative Urban Futures, Denzel Amoah

Masters Theses

The Detroit Jazz Clubs of the 1920s-1960s existed as an emblem of marronage, or as an escape from a colonial world, becoming a spot of refuge and freedom for Blacks living in Detroit. There they were able to create a subculture that was antagonistic to hegemonic norms.

Currently, Detroit is on the precipice of a new development plan, titled ‘Detroit Future City” which aims to revitalize the city through the bolstering of industrialization and commerce. The history of Detroit has shown the dangers of what industrialization can do and alternative modes of development should be explored.

To honor the legacy …

Conspicuous Repair: Drawing Attention To Brokenness In Public Landscapes, Ashley Pedersen

Masters Theses

Repair, as a design provocation, encourages material conservation, hands-on engagement with materiality, and evaluation of maintenance routines all of which contribute to a model of sustainability that values a circular economy and degrowth. Through visible repairs that focus our ongoing attention on brokenness, repair has the potential to illuminate, and start to address the systemic causes of brokenness. In this way, repair can be a catalyst for increased stewardship of a place.

Conspicuous Repair: Drawing Attention to Brokenness in Public Landscapes investigates clay as a suitable material for the repair of masonry in urban landscapes which has the potential, through …

The Runis: How Can Social Remidation And Environmental Remeidation Be Linked Throguh Architecture?, Tayu Ting

Masters Theses

This thesis delves into the integration of social and environmental remediation through innovative architectural strategies, focusing on the adaptive reuse of an abandoned copper smelter plant in New Taipei City, Taiwan. The project confronts the site’s industrial legacy by deploying contemporary programs that cultivate a productive, sustainable, and community-oriented environment. A pivotal aspect of the redevelopment is a phytoremediation system utilizing wetlands to purify toxic metal-contaminated water, thus restoring ecological integrity and providing clean water to the community.

At the heart of this transformation is the artistic integration of glassmaking, where flowers and plants that have absorbed metals through phytoremediation …

Design With Decay, Charlotte Wyman

Masters Theses

The following project is an exploration and argument for greater acceptance of material change. The argument finds its narrative through the story of five historic coastal properties in Rhode Island that have become increasingly threatened by rising sea levels.

Despite undergoing foundation upheaval, relocation and leveling onto stilts, all but two homes remain intact. This project is a proposal for an alternative past in which the homes are not moved or raised, but instead ushered into states of decay that challenge our notions around sub-natures and their viability.

A Dispatch From The Site Office, Adrian Pelliccia

Masters Theses

In the middle of the 20th century, a rare confluence of political, economic, and cultural forces aligned to produce a slate of highly progressive policy and design agendas for social housing in the United Kingdom. A widely shared utopian ambition to house all people with dignity was made real by a motivated government and its well-resourced planning and architecture offices, tasked with bringing this vision to bear in the built environment. In London, the London County Council Architect’s Office and later local council-led architecture and planning offices were at the forefront of designing and delivering high quality, formally ambitious housing …

Dreampool, Xia Li

Masters Theses

DREAMPOOL is a spatial experience of virtual architecture based on the public bathhouses of northern China during the 00s - 10s. It focuses on the significance of nostalgia and the connection between architectural space and the spiritual world. The dreampool began with my interest in Bathhouse and Dreamcore videos that were popularized on the Chinese internet during the pandemic.

Like every nostalgia trend emerging, such as steampunk, some young Chinese people are starting to miss their childhood life around the year 2000 at a time when they are losing their public space and socialization. Public bathhouses, as a collective memory …

[De]Composition: Grounding Architecture, Skylar Perez

Masters Theses

This thesis forages through a multitude of entangled scales that utilizes geologic time, water bodies, farming systems and fungal networks to reorient how we as humans herald the vital connecting force that is SOIL.

Reimagining how approaches to soil care could alter visions of innovation and land management in the arid region of Llano Estacado (Lubbock, TX).

The research embraces soil a place full of life and microbial activity that systematically contributes to local ecosystems and planetary health.

How do we build soil?

Uncovering Emotional Contamination: Five Sites Of Trauma, Abigail Zola

Masters Theses

“Emotional contamination,” describes residual feelings associated with a space where a negative or tragic event occurred to an individual or group either personally, historically, or politically. Emotional contamination affects people’s associations with place and informs their willingness to spend time in them. This project considers a set of design principles rooted in uncovering and acknowledging the lifespan of a site, and considers how this acknowledgment can exist as an urban system rather than an individual architectural artifact. My thesis work analyzes five case studies in Berlin where political and economic factors determined the result of intervention, and how these sites …

Translational Placemaking: The Diasporic Archive, Alia Varawalla

Masters Theses

Globalization and mass migration has propelled a hybrid existence, as individuals that occupy multiple geographies we live in a constant state of translation. Our museums and cultural institutions are in opposition to this; static, preserved and de-contextualized. At the intersection of printmaking and architecture, this thesis proposes a living archive to document the collective migratory journey across sites, materials, and hybrid identities. A network of centers for knowledge sharing and production centered on India and its diaspora. As art practices and people migrate, cultural production evolves with its context, gaining new meaning as it changes hands generationally and globally.

Ritual As Design Gesture: Reimagining The Spring Festival In Downtown Providence, Wenjie Wang

Masters Theses

Rooted in the belief that architecture should transcend mere functionality and embrace the realms of emotional profundity, experiential richness, spiritual resonance, and poetic expression, this thesis aims to evoke potent emotional and spiritual connections within the human psyche. My thesis, taking advantage of ritual practice, employs an architectural perspective to examine the temporal and spatial aspects, utilizing ritual practice as a design gesture to generate a platform for social relationships outside the existing community.

Focusing on the Chinese diaspora communities in Providence, my thesis reimages the long-lost Chinatown of Providence and design both ephemeral and enduring architecture with scenes of …

Myths, Legends, And Landscapes, Oromia Jula

Masters Theses

The concept of myth-making in architecture involves the use of narratives, symbolism, and cultural references to shape the meaning and experience of built spaces. These myths hold significance beyond the distinction between fiction and reality; they exist to provide explanations and hold great influence over our lives. Understanding a place and its identity requires an exploration of the narratives and beliefs associated with it, as they directly shape the physical environment. By embracing and incorporating these mythologies, designers and planners can create meaningful and authentic spaces that resonate deeply with people.

Communities, being socially constructed, rely on unifying narratives that …

Tracing As Process, Lesley Su

Masters Theses

Tracing is a way to observe, document and translate, to be anchored in the physical working, to find personal occupancy in the built environment.

By establishing one-to-one relationships with the physical context, tracing enables us to comprehend objects in multiple dimensions. Through tracing, we can explore how two-dimensional drawings can be transformed into three-dimensional objects, and vice versa, objects can be documented through drawing to capture the essence of reality.

Based on materials and motion, research on tracing techniques guides me into how tracing could act as a process of art and architecture practice.

Decolonial Perspective On Fashion And Sustainability, Haisum Basharat

Masters Theses

The fashion industry has long been criticized for its exploitative practices, cultural appropriation, and detrimental impact on the environment. To address these challenges, there is a growing need to adopt a decolonial approach that acknowledges the historical injustices perpetuated by colonial systems and centers the voices, practices, and traditions of marginalized communities. This abstract presents a model that integrates decolonial principles into the fashion industry while incorporating traditional textile practices to promote local autonomy, cultural sustainability, and mitigate climate change.

Liquid Border, Yingfan Jia

Masters Theses

A River is a mighty and constantly-evolving force, leaving behind an intricately designed and constantly changing system. Not just a river, the Rio Grande stretches all the way from Colorado before intersecting with the US-Mexico Border in southern Texas - a point where the powerful forces of nature now merge with a clearly-defined political boundary. The outcome of this is a unique ecological niche, which may often go unnoticed despite its distinctiveness.

Texas is famous for its farms and ranches, and the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas was once an agricultural hub. However, urbanization and the depletion of water …

You're Making Me Sentimental, Chris Geng

Masters Theses

My project is a personal search for a different way to see the footprint we have left on the landscape. A way of seeing that finds potential in existing buildings without placing the building in the background, that instead engages sentiments in order to approach reuse as an act of layering that retains the memories of before. I went about uncovering the memories of a site through film photography, a process equally rooted in nostalgia and sentimentality. These images attempt to capture the beauty of melancholy and in turn, ask the architect and audience to slow down and contemplate as …

Garden Etiquette, Kai Wasikowski

Masters Theses

Garden Etiquette is an ongoing project concerned with landscape photography, environmental conservation, and the way they have both served the settler colonialist agenda. I focus specifically on the conservation ideologies shaped in New South Wales (NSW) Australia and New England, United States of America (USA) in the late nineteenth century and the settler visualities that underwrote them. Both countries’ histories were marked by photography and conservation’s common function of mythologising land as empty space—to be invaded, extracted and occupied, and wilderness—to be territorialized and protected, albeit, in distinct ways.

With British, German and Polish settler ancestry, born and raised on …

Nature As Material, Time As Tool, Chuchu Chen

Masters Theses

No building stands forever. Over time, the natural environment acts upon the outer surface of the building, leading to the failure of materials and the final dissolution of the structure itself, leading to ruin. In order to prevent this or retard its occurrence, we constantly maintain and renew the things we build. Nature seems to stand in opposition to architecture. The passage of time is constantly subtracting from the building. However, what differentiates nature from architecture? This thesis questions whether these two are not opposed, but on a continuous spectrum. Approaching the building as part of the overall environment that …

A Day Stood Still, Yuting Sun

Masters Theses

The Brooklyn Navy Yard is an important industrial historic site in New York City. It was established in the 1810s as a private shipyard and became a military property in the late nineteenth century. It provided significant production capacity for the Pacific battlefield during World War II. After the war, the entire campus closed in the 1960s as military orders declined and transportation changed. The Brooklyn Navy Yard was later sold to New York City and repurposed.

After the city government took over the park, unlike other industrial sites that were developed as real estate, manufacturing is still the main …