Architecture Commons^™

Adaptive Typologies For Permanent Crises: Options For Rehabilitating Aleppo, Katherine Barymow

Honors Capstone Projects - All

There is little doubt that the Syrian civil war has catalyzed what experts and onlookers now consider the greatest humanitarian crisis in the 21st century. Per the UNHCR, the UN Refugee relief agency supporting refugee camps across the globe, roughly half of Syria’s 22 million pre-war population has been displaced, most which have fled to neighboring countries of Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and beyond to seek refuge. 13.5 million of these people, whether unable to leave their homes or awaiting permission to do so, are in dire need of international support from non-for-profit relief agencies struggling to provide basic necessities of …

The Manifest Narrative, Kelsey Requeña Devries

Honors Capstone Projects - All

I posit that architecture can serve to expose the vital immigration, labor, and consumption processes underlying food production in the United States through a clear narrative made evident by techniques of sequence, mimesis, and composition in a functional monument containing an Immigration Advocacy Center, Community Garden, and Farmer’s Market for the city of Sacramento.

In architecture, narrative is the observation, interpretation, and implementation of ideas developed through stories. The architect formulates an observation about something in a society that exists or should exist in the form of a story, finds a time and place where the narrative is applicable, and …

American Picnickers, Yuxiang Luo

Honors Capstone Projects - All

This thesis investigates the eating practice of American commuters. The issue of food is addressed through a social lens, affected by spatial conditions. The project thus aims to reinvent the operation of roadside food business, through the design of a series of spatial conditions that activate new social relations.

Commuters’ eating practice is problematic; the drive-thru as a prevalent building and business typology has created spatial and social isolation for various parties in the society. The social isolation has two implications. On one hand, as drivers eat alone in the car, they are isolated from other eaters, thus degrading the …

2041: A Communal Life, Nathaniel Thomas Danciger

Honors Capstone Projects - All

I posit that an architecture of collective cultural spaces, shared human and animal habitat, and affordable local building techniques, implemented through the design of a co-housing community, would promote a collaborative and communal way of life in harmony with the natural landscape and offer a model for the future development of former agricultural and suburban sites in a manner preferable to the current practices of the American suburb. This project is concerned with redefining the way that people in the United States will occupy rural landscapes in the future. The site for this new co-housing model is a field outside …

Five Rings To Rule Them All / Olympus The Architecture Of The Olympics & Global Media, Harsha Royyuru

Honors Capstone Projects - All

900 million people across the globe tuned in to watch the London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony on television. The International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) own broadcasting division circulated over 100,000 hours of coverage to respective national networks, extending the breadth of the Olympic telecast into every one of the 204 participating countries. At the conclusion of the Games, more than 1 billion views had been recorded on NBC’s YouTube webpage specifically designed for Olympic coverage. In a time when occupation of space via digital media is the preferred method of experience, what is the agency of the architect? Stadiums once designed …

Engaging Holistic Health Through Active Design In Public Space, Alec J. Hembree

Honors Capstone Projects - All

The design proposal for a health center and urban network of active pathways in Pittsburgh, PA is the cumulative result of two semesters of research and a partenership between myself and Emily Sholder (non-honors; B. Arch. May 2014). The ideas behind the research and design work included within originated from the pressing need to address physical health issues, educational shortcomings, and community disparagement present in many cities in the United States today. By addressing these issues at the scale of the individual, the school, and the urban environment through design in public space, we feel that architecture can empower people, …

Representing Rurality, Carolina Esther Jimenez

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Architecture is a system of representation. Architecture’s power is that through representation we may change previously constructed conceptions and misperceptions, and ultimately it can transform patterns of spatial inhabitation. Through words, images, drawings, and built work, we define modes of experiencing space. This project seeks to redefine Nebraska as a territory of critical social, political, economic, and physical importance through architectural representations.

The Knowledge Accident Situating The Built University Within The Virtual, Alanna Beth Rosenblatt

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Abstract

The increasing un-sustainability of the built university and the rise of the apparent mass democratization or synchronization of higher education through the virtual Massive Open Online Course [MOOC] is occurring concurrently with the mutation of the historically grounded Accident into the Knowledge Accident. The standardization of higher education through the MOOC has created the conditions for the Knowledge Accident, the “integral accident”, of the built university. This is where we find the present state of the university, in a moment of crisis grounded in unconstrained "progress".

The current form of the MOOC, begun in 2011, has expanded and evolved …

The Regional Exchange: From Main Street To Shopping Mall To App Market, Chris Depalma

Honors Capstone Projects - All

The heart of our existence lies within regions. Loosely defined, these territories are defined by what we do, not by what we call them. It is where we live, work, shop and socialize, characterized by an infinite multitude of interactions with other people and environments. The concept of “regionalism” is best described as a set of overlapping factors that together characterize the shared interests and dynamics of its people and environment, whether social, cultural, ecological or something else. This dynamic, constantly-changing overlap is most apparent at the center of the region, and least so at its edges.

Regionalism is especially …

Fun-Ctional Mega-Structure: A Formula For What Is Beyond Necessities In East Asian Cities, Sooji Jung

Honors Capstone Projects - All

No abstract provided.

Corporeal Meeting Place: The Racialization Of The Suburban Demographic, Brandon Lee Maldonado

Honors Capstone Projects - All

The Modernist movement was able, through the industrial revolution, to eliminate the role of façade as load bearing member, fetishizing transparency. However, this new preeminence of visuality was not applicable to the suburban home, with its predisposition toward the creation and control of privacy. What separates the suburban condition from the urban, in addition to the role of the single-family home as purchasable symbol representing an ideal, is the front yard. Instead of a simple A-B division across a singular surface, the yard creates a “deep” façade, a series of layered spaces serving as filtration; sidewalks, fences, plantings, yards, and …

Technocarpet Supporting A Culture Of Congestion, William Andrew Weigand

Honors Capstone Projects - All

No Abstract

Modus Vivendi: Ecological Intervention In The Future Korean Dmz, Sunchung Christine Min

Honors Capstone Projects - All

The demilitarized zone between North Korea and South Korea has been absent of any human development for 53 years. When the reunification between two divided nations occurs in the future, the land that stands as a buffer zone will become of interest to many as a potential open site for the beginnings of a new urban city, industrial complex, consumerism, and massive infrastructure. In other words, the DMZ is most likely to be consumed by its neighboring urban cities to meet the immediate needs of urban development and growth. However, it would be a shame if the last untouched landscape …

Fast/Fresh Food: Feed Syracuse Communities, Dorothy Ann Buttz

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Industrial agricultural practice coupled with urban planning and infrastructural development over the past century has placed an unfair environmental burden on low income urban communities across the United States of America. As Majora Carter explains in her 2006 TED talk titled “Greening the Ghetto,” race and class correlate directly with the availability of parks, space and quality of public programming, as well as proximity to undesirable things such as highways, dumps, power plants, distribution centers etc. Furthermore, the development of said highways, distribution centers and the like has precipitated the exodus of economic opportunity including healthy food programming from the …

Infrastructured: Opportunistic Infrastructure, Urban Revitalization, And Socioeconomic Reconciliation At Boundaries In Downtown Syracuse, Ny., Nilus Klingel

Honors Capstone Projects - All

The contention of this thesis is that large-scale infrastructures, such as highway systems, energy networks, or water supply complexes – as well as more abstract infrastructures, such as the infrastructures of capitalism or mercantilism – have, as the ‘harbingers’ of Modernity, an indelible impact upon the lives of the human beings who exist under their influence. Eradicating the traditional way of life that preceded them, these structures provide only one point of reference: the unknown future, in which the human struggles to find an identity.

Recent recuperations of infrastructures illustrate how the transformation of former agents of alienation can build …

Architecture For Disparate Communities In Transitional China: Urban Housing Stitch For Chinese Migrant Workers And City Dwellers In Rapidly Urbanizing Cities, Jennifer Hoi Ling Ha

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Problem:

Two housing types in China’s urban cities serve two specific demographics, the city dweller and the migrant worker. The high-rise and the urban village reside on the same block of land but cannot coexist. In order to save the urban villages from being demolished and to keep the migrant worker population within the city, there needs to be a more appropriate and aggressive housing concept to address China’s “changing contemporary social reality” between the two demographic.

Methodology:

The first step is to understand the two typologies of housing. Through the study of migrant housing typologies in different major …

Conspicuous Space: Parking Lot Suburbanism, Ian Nicholson

Honors Capstone Projects - All

What can be accomplished without a car? In a city: everything. In a suburb: nothing. Without a car, one cannot escape the city. Without a city, one cannot escape the car. Neither city nor suburb is an ideal habitat. The city has no nature. The suburb has no culture. What’s good about the suburbs over the city? According to economics: houses.

The American dream has long been “one’s own house with a private yard” (Nelesson xi); an acre and a mule for every free citizen. But this dream has created distance; a nightmare of endless commutes and oil addiction. What …

‘Capital’ City: Creating An Approach To Urban Development In A Monumental City, Lindsay H. Davis

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Washington DC is the political capital of the country, nestled within a working city. It is under international scrutiny everyday, acting as the face we show the world. A recent development in the center city showed the world our view on future

urban development, as the historic Chinatown was completely demolished to make way for new condos and a convention center, leaving a single street for nostalgia. Is this how we should think about our cities futures? As architects, we often become obsessed with the details of our designs, forgetting the larger forces that impact these projects, or that they …

Urban Fabrication: The Architectural Heightening Of The Urban Tactile Sensibility A Fiber Arts Fabrication & Exhibition Center In Dublin, Ireland, Elizabeth Fallon

Honors Capstone Projects - All

The discipline of fiber arts has been in existence since the beginning of civilization to produce both functional equipment as well as aesthetically driven art pieces. The craft, at times highly specialized, often produces elements at the scale of the human body, due to the personal level by which fiber artifacts are produced. The making of artifacts and implementation of fiber art strategies have simultaneous cultural, environmental, formal, and gender-related relationships and implications. The design, construction and experience of buildings and inhabitable space at all scales can benefit from these relationships.

It is the contention of this thesis to merge …

Increasing Stimulation | Decreasing Progression: The Built Environment’S Impact On Alzheimer’S And Dementia, Tracy Chin

Honors Capstone Projects - All

With people living longer lives, the population of elderly is increasing at significant rates. Currently 5.3 million suffer from Alzheimer’s in America and 35 million people worldwide. The disease is one that deteriorates brain cells which in turn affects everyday thinking, behavioral problems, and results in a reduced mastery of one’s environment. The current typology is one that has been designed along the same premises of medical institutions and hospitals. The configuration results in narrow corridors and confined, unlit spaces that lead to disorientation and fear—exacerbating both physical and mental symptoms of the disease.

In addition to memory, sensory losses …

Activating Infrastructure, Joanna T. Myers

Honors Capstone Projects - All

“The City Implant is an urban design project that can be used to strengthen an existing center or create a new one. It is a spatial and programmatic upgrade that gives an area the status of a center or increases the density of an existing center. Rather than intervening in undeveloped land, a City Implant should be a transformer of empty land and even under-exploited traffic junctions. A City Implant should describe the quality of centrality itself.” Alex Wall “Boomtown v. Regiocity: Thinking and designing or the Networked City Region.” (Almy, 286)

Transportation infrastructures across the United States create issues …

Urban Farming Mumbai, Ankur Patel

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Abstract not included.

Green | Instruction, Christine C. Ritson

Honors Capstone Projects - All

If society shows the need for a re-engagement with its surrounding nature in order to develop conscious environmental decisions, then a pre-kindergarten through fifth grade school, with the careful design and testing of materials, courtyards, and circulation strategy, will be the vehicle through which everyday decisions are taught at the earliest age.

Problem | Statistics | 20 percent of Americans go to school every day, equating to 55 million students and nearly 5 million teachers and staff. More than 25 percent of those students and teachers are going to school in inadequate facilities where their health is at risk.[1] …