Architecture Commons^™

Fluid Urbanism: Connecting The Tennessee River Mega-Region, John D. Koelsch

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

America's Oblivion: Preservation In The Age Of Erasure, William Dillon Dunn

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Urban Identity, Mustapha A Farrakhan Williams

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The New Parallel: Urban And Agrarian Political, Environmental, And Architectural Landscapes Of The Demilitarized Zone, Robert Vincent Truka

Masters Theses

North and South Korea share the most heavily armed military border in the world. Technically both sides are still at war dating back to 1950. The 38th parallel, also known as The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) is a 156-mile long by 2.5- mile wide border condition with over two million plus known landmines buried with-in its boundaries. The Juxtapositions of the financial, political, economical, and military modalities could not be more drastically different between North and South Korea. North Korea is a communist autocratic military dictatorship and has one of the worlds lowest Gross Domestic Products (GDP). South Korea is a …

Scruffy City, Variegated Spaces, Rare Places, Royal Moore Starr

Masters Theses

The general basis of this thesis is to provide a critical examination of city branding and its implications on the built environment. Geographically fixated upon on the city of Knoxville, TN, Scruffy City, Variegated Spaces, Rare Places explores a unique relationship between cultural identity and architectural form. This project is an attempt to understand and harness an allusive attitude that undoubtedly shapes the architecture of this city. Therefore, the project itself is an open-ended set of design operations that inherently challenge the nature of architectural process in an attempt to study and emulate scruffiness in the built environment.

The project …

Monumental Revival, Michael Brandon Litton

Masters Theses

The post-industrial era has left textile mills programless and isolated from their towns, leaving these monuments in ruination. The villages surrounding these mill have began to decay as a part of the process of the mill closing. In search of a thriving economy, inhabitants of the town leave for opportunity elsewhere. This thesis explores a method of reviving a mill town by re-adapting the textile mill and injecting a transnational economic system into the town.

Integral Perspectives, Henry Brian Cheek

Masters Theses

Integral Perspectives is a method to architectural design that encompasses four different approaches. The four approaches, or perspectives, I chose to focus on include: Cultural, Experiential, Performance, and Systems. Designing with each of these perspectives in mind, I intend to create a more holistic and integral design solution. My thesis explores this methodology using the affordable housing crisis in Nashville, TN.

The New Sub Urban, Brad Lee Herr

Masters Theses

By pairing the unique and varying physical conditions of open-pit mines with the contextual situations and issues that surround them, these often abandoned and overlooked gaps in the earth can be rethought as a new landscape for creating future infrastructures that uniquely address national and global issues that are likely to increasingly effect our world in the future. This thesis project aims to rethink and restore purpose to these numerous vacant gaps left in the earth to determine how their unique conditions can provide a greater benefit to society through adaptive reuse.

The Fabricated City: Created Energy Of The Assembled City, Julie Davenport

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Operational Jakarta: The Problem Of Representation, Kevin Patrick Jeffers

Masters Theses

As the twenty-first century unfolds with newly formed degrees of hypercomplex interactions and reactions amongst space, time, economy, politics, social dynamics, and cultural paradigms, we are observing new typologies of urbanism that are different in kind, rather than degree, from the previous “urban” upon which the vast majority of present theoretical and practical discourse has been based. The techniques, strategies, and methodologies of the twentieth-century no longer serve to adequately represent or to explain the phenomena of today’s incipient mega-cities. A new vocabulary must be developed. A new way of seeing is required in order to understand and therefor to …

Formal Displacement, Savannah Grace Dixon

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Gra[In]Vincible, Kimberly Ann Wojcik

Masters Theses

This thesis is about the stitching of a community back together at a scale that is appropriate to the existing demographics. The memory of place and time are still evident in the relics that are the Buffalo Grain Elevators; the only changing variable is the rate of population and affordability in the adjacent Old First Ward.

The economic downturn of big business and the havoc it wreaked on the worker community created a ripple effect in large enough scale to grab hold of an entire city. In an attempt to bulldoze rust covered structures and knock down abandoned homes rather …

Activating The Edge Defragmenting The City Of Atlanta, Allison Marie Summers

Masters Theses

Connecting the fragmented urban landscape through the tactical activation of the drosscape, “in-between” spaces, separating communities within the urban fabric.

American cities are currently experiencing a period of deindustrialization, factories are moving out of the traditional city center and into the suburban landscape, taking employment opportunities and people with them. The result is a horizontal urbanization that creates conditions of fragmentation and increased separation between communities within the city. Borders and boundaries between communities become increasingly more defined, generated by physical, geographical, political, social, cultural, and economic differences.

Strongly defined separations between communities within an urbanized area can bring to …

Urban Infrastructure Reconnection: Recuperating The Riverfront Of Cincinnati., Ethan William Keller

Masters Theses

Transportation infrastructure has created divides within cities, but as cities continue to grow again, these spaces can be recuperated, utilized, and integrated into the urban fabric to reconnect neighborhoods, engage people in urban culture, and insure long-term viability of cities. Cincinnati is a city that has been divided by convergent highways cutting the riverfront from the downtown and surrounding neighborhoods. These large voids of space must be activated to develop a reconnection that once existed between the city and its riverfront. Connectivity will create an abundance of pedestrian flow which will increase growth and economic opportunities for the city. Infrastructure …

River Machine: A Balcony For The City, Nicole Anne Drelich

Masters Theses

The city of Knoxville, as it is today, lacks a certain level of connection with the Tennessee River. The goal of this thesis project is to identify the source of development away from the river, and to design a waterfront intervention, which will reflect community goals, as well as pay respect to the factors that have driven the development of Knoxville in the past.

Through the study of Knoxville’s history, one can see a clear change in the geographical and social condition of the Tennessee River in Knoxville. Through the innovation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the riverbanks were inherently …

Contextual Typologies: Synthesizing Timeless Architecture Typological Details In The Classical Urban Fabric Of Charleston, South Carolina, Denver George Sells

Masters Theses

The purpose of this thesis project is to explore the creation of a methodology as a tool and means of making an objective analysis out of a subjective design issue. This thesis deals with public perceptions of architecture and design, specifically Clemson University School of Architecture’s new Spaulding Paolozzi Center in Charleston, South Carolina, designed by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture, and what ultimately led to its redaction from the Board of Architectural Reviewers in Charleston. In order to do so, case studies of other classical cities will be examined and compared to the historic urban fabric of Charleston, …

Culinary Biologique And Cartographic Anxiety, Adam Lamar Buchanan

Masters Theses

The 21st century’s most dominant characteristic, and greatest challenge, is the explosive growth of the world’s population. Swelling at an exponential rate, the increasing physical distance between the acts of growth and consumption yields an agrarian system that is highly unsustainable… a crisis looms in the future!

This crisis is most easily detected in images of the Earth taken from satellites. These recently recorded pixels of reflected light taken from the cherished Icarian vantage point have been acquired and perfected over the past five decades. Ultimately, these lightning speed revelations show patterns that emerge as broken relationships that can be …

Excess Capacity: Shared Space Possibilities In An E-Commercial Suburbia, Christina Lulich

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Berlin: Border Control, David Berry

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Community Identity: Place And The South Knoxville Waterfront, Nicholas Joseph Burger

Masters Theses

“With the loss of tactility and the scale and details crafted for the human body and hand, our structures become repulsively flat, sharp-edged, immaterial, and unreal” (Holl 29). Our built environment is full of constructs which are unsuccessful on a number of levels proving why it is critical to concentrate on a sense of place and identity. A great place is described as one where people gravitate towards, a place for everyone, something that is memorable, and a space which evokes a story (Placemaking Is...). South Knoxville, Tennessee, the selected site of this thesis, will test the concept of place …

Reconnecting The Urban Web: Chicago's Failed Olympic Hope, Eric Archer

Masters Theses

‘Towers in the park,’ a destructive urbanistic typology that gained notoriety with idealistic projects by Le Corbusier, are prevalent in American cities. This architectural and urban concept consists of mono-functional high-rise towers, typically residential, placed on a superblock of unprogrammed over-scaled greenspace. The original intention was to create order within the city and provide plenty of landscaping and urban space for the city’s occupants. Noble in goals, these mega-towers have been chastised for their lack of character, inappropriate scale, and the inability to create vibrant public space that promote interaction and community by creating an over concentration of segregated nodes …

The Role Of The Architect In The Process Of Development, Christopher Alan Owens

Masters Theses

Population growth and cars have caused cities to sprawl from their downtown cores, resulting in a landscape of low density building. Far too often the empty lot at the edge of the city or along a highway attracts the next opportunity for development, furthering the gap between residential and commercial zones. The profession of architecture recognizes that urban site selection and mixed-use programming is vital to the social and financial health of a city, though it typically only participates in the design of the building. However, the visionary training and practice of architecture places the architect in a unique position …

Network-Based Development In Chattanooga, Tennessee: Processes And Potentials, Kathryn Ansley Taylor

Masters Theses

Chattanooga is a city of networks. The goal of this project is to provide examples of how developers, by tapping into Chattanooga’s most vital networks, can create buildings that speak to the city’s unique character, build interest in the city, and foster a stronger future for Chattanooga.

Chattanooga has four networks that serve as its backbone. They are the Cultural Network, the Blue Green Network, the Fiber Optic Network and the Dwelling Network. These networks are linkages between people and places, bound by common hopes and affinities. They are platforms for social connection, economic growth and physical change.

Three developments …

Forgotten Infrastructure: The Future Of The Industrial Mundane, Whitney Ann Manahan

Masters Theses

The typical cycle of industrial use, disuse, and abandonment is no longer acceptable or feasible. This thesis investigates phased remediation and conversion of petrochemical structures and their respective sites with the intention of increasing both the socioeconomic vitality and environmental quality of the area.

The oil silo is an intriguing object and industrial artifact. Being close to one of these massive structures is captivating and there is something truly exciting and thought provoking about inhabiting a space that was clearly not meant for humans. These are qualities that provide opportunities to connect people with a site and create a place …

Layers Of Staro Sajmište [Re]Opening Dialog, Jared Samuel Wilkins

Masters Theses

This research analyzes and tests the application of a process driven memorial intervention on the contested territory of Staro Sajmište, Novi Belgrade’s former 1937 International Exposition Fairgrounds that was adapted into a concentration camp in 1941. Today, Staro Sajmište exists as makeshift living for an impoverished community. Traditional memorial and conservation efforts have been attempted on the site over the last 60 years; however, none have achieved an appropriate depth of impact. I propose to revisit Staro Sajmište through an intervention not recognized as a literal memorial, but rather as the transformation and re-appropriation of the urban fabric into an …

Constructing Terroir: Architectural Mitigation In Mono-Economies At Risk To Climate Change, Geneva Margaret Hill

Masters Theses

Climate change will have enormous implications for the future of architecture and design at all scales. Architectural discourse has recently focused mainly on preparing major cities to become the future sustainable centers of living for the world. Little has been discussed, however, about the future of smaller communities on the periphery and the implications of their loss to the diverse American cultural landscape.

Napa Valley contains many communities threatened by a changing climate. Napa Valley plays a major role in America’s culture as the heart of American winemaking. The success in Napa Valley wine is deeply rooted to the soil. …

Placial Identity, Garrett Keyes Nelli

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Dwell: Reinhabiting Elkmont, Joseph Wessels

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Integrating Engineering And Social Aspects In Selecting Stormwater Control Measures (Scms), Maudy Indriani Budipradigdo

Masters Theses

The Low Impact Development (LID) approach to stormwater management is rapidly becoming the required replacement for the traditional approach of development design, solely for peak runoff attenuation. Stormwater Control Measures (SCMs) used in LID designs are some combination of physical structures and /or agronomic practices designed to capture runoff, remove pollutants, promote groundwater recharge, and protect receiving streams from channel degradation. The LID approach has been studied and documented in many journals and design manuals, but we know of no comprehensive study that combines the engineering (hydrologic performance requirements) and social aspects (complementary requirements) of the approach. SCMs have historically …

A City Divided: “Fragmented” Urban Space In 20th Century Buenos Aires, Marianela D'Aprile

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.