Architecture Commons^™

Traversing The Urban Landscape: Connecting The Pedestrian Grid, Carly Augustine

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that the advent of the super highway, reliance on the automobile and large scale infrastructure has further disconnected the shrinking city of Baltimore, Maryland by creating borders, barriers and vacancies within the pedestrian grid directly affecting the vitality of cultural street life, cohesion of communities and future densification."

The Overgrown Grid: An Alternative Zoning Proposal For The Island Of Manhattan, Thomas Day

Architecture Senior Theses

"This thesis proposes to restructure the primary agenda of the collective monument from a homogenizing force at the local scale, to an object celebrating diversity and multiculturalism. By establishing a continuous mass connecting and collecting the city's currently isolated collective monuments, the new monument will be adjusted to regain formal and cultural contrast to the urban fabric."

Technocarpet: Supporting A Culture Of Congestion, William Andrew Weigand

Architecture Senior Theses

"The TechnoCarpet is a public space sited in a future of resource scarcity, climate disruption, and urbanization. It provides support facilities and cultural amenities necessary to sustain super dense urban populations. I establishes an internal frontier for the city as a means to provoke density, by creating an escape from it. The TechnoCarpet is a model for parks in the 21st century."

Informal, Scott Reynolds

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that architecture can offer agency in new forms of urban relationships to engage the edge condition between formal and informal, critical to the success of today's in-situ slum up gradation and integration to the formal city. Dismantling the spatial segregation will socially, economically, and politically integrate the two cities for sustainable growth of the metropolis."

Intensity Without Density, Nicole Blasetti

Architecture Senior Theses

"Within the field of residual space, a reactive public infrastructure is the setting for intense public intervention."

Illegal Linkage: Transition Of Beijing Informal Economy, Wanjing Xiao

Architecture Senior Theses

"This project contends that the transitional urban fringes are places where the informal economy grows in the most spontaneous and efficient form. By investigating the transitional urban fringe, one can study its informal urban behavior at local and long-term effects, enabling the social awareness and political force to manifest in an informal linkage leading illegal economy towards legalization, while encouraging a new form of 'formal'"...

"This thesis proposes a statistic informality that is able to resist the clearance from urbanization. The new paradigm will be extracted form existing informality models acting as a field condition to bridge the formality and …

Corporeal Meeting Place, Brandon Maldonado

Architecture Senior Theses

"The modernist movement was able, through the industrial revolution, to eliminate the role of facade 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 separate 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" facade, a series of layered spaces serving as filtration' sidewalks, fences, plantings, yards, and …

A Sacred And Secular Landscape: Empowering Social Agency, Shreya Shah

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that landscape can provoke an idea for a productive, public space using the people of the city as social agents to create a sensitive rather than oppressive water remediation system. By inventing a program that uses landscape as a water remediation space as well as landscape as a religious and social space, the project will exhibit the idea that social agents can inform a change in the water pollution crisis."