Architecture Commons^™

White Picket Possibilities: Socially, Economically And Environmentally Reshaping Suburbia, Brendan Carroll

Architecture Senior Theses

What does the future of suburbia look like? For much of its history suburbia marketed itself as a pillar of the American dream. While it could be argued that for many years owning a single-family home was an obtainable goal for most Americans, this is far from the case today. Suburbia has shifted from the housing type advertised for the masses to a housing type only obtainable by a fraction of Americans. Suburbia and the housing units within it do not match the social, economic, or environmental needs of today's society.

As the demand for suburban living remains at all-time …

Paradigms Of The Post-Natural: Depicting Alternative Futures, Andrea De Haro, Charlotte Bascombe

Architecture Senior Theses

Paradigms of the Post Natural is a thesis that utilizes imagery and storytelling to critique present practices of design which disregard the protection of our environment. We are interested in current environmental degradation characteristics of the era of the anthropocene where human-centric design methods have manipulated and exploited the ecosystem in which we coexist with other organisms as destructive pursuits of human development. Our inspiration developed from a shared interest in the conservation of non-human organisms. Specifically, we are interested in ecocides, areas in which animals are forced to adapt as they experience the human destruction of their habitat. Examining …

Toxic Glacier: Confronting Our Society's Consumerism Culture, Valeria Otero Lopez

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis is situated in the scenario of a dysfunctional society in which States refuse to cooperate with one another, and every State refuses to import NYC’s waste.

I’m proposing the implementation of a waste treatment plant that processes waste into a “Toxic Glacier” in Central Park, which was originally developed as a place to escape from the overcrowding and polluting streets. Because of the tremendous size this would conquer, there is nowhere in NYC to execute the project but the park.

This project uncovers the City’s hidden motives for concealing waste from its inhabitants. It questions the City’s intentions …

Threshold Tectonics: Reclaiming Space Through Geomorphological Design, Amreeta Verma

Architecture Senior Theses

This research posits that a revitalization of indigenous earth architecture practices in a contemporary context can mitigate the immense waste and embodied carbon in the construction industry while engaging practices of land return and reclamation. Locally sourced earth materials are the focus of this research because when utilized in a circular consumption cycle, they can be reused or returned to the natural environment. Designing with a temporal understanding of material decay, changing site conditions, and project life cycle reduces the impact of construction waste on the burgeoning issue of environmental degradation and resource depletion. Material experimentation is used to develop …

Linear Waltz With Nature: A Self-Supporting Infrastructure In Nature, Shangkun Zhong

Architecture Senior Theses

This project aims to create a sustainable system that addresses waste management issues in urban areas by examining the functionality of recycling infrastructures and how they can be integrated. The system will absorb waste and convert it into renewable energy to support a field station in Tibet, where self-sustainability is critical, due to the remote location. Architects often demonstrate their understanding of sustainability through various means such as integration, passive/energy-saving, and natural architecture. This thesis argues that a sustainable system such as CopenHill, can exemplify the combination of green-manifested design and recycle content as a sustainable cycle that supports human-nature …

Dissolve Of Living Space: Living Space Under The Development Of Metaverse, Wenting Feng, Nuo Lyu

Architecture Thesis Prep

According to our vision, in the future, after the use of the metaverse becomes popular, we will spend a lot of time working, living and playing in the metaverse. The space needed in reality will be reduced by the use of the metaverse, and public buildings will be retained or not depending on the nature of the building. Because the focus of human life shifts from reality to the metaverse, energy and material consumption will also be reduced, and environmental problems can be properly alleviated. The nature in the real city will also be expanded by the reduction of the …

Paradigm Of The Post Natural: Critiquing Capitalist Ideals Through Environmental Degradation, Andrea De Haro, Charlotte Bascombe

Architecture Thesis Prep

There is an unspoken value in the destructiveness caused by design that is exposed through the exploitation of natural resources. This thesis seeks to exemplify the aesthetic value inherent within these newly defined environments. Nature is a source for human consumption, and as such it has developed into a commodity. By now it should be made evident that humanity’s presence is everywhere. There is no ecosystem left unturned by human manipulation Iin this respect, nature is dead. Deforested sites of oil fracking leave mile long toxic ponds highlighting the destructive pursuits that capitalism creates. Chernobyl showcases how human errors in …

Tectonic Thresholds: Reclaiming Space Through Geomorphological Design, Amreeta Verma

Architecture Thesis Prep

This research posits that a revitalization of indigenous earth architecture practices in a contemporary context can mitigate the immense waste and embodied carbon in the construction industry. Earth materials are the focus of this research because they are locally sourced, abundantly available, and can be reused or returned to the natural environment, when utilized in a circular consumption cycle. Designing for reuse reduces the impact of construction waste on the burgeoning issue of environmental degradation and resource depletion.

The structural viability and environmental enclosure capabilities of soil throughout its lifecycle will be tested in different forms derived geomorphically from the …

The Ark: Sanctuary For Isfs, Zejun Sun, Wei Wei Li

Architecture Thesis Prep

The thesis is aiming to decrease the potential flooding damages to the ISFs, and a balance between the limited resources and high population density to relieve the flooding issues through the renovation and reconstruction of local churches in the Baseco Compound.

Flooding has become one of the most common and devastated issues in developing countries, and it is worsen by the housing crisis that lead to a formation of informal settlements with shoddy constructions and destabilized communities. What is an applicable approach to decrease the potential flooding damage to the ISFs? How to find a balance between the limited resources …

More Than Just A Fantasy: Literary Fantasy As An Architectural Tool, Kae Schwalber

Architecture Senior Theses

Fantasy literature world building can suggest and support alternative paths for architectural practice using the super stimuli of fantasy “otherworlds” to promote and create more “placed” spaces and improve the wellbeing of communities. According to Edward Relph, the United States has had an issue with “placelessness” since the 1950’s, where building typologies are nationally distributed and rarely localized. Literary Fantasy has created worlds so desirable that they have permeated into a multi-billion dollar industry that reaches past literature, making the consumption of fictional worlds a central behavior in modern societies. The cultural importance and success of the genre is due …

Terra Dispositions: A Lithospheric Investigation Of Wet-Matter, Alec Rovensky

Architecture Senior Theses

Human intervention of the landscape by damming, filling wetlands and over-extracting is resulting in the rapid perversion of water bodies through the desertification or flooding of terrain and the ensuing contamination of reservoirs. In turn, these changes are disrupting ecosystems, reshaping geological borders, and causing irreversible damage that poses a threat to clean water supplies. As humans exert agency over local hydrology, there is scarce consideration of the ensuing ecological consequences. This thesis aims to expose the ecological transformations of territories laced with human agency by examining the residues left by water in order to deviate from the misplaced nostalgia …

Contaminated Mycoscapes: Designing With Living Organisms, Maria Gutierrez, Elise Zilius

Architecture Senior Theses

The Anthropocene has stripped the planet of its resources, leaving behind an abundance of contamination. The built environment no longer meets the standards set by our turbulent planet. Humankind has lost the privilege of agency in design and construction. Construction methods have failed to evolve concurrently to the intense accumulation of waste; remaining firmly rooted in the materiality of the past, they have upheld architectural notions of stagnancy, cleanliness, and hygiene and ignore the rapidly changing conditions of the environment. This investigation uses contamination to fuel mycelial growth and construct emergent forms whilst executing remediation strategies for polluted sites of …

Semi Open Partitions: A Defense Strategy For Airborne Disease, Kerrie Marshall, Arik Palileo, Eric A. Schiff

SyracuseCoE Research Brief Series

This brief summarizes research on two measures that reduce the risk of transmitting COVID-19 from an infected person to a virus-free individual. Semi-partitioned spaces can reduce airborne disease transmission when combined with a proper ventilation flow pattern in a room. With advanced displacement ventilation risk can be reduced by at least 4 times.

Ventilation & Masks: Reducing Airborne Transmission Of Covid-19 In A Classroom, Eric A. Schiff

SyracuseCoE Research Brief Series

We've calculated the number of COVID-19 infections that will be spread from a single COVID-19 "superspreader" to students and teachers in a classroom shared for 4 hours in different ventilation and masking conditions.

How Natural Materials Affect Our Perception Of The Built Environment, Iryna Demianiuk

English Language Institute

Our daily life is shaped by the emotions we feel, and our emotions are highly dependent on the environment we live in. Those connections have been developing through the whole history of humankind, starting with the feeling of shelter near bonfires in caves. Today, we can discover neural responses to environmental conditions and even certain materials around us. Those findings have allowed architects and neuroscientists to work more closely together, and, through that collaboration, the new field of neuroarchitecture appeared. This relatively young discipline explores the way our brain responds to the environmental stimuli we are facing, and how different …

Turn Trash Into Treasure: Recycling Of Waste Building Materials, Xiaoyin Shen

English Language Institute

No abstract provided.

Architecture In Open World Video Games, Congshuo Zhang

English Language Institute

No abstract provided.

Reconsidering Black And Light: Black And Light Projects That Challenge Perception, Chen-Yang Chang

English Language Institute

No abstract provided.

Water-Infused Design: Two Contemporary Projects, Ziwei Zheng

English Language Institute

No abstract provided.

Intentionally Unsustainable Forms For Crisis Design: Planned Obsolescence, Daniel Hogan

Architecture Thesis Prep

The ShutDownDC protest that stopped traffic on Monday, September 23rd demonstrated a significant shift in the debate for climate justice. The movement targeted not only the culpable institutions but the physical infrastructures which both monumentalize and enable factors responsible for global climate change (in this case automobile infrastructure). This is a particularly relevant example of how built form not only reflects our cultural preferences for private transportation but also informs/enables the processes which are actively working against public good. In this example, road infrastructure is both a symbol and an active player in the game of continued environmental injustice.

This …

Zones Of Entanglement: Nigeria's Real And Imagined Compounds, Joseph Godlewski

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

This article is part of TDSR, Volume XXVII, Number II, 2017

From the article abstract: This article examines the architectural and discursive configurations of traditional walled compounds in Nigeria. It begins by discussing the spatial and social organization of compounds in different regions of the country, focusing on the impermanent structures of the Èfik in and around the southeastern port city of Old Calabar. It then examines archival evidence to highlight the ways that compounds have been rhetorically constructed by European observers and post-independence scholars. It concludes that a more productive reading results from understanding the compound as a zone …

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 Public Sky-Spacer, Piotr Jankowski

Architecture Thesis Prep

We have reached an era where architecture has to prepare for the alarming changes affecting our modern society. Predicted urbanization will lead to cities becoming denser and taller to facilitate the needs of housing and workspace for the growing world population. High costs of rent and scarcity of real state land in city centers will force developers to build skyscrapers. Taking into account the impact of larger populations, skyscrapers will have to offer more efficient spaces and follow strict environmental regulations while contributing to the production of energy and necessary resources. Focus on human comfort and sustainability will play an …

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 …

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.

The Burning Building | Fire As Place, Winnie Tu

Architecture Senior Theses

The importance of fire in human social evolution is widely acknowledged but the extent of its impact is not fully explored. Generally, it is connected to energy, light, purification, illumination, creation, destruction and metamorphosis. Fire’s paradoxical nature has built up many societies throughout human history and has been the primary social driver within communities. Due to technological advances, its energy has been transformed into a distant element which is being used discretely in industrial buildings, hidden under basements, or replaced by other forms of energy. Now, heat, energy, and light is readily available anywhere at any time, eliminating the biological …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …