Architecture Commons^™

Adaptive Layers: Preservation In High Speed Urbanism, Yuanyue (Alex) Chen

Architecture Senior Theses

With a population density of 20, 191.5 people per square mile and 279 square miles of land, Singapore is the world's third densest country. One hundred percent of the population lives in an urban area. Every year, the population increases by an average of 100,000 people, while land shrinks due to rising sea levels. For Singapore, the only option is densification. Singapore's historical identity is often secondary to the pragmatic need for densification.

In a city built in 30 years, the rapid rate of modernization has created a disconnect between our historical background and architecture today. Buildings in Singapore have …

Mediating Propagated Consumption: Integrated Shielding For A Wireless World, Olivia Humphrey

Architecture Senior Theses

Manifesting architecture in the physical realm and using simulation technologies that can model specific spatial or programmatic adjacencies will both influence the way we design material performance in response to electromagnetic radiation (EMR). The project intention is threefold: to measure, shield, and visualize, mediating propagated consumption. Design and data visualization strategies used by architects can convey social, medical, and environmental messages about the impact of how information is stored and accessed. These messages inform both the occupant and the designer. The college campus is becoming a breeding ground for wireless devices, from academic buildings to residence halls. Growth in residential …

Reconceptualizing The Urban Artifact, Ricardo Rodriguez Huerta

Architecture Senior Theses

This is a study of the architectural and historical construct of the Urban Artifact. For the purposes of this exploration, an Urban Artifact is to be understood as the physical manifestation of the city and its collective memory. It is the product of the history and character of its place and the embodiment of an idea of its type and the memory of its lineage. In contrast to the fixed intention and permanence of a monument, an Urban Artifact has its own autonomy and value gained over time until it ultimately becomes also identified as a monument. These concepts, defined …

Paintings Without Frames: The Role Of Augmented Reality In Art Galleries, Laura Clark

Architecture Senior Theses

Art and architecture define one another; the way we can move through an art gallery is defined by the architectural space that has been created, but the actual direction of travel is dictated by the art itself.

This thesis questions both architecture's role in an art gallery and the role of technology, which is changing our perception of space. Augmented reality can be used within the art galleries as a way to provide context, to distort and add to the perception of artworks, as a means of way-finding, and as a tool to allow visitors to curate their own gallery …

Modern Chinese Architectural Restoration, Tengkui Xie

Architecture Senior Theses

All over the world, there are always buildings to be built and buildings that become old. Should buildings that catered to older needs but are now obsolete be torn down and replaced with new buildings or can we do something to balance the value of the present and the past? All buildings have historic and aesthetic values of their own times, so it is not wise to wipe them out of history completely. It would be better to preserve, restore and reuse them. Restoration has a long history in the West and since the beginning of the 20th century there …

Public Space With Character: A Late, Late, Entry- Chicago Library Competition, Kokeith Perry Ii

Architecture Senior Theses

The city of Chicago has a complex relationship with the aesthetics of civic monuments and infrastructures. The cities most canonical projects validate its apparent biases - an oscillation between iconic modern and postmodern figures proliferate the urban fabric. The dynamic between these two paradigms creates a complex relationship between architecture, urban space, and the public mirroring the cities longstanding and complex history of segregated urban space and peoples. This project draws precedent from the format of the 1980 Stanley Tigerman exhibition Late entries to the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition, a then radical competition set to reinvigorate the discipline the way …

Sinoconn: Merchandising Of Architecture And Rearmament Of Labor, Furui Sun

Architecture Senior Theses

The project is situated in the context of contemporary China, where tremendous production power and a huge labor force have been accumulated through decades of rapid economic growth. In recent years, China's persistent growth has begun to slow, which challenges the administration with an imminent socio-economic crisis and the potential for a massive scale of surplus capital and its consequences. This conflict emerges out of the complementary "inner connection...between the developments of capitalism and urbanization" identified by British-born Marxist scholar David Harvey. Such a problem and its resolution can be seen in France in the mid-19th century right after an …

Encapsulated Fantasy:A Dystopian Future Of Segregation By Technology, Shihua Xuan

Architecture Senior Theses

Objects...previously only available through interpersonal relationships, such as daily food and sexual partners, can now be obtained extremely easily with the help of fast food and sex industries without any troublesome interpersonal relationships. At this point, it can be said that our society has been constantly moving towards animalization... - Azuma Hiroki, the post-modernization of animalization: Japanese society in the eyes of the otaku

In an era of losing the grand narrative and the development of technology in Japan, many people no longer search for life's meaning, easily amazed by superficial products created by the capital market. Desire describes a …

Mirage: Architecture's Confounding Experiences, Nuofan Xu, Ziyao Zhang

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis explores experiences created from mixing architectural elements with projections, in order to make projections melt into architecture as an inseparable element. By proposing an architecture that integrates the effects and infrastructures of digital displays at the starting point of the design process, the project seeks to explore the ability of digital displays to blur physical boundaries, to apply temporality on eternal structures, and to isolate the exterior from the interior.

The project uses mirage, an optical phenomenon that produces illusory images of distant objects, as an analogy to speculate about digital displays in architecture. On the one hand, …

Atmospheric Architecture: Virtual Possibility Of The Picturesque, Yuqi Jin

Architecture Senior Theses

In the 18th century theory of the “picturesque,” imagination substitutes reason. That strategy was profoundly captured in artists’ use of the Claude Glass as a device to distort natural scenes and reproduce reality. A later and more “unreal” variation of this imaginary occurs in picturesque landscape drawings. The result was a recasting of the perfection of nature as an aesthetic of nature. The picturesque thus enacted a transition from reality to virtuality, and that alteration was then reflected back onto reality.

Today’s “atmospheric” architecture pursues similar objectives by taking elements of nature, such as light and air, to produce a …

Falling Ground: Underground Osmosis, Byungryoung Lee

Architecture Senior Theses

Highly urbanized areas over the world must prepare for another huge population inflow. According to the UN, around 70 percent of the world population will likely live in urban areas by 2050. Big cities such as New York City, Tokyo, and London already face land scarcity and high property costs in their main urban regions.

This thesis explores a new underground typology, adapting into existing urban contexts as a potential solution for these growing issues. Existing infrastructure elements such as parks, subways, and water tanks or sewage systems, which are omnipresent in urban regions, become part of the underground space …

Blurring The Divide: Architecture That Encourages Socially Inclusive Urban Environments, Erin Benken

Architecture Senior Theses

Segregation in the United States has existed for many decades. As a result of social, economic, and political factors, community members of different races, ethnicities and social classes tend to congregate and live together in the segregated neighborhoods of America's cities. While social values now are more open to integration than they were a century ago, tradition, familiarity, and social ties keep this segregated distribution alive today. This thesis explores the topic of segregation in cities by asking, how do we create an architecture that breaks through social divides to create more socially inclusive urban environments?

Using Chicago as a …

Urban Rangers: The Scope Of Medellin Through Informal Waste Collection, Christina M. Rubino

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis critiques the city of Medellin through the scope of an informal waste collector. This research defines a waste collector as a person who resides within informal settlements and relies on disposed belongs of others as exchange for income. Their act of informal waste collection often occurs in residential communities. The subjects, informal waste collectors, are traced in their everyday routes and urban experiences; their actions, means, and methods are then quantified in order to determine an algorithm for an optimized collection technique and performance. This critique reveals the obstacles that waste collectors face in transportation and storage to …

Architectural Ecotone: The Edge Effect, Holly Metzger, Tara Nuqul

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis aims to study the relationship between architecture and its environment. Specifically, this thesis will explore symbiotic relationships between architecture and surrounding ecosystems in many different terrains. Iceland presents a particular important case for this idea because it is a hotbed of geological activity. The country itself is a patchwork of desert, glaciers, geysers, lava fields and active volcano, which has led to Iceland developing intelligent systems of vernacular architecture throughout history to mediate this environment.

This thesis studies systems of domestic vernacular architecture by examining the qualities and characteristics of craft, materiality, structure, and a symbiotic relationship to …

Towards A Floating Urbanism: Adapting To Water As A New Ground, Chris Autera

Architecture Senior Theses

Climate change offers myriad challenges to society, including a rising sea level and increasingly intense storms. Resilience to climate change, particularly the reliance on hard barriers, only protects certain areas and raises the risk of catastrophic failure. More deeply, these approaches reflect an attempt to preserve society as it exists today, denying the reality that the multi-millennia process of climate change necessitates a more profound reevaluation of how society operates. Adaptation takes this need as a given, arguing for the retrofitting of infrastructure to regular inundation when possible and the abandonment of at-risk areas when not. However, these strategies are …

Growing Above The City: Application Of Open-Source Urban Agriculture System To Different Boroughs In Nyc, Jiyoon Bae

Architecture Senior Theses

The metropolitan area we live in faces the environmental as well as social issues such as air pollution, high density, or broken work-life balance, which cause our unhealthy lifestyle. New York City is one of the representative areas where faces social and environmental problems. At the same time, many of the social movements are uprising to overcome those issues. Urban agriculture is part of these movements to restore their healthy life, resisting against food discrimination, or educating the public about health and environmental significance. According to official reports, the number of urban farms reaches 550 through the entire city. However, …

The Postmoder Hermits, Xuechen Li

Architecture Senior Theses

Metropolitan cities to grow at unfathomable rates, forming a new scale of geography know as Megaregions. And as these settlements continue to develop with the principal focus on the consequences of economy and environment, the psychological, mental health of the inhabitants becomes neglected. Japan, the archetypal example of a highly developed country, despite its economic and technological advantages, has been plagued by social isolation, suicides, and mental health issues among its people. With 541,000 young Japanese labeled as hikikomori, a term describing young people who isolate themselves in their rooms for months or years at a time, their memories of …

2047 City: Hong Kong’S Identity In A Space Of Disappearance, Mike Liu, Raul Sadhwani

Architecture Senior Theses

Hong Kong has always been colonial; its existence is shaped from the confluence of East and West. After 158 years of British rule, Hong Kong's handover to the Chinese Government, catalyzed by the expiration of its 99-year lease of the New Territories, began in 1997 whereby the city operates under a "one-country-two-systems" policy. These events have created a culture and identity of disappearance as the people of Hong Kong have scrambled to define their identity due to the imminence of its disappearance, as discussed by Ackbar Abbas. This is exemplified in the Umbrella Revolution in 2014 when citizens, mainly students, …

Embracing The American Atlantis: Designing For A Post-Disaster New Orleans, Mikayla Beckwith, Katherine Truluck

Architecture Senior Theses

In the year 2100, New Orleans is flooded and reduced to a fraction of its previous grandeur. The rising sea level has reduced the city to an archipelago settled between the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. Through the implementation of a transportation and program core system, the archipelago of territories is reconnected and the programmatic organization of the land is redistributed. This project combines architectural, infrastructural, and utopian case studies to move beyond the mitigation of water and instead create a new condition that adapts to the water in a more symbiotic fashion. Through this intervention, New Orleans …

Re-Imagine Air: Transforming Zoning Around Landmarks, Brian Hurh

Architecture Senior Theses

Today’s New York City skyline has been developed as a result of over a century of zoning resolutions and changes. Zoning code were first established in 1916 to regulate the building of skyscrapers. These resolutions act as “harm preventing” 1 measure to provide limits, meaning the zone prevents extremities in building dimensions to have some control. However, today’s skyscrapers are built higher and higher through exploits and loopholes. The transfer of development rights from adjacent lots or landmarks allows developers to break regulations. It also allows structures to reach unexpected heights to the most recent zoning resolution in 1961 . …

Amazon Vertical City: The Fulfillment Center Of The Future, Jessica Casero Lopez

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis looks for at the projection of Amazon's patent drawings for vertical fulfillment centers and speculates on their design to evolve into a significant typology in the present day.

Amazon is the world's largest online retailer. In June of 2017, Amazon released one of their most compelling patents, a multi-level fulfillment center with a beehive structure for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. The release of the drawings made international news. These could change the way distribution centers are perceived and designed. In 2017, Amazon had 300 million users worldwide. Rapid growth has enabled Amazon to expand to different continents and forced …

Encyclappedia: Confronting Sidewalklabs Digital Physical Community, Katharina Elisa Körber

Architecture Senior Theses

Google's Sidewalk Labs claims that its plans for Quayside in Toronto will result in the "most measurable community build from the Internet up" [Dan Doctoroff, CEO Sidewalk Labs]. How can we understand the realities and implications of an urbanism that so radically challenges the current physical and mental relationship between humans and architecture, and architecture and digital devices? This thesis examines the roles of architects when a city and its architecture are planned as a community of digital devices. It explores ways to disrupt and conceptualize Sidewalk Labs' strategy of a community where humans and non-human devices "live" among systems …

Building Reconfigurations, Alex Allen, Scott Krabath

Architecture Senior Theses

In a contemporary society saturated with images, photographs of physical artifacts are intermixed with inaccurate drawings and low-res copies. These new images challenge the associations between buildings and their representations. While Robin Evans writes about the translation of drawings to buildings in the past, this thesis extends this exploration to include the reconfiguration of images using several current digital formats. This aligns to Joselit's statement in After Art, which argues that "an image is a visual byte, vulnerable to virtually infinite remediation." This thesis contends that the reconfiguration of active images into static material can be exploited as a design …

Getting There: The Return Of A Public Infrastructure, Yun Qing Hu, Sizhe Wang

Architecture Senior Theses

The Greek agora was a crossroad, a civic center, a marketplace. The colonnade stoa lining the Agora of Athens was, as John Camp has written, "a true public building, designed for no specific magistrate, group or function..anyone could pass the time of day there. It was, therefore, a popular meeting place..." An agora was a social space, a place to meet or a stop while en route to other destinations. Such public space naturally formed at the intersection of social, political and commercial activities and promoted a diversity of constituents.

Public space is where society is shaped and where the …

Vimana: A Crisis Of Translation, Apoorva Rao

Architecture Senior Theses

The architecture of the Hindu temple, as we know it today, has become a caricature of applied style and a theater for rituals rather than the symbolic representation of the core concepts of Hinduism. There is a disconnection between the beliefs and their translation into architecture, which has resulted in a dissolution and erosion of the temple as a vehicle for the ritual spiritual journey1. The temple is built on a literal and conceptual framework of core essential elements such as the sanctum sanctorum, the roof, the plinth, its orientation on earth, and its function to, metaphorically, transport people from …

Material Density: A Radical Approach To Adaptive Reuse, Madeline Laberge

Architecture Senior Theses

Through disassembly and reconfiguration, this thesis proposes to create new relationships between existing materials and their typical forms, using a material-focused densification specific to the site. This radical approach to adaptive reuse contrasts the current over-designed and over-theorized architectural projects, aiming to use a pragmatic approach in how materials on historical sites can be reclaimed. Situated on a site with forgotten architecture, the building’s “ruins provide the incentive for restoration” where one can re-immerse themselves with the grand, sublime space. But sites like these are typically demolished for new construction due to costly rehabilitation, with new designs ignoring or not …

Casting Contradictive Landscapes: The Objects Of An Obsolescent* Future, Sarah Catherine Beaudoin

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis pays homage to the longevity of the ordinary yet iconic elements of the German Ruhr Valley, aiming to bring its functionally obsolescent architectural characters to the forefront of design analysis. The investigation catalogs, dissects, and speculates a series of conditions that arise from the mixed array of economic, geographic, and cultural pressures of the contemporary Ruhr Valley. Rather than merely describing and critiquing the found industrial objects, a series of paradigms visualize a fictitious world in which a family of could-be-architectures can take stage. They act as prototypes for unspecified places while still exploring the consequences of their …

Activating Place: America’S Former Beer Capital, Elise Chelak

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis contends that the tool of mapping, as well as its various techniques and typologies, can uncover historical identities in the urban landscape, so as to generate rich, spatial narratives of place. Through alternative and contemporary methods of mapping, (e.g. drift, layering, game-board, thick-mapping, ghost-mapping, and counter-mapping), community stories are layered to reveal a complete and unaltered genius loci (spirit of place). Fragments of the urban fabric that were once erased, excluded, or edited, are now reframed for the work they do to contain and convey, and reinterpret to revitalize this neighborhood while drawing on its past. Acknowledging what …

Built In Weather: Architecture In Ephemeral Landscape, Hanseul Jang

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis wishes to push the spectrum of how architecture as a built form can be fixated in an ephemeral environment. A camera serves as both analytical and representational tool to capture the ephemeral process of landscape transformation. Visualization of temporal elements of natural landscape forces- through the production of motion images- aims to stimulate variability of the perceptual process into awareness of the changeability of architectural objects.

Examining and visualizing landscape forces at the coastline of Jeju, the thesis aims to further examine architecture's potential as an infrastructure to amplify and adapt to its ephemeral landscape process. The proposed …

Topologies Of Historic Typologies: Radical Transformations To Historic Preservation, Ian Masters

Architecture Senior Theses

In direct opposition to whitewashing and absolute preservation, this project expos­es the darkening: an array of possible in­terventions upon a historic building that progressively enrich existing typological experiences to provide groundwork for ex­ploring, reconfiguring, and relearning from architectural typologies overlooked and under-investigated as a result of zeitgeist.

By way of selectively oversaturing spaces with the most fundamental building components of a historical build­ing, Topologies of Historic Typologies addresses how more thoughtful approaches to intervention can concurrently yield [figuratively] modern spaces and visual­ly-taught historic architecture.

Topologies of Historic Typologies considers old, antiquated constructs the foundation for purposeful intervention, capable of disrupting …