Architecture Commons^™

Re-Treeting Detroit: Return Of A Blighted City Back To Nature, Nivedita Keshri, Shreeya Shakya

Architecture Senior Theses

Detroit’s complicated history of corruption, racial tensions and economic decline have made conventional strategies for growth, repopulation and infill inadequate for dealing with ongoing and overwhelming urban vacancy. Dealing with voids within shrinking cities have been difficult because it lies outside the existing experience and vocabulary of urban planning, architecture and socioeconomics. Our thesis explores the potential of voids within a blighted city. We recognize the value in intentionally keeping voids as voids in a city and allowing the built environment to take a step back and allowing “nothing” to take its place.

What is the current conditions of these …

P.E.T.S.: Personal. Empathic. Topological. Series., Ian Mulich, Jose Sanchez

Architecture Senior Theses

Within the current conditions of our globalized society, market structures and logics have come to organize culture, economy, and politics in an increasingly interrelated manner. Contingent to this triangulation, architecture needs to be critical about its turn towards the market and the commercialization of its production. By performing as a brand that expands and evolves serially, architectural practice can maneuver commercial systems of exchange and act as a cultural agent that promotes deeper engagement with design. Corporeal forms that induce empathic relationships can serve as the architectural products necessary to fuel consumption practices that craft individualized disciplinary interaction. The empathic …

The Treachery Of Architectural Matter, Weiqiao Lin

Architecture Senior Theses

Besides giving objects a physical form, material qualities contribute to and codify the way we understand architecture. From the pictorial aesthetics of the picturesque and the sublime expressed in Henry Hobson Richardson’s rusticated stone, to the purity of whiteness declared by Le Corbusier in “The Law of Ripolin”, to the brutalist roughness expressed in Alison & Peter Smithson’s raw concrete surfaces; materiality is delivered through imitation or dissimulation in the semantic field of architecture. Beginning in the late 18th century, Carlo Lodoli’s doctrine of truth in materials launched a rebellion against imitated materiality and decorated wallpaper. While this polemic sough …

Territorial Transgressions: The (New) New Jersey, Ryan Oeckinghaus

Architecture Senior Theses

Understanding the operation of a Territory as opposed to conceiving solely of urban and non-urban/rural areas illuminates the underlying flaws present in the built environment that are caused by this assumption. Infrastructure is a vital component of planning that is significantly downplayed and disjointed when looking at areas independently, and as such should be linked back into a proper understanding of the territory. This Thesis seeks to provide an example of a possible territorial reconfiguration in New Jersey that utilizes an updated conception of territory, creating a Holistic Proposal to remedy outdated planning and infrastructural practices stemming from the misconception …

False Actually: Constructing The False-Hyper-Real In The Quotidian American Landscape, Rose Maalouf

Architecture Senior Theses

The thesis contends that imagery, deployed through the deliberate staging of an architectural scene, can misrepresent actuality for the creation of cinematic illusion.Through the consideration of matter as imagery, my project aims to design a set of fictive traces of life/occupations that mimic the limits of realism. It is about designing a hyper-real landscape through narrative.

The author chose the site of Erie Boulevard in Syracuse as a place to catalog over time through a series of photographs. My observations over the course of 6 months gave me an image catalog to extract from and a set of actions that …

Political Archipelago: Repoliticizing Post-Umbrella Revolution Hong Kong, Dora Yui Kei Lo

Architecture Senior Theses

This project aims to re-politicize the public sphere of post-Umbrella Revolution Hong Kong. Umbrella Revolution was one of the latest defining events of democratic struggles in Hong Kong. Like other protests, civil disobedience and revolutions, Umbrella Revolution was more than just “organized public dissents”; it was an experiment of an alternative democratic sphere for agonistic struggles. The occupation temporarily altered, reoriented, disoriented or debilitated the existing boundaries and thresholds in the city; it resisted the logic of the city to create a space of exception. However, these temporary alterations did not leave significant permanent imprints to the city. At the …

Territories Of Matter: Revealing The Economies And Ecologies Of Aluminum, Noah Anderson

Architecture Senior Theses

This project seeks to understand matter through the environments it creates. These environments, created through production, end-use, and disposal, extend to the scale of the world, the territory and the product. In a globalized world, the separate environments of a single material are highly external, and while we may know where a material comes from, the consequences of its extraction and manufacture are out-of-site, out-of-mind. This externalization is evident for Aluminum, which has a diverse and often contradictory range of environments.

Finding A New Center: A Study Of Neo-Industrial America, Juliet Domine, Virginia Paulk

Architecture Senior Theses

As a result of globalization, manufacturing in America moved overseas. The coasts, with greater access to international markets, have flourished, creating a distinct divide between the middle and the edge. Moving from the post-industrial era into the current age of the neo-industrial, revitalization of the middle can occur by introducing an industry utilizing previous skill sets. Therefore, the center of the United States can be made relevant again through the programmatic revitalization of post-industrial sites.

In the post-industrial era, St. Louis has suffered from economic decline, unemployment spikes, and population decreases. Revitalizing forgotten industrial spaces with a new mode of …