Architecture Commons^™

Residential Rebuilding In Rural Haiti Natural Disaster Recovery Strategies, Mallory Lyn Barga

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on an appropriate and applicable way to recover from natural disasters in a place where indigenous resources, building and construction technologies, and manpower are unlike those in developed countries. Overtime, Haiti has suffered from a multitude of natural disasters that have had devastating long-term effects on the safety and health of the country. As a result, it has become apparent that Haitians expanded their housing off of existing relief shelters through improper building techniques. These improper techniques lead to insufficient structural stability of their homes and increased vulnerability to future disasters. The proposal for this thesis focuses …

Communicating Sustainable Design Through Visual Dynamics, Phillip Walter Zawarus

Masters Theses

My thesis is the exploration of dynamic methods to eff ectively visualize and communicate sustainable designpractices. Every site consists of temporal conditions (climate, vegetation growth, hydrology, comfort, aesthetics)that require dynamic representation of it’s progressive state. By understanding both the quantitative and qualitivemeasures of a site’s content, designers can begin to create guidelines and adaptive responses to the changingconditions. Th is can be achieved by fi rst understanding the intergrated relationship of those conditions, as oneelement has a direct or indirect impact on another. Th e design, in turn, cannot be a static implimentation butrather an evolutionary application.

Beneath The Surface: A Culturally Informed Approach To Regenerative Water Resource Management In Fond-Des-Blancs, Haiti, Muriel Elowyn Miller

Masters Theses

A growing movement in the design fields toward humanitarian and socially conscious work expressed itself in the aftermath of the earthquake that hit Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in January 2010. However, humanitarian work begets skepticism. Four to five decades of foreign aid have not lifted the country out of its impoverished state. Common critique emphasizes the importance of cultural appropriateness, but this is difficult to achieve at a time when much help must come from abroad.

Cultural anthropologists are experts in the study of cultural appropriateness. It is this discipline, and its methods, to which designers should turn for lessons on appropriateness. …