Architecture Commons^™

Unimaginable Form Semantic Exploration In Digital Turn 2.0, Yang Wang

Architecture Senior Theses

Bill Bryson cited in 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' that "We live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don't truly understand." Using Big Data-Driven algorithm based on the Self-Organized Mapping (SOM) and Convolutionary Neural Network (CNN) to do the Computational Generative Form Design with huge complexities of Form Reality. The initiatively avoidance on the complexities of form has imprisoned architects' creativity.

Learning instinct of human being is seeking common information. Artificial intelligence …

Framing The Future: Imagining The City Through The Lens Of Film, Sofia Zavala Ferreira

Architecture Senior Theses

With a great interest in the relationship between film and architecture, this project establishes its subject matter on the possibilities presented in science fiction cinema and speculative design. By extracting attributes from these that would influence design and architectural concerns, a bridge between the disconnected imagined and real, current and future, can be created through the creation of a speculative scenario and a narrative.

It seeks to utilize cinematic design and storytelling conventions to successfully convey the desired atmosphere, architectural realities, and life conditions of a fictional city. By utilizing advanced digital techniques often used in cinema itself, including but …

Y'All Come Back Now, Ya Hear: A Reflection On Nashville's History And The Carnivalesque, Kolby Forbes

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis seeks to utilize the technique of allegorical image in understanding both the past and present histories of Nashville. By collaging aspects of past and present, the images produced seek to present the emerging alternative. This otherness constructs an in between in which the narratives of both instances begin to merge and mutate. These collages establish a landscape of Nashville which is no longer constricted temporally or spatially, remaining open to interpretations and resisting a clear sense of closure. The designs that I propose are meant to clarify the neglected traumas and occurrences of the past to demonstrate that …

Rural Retreat | Urban Myth, Celeste Pomputius

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis proposes a destination for recreation and retreat on Plum Island, New York that references the model of the National and State Park Services and whose intended audience is primarily residents of New York City who are without the means or methods of easily seeking other experiences of nature outside the realm of city limits. The first step of this design process involves reexamining the traditional definition of “urban” to shorten the leap from the comforts of the city to the unknowns of nature. From there, the project identifies and resolves three challenges that stand between urban residents and …

Food Form Function, Travis Telemaque

Architecture Senior Theses

By 2050, the global population will have grown to over 9.7 Billion people. Traditional farming practices will no longer be able to sustain food production for the increasing population. This thesis demonstrates how architecture and urban food production can be used to educate and reconnect our cities with locally sourced food. Integrating food production into dense urban settings will create a more efficient and resilient city.

Optimized Density: Rehabilitating The Tower In The Park For The 21st Century, Emmett Walker

Architecture Senior Theses

Optimized densification is the exploitation of under utilized space to create a more dynamic cooperative based density often times adding onto what is already exists. The pursuit of maximizing intelligently can help to relieve socioeconomic exclusivity, create a more ecologically sustainable lifestyle and influence social mixing. Though architecture can only have a limited influence on the social climate of a place like New York City, re-envisioning and optimizing the density of the tower in the park typology can lead to a more harmonious engagement between buildings and their surrounding context or population. Optimizing density could be the modern day American …

A Simulation-Assisted Workflow For Outdoor Thermal Comfort Design In Downtown Syracuse, Pouya Zhand

Architecture Senior Theses

Cities are not just about the buildings and skylines. Cities are also about the space be­tween buildings (the ground in figure-ground). More importantly and fundamentally cities are about people and the life that happens between buildings. Simulation tools can inform the design of attractive public spaces by pro­viding insight about the environmental conditions.

Learning From The Informal: Designing A New Housing Typology For Informal Development In Cairo, Cherif Farid

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis examines what to design when designing for the informal and questions the role of the architect. The project combines the inherent qualities of the informal; self-built, incremental construction, and flexibility of spatial uses, with alternative urban design strategies.

The design strategy is to control the ground plane and roof scape, while leaving an open frame in between to be incrementally filled with housing. This frame allows residents to voice their identity by physically constructing their homes. It introduces an urban system that is composed of blocks that consist of an aggregation of identical units. The blocks are connected …

Breaching The Divide: An Inquiry Into Border Passage, Russell Scheer

Architecture Senior Theses

The wall that divides intertwining borders of Israel and the West Bank is such a division. Palestinians and Israelis pass along and cross through the wall everyday, engage in trade, and lay claim and pray in the same ancient, religious places. But the wall separates, marking stark difference in resources, access and freedom of movement. This project is an inquiry into the existing threshold that currently separates Israelis from Palestinians in the West Bank. Through the dismantling of the Israeli border checkpoint and reinterpretation of its parts, this project reimagines the sequence of passing through the threshold. By framing the …

@The_New_House: An Online-Offline Manifesto, Ana Paola Hernandez Derbez, Domenica Velasco

Architecture Senior Theses

The house, is one of the most fundamental architectural archetypes, has long been used as unbuilt or built manifestos to declare the avant-garde of the discipline. As designers, we need to re-visualize design concepts to create architecture that integrates and corresponds to the way we dwell. Innovating design in the same way technology and digitalization have been innovating production and the way we live. This thesis investigates a return to the design of a house as a manifesto, focusing on today’s advanced modes of fabrication and evolving ways of living to challenge the current design mindset.

@The_New_House: An Online-Offline Manifesto, Ana Hernandez Derbez, Domenica Velasco

Architecture Senior Theses

The house, is one of the most fundamental architectural archetypes, has long been used as unbuilt or built manifestos to declare the avant garde of the discipline. As designers, we need to re-visualize design concepts to create architecture that integrates and corresponds to the way we dwell. Innovating design in the same way technology and digitalization have been innovating production and the way we live. This thesis investigates a return to the design of a house as a manifesto, focusing on today’s advanced modes of fabrication and evolving ways of living to challenge the current design mindset.

Breaching The Divide: An Inquiry Into Border Passage, Russell Scheer

Architecture Senior Theses

This project is an inquiry into the existing threshold that currently separates Israelis from Palestinians in the West Bank. Through the dismantling of the Israeli border checkpoint and reinterpretation of its parts, this project reimagines the sequence of passing through the threshold. By framing the mundane activities of border passage through dramatic scenes, this architecture can reveal themes religion, resources, and surveillance. This architecture also intends to highlight the imbalance of the current conflict and those involved in it, by creating an architecture equally absurd.

As Above, So Below: Tapping Into The Latent Energy Of Abandoned Underground Infrastructure, Alexandra N. Ramirez

Architecture Senior Theses

How can architects formalize the use of surplus energy to reach more people in a more systematic way? Abandoned underground infrastructure is an example of an untapped surplus in energy that the architect has the opportunity to repurpose. Tunnels in particular, can be used as systems to heat or cool a network of buildings above ground to create more sustainable urban environments. In addition the system could also have beneficial social implications within segregated cities by providing fluid connections between divided neighborhoods.

This thesis will establish a framework for repurposing underground infrastructures. The strategy operates under an umbrella of sustainability …

Wrong Features: Re-Framing The Everyday Through What It's Not And What It's Near, Paul J. Lee

Architecture Senior Theses

In the world’s ubiquity of images and growth of visual culture, it is appropriate to reconsider images as a source for producing architecture. Search engines and image-based social media illustrate Jacque Ranciere’s alterity of images - that images are autonomous from and other than the objects they represent - to a degree like never before. Given this vast field of images that make up our perception of reality, this thesis exposes and embraces the inherent distinctions between images and their represented objects to arrive at an architectural sensibility of distinction and otherness. By re-drawing, re-imaging, and re-presenting Bernd & Hilla …

Rethinking "Stuff", Jonathan Anthony

Architecture Senior Theses

As our methods of storing grow, our storage environments tend to not adapt. Rethinking "Stuff" contends that our established storage environments have the potential to be more closely correlated to the complex nature of our stuff today. This thesis attempts to leverage the effects of stuff in storage by capitalizing on three notions that stuff is increasingly challenging: ritual, temporality, and ownership.

What Is Sacred, Maxwell K. Baum

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis aims to reinterpret the notion of sacred space and explore architectures role in the creation of sacred space. Stripped of the religious connotations of the sacred, this thesis hopes to create an architecture that balances between the individual and the collective, fosters both introspective reflection and extrospective contemplation, and proposes architecture for the experiencing of the sacred.

Architecture can serve as the platform for the transcendental experience. This can be achieved through a thorough understanding of criteria this thesis has identified as constituents in creating sacred space. The concept of Le Corbusier’s “L’espace Indicible,” the ideas of phenomenology …

The Graduate School Collaborative, Jake Copich, Stanislav Nedzelskyi

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis proposes a solution to the disconnect between today’s designers and makers. Specifically geared towards the profession of architecture, these discussions should be applied in any process of making. After providing a historical reading of the crafted object and the people involved in making it, the paper proposes a new way to perceive craft in today’s world. When defined as an indexical quality, both in the mathematical and in the pointing sense described by Charles S. Pierce, the craft of an object becomes an accessible and efficient tool for the analysis and comparison of artifice.

Reconstruct The Missing Narrative: Rethinking Contemporary Chinese Architecture Through Ancient Landscape Paintings, Taiming Chen, Yiwei Wu

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis addresses the issue of lacking self-identity and missing narrative under contemporary Chinese architecture discipline. Using ancient landscape paintings as design source, this project aims to create an environment that provides personal experience and exclusive meaning from a participant’s point of view instead of an omniscient view.

Paintings are selected from different dynasties and artists, but all based on one important cultural theme: Reclusion. Thus, the reconstructed narrative would provide a tranquil environment for inhabitant to have a temporary retreatment from the city life through making, seeking and thinking.

Details Matter: A Pavilion For India In Venice, Rajkumar Kadam

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis proposes a national pavilion for India at the Venetian Arsenal, one of the sites for the Venice Biennale. The design of a pavilion for India at the Venice Biennale is an opportunity to understand architecture as a vehicle that illustrates values that are simultaneously universal, and culturally specific. While the proposed Indian pavilion incorporates the details that define Indian architecture, they are appropriated to the highly articulate Venetian context because principally, Indian architecture is malleable and fits within its local environment. This cross-cultural representation is accomplished through symbolic relationships to natural elements and site, abstract architectonic form and …

Gold: Stories Of A City, Vivek Vijayan Njanappilly

Architecture Senior Theses

The thesis explores the latent influences of gold and its value systems on the urban geo-politics of a South Indian city. It is an anthology of sporadic narrations recording the growth and transformation of a city over time. These narrative compositions contain traces of the past, the city of the present and speculative futures. They indicate change without erasure. Their values are embodied in gold; malleable, ductile and fungible in its different forms.

The intention of the thesis is not to merely speak of a specific commodity nor is it to narrate the history of a city. It is an …

Library To Nowhere, Anna Sernicki

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis explores the idea of the architectural paradox, which questions the ability of experiencing exterior (pyramid) and interior (labyrinth) spatial conditions simultaneously. The pyramid makes places of architecture, while the labyrinth respectively displaces architecture. New York City, as the site of the project, is an example of how the architectural paradox works on an urban scale, whereas the Library to Nowhere condenses these ideas consciously into a local scale. Besides the physical layer of architecture as a labyrinth, the Library to Nowhere enters a psychological realm that forces visitors to transcend reality into the sublime …

The Moving Image, Eujean Cheong, Andrew Kim, Sol Yoon

Architecture Senior Theses

Form in architecture has become synonymous with geometries as opposed to the philosophical Aristotelian notion of form. This thesis rests on two beliefs: space and form are co-present, as space without form is nothing and likewise form without space leaves no room to materialize itself. An object results when space and form are co-present; architecture as an object then subsequently reveals itself when a third element of human movement is introduced.

This thesis contends that if architecture is perceived through the introduction of human movement, then it is peculiar that architectural representation has historically been represented through means of …

For The Love Of Concrete: Embracing The Ugly Duckling, Not The Decorated Shed, Steven Carlson

Architecture Senior Theses

For the Love of Concrete is at its heart an homage to concrete, advocating beauty, versatility and durability; celebrating concrete's ability to create spatial experiences that are compelling, varied, acoustically attuned and thermally tempered. In the face of increasing superficiality, in architecture and the world at large, this thesis celebrates the authenticity and substantiality of concrete.

Method Meditation, Armand F. Damari

Architecture Senior Theses

The place of psychology in architecture has always been a contentious topic. Though the physical environment influences how occupants feel and behave, neither architects nor psychologists have been able to produce environments that can consistently create a desired effect. In this thesis, I have continued to test the legitimacy of systemization in architectural design by using a rigorous survey of potential users. My system is informed by previous experiments, yet also employs the critiques of these systems to inform the rules. It’s theorized the byproduct of this unlikely system should be the “perfect” space for calmness and relaxation.

Layered Scamming: Exposing How The Desires Reflect In The Architecture Design, Alejandra Charrabe

Architecture Senior Theses

Based on the essay “Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Forms” by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour the terms “decorated shed” and “duck” take on a different meaning when speaking of architecture. These terms specifically described a relationship between the program and the façade of a building. By taking such terms an applying them to an analysis of brothel facades, an interesting relationship can be created between the marketing strategy desired for such brothel and the way in which the façade represents such strategy. I will be analyzing the relationship between public/private, commercial/cultural, container/content …

Configuring Narrowness: Formulating Vertical Vernaculars In The Forgotten, Teriya Lee

Architecture Senior Theses

The thesis is convinced that a memorable narrowness can be achieved in an urban void if the architect shifts focus from the horizontal plane to the vertical plane. Indeed, a large portion of what can be seen when approaching a narrow street is not "the front," but "the sides." By using the current vernacular palette to develop vertically-oriented shacks, the thesis proposes two alternative designs to reimage these cracks in the city, in order to fill these cracks in memory.

Materializing Light, Lirong Tan

Architecture Senior Theses

Artificial light, especially volumetric light, can be materialized and transform the existing ruin. Specifically, I would choreograph the interaction between people and light to exaggerate, or dramatize, the tragic feeling of Hiroshima Memorial Dome.

Blur Out, Hye Rim Shin

Architecture Senior Theses

Blur Out explores ideas about architecture that seeks ephemerality rather than legibility, eidetic affects rather than demand of focused attention and atmospheric or emotional spaces rather than conventional spaces.

The exploration of Blur Out is situated within the research topic of different states of snow that are generated from avalanche phenomena of Iceland, which develops site specific understandings of the phenomena and effects. The project aims to build a blurred boundary both literally and experientially between the built and natural environment to challenge representing and re-presenting the spectrum of tangibility to intangibility. By exploring the dichotomy between the built and …

I Want This! I Want That!: A Speculation On The Future Context Of Architecture, Olivia Flores-Siller, Steven Worthington

Architecture Senior Theses

We are hypothesizing a potential future reality where architecture is in the hands of the common person, projecting the idea of mass customization and the expanding scope of DIY into the larger scale of ‘building.’ Hyper-individualism, experimentation, and expressionism characterize this ‘world’ because increases in technology have led to there being little commitment and consequence attached to actions and ‘building’. Technology works harder for us; and as we work less, we play more.

Our values and lifestyles are echoed in our architecture; what, then, is the condition an urban landscape focusing on individualism and mass customization? In this story, architecture …

Axon-Orama: A New System Of Architectural Representation, Fei Wang

Architecture Senior Theses

A codified architectural representation, the axonometric drawing is objective, yet an audience's reception of a building is perspectival and constructed through a spatial narrative over time. In response to this paradox, Axon-orama is proposed as a new representational technique - a set of variational drawings with pliable arrangement and hybrid expression - explored through the use of the British board game, Myriorama. The work blurs the boundary between objective and subjective representation and perception, offering a new system of architectural inquiry.