Architecture Commons^™

Risd Club, Madeleine Devall

Masters Theses

Higher arts education is an enormous luxury. If part of the appeal and exclusivity of higher education is grounded in the extravagance of attending private, reputable schools like Rhode Island School of Design, is there a way to extend this exclusive “club” to alumni and visiting artists and designers?

When we join a club, we become part of an organization that is exclusive to people with similar interests. Education is a club; the privilege to be accepted to an exclusive group of people with similar interests allows for access to professional insight, resources, and knowledge. RISD provides privilege where ability …

Imagine Of Space : Rest(Ing) Rooms For High-Stressed Risd Students, Fang Ho

Masters Theses

Th e Rhode Island School of Design as an arts-cultivating institution endeavors to provide abundant resources to mentally and physically support students. Even though the campus provides various mental health resources, the expression of depression, eating disorder and suicide from students has never diminished. RISD students work under high-stress conditions caused by their assignments, expectations from others and themselves, and the environment surrounding them.

Studios and work areas become spaces associated with stress and negative atmosphere. Th e materials, ceiling, fl oor and even the breathing air hint at this gray emotion. If a space where art students spend the …

Perceptible Ambiguity : Learning Center, Zhurong Qian

Masters Theses

This project investigates the possibility of using the concept of projection to blur a boundary, as well as the potential to create an ambiguous transition between various spaces. In this project, the differentiation between floors, inside and outside, solid and void, starts to fade away.

Projection is a way to understand the world. Through “looking”, we “collapse” the original object, and reconstruct the image in our head.

Learning is in the same way, we “break down” the phenomenon in order to comprehend the logic, and through experiments, we examine the theory repetitively. Learning is also about seeing the same thing …

Healing Landscapes, Siyi He

Masters Theses

This thesis divided to three parts; it mainly looks at the scenario of healing landscapes in the Financial District. Phase one focused on the overall history and site condition of the Financial District, and tried to combine it with the typology of a traditional healing landscape. New typologies of healing landscape for high density and unhealthy urban areas were explored. Phase two evaluated various site conditions and documented the flow of people in the Financial District. The typology of healing practice forms was developed. Phase three tried to locate the specific location of healing practice paths and the area of …

Water For The Future, Ziqing Chen

Masters Theses

Water is a fundamental element for lives. Located in Long Island detached from the mainland of New York State, the densely-populated counties - Kings, Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk Counties - rely on groundwater for their sole freshwater source for a long time. The underground geology determines the groundwater movement on western Long Island: from Nassau County to Queens. When overpumping happens in Queens, Nassau County is firstly threatened by lowered water table. The thesis is aiming to propose a local solution to mitigate the problem brought by groundwater movement when overpumping.

In Phase 1, the study focuses on the underground …

Borderscape : Weaving Political Boundaries In The Amazon Through Water Performance, Lucila Silva-Santisteban

Masters Theses

This research project is about how to connect political bordering urban systems through the natural structure for a coherent occupation between the built environment, ecosystems and resources following the Landscape Architecture lens that can address different scale systems simultaneously to create a holistic approach between them. And the proposition of a new type of landscape of this threshold territory as its own kind. Specifically looking at the bordering cities in the heart of the Amazon Region in South America that fall between Colombia, Brazil and Peru.

Why the Amazon?

Not only because of the usual fascination, but because of the …

Landscape As An Interactive Layer, Yifan Kong

Masters Theses

The main topic of this investigation is memory and place. The study uses qualitative and quantitative research methods with the aim of addressing the question of, “how landscape design generates interactive layers that last in a community’s memory within a constantly evolving neighborhood demographics?” This thesis is divided into three phases:

Phase I explores the evolving neighborhood in New York City. Specifically focusing on communities with high immigrant populations located in Queens. This phase helps develop a stronger understanding of the issues associated with gentrification and the impacts it has on immigrant neighborhoods and provides the groundwork for the rest …

Building Community : Network Within Grey Space, Lingfei Liu

Masters Theses

Buildings constitute the city, but at the same time isolate people from the action of the city by delimiting the activities within. Considering the relationship between buildings and public urban areas, is there a missing characteristic which could blur the boundary and create a smooth transition, a grey space gradually mediating between the outside and the inside, exterior and interior? Perhaps a type of connection within the city which contains more flexibility and accessibility would reduce the isolation of people from the activities of their own cities.

Isolation of this type exists on the urban scale, but also affects institutions …

Room In A Forest, Amelia Millan Osma

Masters Theses

This thesis is an exploration of the frictions between the self and the external worlds, using architecture as a woven structure that oscillates between the two worlds. This structure allows us to understand our individual intimacies in the midst of constant exposure. It is the sum of this encounters that will constitute the final form of the architecture.

Spanish Ambassador’s House: The endless outsider

“I am the center of the house, but in control. I am the center under observation”.

My thesis proposal is bound for the Spanish Ambassadress in Lower Manhattan, New York City. The house is a dwelling …

Super Natural : Hybrid Strategies For Urban Flood Protection In Coney Island Ny, Georges Fischer

Masters Theses

How will inundation change the design of city coastlines? This thesis is an investigation into strategies to mitigate urban flooding from storm surge in Coney Island NY.

In Phase 1, dynamic phenomena are identified and deconstructed, the result are properties that can be assembled to make a machine that applies forces to wet plaster, which solidified to yield insights into the sectional forms of waves. This process was used to inform a conceptual model documenting the site’s physical form, and the relative differences between land and water in terms of its density and porosity.

In Phase 2, a catalog of …

Thrive In Sea Level Rise, Xiang Zhao

Masters Theses

Port Morris has played an important role in the industrial realm of New York City since 1842. After the construction of the first Railroad in Port Morris, the area became an accumulation zone of factories and warehouses. These settlements, over time, though, have caused certain problems.

The waterfront area cannot be reached by the public: traffic is dense, air pollution is prevalent. The particle pollution in Port Morris is 2.6 micrograms per cubic meter, the highest in New York City. Across the three miles of shoreline, there are only three spots where people are able to access the waterfront. Besides …

Culturally Integrated Space, Jing Wang

Masters Theses

The topic of this thesis is the urban public space responses to new residents in old neighborhoods. In phase 1, the GIS collection of demographic changes of New York and typology studies about existing urban parks asks the question: how might urban parks better integrate the new residents into old neighborhoods? This question helps choose the Sunset Park Neighborhood as the study and test site. In phase 2, the site analysis including history, climate, and the park usage of Sunset Park Neighborhood, leads to a preliminary proposal of a new urban park typology for better integrating the new residents into …

A Tale Of Lights : Light As The Visual Construct Of The Ephemeral Space, Alice M. Zhen

Masters Theses

Buildings are designed for a specific purpose. A library has large open rooms to accommodate bookshelves, schools have classrooms and auditoriums for groups of students, businesses have offices and conference rooms, homes have bedrooms and living rooms, and so on. In each situation, conventional architecture would start by establishing the boundaries of the site, defining the 2 dimensional floor plan, and then introduce other secondary aspects, such as circulation & light, which eventually create a coherent and cohesive 3 dimensional space.

In my thesis I wanted to explore the reverse process to emphasize the importance of light. I wanted to …

Cultural Infrastructure, Public Space, And The Contemporary Library In Toronto, Zoë Ritts

Masters Theses

Public space is an aggregate of differences, a place of exposure and adjacency to other lived social realities. The potential of public space is the confrontation or mediation of differences through interaction.

Public spaces are therefore about intersections and visual transparency between publics. Through architecture, we can create the conditions for contact with difference: with openness, transparency, density of program, and merging and splitting trajectories, we can work toward greater engagement in society.

As civic institutions, the bus station, an affordable method of transportation and movement, and the library, a crucial component of cultural infrastructure, can collide to create a …

Collective Consumption : A Game For Living, Zachary Rochman

Masters Theses

“The time-lapse fluctuation of our societal floor plan has accelerated. Now you can almost watch the walls go up and down in real time.” -Rem Koolhaas, Elements

There is an efficient and beneficial way to collectively consume resources, but our houses and apartments do not function this way. The commons still exist, but their locations are sparse and specific. What if we established communal spaces that connect private dwellings and blur the lines between them? What new responsibilities and freedoms would arise? If we establish new commons and new abilities to share spaces and resources, we can help alleviate the …

Killing The Angel, In The Mind, Body And Home, Vaishnavi Ramesh

Masters Theses

There is something reassuring about belonging to a space. In patriarchal societies, there is a perceptible manifestation of gender that is constructed into spaces. The street and a public life contain within it the notions of movement that is unrestrained and free. These are attributes of a space that men identify with and an unintended consequence has resulted in public spaces being demarcated as male domains. This notion is embedded in how women experience life everyday, as they are accustomed to the idea that public spaces and streets are only spaces they pass through to reach destinations and not enjoy …

[De]Construction And [Re]Construction : A Promenade Theater, Jingjing Zhao

Masters Theses

REFRAME THE COMMONPLACE

I see corners, ceilings, openings and steps. I see the whole through gathering the spatial fragmentations. I see the extraordinary phenomenon within the frame of domestic life. I see the potential for being anomaly from what we usually take for granted.

Spaces are entities propelled by the phenomenological, the conceptual and the physical. Built and spatial forms serves as functional and structural vessel to capture, balance and rearrange the multiple forces between the common and the abnormal, between the real and the abstract.

Capturing the domestic moments in daily life and reframe the fragmentations into certain from …

Wayfinding Streetscapes : How To Integrate A Wayfinding System Into The Streetscape, Improving Public Transit And Pedestrian Mobility, Lu Zhang

Masters Theses

This is a thesis investigation in 3 phases, integrateing wayfinding system into streetscapes by effective spatial planning and environmental communication, aiming to improve public transit and pedestrian mobility. Considering streets as one of the major sites of city life, they play a critical role in the process of daily information flow and communication. This entire thesis tests the possibility of adding a new layer into streetscapes as both a city infrastructure and a method to raise people’s awareness towards a certain site.

Surveillance City In A Post 9/11 Era, Wanting Dong

Masters Theses

Surveillance City in A Post 9/11 Era is a thesis investigation trying to understand our privacy, perceived safety and public realm in the large context of evolving terrorism worldwide by promoting a conversation about how surveillance would change our city, our new relationship with the city under surveillance, and how people will live with surveillance in the future.

Phase one seeks to understand terrorism and terrorist attack in general, and the opportunities and limitations of the existing security design strategies that have been implemented by US government. In phase two, a specific investigation direction is determined and a series of …

Alleyways As Avenues, Rebecca E. Ladd

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the possibilities of in-between spaces bounded by the realms of public and private experience in an urban environment, specifically situated in Downtown Providence, RI. This thesis begins by questioning the meaning of what public space is and how we as humans choose to inhabit space that has been given a particular program or quality. What allows a person to feel that he or she has ownership over a public space? Through the interdisciplinary lens of Landscape Architecture and Interior Architecture, the subsequent phases will analyze how people in Downtown Providence perceive and utilize space within the city …

Grave : Landscape Necromancy, Jil Sanchez

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on the phenomenon of festivity in order to better understand the spatial qualities of platforms for experiences of release. The work is grounded in the intimate connection between post-industrial landscapes and the emergence of raves and electronic music. The design approach questions western cultural norms by creating a scenario for a combined rave venue and cemetery. The investigation’s material and spatial manifestations are applied to Red Hook Grain Terminal, an ideal latent venue for raves, concerts, and other festive and contemplative functions on New York City’s fringe. The project aspires to widen the range of conversations landscape …

Into The Open : Blurring Building Fences, Chun Qiu

Masters Theses

When an urban college campus is open to the surrounding community, students benefit from a closer engagement with the resources of the city: entertainment, markets, living arrangements, more cultural and professional experience. At the same time, local residents enjoy a stronger regional economy from all of the people attracted to study or work on campus, allowing closer contact for locals with the world beyond the boundaries of their own city.

Though it is clear how valuable communal engagement is to urban life, we live in a society obsessed with separation. The near-universal practice of extruding backyard parcel lines has created …

Updraft : Crafting A New Passive Cooling, Hobin Song

Masters Theses

To comfortably inhabit historic buildings we have developed mechanical devices to manage the internal environment so that it is possible to keep the room temperature stable despite season and climate. However, enormous energy is necessary to sustain these machines, which poses practical and environmental problems. To overcome and prevent this waste, efforts have been made to control the internal environment of contemporary buildings using natural principles. Is it possible to use this approach to improve the performance of historic buildings without compromising character or significance?

This is an ideal topic to test against RISD campus buildings. The campus is made …

Proximity, Interaction, And Evolution : Taking A Deeper Look At The Systems Around Us, Rachel Back

Masters Theses

In the new age of the sharing economy, the society is more connected than ever, but humanity has never been more disconnected from the environment and the natural world. This thesis begins with studying the dynamics of physical and non-physical systems, at all scales. Additionally, this thesis explores the physical and emotional connection to place, time, and memory. Finally, the goal of this thesis is to create spaces that reintroduce nature into architecture, and allow the inhabitant to experience the mystery and awe of the living systems.

Living On The Edge : Failure By Design, Odile Schlossberg

Masters Theses

This Thesis Project starts a conversation between the coastal edge and the built environment in order to develop a new approach towards transformable architecture design.

Erosion has an inevitable impact on coastal inhabitation. Over time, the water edge erodes and the shoreline retreats, pushing back development or causing existing buildings to collapse. Raised architecture has been a proposed solution to mitigate the impact of oceanic forces on buildings, but I believe there can be a different alternative to this approach.

Erosion could be seen as a ‘transformation that takes place over a period of time’, rather than as an environmental …

Resilience On Wall Street, Rahul Ghera

Masters Theses

On October 29th, 2019, the most substantial economic depression of the modernized world abruptly began, as the international financial market and the global GDP took a plunge. Over the course of the next decade, all that continued to rise were unemployment and suicide rates.

The Wall explores the question of what happens when the lights go out on a society that is irrevocably halted. Questions of responsibility, reparations, and conviction are all weighed as ‘Wall Street’ is revealed as ground zero, and the once-powerful bankers are uncovered as the addicts who have gone too far, gambled too much, and are …

Motion And Architecture : Transition Between Spatial Fluidity And Body Language, Tong Li

Masters Theses

Architecture is always changing. Seeing birds flapping the wings, horses running across the grassland, leaves falling down from the tip of the tree, clouds being blew away by a gust of wind, a drop of water sliding down from a flake of flower...I see architecture.

Hill Study : Re-Energize Highly-Programmed Hill Study Space, Di Qiang

Masters Theses

Sloping sites present a variety of difficulties to the structures on which they are built: difficulty in access, difficulty in delineating the space, difficulty in reaching specific functional areas. These problems aren’t caused by the sloping site itself; the sloping site is a natural terrain. The problem lies in the contradiction between the natural sloping site and the traditional hillside architectural forms which evolved from flatland architecture. The College Building of the Rhode Island School of Design exemplifies the use of flatland architectural typology on the hillside . During the expansion of Rhode Island School of Design in 1935, RISD …

Sculpting Time In Spatial Narrative, Hua Gao

Masters Theses

In architecture, we dwell in time as much as in space. As there is a geometry in space, so there is a psychology in time. The spatial narrative refers to a plot involved in the space design, also to the construction of the space, the arrangement of order relationship results in the effective content of space. The core of spatial narrative is to create the space order. The spatial narrative contains a mental world, in which the experienced, remembered and imagined, as well as the past, present, and future is inseparably intermixed.

Architecture is not only enfolded by the eye …

Writing A City : A Self-Reflexive Exploration Between The Lines, Po-Ming Chou

Masters Theses

My thesis investigates the dialogue between the act of writing and the process of making: the spatiality of the literary dimension versus the architectural dimension, through creating an invisible city. It is a self-reflexive process in which the storyline and the structure of writing affects how the casts are designed, while in reverse the process of making directs the trajectory of the story. It is a narrative project that lives in both media, and deals with the difficulties that come out of the different directions.

Consciously working with intuition, and exploring roots in every decision made, as if diagnosing my …