Architecture Commons^™

Vesseled Cultures; Figures Of Diasporic Comforts, Ying Na Li, Rachel Ly, Skylar Sun

Architecture Senior Theses

The Domestic sphere of the Chinese American home is a promising site where continuous identities and memories of routine name are at play. In the kitchen, engaging in rituals of food making - a natural home endeavor- fosters reconnection and reconciliation with a past identity long forgotten. Architectural extrapolation is then seen through means of practices like fermenting vegetables and observation of domestic rituals between the individuals and their surroundings - whether it be the orchestration of food (the process), the jar in which the vegetables and brine rest (the vessel), or the patterns of kitchen utilities being used (the …

Alternate Americanisms, Ella Arne

Architecture Thesis Prep

Architecture is actively crafting reality, culture, and identity. It is simultaneously constructed from and constructing meaning. Route 66 exists as an American invention, ruin, and manifestation of American Identity. The objects on the route sit innocently on the landscape, covering their complex histories and power networks that lead back to the dominant government administration.

Alternate Americanisms shows the agency of architectural objects in creating new realities, identities, and histories.

The game explores how every single decision changes the entire built landscape. It reflects and translates alternate histories to project alternate versions. It examines the relationship between meaning and architecture, identity …

Speculative Spoliation: Spolia As An Instrument Of Locus Making & Identity Mediation, Amelia Gan

Architecture Senior Theses

In this thesis, spolia is defined as the repurposing of found artifacts or material with ingrained place identities to new building matter in novel contexts. This includes architecture remnants or fragments from sites of historical ruins, urban derelicts and artifacts currently displayed in museums.

Architecture's impermanence results in demolishment, reconstruction, or exhibition of its fragments in museums or ruin parks. Attempts at preservation often only look at the surface-level significance of these artifacts without allowing for the addition of meanings over time. While displaying an artifact in a museum or turning ruins into tourist parks directly addresses the history of …

Speculative Spoliation: Spolia As An Instrument Of Locus Making & Identity Mediation, Amelia Gan Wen Jiun

Architecture Thesis Prep

In this thesis, spolia is defined as the repurposing of found artifacts or material with ingrained place identities to new building matter in novel contexts. This includes architecture remnants or fragments from sites of historical ruins, urban derelicts and artifacts currently displayed in museums.

Architecture's impermanence results in demolishment, reconstruction, or exhibition of its fragments in museums or ruin parks. Attempts at preservation often only look at the surface-level significance of these artifacts without allowing for the addition of meanings over time. While displaying an artifact in a museum or turning ruins into tourist parks directly addresses the history of …

We Die As We Live, Yücel Güven

Architecture Thesis Prep

Each person is made up of different characters that build his/her complete identity. It is possible to identify these individual personas and design a different mausoleum to each one, specific in architectural language and function. The mausoleum should architecturally be unique to the persona and functionally serve the same purpose.

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.

Urban Amnesia, Teriya Lee

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis is a response to Kevin Lynch's claim that "in the process of way-finding, the strategic link is the environmental image, the generalized mental picture of the exterior physical world that is held by an individual." Specifically, the thesis deals with those parts of the urban fabric which are imageless - the unidentified, or, the forgotten. It asks the question: what can architecture do to clarify spatial identities? The thesis will explore Hong Kong's identity as it relates to memory and space.

It's Not Easy Being Whole | Reevaluating The Relationship Of Part Whole In Pursuit Of A New High-Rise Vernacular, Josh Bransky

Architecture Senior Theses

Architecture has the power to structure societal relationships. Specifically, architecture's form can bring the balanced relationship between community and individual identity, as exhibited in vernacular single-family homes, to the housing tower. This thesis plans to achieve such a social orchestration through a nuanced understanding of formal part-to-whole relationships, or "differentiated" parts within the whole, exhibited in a 300' housing tower in Seattle, WA.

By carefully balancing the relation, material, scale, and form of each part, this project will achieve this difficult whole (of differentiated parts). Mining this middle ground will produce a housing tower in Seattle, which actively balances the …

Hijacked | Reclaiming Legislative Loopholes, Lara Moock

Architecture Senior Theses

ARTICLE 1: GENERAL PROVISIONS.

SEC. 100. PURPOSES.

San Francisco’s current political legislation has critical loopholes that have constructed a predominant shift in the city’s identity and urban fabric, as well as an obvious neglect of the public realm and social agenda. The recent move of the Silicon Valley tech headquarters to the city’s center has dramatically changed the architectural landscape as well as reinforced a growing push for corporate privatization. This thesis aims to expose and confront the hidden political and social dynamics of the constructed environment and reclaim the existing loopholes in order to propose a project without major …

Transient Solutions: Responding And Adapting To Rapid Change Through Temporary Design- Part 2, Casie Kowalski

Architecture Senior Theses

PART 1: RAPID CHANGES

The American City is characterized by a history of industry, rapid growth and stagnant economy, and a quick adaptation to consumer culture. In cities once characterized by specific industries, they now attempt to cling to their cultural identity and the arts to preserve their image beyond their industry, readdressing and reinvigorating permanent cultural entities such as the library, museum, and theater. This reviving is done in variety of ways, all of which require heavy funding both privately and publicly and primarily result in interventions of permanence. [Chicago's Millennium Park, Cleveland funding waterfront activity, New York City …

Transient Solutions: Responding And Adapting To Rapid Change Through Temporary Design- Part 1, Casie Kowalski

Architecture Senior Theses

PART 1: RAPID CHANGES

The American City is characterized by a history of industry, rapid growth and stagnant economy, and a quick adaptation to consumer culture. In cities once characterized by specific industries, they now attempt to cling to their cultural identity and the arts to preserve their image beyond their industry, readdressing and reinvigorating permanent cultural entities such as the library, museum, and theater. This reviving is done in variety of ways, all of which require heavy funding both privately and publicly and primarily result in interventions of permanence. [Chicago's Millennium Park, Cleveland funding waterfront activity, New York City …

Opp: Id, Marcus Johnson

Architecture Thesis Prep

Because embassies increasingly function as symbols instead of diplomatic outposts it is necessary to question their effectiveness as diplomatic tools in a global society. If the United States intends to maintain physical diplomatic outposts as part of its foreign policy, then it will require reducing the collateral that is associated with such dangerous missions. While security enhancements have improved the safety and welfare of the Foreign Service in the past, persistent attacks question the relevancy of this approach. Architecture and Urbanism should be included in as possible, if not probable and appropriate, solutions to this difficult problem.

Essen(Ce)Tially Authentic: Contemporary Design Within A Historical Context And The Parameters Of The “Preserved”, Danielle Ciccone

Architecture Senior Theses

Contemporary architecture needs to solidify its role amongst the pressures of preservation. It is crucial to build reflective of our time, even within a historical area. Though the past should be appreciated, it cannot be revived. Architectural design should exhibit a successive evolution instead of white washing its progression. The essence of a place must be interpreted, distilling and capturing its characteristics while establishing a more authentic architecture of the present. Identity endures not in appearance but with the culture, tradition, technology and people of a particular time.

Essen(Ce)Tially Authentic: Contemporary Design Within A Historical Context And The Parameters Of The “Preserved”, Danielle Ciccone

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Contemporary architecture needs to solidify its role amongst the pressures of preservation. It is crucial to build reflective of our time, even within a historical area. Though the past should be appreciated, it cannot be revived. Architectural design should exhibit a successive evolution instead of white washing its progression. The essence of a place must be interpreted, distilling and capturing its characteristics while establishing a more authentic architecture of the present. Identity endures not in appearance but with the culture, tradition, technology and people of a particular time."

The Exchange: A Celebratory Space For Commodity Exchange Via The Hyper-Mall, Jaime Magaliff

Architecture Senior Theses

"The consumer object reigns supreme in American Society. Shopping and consumption have become the trademark of identity. The social act of exchange makes value. The social phenomenon of the mall has cultivated a Mecca for commodity exchange."

Landscape Of Culture: Permanence And Change, Stefanie Huchzermeier

Architecture Senior Theses

"As conditions change and culture shifts to adapt, it is my contention that architecture has the capacity to provide an understanding of identity in times of change by regenerating the previously existing level of engagement between people and their natural environment through means of a reestablished spatial network and a materialization of informal social and spatial relationships."

Cultural Layering, Paloma Rodriguez-Torres

Architecture Senior Theses

Architecture, history, and identity in Mexico City

"Even though different pieces of architecture that range from the Ancient to the Contemporary era can be found sharing the same physical space, they have not yet created any source of interaction, causing a lack of understanding in the region. These pieces are the key players to what one sees or identifies as the identity of the pace and by it not having an common thread that linkg them together, it creates a false sense of identity."

Euro, Ryan A. Doyle

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Architecture can create a flexible representation for institutions of supranational power through the consolidation of the political functions that embody its states' identities."

Reclaiming Identity Through Spectacle, Miguel Antonio Felices

Architecture Senior Theses

"The space of cultural spectacle can lead to a re-definiteion of identity in Condado through architectural implications that capitalize rather than 'sole' its state of ambivalence. For the foreigner who seeks the exotic and the denizen who seeks the authentic, the cultural spectacle can become a point of convergence.

Architecture has the capacity to mould an ambiguous cultural identity by facilitating and sustaining the cultural expressions of a people though a space of spectacle."

Resolution Through Pixelation: A Lifestyle Application For Rochester, New York, Therese Mutter

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The requirement of cities is to take on multiple personalities as a responsive strategy towards the various lifestyle existences while maintaining a fulfillment of necessary and desirable aspects in order to attain an ideal state."

"Objective: To create a cohesive program which allows for the simultaneous existence of multiple lifestyles in a singular instance in order to recreate a sense of multiple personalities within a city."

Patrol, James Degennaro

Architecture Thesis Prep

"For the later half of the 20th Century, East European metropoles were systematically disengaged from international relations, removed from circulation and "nationalized" under a particular regina. The reallocation of these metropoles, stemming from an abrupt discontinuation in 1989 of Soviet policy (a program of cultural production), to the immediate years that followed toward liberal democracy, became a critical act in the name of socio-political progress. This reaction, which produced innumerable degrees of success and failures across the former East-Boc region requires new conceptualizations of the political borders and cultural contours within the landscape of the contemporary East European peripheral city... …

Vertica 'L' Exchange: Public Interaction And Community Identity Along The 'L' In Chicago, Dena M. Wangberg

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis proposes to counter the 'genericness' of network identity in public transportation through the transformation of two nodes along the network of the 'L' in Chicago, Illinois.... Through this thesis investigation, the larger network of public transportation infrastructure is particularized by the introduction of new urban program that not only reveals the identities of a given place, but also helps to construct a richer identity throughout the entire network."

Connecting Identity And Place: Refugee Relocation Facility, Kathryn Walsh

Architecture Thesis Prep

"architecture's place in the global flow of people, identity, and the city can no longer be taken for granted. Architecture must consider the current conditions, the past histories, and future prospects of its relationship to identity and place within the changing city."

The Interface Of Two Extremes: Preserving The Local, Connecting To Global - The Question Of Architecture In A Third World Environment, Ella Scheuer

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Striving for global equality, uniformity and at times, excessive luxury has led to ignorance and neglect of regional character and authenticity.

"Understanding this, I found the need to create an architecture that embraces local heritage as well as global progress. This duality will be expressed through the language of the architecture by studying both equatorial African building techniques and contemporary building technologies of the West.... By maintaining a focus on both local and global constituents, a world awareness can be fostered without losing sight of the sense of community."

Suburban Adaptability: Urban Context, Joshua Seidner

Architecture Senior Theses

The urban environment historically fosters anonymity among urbanites denying individual expression, user flexibility, and family adaptability. The result is the draw to the suburban house model which inherently concedes ones' expression of individual identity. The urban landscape has historically formed with the core and periphery. Over the last sixty years the periphery has harbored the creation of suburbia. Traditionally, the urban landscape has, and continues to suppress individualism and flexibility to create uniformity and homogeneity[...] Arguably by default, suburbia creates a basic template which the end-user can customize. On the contrary, the urban environment does not foster the ability to …

Building A Future With Our Past, Maureen T. O'Sullivan

Architecture Thesis Prep

"I contend that the contrast of traditional and contemporary architectural building methods and program will visualize the process of change and allow for subsequent transformations of existing constructs. A disregard for traditional architecture will eventually leave us with no conception of our cultural past. These structures are a physical accumulation of our past that we can experience spatially and upon which we can build."

Infrastructure And Improvisationalism, Nick Saponara

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Infrastructure serves as a milt-scaled organizing urban framework in which material practices impose an identity on a given place allowing for the activation of otherwise static conditions.

Clothing As Identity, Kyung Sook Kim

Architecture Thesis Prep

Showroom - Meat Packing District, NYC

"Architecture is not a question of material or structural reality but of the effects of the particular surfaces it presents to the observer, which informs a sense of identity. Identity is constructed from people's perceptions of the appearance or outer skin of a person and a building. What he or she wears or skin that covers the building defines the appearance."

The Congregation: Sha-Ar Ha Kollel, "The Gate For All People", Avi Michael Shoss

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The issue I intend to explore is the growing lack of identity, of place, for this generation's Jewish youth."

Traces Of Time: Urban Palimpsest And Transformations, Tomas B. Fernandez

Architecture Thesis Prep

"I contend that the city is a deeply scored palimpsest that through specific natural, social, and cultural changes reveals its traces of permanence and temporality; therefore, to create in the urban realm is to respond to these vestiges of time through decoding and transformation, as if one was gently manipulating the genome of the city."