Architecture Commons^™

Connective Ecology: Reclaiming The Postindustrial Urban Landscape, Thomas Smith

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis contends that by considering the urban landscape as an evolving interconnected network, much like an ecosystem, architecture can create flexible, accessible public space as part of a larger scale system which affects as well as responds to specific physical and social forces of the contemporary postindustrial city.

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

Architecture Senior Theses

The world in which we live is evolving at exponentially increasing speeds[...] The constant upgrades are considered to be arduous in the U.S. but it can be overwhelming for a Third World country who has only been introduced to the advances secondhand...This 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 heritages as well as global progress. This duality will be expressed through the language of the architecture by studying both equatorial African building techniques …

Organic Architecture And Direct Democracy: Claude Bragdon's Festivals Of Song And Light, Jonathan Massey

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

Graduate Sessions 3: Juan Herreros, Mark D. Linder, Beth Mosenthal

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

Juan Herreros is the founder and principal of Abalos and Herreros Architects in Madrid and teaches internationally as a Doctor of Architecture, Senior Professor and head of Teaching Unit Q at the Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid, as well as a Visiting Professor most recently at Princeton University and the Illinois Institute of Technology

The work of Abalos and Herreros ranges from published works including Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice and Recycling Madrid to critically-acclaimed built work including apartment and office towers in Vitoria and the Woermann complex in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. …

Architecture News: The Newsletter Of The Syracuse School Of Architecture, N.1 Fall 2006, Mark Robbins

Newsletters from School of Architecture - ArchitectureNews

Architecture News: The Newsletter of the Syracuse University School of Architecture No. 1, Fall 2006.

Boston City Hall: Rediscovering The Civic Center, Joshua Simoneau

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Architecture can restore the civic center as the symbolic and intrinsic heart of the contemporary city through the integration of government and market centers."

Mall | Memory | Morphology : Fragmenting / Adapting An Obsolete Building Type, Jonathan Danho

Architecture Thesis Prep

"facing contemporary retail trends, the age of the shopping mall is on the verge of obsolescence. An icon of late twentieth century economy and society, the mall holds significant importance to both individual and collective memory. In order to preserve its iconic presence, the type must be fragmented and adapted to a completely different program to avoid total demolition. Doing so will preserve the memory of its presence and experience while introducing a new layer of program and memory in its fabric."

Building A Sustainable Housing Environment, Shanna Telesco

Architecture Thesis Prep

"There are three major factors being studied throughout this exploration: sustainability, housing, and the environment. Each factor can be carefully examined separately under its own terms, but ultimately, the goal of this thesis is to gain a better understanding of their possible integration within the processes of architecture.

My housing project seeks to integrate and improve the existing methods of sustainability that have evolved in architecture by carefully considering renewable resources found in nature, especially the sun, air, and water."

Rethinking Cultural Institutions In Relation To The City, Monica Rodarmor

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Rather than trying to distribute culture to the masses, the cultural institution shall be a place where the masses educate one another about culture. Thinking about institutions as 'arenas for cultures of the world' better serves urban life than an institution that is simply a dusty bank of memories. The aim of the institution should be to stimulate cultural dialogue which will better serve the American City. By changing the purpose, the end result is now attainable. Education and inspiration of the masses is achieved through a new urban condition: one that promotes interaction and understanding between cultural spheres."

From Peripheral To Central: An Urban Reintegration Of The Elderly Community, Anne Mcgee

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Throughout time, suburban sprawl has nullified the town center through the creation of satellite centers which cater to specific architectural typologies, programs, and demographic groups. The contention of this project is that the lost city center is an integral part of urban life, both architecturally and socially. A center shall be reestablished through combining typologically unrelated programs and urban conditions, while also bringing together otherwise isolated social groups."

Civic Architecture's New Setting In The Post-Industrial City, Donnie Garrity

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis argues that with a changing population and climate of a city comes the need to re-think how civic institutions engage themselves with their people. I contend that in order for civic architecture to regain its prominence in the city it needs to adapt itself to contemporary society and respond to its needs. The way in which this can happen is through program; if civic architecture can change its stigma by adopting new forms of program that respond to what its community needs, then the civic architecture will become more proactive in its community. Through a new way of …

Connective Ecology: Reclaiming The Postindustrial Urban Landscape, Thomas Smith

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis contends that by considering the urban landscape as an evolving, interconnected network, much like an ecosystem, architecture can create flexible, accessible public space as part of a larger scale system which affects as well as responds to specific physical and social forces of the contemporary postindustrial city."

Transitioning Society For An Elderly Care Community Within The City, John Budesa

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Instead of isolating senior citizens form the community, my desire is to actively engage them with it; to facilitate the outside community to want to engage with the senior citizens. By combining the typology of the mall as an extremely public and interactive space with the typology of the monastery as the epitome of private living on a secluded site, one could imagine a community of commercial and residential spaces as opposed to the current model for elderly care."

Rural Iowa And The Transgenic Railroad, Wilson Day

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Using an understanding of transgenics and recombinant SNA technology as an analogue for exploring the architectural possibilities within a rail line in Clinton, Iowa, and its directly adjacent modes of transportation, I propose to create an intervention which bridges all modes and establishes a connection between a large portion of Eastern Iowa and the city of Clinton, which will act as an interface for the transfer of architectural goods as well as the transfer of people from various parts of rural Iowa to larger urban areas."

Filmed Architecture: The Nature Of Vision, Theodore C. Grothe

Architecture Thesis Prep

"By researching the methods, technologies, theories, and criticism of motion film, one can begin to gain an understanding of these phenomena. Tha language of film becomes apparent, and can then be used in architectural discourse.

How can these methods and techniques begin to translate into the discipline of architecture? What can the discipline gain from them In what capacity can we begin to augment their affects on our perception of architecture, form, reality, and space?"

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."

Urban Housing, Fabric, And Flows: New Connections In The Post-Industrial City, Colin Simmer

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The transition from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy in post-industrial American river cities has left extensive tracts of derelict land along urban waterfronts. After years of physical and psychological separation from the rivers, cities are renegotiating the boundaries of post-industrial landscapes and making efforts to reconnect to the riverfront. My thesis aims to generate a new model of urban housing and public spaces that will reconnect historic fabric to the water."

A Sustainable Foundation, Mark K. Wizeman

Architecture Thesis Prep

"My intentions of this project are to investigate the potential of architecture to augment its efforts of sustainable strategies with aspirations of achieving a socially sustainable foundation in the urban setting. Within the context of Trenton, the understanding of the local communities, the capital and business districts, the education system, and the areas of renewal efforts can reveal solutions to the rebuilding of the city's community by way of reconnecting these now divided forces. What makes architecture critical in this application is its ability to effectively address the very tangible aspects of sustainable practice and the potential for it to …

Social Interaction In The Digitally Networked City., Zachary Goldstein

Architecture Thesis Prep

"There is an underlying digital network that exists in our contemporary cities that affects every aspic of urban life. Technology has changed the way we perceive and activate space, and communicate with one another....

Public space will always be critical in city planning because it fosters human interaction. No matter how advanced our technology becomes, nothing will be able to replace talking to someone in person or participating in live events."

Ephemeral Urbanism: Exploring Impermanence In A Static Environment, Lawrence Salviejo

Architecture Thesis Prep

"In a city where hyper-density and permanence are established as the norm, its inhabitants are limited in their opportunity to perform acts of spontaneity. Architecture of monumentality within our cities has taken away form our outspoken temperament due to their static and unchanging nature. These buildings contain the desires and pre-occupations of their time and cannot adapt to changing social dynamics. To counter this rooted and presiding environment, I am proposing the introduction of mobile interventions to the urban environment in order to create opportunities for the city's inhabitants to engage in spontaneous discourse."

Village Methodology For Grandfamily Housing, Meghan O'Reilly

Architecture Senior Theses

"The study, analysis, and use of a village as a model for housing, specifically grandfamilies housing, allows the opportunities to see the bridge between community spaces in a village, a community spaces in housing. Villages operating as a community through the creation of spaces [such as: town squares, meeting halls, churches, stores, schools, and places of worship] can be used as an architectural model for how in the housing typology of grand families, the same spaces [such as: gathering halls, gardens, communal kitchens, counseling centers, after school care, and spiritual spaces] can allow the community to operate as an analogous …

Architecture For A Simulated World, Clay Strange

Architecture Thesis Prep

"It is the contention of this thesis that such an architecture should be light and insubstantial, like a simulation. Architecture should appear ambiguous and fleeting."

Graduate Sessions 4: Transdisiplinary Applications, Mark D. Linder, Joseph Sisko

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

This issue of Graduate Sessions combines the panel discussions of Transdisciplinary Applications, a symposium featuring designers and researchers who studied the discipline of architecture and now are expanding the field of the discipline by applying specifically architectural techniques to problems and projects outside of, or marginal to, the proper domain of the profession.

Hotel Refugee: Temporary Housing Oasis, Leonardo Perez-Alonso

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis aims to generate a "hyper-prototype" that intends to reanimate architecture as a catalyst for social and political invention by exploring its potential to redefine boundaries through its positioning in the urban context."

Rebuild New Orleans, Sean Karns

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The development of a city depends on its ability to rebuild. In many cases planners have been unaware of future threats to their city that may occur. Often times in order to rebuild one must rethink and replan in order to fully utilize while learning and taking away valuable lessons from the past. In the case of a natural disaster, such lessons usually stem from precautions that could have been made to proactively resolve the situation."

Mps Movement Public Space, Matthew R. Kanewske

Architecture Senior Theses

"Portland provides an opportunity to examine the way this can relate to formal construction because cities' primary sites of public spaces will be integrated with the flows of movement, but this creates a dichotomy between the nature of site as a singular entity and the requirements of multiplicity required by a system. In this lies an opportunity for architectural invention of new forms of communicative public space."

33.3% - Creative Entrepreneurship In Buffalo, Ny, Bruce Molino

Architecture Senior Theses

"This work has emerged out of an interest in the idea of the resilient city. It is an experiement intended to test ideas and suggest ways in which to reconsider architecture within a directed urbanism. Directional urbanism is a term that I use to describe how insertions can redirect or reinvent the trajectory of a city. This thesis privileges resiliency as the objective of that new trajectory; not as a moment of realization, but rather a continually changing adaptive process that allows cities to act, and react, in a constructive way."

Building Urban Texture, Fernando Pabon-Rico

Architecture Senior Theses

"This investigation is based on the contention that a city is made up of an urban construct where certain elements are continuous in their presence. This continuity provides legibility to an urban environment. The fact that elements or parts are an integral part of the legibility of the city fosters the reading of the city as a function of their integration. The role or place of architecture therefore lies on the formation of the city through its parts."

Dwelling In The Stability Of Change: Creating Identity Through The Repetition Of Site Specificity For The Foster Care System, Emily A. Wiles

Architecture Senior Theses

"This thesis contends that an integration of the associations that modernity and dwelling have with foster care will enable place identification in the deinstitutionalized system. When the two work in conjunction with each other, opportunities for dwelling will be created within, between, and around the framework of the modern grid."

Activating The Void: Programmed Pedestrian Infrastructure In Syracuse, Ny, Karissa Kizer

Architecture Senior Theses

"To deal with the abundance of vehicles, much of the land immediately surrounding highways is occupied by parking facilities. These facilities, however, are neither spatially nor economically beneficial to the site, and are considered voids as they lack any meaningful use or activity. The scales of highways and pedestrians must be reconciled and the voids activated in order for cities to continue to survive with the ever-increasing presence of transportation infrastructure."