Architecture Commons^™

Matter Dis//Assembled: Revealing The Economies And Ecologies Of Aluminum, Noah Anderson

Architecture Thesis Prep

This project seeks to understand matter through the environments it creates. These environments, created through production, end-use, and disposal, extend to the scale of the world, the territory and the product. In a globalized world, the separate environments of a single material are highly external, and while we may know where a material comes from, the consequences of its extraction and manufacture are out-of-site, out-of-mind. This externalization is evident for Aluminum, which has a diverse and often contradictory range of environments.

Casting Contradictive Landscapes: A Thesis By Sarah Catherine Beaudoin, Sarah Catherine Beaudoin

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis aims to bring functionally obsolescent architectural elements to the forefront of design analysis, in the pursuit of architectural character over typology. The analysis is not of buildings, but rather how their recognizable ordinary elements can adopt alternate personalities, identities, and attitudes to the landscapes in which they inhabit.

Here, the understanding of what it means to be “ordinary” is critical. The ordinary is always leftover, comedown, fallen. In this, it is seen that we do not remember ordinary typologies, but rather the everyday features and characters that make up their compositions. This thesis seeks to draw on this …

Imitation & Dissimulation, Weiqiao Lin

Architecture Thesis Prep

Imitation plays a fundamental role in cultural development, and it’s an instinct that human-being born with. Because of its fundamentality, forms of imitation are infiltrated in many fields, including the art and design industries. For example, philosophers have used the term, mimesis, to discuss the criticality of imitation in art and literature. Theories of imitation and mimesis have been addressed in an academical manner since ancient Greece, however; imitation is also something we encounter on a daily basis. In the field of user interface design, designers use the term, Skeuomorphism, to represent the type of design methods of making items …

Vimana: A Crisis Of Translation, Apoorva Rao

Architecture Thesis Prep

The architecture of the Hindu temple, as we know it today, has become a caricature of applied style and a theater for rituals rather than the symbolic representation of the core concepts of Hinduism. There is a disconnection between the beliefs and their translation into architecture, which has resulted in a dissolution and erosion of the temple as a vehicle for the ritual spiritual journey. The temple is built on a literal and conceptual framework of core essential elements such as the sanctum sanctorum, the roof, the plinth, its orientation on earth, and its function to, metaphorically, transport people from …

Avoiding The Real World, Ryan Oeckinghaus

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis, entitled Avoiding the Real World, postulates on alternative urban formations that could circumvent further decline in our current dystopian scenario. This takes the form of the redistribution of people and resources in New Jersey, a state of unique sprawl and density who’s development has been driven by its relationship to the urban centers of New York and Philadelphia. It proposes a renewed interest in the linear city model as a means of effectively densifying the land area and allowing the reappropriation of space for agricultural and clean energy supply, functions that have long been subordinated to home ownership …

Emoji Disorder, Doria Miller, Irving Shen

Architecture Thesis Prep

The introduction of emoji to language creates a universal form of communication through expression. The thesis posits that with the contemporary context of a rising digital and visual language, the elastic architectural design language has the capability to be updated. The updated design language is translated from the existing context of emoji and reflects its pragmatics and characteristics. The duck, based on form, and the decorated shed, based on signage, are no longer adequate to project meaning on architecture. The symbolic language of emojis calls for a new model: the duckerated shed. This thesis will use the house typology as …

Death Of A Posthuman, David Bullard, Carolina Hasbun Elias

Architecture Thesis Prep

Some of the first marks humans left on the world were the architectures of death and remembrance. From the pyramids of Ancient Egypt and the catacombs of Ancient Rome, to the burial landscapes of the 20th century, today’s architecture of death manifests itself mainly as cemeteries and crematoriums. However, the culture of death in the 21st century has evolved to need a new type of architecture that acknowledges changes in humanity and its impact on the natural and technological environment. Humans are no longer just human. Our recent evolution has presented two realities which the discipline of architecture needs to …

Re-Wildin Detroit: Return Of A Blighted City Back To Nature, Nivedita Keshri, Shreeya Shakya

Architecture Thesis Prep

Detroit’s complicated history of corruption, racial tensions and economic decline have made conventional strategies for growth, repopulation and infill inadequate for dealing with ongoing and overwhelming urban vacancy. Dealing with voids within shrinking cities have been difficult because it lies outside the existing experience and vocabulary of urban planning, architecture and socioeconomics. Most have failed to recognize that voids are not useless and there is potential value in keeping them as voids.

What is the current conditions of these voids? How do we make use of it without erasing it? How can we revisit ideas of a city that embraces …

P.E.T.S.: Personal. Empathic. Topological. Series., Ian Mulich, Jose Sanchez

Architecture Thesis Prep

Within the current conditions of our globalized society, market structures and logics have come to organize culture, economy, and politics in an increasingly interrelated manner. Contingent to this triangulation, architecture needs to be critical about its turn towards the market and the commercialization of its production. By performing as a brand that expands and evolves serially, architectural practice can maneuver commercial systems of exchange and act as a cultural agent that promotes deeper engagement with design. Corporeal forms that induce empathic relationships can serve as the architectural products necessary to fuel consumption practices that craft individualized disciplinary interaction. The empathic …

Baita, Xiong’An: Towards And Alternative Urbanism, Minglu Wei, Ying Zuo

Architecture Thesis Prep

The project focuses on Xiong’an, the new special area established in April 2017 by the Chinese government, as well as the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in China, both as a typology and political and economic events. By documenting and understanding the urban development pattern that has been implemented in China since 1978 and by revealing the process of translation and materialization of this capital and politics driven utopian model in the past forty years, the objective is:

1. To construct an alternate portrait of the development of Xiong’an, which is arguably a unique urban typology in China, from pieces of …

[Chinese Urban Villages Research], Yan Liu

Architecture Thesis Prep

“Throughout history, expanding cities have always run over villages, hamlets, estates, gardens, and soft elements that constitute the countryside, the domain that hosts agriculture and nature.” Urban Villages, essentially a composite of these “soft” elements, remained as one of the hardest anchors among the residual or by-product in China’s urban development. Until 1985, the Pearl River Delta region had been mainly dominated by farms and small rural villages. The onset of economic reform and the open-door policy brought an influx of foreign investment which fueled the unstoppable train of urbanization. Rapid urbanization let to the formation of Urban Villages, a …

Multiplicitous Realities: Hybridizing The Virtual And The Physical, John Carino

Architecture Thesis Prep

User spatial experience is no longer solely determined by objective physical realities in today's architecture. A new set of tools allowing for seamless virtual overlay and a new architectural disciplinary and industry interest in creating "virtual" environments are changing the way users understand and experience physical space. These tools include elements such as projection mapping, augmented reality, holograms, and digital display systems. These tools are able transform static physical spaces into dynamic spaces creating multiplicitous realities that transcend spatial physicality.

Researching nightclubs and discotheques as a precedent has revealed the many scales, programs, and possibilities of virtual materials to transform …

Growing Syracuse: The Architect's Role In Improving Syracuse, Ny's Food Environment, Stephanie Wagner

Architecture Thesis Prep

Urbanism requires community, and community requires a platform of public space. Underutilized spaces within the urban fabric can be activated by small scale architectural interventions to create formal spaces for community gathering, interaction, and commerce. The positioning and connectivity of these interventions can lead to the creation of new urban corridors that encourage growth within and between underdeveloped parts of the city.

It is the role of the architect to develop an architecture that is contextually relevant to a community, while addressing larger-scale urban issues, in order to create an accessible and beneficial built environment and lifestyle for users. The …

Urban Rangers: The Scope Of Medellin Through Informal Waste Collection, Christina Rubino

Architecture Thesis Prep

Waste Collectors: Urban Rangers proposes that looking at Medellin through the scope of an informal waste collector allows for the visualization of the relationship between the user and distribution of repurposed values in the city. The analysis focuses on the existing infrastructure and legislation that frames this practice; it provides a critique of current working elements that could be designed to function as a network to assert a new spatial agency with user specificity. This thesis uses the scope of the waste collector, an urban phenomenon, to reexamine the city of Medellin and its legislative practices regarding this issue. Addressing …

Drone Mapping The 140: A Narrative Of Architecture In The Conflict Zone, Rasan Taher

Architecture Thesis Prep

Since the Kurdish regional government in Iraq was established in 1991, the border between the federal government and the KRG has shifted and is in constant dispute. In 2003, under the new Iraqi constitution, article 140 identifies the mechanism to settle the disputed areas through the restoration of all demographic changes and by referendum to decide land claims, to be held no later than 2007. Since then, many attempts to change the demographics and the cultural characteristic of the disputed area have been attempted by both governments in order to secure their political and economic interest in the area. The …

2047 City, Mike Liu, Raul Sadhwani

Architecture Thesis Prep

Hong Kong has always been colonial; its existence is shaped from the confluence of East and West. After 158 years of British rule, Hong Kong's handover to the Chinese Government, catalyzed by the expiration of its 99-year lease of the New Territories, began in 1997 whereby the city operates under a "one-country-two-systems" policy. These events have created a culture and identity of disappearance as the people of Hong Kong have scrambled to define their identity due to the imminence of its disappearance, as discussed by Ackbar Abbas. This is exemplified in the Umbrella Revolution in 2014 when citizens, mainly students, …

Old Buildings, Progressive Forms: Exploring Radical Methods Of Historic Preservation, Ian Masters

Architecture Thesis Prep

Old buildings when coupled with -- or challenged by -- contemporary form produce new visual and spatial compositions, fundamental in developing more investigative methods of preservation that enrich architectural identity. Since the 1960s and the formation of the National Register of Historical Places, American ideas regarding antiquity have been idly manifested in historic preservation, where old buildings are forcefully cemented in their original state to reflect their ‘peak’ condition. It is important to understand and visualize historic buildings as they were conceived; however, universal concessions to historical preservation fail to stimulate architectural progression. Preserving historic buildings means supporting and enriching …

Gender Segregation: What Does Dividing Space Across Gender Mean?, Mikayla Hope Starr

Architecture Thesis Prep

A Utopia is an idea of an ideal form of society that rethinks current power structures and dynamics at play in the world and subverts them. In proposing a new perfect society, one is critiquing the current society and questioning what can and should be done to improve the status quo. To start creating a Utopia, designers must first consider what faults exist in the world that they wish to remove or improve.

In this Utopia, the focus will be on equality for all gender identities, through spatial design. The specific elements being studied are those spaces clearly delineated on …

The New Urban Artifact, Ricardo Rodriguez Huerta

Architecture Thesis Prep

This is a study of the architectural and historical construct of the Urban Artifact. For the purposes of this exploration, an Urban Artifact is to be understood as the physical manifestation of the city and its collective memory. It is the product of the history and character of its place and the embodiment of an idea of its type and the memory of its lineage. In contrast to the fixed intention and permanence of a monument, an Urban Artifact has its own autonomy and value gained over time until it ultimately becomes also identified as a monument. These concepts, defined …

Mirage: Architecture's Confounding Experiences, Nuofan Xu, Ziyao Zhang

Architecture Thesis Prep

The thesis explores the experiences created from mixing architecture elements with projections, in order to make projections melt into architecture as an inseparable element. By proposing an architecture that integrates the effects and infrastructures of digital displays at the start point of the design process, the project seeks to explore digital displays’ ability to blur physical boundaries, to apply temporality on eternal structures and isolate the exterior from the interior.

The project uses mirage, an optical phenomenon which produces illusory images of distant objects, as an analogy to speculate digital displays in architecture. On one hand, mirage shows an ordinary …

Finding A New Center: A Study Of Neo-Industrial America, Juliet Domine, Virginia Paulk

Architecture Thesis Prep

Globalization moved manufacturing in America overseas, leaving the middle of the country with forgotten industrial zones. As a result, the edges of the country, with greater access to international markets, have flourished, creating a distinct divide between the middle and the edge. Moving out of the post-industrial era into the current age of the neo-industrial, revitalization of the middle can occur by reintroducing industry utilizing previous skill sets needed for agriculture and manufacturing. We are arguing that the center of the United States can be made relevant again through the programmatic revitalization of post-industrial sites. The Mississippi River is historically …

Public Space With Character: A Late, Late Entry To The Chicago Central Public Library Competition, Kokeith Perry Ii

Architecture Thesis Prep

The city of Chicago has a complex relationship with the aesthetics of civic monuments and infrastructures. The cities most canonical projects validate its apparent biases - an oscillation between iconic modern and postmodern figures proliferate the urban fabric. The dynamic between these two paradigms creates a complex relationship between architecture, urban space, and the public mirroring the cities longstanding and complex history of segregated urban space and peoples. This project draws precedent from the format of the 1980 Stanley Tigerman exhibition Late entries to the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition, a then-radical competition set to reinvigorate the discipline the way the …

Crude Urbanism, Ahnaf Chowdhury, Anuradha Desai

Architecture Thesis Prep

Mumbai’s formal and informal components operate in interdependence. Matter from the formal is absorbed by the informal, where it is hacked, recycled and repurposed. The output, now lucrative, is spat back into the formal. For example, the city’s trash is collected, sorted and prepared by the informal as a commodity that is sold back into the formal. This cycle creates crucial nodes, where the formal relies heavily on the informal for its flexible and resilient systems.

Though these systems may be independent and engrained in Mumbai’s economy, the worker’s relation to the system’s matter reveals needs that the informal sector …

The Cultural Mosaic: Knowledge, Conflict And The Power Of Place, Shanaya Girdharlal

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis explores how contemporary architecture can recreate the authentic experience of a historical site by intervening in a historical context such that both historical continuity and contemporary additions manifest in a symbiotic and didactic way.

The project examines how the history of a place is represented and reflected logistically, and how it materially manifests in its built form. In the context of Rajasthan, identification means to acknowledge the ruling past, to embrace its traditions, crafts, and architecture, and to create a contemporary language for the site based on past evidence. The thesis tries to establish a historical continuum using …

Surfaces Of Exchange: Formulating Connections And Experiences In The Physical And Digital Landscape, Brooke Calhoun, Ross Hanson

Architecture Thesis Prep

The means and modes through which people and places have connected has drastically altered within the recent past. At the global scale, as recent as the mid 1800’s, the cross-cultural exchange of information was rare and occurred only through person-to-person connections. Expositions such as the Great Exhibition hosted in London at the Crystal Palace in 1851 is a clear example of how cultures communicated in our recent past. Information, machines, animals, plants, all the above, was removed from its natural habitat and placed on display in front of an audience; a one-point perspective through which one culture would understand another. …

Transitional Spaces: Re-Thinking Of Disaster Relief Housing, Evelyn Brooks

Architecture Thesis Prep

Natural disasters such as tornadoes, wildfires, earthquakes, and hurricanes destroy our infrastructure, civic buildings, public amenities, and homes. These disasters create problems of homelessness, but they also create environments within the city that are unlivable due to a lack of electricity and potable water. People displaced by disasters often find themselves living in a government-or non-profit-run evacuation shelter, at the mercy of bureaucratic organizations for assistance to begin the recovery process. People forced to evacuate neighborhoods where they have perhaps been established for decades often also lose their ability to attend school. These shelter environments are repurposed public buildings like …

Embracing The American Atlantis: Designing For A Post-Disaster New Orleans, Mikayla Beckwith, Katherine Truluck

Architecture Thesis Prep

In the year 2100, New Orleans is flooded and reduced to a fraction of its previous grandeur. The rising sea level has reduced the city to an archipelago settled between the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. Through the implementation of a transportation and program core system, the archipelago of territories is reconnected and the programmatic organization of the land is redistributed. This project combines architectural, infrastructural, and utopian case studies to move beyond the mitigation of water and instead create a new condition that adapts to the water in a more symbiotic fashion. Through this intervention, New Orleans …

Building Translations: Narratives On Bizarre Preservation, Alexandra Allen, Scott Michael Krabath

Architecture Thesis Prep

In today’s globalized society, we’re confronted with a flood of images and data at a speed that strains our ability to fully process the information. This messy network often gives way to misreading’s and poor interpretations. In the architectural discipline, a suspension of critical disbelief is necessary to accommodate the lack of fidelity, clarity or resolution that exists in many of the documents we encounter.

We contend that there’s a productive tension between the object and its mediated representation and that the translations that occur between the two are embedded within the way that architects communicate with one another.

Robin …

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 …

City Of Brick: Spatial And Material Explorations In 21st Century Urbanism, William Collins

Architecture Thesis Prep

The project I’m proposing, City of Brick: Spatial and Material Explorations in 21st Century Urbanism, will analyze the problem of and propose an alternative to the supertall residential tower in the contemporary city. Th ere is a trend in American cites toward the construction of ‘prestige’ projects, namely, skyscrapers of luxury apartments purchased as investments. Th is phenomenon is well-documented in the spacious floorplans of these towers; for example, 432 Park Avenue in New York City, though it is the tallest residential building in North America, only contains 104 units. My proposal seeks to provide a counter to the ultraluxury …