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.

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 …

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 …

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, …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Relink Tangible And Intangible, Weibin Lao, Xiaobai Zhao

Architecture Thesis Prep

Syracuse, as part of the Upstate New York used to be an essential economic center of the United States. This not only was resulting from its once influential salt industry and its easily accessed canal infrastructure, but also was heavily influenced by the industrial innovation. Without trained engineers, the people in Syracuse designed machines for excavating the earth and building the Erie Canal. And with easy transportation, goods and industrial products created and produced from Syracuse were shipped and transported. This brought prosper and wealth to the Syracuse. With new transportation technology development including the railways for trains and highways …

Living In The Shrinking City: Making A Case For An Urban Resurgence In Syracuse, Sou Fang

Architecture Senior Theses

The focus of this thesis is the City of Syracuse. Understood as a city undergoing population decline since the 1950s, this thesis attempts to engage with the effects of city shrinkage by evaluating the socio­-economic and material reality of the city. This project challenges the pedagogy of architecture to both broaden and be very explicit on how its disciplinary questions enter the frame of discussion surrounding the shrinking city discourse. The aim of the research / investigation and analysis (phase 1) is to understand the underlying principles, characteristics and effects of city shrinkage in the case of the City of …

Atmospheres And Bureaucracy: Challenging Everyday Perception And Regulation Of Public Space, Philip Claghorn

Architecture Senior Theses

It is common for us to overlook the everyday elements encountered in the city such as public Wi-Fi beacons, aestheticized benches, bike-sharing stations, and other items which have colonized street-scapes. In reality, these components are cosigned by business investment districts, private businesses, and city governments who stand to profit by maintaining control of public space. This struggle between formal and informal urbanism has been played out globally. The best example of informal urban contention can be found in street vending policy. An increasingly congested sidewalk, in conjunction with convoluted policies in places such as New York City, has made street …

Subaltern Virtuality: Virtual Hegemony And Domestic Architecture In Postcolonial World, Nusrat Jahan Mim

Architecture Senior Theses

Antonio Gramsci coined the term “subaltern” to reveal the presence of small social groups of people on the fringes of history. Subaltern can be perceived as negative space or position of disempowerment, a position without social or political agency, and access to the power or hegemony. Today the emergence of ubiquitous computing, virtual social network, and globalized image culture has created a new group of subalterns in the virtual world. Amounts of tweets, likes, views, shares etc. have started to appear as a dominating factor in determining the “status” of a person in the virtual world and hence, have created …

Reshaping Reality: From Disneyland To Dismaland, Lina Wang

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis deals with hyperreality as a key concept to reassess contemporary socio-cultural conditions. Jean Baudrillard once described Disneyland as one of the main examples of hyperreality. By presenting imaginary as more realistic than reality itself, Disneyland draws visitors into the world of escapism and happiness achieved through simulation; it makes the troubles of the real world less relatable. If we wear glasses to view Disneyland more closely, however, we might see many issues behind it. Dismaland is an important reference in this thesis. When asked about the idea and inspiration for his Dismaland project, Banksy stated, "theme parks should …

Volcano: Tools + Projections, Sang Ha Jung, Young Joon Yun

Architecture Thesis Prep

The core of this project is the idea of humankind as a geological force. By imagining the active ground in relation to the creation of new ground and environment, this thesis seeks to reclaim the formal language of the geological through volcanism. As we create a series of spaces within this new ground, using lava as our natural tool for architecture, the goal is to create architecture and landscape that reconciles the geological and the biological, merging the natural and the artificial. Architecture can be formed naturally, like a stone built over time, through sedimentation and erosion. This idea of …

Suicide Normal Absurdity Foxconn Utopia, Yenhsi Tung, Yuchi Kuo

Architecture Senior Theses

Suicide normal absurdity Foxconn utopia is a study of modern architecture and urbanism in the information age. It posits that the metropolis spectacle that can be infinitely extended as a sprawling and systematic intervention. Snafu narrates the spectacle of high-efficiency in the Shenzhen and Hong Kong region, as represented by the existing Foxconn technology group in the Longhua campus. This manufacturing panorama is utopian. It consists of normal and all-inclusive phenomenon for each occupant in the form of productive cell that is embedded within an efficient coordinated system. Additionally, the standardization, optimization and hierarchical manipulation formulated by snafu generates a …

Hatch Is Hatch: Building Building Drawings, Thomas Kuei

Architecture Senior Theses

The hatch is a series of marks on a page laid out systematically. It is a representational technique that has evolved, taken up different values, and has been utilized in different ways over time as technologies and practices changed. Today, the hatch is used symbolically as a way of communicating a drawing and has no direct relationship to the represented subject. However, by looking back at drawing practices, we start to understand the hatch has material consequences and is no longer solely illusory. The act of making a mark allows for the process to be read in the final image …