Architecture Commons^™

Designing For A Resilient Waterfront, Laura Festa

Architecture Thesis Prep

The project will use soft infrastructure systems to create a more environmental, technical, and economically resilient waterfront development. The threat of rising sea level will become the framework for a flexible and holistic design between architecture, landscape, and soft infrastructure. By arraying the activities of recreation, ecology, and urban development along the waterfront and combining these design strategies with a soft infrastructure system, the coastline of East Boston has the potential to become a precedent for other urban waterfronts vulnerable to sea level rise. By rethinking the division between landscape and infrastructure to form a soft infrastructure system, solutions can …

The Tectonics Of Turning The Corner: A New City Hall For Boston, Massachusetts, Hillary Barlow

Architecture Senior Theses

The corner is a unique architectural condition that serves as a rhetorical device through its role in the configuration of space. How architects "turn the corner" or the "problem" of the corner has long been rooted in architectural discourse however as Eisenman notes, "corners are elusive and thus rarely thematized in architecture. For example, when Rosalind Krauss said that architecture will always have four walls-that is, an enclosure-she never said that architecture has corners, either external or internal." The corner specifically can produce multiple layers of meaning since the corner can define form either as a series of edges, surfaces …

The Tectonics Of Turning The Corner: A New City Hall For Boston, Massachusetts, Hilary Barlow

Architecture Thesis Prep

"In today’s society, the relationship between architecture and political

behavior is largely undetected. Such is the case with Boston, Massachusetts’

present City Hall, where the brutalist structure was once believed to broadcast

Boston’s power and importance however time has shown it to be an unengaged

object in Boston’s historical landscape with a plaza devoid of activity. This

project proposes a new city hall and plaza design for Boston that proves through

the lens of the corner, physical architectural attributes can make Boston’s City

Hall a successful civic space that embodies Boston’s history, democracy and

public."

The Architecture Of The Profane, Dylan Forester

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that it is vital to understand this shift in the role of secularization in order to anticipate what the implications of such changes will be for an ever-growing secular-minded society in the future. Furthermore, it is my contention that this movement must be realized through a new nondenominational architecture - a spatial manifestation that provides a universal setting for both contemplative and spiritual action; a sanctuary that provokes the tension between singularity and multiplicity."

It Takes A Village: The Decentralized School, James Ben Harrison

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that architecture should act as a threshold that mediates between education and community in order to create a "decentralized educational facility" that revolves around the concept of educational space, that Jhn Dewet describes as a communal environment which fosters interaction. The resulting programmatic overlap will create something that is more than a school, by incorporating existing community accessible activities that work with the school. This intervention will create an opportunity to enhance the performance of the school and redefine the educational situation as [school as community] rather than [school or community]."

Cycling Without Spandex: A Transdisciplinary Approach To Design, Jess Garnitz

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Engaging with other disciplines is important to designers today as the nature of problems and issues are becoming more complex."

"The problem of integrating bicycles into our city streets is inherently a problem that requires transdisciplinary work. This is because of the complexity of the problem and the numerous areas affected through the integration. The problem is like an interconnected web of relations. There are issues relating to wayfinding and understanding how to get from destination to destination, which relate to issues of speed and non-verbal communication."

Architecture Cover To Cover [Entry To Exit], Ryan Kowalczyk

Architecture Senior Theses

"By making an architecture that offers successive ideas to complete a coherent whole, the true art of architecture can be re-realized."

Urban Engagement: Social Interaction Through Urban Spectacle, Philip Gleason

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Cinematic devices are utilized in film to distort and alter perception, layer events and situation, and manipulate the understanding of time. The translation of such ideas through architecture will lead to the development of a Cinema Center that will function as an extension of film into habitable space. The Cinema Center is intended to be a multi media experience capable of interrupting ones sense of time and place while altering emotion, and perception of the urban environment, much like ones reaction to film. The Cinema Center has the potential to energize the newly developed Boston Greenway by creating new connections …

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."

Green Reintroducing Nature To The City, Andrew Cunneen

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The architecture of present day America reflects the way in which we give little consideration to the impact that built forms have on the environment. American cities are expanding beyond their former limits into the natural environment previously untouched by built form. It is important for us to foster a sense of environmental concerns in an age of increasing development and advancements. While technology continues to progress it seems that these advancements are applied to everything but architecture. We have designed ways to get more mileage out of a tank of gas, and created appliances that reduce our electric consumption, …

The Void: Urban By Association, Brian Kessler

Architecture Thesis Prep

"I contend that a regional and now increasingly global scale dictates the development of the city. At this super-urban scale the specificity of architecture is impractical and too expensive, yet the city adn architecture still persist, because of the fundamental human desire for intimate social interaction. Architecture, stripped of its unobtainable utopian ideals, still maintains its significance as the literal and symbolic framework of the urban condition; the space of intense, physical interaction, leading to the literal procreation of humanity and limitless possibilities for new unforeseen activity."

Unearthing Threshold, Maggie L. Cookman

Architecture Senior Theses

In addition to responding to its immediate physical context, architectural form has the capacity to reveal and celebrate history, promoting an understanding of the relationship of site and region to historic conditions no longer in their original form. Within the built environment, architecture has an inherent ability to influence the experience and perception of historical relationships. This can be achieved through prescribed interactions with the constructed form, beginning before one enters the building, and continuing through the program. The exterior begins to engage the visitor through both site and facade. The building itself, as well as its response to physical …

Unearthing Threshold: [Re]Creating History In Boston's South End, Maggie L. Cookman

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis contends that architecture can act as a unifier and agent of interaction by conveying historical conditions within a modern context, through which the awareness of historical relationships occurs. Through this thesis, the intention will be to investigate how history can be revealed through architectural form and one's perception of the juxtaposition of past and present."

Rituals Transforming Cultures, Cultures Transforming Rituals: Tea Importers' Headquarters + Interactive Tea Museum, Todd Rubin

Architecture Thesis Prep

Throughout tea's history, rituals have developed ranging from strictly obeying principles in Japanese tea ceremonies to loosely interpreting principles of tea such as drinking a bottle of iced tea in America. Locating a program to explore the historic, cultural, and political connotations of Boston, in its Inner Harbor, tea can be culturally transformed through a process of an interactive museum in conjunction with the headquarters for a tea importing company, which will explore cultural and ritual issues of tea. This exploration will further enhance these transformations of cultures and rituals that exist with the ever changing life of tea.

Rebuilding Community: Boston's North End, Maria A. Fazio

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The city is enhanced by architecture form which participates in the urban fabric as a means of connection, therefore promoting the formation of community... The intent is to propose developemnt for portions of the Central Artery Master Plan in Boston, Massachusetts. The city is currently in the process of relocating a major infrastructural element from its present location above grade to a tunnel beneath the city. Demolition of the exiting central artery offers the city an opportunity to infill much of the land and restore surface level streets reconnecting the east sire of the interstate to the downtown area...

The …

Architecture, Dis/Order(S) And Interlapping, Allen Williams

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Application of a theater and subsidized housing program into a complex urban site in Boston, Massachusetts."

An Architecture Of Ground, Frame, And Viewer: A Box Office For The Theatre District Of Boston, Ma, Casey Boss

Architecture Thesis Prep

"There exists a separation between what we see and the reproduction created to describe it. Through seeing we locate ourselves in the world. References to the things around us as well as recollections of things we have seen before are our base for what we currently see.

Benefits Of Community: Housing For People Living With Aids, Paul R. Coffman

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The notion of a beneficial community is the primary concern in the creation of a program to provide housing and health care for people with AIDS (PWA). The program will provide long term housing for PWA as well as hospice care during the time of their dying.

Given the fact that the disease strikes without prejudice at all levels of society, not discriminating upon race, age or gender and that the victims tend to be concentrated within dense urban condition, the program will be located in a mixed socio-economic, residential, urban neighborhood: Boston's South End."

The Monument And The Square: Evolving An Identity For Harvard Square, Kathleen Kulpa

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis will demonstrate the making of a civic building as a resolution between urban conditions and as a focal point in a urban square. It proposes to create an identity for the place by using abstraction of the meeting house as a recognizable type which can allow for the reproposition of the community within."

A Meeting House In Boston: A Vehicle For Reconnection, Roseanne Hennessey

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The thesis project will explore the reconnection of the urban core to the periphery. It will deal fundamentally with the relationship of center to edge and the sue of architecture as connective tissue. The vehicle for this exploration if a meeting house in Boston. This vehicle presents an opportunity to investigate the topic of reconnection as an urban/site proposition as well as a use/program proposition."

The Paul Revere Mall: The Synthesis Of The Ideal And The Circumstantial, John B. Burse

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The intent of my proposal for thesis is an investigation of the synthesis of the ideal and the circumstantial. In the collage of these distinct and different qualities, a demonstration of how urban building can not only respond to but enhance the given conditions of a city will be presented. The resultant coexistence of the two I believe to be an ideal in and of itself."

Recreational Center In Boston, Amy Coburn

Architecture Senior Theses

Recreational Center in Boston.

Thesis Board, Britton Award Winner.