Architecture Commons^™

Olympic Gardens After The Games, Kaylee O'Brien

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis begins with an intense study of landscape and the garden. In addition to research on the historical, theoretical, and contemporary conditions of the garden, the thesis investigates the architectural and landscape conditions of the Olympic Games. Specifically looking into issues including Olympic Legacy, Olympic Gardens, and urban interventions associated with Olympic Parks, the project aims to understand ways in which these subjects can be studied, analyzed, and reapplied in the context of a new architectural design. This combined research into gardens and the Olympic Games serves as a foundation for the thesis design project, providing strategies and ways …

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.

Reconstruct The Missing Narrative: Rethinking Contemporary Chinese Architecture Through Ancient Landscape Paintings, Taiming Chen, Yiwei Wu

Architecture Thesis Prep

In this thesis, we will continue to address the issue of self-identity and missing narrative in contemporary context. Differently, we will use landscape paintings as our design source to revive the narrative quality. We will use the methodologies developed from the research to deconstruct the selected landscape paintings, transform them into narratives, and reconstruct the narratives into architecture.

By extracting events, atmosphere, and spirits from original painting narratives, and by borrowing the principles of paintings to transform them into sequences, we will set up architectural narratives in contemporary context for people to experience.

Decentral Park, Garrett Wineinger

Architecture Senior Theses

In this thesis, I will contemplate the necessary process of weaving the large landscape into the urban fabric. As stated within Anita Berrizbeitia’s essay, Re-placing Process, in the book Large Parks, “Yet for all their susceptibility to the ebb and flow of urban circumstances, large parks remain fundamental to cities, not only because they take on infrastructural and ecological functions displaced from densely built centers but because they are distinct, memorable places. They absorb the identity of the city as much as they project one, becoming socially and culturally recognizable places that are unique and irreproducible. Those large public parks …

The Border Land, Zhuocen Yao

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis aims to explore the issue of the conceptual space for the establishment of difference: the border, in both literal and phenomenal term. What can architecture do to change the way we perceive borders. How can the border politics construct border architecture and can the new border architecture in another way result in new border politics. How can we transform the indeterminate nature of the border from a threshold that demarcates into a new in between landscape typology that mediates between the need for quality space of hosted events and influences and security?

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 …

Enhancing Sensory Environments Of Crematoria, Tanya Bhatia

Architecture Thesis Prep

How can technology today enhance or amplify the social interactions of people in crematoria through the simulation of nature? Crematoria typically, are religious and neutral spaces appropriate to those who want to participate. One of the most significant aspects of crematoria is location. Most crematorium complexes today are located next to either a noisy motorway or in an industrial park. The reasoning behind this is usually to make sure it is not open to the public for viewing unless they want to be a part of it. Usually the crematoria end up in an open landscape, but have walls that …

Unveiling The Rural Landscape, Carolina Jimenez

Architecture Senior Theses

Within the past 50 years, industrialized farming has transformed America’s rural and agricultural landscapes. These two landscapes have taken on increasingly divergent cultural representations in language, paintings and photography. Architectural interventions within the rural landscape can act as a device to reveal these differences. In this way I am engaging in four interrelated discourses.

Defining the Rural | Linguistic, Painting, Photographic Representations In order to define the rural landscape, it is essential to understand the way it has been constructed by cultural representations in language, painting and photography. Images of nature mediate that which is outside of us, translating environment …

(Im)Permanent Landform Built: The Edge Between "Natural" And Man-Made, Katharina Hoerath

Architecture Senior Theses

"I believe that the paramount interconnectedness between architecture and site should become apparent when examining the theoretical constructions, physical, metaphysical, and sensual dimensions. Having chosen the sites at two different threshold of erosion (Matterhorn and Holderness Coast), I claim that the gray zone between “natural” and man made needs to be addressed in an intriguing way to create an aesthetic form responding to landform change over time. This thesis offers an opportunity to contextualize past events and to provoke and imagine something new. Architecture as the permanent, solid element determines the edge towards the solidifying landform. Moreover, this topic provides …

Re-Thinking The Green Belt: Sustainability And Development In Growing Cities, Maria Saavedra

Architecture Senior Theses

One of the major goals of this research is to study the relationship between nature and technology as urban generators. I agree with Lisa Tilder and Beth Bostein, who state that instead of using architectural technology to return nature to some impossible, pre-human pristine state, we should consider fully employing the power of architecture to produce new forms of nature. Instead of thinking about the River’s edge as a natural and physical barrier between the water and the city, we should consider it as an opportunity to challenge the image of nature, exploring how it limits or furthers our social …

Process And Making Of Landscape, Joseph Wood

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis seeks to focus its study on geological processes in nature as a tool to both make and read the landscape as if it were a novel; to uncover its myths and to allow the viewer to interpret its past. As Brad Cloepfil of the architecture practice Allied Works has stated, "A landscape that took some ten million years to form, millions of years before the appearance of man, is thereby nudged toward that most unique of human capacities; language." I claim that by extending the definition of making, earth driven processes can be used as tools to study, …

Re-Thinking The Green Belt: Sustainability And Development In Growing Cities, Maria Saavedra

Architecture Thesis Prep

"One of the major goals of this research is to study the relationship between nature and technology as urban generators. I agree with Lisa Tilder and Beth Bostein, who state that instead of using architectural technology to return nature to some impossible, pre-human pristine state, we should consider fully employing the power of architecture to produce new forms of nature. Instead of thinking about the River’s edge as a natural and physical barrier between the water and the city, we should consider it as an opportunity to challenge the image of nature, exploring how it limits or furthers our social …

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."

A Sacred And Secular Landscape: Empowering Social Agency, Shreya Shah

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that landscape can provoke an idea for a productive, public space using the people of the city as social agents to create a sensitive rather than oppressive water remediation system. By inventing a program that uses landscape as a water remediation space as well as landscape as a religious and social space, the project will exhibit the idea that social agents can inform a change in the water pollution crisis."

Architecture Of Population Flows | Localizing Tourism In The Inside Passage, Jennifer Tamblin

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis focuses on a problem that arises due to the specific flows of tourists and migrant workers into the south east Alaskan Inside Passage. Because of these population flows, situations have emerged in the small town communities that create a need for an intervention designed to cater to the specific circumstances surrounding each individual group of people, and how they coexist with one another."

Campus [Re]Connected: Research, Housing, And Recreation Campus In The Pristine Northern Woods Of Wisconsin, David A. Franknecht Jr.

Architecture Senior Theses

"People are becoming more and more removed from the natural world through the development of modern technologies and lifestyles... Reconnecting people with the natural environment will enable a realization of our reliance on the natural environment and its success in the future. Campus design and landscape architecture can come together to interpret the way we interact with the environment and further this connection in a positive way."

The Architect's Work: David Adjaye Interview, David Adjaye, Scott Ruff

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

The Syracuse University School of Architecture: The Architect's Work Series | April 18 - May 27 2005. Interview of David Adjaye by Scott Ruff.

Site As A Measurement Of Place, Creighton Willis

Architecture Thesis Prep

"PLacement and relationship of a city within its physical environment is a dynamic process that is revealed through its architecture and constructed (designed) interventions. The lift of this dynamic process deposits cicatrices, inscriptions, footprints, and artifacts within the city and place. These events inscribed in the landscape of a city reveal this changing relationship of city-environment. The contention is that a new construction within the city can actively manifest the current city landscape while also revealing the history of the place."

Urban Agents, New Events: A Transformation Of The Postindustrial Landscape, Kevin Toukoumidis

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Railway yards, abandoned industrial processing plants, decommissioned factories and polluted river ways are the leftovers from the industrial age. With the deindustrialization of society, a new prevailing urban condition has resulted: a marginalized landscape of residual spaces and urban voids, often with real or perceived contamination.... The potential for reclaiming these marginalized landscapes becomes a catalyst for the design of new modes of occupation and human activity."

Nature And Architecture, Peter Fx Mattis

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Given all the concern about the environment, my intervention will be dedicated to the ocean and surrounding aquatic habitats. It will act as a place of education, informing the viewer of the river, streams, ponds, lakes, marshes, and their inhabitants, which all are linked in some way, to the big blue underwater world of the sea."

Connection, Sara Lopergolo

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the connection between past and present and landscape to cityscape. Involved with this is a study of various themes tat are specific to place and help support the initial investigation."