Architecture Commons^™

Entangling Manila’S Seams, Patrick De Garcia

Architecture Thesis Prep

Manila, Philippines is a city fragmented into slums and upper-class enclaves. The adjacency of their separated development contributes to intensifying class-relations; each side is fearful of the other. Symbolic manifestations of the border are made apparent due to economic inaccessibility, emphasizing social stratification. This project is interested in blurring the boundaries maintaining social segregation to enhance public spaces’ quality, specifically through redeveloping the shopping mall.

Dissolving Reality: An Endless Domestic Landscape, Hanzhang Lai, Phang Lim

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis explores how the exponential growth in communication technology is changing the way we interact with the tangible and intangible spaces. The invasion of the public into the private, the collective into the domestic, the work into the leisure, and the ability to be constantly connected wirelessly have caused a dissolution of the physical domestic space. The domestic space has lost its value of privacy and intimacy and the boundary between the binaries will be no more. The gap between “the control” and “controlled” has widened and productive workers will be oppressed to be even more productive under the …

Privacy Reconfigured: Examining Public Interactions Within Domestic Space, Vanessa Poe

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis reconfigures private domestic spaces by combining modes of privacy in order to accommodate the needs of the townhouse, resulting in a new series of private reveals through socialization.

Reconceptualizing The Urban Artifact, Ricardo Rodriguez Huerta

Architecture Senior Theses

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

A Simulation-Assisted Workflow For Outdoor Thermal Comfort Design In Downtown Syracuse, Pouya Zhand

Architecture Senior Theses

Cities are not just about the buildings and skylines. Cities are also about the space be­tween buildings (the ground in figure-ground). More importantly and fundamentally cities are about people and the life that happens between buildings. Simulation tools can inform the design of attractive public spaces by pro­viding insight about the environmental conditions.

Reconnect: Amplifying Circulation Typologies To Radically Rethink Urban-Aqueous Relationships, Tiffany Pau

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis proposes a radical rethinking of city-water relationships to leverage existing infrastructural and architectural divides; because it holds great architectural and social value to work within and challenge existing systems, and because access to the waterfront– for sustenance, transportation, commercial, or leisure purposes– is a core human need. The project questions what happens when connections are scaled extra-large, yet aim to maintain the qualities that are imbued within them at the micro scale to generate increased public activity at the water’s edge. It looks to create a new type of urbanism, one that prioritizes the very act of circulation …

Ritual Place, Dabota Wilcox

Architecture Senior Theses

What is a ritual? Its connotations are rooted in the vocabulary of religion, but essentially a ritual is a repeated or singularly significant act meant to instill a deeper meaning or reinforce a belief. Beliefs are supported through the practice of rituals. Rituals are special because they facilitate experiences that separate us from the mundane. They serve to pull its participants to recognize and participate in something of worth. But what would it mean to imagine the new ritual? If for a moment this distinction were expanded there are countless moments, activities, or seemingly insignificant acts that could be considered …

The Public Sky-Spacer, Piotr Jankowski

Architecture Thesis Prep

We have reached an era where architecture has to prepare for the alarming changes affecting our modern society. Predicted urbanization will lead to cities becoming denser and taller to facilitate the needs of housing and workspace for the growing world population. High costs of rent and scarcity of real state land in city centers will force developers to build skyscrapers. Taking into account the impact of larger populations, skyscrapers will have to offer more efficient spaces and follow strict environmental regulations while contributing to the production of energy and necessary resources. Focus on human comfort and sustainability will play an …

Charon's Passage: The Journey To Nimiety, Nicholas Kronauer

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis aims to reconsider the possibility and potential of the mausoleum as an architectural contradiction by reconceptualizing the mausoleum as a typology for public space, thus inverting the traditional objective of introspection and the object-form, interior-exterior dialectic of funerary architecture. By engaging the mausoleum with 21st-century urbanization, traditional notions of permanence, meaning, and tectonics can be renegotiated through the juxtaposition of a foreign object that activated by the appropriation and integration of a social program. Through this thesis, the mausoleum is no longer a place for reflection or solidarity but will operate as a stage set to frame and …

Efficacy Of Perspective: The Production Of Transitoriness In 21st Century Public Space, Kenny Kim

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis considers the specific relationship between representation of cities and its capacity to promote and construct cities. In the last century, there has been a shift of theorizing in the position of the human eye to organize the new systems of the contemporary city. It has moved away from using these tools to imagine and polemically argue for or against the city.

Charon's Passage: A Pyramid For The 21st Century, Maximilian Kronauer

Architecture Senior Theses

Charon’s Passage is the product of nimiety1: a pyramid for the 21st century. By engaging the mausoleum within the context of global urbanization and global consumption, notions of permanence and object-form relationships are challenged and renegotiated through the introduction of foreign agents and spatial products. Ultimately, the agency of the project is facilitated by overlapping autonomies that assume the scale, density, and power structures of a city-state as exhibited by the casino-resort while reinforcing the sacredness of the mausoleum’s objective formal agenda.

Spatializing The Corridor, Mengru Li

Architecture Thesis Prep

The goal of this thesis project is to develop a model for a public corridor that would serve as the basis for the future development in the planning of a new district.

Revitalizing Waterfront: The Sinking City, Clifford Shih

Architecture Senior Theses

The existing waterfront condition presents a separation between the water and urban. I propose this separation between the water and urban is an interacted space of urban and water. Waterfront constructed in this way protects the city from floating, yet a solution of creating a public space, ports, and water filtration facility will blend the separated condition. Thus, architecture exemplifies a vehicle to constitute physical and visual connection for dichotomy edge created by the waterfront in a rapid stratified urbanization and industrialization.

Technocarpet: Supporting A Culture Of Congestion, William Andrew Weigand

Architecture Senior Theses

"The TechnoCarpet is a public space sited in a future of resource scarcity, climate disruption, and urbanization. It provides support facilities and cultural amenities necessary to sustain super dense urban populations. I establishes an internal frontier for the city as a means to provoke density, by creating an escape from it. The TechnoCarpet is a model for parks in the 21st century."

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."

Bridge_Works, Chris Driscoll

Architecture Senior Theses

Building typologies are generally well defined and functionally specific. A church is for worship, a house is for living, and a theater is for performing. In certain instances, these basic building typologies have been combined to form composite structures such as mixed-use housing/retail projects, or a house on a boat. The opportunities created by composite typologies have allowed for broader economic development, more complex and integrated programming, greater utility and richer social structures. A specific combination of typologies--the mix of infrastructural bridge with housing/retail/public space--has produced a few historically successful models[...] Over time, the bridge was developed from a simple …

[Re]-Establishing Connection: Integrating People Through Movement And Culture In Nyc, Justin Leung

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis proposes to test and re-establish how architecture can make connections between people. Through freedom of movement, transportation creates many opportunities for the congregation of people and social interaction. This thesis aims to create spaces for mixing and awareness through movement, and program."

Resurrecting The Bauhaus: Public Interaction Through Constructive Education In Harlem, Luke Carnahan

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Architecture has the capacity to mediate the boundaries between the social territories of urban contexts. Educational programs become the vehicles that generate the dynamic social exchange necessary to do so."

Constructing A Living Surface: City Hall As Connective Tissue, Benjamin Grace

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Infrastructural space offers a model for architecture which is not closed and self-contained, but expansive, continuous, and referential beyond itself. A healthy urban landscape can be produced by buildings that serve to construct sites which expand into the city, giving expression to the role of the urban surface."

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."

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."

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."

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."

Fertile Fragments: An Improvisational Urbanism For The Evolving Urban Edge, Matthew Duggan

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Often cities are developed and designed on a parcel by parcel basis without an overall master plan. Urban actors (architecture, planners, developers, municipalities, engineers, artists, etc.) are responsible for what happens on their land alone. While this can result in a series of discrete separate enclaves it is also possible to graft new developments into/onto existing ones. This thesis contends that fragments of urban form can be guiding catalysts for subsequent urban growth and transformation. It intends to explore the possibilities opened up when urban actors leave behind partial or fragmentary works for others to elaborate upon."

Today's Neighborhood Drugstore, B. Sparano

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis attempts to align architectural critique with the forces that inevitably shape it. For architecture to become a (critical) reality, the architect is forced to take on new roles. She can no longer be (solely) a manipulator of aesthetics, images and signs. She must also, in addition, become the manipulator of underlying forces beneath the surface (i.e. social, political, and economic)."

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."

Breaking Boundaries: The Connection Of Public Buildings To Public Spaces, Josh Linkov

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Traditionally, public buildings sit as monuments in a city and can be read as objects in a public space or boundaries surrounding it. There is often little interaction between the building and the site. I am proposing a new town hall located on a public plaza that will deal with connecting the building to the space it sits within. I will show how the ideas initially incorporated in New England town halls, up until the mid 1800's, can be investigated and reinterpreted to form a coherent unified system of built form and designed landscape."