Architecture Commons^™

Activating The Edge Defragmenting The City Of Atlanta, Allison Marie Summers

Masters Theses

Connecting the fragmented urban landscape through the tactical activation of the drosscape, “in-between” spaces, separating communities within the urban fabric.

American cities are currently experiencing a period of deindustrialization, factories are moving out of the traditional city center and into the suburban landscape, taking employment opportunities and people with them. The result is a horizontal urbanization that creates conditions of fragmentation and increased separation between communities within the city. Borders and boundaries between communities become increasingly more defined, generated by physical, geographical, political, social, cultural, and economic differences.

Strongly defined separations between communities within an urbanized area can bring to …

Community Identity: Place And The South Knoxville Waterfront, Nicholas Joseph Burger

Masters Theses

“With the loss of tactility and the scale and details crafted for the human body and hand, our structures become repulsively flat, sharp-edged, immaterial, and unreal” (Holl 29). Our built environment is full of constructs which are unsuccessful on a number of levels proving why it is critical to concentrate on a sense of place and identity. A great place is described as one where people gravitate towards, a place for everyone, something that is memorable, and a space which evokes a story (Placemaking Is...). South Knoxville, Tennessee, the selected site of this thesis, will test the concept of place …

The Role Of The Architect In The Process Of Development, Christopher Alan Owens

Masters Theses

Population growth and cars have caused cities to sprawl from their downtown cores, resulting in a landscape of low density building. Far too often the empty lot at the edge of the city or along a highway attracts the next opportunity for development, furthering the gap between residential and commercial zones. The profession of architecture recognizes that urban site selection and mixed-use programming is vital to the social and financial health of a city, though it typically only participates in the design of the building. However, the visionary training and practice of architecture places the architect in a unique position …

Breaking The Eviction Cycle: Rethinking Design In An Urban Homeless Campsite, Lauren R. Dunn

Masters Theses

In Knoxville, TN, in an area of decaying rail-based industry close to a cluster of homeless services, people experiencing homelessness, who cannot or will not use the shelter system, generate outdoor campsites. Every 6 or 8 months, local authorities evict the campers due to complaints of trash accumulation or disturbances. The homeless campers then move to new locations, and the cycle begins anew. Homeless service providers and policy makers discuss what to do about the perceived problem, but they do not condone the urban campsites or ask the campers what they need to improve their situations.

This is a “wicked …

Prioritizing Stormwater Management: Comparing Integrated Best Management Practices In Urban And Suburban Neighborhoods, Danielle Kathleen Norman

Masters Theses

This thesis demonstrates a comparison of two design proposals that integrate Best Management Practices to address stormwater runoff volumes in urban and suburban neighborhoods. The thesis investigation includes the selection and comparison of two diverse neighborhoods to inform design decisions. It then assesses the environmental, social and economic implications of the design proposal in each neighborhood.

The site selection process is a method that overlays specific criterion such as residential land use, topographic features, and median household income (3) nested scales; the watershed scale, the sub-watershed scale, and the neighborhood scale. For the purposes of this paper, nested scales are …

The Life And Death Of An American Block: A Dialogue With Entropy, Micah Daniel Antanaitis

Masters Theses

My goal in this thesis is to frame, through design, an existing environment in a manner that fosters the witness and embrace of the reality and beauty of decay—which acts as a marker of the passage of time. My intent is to engage in a careful renewal of a neglected, and largely forgotten, urban landscape, which does not ignore its temporal context. My hope is to explore the full potential of the life cycle of buildings and discover the lesson of mortality in modern American ruins.

Things fall apart. This is a simple truth about the physical world that humanity …

Rethinking Greenways Design In Context Of Sustainable Development: Towards Landscape Synergism, Archana Sharma

Architecture Publications and Other Works

Greenways design and planning has been largely framed as a multi-functional, multi-objective approach to address socio-cultural and ecological concerns (Fabos,2004; Hough 2004, Steiner, 2002; Fabos, 1995, Ahern, 1995; Ndubisi, 1995; Forman,1995). Social well-being, identity and memory have been predominant socio-cultural concerns while biodiversity preservation and natural resources conservation have been key ecological concerns. These concerns have now been superseded by the more urgent concerns of sustainable development such as availability of energy resources, both food and fuel. Whether and how the design and practice of greenways meets these sustainable development challenges is the primary question raised through this paper.

The …

Greenways As Instrument Of Landscape Synergism_Chinese Translation, Archana Sharma, Hui-Cheng Zhong

Architecture Publications and Other Works

This paper explores whether and how the design and practice of greenways meets the sustainable development needs of food and fuel. It outlines three predominant design typologies of greenways: connector design, containment design and composite network design. It also advocates for composite network design typology of greenways for its scalar versatility enabling neighbourhood to city level applications and illustrates the sustainable development outcomes related to socio-cultural, ecological and economic wellbeing as generated through green network design at neighbourhood scale, and. It articulates greenways as synergistic landscapes that create harmony amongst the urban system with broader biophysical system. Essentially, the paper …

Green-Switch: Reducing The Conflict Between The Industrial And The Residential Interface, Archana Sharma

Architecture Publications and Other Works

The dilemma of co-existence of human-industry has been a constant topic of debate among the realms of landscape planning, many times without being clearly articulated as such. This paper examines the conflict through the study of industrial-residential domain. Natural resources such as water and land are primary reasons of conflict. The paper explores the potential of landscape design to address this conflict. The proposed landscape design strategy green-switch combines the landscape planning concept of “greenways” and applied ecological engineering concept of “constructed wetland” to address the conflict.