Architecture Commons^™

Remembered Spaces: Reframing Architecture From Body To Building, Shaan Lyngdoh Lakshmanan

Architecture Senior Theses

Our bodies act as instruments to record sensations received from the world that surrounds us. The internal world we create is how we perceive, remember, and preserve the external world. The process is essential to the continual formation of ourselves.

This thesis aims to reframe the values we place on architectural representation, from the objective, novel, cartesian parameters of architecture to qualities of emotion and place. The device for this reframing is the remembered space, which is an architecture that exists in our memories. It is within the remembered space that we begin to understand how a space was inhabited.

Living Memories: Rethinking Remembrance, Timothy Mulhall

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis will interrogate conventional types and methods of memorialization, challenging the memorial as a complete product. Developing from inquiries into alternative acts of commemoration, this investigation will seek to conceive a memorial in the making. Memorials must be alive, changing, constantly developing as a result of interaction. The reliance on overly abstract, rhetorical conditions of design will become obsolete. The static condition of the image-friendly object will be replaced with a dynamism influenced by time and participation.

Spatializing Erasure: Forging A New Commemorative Typology, Sarah Quinn, Isabel Munoz

Architecture Senior Theses

Spatializing Erasure is an investigation into and a critique of current traditional memorialization techniques and the erasure of counter-historical narratives from the urban fabric. We are seeking to use architecture as a lens to critique our current socio-political climate by employing techniques of memorialization, sensationalism, and certain spatial tactics relating to memory onto the typologies of the courthouse and the archive, actively reinforcing memories of trauma, injustices, and activism onto a typology that has historically been negligent towards its contribution to systemic erasure and oppression of counter-history. This project aims to impose the collective memory of erased narratives onto the …

Speculative Spoliation: Spolia As An Instrument Of Locus Making & Identity Mediation, Amelia Gan

Architecture Senior Theses

In this thesis, spolia is defined as the repurposing of found artifacts or material with ingrained place identities to new building matter in novel contexts. This includes architecture remnants or fragments from sites of historical ruins, urban derelicts and artifacts currently displayed in museums.

Architecture's impermanence results in demolishment, reconstruction, or exhibition of its fragments in museums or ruin parks. Attempts at preservation often only look at the surface-level significance of these artifacts without allowing for the addition of meanings over time. While displaying an artifact in a museum or turning ruins into tourist parks directly addresses the history of …

Beyond Architecture: Architecture’S Alternative Role In Architecture Image, Zexi Tang

Architecture Senior Theses

Images/drawings of architecture primarily act as documentation of structures to help the audience (architects or clients) understand how architecture functions: the sense of space, physical relationship with the context, and circulation through different programs. Nevertheless, architectural images that focus not on functionally determine spaces but rather on an idea or provocation, also play a significant role in the representation of architecture. The role of architecture in these kinds of images can be beyond a shelter or accommodation. It can set up a stage to deliver messages; discuss historical, social, economic or political issues; or to express emotion or desire. Architects/artist …

Memory + Architecture | The Act Of Forgetting, Mariel Mora Llorens

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis proposes the activation and repurposing of buildings associated with traumatic memories as a means of studying the ways in which architecture embodies memories and aids in the process of forgetting. Architecture and the built environment are linked to the creation and recollection of memories because they trigger four of the senses that are related to memory.

To forget is an active, not passive endeavor. Conscious forgetting is not an act of erasing memories, but transforming them by removing the emotional responses that are produced by our recollection of these memories. Like memories in our brains, buildings that have …

Beyond The Object: The Phenomenon Of Memory In Architecture, Greg Bencivengo

Architecture Senior Theses

Situated in Chicago, IL, the process of commemoration will be realized as a set of architectural pavilions, each reconstructing a critical moment from the city's past. Said events will be selected for their influence on Chicago's development and should be commemorated on the sites at which they occured. As a series of episodes throughout the city, the architecture will emphasize the interdependence of present and past events, of memory and perception, and of collective memory and architectural experience.

The goal is not to replace our understanding of collective memory, but through fostering an awareness of self and one's relationship to …

Architecture And Memory, Mary Patterson

Architecture Senior Theses

"The primary focus of this thesis is to understand the role and responsibility of architecture in provoking memory."

"The vehicle selected for the pursuit of this thesis is an Institute of Maritime Etruscan Studies sited in Cerveteri, Italy, one of the most memorial and testimonial sites in Italy today."