Architecture Commons^™

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 …

Didactic Architecture Of The Caribbean Resort, Erwin Riefkohl

Architecture Senior Theses

I believe that architecture is a communicative artifact that has the capacity to carry meaning. Architecture has the capacity to reconnect us to nature and sympathetic to local Culture. The reconnection is made by the phenomenological experiences that an architectural artifact has the potential to provide. This architecture should be seen as a didactic tool that fosters a hyperawareness of the occurrences in the natural environment. This artifact also reflects to local culture through the engagement of the theory of critical regionalism. As a sum of these two ideas the artifact will be designed with intent to foster meditation on …

[Re]Formulating The Informal, Sebastien Coles

Architecture Senior Theses

The identity associate with the inhabitants of the "Bidonvilles" of Haiti is arguably nonexistent aside from its connection to the impoverished conditions of the Haitian slum/shantytown. This thesis contends that with the insertion of a reformative intervention in the heart of the community promoting a conducive and educational environment while overlaying a currently absent infrastructure, will help in creating a positive inner growth within the informal typology. More specifically architecture will act as a form of "pride of place," enticing interaction through the direction connection to culture.

Prototyping Community, Daniel Di Dio

Architecture Senior Theses

'This thesis focuses on implementing this system for the Chad refugee camp of Iridimi located along the border of the conflict stricken Darfur region of Sudan. Its climate and soil content are idea for rammed earth construction and its population is in need of better solutions to the increasing struggle for adequate shelter."

Flip_Space, Wendy Wade

Architecture Senior Theses

"The flip book, a device for viewing moving images, has unique characteristics that can be analyzed and translated into the built environment. In order to understand what is truly unique about FLIP_pace, the flip book moving image needs to be analyzed in contrast to the cinematic moving image to see where one form of media ends and the other beings. Based on the analysis of the flip book, the most conductive architectural space is the elevator. The speed of the elevator, the proximity of the image, the potential for human interaction, and the ability to control views are the primary …

Perartisan Intervention: Place Syntax As Socio-Urban Catalyst, Fahir Burak Unel

Architecture Senior Theses

"Culturally-informed spatial network analysis, achieved through the joint use Hillerian Space Syntax Theory and traditional understandings of place-making in architecture, can enable and facilitate the creation of effective, site-specific social condensers that can ultimately act as a solution to Galata-Pera's post-20th-century problem of community attrition caused by the erosion of traditional commercial culture that historically defined Istanbulite social identity."

Leaving A Smaller Footprint: Optimizing Passive Systems For Single Family Attached Housing, David J. Silver

Architecture Senior Theses

"Creating the best internal comfort conditions for the resident, while using little to zero non-renewable energy, is ideal in creating a sustainable, innovative, and contemporary structure that embraces both a flexible and efficient lifestyle and, at the same time, addresses important energy issues that will be a solid foundation for a new modern world."

Deregulatory Space: A Project To Revitalize Mccarren Pool, Thomas Reeves

Architecture Senior Theses

"By embracing the deregulatory, informal, and indeterminate production of space, architecture may operate as framework for the inhabitation of public space that both enables and demands public agency. As such, the architecture operates to assist rather than prescribe, relying on the energy of the general public to construct a more dynamic and social-viable public space: one that is constantly in flux."

Replacing The Plaza, Timothy Jeremiah Nolan

Architecture Senior Theses

"The modernist plaza is a site of multiplicity. Through intense and informed scanning, alternative orders latent within these constructions are revealed. This project uses these latent orders to propose a series of alternate realities that find productive potential in the failures of modernist architecture to fully manage factors such as construction, weathering, and occupation."

Interactive Architecture: Creating Opportunities For Our Future, Gregory Levy

Architecture Senior Theses

"It is the contention of this thesis that developing more interactive relationships will create new opportunities for a building to respond and adapt to the rapid pace of change. Through means of flexibility and efficiency, his expanded dynamic process can generate direct engagement between a building and the users and the natural environment that interact with it."

Surface Culture: A Museum Of Contemporary Persian Art For Los Angeles, Nicholas Williams

Architecture Senior Theses

"Primacy of surface and script as screen and texture are, along with visual distortion and flattening, embedded in the Persian artistic tradition. To build upson these concepts and conditions through the medium of a museum of contemporary Persian art will allow for a synthesis of the conditions produced b the acquisition of the strip with a visual manifestation of the compositional tendencies of Persian art, The result of this synthesis is an institution that furthers the central role that Westwood Boulevard plays for the local Persian community."

Secretive Occupation Along The Us Mexican Border, Zach Kuehn

Architecture Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

No Child Left Inside: Environmental Education Through A Reciprocal Relationship Between Architecture And The Natural World, Leah Kleinman

Architecture Senior Theses

"Through a reciprocal relationship between architecture and the natural world, this thesis contends that environmental education programs can teach children to appreciate and preserve our natural environment. Architecture becomes an instructional tool itself and a way of experiencing the natural world while sustaining it and providing a healthy and comfortable setting in which to learn and have fun."

Fragmented City: The Intersection Of Surrealism And Urban Reality, Lauren Hackett

Architecture Senior Theses

"The concept of the experience becomes relevant in the surrealist view of the city. It is one that has been embraced by the situationists in their concept of the derive. The psychological understanding of urban space can supersede the retinal understanding of rationalized space. The search for truth within the city is what guides a civilization toward absolutism.

In treating the city as a field for discovert and the formulation of ideaas and pure thought, urban space enters a realm of surreality."

Snafu - Spectacle Of Celebrity Injustice, Matthew Robert Finn

Architecture Senior Theses

"In this issue of SNAFU we take you through the conception and construction of one of the most scandalous architectural creations ever built. Situated in Hollywood, the project understands Hollywood as a place that has blurred the lines between its cinematic fiction, and its physical existence. This discrepancy continuously challenges our perceptions of reality and imaginary, familiar and not, and right and wrong. The project offers a means for audiences to produce behaviors that reveal and confront moral positions."

Reclaiming Identity Through Spectacle, Miguel Antonio Felices

Architecture Senior Theses

"The space of cultural spectacle can lead to a re-definiteion of identity in Condado through architectural implications that capitalize rather than 'sole' its state of ambivalence. For the foreigner who seeks the exotic and the denizen who seeks the authentic, the cultural spectacle can become a point of convergence.

Architecture has the capacity to mould an ambiguous cultural identity by facilitating and sustaining the cultural expressions of a people though a space of spectacle."

Euro, Ryan A. Doyle

Architecture Senior Theses

"How does Europe represent its idealized form as a whole... and is flexible enough to represent its changing interests? By organizing these functions through their identities, a legibile yet changing whole emerges.

How does Europe represent its idealized form as a whole... that distinguishes itself within its urban position, and is flexible enough to represent ies changing interests? By shaping its identifiable image into a clear form, a legible yet changing whole emerges."

How does Europe represent its idealized form as a whole... that participates in the public realm, awhile maintaining the identities of its parts? By conforming its idealized …

Sun City Blues: The Contemporary Urban Realization Of Sun City, Usa, Patrick Lundberg

Architecture Senior Theses

"While providing a marketable, popular, and economically successful municipal entity, Sun Cities and Active Adult Communities manifest problems. Through their strict planning, restrictive ordering, and operative rules, these communities produce issues of: population segregation, formal homogeneity, discouraged density, and programmatic disconnect."

Democracy In The Post Soviet Landscape, George Dolidze

Architecture Senior Theses

"The citizens of Georgia have been empowered with new opportunities to participate in their own governance through fair elections and the right to hold political demonstrations. I contend that the production of a new type of urban 'theater' can invoke a new political activity. This version of place making requires the ability to 'assemble' at a local and national scale for social and political expression. The program must absorb traditional customs as well as provide the 'playing field for new opportunities to voice political goals."

{Perm] House: Performance Of Recycled Materials, Cristina Alonso

Architecture Senior Theses

"The construction of single-family housing units will prodive an opportunity to design using recycled materials. This thesis seeks to evaluate the effectiveness of the unit's performance in a tropical climate, through means of passive cooling; in particular the promotion of comfort ventilation during the daytime."

Digital-[Pre]Fabrication, Ryan Noone

Architecture Senior Theses

"Architecture holds the capacity to reflect time. Inregards to pre-fabricated housing, digital fabrication processes demonstrate an advancement from our past, Modernist pre-fabricated predecessors by successfully wedding function, performance, and construct ability (manufacturing processes). The implementation of a digitally prefabricated housing typology informed by the past and utilizing the technologies of the present will create a responsible housing typology, one which is truly a reflection of our time."

Lattice Architecture, Elizabeth M. Quick

Architecture Senior Theses

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The pervasive proliferation of complex tracking systems such as GPS and simulation gaming environments such as Full Spectrum Warrior are transforming the built environment into an immersive 1:1 map where all flows and transactions are measured, monitored, and tracked. The gap between map and real experience disappears resulting in an immersive map. The spatial implications of this real time 1:1 immersive map creates an opportunity for architecture itself to monitor, track, and measure flows and transactions. This tracking and simulation agenda plays out specifically in the design of a surface that integrates military training, military artifacts, and civilian recreation …

The District: Sight/Sire Lines // The War Of Tourisms: Back To The Panopticon, Charles Michael Frederick Proffit

Architecture Senior Theses

"Because of the shortcoming of visual and non-visual technologies, it is necessary to return to the Panopticon in order to engage any conversation of vision and control. It is the contention of this thesis that the sinister interpretations of the architectural community fall short of the authors intentions and that it is possible to consider vision as being used simultaneously by different agencies. This simultaneous vision can create visual encounters that lead to unforeseen hybridizations, turning Granada into a laboratory of hybrid cultures, tourist and citizen, nomadic and sedentary."