Architecture Commons^™

Vesseled Cultures; Figures Of Diasporic Comforts, Ying Na Li, Rachel Ly, Skylar Sun

Architecture Senior Theses

The Domestic sphere of the Chinese American home is a promising site where continuous identities and memories of routine name are at play. In the kitchen, engaging in rituals of food making - a natural home endeavor- fosters reconnection and reconciliation with a past identity long forgotten. Architectural extrapolation is then seen through means of practices like fermenting vegetables and observation of domestic rituals between the individuals and their surroundings - whether it be the orchestration of food (the process), the jar in which the vegetables and brine rest (the vessel), or the patterns of kitchen utilities being used (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 …

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.

It's Not Easy Being Whole | Reevaluating The Relationship Of Part Whole In Pursuit Of A New High-Rise Vernacular, Josh Bransky

Architecture Senior Theses

Architecture has the power to structure societal relationships. Specifically, architecture's form can bring the balanced relationship between community and individual identity, as exhibited in vernacular single-family homes, to the housing tower. This thesis plans to achieve such a social orchestration through a nuanced understanding of formal part-to-whole relationships, or "differentiated" parts within the whole, exhibited in a 300' housing tower in Seattle, WA.

By carefully balancing the relation, material, scale, and form of each part, this project will achieve this difficult whole (of differentiated parts). Mining this middle ground will produce a housing tower in Seattle, which actively balances the …

Hijacked | Reclaiming Legislative Loopholes, Lara Moock

Architecture Senior Theses

ARTICLE 1: GENERAL PROVISIONS.

SEC. 100. PURPOSES.

San Francisco’s current political legislation has critical loopholes that have constructed a predominant shift in the city’s identity and urban fabric, as well as an obvious neglect of the public realm and social agenda. The recent move of the Silicon Valley tech headquarters to the city’s center has dramatically changed the architectural landscape as well as reinforced a growing push for corporate privatization. This thesis aims to expose and confront the hidden political and social dynamics of the constructed environment and reclaim the existing loopholes in order to propose a project without major …

Transient Solutions: Responding And Adapting To Rapid Change Through Temporary Design- Part 2, Casie Kowalski

Architecture Senior Theses

PART 1: RAPID CHANGES

The American City is characterized by a history of industry, rapid growth and stagnant economy, and a quick adaptation to consumer culture. In cities once characterized by specific industries, they now attempt to cling to their cultural identity and the arts to preserve their image beyond their industry, readdressing and reinvigorating permanent cultural entities such as the library, museum, and theater. This reviving is done in variety of ways, all of which require heavy funding both privately and publicly and primarily result in interventions of permanence. [Chicago's Millennium Park, Cleveland funding waterfront activity, New York City …

Transient Solutions: Responding And Adapting To Rapid Change Through Temporary Design- Part 1, Casie Kowalski

Architecture Senior Theses

PART 1: RAPID CHANGES

The American City is characterized by a history of industry, rapid growth and stagnant economy, and a quick adaptation to consumer culture. In cities once characterized by specific industries, they now attempt to cling to their cultural identity and the arts to preserve their image beyond their industry, readdressing and reinvigorating permanent cultural entities such as the library, museum, and theater. This reviving is done in variety of ways, all of which require heavy funding both privately and publicly and primarily result in interventions of permanence. [Chicago's Millennium Park, Cleveland funding waterfront activity, New York City …

Essen(Ce)Tially Authentic: Contemporary Design Within A Historical Context And The Parameters Of The “Preserved”, Danielle Ciccone

Architecture Senior Theses

Contemporary architecture needs to solidify its role amongst the pressures of preservation. It is crucial to build reflective of our time, even within a historical area. Though the past should be appreciated, it cannot be revived. Architectural design should exhibit a successive evolution instead of white washing its progression. The essence of a place must be interpreted, distilling and capturing its characteristics while establishing a more authentic architecture of the present. Identity endures not in appearance but with the culture, tradition, technology and people of a particular time.

The Exchange: A Celebratory Space For Commodity Exchange Via The Hyper-Mall, Jaime Magaliff

Architecture Senior Theses

"The consumer object reigns supreme in American Society. Shopping and consumption have become the trademark of identity. The social act of exchange makes value. The social phenomenon of the mall has cultivated a Mecca for commodity exchange."

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."

Cultural Layering, Paloma Rodriguez-Torres

Architecture Senior Theses

Architecture, history, and identity in Mexico City

"Even though different pieces of architecture that range from the Ancient to the Contemporary era can be found sharing the same physical space, they have not yet created any source of interaction, causing a lack of understanding in the region. These pieces are the key players to what one sees or identifies as the identity of the pace and by it not having an common thread that linkg them together, it creates a false sense of identity."

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."

Suburban Adaptability: Urban Context, Joshua Seidner

Architecture Senior Theses

The urban environment historically fosters anonymity among urbanites denying individual expression, user flexibility, and family adaptability. The result is the draw to the suburban house model which inherently concedes ones' expression of individual identity. The urban landscape has historically formed with the core and periphery. Over the last sixty years the periphery has harbored the creation of suburbia. Traditionally, the urban landscape has, and continues to suppress individualism and flexibility to create uniformity and homogeneity[...] Arguably by default, suburbia creates a basic template which the end-user can customize. On the contrary, the urban environment does not foster the ability to …

Urban Prospects: A Search For Poetry In The American City, Gerard D. Damiani

Architecture Senior Theses

"This thesis is about establishing an attitude about design which argues building organization, appearance and meaning. Architecture should be a reflection of culture rather than being an instigator of change."