Architecture Commons^™

Folie A Cinq: Performative Systems Exhibited Through Theatrical Means., Madison Cannella

Architecture Senior Theses

Performative Systems Exhibited through Theatrical Means

Rethinking Home Waste, Elena Echarri Myers

Architecture Senior Theses

Ever since the emergence of capitalism, followed by trends of conspicuous consumption and the boom of plastics and preservative packaging, household waste production has become an issue of public concern in which the US has achieved to champion the podium. Ever since the 1800's world shift from a society focused on consumption for basic necessities to one directed mostly by consumption by leisure, individuals have lost their ability for consumer control, shopping mostly for pleasure and for items with unprecedented short lifespans whose final destination is the land­fill. The world's economic system change too, feeding off these impulsive consumer behaviors, …

Truth Games, Hanneke Van Deursen

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis analyzes Neoliberalism, and architecture as its active agent, not only in constructing space, but constructing subjectivity within that space. If Neoliberalism exists in two forms, policy and ideology, I contend that architecture serves as a mediator between these forms: shaped by policy and naturalizing ideology. Truth Games – constructed “truths” which embed themselves in common knowledge and practice – allow the city to appear as banal and incidental, maybe even nice. However, the urban environment is a powerful weapon. The Truth Games embedded in architecture legitimate forms of power that operate on and through the constitution of the …

Hidden Realities, Nashwah Ahmed, Prerit Gupta

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis uses preexisting local phenomena in Dubai to construct a near-future scenario where political systems are exploited to demonstrate the politics of aesthetics and their ability to alter the context and its existing socio-economic infrastructure. By imposing unfamiliar forms and systems, familiar aesthetics are recast to redistribute the sensible and create a new reality out of underlying social, economic, and cultural power structures. As a result, form, composition, and aesthetics can begin to operate politically to uncover hidden realities and project alternative futures.

Architecture Of Narrative, Yinem Day

Architecture Senior Theses

A historic building should be adapted to the existing context and its character should be encouraged to evolve and transform. The addition and intervention to existing building is an inventive and creative process which provides great opportunities to transform an obsolete building into a propelling agent through particular ways, although at the same time restricted by numerous limitations. Architecture should become a tool of highlighting the relationship between the old and new and a bridge that connects the past, present, and future, becoming a point in the timeline of a place and culture. Also, visual storytelling displays a history of …

Manifested Tectonic 'In Search Of Theatricality', Ching Huen Leung

Architecture Senior Theses

A column at a scale of a chair, a door half-opened in front of that column. Dancing, spectating, running, etc. Can an open-ending narrative be generated through the interaction between these disembodied objects and subjects? Treating building elements as set pieces, improvisations are generated by both signified objects and participants. The show is currently on play in different locations: You can find it in a field of landscape; in a chaotic street of Tokyo, or even at the back alley near your neighborhood…Don’t hesitate to create your own plot when you encounter them! My thesis mainly focuses on the implementation …

Occupy, Nitya Charugundla

Architecture Senior Theses

Union Square, originally called “Union Place,” was a former site for public forum, parades, public addresses and much more. However, the newest design of the park that can be seen today has attempted to make a space that is far less conducive to public forum and assembly than it once was. This thesis seeks to change that and allow for Union Square, as well as a news media center, to be a vehicle for public forum once again. The public space will be used as a vehicle for different types of forums, protests, and even public address in conjunction with …

Alternative Americanisms, Ella Michelle Arne

Architecture Senior Theses

This project investigates the circular influence of architecture, meaning and place across the built American landscape of Route 66. It focuses on the route as an uniquely American invention, reflection, and now obsolete piece of cultural infrastructure.

Subterranean Intermission, Yiwen Dai

Architecture Senior Theses

Every space serves a purpose; therefore, all space should be valued and cherished, including what is typically perceived as the foul, dark, unstable, abandoned corners and dead ends. As designers we should take these places and make the most of them so they too can be enchanting. New York city like many other metropolitan areas are faced with shortage of available space. For example, underground development became unavoidable in order to build a reliable subway system that trans-ports and connects its daily commuters to the spatially growing city. Along with the new infrastructure, waiting areas and platforms that form strips …

An Agricultural Ruin, Patrick Smith

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis uses ruin to a radical alteration and preservation of obsolete industrial sites through the process of stripping back, in order to highlight and explore the history and potential of an industrial site’s temporal identity. Through alteration, the specific, utilitarian, and abandoned typology will be altered into a new, productive, and sustainable “difficult whole”.

Continuous Interior Space Architecture, Natasha Liston-Beck

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis speculates a changed relationship between bodies and information access, mediated by an omni-orientable, continuous spatial information-interface. The closed world of the spacecraft is a digiphysical reality where these two spatial experiences are utterly entangled such that a person’s movements and engagement with and within this space is defined by the two simultaneously. In preference of depth and specificity of the thesis, this work is not focused on the mechanics or engineering of a spacecraft. But instead it focuses on the spatial and experiential environment, augmented with information.

Uncomfortably Numb, Camila Andino, Daniela Andino

Architecture Senior Theses

Modernist Architecture is characterized by its ambition to miraculously heal the “diseases”1 of society. Along with this desire to heal, “Design was formed as a way to deal with the increasingly dominant logic of the industrialized and globalized world while resisting the perceived dehumanizing impact of the world.”2 This pursuit of numbness has always been at the center of design. It reveals the complicity between design and capitalism. Following the shock of the war and the machine age, design sought to fight the negative climate of the world around them. No outcome is prescribed, but it is desired. With this …

15th Ward North, Baxter Hankin

Architecture Senior Theses

THIS THESIS ARGUES IN FAVOR OF WALKABILITY AT THE SCALE OF THE CITY, NEIGHBORHOOD, BLOCK, STREET, SPACE, BUILDING, AND DETAIL. WALKABILITY IS A CONDITION THAT ALLOWS FOR INTERESTING AND USEFUL WALKS ON A DAILY BASIS. THIS IS CREATED FROM A MIX OF STRATEGIC, PLANNED CIVIC CONDITIONS, AND AN URBAN FABRIC OF UNPLANNED, FINE-GRAINED, BOTTOM-UP DEVELOPMENTS. THE WALKABLE CITY IS NECESSARY IN TERMS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE, SUSTAINABILITY, AND CONNECTIVITY. THE INTERESTING ASPECT OF THE WALK IS DETERMINED BY PARALLAX AND THE PICTURESQUE. PARALLAX IS THE “DISPLACEMENT OF THE APPARENT POSITION OF A BODY DUE TO A CHANGE OF POSITION OF THE …

Alternative Shelters, Sukhmann Kaur Aneja

Architecture Senior Theses

In the spring of 2018, a small group of homeless people took shelter underneath the scaffolding at 1441 Broadway in Times Square after a massive rainstorm made its way through New York City. They hung their wet clothes on the steel bracing and slept on unfolded cardboard boxes. This makeshift encampment lasted for a few days before the police officially kicked everyone out.1 Two years before that, homeless New Yorkers set up a similar camp underneath the scaffolding in NoHo. Residents of NoHo blamed a surge of local construction for the implementation of sheds under which people could hide out.2 …

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 …

But Soft! Fabricating Adaptive Urbanism, Caroline Barrick, Arezo Hakemy, Sabrina Logroño

Architecture Senior Theses

We contend that a performative fabric that combines strategies of comfort and adaptation and deployed as large-scale soft architecture can challenge the approach to urban infrastructural issues currently only managed by hard architecture. We are investigating both soft and hard architecture through the human scale and experience, the urban scale, materiality, adaptability, and temporality. Soft architecture produces comfort and ergonomic design for both physical and mental benefit and affects the built environment through its tactile materiality, its ephemeral temporality, and its swift adaptability. Hard architecture resists environmental and human adaptation through its rigid materiality, its lasting temporality, and its reluctant …

Spatial Agency For Migrant Workers: Rethinking The Dynamics Of Urban Villages In China, Yan Liu

Architecture Senior Theses

“Throughout history, expanding cities have always run over villages, hamlets, estates, gardens, and soft elements that constitute the countryside, the domain that hosts agriculture and nature.” Urban Villages, essentially a composite of these “soft” elements, remained as one of the hardest anchors among the residual or by-product in China’s urban development. Until 1985, the Pearl River Delta region had been mainly dominated by farms and small rural villages. The onset of economic reform and the open-door policy brought an influx of foreign investment which fueled the unstoppable train of urbanization. Rapid urbanization let to the formation of Urban Villages, a …

A School Design: For Homeless Children In Nyc, Tingjie Zhou

Architecture Senior Theses

By the end of 2017, more than fifteen thousand homeless families with over twenty-three thousand children lived in shelters in New York City (Coalition for the homeless, Facts About Homelessness). Receiving education in a school, a daily activity for school age children, can easily become an unachievable thing for homeless children. Though many programs and acts are carried out to help these children, their educational situation is still severe.

Noticing the circumstance that homeless children are facing, I’m interested in the role that architecture can play in responding to homeless children’s educational concerns. When looking at the schools with high …

Plastic Revolution: Reuse Of Marine Plastic Garbage, Jingshi Zhang

Architecture Senior Theses

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also described as the Pacific trash vortex, has been getting more and more attention recently. It is a gyre of marine debris particles in the north central Pacific Ocean, with an estimated size range from 700,000 square kilometers (about the size of Russia). In 1992, 28,000 rubber ducks were plunged into the ocean after a shipping crate was lost at sea on its way to the US from Hong Kong. Many years later, the rubber ducks have become a vital tool in our understanding of ocean currents, as well as teaching us about ocean pollution. …

A Material Affair: The Intimacy Between Materials And Affective Space, Rex Hughes, John Mikesh

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis argues that an architecture embracing innate material qualities, deployed for choreographed sensory experiences, will open a more intimate dialogue between humans and their environment. This thesis is rooted in the idea that the most powerful experiences are those that stimulate all the senses at once. This is illustrated by architect Lisa Heschong, who explains that fire fascinates humans because it glows, crackles, smells of smoke, and gives off heat. This intimate sensory experience provides an archetype for the way users may be seduced into engaging affective environments through haptic materials.

In an investigation of material qualities (density, hardness, …

Your Second Home: Re-Thinking Of Post-Disaster Housing, Evelyn Brooks

Architecture Senior Theses

Natural disasters such as tornadoes, wildfires, earthquakes, and hurricanes destroy our infrastructure, civic buildings, public amenities, and homes. These disasters create problems of homelessness, but they also create environments within the city that are unlivable due to a lack of electricity and potable water. People displaced by disasters often find themselves living in a government- or non-profit-run evacuation shelter, at the mercy of bureaucratic organizations for assistance to begin the recovery process. People forced to evacuate neighborhoods where they have perhaps been established for decades often also lose their ability to commute to work (if their employer still exists) as …

Learning From Wes Anderson: On Artificial Memory And Detail, Abigail Campion

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis focuses on the reproduction of detail, through compression and misarticulation, an artificial memory of its reference. The project culminates on three films of Wes Anderson: The Royal Tenenbaums, Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel. These specific films were chosen due to their cult following within the Anderson canon. Wes Anderson articulates his cinematic universes very meticulously. He uses unique methods to capture certain emotions in his films. A huge part of Anderson’s film worlds is his attention to detail. All parts of his films are deeply invested in maintaining the illusion of the film world he has …

Eldgos: The Terra-Forming Earth, Sangha Jung, Young Joon Yun

Architecture Senior Theses

The core of this project is the idea of humankind as a geological force. By imagining the active ground in relation to creation of new ground and environment, this thesis seeks to reclaim the formal language of the geological through volcanism. As we create a series of spaces within this new ground, using lava as our natural tool for architecture and landscape that reconciles the geological and the biological merging the natural and the artificial. Architecture can be formed naturally, like a stone built over time, through sedimentation and erosion. This idea of architecture as natural processes is applied to …

Death Of A Posthuman, David Bullard, Carolina Hasbun Elias

Architecture Senior Theses

Some of the first marks humans left on the planet were the architectures of death and remembrance. From the pyramids of Ancient Egypt to the burial landscapes of the 20th century, today’s architecture of death manifests itself mainly as cemeteries and crematoriums. However, we contend the culture of death in the 21st century has evolved to demand an architecture that acknowledges changes in its culture and its impact on the natural and technological environment. Humans are no longer just human. Our recent evolution has presented two realities, to which the discipline of architecture needs to respond. First, the split presence …

Xiong'an,Minglu Wei Baita: Towards An Alternative Urbanism, Minglu Wei, Ying Zuo

Architecture Senior Theses

In 1978, with the onset of economic reform, the creation of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) started to accelerate in China. Beyond the success of these mega-cities, if one starts to relate the history of SEZs to the political history of China, one may find that SEZs have always been utilized as a method for the leaders of CCP to manifest their authority and to fortify their achievements. Such state projects are inevitably founded on a paradoxical claim. While being announced as monumental undertakings capable of glorifying the country and benefiting people, they also demand sacrifices of citizens for a higher …

The Denuded Image: A Critique Of The After-Image, Danya Li

Architecture Senior Theses

The Denuded Image aims to create a conversation between a photograph and its viewer by adding back the third dimension. It is not a proposal of how architects should design space, but a model for observation and study of how to create new ways of seeing. The dioramas at 1:8, 1:4, and 1:2 scales expose the reality of the forced perspective and the denuded photograph's distorted characters. As scale increases, the observer is invited to engage with the in-visible parts of the image that differ in materiality. The final spectacle includes all models and their respective images, to expose the …

An Intelligent Smart City, Erik Sanchez

Architecture Senior Theses

How intelligent is the typical smart-city design approach? In an era when artificial intelligence and big data promise to improve urban life in unprecedented ways, are smart cities being imagined and designed in ways that are actually inspiring and truly innovative? This project examines the proposals and approaches of Sidewalk Labs’ designs for Quayside, located in Toronto Canada, and asks how intelligent, really, is the city the propose. Sidewalk Labs (the city-building subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company), in partnership with Waterfront Toronto (a government-appointed nonprofit development corporation), claims to be reimagining cities from the internet up.” But is their …

Fantasy Park: Mode Of Reality, Sai Lyu

Architecture Senior Theses

In the book Privacy and Publicity, Beatriz Colomina (1994) states that with the development of railways and photography, travel culture - as the beginning of mass media - has changed the relationship between people and urban space, making the place into non-place. Place then becomes a commodity to be consumed by the masses, breaking the relationship between people and urban space into fragments, replacing the linear relationship that existed in the Renaissance period.

Moreover, with the beginning of mass media, advertising architecture has had a significant influence on the urban fabric and on the relationship between people and the urban …

Re*Presenting Dharavi: Activism And Agency Of Architecture In Informal Settlements, Ahnaf Chowdhury, Anuradha Desai

Architecture Senior Theses

Plastic recycling is a critical informal economy in Dharavi, one of Asia's largest slums in the heart of Mumbai. Waste from dumping grounds is collected, sorted and prepared by recyclers who transform trash into a commodity to be sold back into the city. As part of top-down efforts to redevelop Dharavi's valuable land, the Mumbai government has tarnished the industry's image, labeling it as "polluting," and has increased the cost of utilities such as electricity in an effort to drive it out of the community. As it becomes more expensive for recyclers to operate, the labor unions that organize the …

The Disputed Territories: An Alternate History, Rasan Taher

Architecture Senior Theses

Architecture and the built environment are the mediums onto which political and physical events and forces are registered. This thesis explores the potential of Drones (UAVs) as a tool to launch a spatial investigation into disputed territories of the built environment. The objective of this specific work is to produce and represent spatiotemporal analysis and architectural evidence of the unlawful systematic destruction of Arab neighborhoods and villages in the disputed territories—here in relation to the continuous power shifts in the disputed internal boundaries between the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and Iraqi Federal Government in Iraq. The increasing availability and advancements …