Architecture Commons^™

An Interface: An Architecture That Stitches Species, Suren Sivaram

Architecture Thesis Prep

Materialized, architecture could be considered as an interface that promotes and preserves biodiversity within a site, as “all life is bound into dynamic and interrelated processes of codependency.” In addition, this thesis posits that architecture as an interface may act representationally to raise awareness of the need to embrace biodiversity and to sustain humanity. In Greater Perfections, Hunt suggests, “The garden will … be distinguished in various ways from the adjacent territories in which it is set … it will be set apart by the greater extent, scope, and variety of its design and internal organization”. Stitching elements of its context, the ...

Resembling Legitimacy: Restructuring The American Civic Architectural Myth, Estefany Lona

Architecture Thesis Prep

By looking at three case studies--Esposizione Universale Roma, the New Deal, and Red Vienna--this project demonstrates that the architecture within each context to be more than subjective constructions of political ideology. They grasp at the history of nations, tangible environments, and coincide with implementation of public policy.

Qi And Garden Wall, Gaole Dai

Architecture Thesis Prep

By using Feng Shui’s principles of Qi in relation to specific residential properties – site organization, surrounding environment and existing structures – this thesis will demonstrate new spatial, formal, and material potentials of the garden wall, as the medium for occupation. The prototypes that achieving therapeutic qualities of Qi and phenomenological effects of the garden wall will be developed for diverse residential landscapes.

Mycotecture Of Contamination, Maria Gutierrez, Elise Zilius

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis situates living organisms, specifically mycelium, as the primary designer of the built environment. The investigation uses contamination to fuel mycelium growth and create emergent forms whilst executing remediation strategies for contaminated sites.

Privacy Reconfigured: Examining Public Interactions Within Domestic Space, Vanessa Poe

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis reconfigures private domestic spaces by combining modes of privacy in order to accommodate the needs of the townhouse, resulting in a new series of private reveals through socialization.

Image Carnival, Kaixin Huang, Siting Xing

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis project will begin with a basic understanding of iconology, and research on social and technological changes, and explore the different levels of images in a certain range of Instagram-based image sharing social media, and the current social media The space design for the goal is characterized by two directions, which leads to our architectural iconology.

Drawing Ambulatory Cartographies: Understanding Urban Experience Through Walking, Bonnie Yu

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis contends that the act of walking, as a way of seeing, being, and understanding in the city, can be a form of urban intervention that enables the transformation of space by allowing individuals to imbue spaces with meaning. The act of walking, in conjunction with mapping practices, can be a critical tool for understanding urban space, acting as a nomadic architecture that works to subvert and smooth the striated space of the city.

This project will investigate the ways in which urban landscape representation, in particular the processes and performances of walking-based mapping practices, can reveal and assert ...

Beyond The Border: On The Contested Island, Ruxuan Zheng, Shengwei Liu

Architecture Thesis Prep

Every life is important and fragile, but what human being has done for centuries are destroying the balance between human and nature, threatening the future of every life on the Earth. Nowadays, waters are going out of control, while climates are changing dramatically, international boundaries are thickening, and regional human conflicts are tensing. New architectural forms are needed in order to restore the wounded nature, reconcile the political contests, and restructure the relation between human and non-human. We are designing architecture as an initiative to solve those problems, starting from one site and one marine creature, then extending ecologically, socially ...

“Urban Corridor”: Growing The Connective Tissue Of Nashville, Lindsey Brown

Architecture Thesis Prep

Nashville is undergoing mass-gentrification, and certain marginalized groups are disconnected by infrastructure or distance from basic needs and resources. Architecture can reconnect underserved communities in order to empower them to participate culturally and reclaim autonomy over their community. Through this thesis, architecture can connect the city through the development of infrastructure that (1) encourages tourist exploration out of the inner ring, (2) encourages more sustainable transportation by visitors and residents, (3) increases visitor and resident access to resources through the incorporation of program to make an “active infrastructure”, and (4) highlights the wide variety of cultures in Nashville.

Mutualistic Infra\Structures, Dylan Crean

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis asserts design for Infra\ Space, to override static private or public conditions of territory and manipulate Neoliberal investment patterns. The architectural output will be Mutualistic Infra\ Structures. Buildings developed on a methodology focusing on how to lead investment to interstitial spaces.

Communion Composed: Fostering Unity Through A Nourished Architecture, David Acevedo

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis looks to utilize food and its inherent social properties as a medium in which architecture can have greater agency in the unification of people, more specifically, distraught communities. Guatemala, a pillar of Central American culture, will be the chosen zone of exploration where such a collaboration can be implemented at a ceremonial scale, utilizing techniques and methods found in ecologically efficient urban food production, intimate domestic food consumption, and marrying them to methods of engaging ceremonial food preparation to create a new edible landscape of socially sustaining architecture.

Olympic Gardens After The Games, Kaylee O'Brien

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis begins with an intense study of landscape and the garden. In addition to research on the historical, theoretical, and contemporary conditions of the garden, the thesis investigates the architectural and landscape conditions of the Olympic Games. Specifically looking into issues including Olympic Legacy, Olympic Gardens, and urban interventions associated with Olympic Parks, the project aims to understand ways in which these subjects can be studied, analyzed, and reapplied in the context of a new architectural design. This combined research into gardens and the Olympic Games serves as a foundation for the thesis design project, providing strategies and ways ...

Latent Territories, Vasundhra Aggarwal, Jaclyn Doyle

Architecture Thesis Prep

Through accelerated processes of recording and transmitting visual data of our built environment, architecture is increasingly consumed as a series of pixels and numbers by machine modes of vision for other autonomous actors. The incessant processing and data hoarding is saturating the networks that are perceived to be infinite, leading to the inevitable physical and digital decay. As weathering is to the physical, lags and glitches are to the the digital. The effects of aging of physical degradation are evident in our environment, however, the loss of material integrity of digital files is much less visible. Due to the mutable ...

Dissolving Reality: An Endless Domestic Landscape, Hanzhang Lai, Phang Lim

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis explores how the exponential growth in communication technology is changing the way we interact with the tangible and intangible spaces. The invasion of the public into the private, the collective into the domestic, the work into the leisure, and the ability to be constantly connected wirelessly have caused a dissolution of the physical domestic space. The domestic space has lost its value of privacy and intimacy and the boundary between the binaries will be no more. The gap between “the control” and “controlled” has widened and productive workers will be oppressed to be even more productive under the ...

Hidden Narratives, Diego Becerra

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis is interested in the active interventions that affect isolated towns through new economic developments. And I'm focused in the use of architecture as a leverage to transform the city in a way that empowers their local community, by adapting the architecture to handle the economic, infrastructure and density change, by working with existing building interventions. So it maintain its character but it also becomes its tool for social and economic cohesion that empowers the community.

Entangling Manila’S Seams, Patrick De Garcia

Architecture Thesis Prep

Manila, Philippines is a city fragmented into slums and upper-class enclaves. The adjacency of their separated development contributes to intensifying class-relations; each side is fearful of the other. Symbolic manifestations of the border are made apparent due to economic inaccessibility, emphasizing social stratification. This project is interested in blurring the boundaries maintaining social segregation to enhance public spaces’ quality, specifically through redeveloping the shopping mall.

Rethinking Participatory Design: Tools For Modelling Community Potentials, Adam Liu, Stephen Marinelli

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis aims to provide an alternative method of community engagement through the process of participatory model-making. Rather than only seeking out community voices for surveys and data collection, this project’s goal is to empower a community’s sense of ownership through collective design.

The methods of this project will be tested and examined in collaboration with students from Dr. King Elementary School in Syracuse, New York. By designing a participatory method for model-making, the project will involve students in the early stages of urban design and make it more educationally and socially accessible.

Living Memories: Rethinking Remembrance, Timothy Mulhall

Architecture Thesis Prep

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. An ever-changing memorial that embraces temporality and the process of becoming will offer a new way of rendering remembrance in the built environment.

Intentionally Unsustainable Forms For Crisis Design: Planned Obsolescence, Daniel Hogan

Architecture Thesis Prep

The ShutDownDC protest that stopped traffic on Monday, September 23rd demonstrated a significant shift in the debate for climate justice. The movement targeted not only the culpable institutions but the physical infrastructures which both monumentalize and enable factors responsible for global climate change (in this case automobile infrastructure). This is a particularly relevant example of how built form not only reflects our cultural preferences for private transportation but also informs/enables the processes which are actively working against public good. In this example, road infrastructure is both a symbol and an active player in the game of continued environmental injustice ...

An Authentic Reality, Genevieve Dominiak, Hannah Rachel Michaelson

Architecture Thesis Prep

We, as a society, have chosen to erase and neglect the problematic images and narratives of these wastelands from our, American, history. Therefore, the thesis aims to offer an authentic reality in which Human Ecology coexists with the previous erasures of Toxic Ecology. Currently, these wastelands are portrayed as foreign entities that American companies engage with, rarely do the cameras turn to our own backyard though. Rather than remediate these industrial sites and thus revive nature, the work looks to coexist with the consequences of our past and ongoing present through myth.

When challenged with the imagery of these damaged ...

Alternate Americanisms, Ella Arne

Architecture Thesis Prep

Architecture is actively crafting reality, culture, and identity. It is simultaneously constructed from and constructing meaning. Route 66 exists as an American invention, ruin, and manifestation of American Identity. The objects on the route sit innocently on the landscape, covering their complex histories and power networks that lead back to the dominant government administration.

Alternate Americanisms shows the agency of architectural objects in creating new realities, identities, and histories.

The game explores how every single decision changes the entire built landscape. It reflects and translates alternate histories to project alternate versions. It examines the relationship between meaning and architecture, identity ...

Waiting: Sidewalk Sheds And Urban Identity, Sukhmann Aneja

Architecture Thesis Prep

In New York City, a sidewalk shed is a structure that covers a sidewalk immediately adjacent to a site under construction in order to protect pedestrians from falling debris. There are currently about 9,000 sheds in the entire city, with a lifespan of about 300 days. In total, all of the sidewalk sheds take up about 1,000,000 feet of space.1 Their existence is unwanted but inevitable, and, over the last four decades, these sheds have become an integral part of the City’s identity. This thesis proposes an intervention that allows the shed to better engage ...

Naturalizing The Neoliberal Subject, The Object: To Change The Soul, Hanneke Van Deursen

Architecture Thesis Prep

Neoliberalism exists in two forms: policy and ideology. On the policy side, a crusade of deregulation, privatization, and the competition was ushered in by Neoliberal politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. On the ideology side, Neoliberalism constructs for us a series of truth games. It tells us: our society is too complex for us to understand, and therefore it can not be ordered by humans. In contrast, the market is itself a mechanism of spontaneous order, and therefore is better suited to calculate, process, and order our society. Subsequently, it is humans who must adapt to the needs of ...

Spatializing Erasure: Counter-Histories On The Verge Of Disappearance, Isabel Munoz, Sarah Quinn

Architecture Thesis Prep

Our thesis ambitions are centered around the investigation of memory and architecture as it relates to the narratives of erasure in urban space. Over the course of the academic year, we are seeking to use architecture as a lens to critique our current socio-political climate regarding gender inequity and political regression. Our site of speculation and research will be the city of Chicago, as it has a rich history of feminism and civil rights with many historic spaces of protest that accommodated intersectional identities and historic protests. In today’s political climate, where Roe v. Wade is facing reversal in ...

Matter Dis//Assembled: Revealing The Economies And Ecologies Of Aluminum, Noah Anderson

Architecture Thesis Prep

This project seeks to understand matter through the environments it creates. These environments, created through production, end-use, and disposal, extend to the scale of the world, the territory and the product. In a globalized world, the separate environments of a single material are highly external, and while we may know where a material comes from, the consequences of its extraction and manufacture are out-of-site, out-of-mind. This externalization is evident for Aluminum, which has a diverse and often contradictory range of environments.

Political Archipelago: Repoliticizing Post-Umbrella Revolution Hong Kong, Dora Yui Kei Lo

Architecture Thesis Prep

This project aims to re-politicize the public sphere of post-Umbrella Revolution Hong Kong. Umbrella Revolution was one of the latest defining events of democratic struggles in Hong Kong. Like other protests, civil disobedience, and revolutions, the Umbrella Revolution was more than just “organized public dissents”; it was an experiment of an alternative democratic sphere for agonistic struggles. The occupation temporarily altered, reoriented, disoriented or debilitated the existing boundaries and thresholds in the city; it resisted the logic of the city to create a space of exception. However, these temporary alterations did not leave significant permanent imprints to the city. In ...

Casting Contradictive Landscapes: A Thesis By Sarah Catherine Beaudoin, Sarah Catherine Beaudoin

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis aims to bring functionally obsolescent architectural elements to the forefront of design analysis, in the pursuit of architectural character over typology. The analysis is not of buildings, but rather how their recognizable ordinary elements can adopt alternate personalities, identities, and attitudes to the landscapes in which they inhabit.

Here, the understanding of what it means to be “ordinary” is critical. The ordinary is always leftover, comedown, fallen. In this, it is seen that we do not remember ordinary typologies, but rather the everyday features and characters that make up their compositions. This thesis seeks to draw on this ...

[Chinese Urban Villages Research], Yan Liu

Architecture Thesis Prep

“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 ...

Avoiding The Real World, Ryan Oeckinghaus

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis, entitled Avoiding the Real World, postulates on alternative urban formations that could circumvent further decline in our current dystopian scenario. This takes the form of the redistribution of people and resources in New Jersey, a state of unique sprawl and density who’s development has been driven by its relationship to the urban centers of New York and Philadelphia. It proposes a renewed interest in the linear city model as a means of effectively densifying the land area and allowing the reappropriation of space for agricultural and clean energy supply, functions that have long been subordinated to home ...

Baita, Xiong’An: Towards And Alternative Urbanism, Minglu Wei, Ying Zuo

Architecture Thesis Prep

The project focuses on Xiong’an, the new special area established in April 2017 by the Chinese government, as well as the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in China, both as a typology and political and economic events. By documenting and understanding the urban development pattern that has been implemented in China since 1978 and by revealing the process of translation and materialization of this capital and politics driven utopian model in the past forty years, the objective is:

1. To construct an alternate portrait of the development of Xiong’an, which is arguably a unique urban typology in China, from ...