Architecture Commons^™

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 …

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

Architecture Thesis Prep

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 …

We Die As We Live, Yücel Güven

Architecture Thesis Prep

Each person is made up of different characters that build his/her complete identity. It is possible to identify these individual personas and design a different mausoleum to each one, specific in architectural language and function. The mausoleum should architecturally be unique to the persona and functionally serve the same purpose.

Urban Amnesia, Teriya Lee

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis is a response to Kevin Lynch's claim that "in the process of way-finding, the strategic link is the environmental image, the generalized mental picture of the exterior physical world that is held by an individual." Specifically, the thesis deals with those parts of the urban fabric which are imageless - the unidentified, or, the forgotten. It asks the question: what can architecture do to clarify spatial identities? The thesis will explore Hong Kong's identity as it relates to memory and space.

Opp: Id, Marcus Johnson

Architecture Thesis Prep

Because embassies increasingly function as symbols instead of diplomatic outposts it is necessary to question their effectiveness as diplomatic tools in a global society. If the United States intends to maintain physical diplomatic outposts as part of its foreign policy, then it will require reducing the collateral that is associated with such dangerous missions. While security enhancements have improved the safety and welfare of the Foreign Service in the past, persistent attacks question the relevancy of this approach. Architecture and Urbanism should be included in as possible, if not probable and appropriate, solutions to this difficult problem.

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

Architecture Thesis Prep

"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."

Euro, Ryan A. Doyle

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Architecture can create a flexible representation for institutions of supranational power through the consolidation of the political functions that embody its states' identities."

Resolution Through Pixelation: A Lifestyle Application For Rochester, New York, Therese Mutter

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The requirement of cities is to take on multiple personalities as a responsive strategy towards the various lifestyle existences while maintaining a fulfillment of necessary and desirable aspects in order to attain an ideal state."

"Objective: To create a cohesive program which allows for the simultaneous existence of multiple lifestyles in a singular instance in order to recreate a sense of multiple personalities within a city."

Patrol, James Degennaro

Architecture Thesis Prep

"For the later half of the 20th Century, East European metropoles were systematically disengaged from international relations, removed from circulation and "nationalized" under a particular regina. The reallocation of these metropoles, stemming from an abrupt discontinuation in 1989 of Soviet policy (a program of cultural production), to the immediate years that followed toward liberal democracy, became a critical act in the name of socio-political progress. This reaction, which produced innumerable degrees of success and failures across the former East-Boc region requires new conceptualizations of the political borders and cultural contours within the landscape of the contemporary East European peripheral city... …

Vertica 'L' Exchange: Public Interaction And Community Identity Along The 'L' In Chicago, Dena M. Wangberg

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis proposes to counter the 'genericness' of network identity in public transportation through the transformation of two nodes along the network of the 'L' in Chicago, Illinois.... Through this thesis investigation, the larger network of public transportation infrastructure is particularized by the introduction of new urban program that not only reveals the identities of a given place, but also helps to construct a richer identity throughout the entire network."

Connecting Identity And Place: Refugee Relocation Facility, Kathryn Walsh

Architecture Thesis Prep

"architecture's place in the global flow of people, identity, and the city can no longer be taken for granted. Architecture must consider the current conditions, the past histories, and future prospects of its relationship to identity and place within the changing city."

The Interface Of Two Extremes: Preserving The Local, Connecting To Global - The Question Of Architecture In A Third World Environment, Ella Scheuer

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Striving for global equality, uniformity and at times, excessive luxury has led to ignorance and neglect of regional character and authenticity.

"Understanding this, I found the need to create an architecture that embraces local heritage as well as global progress. This duality will be expressed through the language of the architecture by studying both equatorial African building techniques and contemporary building technologies of the West.... By maintaining a focus on both local and global constituents, a world awareness can be fostered without losing sight of the sense of community."

Building A Future With Our Past, Maureen T. O'Sullivan

Architecture Thesis Prep

"I contend that the contrast of traditional and contemporary architectural building methods and program will visualize the process of change and allow for subsequent transformations of existing constructs. A disregard for traditional architecture will eventually leave us with no conception of our cultural past. These structures are a physical accumulation of our past that we can experience spatially and upon which we can build."

Infrastructure And Improvisationalism, Nick Saponara

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Infrastructure serves as a milt-scaled organizing urban framework in which material practices impose an identity on a given place allowing for the activation of otherwise static conditions.

Clothing As Identity, Kyung Sook Kim

Architecture Thesis Prep

Showroom - Meat Packing District, NYC

"Architecture is not a question of material or structural reality but of the effects of the particular surfaces it presents to the observer, which informs a sense of identity. Identity is constructed from people's perceptions of the appearance or outer skin of a person and a building. What he or she wears or skin that covers the building defines the appearance."

The Congregation: Sha-Ar Ha Kollel, "The Gate For All People", Avi Michael Shoss

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The issue I intend to explore is the growing lack of identity, of place, for this generation's Jewish youth."

Traces Of Time: Urban Palimpsest And Transformations, Tomas B. Fernandez

Architecture Thesis Prep

"I contend that the city is a deeply scored palimpsest that through specific natural, social, and cultural changes reveals its traces of permanence and temporality; therefore, to create in the urban realm is to respond to these vestiges of time through decoding and transformation, as if one was gently manipulating the genome of the city."

Bastard Brand Civility, Mclain Clutter

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This investigation springs from a simultaneous interest in two parallel trends int he contemporary city:

1. The loss of the primacy of architectural and urban form in lieu of economic, market driven understandings of the city...

2. The related necessity of the city to adapt to this move towards the economic, and subsequently market itself as a commodity attractive to the consumer...

My contention, instead, is that we must embrace market forces and sell the city as a spectacle.

Education Through Architecture: Carnival And Merengue Museum, Andres Pastoriza

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis examines the ability of architecture to educate through experience. Architecture creates environments which represents the history, folklore, and tradition of a region by way of semantics. individuals interact with the building and become part of it by providing their knowledge and recollection of the signs and symbols. Through the representation of symbols and the recreation of events, the building evokes the collective memory of the individuals who experience them. Folklore relies heavily on experience, as does architecture. The interaction of event, program, space, and form result in architecture that provides all the elements necessary to educate folklore. By …

Architecture (Re)Assemblage, Chao-Chi Lin

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This is a proposal for a new architectural intervention with an "icon" building, in order to create a history museum whose subtext is to present an historic and critical presentation of colonialism and modernity in Taiwan."

A Paradigm For The Construction Of Architectural Narrative, Sarah F. Holmes

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This proposal concerns the inquiry into the physical and metaphysical structure of place. In this thesis I propose a system of analysis resulting in the creation of a structure from which an architectural narrative may be revealed."

Thesis Preparatory Booklet - Contemporary Design And Historical Sensitivity; Design Of A Museum And Cultural Center In Pondicherry, India, Pavlom Mistry

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The primary goal of this thesis is to investigate and test hoe an architectural intervention in a historical site will set a direction for future development of an urban fabric. The urban architectural intervention will be in a form of a modern building project, which shares a dialogue with the history and which will be based on the analysis of historical and contemporary precedents. Tha ability of the architectural intervention to express a regional and universal identity is the motivating concern. The following architectural issues will be addressed: Context, Process, Scale and Image."

The Providence Renaissance Center, Dante J. Boffi

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The intent of this thesis is to create an urban gateway through the architectural manipulation of a city's edge. Physical and visual linkages will be carried from an urban center to the surrounding context by using a specific piece of architecture as the focal point. Issues such as the pedestrian/city relationship and the notion of architecture as a cultural symbol will help to inform and direct the thesis."

The Monument And The Square: Evolving An Identity For Harvard Square, Kathleen Kulpa

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis will demonstrate the making of a civic building as a resolution between urban conditions and as a focal point in a urban square. It proposes to create an identity for the place by using abstraction of the meeting house as a recognizable type which can allow for the reproposition of the community within."

Housing In Harlem: An Investment In The Future, Kelly J. Beaudreau

Architecture Thesis Prep

"I propose to demonstrate that a housing community in the spirit of the Modern Movement can be placed in Harlem so as to provide safe housing that gives a sense of identity to the residents and which will provide an urban link between Morningside Heights and Harlem so that Morningside Park will no linger pose a threat to the community."