Architecture Commons^™

The Politics Of The Trash Heap, Kyle Neumann

Architecture Thesis Prep

I propose to develop a new methodology on housing fabrication and community development and engagement in the region of northern Baja to be achieved through material sourcing and fabrication, localized infrastructure, and larger scale infrastructure throughout the border region of Mexico and California. This will be done at three scales: Macro-scale, studying ecologies, climate, and political landscapes; Meso-scale, studying infrastructure, resources, population density, and agriculture; Micro-scale, studying familial types, dwelling infrastructure and the cultural community. The Human dwelling will be the amalgamation of this border redevelopment, as refuse material from the US can be augmented to produce climactically appropriate materials …

Surfaces Of Exchange: Formulating Connections And Experiences In The Physical And Digital Landscape, Brooke Calhoun, Ross Hanson

Architecture Thesis Prep

The means and modes through which people and places have connected has drastically altered within the recent past. At the global scale, as recent as the mid 1800’s, the cross-cultural exchange of information was rare and occurred only through person-to-person connections. Expositions such as the Great Exhibition hosted in London at the Crystal Palace in 1851 is a clear example of how cultures communicated in our recent past. Information, machines, animals, plants, all the above, was removed from its natural habitat and placed on display in front of an audience; a one-point perspective through which one culture would understand another. …

Transitional Spaces: Re-Thinking Of Disaster Relief Housing, Evelyn Brooks

Architecture Thesis Prep

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 attend school. These shelter environments are repurposed public buildings like …

Contemporary Infrastructure For The Sustainable Mid-Sized City, Christian Martinez

Architecture Thesis Prep

Embedded within the Feasibility Assessment of Sustainable Transportation: Syracuse study’s goals is an interest in urban mobility particularly in mid-sized cities in America. Well referenced texts tend to deliberate on issues of urban infrastructure in great urban metropolises. This presumes infrastructure improvements can universally have a positive impact on urban mobility irrespective of city size. But is it possible for the prosperity of cities to be augmented by virtue of investing in policy and infrastructure for sustainable transportation through following megalopolis biased guidebooks? Vishaan Chakrabarti advocates for a more urban America in “A County of Cities”, because of their ability …

As Above, So Below: Tapping Into The Latent Energy Of Abandoned Underground Infrastructure, Alexandra N. Ramirez

Architecture Thesis Prep

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Abandoned underground infrastructure is an example of an untapped surplus in energy that an architect has the opportunity to reappropriate. Tunnels in particular, can be used as systems to heat or cool a network of buildings above ground to create more sustainable urban environments. In addition to greater energy efficiency, the system could also have beneficial social implications within segregated cities by providing fluid connections between divided neighborhoods.

This thesis will establish a framework for repurposing underground infrastructures. The strategy operates under an umbrella of sustainability and urban improvement which are two concepts applicable to sites far beyond the …

Infra[Re]Structure, Sara Minsley

Architecture Thesis Prep

This project contends that through the mediation and expression of systems, energies and flows the pedestrian can reclaim the experience of the street.Crucial to this is an understanding of what is on the street and how objects and people are situated on the streets currently. Through exploiting these issues New York City the pedestrian is offered a more engaged experience of moving through the city.

Decay And Opportunity Of Architecture, Alexa Hansford

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis aims to develop a connection between the newly elevated downtown Brooklyn and the cultural/civic center of lower Manhattan. One of the growth projects is known as the Urban Farming Initiative. Private areas through out the five boroughs have been redeveloped into community gardens. The public then cultivates and reaps goods for their personal use. Through the expansion of the Urban Farming Initiative this new network connection can act as the "bridge" between the two major city centers as well as creating a central hub for the farming network.

Architecture Power: Towards A New Transparency Of Energy Infrastructure, Shaun Leon Selberg

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Over the last 150 years our landscapes have been defined by the production and transportation of energy. A complex network of railroads, canals, highways, tunnels, bridges, and viaducts are the result of energy consumption and the distancing of negative or unaccepted effects of energy to remote places. Deforestation and TV broadcasting reveals the scars of energy abuse and displays catastrophes and disasters in real time. Our ordered energy landscapes, defined by their separation and reliant on a level of invisibility, now appear to invade the ‘terrestrial skin’ and are signs of infection and waste. 1 Crippled by the necessity of …

Architecture Of Population Flows | Localizing Tourism In The Inside Passage, Jennifer Tamblin

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis focuses on a problem that arises due to the specific flows of tourists and migrant workers into the south east Alaskan Inside Passage. Because of these population flows, situations have emerged in the small town communities that create a need for an intervention designed to cater to the specific circumstances surrounding each individual group of people, and how they coexist with one another."

Activated Infrastructure, Joanna T. Myers

Architecture Thesis Prep

No abstract provided.

[Re]-Establishing Connection: Integrating People Through Movement And Culture In Nyc, Justin Leung

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis proposes to test and re-establish how architecture can make connections between people. Through freedom of movement, transportation creates many opportunities for the congregation of people and social interaction. This thesis aims to create spaces for mixing and awareness through movement, and program."

Constructing A Living Surface: City Hall As Connective Tissue, Benjamin Grace

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Infrastructural space offers a model for architecture which is not closed and self-contained, but expansive, continuous, and referential beyond itself. A healthy urban landscape can be produced by buildings that serve to construct sites which expand into the city, giving expression to the role of the urban surface."

Synthetic Window: Game Space And The Player's Dilemma, Alejandro Perez

Architecture Thesis Prep

No abstract provided.

Landscraper, Erik Maso

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The LANDSCRAPER project challenges the re-establishment of perceptually stable and natural orders. It is specifically attracted to the claim that one of the largest infrastructural projects exists in the intermountain region of western United States with the abundance of reclaimable mining territories. The project is in the conception of organizational system that instrumentalizes mining techniques to shape, stabilize, and revegetate unclaimed waste rock edifices, maximizing the potentials of a nature whose production and consumption is perpetually fueled by cultural needs and desires. Its intentions are to consider the imaging of nature, extend the perception of nature in the context of …

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."

Rural Iowa And The Transgenic Railroad, Wilson Day

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Using an understanding of transgenics and recombinant SNA technology as an analogue for exploring the architectural possibilities within a rail line in Clinton, Iowa, and its directly adjacent modes of transportation, I propose to create an intervention which bridges all modes and establishes a connection between a large portion of Eastern Iowa and the city of Clinton, which will act as an interface for the transfer of architectural goods as well as the transfer of people from various parts of rural Iowa to larger urban areas."

Activating The Void, Karissa Kizer

Architecture Thesis Prep

Syracuse, New York contains an abundance of voids created by transportation infrastructure. Interstate 81 runs north-south through the city, connecting with Interstate 690 and eventually to the New York State thruway. I-81 exists in the city as an overpass, a barrier which effectively slices the city in two. Each half of the city contains a major productive zone, though the area in between the two, the district surround the highway, exists as both a physical and programmatic void. Within this area, there are numerous specific voids, most in the form of parking facilities which can be used to explore the …

Fluid Architecture : Synthesis : City, Adriana L. Zarrillo

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This proposal intends to manipulate the streams of the city and their potential overlaps and deviations in order to create an intervention that will revitalize both economically and aesthetically a localized area. By further developing the city streams that are already present, the pre-existing conditions, and subsequently introducing those streams that are not present in order to produce the desired result, a successful dynamic node of convergent streams with the potential to link back to larger scales."

Gateway To Interaction, Adam C. Mcwilliams

Architecture Thesis Prep

"American cities presently face a moment of truth. While traditional city centers continue to signify established culture, science, education, and finance, in almost every city crucial sections of originally thriving city centers have persistently decreased as a location of interaction.

The regional city, if it is to sustain itself and maintain any diversity of architecture, density, and most importantly interaction, will need to accommodate a broad range of speeds, scales, and means of movement in both directions to reactivate the city center."

The Effect Of Cinematographic Architecture On Urban Space, Jose R. Fonacier

Architecture Thesis Prep

"These ideas of cinematic architecture gate when utilized in a hierarchical network of city gates within an urban space can begin to create more complex story lines to bring order to a complex variety of experiences. It also perceptually breaks down a large urban space that is perceived as homogeneous by creating sub-defined districts through a hierarchical network of regions."

A Structure Defining Movement: Mediating Between The Past & Present, Laura Klock

Architecture Thesis Prep

Erie Canal Aqueduct, Rochester, NY - Re-forming the Identity of a Historic Urban Artifact

"Structuring the movement through space, and thus the temporal experience of that place, can serve as a mnemonic device for the recollection of the past and the reinterpretation of a site's identity as a composite of the past and present."

Rebuilding Community: Boston's North End, Maria A. Fazio

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The city is enhanced by architecture form which participates in the urban fabric as a means of connection, therefore promoting the formation of community... The intent is to propose developemnt for portions of the Central Artery Master Plan in Boston, Massachusetts. The city is currently in the process of relocating a major infrastructural element from its present location above grade to a tunnel beneath the city. Demolition of the exiting central artery offers the city an opportunity to infill much of the land and restore surface level streets reconnecting the east sire of the interstate to the downtown area...

The …

Mobility And Station: Place And Movement In A Culture Of Nostalgia And Commodities, Jonathan Hicks

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The proposal, interchanging an already detached program, resurrecting forgotten artifacts as symbols, and inverting conceptions of organization, would be one method of connecting to local networks and contexts in order to ground the project in site and place. It is not meant to be seen as a corrective measure for any aspect of the site, only as an opportunity to utilize and reinvent its unique situation and history in a new way. It is a model for the creation of a sustainable place in a mobile society."

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.

Vorhizomeid: Nodes Of Community Services Connecting Albany, Ny, Andrew Watkins

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The contention is to reposition terrain vague into the urban fabric recreating a continuum of the urban system while attempting to detract neither from the scale of the infrastructural system, nor that of the human body. Terrain vague muse be approached in a different manner than that of the traditional urban city. Establishing community through terrain vague should be done by measure of the forces, flows, and rhythms of space."

Urban Agents, New Events: A Transformation Of The Postindustrial Landscape, Kevin Toukoumidis

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Railway yards, abandoned industrial processing plants, decommissioned factories and polluted river ways are the leftovers from the industrial age. With the deindustrialization of society, a new prevailing urban condition has resulted: a marginalized landscape of residual spaces and urban voids, often with real or perceived contamination.... The potential for reclaiming these marginalized landscapes becomes a catalyst for the design of new modes of occupation and human activity."

Architecture And The Articulation Of Passage: A Ferryboat Terminal For Old San Juan, Ruperto Arvelo

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The primary goal is to develop the area around the ferryboat terminal of San Juan waterfront, understanding such issues as:

-the importance of the bay and the role that the city of Old San Juan played in it as its physical entrance.

-definiteion of the waterfornt edge...

-the connection of Old San Juan to other areas of the metropolitan area through the new ferryboat system...

-ideas of representation, of historical continuity between the traditional and modern architecture, an understanding of the old fabric and how we can complement it, without imitating it or opposing it."