Architecture Commons^™

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."

Retro Fitting In, Nartano Lim

Architecture Thesis Prep

Consumer culture has become a driving force within western society through the rise of expendable goods and the lower costs of manufacturing. The "good life" has now been made available to a much greater portion of society and as a result, possessions as signifiers of status have lost much of their exclusivity, but none of its effectiveness. How does one assert individuality by the products they choose?

A primary driving force of consumer culture is that goods have a designated obsolescence that is perhaps only surpassed by the users desire for something new sooner. This rapid rate of replacement is …

Suburban Adaptability: Urban Context, Joshua Seidner

Architecture Thesis Prep

Creating an Architecture that permits flexibility within a system of controls through the design of an urban mixed-use building in Hoboken, NJ

"The urban context 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 one's expression of individual identity."

The Providence Public Library At Waterplace Park: Modifying The Public Library To Engage With The Civic Realm, Nicole Lecuivre

Architecture Thesis Prep

"A new library and park placed into an underdeveloped parcel of urban fabric in Providence, Rhode Island will create a new public architecture that reflects the modification of the public library type and engages the civic realm at a greater capacity. A library that functions through indoor and outdoor space will strengthen future urban development of the city center a well as serving as 'the community living room' and an icon of Providence."

Incubator Architecture: Jazz Center, Harlem, Tyler Hinckley

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This proposal I will outline the framework for all of the local centers, and more specifically I will address the crucial juxtaposition of the base and a local center by designing the two together in Harlem...

By creating an adaptive yet integral facility the local jazz center will not only be able to flourish and grow in its own incubation period, but will also become a contributing factor to the incubation of new jazz developments in the future of the community."

Refocused Gaze, Gabriel Swire

Architecture Thesis Prep

"How can we study overlapping of space, and even deeper, the interactions that occur in those spaces? View becomes a powerful connection that links spaces and talks about the interaction within a singular space. Gaze, discussed by Lacan and Foucault, creates a basis of exploring possible overlapping of spaces through human interaction. The gaze is a conceptual idea that allows the dissecting of social norms of space to reveal these connections and communications between them.

The objective of a museum is to create an ideal environment for interaction of people and art. the galleries and public spaces are the major …

Fertile Fragments: An Improvisational Urbanism For The Evolving Urban Edge, Matthew Duggan

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Often cities are developed and designed on a parcel by parcel basis without an overall master plan. Urban actors (architecture, planners, developers, municipalities, engineers, artists, etc.) are responsible for what happens on their land alone. While this can result in a series of discrete separate enclaves it is also possible to graft new developments into/onto existing ones. This thesis contends that fragments of urban form can be guiding catalysts for subsequent urban growth and transformation. It intends to explore the possibilities opened up when urban actors leave behind partial or fragmentary works for others to elaborate upon."

Abstracting The Monument: Architectural Representation For A Contemporary Institution, Emma Isabel Corbalan

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis contends that a strategic, meaningful abstraction of the traditional principles of monumentality will create an architecture that is identifiable and communicative, and that can become contextual without the evocation of specific historic references."

Jersey [Limited]: Logistical Architecture, Dennis A. Daisey

Architecture Thesis Prep

"I am proposing a brand that benefits from the addition of architectural thinking in the analysis of the systems utilized by the fashion industry in the development of a new business model. The brand and business model are formulated by the fusion of an architectural sensibility in the consideration of space and form in addition to the study of business practices that have brought success to their respective companies."

Perception Potential And The Performance Of Change, Milo Bonacci

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Sustainable architecture should have the ability to evolve as influenced by societal, cultural, environmental, economic, and political factors. By being dynamic and responsive in this sense, an architecture would be able to interact with its environment in similar ways to how a biological organism both influences and is influenced by its ecosystem - maintaining a state of dynamic equilibrium and ultimately being sustained."

Green Reintroducing Nature To The City, Andrew Cunneen

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The architecture of present day America reflects the way in which we give little consideration to the impact that built forms have on the environment. American cities are expanding beyond their former limits into the natural environment previously untouched by built form. It is important for us to foster a sense of environmental concerns in an age of increasing development and advancements. While technology continues to progress it seems that these advancements are applied to everything but architecture. We have designed ways to get more mileage out of a tank of gas, and created appliances that reduce our electric consumption, …

Airport And Tense Airport, Mike Ness

Architecture Thesis Prep

ACSA Airport Design Competition entry

The Void: Urban By Association, Brian Kessler

Architecture Thesis Prep

"I contend that a regional and now increasingly global scale dictates the development of the city. At this super-urban scale the specificity of architecture is impractical and too expensive, yet the city adn architecture still persist, because of the fundamental human desire for intimate social interaction. Architecture, stripped of its unobtainable utopian ideals, still maintains its significance as the literal and symbolic framework of the urban condition; the space of intense, physical interaction, leading to the literal procreation of humanity and limitless possibilities for new unforeseen activity."

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."

Salad Builders: An Architecture Of Modern Customizable Fast Food", Anthony Francis

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The artificiality of architecture and nutrition of the fast food industry has become caustic to society by deteriorating the ideals by which modern design and health function."

Unveiling The Commodified Landscape: Fixing The Tourist Gaze, Rachel Monk

Architecture Thesis Prep

"My intention is to provide a counterbalance to the shared delusion of a created environment; to relate the landscape and building as constructed commodities which represent place. The project will objectify the existing methods of commodification within the site utilizing methods of natural processes on the site, erosion, and architectural precedents."

Intertwined Boundaries, Naomi Susman

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis will explore ways in which a narrative experience influenced by tradition and cultural exchange serves to stimulate and depict one's understanding of the collaborative product of technique, design, and social movement."

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 …

A Cathedral Of Utility, Arthur Chukhman

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Amenity infrastructure is an effective form of sustainability that can be applied to multiple scales of architecture. Designing infrastructure to be multifunctional while programming it into an amenity produces not only an efficient space but also brings people and social activity within close proximity to infrastructure. This new relationship between society and infrastructure should be realized through a didactic form of architecture in order to reveal what is normally the hidden framework of the built environment to generate a consciousness for energy consumption and other sustainable principles. In effect this thesis is attempting to address the problems associated with …

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."

Unearthing Threshold: [Re]Creating History In Boston's South End, Maggie L. Cookman

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis contends that architecture can act as a unifier and agent of interaction by conveying historical conditions within a modern context, through which the awareness of historical relationships occurs. Through this thesis, the intention will be to investigate how history can be revealed through architectural form and one's perception of the juxtaposition of past and present."

Balancing Scales Of Environment And Activity, Justin Matthew Feit

Architecture Thesis Prep

"What we build is outlined by the context in which we live and work. It can be informed/described by ranges of area (man-made or natural), social intensity or isolation, and program. It is my contention that design should balance between the existing scales and degrees of these topics."

Process Informing Form, Kiera Phillips

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Looking at industrial processes and their respective architecture, specifically steels mills, the process housed within the architecture begins to inform the spatial qualities of the structures. The process of steelmaking starts to exhibit itself in the built forms of the steel mill: the ducting of the blast furnace, the exhaust systems of the basic oxygen furnace, the drawn out sheds of rolling mills. Currently, both process and forms of steelmaking have been removed from the site, To fill this void, I propose a new process that creates this relationship between the act of "making" and form."

Experiencing An Education: Principle And Form, Matthew T. Ahlberg

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The question being investigated deals with the issue of how architecture can become the primary teaching mechanism in an educational environment and what the built forms that evolve form this approach to teaching and its relation to the built environment will take on when considered in relation to existing artistic and architectural models later on in the design process"

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."

Intertwined Boundaries, Naomi Susman

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis will explore ways in which a narrative experience influenced by tradition and cultural exchange serves to stimulate and depict one's understanding of the collaborative product of technique, design, and social movement."

The Tactile And Sensual: Redeveloping An Abandoned Granite Quarry As Hospice Facilities For The Elderly, Linnaea Stuart

Architecture Thesis Prep

The complex nature of one dealing with the end of their time here on Earth can never be fulling grasped by one moment, one person, or one idea of death. The cycle of life itself is a constant reflection of overlapping circumstances and memories that can only be understood in concurrence. The phenomenological aspect of 'being' both physically as well as mentally allows for this simultaneity to occur.

As one part of mans preparation of death, architecture has the potential to invoke an acute awareness of being (the understanding that one is still an individual with importance ans place in …

Rituals Transforming Cultures, Cultures Transforming Rituals: Tea Importers' Headquarters + Interactive Tea Museum, Todd Rubin

Architecture Thesis Prep

Throughout tea's history, rituals have developed ranging from strictly obeying principles in Japanese tea ceremonies to loosely interpreting principles of tea such as drinking a bottle of iced tea in America. Locating a program to explore the historic, cultural, and political connotations of Boston, in its Inner Harbor, tea can be culturally transformed through a process of an interactive museum in conjunction with the headquarters for a tea importing company, which will explore cultural and ritual issues of tea. This exploration will further enhance these transformations of cultures and rituals that exist with the ever changing life of tea.

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."