Architecture Commons^™

Prototyping Attainability: A Guide For Incremental Density In Communities, Quinlan Mcfadden

Masters in Architecture Program: Theses

In the absence of direct public investment solutions, Prototyping Attainability, explores how the combination of building typologies and land uses can achieve attainable housing strategies by striking a balance between shared community spaces and optimizing density, without disrupting the existing residential landscape. Through this exploration of research and design, strategic changes in zoning, regulation and typologies will be brought forward to aid the framework process of solutions to the housing crisis not only within Nebraskan communities, but in communities nationwide.

Restoring Lost Heritage, Lewis Culliver

Masters in Architecture Program: Theses

One of the best streets to explore in Omaha is N. 24th Street. Many buildings showcase larger than life, vibrant murals that express the creative nature and spirit of this part of historic North Omaha. The murals represent a healing element for the community; many murals cover structures that are in various states of disrepair. Community gardens have risen to fill voids left by traumatic development practices, such as the implementation of the north freeway.

Despite having lost a large part of its heritage, including hundreds of homes and businesses that were destroyed to make way for the north freeway, …

Bellingham's Housing Ecosystem, Malene Garcia

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

The goal of my project was to understand what puts people at risk of becoming unhoused and what solutions are the most effective in combating and preventing houselessness.

To figure this out, I used Bellingham as a case study. I did research on homelessness in general, and then used that to guide my research specific to Bellingham. I focused on the causes of houselessness, the demographics of those experiencing houselessness, and the challenges that they face. Then, I researched solutions. To supplement this research, and get different perspectives specific to Bellingham, I interviewed people working in three different organizations: The …

Planning, Aging, And Loneliness: Reviewing Evidence About Built Environment Effects, Yingying Lyu, Ann Forsyth

Geography & Planning Faculty Publications

Large numbers of people in many countries report being lonely with rates highest among the very old. Does the built environment affect loneliness among older people and if so, how? Using a scoping review, we examined associations between loneliness and built environments at the block, neighborhood, and city scales The (a) neighborhood environment has received most attention. Research has also examined (b) urban contexts, (c) housing, and (d) transportation access. Findings are mixed with the stronger evidence that local resources, walkability, overall environment quality, housing options, and nearby transportation alternatives can help combat loneliness.

Built Environment And Self-Rated Health: Comparing Young, Middle-Aged, And Older People In Chengdu, China, Yingying Lyu, Ann Forsyth, Steven Worthington

Geography & Planning Faculty Publications

Objectives: This article explores how the building-scale built environment is associated with selfrated health, examining differences in this association among younger, middle-aged, and older age groups. Features examined included building type, building condition, and sidewalk presence in front of dwellings. Background: Understanding how the relationships between built environments and health vary across age groups helps to build a healthy environment for all. However, most studies have concentrated on the neighborhood or indoor environment, rather than whole buildings, and few have compared age groups. Methods: This study analyzed survey data from 1,019 adults living in 40 neighborhoods in Chengdu, China, recruited …

Yimby And Covid-19, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

Discusses whether the COVID-19 pandemic strengthens the case for the pro-housing YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) movement.

America’S Finest Housing Crisis: Racialized Housing & Suburban Development, Vicenta Martinez Govea

McNair Summer Research Program

U.S. Government operations between 1940-1950 brought unprecedented direct and indirect employment opportunities to San Diego, exacerbating an already growing housing shortage. To accommodate the thousands of new defense workers, the government produced the largest defense housing project to date in the small neighborhood of Linda Vista. However, this opportunity and largesse was extended primarily to a select group of white working-class families who had access to defense jobs and, consequently, subsidized housing. Military presence in San Diego during World War II shaped the design of homes and exclusively allocated housing, as both shelter and financial instrument, to white working-class families …

Micro-Housing In Seattle Update: Combating “Seattle-Ization”, Taylor Haines

Seattle University Law Review SUpra

No abstract provided.

The State Of Affordable Housing In Pierce County, Ali Modarres, Hannah Miner, Anthony Hoffmann

Professional Reports

Affordable housing is a complex issue, requiring significant regional and metropolitan level attention. There are very few cities that can claim to have succeeded in solving this problem. However, the policy toolkit to engage with this particular challenge has grown over the last few decades. Given the diminishing role of the federal government in building and financing affordable/social housing, it has fallen to tribes, states, counties, and cities to tackle this challenge on their own or through collaboration. The State of Washington and Pierce County governments are no exception. Meanwhile, as the number of cost-burdened households has increased over time, …

Beyond The Market: A “Public-Commons-Partnership” For Housing, Arielle Lawson

Publications and Research

The commodification of housing has led to new levels of unaffordability for tenants all over the country. With skyrocketing rents and an explosion of homelessness, we are faced with the glaring failures of our capitalist housing system to meet people’s most basic human needs. Recognizing the inherent limitations of “affordable housing” within a profit-driven system, we need a paradigm shift around housing that can change the terms of the debate, and advance a real alternative to the speculative market. A growing housing justice movement — combined with a renewed politicization of tenants — is leading the way. From new rent …

Housing Availability, Accessibility And Affordability For Nebraska's Rural Aging Populations, Jordan G. Grummert Rasmussen

Community and Regional Planning Program: Theses and Student Projects

Rural America and the nation as a whole has entered a phase of significant demographic change, as the number of Americans over the age of 65 is estimated to double by 2050. Nebraska counties and the state are, too, experiencing this shift in the age demographic. As the population ages, consideration must be given to the housing options for older adults, specifically those who reside and wish to remain in rural areas.

While broad consideration is given to either population aging or housing in rural areas, there is limited county level analysis adjoining these demographic and housing realities. This study …

An Evidence-Based Approach To Designing Low-Income Housing Communities, Kaitlin Ward

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

In the field of interior design, functionality and aesthetics are combined to create spaces that are beautiful, but also serve a variety of purposes. Broadly categorized into residential and commercial sectors, interior design considers the health and wellness of users in a space, and strives to improve the standard of living. Quality interior design is often treated as a luxury afforded only to the wealthy, although the field can and should be applied to benefit a wider demographic. Intelligent design and space planning can be used as a tool for community-building, especially among populations often overlooked due to reasons such …

Learning From The Informal: Designing A New Housing Typology For Informal Development In Cairo, Cherif Farid

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis examines what to design when designing for the informal and questions the role of the architect. The project combines the inherent qualities of the informal; self-built, incremental construction, and flexibility of spatial uses, with alternative urban design strategies.

The design strategy is to control the ground plane and roof scape, while leaving an open frame in between to be incrementally filled with housing. This frame allows residents to voice their identity by physically constructing their homes. It introduces an urban system that is composed of blocks that consist of an aggregation of identical units. The blocks are connected …

The Crisis In Housing Has Deep Roots And Supply Alone Will Not Resolve It., Tom Dunne

Conference papers

Ireland is suffering a housing crisis which will not be easily solved. This is not the first generation to struggle with housing problems. A review of history shows that property markets have pronounced cycles and a continual struggle to provide affordable housing with much direct state provision and extensive subsidises for home ownership. Part of the current crisis results from the abandonment of direct provision of housing by the state but the gradual withdrawal subsidies for owner occupation, has also made a contribution to making home ownership less affordable for many.

A crucial part of dealing with the crisis is …

New Beijing | A Renewed Vernacular, Bowen Victor Zhang

Architecture Senior Theses

What does the term "vernacular" means? In an increasingly flay world, this thesis seeks to define the essential elements of the vernacular architecture of Beijing in order to propose a contemporary residential archetype.

In the past century, China has experienced unprecedented economic growth and development. Along with the many influences introduced by cross-cultural interactions, the phenomenon of architectural and social gentrification has begun to affect many of the populations living in urban centers. The same gentrifying forces that have drastically changed Greenwich Village and other New York City neighborhoods has rapidly moved to China and has replaced centruries-old vernacular communities …

It's Not Easy Being Whole | Reevaluating The Relationship Of Part Whole In Pursuit Of A New High-Rise Vernacular, Josh Bransky

Architecture Senior Theses

Architecture has the power to structure societal relationships. Specifically, architecture's form can bring the balanced relationship between community and individual identity, as exhibited in vernacular single-family homes, to the housing tower. This thesis plans to achieve such a social orchestration through a nuanced understanding of formal part-to-whole relationships, or "differentiated" parts within the whole, exhibited in a 300' housing tower in Seattle, WA.

By carefully balancing the relation, material, scale, and form of each part, this project will achieve this difficult whole (of differentiated parts). Mining this middle ground will produce a housing tower in Seattle, which actively balances the …

Green Blot District | Considering Low Density Neighborhoods, Tom Arleo

Architecture Senior Theses

By adjusting the texture of now declined early 20th Century outer-urban neighborhoods to adopt low density blocks, new zoning and its resultant architecture can produce an intricate spatial fabric that mediates between individual customization and collective suburban image essential to American detached dwelling. Overlapping functions, spaces, and surfaces offer a new cohesion necessary for developing physically and socially tight-knit communities in a thinning, object-made fabric.

This thesis rethinks suburban practices at the scale of the house, lot, and block, in order to speak directly to issues of building autonomy, non-spatial surface and volume conventions, and residential-program-only zoning. Creating the scheme …

Deployable Domesticity, Daniel Hopkins

Architecture Senior Theses

Deployable homes have characterized the survivalist origins of our species, the lifestyles of disenfranchised populations, and the luxurious retreats of others. Still, a predominance of contemporary domestic space relies on the ‘permanently’ stationary and situated object. As the social and ecological conditions of our society are rapidly and continually fluctuating, we must reaffirm our association with deployable culture and expand the utilization of mobile and adaptable unit. Further, architecture must negotiate the contrasts between ephemerality and permanence.

Through speculation of the social and sustainable implications of the deployable unit, issues of flexibility, material selection and afterlife, economics, ecology, and efficiency …

Algorithmic Settlements | Modeling Informal Settlement Through Automated Generative Design, Ben Anderson-Nelson

Architecture Senior Theses

The position of the architect when designing is to arbitrate which information is relevant and which is not, and to do so across a broad spectrum of fields. Considering this, Christopher Alexander claimed as long ago as 1964, that “design problems are reaching insoluble levels of complexity.”This thesis focuses on informal settlement growth and how architects can investigate growth as a part of master-planning new housing. Drawing on case studies of settlements, video game logics, and existing architectural tools, a tool was developed to study the growth of settlements. This tool is based on cellular automata, a spatial and algorithmic …

Routes To The Renaissance For Pittsfield, Ma, Nicholas A. Armata, Laura Caughlan, Ross C. Kahn, Leonard M. Kendall, Sarah Lang, Tiffany Leung, Christopher Mcgoldrick, Stephen Meno

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Studio and Student Research and Creative Activity

The goal of the Master of Regional Planning Studio is to develop a student’s techniques for collecting, analyzing, and synthesizing spatial and non-spatial data and then presenting that collective data in a manner (i.e., report, video, presentation, and charettes) that is understandable to academics, professionals, and the public. Planning Studio allows students to integrate knowledge from coursework and research, and apply such knowledge to resolving representative planning problems. At UMASS Amherst, these problems are found in neighborhood, rural, urban, and/or regional settings.

In the fall of 2015, the City of Pittsfield contracted the MRP Studio to create a vision plan …

Housing In Zurich, Switzerland, Edward Asfour

Architecture Senior Theses

Housing in Zurich, Switzerland

Britton Award Winner, Thesis Board.

Renting Trouble: Current Government Policy Of Relying On The Private Rented Sector To Deliver Social Housing Is Unlikely To Succeed, Tom Dunne

Reports

A review of the history of housing in Ireland shows that owner occupancy and social housing were policy choices by successive governments. Owner occupancy was heavily supported through a system of grants and tax breaks and social housing was directly provided through local authorities at subsidised rents. In recent years policy has changed and tenure neutrality is now guiding the government’s attitude to housing. This is a significant change which has not been sufficiently discussed and has consequences which are not appreciated. Relying on the market to provide rental housing for people on low incomes and who may be in …

Use Of Accessory Dwelling Units As A Housing Strategy: A Case Study Of Lawrence, Kansas, Travis M. Hulse

Community and Regional Planning Program: Theses and Student Projects

Accessory dwelling units have long been utilized as an alternative strategy of homeowners within single-family neighborhoods of the United States in response to changing needs in living arrangements. The American Planning Association defines an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) as either a self-contained living area located within the walls of an existing home or a freestanding structure on the same lot as the principal dwelling unit. While it is difficult to accurately identify all of the municipalities that allow the creation of ADUs in single-family neighborhoods, their presence was long established prior to the enactment of zoning regulations in cities across …

Precarity And Gentrification: A Feedback Loop, Samuel Stein

Graduate Student Publications and Research

How do rent hikes and labor precarity conspire to reinforce each other against tenants and workers? Samuel Stein explains the mechanisms that link these two trends affecting citizens and calls for a tightening of rent-control laws to stop the spiraling descent of American residents into poverty.

House As Mediator: Integrative Typology As Connector Between Land And Sea, Samantha Kudish

Architecture Thesis Prep

Rather than the water being an obstacle to coastal residential communities, water can act as an opportunity. Instead of barricading these areas from the water, integrating it with the area would create communities that are capable of living in unison with the ocean. This can introduce new typologies of housing that can withstand the continuing rise of sea levels. Blurring the line between land and sea by living with the sea will allow coastal regions to stay afloat, benefiting from ever-changing water conditions. A proposed new housing typology would introduce a new program to coastal neighborhoods, rather than putting up …

A Place Of Dwelling For Graduate Students, Garth H. Schwellenbach

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

The lives of graduate students are often insular and focused, with high workloads and resultant stresses. Beyond the unifying demands of academia, graduate students have a diverse set of individual challenges. Some students have families, some are visiting the US and learning to live in a new culture, and some are fresh out of undergraduate studies and living on their own for the first time. In addition to these challenges the graduate student body is a diverse and disparate group, representing varied cultures, experiences and generations. Due to these demands and circumstances the students have little time and energy to …

Prelude To A Master Plan: Ware, Massachusetts, Belen Alfaro, Bruno Carneiro, Margaret Engesser, Kathryn E. Fox, Evadne R. Friedman, Timothy Inacio, Anita Lockesmith, Christina Mills, Stephanie Molden, Meagen Mulherin, Russell Pandres, Vinicius Pereira, Brian Reid, Pedro Soto, Jennifer Stromsten

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Studio and Student Research and Creative Activity

Prelude to a Master Plan offers ideas, recommendations, and a toolkit to help the town chart its own path towards that future. While the teams and individual students worked to ‘drill down’ into specific topic areas, the Studio defined three basic areas in order to think about how the various assets, challenges and ideas undermine or reinforce one another. The report is loosely organized in those terms: addressing the outlying rural areas and issues specific to these places, considering one of the key growth areas that has extended from town and the conflicts that arise from the many uses occurring …

Housing Indeterminacy: Responsive Design For Diverse And Changing Households, Mark Sousa

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This project hopes to create a new outlook on the future of housing design. Ray Forrest wrote, “The pace of demographic change need not be that dynamic to outpace the capacity of markets or states to provide appropriate dwellings in appropriate locations. […] Dwelling placement or adaptation is always likely to lag.”2 The preceding statement reflects the belief that housing is static and rigid, and that dwelling replacement or major structural adaptation is necessary to accommodate a continually evolving population. On the contrary, responsive housing can release significant pressure on housing systems by anticipating change and providing a lower cost …

Avoiding The Mistakes Of The Past, Tom Dunne

Articles

Tom Dunne explores the long term drivers of dysfunction in Ireland's housing markets and what a more sustainable housing system would look like.

Conspicuous Space: Parking Lot Suburbanism, Ian Nicholson

Architecture Senior Theses

"Locating neighborhoods of housing in currently underutilized surface parking lots which serve successful commercial shopping centers and big box stores can synergistically improve the American suburb by allowing opportunities to maintain the suburban idea (rugged individualism, privacy, and mobility) while mitigating its problems (automobiles dependence, distance, and isolation)."