Architecture Commons^™

Suppression | Liberation: Memorial To The Lgbtq + Holocaust Victims, Justin Difabritis

Architecture Thesis Prep

Architecture + poetry are powerful forms of creativity, both exemplifying beauty, symbolism, emotion, and experience through structure + form. This thesis is interested in poetic architecture and its ability to not only narrate, represent, symbolize, or express, but also eternalize, the story of groups, individuals, and events.

Through the analysis of, but not limited to, memorials, tombs, and monuments, a deeper architectural understanding will be offered, one of architecture’s ability to emotionally affect others as a means of remembrance.

This research will focus on the literal + symbolic narrative and experience of the LGBTQ+ victims of the holocaust, placing a …

Panopticon: A Privacy Revelation, Kexin Wang, Zhexu Yang

Architecture Thesis Prep

Our thesis project studies and analyzes the control of Surveillance Capitalism over people’s privacy, and how to make people realize the importance of privacy through the means of an architectural/design narrative. This concept comes from Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, which explains how tech companies collect extra data, capture people’s behavioral surplus and sell them to third party customers, such as advertising companies, thus the predictions about people’s preferences accordingly. In this process, technology companies can make tremendous profit by stealing users’ personal information and then …

Tectonic Thresholds: Reclaiming Space Through Geomorphological Design, Amreeta Verma

Architecture Thesis Prep

This research posits that a revitalization of indigenous earth architecture practices in a contemporary context can mitigate the immense waste and embodied carbon in the construction industry. Earth materials are the focus of this research because they are locally sourced, abundantly available, and can be reused or returned to the natural environment, when utilized in a circular consumption cycle. Designing for reuse reduces the impact of construction waste on the burgeoning issue of environmental degradation and resource depletion.

The structural viability and environmental enclosure capabilities of soil throughout its lifecycle will be tested in different forms derived geomorphically from the …

My Abject Body: Dissimulating & Disheveling Fleshy Matter, Taylor Hoople

Architecture Thesis Prep

Body (as subject) and space (as object) are polarized entities in modern discourse and design. The current epoch of hygiene, control, and mass-production/ consumption renders the body and the space(s) it inhabits as whole, discrete entities. In their totality, body and space are idealized opposites, failing to experience any messy overlaps or ambiguous in-betweenness. My feminine body is particularly subject to this dualism, being tightly bound to the legal and social patriarchal dominance over my body’s autonomy and appearance.

This thesis seeks to corrupt my hyper-aestheticized and policed body by making (with) abject( ion). Understood both as an ongoing condition …

Maps!: Living With Ghosts, Ximeng Luo, Shihui Zhu

Architecture Senior Theses

The scene is set along Heilongjiang. The river feeds populations in the Russian Far East and Northeastern China, while simultaneously delineating the long and winding national border between contemporary Russia and China. The Chinese Northeast has been flattened and re-established as a cultural icon, yet when we peel off the pictures from streaming media, what kind of marks does the northeast- once called "the eldest son of the Republic" for its rapid industrial development in the last century- leave on the land? Infrastructure - such as collective farms in fields, tree farms in forests, road and electric towers- becomes a …

Emotional Architecture Under Modernism, Yi Chen

English Language Institute

The impression of modernist architecture is rational and emotionless. However, this is just a disguise of the modernist architects' emotional pursuit. This article aims to expose and analyze the architectural emotion in the context of modernism.

Neo Collectivism: Public Space Design For The Intergenerational Community, Shu Zhang

Architecture Senior Theses

Within our lifetime, we will see an increase in the aging of the population in China, and the social isolation of the elderly is occurring every day. Simultaneously, more and more young people migrate to large cities, while older family members stay in their home towns to ease the younger generation's burden. The once collectivist family culture has been destroyed, and the daily life of the elderly without their relatives has become monotonous and lonely. Moreover, with the advancement of technology, the younger generation is increasingly dependent on smartphones for social interaction and life, which increases the possibility of the …

Living Memories: Rethinking Remembrance, Timothy Mulhall

Architecture Senior Theses

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. Memorials must be alive, changing, constantly developing as a result of interaction. The reliance on overly abstract, rhetorical conditions of design will become obsolete. The static condition of the image-friendly object will be replaced with a dynamism influenced by time and participation.

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.

Reconsidering Black And Light: Black And Light Projects That Challenge Perception, Chen-Yang Chang

English Language Institute

No abstract provided.

The Refurbishment And Renovation Of The Palais-Royal During The Recency, Jean-François Bédard

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

Philippe II, duc d'Orléans and his architect, Gilles-Marie Oppenord, embraced the grand goût style and recast the Palais-Royal as a surrogate Versailles. This shift imagined the Palais-Royal as the center for royal power during the Regency period. This article traces the ways in which renovations from 1713 until 1723 transformed the Palais-Royal. While Louis XV moved the seat of power back to Versailles, Paris remained the center for French politics thanks to duc Orléans and Oppenord.

Schloss Sanssouci (1743-1745), Jean-François Bédard

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

This article is a general overview of Schloss Sanssouci, a summer palace of Fredrick II, King of Prussia. The architect, Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, depended heavily upon Fredrick's idiosyncratic designs, giving Scholoss Sanssouci a unique character.

Vierzehnheiligen (1742-1744), Jean-François Bédard

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

This article traces the ways in which competing architectural plans for the Vierzehnheiligen (currently known as the Basilica of the Fourteen Holy Helpers) in Southern Germany evolved from its 1735 until 1744. These changes reflect changing ideas of church architecture and the pragmatic realities of the site.

The Shenzhen Activist Program`, Hyunggyu Kim, Jae Hyun Kim

Architecture Senior Theses

There is a gap between being an architecture student in western countries and working as an architect in underrepresented communities. Architect Teddy Cruz defines the role of an activist architect as "expanded mode of practice", and the task of "deigning the protocols or the interfaces between communities and spaces".

This thesis contends that architecture schools need to continue to embrace the widely-accepted norm of studios studying abroad and working in an international studio. Current study abroad programs tend to skew towards being touristic field trips and there is not a curriculum or programmatic investment in cultivating relationships between the visiting …

A Plan Of The Louvre's Cour Carrée And The Making Of The Architecture Française, Jean-François Bédard, Pierre-Édouard Latouche

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

In November 1894 an album of drawings of the Louvre was auctioned in Paris. Contained within the album is an anonymous and undated plan of the ground floor of the Cour Carrée. This article argues that the survey for this plan was sponsored by educator and architect Jacques-François Blondel, and give evidence for this attribution.

Collaborating With Catastrophe | A User's Guide To Post-Apocalyptic Farming, Patricia Cafferky

Architecture Senior Theses

“Collaborating with Catastrophe” contends that architecture has the capacity to visually manifest unseen forces through design’s reaction to them, allowing people to more fully comprehend and engage the intangible. Climate change, arguably the largest threat to modern day humanity, is not visible, existing only as a collection of data and patterns in a statistical construct. Taking stock of the present day failings of society in the face of crisis, this thesis then extrapolates a potential future dystopia precipitated by man-made pollutants in order to engage the problem at its most severe. Architecture is then able to make the toxic visible …

The Foreign Complex | A Cross-Cultural Vernacular, Dexter Cicchinelli

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis investigates transforming a decommissioned military site into a productive part of its host nation’s context. Okinawa consists of a group of islands that make up the southern-most prefecture of Japan. MAP It is situated midway between Tokyo and Manila, and called the “keystone of the Pacific” by military planners because of its strategic location. AERIAL FLIGHT MAP It was the site of the devastating Battle of Okinawa in WWII which prompted an ongoing history of military intervention and occupation. TIMELINE Immediately after the war, displaced Okinawans were put in camps while the military claimed land for bases. Some …

Redefining The Constraint | Designing Control To Support Rehabilitation, Jessica Borri

Architecture Senior Theses

The concrete lined cells of a contemporary prison do not lend themselves well to processes of rehabilitation. This thesis contends that it is time for architects to rethink the architecture of the prison. When an inmate knows he is being watched, he tends to exhibit positive behavior out of fear of the consequences of any action deemed to be negative. This thesis contends that by incorporating the apparatus of surveillance seamlessly into a prison's architecture it may be possible to provide spaces that feel more open and less oppressive.

One way to generate a feeling of openness is to create …

Free Encounters | Giving Form To The Informal Workplace, Ryan Williams

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis contends that the "office" as a solely economic construct is no more: Its utility as an engine driving productivity and the accumulation of capital has stalled in our present age of information where value is constructed through knowledge exchange and interaction.

Via the use of new technologies, millennial workers' transition from the college campus to the office has become more seamless and, this thesis argues, it is in this paradigm shift that it is possible to identify a blurring of the public and private spheres. The millennial worker-turned-freelancer's life exists forever suspended between work and play, place and …

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 …

Uncreative Construction | Domestic Mutations In America, Sean Morgan

Architecture Senior Theses

A shift in residential patterns in American cities have fostered a breeding ground for mutant buildings. Owners split, manipulate, and expand their houses as they create idiosyncratic constructs of great visual and spatial complexity. Originally developed for a middle class population, single-family homes have become mixed-use or multi-family complexes thanks to the resourceful implementation of commercial materials.

This thesis aims to develop a new strategy for transforming the normative American house by using the conventions of platform frame construction. Variations will emerge from a set of design constraints, which—unlike that employed for typical houses—are based on data that disregards style …

Another Milstein Hall, Daniel Lin

Architecture Senior Theses

A certain Chinese encyclopedia wrote: Animal are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor (b) embalmed (c) tame (d) sucking pig (e) sirens (f ) fabulous (g) stray dogs (h) included in the present classification (i) frenzied (j) innumerable (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush (l) et cetera (m) having just broken the water pitcher (n) that from a long way off look like flies. –– Jorge Louis Borges

Jorge Louis Borges’ list of animals supposedly drawn from his fictional Chinese Encyclopedia the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, highlights the potent absurdities and lacunae to be identified in …

A Mat Response To Deinstitutionalization | A Model For Spatial Medicine, Dominic S. Lipuma

Architecture Senior Theses

In an attempt to salvage the institution, this thesis adopts the Mat-building strategy and typology, coined by Alison Smithson in 1974, exploiting its inherent qualities as a minimal, flexible, and temporal framework, which best supports the unique program of a Community Mental Health Center (CMHC).

This is in response to the severed and contentious relationship between architecture and mental health, in regards to psychopathology. The two fields were estranged with the onset of deinstitutionalization, beginning in the 1960s, and the consequent abandonment of architectural issues has prevented their reconciliation. As a result, further social issues have manifested, with higher proportions …

Hijacked | Reclaiming Legislative Loopholes, Lara Moock

Architecture Senior Theses

ARTICLE 1: GENERAL PROVISIONS.

SEC. 100. PURPOSES.

San Francisco’s current political legislation has critical loopholes that have constructed a predominant shift in the city’s identity and urban fabric, as well as an obvious neglect of the public realm and social agenda. The recent move of the Silicon Valley tech headquarters to the city’s center has dramatically changed the architectural landscape as well as reinforced a growing push for corporate privatization. This thesis aims to expose and confront the hidden political and social dynamics of the constructed environment and reclaim the existing loopholes in order to propose a project without major …

Memory + Architecture | The Act Of Forgetting, Mariel Mora Llorens

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis proposes the activation and repurposing of buildings associated with traumatic memories as a means of studying the ways in which architecture embodies memories and aids in the process of forgetting. Architecture and the built environment are linked to the creation and recollection of memories because they trigger four of the senses that are related to memory.

To forget is an active, not passive endeavor. Conscious forgetting is not an act of erasing memories, but transforming them by removing the emotional responses that are produced by our recollection of these memories. Like memories in our brains, buildings that have …

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 …

Never-Land | A Parasitic And Accumulative Approach To Urbanization In China, Xiaoyan Dong

Architecture Senior Theses

Ever since 1960s, European situationist and Japanese metabolist architects constantly reject the uniformity and totalitarian of modern architecture/urban design, seeking parasitic and dynamic approaches to post-war urbanization. Projects such as the Plug-In City and the Tokyo Bay dream of alternative urban scenarios by reversing traditional perceptions of infrastructure’s role in the city, combining architecture, technology and society together. However, these megastructure projects not only neglect the existing urban context but also lack political and economic driving force. As a result, they are considered utopian by many contemporary critics.

Fifty years later in China, fast urbanization process creates problems for both …

Total Fiction | The Artifice And The Armature, Anrai Pearson

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis views architecture as a total fiction. It aims to explore the representational and communicative qualities of the architectural surface. Architects have always abstracted raw materials in order to create a larger conceptual basis for architecture but the relationship between abstraction and reality has not always been concrete. In the past, ideals of “truth” and “authenticity” have played a central theoretical role in defining how architects approach building. For example, John Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc decry various forms of material deceit, in favor of an authentic and truthful architecture. Alternately, architects interested in the communicative agency of architecture have questioned …

Absorbency In Tidal Resiliency | The Thickened Pier, Shauna Strubinger

Architecture Senior Theses

The inevitable truth of climate change has placed coastal cities at great risk. Past natural disasters in the United States such as Hurricane Sandy and Katrina, displaced many people because these communities’ only protection was their failed infrastructure.1 Although hard and soft infrastructure strategies have addressed the rising sea level, architecture at the building scale creates static surfaces and divisions that are slow to adapt to flooding and leave little to no room for the ambiguity of tidal flooding and storm surge. Though numerous areas are at risk of sea level rise across the globe, the Chesapeake Bay area is …

A Shifted Perspective On Affordable Micro Housing, Jonathan Reisman

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis contends that growing cities around the world are out-pricing the younger demographic from the urban fabric. It recognizes that constantly rising real estate markets are forcing millennials outside of city centers. It understands that socially, the younger demographic provide the energy and atmosphere required to keep the city alive, and ultimately believes that in order fro young professionals to reclaim their position int he hosing market, a new typology of hosing need to be established.

Such housing takes increasing urban density into consideration, and provides an appropriate dwelling supply for expensive cities moving forward. It is a typology …