Architecture Commons^™

Y'All Come Back Now, Ya Hear: A Reflection On Nashville's History And The Carnivalesque, Kolby Forbes

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis seeks to utilize the technique of allegorical image in understanding both the past and present histories of Nashville. By collaging aspects of past and present, the images produced seek to present the emerging alternative. This otherness constructs an in between in which the narratives of both instances begin to merge and mutate. These collages establish a landscape of Nashville which is no longer constricted temporally or spatially, remaining open to interpretations and resisting a clear sense of closure. The designs that I propose are meant to clarify the neglected traumas and occurrences of the past to demonstrate that …

Rural Retreat | Urban Myth, Celeste Pomputius

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis proposes a destination for recreation and retreat on Plum Island, New York that references the model of the National and State Park Services and whose intended audience is primarily residents of New York City who are without the means or methods of easily seeking other experiences of nature outside the realm of city limits. The first step of this design process involves reexamining the traditional definition of “urban” to shorten the leap from the comforts of the city to the unknowns of nature. From there, the project identifies and resolves three challenges that stand between urban residents and …

Reconstruct The Missing Narrative: Rethinking Contemporary Chinese Architecture Through Ancient Landscape Paintings, Taiming Chen, Yiwei Wu

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis addresses the issue of lacking self-identity and missing narrative under contemporary Chinese architecture discipline. Using ancient landscape paintings as design source, this project aims to create an environment that provides personal experience and exclusive meaning from a participant’s point of view instead of an omniscient view.

Paintings are selected from different dynasties and artists, but all based on one important cultural theme: Reclusion. Thus, the reconstructed narrative would provide a tranquil environment for inhabitant to have a temporary retreatment from the city life through making, seeking and thinking.

Materializing Light, Lirong Tan

Architecture Senior Theses

Artificial light, especially volumetric light, can be materialized and transform the existing ruin. Specifically, I would choreograph the interaction between people and light to exaggerate, or dramatize, the tragic feeling of Hiroshima Memorial Dome.

Axon-Orama: A New System Of Architectural Representation, Fei Wang

Architecture Senior Theses

A codified architectural representation, the axonometric drawing is objective, yet an audience's reception of a building is perspectival and constructed through a spatial narrative over time. In response to this paradox, Axon-orama is proposed as a new representational technique - a set of variational drawings with pliable arrangement and hybrid expression - explored through the use of the British board game, Myriorama. The work blurs the boundary between objective and subjective representation and perception, offering a new system of architectural inquiry.

What Is Sacred, Maxwell K. Baum

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis aims to reinterpret the notion of sacred space and explore architectures role in the creation of sacred space. Stripped of the religious connotations of the sacred, this thesis hopes to create an architecture that balances between the individual and the collective, fosters both introspective reflection and extrospective contemplation, and proposes architecture for the experiencing of the sacred. Ultimately this project will make sacred architecture and experience out of a normal, mundane, and profane program and elevate the users experience to that of a transcendental one.

Blind Spot, Andrea Macias-Yanez

Architecture Senior Theses

Negotiating between the physical and software means mediating perception, therefore physical space is defined by endo-perception and software space by exo-perception. This project investigates the temporary singularity of a frozen moment. Through means of motion Blind Spot will reveal unalienable, hidden software algorithms, stripping off what is not comprehensible and feed back the output back into the process of creating architectural speculation.

Augmenting The Third Teacher, Christina Hoover

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis explores the formal and material design potentials of the school and contends that for it to adapt to the needs of today’s techno-centric youth, dynamic and responsive materials should be integrated to enhance the environmental quality of spaces for a child’s developmental benefit.

Literally Figurative: Architectural Manifestation Of The Written Word, Carrie Leneweaver

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that architecture and literature can enhance one another, not only as methods of storytelling and creating narrative, but in their capacity to establish metaphors and themes which provide realizations of larger social conditions...

To test my thesis, I propose designing a library based on the life of author Antoine de Saint-Exupery and his allegorical story: The Little Prince."

Sens(E)Ible Education: A Sensory Approach To An Inclusive Kindergarten, Mary Delaurentis

Architecture Senior Theses

"Architecture that is designed with the intended occupants full sensorial needs in mind ultimately enhances the occupants' experience. Architecture that engages all our senses will create spaces that transcend the purely visual. This higher order of perception will make occupants more self aware, conscious of their embodied experience of the world around them, and create informative experiences."

The Architecture Of Terroir: A Phenomenological Approach To The Design Of A Winery, Marina Gabriela Brink

Architecture Thesis Prep

In this project, I propose a phenomenological approach to the design process that will emphasize the engagement of the senses in the experience of the building and the site. The interest in a phenomenologically enhanced architecture derives from the potential for the landscape and the processes of wine making to heighten the experience of the built environment.

Interactive Architecture: Creating Opportunities For Our Future, Gregory Levy

Architecture Senior Theses

"It is the contention of this thesis that developing more interactive relationships will create new opportunities for a building to respond and adapt to the rapid pace of change. Through means of flexibility and efficiency, his expanded dynamic process can generate direct engagement between a building and the users and the natural environment that interact with it."

Fragmented City: The Intersection Of Surrealism And Urban Reality, Lauren Hackett

Architecture Senior Theses

"The concept of the experience becomes relevant in the surrealist view of the city. It is one that has been embraced by the situationists in their concept of the derive. The psychological understanding of urban space can supersede the retinal understanding of rationalized space. The search for truth within the city is what guides a civilization toward absolutism.

In treating the city as a field for discovert and the formulation of ideaas and pure thought, urban space enters a realm of surreality."

Construction For Art, Will Fellis

Architecture Thesis Prep

"When museums draw large crowds and display large collections, there is a lack of personal relationship and understanding of the art.

Small scale museum architecture, in the form of single galleries or pavilions housing only a few pieces by a specific artist or simply expressing the concepts of a certain artist's work, offers and opportunity to create a more intimate relationship between the artwork and the viewer.

The design of a pavilion according to an artist's philosophy will be manifested within the construction. Therefore the detailing of the pavilion will be the point at which the occupant engages the principles …

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."

The Specific Engagement: A Didactic Center In Collaboration With The Adjacent Children's Museum, Aaron Bancroft

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Architecture transcends the act of 'making space' when it can engage the visitor through the realization of the what had yet to be perceived. This didactic realization can be accomplished through a series of specific moments which relate directly to the entirety of the complete experience. The sequence can be so intense or emotional that the visitor recognizes that they are meant to interact with the architecture through the varying levels of engagement and understanding."

Phenomenological Perception: A Memorial For Fishermen Lost At Sea, Joel Kline

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis contends that through the exploration of tactile issues of arhitectural perception, architecture can be tested for its broader role as an effective mediator between us and the world, the individual in society, and life and death."

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 …

On Memory And Architecture, Stacey Hopkins

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The symbiotic relationship between architecture and memory is forged in each one's appropriation of the other to make connection in space and time; the fragmentation between present and past disappears as one place, through imagery, unites with another. Memory and architecture relate to one another in that they use man's perception of and empathy with imagery to recall particulars of place, the connection of one place to others, and the way that these connections might explain time in tangible terms. For memory, architecture symbolizes a point of reference in time - a proscenium against which experience can be recalled; in …

Aspects Of Order And Chaos For The Cityscape, Nickolaos A. Rombos

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

Rombos explores the qualities of experience, specifically within urban contexts, aiming to define those factors which affect through visual perception and human behavior. within his inquiry of the type of experience.