Architecture Commons^™

Bunker Reclamation, Demosthenes Sfakianakis

Architecture Senior Theses

-an analysis and documentation of the extremes of the communist regime of Albania

-a political exploration into the dictatorship of the proletariat in which the working class holds power in a post-Hoxha environment

-a design implementation in which the bunkers are reclaimed from the charged symbolism of oppression and become agents towards a collective catharsis and healing

Re-Designing Gentrification, Elena Whittle

Architecture Senior Theses

In Paris sans le people, a book on the gentrification of Paris, Anne Clerval writes (in a French to English translation) that, “gentrification reflects the dynamics of class relationships in the urban space” (p. 10). This thesis explores this dynamic in the context of American cities and additionally points to race relations, and private-public interests’ relations as other important factors in the American urban sphere. This thesis is an exploration of how capital plays a critical role in the morphology of the built environment. One of the ways that this is most obviously observed is through the commonly occurring phenomena …

Folie A Cinq: Performative Systems Exhibited Through Theatrical Means., Madison Cannella

Architecture Senior Theses

Performative Systems Exhibited through Theatrical Means

Rethinking Home Waste, Elena Echarri Myers

Architecture Senior Theses

Ever since the emergence of capitalism, followed by trends of conspicuous consumption and the boom of plastics and preservative packaging, household waste production has become an issue of public concern in which the US has achieved to champion the podium. Ever since the 1800's world shift from a society focused on consumption for basic necessities to one directed mostly by consumption by leisure, individuals have lost their ability for consumer control, shopping mostly for pleasure and for items with unprecedented short lifespans whose final destination is the land­fill. The world's economic system change too, feeding off these impulsive consumer behaviors, …

Truth Games, Hanneke Van Deursen

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis analyzes Neoliberalism, and architecture as its active agent, not only in constructing space, but constructing subjectivity within that space. If Neoliberalism exists in two forms, policy and ideology, I contend that architecture serves as a mediator between these forms: shaped by policy and naturalizing ideology. Truth Games – constructed “truths” which embed themselves in common knowledge and practice – allow the city to appear as banal and incidental, maybe even nice. However, the urban environment is a powerful weapon. The Truth Games embedded in architecture legitimate forms of power that operate on and through the constitution of the …

Hidden Realities, Nashwah Ahmed, Prerit Gupta

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis uses preexisting local phenomena in Dubai to construct a near-future scenario where political systems are exploited to demonstrate the politics of aesthetics and their ability to alter the context and its existing socio-economic infrastructure. By imposing unfamiliar forms and systems, familiar aesthetics are recast to redistribute the sensible and create a new reality out of underlying social, economic, and cultural power structures. As a result, form, composition, and aesthetics can begin to operate politically to uncover hidden realities and project alternative futures.

Architecture Of Narrative, Yinem Day

Architecture Senior Theses

A historic building should be adapted to the existing context and its character should be encouraged to evolve and transform. The addition and intervention to existing building is an inventive and creative process which provides great opportunities to transform an obsolete building into a propelling agent through particular ways, although at the same time restricted by numerous limitations. Architecture should become a tool of highlighting the relationship between the old and new and a bridge that connects the past, present, and future, becoming a point in the timeline of a place and culture. Also, visual storytelling displays a history of …

Manifested Tectonic 'In Search Of Theatricality', Ching Huen Leung

Architecture Senior Theses

A column at a scale of a chair, a door half-opened in front of that column. Dancing, spectating, running, etc. Can an open-ending narrative be generated through the interaction between these disembodied objects and subjects? Treating building elements as set pieces, improvisations are generated by both signified objects and participants. The show is currently on play in different locations: You can find it in a field of landscape; in a chaotic street of Tokyo, or even at the back alley near your neighborhood…Don’t hesitate to create your own plot when you encounter them! My thesis mainly focuses on the implementation …

Occupy, Nitya Charugundla

Architecture Senior Theses

Union Square, originally called “Union Place,” was a former site for public forum, parades, public addresses and much more. However, the newest design of the park that can be seen today has attempted to make a space that is far less conducive to public forum and assembly than it once was. This thesis seeks to change that and allow for Union Square, as well as a news media center, to be a vehicle for public forum once again. The public space will be used as a vehicle for different types of forums, protests, and even public address in conjunction with …

Alternative Americanisms, Ella Michelle Arne

Architecture Senior Theses

This project investigates the circular influence of architecture, meaning and place across the built American landscape of Route 66. It focuses on the route as an uniquely American invention, reflection, and now obsolete piece of cultural infrastructure.

Subterranean Intermission, Yiwen Dai

Architecture Senior Theses

Every space serves a purpose; therefore, all space should be valued and cherished, including what is typically perceived as the foul, dark, unstable, abandoned corners and dead ends. As designers we should take these places and make the most of them so they too can be enchanting. New York city like many other metropolitan areas are faced with shortage of available space. For example, underground development became unavoidable in order to build a reliable subway system that trans-ports and connects its daily commuters to the spatially growing city. Along with the new infrastructure, waiting areas and platforms that form strips …

An Agricultural Ruin, Patrick Smith

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis uses ruin to a radical alteration and preservation of obsolete industrial sites through the process of stripping back, in order to highlight and explore the history and potential of an industrial site’s temporal identity. Through alteration, the specific, utilitarian, and abandoned typology will be altered into a new, productive, and sustainable “difficult whole”.

Continuous Interior Space Architecture, Natasha Liston-Beck

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis speculates a changed relationship between bodies and information access, mediated by an omni-orientable, continuous spatial information-interface. The closed world of the spacecraft is a digiphysical reality where these two spatial experiences are utterly entangled such that a person’s movements and engagement with and within this space is defined by the two simultaneously. In preference of depth and specificity of the thesis, this work is not focused on the mechanics or engineering of a spacecraft. But instead it focuses on the spatial and experiential environment, augmented with information.

Uncomfortably Numb, Camila Andino, Daniela Andino

Architecture Senior Theses

Modernist Architecture is characterized by its ambition to miraculously heal the “diseases”1 of society. Along with this desire to heal, “Design was formed as a way to deal with the increasingly dominant logic of the industrialized and globalized world while resisting the perceived dehumanizing impact of the world.”2 This pursuit of numbness has always been at the center of design. It reveals the complicity between design and capitalism. Following the shock of the war and the machine age, design sought to fight the negative climate of the world around them. No outcome is prescribed, but it is desired. With this …

15th Ward North, Baxter Hankin

Architecture Senior Theses

THIS THESIS ARGUES IN FAVOR OF WALKABILITY AT THE SCALE OF THE CITY, NEIGHBORHOOD, BLOCK, STREET, SPACE, BUILDING, AND DETAIL. WALKABILITY IS A CONDITION THAT ALLOWS FOR INTERESTING AND USEFUL WALKS ON A DAILY BASIS. THIS IS CREATED FROM A MIX OF STRATEGIC, PLANNED CIVIC CONDITIONS, AND AN URBAN FABRIC OF UNPLANNED, FINE-GRAINED, BOTTOM-UP DEVELOPMENTS. THE WALKABLE CITY IS NECESSARY IN TERMS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE, SUSTAINABILITY, AND CONNECTIVITY. THE INTERESTING ASPECT OF THE WALK IS DETERMINED BY PARALLAX AND THE PICTURESQUE. PARALLAX IS THE “DISPLACEMENT OF THE APPARENT POSITION OF A BODY DUE TO A CHANGE OF POSITION OF THE …

Alternative Shelters, Sukhmann Kaur Aneja

Architecture Senior Theses

In the spring of 2018, a small group of homeless people took shelter underneath the scaffolding at 1441 Broadway in Times Square after a massive rainstorm made its way through New York City. They hung their wet clothes on the steel bracing and slept on unfolded cardboard boxes. This makeshift encampment lasted for a few days before the police officially kicked everyone out.1 Two years before that, homeless New Yorkers set up a similar camp underneath the scaffolding in NoHo. Residents of NoHo blamed a surge of local construction for the implementation of sheds under which people could hide out.2 …

Spatializing Erasure: Forging A New Commemorative Typology, Sarah Quinn, Isabel Munoz

Architecture Senior Theses

Spatializing Erasure is an investigation into and a critique of current traditional memorialization techniques and the erasure of counter-historical narratives from the urban fabric. We are seeking to use architecture as a lens to critique our current socio-political climate by employing techniques of memorialization, sensationalism, and certain spatial tactics relating to memory onto the typologies of the courthouse and the archive, actively reinforcing memories of trauma, injustices, and activism onto a typology that has historically been negligent towards its contribution to systemic erasure and oppression of counter-history. This project aims to impose the collective memory of erased narratives onto the …