Architecture Commons^™

Linear Waltz With Nature: A Self-Supporting Infrastructure In Nature, Shangkun Zhong

Architecture Senior Theses

This project aims to create a sustainable system that addresses waste management issues in urban areas by examining the functionality of recycling infrastructures and how they can be integrated. The system will absorb waste and convert it into renewable energy to support a field station in Tibet, where self-sustainability is critical, due to the remote location. Architects often demonstrate their understanding of sustainability through various means such as integration, passive/energy-saving, and natural architecture. This thesis argues that a sustainable system such as CopenHill, can exemplify the combination of green-manifested design and recycle content as a sustainable cycle that supports human-nature …

Dissolving Realities: An Endless Domestic Landscape, Hanzang Lai, Phang Lim

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis explores how the exponential growth in communication technology is changing the way we interact with the tangible and intangible spaces. The invasion of the public into the private, the collective into the domestic, the work into the leisure, and the ability to be constantly connected wirelessly have caused a dissolution of the physical domestic space. The domestic space has lost its value of privacy and intimacy and the boundary between the binaries will be no more. The gap between “the control” and “controlled” has widened and productive workers will be oppressed to be even more productive under the …

But Soft! Fabricating Adaptive Urbanism, Caroline Barrick, Arezo Hakemy, Sabrina Logroño

Architecture Senior Theses

We contend that a performative fabric that combines strategies of comfort and adaptation and deployed as large-scale soft architecture can challenge the approach to urban infrastructural issues currently only managed by hard architecture. We are investigating both soft and hard architecture through the human scale and experience, the urban scale, materiality, adaptability, and temporality. Soft architecture produces comfort and ergonomic design for both physical and mental benefit and affects the built environment through its tactile materiality, its ephemeral temporality, and its swift adaptability. Hard architecture resists environmental and human adaptation through its rigid materiality, its lasting temporality, and its reluctant …

Paintings Without Frames: The Role Of Augmented Reality In Art Galleries, Laura Clark

Architecture Senior Theses

Art and architecture define one another; the way we can move through an art gallery is defined by the architectural space that has been created, but the actual direction of travel is dictated by the art itself.

This thesis questions both architecture's role in an art gallery and the role of technology, which is changing our perception of space. Augmented reality can be used within the art galleries as a way to provide context, to distort and add to the perception of artworks, as a means of way-finding, and as a tool to allow visitors to curate their own gallery …

@The_New_House: An Online-Offline Manifesto, Ana Hernandez Derbez, Domenica Velasco

Architecture Senior Theses

The house, is one of the most fundamental architectural archetypes, has long been used as unbuilt or built manifestos to declare the avant garde of the discipline. As designers, we need to re-visualize design concepts to create architecture that integrates and corresponds to the way we dwell. Innovating design in the same way technology and digitalization have been innovating production and the way we live. This thesis investigates a return to the design of a house as a manifesto, focusing on today’s advanced modes of fabrication and evolving ways of living to challenge the current design mindset.

Aftermarket Supermarket | A Speculative Retrospective, Alexander Kim

Architecture Senior Theses

In the preface to Delusive Spaces: Essays on Culture, Media and Technology, media theorist Eric Kluitenberg writes that “the delusion of the new”1 pollutes our theorizations of new media. This sort of technocratic fetishization of emergent technologies can only amount to a surfatial investigation of its effects or capabilities. Architectural investigations of virtual reality and other new media systems suffer from this tendency as well. Content-based experimentation and criticism obsess over the simultaneously exciting and daunting prospects of what we can now do or make with recent digital developments. There’s definite value in such endeavors, but frankly, in the grand …

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 …

The Synchronous City, Patricia Olivera

Architecture Senior Theses

Architects’ conceptualizations of cities reference and reflect trends in contemporary culture. During the early 1900's, architects such as Ebenezer Howard, and Tony Garnier speculated on modernist visions of cities, while in the mid-late 1900's radical visions of cities by Archigram, and Archizoom emerged. This project will operate along the framework of previous visions of cities by architects and envision a city rooted on the use of digital information and communication technologies (ICTs).

In order to best engage the provocation of a city based on ICTs as the primary means of exchange and interaction between citizens (as opposed to cars, pedestrians, …

Housing For Introverts, Morgan Graboski

Architecture Senior Theses

The Millennial demographic is one defined by technologically induced changes in social interaction. Situational introversion has emerged due to Millennials obsession with technology. Coupled with an aversion to suburban single-family homes; Millennials also represent a radical change in household makeup. There is no more nuclear family; 1- and 2-person households are very common. As witnesses of housing crash they are paradoxically then attracted to urban housing but they cannot afford it.

Knowledge Accident- Part 1, Alanna Rosenblatt

Architecture Senior Theses

The increasing un-sustainability of the built university and the rise of the apparent mass democratization or synchronization of higher education through the virtual Massive Open Online Course [MOOC] is occurring concurrently with the mutation of the historically grounded Accident into the Knowledge Accident. The standardization of higher education through the MOOC has created the conditions for the Knowledge Accident, the “integral accident”, of the built university. This is where we find the present state of the university, in a moment of crisis grounded in unconstrained "progress". The current form of the MOOC, begun in 2011, has expanded and evolved with …

Knowledge Accident- Part 2, Alanna Rosenblatt

Architecture Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

The Regional Exchange: From Main Street To Shopping Mall To App Info-Structure, Christoper R. Depalma

Architecture Senior Theses

The current switch that has now made the shopping center model vulnerable to yet another evolution is the smartphone, which, since its introduction has become an essential component to American lifestyle even more quickly than the car, changing the way in which people engage in both social and commercial activity. Unlike their response to the automobile switch, if architects can recognize and accept the smartphone as a evolutionary tool, then they can take a center role in designing the next major regional exchange. This new social and commercial regional spatial organizer is still desired to be a physical place, however …

Re-Thinking The Green Belt: Sustainability And Development In Growing Cities, Maria Saavedra

Architecture Senior Theses

One of the major goals of this research is to study the relationship between nature and technology as urban generators. I agree with Lisa Tilder and Beth Bostein, who state that instead of using architectural technology to return nature to some impossible, pre-human pristine state, we should consider fully employing the power of architecture to produce new forms of nature. Instead of thinking about the River’s edge as a natural and physical barrier between the water and the city, we should consider it as an opportunity to challenge the image of nature, exploring how it limits or furthers our social …

The Interface Of Two Extremes: Preserving The Local, Connecting To Global The Question Of Architecture In A Third World Enironment, Ella Scheuer

Architecture Senior Theses

The world in which we live is evolving at exponentially increasing speeds[...] The constant upgrades are considered to be arduous in the U.S. but it can be overwhelming for a Third World country who has only been introduced to the advances secondhand...This 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 heritages as well as global progress. This duality will be expressed through the language of the architecture by studying both equatorial African building techniques …