Architecture Commons^™

Riverside Brewing Facility: The Sustenance Of Water Allocation, Ryan T. Luczkowiak

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Water is the most vital resource on Earth. We are facing a global water crisis and the time has come to investigate how we can cope with this issue at a local basis. We live in a culture that is facing economic recessions and is striving for a developmental change. In the advancement of our technological age we are looking for new innovative means of development. Our existing infrastructural conditions cannot handle the sort of social shift we are striving for. We have to become sustainable but the most important is the allocation of water. The issue I am addressing …

Canvas And Catalyst: Reinventing Urban Space, Ricardo A. Borges

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

As an intervention strategy set amid a stark and neglected, yet highly energized urban setting of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, this project seeks to relieve a stagnating urban condition through the introduction of contemporary and dynamic forms of expression. Skateboarding and street art can be seen as interpretative modes of action that reinvent objects, spaces, and conditions within the urban landscape, lending creative and engaging gestures to the everyday. As (sub) cultural expressions in their own right, these practices transcend their mere formal representations, and present unique identities, spaces, and modes of engagement within a society, initiating a creative mindset and DIY …

Interactive Music Experience, Gaetan Jacques

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

In February of 2012, alternative rock band OK Go released a music video for their song “Needing/Getting”. The video explores a creative way of playing music, by driving a car through a constructed, choreographed environment. A driving track was set up as a large musical instrument which was “played” by a car. Architects, musicians, and artist are looking for innovative ways to develop active relationships between people, music, and architecture. The traditional passive relationship of these three is static, a design that does not promote interaction or participation. If we consider, behind a performance, there is a great deal of …

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 …

Fabricating A Future Architecture, Kris L. Weeks

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

During the Renaissance era, the builder was the master of both design and fabrication. The Industrial Revolution split these two activities in the pursuit of higher efficiency. Now, the ascendance of digital fabrication could bring the two back together. This study explores the current and future use of digital fabrication in architecture. Digital fabrication is increasingly used to manufacture components for other industries, but it is experiencing slower adoption in the building industry due to size and material limitations and a contract process that makes fabricators less willing to take risks on newer digital technology. A design project was undertaken …

Housing For The Aging, Sybil R. Idelkope

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Future housing for the elderly should focus more on the psychological stresses of aging, and find solutions for the physical disabilities through this perspective. With design techniques such as biophilic architecture, mixed use and warmer, yet contemporary, materials, elderly housing can feel less institutional, and people can feel like their new home is at least comfortable and supportive of their needs.

Biomimicry: Emulating The Closed-Loops Systems Of The Oak Tree For Sustainable Architecture, Courtney Drake

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Biomimicry comes from bios, life, and mimesis, to imitate. Biomimicry is becoming an increasingly well-known topic in the field of architecture, imitating nature’s designs and processes to solve human problems. This project uses the oak tree as a model, measure, and mentor to derive sustainable architecture. Biomimicry is examined as a holistic methodology with six steps: identify, interpret, discover, abstract, emulate, and evaluate. Using this methodology, this project investigates oak tree’s closed-loop systems including water, oxygen, and food. The synergies that exist within these systems are emulated to develop a complex green infrastructure of building and landscape systems. …

The Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway: Making The Vision A Reality, Alec E. Zebrowski

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

The $15+ Billion "Big Dig", replaced Boston's deteriorating six-lane elevated Central Artery, known as the Green monster, with a widened highway tunnel running underground through Downtown Boston and crossing the Charles River, creating more than 27 acres of new land area for reuse in Downtown Boston.

Today, a significant portion of the land has been turned into a system of parks known as the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway. Since its completion in 2008, five civic and recreational developments planned for the Greenway have been abandoned due to poor funding, rising construction estimates, and a general lack of support. Disconnected, under-programmed …

The Kitchen Culture Project: A Center For Food And Culture, Andrew S. Toomajian

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Food is a primary aspect of daily life, and it’s preparation and consumption function as accessible markers of cultural heritage and as a vehicle for cultural exchange. The Kitchen Culture Project seeks to create a Center for Food and Culture that will function as an aggregator for a number of different programs and organizations working to promote cultural awareness and community development through culinary education and exchange. The focus of the project will be the design of a building on a site in Greenfield, Massachusetts; to house these combined programs and a study of their potential interactions in the community.

Regenerative Agriculture Infrastructure Design: The Built Environment Of Food, Culture, & Soil, Jesse Jw Selman

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

The goal of this work is to explore the built context of our food system as a manifestation of a set of social and environmental conditions that are antithetical to the long-term health and survival of human life on this planet. The specific focus of this work is the small-scale, integrated farm. The farm is but one piece of the puzzle of how we eat and resides within the larger context of storage, distribution, economy, culture etc. Using precedents, both past and present, and through design explorations this work seeks to develop a positive course forward that will enable humanity …

Indexing Trace, Zachary E. Smith

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

This thesis aims to critically examine the relationship of digital technology and the modern art gallery in order to find the possible role of art galleries in the future. The integration of technology and the modern art gallery can change the way people experience art in built space.

In order to examine this, certain questions needed to be asked. The most important of these questions is authenticity and originality in a digital art gallery. What if, in order for the notion of originality to exist, it needs the notion of the copy; a kind of parasite. What if we don’t …

Capturing Gathering Swarming - Re-Coding Post-Communist Space In East Germany, Tobias Bernecker

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

My project is an acknowledgement of the fact that the physical layout of our environments is not directly describing and shaping the way we live or our societies are shaped. Non-spatial structures are playing a bigger role in societal processes than spatial ones. My project is trying to give these invisible processes spatial expression. Non-functional structures that highlight the non-functionality of postsocialist space. The monotony and monumentality of socialist spaces is contrasted with a design that expresses the multiplicity (of possibilities, paths, choices, desires) that exists nowadays. Orthogonal space is sliced up, perforated and at points overlaid without replacing it …

Regenerative Architecture: A Pathway Beyond Sustainability, Jacob A. Littman

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

The current paradigm in the field of architecture today is one of degeneration and obsolete building technologies. Regenerative architecture is the practice of engaging the natural world as the medium for, and generator of the architecture. It responds to and utilizes the living and natural systems that exist on a site that become the “building blocks” of the architecture. Regenerative architecture has two focuses; it is an architecture that focuses on conservation and performance through a focused reduction on the environmental impacts of a building.

This paper introduces regenerative architecture as a means for architectural design. I present the Nine …

Crossfit Design: Maximizing Building Potential Across Broad Time And Modal Domains, Benjamin W. Goodale

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Crossfit is a unique method of physical exercise founded on a specific set of underlying scientific principles. The ultimate goal of Crossfit is to maximize work potential across broad time and modal domains. This project attempts to apply the concepts and principles of Crossfit to architecture to maximize living potential of built environments across broad time and modal domain by means of an architecture that is kinetic, interactive, responsive, and continually reconfigurable. The focus of the project is the design of an approximately 35,000 sf building titled The Motus Center for Kinetic Art Science. The building serves both as an …

Post-Anthropocentric Dwelling Conditions, Peter N. Hendery

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

The way we build our environment today is a process of protecting ourselves from the elements of nature. We build walls, roofs, and windows; we create a more predictable and controllable environment to keep out what’s felt to be dangerous, dirty, and destructive. We isolate ourselves from the things we perceive as threats. This is common practice and not illogical. Shelter is about preservation and refuge. We need to feel safe in order to prosper. What is illogical, though, is wasting all those opportunities that come along with living closer and more integrated these natural processes that are being excluded. …

Designing Community, Martha Bryan

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

It is at the interface of the virtual and the physical worlds where both the practice and the process of architecture are generated. This premise will be explored in the context of designing community- or in other words resolving apparently binary relations.

This thesis explores the spatial interaction of two autonomous but interrelated systems- for example, the interior and the exterior, the virtual and the physical, human systems and informational systems. The proposed “building” becomes the frame of these relationships. The built project is the landscape of connections shaped by its passengers- the networked individual and the incessant flow of …

Tourism As Modern Pilgrimage: A Museum In Bruges, Belgium, Johanna A. Vandemoortele

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Arguing that one of the multiple dimensions of a Museum’s role is as a landmark of cultural pilgrimage, this Master’s Thesis uses notions of pilgrimage and journeying to develop a Museum of Medieval and Contemporary Art in Bruges, Belgium.