Architecture Commons^™

Socializing Vacancy: An Architectural Thesis, Greg Winawer

Architecture Senior Theses

A large portion of office space has been left vacant, and thus provides no beneficial program to its remaining occupants or the local urbanity it is surrounded by. When considering what can be done with this vacant space, the primary motivation should be to integrate a program which does the opposite: a program which positively disrupts its existing context to hybridize and improve the current outdated programmatic arrangement. To insert a residential program into an existing office tower both disrupts and enhances the rigorous flows of our working and our domestic lives. The predefined universal concept of the ‘working-day’ is …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Spatializing Erasure: Counter-Histories On The Verge Of Disappearance, Isabel Munoz, Sarah Quinn

Architecture Thesis Prep

Our thesis ambitions are centered around the investigation of memory and architecture as it relates to the narratives of erasure in urban space. Over the course of the academic year, we are seeking to use architecture as a lens to critique our current socio-political climate regarding gender inequity and political regression. Our site of speculation and research will be the city of Chicago, as it has a rich history of feminism and civil rights with many historic spaces of protest that accommodated intersectional identities and historic protests. In today’s political climate, where Roe v. Wade is facing reversal in the …

Alternate Americanisms, Ella Arne

Architecture Thesis Prep

Architecture is actively crafting reality, culture, and identity. It is simultaneously constructed from and constructing meaning. Route 66 exists as an American invention, ruin, and manifestation of American Identity. The objects on the route sit innocently on the landscape, covering their complex histories and power networks that lead back to the dominant government administration.

Alternate Americanisms shows the agency of architectural objects in creating new realities, identities, and histories.

The game explores how every single decision changes the entire built landscape. It reflects and translates alternate histories to project alternate versions. It examines the relationship between meaning and architecture, identity …

An Authentic Reality, Genevieve Dominiak, Hannah Rachel Michaelson

Architecture Thesis Prep

We, as a society, have chosen to erase and neglect the problematic images and narratives of these wastelands from our, American, history. Therefore, the thesis aims to offer an authentic reality in which Human Ecology coexists with the previous erasures of Toxic Ecology. Currently, these wastelands are portrayed as foreign entities that American companies engage with, rarely do the cameras turn to our own backyard though. Rather than remediate these industrial sites and thus revive nature, the work looks to coexist with the consequences of our past and ongoing present through myth.

When challenged with the imagery of these damaged …

Intentionally Unsustainable Forms For Crisis Design: Planned Obsolescence, Daniel Hogan

Architecture Thesis Prep

The ShutDownDC protest that stopped traffic on Monday, September 23rd demonstrated a significant shift in the debate for climate justice. The movement targeted not only the culpable institutions but the physical infrastructures which both monumentalize and enable factors responsible for global climate change (in this case automobile infrastructure). This is a particularly relevant example of how built form not only reflects our cultural preferences for private transportation but also informs/enables the processes which are actively working against public good. In this example, road infrastructure is both a symbol and an active player in the game of continued environmental injustice.

This …

Waiting: Sidewalk Sheds And Urban Identity, Sukhmann Aneja

Architecture Thesis Prep

In New York City, a sidewalk shed is a structure that covers a sidewalk immediately adjacent to a site under construction in order to protect pedestrians from falling debris. There are currently about 9,000 sheds in the entire city, with a lifespan of about 300 days. In total, all of the sidewalk sheds take up about 1,000,000 feet of space.1 Their existence is unwanted but inevitable, and, over the last four decades, these sheds have become an integral part of the City’s identity. This thesis proposes an intervention that allows the shed to better engage with the general public, particularly …

Naturalizing The Neoliberal Subject, The Object: To Change The Soul, Hanneke Van Deursen

Architecture Thesis Prep

Neoliberalism exists in two forms: policy and ideology. On the policy side, a crusade of deregulation, privatization, and the competition was ushered in by Neoliberal politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. On the ideology side, Neoliberalism constructs for us a series of truth games. It tells us: our society is too complex for us to understand, and therefore it can not be ordered by humans. In contrast, the market is itself a mechanism of spontaneous order, and therefore is better suited to calculate, process, and order our society. Subsequently, it is humans who must adapt to the needs of …

A School Design: For Homeless Children In Nyc, Tingjie Zhou

Architecture Senior Theses

By the end of 2017, more than fifteen thousand homeless families with over twenty-three thousand children lived in shelters in New York City (Coalition for the homeless, Facts About Homelessness). Receiving education in a school, a daily activity for school age children, can easily become an unachievable thing for homeless children. Though many programs and acts are carried out to help these children, their educational situation is still severe.

Noticing the circumstance that homeless children are facing, I’m interested in the role that architecture can play in responding to homeless children’s educational concerns. When looking at the schools with high …

A Material Affair: The Intimacy Between Materials And Affective Space, Rex Hughes, John Mikesh

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis argues that an architecture embracing innate material qualities, deployed for choreographed sensory experiences, will open a more intimate dialogue between humans and their environment. This thesis is rooted in the idea that the most powerful experiences are those that stimulate all the senses at once. This is illustrated by architect Lisa Heschong, who explains that fire fascinates humans because it glows, crackles, smells of smoke, and gives off heat. This intimate sensory experience provides an archetype for the way users may be seduced into engaging affective environments through haptic materials.

In an investigation of material qualities (density, hardness, …

Learning From Wes Anderson: On Artificial Memory And Detail, Abigail Campion

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis focuses on the reproduction of detail, through compression and misarticulation, an artificial memory of its reference. The project culminates on three films of Wes Anderson: The Royal Tenenbaums, Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel. These specific films were chosen due to their cult following within the Anderson canon. Wes Anderson articulates his cinematic universes very meticulously. He uses unique methods to capture certain emotions in his films. A huge part of Anderson’s film worlds is his attention to detail. All parts of his films are deeply invested in maintaining the illusion of the film world he has …

The Denuded Image: A Critique Of The After-Image, Danya Li

Architecture Senior Theses

The Denuded Image aims to create a conversation between a photograph and its viewer by adding back the third dimension. It is not a proposal of how architects should design space, but a model for observation and study of how to create new ways of seeing. The dioramas at 1:8, 1:4, and 1:2 scales expose the reality of the forced perspective and the denuded photograph's distorted characters. As scale increases, the observer is invited to engage with the in-visible parts of the image that differ in materiality. The final spectacle includes all models and their respective images, to expose the …

An Intelligent Smart City, Erik Sanchez

Architecture Senior Theses

How intelligent is the typical smart-city design approach? In an era when artificial intelligence and big data promise to improve urban life in unprecedented ways, are smart cities being imagined and designed in ways that are actually inspiring and truly innovative? This project examines the proposals and approaches of Sidewalk Labs’ designs for Quayside, located in Toronto Canada, and asks how intelligent, really, is the city the propose. Sidewalk Labs (the city-building subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company), in partnership with Waterfront Toronto (a government-appointed nonprofit development corporation), claims to be reimagining cities from the internet up.” But is their …

Re*Presenting Dharavi: Activism And Agency Of Architecture In Informal Settlements, Ahnaf Chowdhury, Anuradha Desai

Architecture Senior Theses

Plastic recycling is a critical informal economy in Dharavi, one of Asia's largest slums in the heart of Mumbai. Waste from dumping grounds is collected, sorted and prepared by recyclers who transform trash into a commodity to be sold back into the city. As part of top-down efforts to redevelop Dharavi's valuable land, the Mumbai government has tarnished the industry's image, labeling it as "polluting," and has increased the cost of utilities such as electricity in an effort to drive it out of the community. As it becomes more expensive for recyclers to operate, the labor unions that organize the …

The Disputed Territories: An Alternate History, Rasan Taher

Architecture Senior Theses

Architecture and the built environment are the mediums onto which political and physical events and forces are registered. This thesis explores the potential of Drones (UAVs) as a tool to launch a spatial investigation into disputed territories of the built environment. The objective of this specific work is to produce and represent spatiotemporal analysis and architectural evidence of the unlawful systematic destruction of Arab neighborhoods and villages in the disputed territories—here in relation to the continuous power shifts in the disputed internal boundaries between the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and Iraqi Federal Government in Iraq. The increasing availability and advancements …

On Nothing, Rutuja Ganoo

Architecture Senior Theses

In southeast Asian philosophy, artha, kama, dharma and moksha are said to be the four major goals in a Hindu's life. While artha (monetary) and karma (sensory) are physical and psychological, moksha is the ultimate destination. In this worldview, the soul goes through endless cycles o existence on various planes, until it grows spiritually; moksha is the release of the soul from the cycle of birth, life and death to the ultimate reunion with "god". The entity being released from this "binding," the soul, is said to work symbiotically with the human body to engage in worldly learning and experience. …

Playingground: Towards A Seriously Playful Architecture, Anita Lamisi Karimu

Architecture Senior Theses

"playGround" is a study of the fundamental rules and organizational logics seen in popular board games and an exploration of their potential applications towards the manifestation of utopian ideals of the built. This thesis is interested in the restoration of user freedom in the built environment by reintroducing the concept of "play" as the fundamental principle of design, giving equal agency to all users in utilizing and modifying transitional and extended-use circulation space. Play in this thesis acts as the antithesis to the normative systems of order and regulation from which contemporary architecture is derived.

"playGround" posits that every ground …

Adaptive Layers: Preservation In High Speed Urbanism, Yuanyue (Alex) Chen

Architecture Senior Theses

With a population density of 20, 191.5 people per square mile and 279 square miles of land, Singapore is the world's third densest country. One hundred percent of the population lives in an urban area. Every year, the population increases by an average of 100,000 people, while land shrinks due to rising sea levels. For Singapore, the only option is densification. Singapore's historical identity is often secondary to the pragmatic need for densification.

In a city built in 30 years, the rapid rate of modernization has created a disconnect between our historical background and architecture today. Buildings in Singapore have …

Mediating Propagated Consumption: Integrated Shielding For A Wireless World, Olivia Humphrey

Architecture Senior Theses

Manifesting architecture in the physical realm and using simulation technologies that can model specific spatial or programmatic adjacencies will both influence the way we design material performance in response to electromagnetic radiation (EMR). The project intention is threefold: to measure, shield, and visualize, mediating propagated consumption. Design and data visualization strategies used by architects can convey social, medical, and environmental messages about the impact of how information is stored and accessed. These messages inform both the occupant and the designer. The college campus is becoming a breeding ground for wireless devices, from academic buildings to residence halls. Growth in residential …

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 …

Public Space With Character: A Late, Late, Entry- Chicago Library Competition, Kokeith Perry Ii

Architecture Senior Theses

The city of Chicago has a complex relationship with the aesthetics of civic monuments and infrastructures. The cities most canonical projects validate its apparent biases - an oscillation between iconic modern and postmodern figures proliferate the urban fabric. The dynamic between these two paradigms creates a complex relationship between architecture, urban space, and the public mirroring the cities longstanding and complex history of segregated urban space and peoples. This project draws precedent from the format of the 1980 Stanley Tigerman exhibition Late entries to the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition, a then radical competition set to reinvigorate the discipline the way …

Sinoconn: Merchandising Of Architecture And Rearmament Of Labor, Furui Sun

Architecture Senior Theses

The project is situated in the context of contemporary China, where tremendous production power and a huge labor force have been accumulated through decades of rapid economic growth. In recent years, China's persistent growth has begun to slow, which challenges the administration with an imminent socio-economic crisis and the potential for a massive scale of surplus capital and its consequences. This conflict emerges out of the complementary "inner connection...between the developments of capitalism and urbanization" identified by British-born Marxist scholar David Harvey. Such a problem and its resolution can be seen in France in the mid-19th century right after an …

Mirage: Architecture's Confounding Experiences, Nuofan Xu, Ziyao Zhang

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis explores experiences created from mixing architectural elements with projections, in order to make projections melt into architecture as an inseparable element. By proposing an architecture that integrates the effects and infrastructures of digital displays at the starting point of the design process, the project seeks to explore the ability of digital displays to blur physical boundaries, to apply temporality on eternal structures, and to isolate the exterior from the interior.

The project uses mirage, an optical phenomenon that produces illusory images of distant objects, as an analogy to speculate about digital displays in architecture. On the one hand, …

Atmospheric Architecture: Virtual Possibility Of The Picturesque, Yuqi Jin

Architecture Senior Theses

In the 18th century theory of the “picturesque,” imagination substitutes reason. That strategy was profoundly captured in artists’ use of the Claude Glass as a device to distort natural scenes and reproduce reality. A later and more “unreal” variation of this imaginary occurs in picturesque landscape drawings. The result was a recasting of the perfection of nature as an aesthetic of nature. The picturesque thus enacted a transition from reality to virtuality, and that alteration was then reflected back onto reality.

Today’s “atmospheric” architecture pursues similar objectives by taking elements of nature, such as light and air, to produce a …

Falling Ground: Underground Osmosis, Byungryoung Lee

Architecture Senior Theses

Highly urbanized areas over the world must prepare for another huge population inflow. According to the UN, around 70 percent of the world population will likely live in urban areas by 2050. Big cities such as New York City, Tokyo, and London already face land scarcity and high property costs in their main urban regions.

This thesis explores a new underground typology, adapting into existing urban contexts as a potential solution for these growing issues. Existing infrastructure elements such as parks, subways, and water tanks or sewage systems, which are omnipresent in urban regions, become part of the underground space …

Blurring The Divide: Architecture That Encourages Socially Inclusive Urban Environments, Erin Benken

Architecture Senior Theses

Segregation in the United States has existed for many decades. As a result of social, economic, and political factors, community members of different races, ethnicities and social classes tend to congregate and live together in the segregated neighborhoods of America's cities. While social values now are more open to integration than they were a century ago, tradition, familiarity, and social ties keep this segregated distribution alive today. This thesis explores the topic of segregation in cities by asking, how do we create an architecture that breaks through social divides to create more socially inclusive urban environments?

Using Chicago as a …

Architectural Ecotone: The Edge Effect, Holly Metzger, Tara Nuqul

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis aims to study the relationship between architecture and its environment. Specifically, this thesis will explore symbiotic relationships between architecture and surrounding ecosystems in many different terrains. Iceland presents a particular important case for this idea because it is a hotbed of geological activity. The country itself is a patchwork of desert, glaciers, geysers, lava fields and active volcano, which has led to Iceland developing intelligent systems of vernacular architecture throughout history to mediate this environment.

This thesis studies systems of domestic vernacular architecture by examining the qualities and characteristics of craft, materiality, structure, and a symbiotic relationship to …

The Postmoder Hermits, Xuechen Li

Architecture Senior Theses

Metropolitan cities to grow at unfathomable rates, forming a new scale of geography know as Megaregions. And as these settlements continue to develop with the principal focus on the consequences of economy and environment, the psychological, mental health of the inhabitants becomes neglected. Japan, the archetypal example of a highly developed country, despite its economic and technological advantages, has been plagued by social isolation, suicides, and mental health issues among its people. With 541,000 young Japanese labeled as hikikomori, a term describing young people who isolate themselves in their rooms for months or years at a time, their memories of …