Architecture Commons^™

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 …

Collaborating With Catastrophe | A User's Guide To Post-Apocalyptic Farming, Patricia Cafferky

Architecture Senior Theses

“Collaborating with Catastrophe” contends that architecture has the capacity to visually manifest unseen forces through design’s reaction to them, allowing people to more fully comprehend and engage the intangible. Climate change, arguably the largest threat to modern day humanity, is not visible, existing only as a collection of data and patterns in a statistical construct. Taking stock of the present day failings of society in the face of crisis, this thesis then extrapolates a potential future dystopia precipitated by man-made pollutants in order to engage the problem at its most severe. Architecture is then able to make the toxic visible …

Other Wildernesses, Other Realities | A Framework For Shrinking Cities, Alyssa Goraieb

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis is an experiment to imagine the possible realities that emerge from a redefining of the "idea of wilderness".

Wilderness is an idea.

Its definition is slippery. It is neither a physical place nor a state of being (as the "-ness" suggests). Wilderness is a human construct defined by varying cultural and social attitude. This fluid meaning drove numerous paradigms throughout American history - from eighteenth century romanticism's sublime doctrine to today's environmentalism.

Inspired by past American paradigms, this thesis invents five other wilderness ides that exist as a parallel alternatives to our own. Each produces a …

Absorbency In Tidal Resiliency | The Thickened Pier, Shauna Strubinger

Architecture Senior Theses

The inevitable truth of climate change has placed coastal cities at great risk. Past natural disasters in the United States such as Hurricane Sandy and Katrina, displaced many people because these communities’ only protection was their failed infrastructure.1 Although hard and soft infrastructure strategies have addressed the rising sea level, architecture at the building scale creates static surfaces and divisions that are slow to adapt to flooding and leave little to no room for the ambiguity of tidal flooding and storm surge. Though numerous areas are at risk of sea level rise across the globe, the Chesapeake Bay area is …

Designing For A Resilient Waterfront, Laura Festa

Architecture Thesis Prep

The project will use soft infrastructure systems to create a more environmental, technical, and economically resilient waterfront development. The threat of rising sea level will become the framework for a flexible and holistic design between architecture, landscape, and soft infrastructure. By arraying the activities of recreation, ecology, and urban development along the waterfront and combining these design strategies with a soft infrastructure system, the coastline of East Boston has the potential to become a precedent for other urban waterfronts vulnerable to sea level rise. By rethinking the division between landscape and infrastructure to form a soft infrastructure system, solutions can …

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 …

Process And Making Of Landscape, Joseph Wood

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis seeks to focus its study on geological processes in nature as a tool to both make and read the landscape as if it were a novel; to uncover its myths and to allow the viewer to interpret its past. As Brad Cloepfil of the architecture practice Allied Works has stated, "A landscape that took some ten million years to form, millions of years before the appearance of man, is thereby nudged toward that most unique of human capacities; language." I claim that by extending the definition of making, earth driven processes can be used as tools to study, …

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

Architecture Thesis Prep

"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 …

Formerly Urban: Projecting Rust Belt Futures, Mark Robbins, Stephanie Miner, Nancy Cantor, Julia Czerniak, Darren Petrucci, Jane Wolff, Mclain Clutter, Hunter Morrison, Damon Rich, Toni L. Griffin, Don Mitchell

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

A two-day conference on the benefits of creating urbanity in weak-market cities gathers twenty-one international experts in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design, as well as planning, policy, finance, economics, and real estate development. Participants share strategies for cities whose urban character has devolved radically due to economic, demographic, and physical change - cities that are now considered "formerly urban."