Architecture Commons^™

Debrisia, Alice Rong, Jing Ying Chin, Tanya Tungkaserawong

Architecture Senior Theses

The project aims to explore the potential of enhancing vacant lots to the benefit of the community and achieve net zero waste by introducing a self-sustaining system. Debrisia acts as a prototype that addresses local needs and adapts to different scales of community. There are five networks supporting each other: energy, water, agriculture, livestock and recycling workshops. The locals will generate electricity collected by motion, manage the livestock, produce fertilizer for vegetation, and create products from their food waste. Emphasis is placed on participation from the residents, and such, the residents will get to receive back what they help produce …

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 …

A Simulation-Assisted Workflow For Outdoor Thermal Comfort Design In Downtown Syracuse, Pouya Zhand

Architecture Senior Theses

Cities are not just about the buildings and skylines. Cities are also about the space be­tween buildings (the ground in figure-ground). More importantly and fundamentally cities are about people and the life that happens between buildings. Simulation tools can inform the design of attractive public spaces by pro­viding insight about the environmental conditions.

It's Not Easy Being Whole | Reevaluating The Relationship Of Part Whole In Pursuit Of A New High-Rise Vernacular, Josh Bransky

Architecture Senior Theses

Architecture has the power to structure societal relationships. Specifically, architecture's form can bring the balanced relationship between community and individual identity, as exhibited in vernacular single-family homes, to the housing tower. This thesis plans to achieve such a social orchestration through a nuanced understanding of formal part-to-whole relationships, or "differentiated" parts within the whole, exhibited in a 300' housing tower in Seattle, WA.

By carefully balancing the relation, material, scale, and form of each part, this project will achieve this difficult whole (of differentiated parts). Mining this middle ground will produce a housing tower in Seattle, which actively balances the …

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 …

Rethinking The Food Narrative, Pt. 2, Danielle Foisy, Taskina Tareen

Architecture Senior Theses

If there is anything to be learnt from developed cities around the world, it is that the private sector will continue to play an increasingly important role in the urban food supply of emerging cities. In the context of Southern Africa, where the informal sector continues to serve a large percentage of the urban poor population, but is losing power due to the advent of modern agribusinesses, it becomes necessary to derive methods to integrate small-scale vendors into formal food marketing systems through the respatializing of logistical spaces of food aggregation and distribution in the city. Through a consolidation of …

Living On The Edge: Landform Resilience, Pt. 1, Lauren Festa

Architecture Senior Theses

The program of a resilience center on the site serves as a way to engage the community with the threat of rising sea levels through education and office facilities, as well as providing a location to double as an emergency evacuation center. The community of East Boston is particularly vulnerable due to its identity as a low income neighborhood. An MBTA ferry terminal supplements the emergency evacuation center, providing an added source of public transit. A square, and a recreation building along the city of Boston's Harborwalk creates an opportunity for the public to engage with the waterfront park.

Living On The Edge: Landform Resilience, Lauren Festa

Architecture Senior Theses

The program of a resilience center on the site serves as a way to engage the community with the threat of rising sea levels through education and office facilities, as well as providing a location to double as an emergency evacuation center. The community of East Boston is particularly vulnerable due to its identity as a low income neighborhood. An MBTA ferry terminal supplements the emergency evacuation center, providing an added source of public transit. A square, and a recreation building along the city of Boston's Harborwalk creates an opportunity for the public to engage with the waterfront park.

Modernization Of Death Spaces: Solution To The Problem Of Lacking Death Space In Hong Kong, Simon Tse

Architecture Senior Theses

Digital media opens up a new dynamic in maintaining and recalling memories. It requires digital ancestral halls to provide spaces for the data to be stored, and for people to commemorate deceased people in the digital age. Using existing pedestrian bridges, these halls will once again be placed in the very center of the community. This thesis proposes the fashioning of a new culture of remembrance of those who have passed away. People will be able to visit casually as a daily routine. The proposed digital death spaces merge the traditional idea of ancestral halls with digital information. The Infusion …

A Critique Of Chinese Education, Ying Chen

Architecture Senior Theses

The biggest problem of the state-controlled children’s education in the People’s Republic of China is that the system focuses more on the method of education rather than learning of children themselves. Thus the children lack of internal motivation to learn. Moreover, the typical education in China tend to isolate the students from the neighborhood, lacking a chance for students to really interact and experiement hands on with new knwoledge. However, this problem aspect can be overcame by learning from the western pedagogical strategies, such as the Montessori Education. For this educational approach, the primary goal is to stimulate children’s internal …

Community Recentered, Elizabeth Arens

Architecture Senior Theses

Chicago, Illinois is a large city comprised of small neighborhoods. The City of Chicago is made up of 77 “Community Areas.” Many diverse neighborhoods are within each community area. Each neighborhood has its own identity that revolves around the churches, schools and community centers that serve the neighborhood. In each of these educational institutions, learning also exists on a larger social and cultural scale that is reflective of the distinct qualities of the neighborhood. The idea of a learning institution as the center of a neighborhood is formed at the time children first begin school. Much of their intellectual and …

Dubai: Re-Designing Labor Worker Communities, Can Cakmak

Architecture Senior Theses

In an effort to provide humane living conditions for immigrant workers in Dubai who are trapped in the flawed immigration system, I will design a ‘worker community ’ to replace the ‘ labor camps’ where workers live today. These communities will be tested at a variety of levels, from planning, infrastructure, modularity to materiality; and while certain elements such as planning will play a much more significant role than, for example, infrastructure, the goal will be to generate a worker community which will provide necessar y amenities and act as a temporar y city - immediately next to the construction …

Just Add Water: Rethinking The Urban Bath House For Contemporary Society, Audrey Snare

Architecture Senior Theses

"There is a need, and an opportunity now to rethink and reintroduce the public bathhouse in the contemporary urban city, and bathhouse is a ripe typology for invention and interpretation when considered against the trend of exclusive spas. I contend that a new conception of urban public bathhouse can initiate new social dynamics, new social opportunities, and new public behavior."

It Takes A Village: The Decentralized School, James Ben Harrison

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that architecture should act as a threshold that mediates between education and community in order to create a "decentralized educational facility" that revolves around the concept of educational space, that Jhn Dewet describes as a communal environment which fosters interaction. The resulting programmatic overlap will create something that is more than a school, by incorporating existing community accessible activities that work with the school. This intervention will create an opportunity to enhance the performance of the school and redefine the educational situation as [school as community] rather than [school or community]."

Orphan: Residential Educational Cultural Center For Orphaned Youth, Valerie Rachel Herrera

Architecture Senior Theses

"This thesis contends that by re-conceptalizing the spatial, programmatic, and sociopolitical forces that for the basis of the orphanage typology, an architectural framework can be constructed that can instigate and facilitate new conditions of programmatic overlap between the 'urban cultural' and the 'private/secure residential'; fundamentally altering the outdated assumptions of the orphanage type in favor of a contemporary response embeds the orphanage in the city and the city in the orphanage."

Corporeal Meeting Place, Brandon Maldonado

Architecture Senior Theses

"The modernist movement was able, through the industrial revolution, to eliminate the role of facade as load bearing member, fetishizing transparency. However, this new preeminence of visuality was not applicable to the suburban home, with its predisposition toward the creation and control of privacy. What separate the suburban condition from the urban, in addition to the role of the single-family home as purchasable symbol representing an ideal, is the front yard. Instead of a simple A-B division across a singular surface, the yard creates a "deep" facade, a series of layered spaces serving as filtration' sidewalks, fences, plantings, yards, and …

Urban Stitch: Reinventing Housing In The Globalized Urban Realm For Chinese Migrant Workers, Jennifer Hoi Ling Ha

Architecture Senior Theses

"This thesis contends that architecture can reclaim individual and community expression within the globalized urban realm through the integration of unique programs in a live/work community environment."

Prototyping Community, Daniel Di Dio

Architecture Senior Theses

'This thesis focuses on implementing this system for the Chad refugee camp of Iridimi located along the border of the conflict stricken Darfur region of Sudan. Its climate and soil content are idea for rammed earth construction and its population is in need of better solutions to the increasing struggle for adequate shelter."

Village Methodology For Grandfamily Housing, Meghan O'Reilly

Architecture Senior Theses

"The study, analysis, and use of a village as a model for housing, specifically grandfamilies housing, allows the opportunities to see the bridge between community spaces in a village, a community spaces in housing. Villages operating as a community through the creation of spaces [such as: town squares, meeting halls, churches, stores, schools, and places of worship] can be used as an architectural model for how in the housing typology of grand families, the same spaces [such as: gathering halls, gardens, communal kitchens, counseling centers, after school care, and spiritual spaces] can allow the community to operate as an analogous …

The Urban Neighborhood Collective, Angel David Nieves

Architecture Senior Theses

The study of development in traditional urban Africa is relevant to the contemporary American architect as it offers the possibility to him or her of a neighborhood form that responds to current American social problems. The form of this new American neighborhood might parallel the African village, a strong paradigm reflecting humankind in a non-alienating relationship with the environment. Our urban areas have deteriorated over the past century, in part because planners and architects seemingly have little understanding of the needs of humankind[...] The lack of self expression that humankind faces at home, at work, and in the community weakens …

The Urban Neighborhood Collective: A Model For Empowerment Through Space Within The Inner City Landscape, Angel David Nieves

Architecture Senior Theses

"The study of development in traditional urban Africa is relevant to the contemporary American architect as it offers the possibility to him or her of a neighborhood form that responds to current American social problems. The form of this new American neighborhood might parallel the African village, a strong paradigm reflecting humankind in a non-alienating relationship with the environment."

"In order to promote social change, architecture must take on a new mode of operation. That is to say that architecture must come from the people, an architecture deemed some years ago in an art installation, "Architecture without Architects." The architect …

Harlem On My Mind, Shawn L. Rickenbacker

Architecture Senior Theses

The thesis involves directly establishing a coherent dialogue between participants and architecture. The site and architecture involved are only a catalyst to the area it is representing, Harlem. However, the project will have the responsibilities of designating itself as a primary theshold to the famous ditricts and attracting would be participants. It is for this reason the program of cultural progress centre has been chosen in the interest of providing a stimulation program. The intention of the proposed centre is not to compete with the district or communty in which it lies, but to act as its subordinate. This will …