Architecture Commons^™

Dwelling In Density: A Study On High Density Residential Architecture, David Domke

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis aims to propose an high density plan for Philadelphia by cataloging existing vacancy levels, define variously dense formal typologies within these vacancies, and strategically implement high-density architectures within the existing urban fabric to accomodate future growth.

Active Density: Stimulating The Urban Domain In High-Rise Social Housing Developments, Heather Dela Cruz

Architecture Thesis Prep

I propose to retain the benefits of vertical housing and improve upon it by

up-zoning the block and building low-rise, high-density mixed-income structures

on the site’s perimeter. The new construction will include public amenities that are

lacking in the immediate area such as retail, restaurants, work space, and public

service facilities. Through adaptive re-use of mega blocks will be reclaimed. This

mixed-use approach to the expanded occupancy will also restore the diversity that

was lost when the towers were first built.

Infra[Re]Structure, Sara Minsley

Architecture Thesis Prep

This project contends that through the mediation and expression of systems, energies and flows the pedestrian can reclaim the experience of the street.Crucial to this is an understanding of what is on the street and how objects and people are situated on the streets currently. Through exploiting these issues New York City the pedestrian is offered a more engaged experience of moving through the city.

Urban Systems Of The Refugee Camp, Julia Slater

Architecture Thesis Prep

Upon completion of my research I will design a system that allows the

flexibility needed by the people as well as the control the government

and NGO’s are responsible for providing. I will focus on the way playing

with the relevant scale can help to bridge the gap between indi

vidual

and group. Special configuration is a key component in forming

communal spaces. The integration of these spaces on every scale is

fundamental to achieving success. Issues of permanence can be addressed

though alternative building methodologies, and the lessons

learned from indigenous people.

Empire State Plaza, Christopher Kovel

Architecture Thesis Prep

De Arce constructed a system--an experiment--that could be applied to the Corbusian city to elicit new meaning from the set pieces. The process of additive transformation allowed the existing monuments to become engaged in a new conversation with their context. The superimposed fabric--‘urban poche’-- created a uniform vertical surface, or datum, against which to read the set pieces. Thus, the city of street and square was educed as fabric and figure were once again allowed to mutually reinforce one another. Public space, understood as the place of confrontation and discussion, has arguably been devalued in the contemporary city.

The ancient …

Permeating The Void: Establishing A New Order Of Informality- Part 1, Lisa Kombakis

Architecture Senior Theses

WHAT IS TRANSIT, AND ITS RELEVANCE TO THE URBAN INFORMAL? Transit, in an urban atmosphere, is a system used to mobilize mass amounts of population in the most efficient way possible. In terms of the urban informal, some of the transit elements used in a formal, static city are re-instated into the informal. Many times these elements (such as taxis, buses, motorcycles, cars and bicycles) are implemented in their hybridized form, creating new and localized forms of transport.Reconnecting and fostering the urban density are a few of the most important aspects that should be considered when exploring the urban informal’s …

Ciudad Disidente: Addressing Social And Infrastructural Deficiencies In Villa Salvador-- Part 1, Victoria Brewster

Architecture Senior Theses

Within the next twenty years, the Global South will account for 95% of urban growth, and nearly half of that will be within the informal sector.1 The population living within slums is expected to increase to two billion people by 2030, and if left unchecked, it may reach three billion by 2050.2 This extreme growth requires an URGENT response in order offset its adverse effects on the urban environment. Thus far, architects’ interventions in informal settlements have focused almost entirely on designing housing in order to improve the quality of life, and to meet the demands of the growing population. …

Permeating The Void: Establishing A New Order Of Informality- Part 3, Lisa Kombakis

Architecture Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

Ciudad Disidente: Addressing Social And Infrastructural Deficiencies In Villa Salvador-- Part 2, Victoria Brewster

Architecture Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

Permeating The Void: Establishing A New Order Of Informality- Part 2, Lisa Kombakis

Architecture Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

Permeating The Void: Establishing A New Order Of Informality- Part 4, Lisa Kombakis

Architecture Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

Revitalizing Waterfront: The Sinking City, Clifford Shih

Architecture Senior Theses

The existing waterfront condition presents a separation between the water and urban. I propose this separation between the water and urban is an interacted space of urban and water. Waterfront constructed in this way protects the city from floating, yet a solution of creating a public space, ports, and water filtration facility will blend the separated condition. Thus, architecture exemplifies a vehicle to constitute physical and visual connection for dichotomy edge created by the waterfront in a rapid stratified urbanization and industrialization.

Metropolis Necropolis: Building A Ritual Of Memorial For The Urban Homeless, Michael Marchand

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The intervention of architecture, through a cultural and contextual understanding, can create a relevant ritual for the memorial of the deceased that is meaningful to the communities it is intended to serve - the marginalized people of the streets of New York - while bringing the needs of the communities into the public light."

Urban Housing, Fabric, And Flows: New Connections In The Post-Industrial City, Colin Simmer

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The transition from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy in post-industrial American river cities has left extensive tracts of derelict land along urban waterfronts. After years of physical and psychological separation from the rivers, cities are renegotiating the boundaries of post-industrial landscapes and making efforts to reconnect to the riverfront. My thesis aims to generate a new model of urban housing and public spaces that will reconnect historic fabric to the water."

33.3% - Creative Entrepreneurship In Buffalo, Ny, Bruce Molino

Architecture Senior Theses

"This work has emerged out of an interest in the idea of the resilient city. It is an experiement intended to test ideas and suggest ways in which to reconsider architecture within a directed urbanism. Directional urbanism is a term that I use to describe how insertions can redirect or reinvent the trajectory of a city. This thesis privileges resiliency as the objective of that new trajectory; not as a moment of realization, but rather a continually changing adaptive process that allows cities to act, and react, in a constructive way."

Building Urban Texture, Fernando Pabon-Rico

Architecture Senior Theses

"This investigation is based on the contention that a city is made up of an urban construct where certain elements are continuous in their presence. This continuity provides legibility to an urban environment. The fact that elements or parts are an integral part of the legibility of the city fosters the reading of the city as a function of their integration. The role or place of architecture therefore lies on the formation of the city through its parts."

Suburban Adaptability: Urban Context, Joshua Seidner

Architecture Thesis Prep

Creating an Architecture that permits flexibility within a system of controls through the design of an urban mixed-use building in Hoboken, NJ

"The urban context historically fosters anonymity among urbanites denying individual expression, user flexibility, and family adaptability. The result is the draw to the suburban house model which inherently concedes one's expression of individual identity."

The Effect Of Cinematographic Architecture On Urban Space, Jose R. Fonacier

Architecture Thesis Prep

"These ideas of cinematic architecture gate when utilized in a hierarchical network of city gates within an urban space can begin to create more complex story lines to bring order to a complex variety of experiences. It also perceptually breaks down a large urban space that is perceived as homogeneous by creating sub-defined districts through a hierarchical network of regions."

Vorhizomeid: Nodes Of Community Services Connecting Albany, Ny, Andrew Watkins

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The contention is to reposition terrain vague into the urban fabric recreating a continuum of the urban system while attempting to detract neither from the scale of the infrastructural system, nor that of the human body. Terrain vague muse be approached in a different manner than that of the traditional urban city. Establishing community through terrain vague should be done by measure of the forces, flows, and rhythms of space."

Traces Of Time: Urban Palimpsest And Transformations, Tomas B. Fernandez

Architecture Thesis Prep

"I contend that the city is a deeply scored palimpsest that through specific natural, social, and cultural changes reveals its traces of permanence and temporality; therefore, to create in the urban realm is to respond to these vestiges of time through decoding and transformation, as if one was gently manipulating the genome of the city."

Urban Agents, New Events: A Transformation Of The Postindustrial Landscape, Kevin Toukoumidis

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Railway yards, abandoned industrial processing plants, decommissioned factories and polluted river ways are the leftovers from the industrial age. With the deindustrialization of society, a new prevailing urban condition has resulted: a marginalized landscape of residual spaces and urban voids, often with real or perceived contamination.... The potential for reclaiming these marginalized landscapes becomes a catalyst for the design of new modes of occupation and human activity."

Joint Venture: The Production And Reproduction Of The Fragmented City, Mark Rhoads

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis proposes an investigation into the fragmented city and what Henri Lefebvre terms as the specialization embedded in the creation of the contemporary urban condition... The museum for censored photography is proposed to occupy Pennsylvania Avenue, a threshold in the city of Philadelphia... The architectural joint or hinge becomes the vehicle for the spatial "insertion.""

Terminus A Quo: An End From Which A Starting Point: The Auto-Terminal, Garrett M. Singer

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The intent of this thesis is to develop a new civic order for parking structures in the urban context. The thesis investigation will exist on two primary parts. The first area of investigation will deal with an urban design and analysis of parking as gateways of arrival to Manhattan. Tis will serve as entry nodes for all automobile passages into the city. The second half of the thesis is an investigation of the transformation of the parking garage, which has typically been seen as an eyesore, into an elegant structure."

In Response, Chip Young

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The thesis is architecture (host of program, activity, and event) as a catalyst to disrupting urban boundaries. The goal is to create an architectural response to contemporary urban developemt that has created boundaries and decreased the dynamism of 'city'."

A Diamond In The Square, Christopher Guido

Architecture Thesis Prep

"When a traditional city element moves to the suburbs, it is detrimental to the element and to the city. The reinsertion of a separated city element into an urban situation, through the reestablishment of its physics, economic, and social relationship to the city, can serve to benefit the newly placed element and its context."

A Waterfront Reclamation, Allen Rossignol

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Due to industry changes, once prosperous maritime towns have been abandoned. The cities have been left as they were and have not adopted new functions or uses for their valuable asset, the water's edge. Although the city's maritime history and culture attract people, the public has turned its back on the waterfront resulting in non-urban, non-public spaces such as parking, run don properties and abandoned storage sheds. This disjunction between the city and the waterfront needs to be addressed."

"A city's waterfront can be reclaimed through the Archtiecture of Recreation in which the facilities and space are designed to heal …

The Providence Renaissance Center, Dante J. Boffi

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The intent of this thesis is to create an urban gateway through the architectural manipulation of a city's edge. Physical and visual linkages will be carried from an urban center to the surrounding context by using a specific piece of architecture as the focal point. Issues such as the pedestrian/city relationship and the notion of architecture as a cultural symbol will help to inform and direct the thesis."

The Monument And The Square: Evolving An Identity For Harvard Square, Kathleen Kulpa

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis will demonstrate the making of a civic building as a resolution between urban conditions and as a focal point in a urban square. It proposes to create an identity for the place by using abstraction of the meeting house as a recognizable type which can allow for the reproposition of the community within."

A Meeting House In Boston: A Vehicle For Reconnection, Roseanne Hennessey

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The thesis project will explore the reconnection of the urban core to the periphery. It will deal fundamentally with the relationship of center to edge and the sue of architecture as connective tissue. The vehicle for this exploration if a meeting house in Boston. This vehicle presents an opportunity to investigate the topic of reconnection as an urban/site proposition as well as a use/program proposition."

Prototype: A Community Center For The Slums Of Sao Paulo, Brazil, Andre' Mellone

Architecture Senior Theses

"Poverty can be viewed through 5 different perspectives: urbanism, economy, sociology, politics, and legislation. Architecture can refer to all of them, but my decision is to deal with primarily urbanistic problems."