Architecture Commons^™

Public-Ish, Aliah Werth

Masters Theses

Climate change affects public space, and architecture must establish tenets that prioritize pedestrians in this difficult era. Greywater re-use can be a mechanism for creating shade, and in turn, public space.

As heat waves grow more intense, the vast swaths of asphalt that connect commercial zones pose greater risks to public health and to urban vitality. This thesis records the typical material, spatial, and lived conditions of strip malls in urban heat islands, and demands more from infrastructure in public-ish space.

Heat violence weaves through Los Angeles’ built form. Parking space minimums, required setbacks, and height restrictions pull buildings away …

On The Edge Of The "Er-Ocean" State, Mariesa Travers

Masters Theses

This thesis will explore how hard coastal infrastructure methods can be redesigned by softening the coastal edge to support the ecosystem and enhance public access to the beach. By referencing and arguing against techniques used by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) as a solution to deal with coastal erosion, this process will propose a regenerated design system. Through a series of material experiments, this research works with natural processes and flows, to create transitory systems that erode and ebb with the coast.

Un-Black Boxing Mitigation Infrastructures : Proposing Alternative Imaginaries For Mono-Functional And Under-Utilized Urban Backstages, Min Jin Kook

Masters Theses

Cities are full of risk-mitigation infrastructure to protect ourselves from floods, erosion and threatening natural disasters. These infrastructures include underground retention tanks, dams and channelized river. They are purposefully hidden away because they are under highways or underground. Most of risk-mitigation infrastructures are under-utilized ninety- five percent of the time. They only serve one function for two weeks every year. They are empty most of the year. Is there an alternative project to consider these risk-mitigation infrastructures while they are completely mono-functional and under-utilized?

Along with my inquiry to utilize risk-mitigation infrastructures, I am critiquing the “blackboxing” and “under-utilization” of …

Intimacy In Infrastructure, Andrew Sponseller

Masters Theses

This thesis employs public transit to establish regional reclamations of infrastructure, empowering cultural identities through a vernacular that is realized and matured into the capacity of today. The decaying state of our mass transit infrastructure is due to a decline of community ownership and regional identity represented in their architecture.

“Communities” can be considered cities, neighborhoods, towns, or entire regions of States depending on the scale of the infrastructure. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania clearly exhibits the range of this decline. A city that went from being the center of the Pennsylvania Railroad, now is sprinkled with infrastructural shells of the past. These …

The Urban Shelf : A Hybrid Between Architecture And Infrastructure, William Morales

Masters Theses

As one of the most prominent and in-famous pieces of infrastructure in the built environment of the city, the freeway has created nasty conditions of socioeconomic division, segregation, mono-functional zoning and land use, and urban sprawl. In the case of Downtown Los Angeles, the city has evolved into two predominant zones of manufacturing and commercial uses. This process has pushed out housing and other necessary infrastructure to the outskirts of the city, making commutes to work, grocery stores, healthcare, and other basic necessities long and burdensome. In general, the ability to acquire resources is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive.

With the …

Narratives Of Public Space : A Manifesto For Future Urban Landscape In Manhattan, Jaehong Chung

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates the history of public space and how it has changed over time. Looking specifically at how social, historical, and advances in technology have influenced and changed the meaning and use of public spaces. Studies of history and its characteristics and case studies check the validity of paradigm of public spaces in Manhattan. The modern features of Manhattan have been completed over 200 hundreds years with Industrial revolutions and influx of immigrants. Due to these reasons, the main focus was to track of causalities among life style changes, social paradigms, and changes of urban landscapes.

As cities developed, …

Borderscape : Weaving Political Boundaries In The Amazon Through Water Performance, Lucila Silva-Santisteban

Masters Theses

This research project is about how to connect political bordering urban systems through the natural structure for a coherent occupation between the built environment, ecosystems and resources following the Landscape Architecture lens that can address different scale systems simultaneously to create a holistic approach between them. And the proposition of a new type of landscape of this threshold territory as its own kind. Specifically looking at the bordering cities in the heart of the Amazon Region in South America that fall between Colombia, Brazil and Peru.

Why the Amazon?

Not only because of the usual fascination, but because of the …

Urban Infrastructure Reconnection: Recuperating The Riverfront Of Cincinnati., Ethan William Keller

Masters Theses

Transportation infrastructure has created divides within cities, but as cities continue to grow again, these spaces can be recuperated, utilized, and integrated into the urban fabric to reconnect neighborhoods, engage people in urban culture, and insure long-term viability of cities. Cincinnati is a city that has been divided by convergent highways cutting the riverfront from the downtown and surrounding neighborhoods. These large voids of space must be activated to develop a reconnection that once existed between the city and its riverfront. Connectivity will create an abundance of pedestrian flow which will increase growth and economic opportunities for the city. Infrastructure …

Bridging The Gap: Community-Oriented Transit Development, Matthew C. Jones

Masters Theses

The bedroom community has become a prevalent and oft-criticized part of the modern architectural landscape. These suburban towns have continually grown radially outward from major cities across the nation since the end of the Second World War. While these suburbs have served to fulfill housing needs and wants of society, pressure to develop has often forced this growth to occur at a much more rapid rate than a traditional community. This rapid development has led to poorly implemented infrastructure, especially with regard to walkability and public transportation, which has fallen short of meeting the needs of users. These solutions in …

70 Mph: Place And Perception In The Automotive Landscape, Erik Nathaniel Hall

Masters Theses

This project explores the adverse impact of the automobile in regards to perception and the resultant disconnect from environment exhibited in the contemporary suburban landscape. It posits that the way we move through the world affects the way we understand the world, both physiologically/sensually, and philosophically/ethically. The automobile, and its landscape, prejudices vision as a means of cognition. Specifically, it is biased to the perceptual characteristics of vision at high speed- that is, a decreased cone of vision, with a consequent increase in the total area of the peripheral visual field. This peripheral field is characterized by flattened, monocular perception, …