Architecture Commons^™

Traversing The Urban Landscape: Connecting The Pedestrian Grid, Carly Augustine

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that the advent of the super highway, reliance on the automobile and large scale infrastructure has further disconnected the shrinking city of Baltimore, Maryland by creating borders, barriers and vacancies within the pedestrian grid directly affecting the vitality of cultural street life, cohesion of communities and future densification."

After The Queer Enclave: Masking Vernacular, And The Architecture Of Sexual Minority, Peter Randolph

Architecture Senior Theses

"Queer architecture doesn't exist. That is, there is no such thing as a designated space for sexual minorities and sexually transgressive acts. Queer space is based in opportunistic insertions into dominant frameworks. It does not exist in permanent, formalized space but appears and disappears, subject to relationships of the context. This prompts the question: what is the agency of Architecture in constructing the space of others? How can architecture allow a queer inhabitation of liminal zones, creating private publics and interior exteriors?

"I contend that the discipline of architecture can articulate transient or provisional queer enclaves. If the research is …

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."

Occupying Spatial Dimensions In Media, Lina Bondarenko

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that in a context in which the protester is warded the minor title of Time Magazine's Person of the Year, multi-agent production of news media outnumbers the institutionalized, and unemployment among educated youth soars, architecture must be capable of fusing the shared appetites between a freshly ambitious urban demographic."

Building The Soundscape In The Age Of Visual Distraction - Audio/Visual Supplement, Jack Solomon

Architecture Senior Theses

"This project demonstrates how implicating the soundscape within the visual primacy of design can produce a richer architecture for facilitating awareness, discourse, and learning."

Audio/Visual supplement to the thesis presentation and book.

Architectural Healing Environments, Brian Schaller

Architecture Senior Theses

"It is the contention of this thesis that a study of the phenomenological approach to how one experiences space and by incorporating evidence-based design criteria that are acknowledged for improving wellbeing, quality of life, and reducing distress in people, a healing environment will emerge. The experienced environment will facilitate a temporal awareness of one's self and the design criteria's attention to the experienced setting will allow for a healing environment to emerge within the architecture. I am not proposing that architecture can heal, but rather the architecture can stimulate a healing environment."

The Overgrown Grid: An Alternative Zoning Proposal For The Island Of Manhattan, Thomas Day

Architecture Senior Theses

"This thesis proposes to restructure the primary agenda of the collective monument from a homogenizing force at the local scale, to an object celebrating diversity and multiculturalism. By establishing a continuous mass connecting and collecting the city's currently isolated collective monuments, the new monument will be adjusted to regain formal and cultural contrast to the urban fabric."

Liberated Confinement: Puertorican Hacienda And Prison Environments, Adriana Concepcion

Architecture Senior Theses

"Understanding the similarities between constrained environments in colonial Puerto Rican Haciendas and the typological needs of prison architecture, the exploration of both confinement systems and programs can lead to the re-activation of a typological puertorican plantation. Consequentially a shift from prison's historical identity, from panopticon's main purpose of controlling the masses to a de-centralization of surveillance through the provision of personalized spaces within confined environments can re-structure constrained architecture to produce liberated, flexible spaces, without sacrificing security."

01 / Stack: Framework For Social Stuff, Stephen Wesley Nowak

Architecture Senior Theses

"This project calls for the tactical realignment of the library as no longer being exclusively dedicated to its collection, but rather the environment it provides as a catalyst for study, research, and exploration."

When Commerce Met Culture, Waeeny Dessources

Architecture Senior Theses

"This thesis contends that an armature project can revitalize the city's existing wall condition and potentialize the present typology of the site by allowing [things] to occur. In doing this; the site disappears and acts as a catalyst: an architectural adhesive; stitching everything in [place]."

Literally Figurative: Architectural Manifestation Of The Written Word, Carrie Leneweaver

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that architecture and literature can enhance one another, not only as methods of storytelling and creating narrative, but in their capacity to establish metaphors and themes which provide realizations of larger social conditions...

To test my thesis, I propose designing a library based on the life of author Antoine de Saint-Exupery and his allegorical story: The Little Prince."

The Exchange: A Celebratory Space For Commodity Exchange Via The Hyper-Mall, Jaime Magaliff

Architecture Senior Theses

"The consumer object reigns supreme in American Society. Shopping and consumption have become the trademark of identity. The social act of exchange makes value. The social phenomenon of the mall has cultivated a Mecca for commodity exchange."

Inner City Junction: Public High School As A Multifaceted/Flex Structure, Daniel Chang

Architecture Senior Theses

"By understanding these factors and implication of the urban public educational institution, does architecture have a role in reversing the public education crisis? Can school design foster educational techniques that counteract learning deficiencies? Looking at the negative symbiotic relationship between the post-industrial inner city school and its surrounding community, can the design of a school reverse the cycle towards a more positive relationship?"

From Exacerbated Difference To Productive Difference: A Parasite Market That Survives Informal Vendors In Shenzhen, Phoebe Zhang

Architecture Senior Theses

Proposition to resolve the crisis facing informal activities in China

Technocarpet: Supporting A Culture Of Congestion, William Andrew Weigand

Architecture Senior Theses

"The TechnoCarpet is a public space sited in a future of resource scarcity, climate disruption, and urbanization. It provides support facilities and cultural amenities necessary to sustain super dense urban populations. I establishes an internal frontier for the city as a means to provoke density, by creating an escape from it. The TechnoCarpet is a model for parks in the 21st century."

Building The Soundscape In The Age Of Visual Distraction, Jack Solomon

Architecture Senior Theses

"This project demonstrates how implicating the soundscape within the visual primacy of design can produce a richer architecture for facilitating awareness, discourse, and learning."

The Architecture Of The Profane, Dylan Forester

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that it is vital to understand this shift in the role of secularization in order to anticipate what the implications of such changes will be for an ever-growing secular-minded society in the future. Furthermore, it is my contention that this movement must be realized through a new nondenominational architecture - a spatial manifestation that provides a universal setting for both contemplative and spiritual action; a sanctuary that provokes the tension between singularity and multiplicity."

Landscape Of Culture: Permanence And Change, Stefanie Huchzermeier

Architecture Senior Theses

"As conditions change and culture shifts to adapt, it is my contention that architecture has the capacity to provide an understanding of identity in times of change by regenerating the previously existing level of engagement between people and their natural environment through means of a reestablished spatial network and a materialization of informal social and spatial relationships."

American Home: Shelter Optimized For Climate, Karen Kentile

Architecture Senior Theses

"Architecture attuned to building form and energy production and consumption can, in turn, suggest an alternate landscape for the country...

This book addresses architecture's role in the energy crisis, recognizing that residential buildings account for 53.7% of the built environment and their gridded energy produces over 21% of the United States' carbon emissions. This thesis begins to implement a process for design which can essentially optimize shelter based on climate, and further develop a local context for dwelling."

New York : Mount Morris

Kansas: Saline River Valley, Smokey Hills

Arizona: Salt River

Florida: Moonshine Bay

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]."

Informal, Scott Reynolds

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that architecture can offer agency in new forms of urban relationships to engage the edge condition between formal and informal, critical to the success of today's in-situ slum up gradation and integration to the formal city. Dismantling the spatial segregation will socially, economically, and politically integrate the two cities for sustainable growth of the metropolis."

Reframing The Caribbean Picturesque, Bianca Tulloch

Architecture Senior Theses

"Current resort architecture in Jamaica fails to engage the local community and regional culture; depending largely on historically established perception of the landscape to attract tourists for economic development. I contend that architecture has the ability to enrich a cultural perception of island culture through cross-programming activities that cater to both types of island inhabitants. Redefining traditional spatial relationships between programs, landscape, society, culture, and nature can foster new interactions between island natives and tourists, resulting in a touristic consciousness, moulding the tourist into a visitor. An architecture that responds to sire through strategies of both eco and heritage tourism …

Aerotopia, Mark Shahlamian

Architecture Senior Theses

"Architecture can critically embrace systems of surveillance, security, and sorting to construct a new collective model for an increasingly kinetic population.

As Airports gain more autonomy from their served cities, they also gain more power, catalyzing growth by expanding services, connections, and employing thousands of people. Through a political re-alignmet, untied from a contextual servant-served relationship, the airport typology will begin to take on qualities of a new type of society, constantly in flux. This new frame work for living will in turn test new ideas about security and surveillance as it applies to global mobilities."

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."

Sens(E)Ible Education: A Sensory Approach To An Inclusive Kindergarten, Mary Delaurentis

Architecture Senior Theses

"Architecture that is designed with the intended occupants full sensorial needs in mind ultimately enhances the occupants' experience. Architecture that engages all our senses will create spaces that transcend the purely visual. This higher order of perception will make occupants more self aware, conscious of their embodied experience of the world around them, and create informative experiences."

Intensity Without Density, Nicole Blasetti

Architecture Senior Theses

"Within the field of residual space, a reactive public infrastructure is the setting for intense public intervention."

Illegal Linkage: Transition Of Beijing Informal Economy, Wanjing Xiao

Architecture Senior Theses

"This project contends that the transitional urban fringes are places where the informal economy grows in the most spontaneous and efficient form. By investigating the transitional urban fringe, one can study its informal urban behavior at local and long-term effects, enabling the social awareness and political force to manifest in an informal linkage leading illegal economy towards legalization, while encouraging a new form of 'formal'"...

"This thesis proposes a statistic informality that is able to resist the clearance from urbanization. The new paradigm will be extracted form existing informality models acting as a field condition to bridge the formality and …

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 …

A Sacred And Secular Landscape: Empowering Social Agency, Shreya Shah

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that landscape can provoke an idea for a productive, public space using the people of the city as social agents to create a sensitive rather than oppressive water remediation system. By inventing a program that uses landscape as a water remediation space as well as landscape as a religious and social space, the project will exhibit the idea that social agents can inform a change in the water pollution crisis."

When It Comes To Design, People Matter: A Search For Defensible Space And Its Application To Public Housing, Jamie Goldstein

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that unsuccessful public housing projects have failed because the projects did not identify with the urban morphology and cultural context of the cities they were built in. They were only identified by attempting to house a maximum density of people and their basic needs of living at the minimum budget...

The goal of the project will be to design a housing type that applies the qualities of defensible space from the urban fabric, as well as considering the design decisions that caused other precedents of housing types to fail. This analysis will culminate with a home considered more …