Architecture Commons^™

Landscape As An Interactive Layer, Yifan Kong

Masters Theses

The main topic of this investigation is memory and place. The study uses qualitative and quantitative research methods with the aim of addressing the question of, “how landscape design generates interactive layers that last in a community’s memory within a constantly evolving neighborhood demographics?” This thesis is divided into three phases:

Phase I explores the evolving neighborhood in New York City. Specifically focusing on communities with high immigrant populations located in Queens. This phase helps develop a stronger understanding of the issues associated with gentrification and the impacts it has on immigrant neighborhoods and provides the groundwork for the rest …

Cultural Infrastructure, Public Space, And The Contemporary Library In Toronto, Zoë Ritts

Masters Theses

Public space is an aggregate of differences, a place of exposure and adjacency to other lived social realities. The potential of public space is the confrontation or mediation of differences through interaction.

Public spaces are therefore about intersections and visual transparency between publics. Through architecture, we can create the conditions for contact with difference: with openness, transparency, density of program, and merging and splitting trajectories, we can work toward greater engagement in society.

As civic institutions, the bus station, an affordable method of transportation and movement, and the library, a crucial component of cultural infrastructure, can collide to create a …

Collective Consumption : A Game For Living, Zachary Rochman

Masters Theses

“The time-lapse fluctuation of our societal floor plan has accelerated. Now you can almost watch the walls go up and down in real time.” -Rem Koolhaas, Elements

There is an efficient and beneficial way to collectively consume resources, but our houses and apartments do not function this way. The commons still exist, but their locations are sparse and specific. What if we established communal spaces that connect private dwellings and blur the lines between them? What new responsibilities and freedoms would arise? If we establish new commons and new abilities to share spaces and resources, we can help alleviate the …

Killing The Angel, In The Mind, Body And Home, Vaishnavi Ramesh

Masters Theses

There is something reassuring about belonging to a space. In patriarchal societies, there is a perceptible manifestation of gender that is constructed into spaces. The street and a public life contain within it the notions of movement that is unrestrained and free. These are attributes of a space that men identify with and an unintended consequence has resulted in public spaces being demarcated as male domains. This notion is embedded in how women experience life everyday, as they are accustomed to the idea that public spaces and streets are only spaces they pass through to reach destinations and not enjoy …

Surveillance City In A Post 9/11 Era, Wanting Dong

Masters Theses

Surveillance City in A Post 9/11 Era is a thesis investigation trying to understand our privacy, perceived safety and public realm in the large context of evolving terrorism worldwide by promoting a conversation about how surveillance would change our city, our new relationship with the city under surveillance, and how people will live with surveillance in the future.

Phase one seeks to understand terrorism and terrorist attack in general, and the opportunities and limitations of the existing security design strategies that have been implemented by US government. In phase two, a specific investigation direction is determined and a series of …

Resilience On Wall Street, Rahul Ghera

Masters Theses

On October 29th, 2019, the most substantial economic depression of the modernized world abruptly began, as the international financial market and the global GDP took a plunge. Over the course of the next decade, all that continued to rise were unemployment and suicide rates.

The Wall explores the question of what happens when the lights go out on a society that is irrevocably halted. Questions of responsibility, reparations, and conviction are all weighed as ‘Wall Street’ is revealed as ground zero, and the once-powerful bankers are uncovered as the addicts who have gone too far, gambled too much, and are …

The Void Between Us, Xiaofan Fan

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates the sense of connection and detachment among people. The interference with sight and physical placement of the body are the two aspects that this thesis researches upon. Through a discussion of life and death, the research is able to take form in the architecture realm with a crematorium as the final deliverable.

The Flood : Another Note Of Humanity, Muyi Fan

Masters Theses

Site is an inhabitable system, in which forces are generated by sets of rules which dictate all the natural and human histories, perceivable and unperceivable. The manipulations of these existing forces are always based on the comprehensive understanding of this system, rather than the willing of a single (group of) inhabitant(s) of occupying, ruling and colonizing. This process is always suggestions rather than solutions, and allows further editing. Through continuous manipulations, site is evolving.

Envisioning Ecological Cities, Carlton Smith

Masters Theses

Our cities are recognized as centers for jobs, entertainment and production; as icons of human innovation. However, they are also recognized as for their consumption. Being that our cities are mechanisms of consumption, they rely on imported resources such as food, water, energy and labor in order to continue to thrive. Though this relationship has fostered technological and mechanical growth, it has also been degrading the natural ecological processes that we rely on to survive. As our understanding of our relationship to the environment deepens, there is a growing push for architecture that embodies an attention to its connections to …