Architecture Commons^™

About Intimacy, Jiamin Lin

Masters Theses

Imagine that there is a person who goes everywhere carrying a chair. From the moment she places her chair down on the ground, this action defines a space around her. The shape of this invisible entity keeps changing. However, I still feel a specific way of “closure”. My thesis started from this moment, about defining intimacy.

Time may be translated into measures of movement and occupancies of space. Film and architecture both mobilize spatial and temporal modes of perception. My exploration of spatial intimacy started from filming the interaction between human being and larger entities. It exploits the filmic capacity …

Acoustic Signatures: Their Study, Representation, And Agency In The Experience Of Architectural Spaces, Nathalie D'Hennezel

Masters Theses

I am proposing to engage sound in the design of space through the representation, study, and creation of acoustic signatures.

Two-Gather / Collective Living : Housing And Recreational Facilities In Suburban Mumbai, Rashi Harshil Lalaji

Masters Theses

Collective form of living is a relevant framework to reconsider way of living in contemporary Mumbai. The thesis explores shared communal architecture elements in a specific housing typology called chawls. These elements are analyzed through its programmatic use of space and scale. Understanding the chawls as a module for communal living situated within a larger city context of Mumbai. The thesis further argues that collective forms of living are possible and should be a precedent for developing the present affordable housing typologies in the urban city.

Digital Duck, Zach Schumacher

Masters Theses

This thesis seeks to further define “digital” for architecture in the 2020’s, by looking outside the discipline to expand upon the post-digital conversation.

The Story Of Market House, Patrick Spence

Masters Theses

Our encounters of space are charged with narratives of the past. These narratives help us define who we are, speaking to our values and providing us with our identity.

The Story of Market House is an exploration into the narratives of the 245-year-old Market House of Providence, Rhode Island. Like the additions and alterations to its form, Market House is layered with generations of unique Providence history.

This project aims to remember and tell an unbiased and empathetic narrative, true to the comprehensive histories of this unique place; and from this present an architectural proposal that projects a new chapter …

Occupying The Public : Humans, Space & Identity, Brittany Knowlton

Masters Theses

My thesis is understanding spectacle and the spatial organization of human society. What is the role of architecture to create performance?

Climate Resilience For A Neighborhood Without Privilege: East Boston, Peter Niels Heller

Masters Theses

This architecture thesis is about climate change and unprivileged populations – sea-level rise in particular, and the neighborhood of East Boston. Across recorded human history, the burdens of climate stress have fallen disproportionately on marginal populations, and today is no different. We don’t have to travel to a South Pacific island to see the risk posed by sea-level rise – that risk can be found right here along the New England coastline. Neighborhoods with a minimum of privilege face challenges to their existence – and those residents want to stay in their homes and preserve their communities just like anybody …

Playgrounds : Symbiosis Of Humans, Nature, And Architecture, Hannah Langmuir

Masters Theses

As we have adapted to learn how to best take advantage of our natural resources, we have evolved into the beings we are today. However, once we shifted away from natural environments to embrace new technologies and confine ourselves to our human-built spaces, we began to take a step backwards in our evolutionary timeline, returning to a confined, limited state.

As a result, this project examines play as a solution to connecting humans, nature, and architecture. By integrating these new programs into existing offices in downtown Providence, this process was an exploration in adapting our architecture to provide spaces where …

Transform Through Architecture : A Journey Of Discovery At The Providence Place Mall, Haoning Li

Masters Theses

Changes can be subtle, but nevertheless they are ever lasting. When one encounters the other, the experience of the encountering changes us. It not only happens with people but also with spaces. Each space tells a story of it’s own, and when we encounter each space we are changed by it. Each space carries with it different imprint and shows different personalities. Therefore, when we encounter them, we are all listeners and transmitters to carry those stories onwards.

Seeing architecture as fertile and breeding ground to welcome, transmit and exchange ideas, the hidden potentials in common building types and structures …

Living Together : Revisiting The Sro + New Forms Of Collectivity, Elizabeth Parker

Masters Theses

The current affordable housing crisis has reached a boiling point. Home prices are increasing at double the rate of wage gains, and almost half of all renters in the United States are considered costburdened (spending 30% or more of their income on rent). There simply isn’t enough affordable housing available to meet the growing demand and people are being priced out. The housing market, as it stands, is in desperate need of re-examination.

Options that better reflect the demographics of growing cities and promote inclusion are of vital importance for a sustainable future.

This directed research project responds to the …

Architecture Of Dreams, Alex Jing-Seng Wong

Masters Theses

Architecture, both of reality and of dreams, is constructed to serve the needs of its world. The environments of dreams are akin to movie sets in that they correspond to a particular story. Recognizing (“remembering” unconscious knowledge) the significance of objects and forms to the story of a dream reveals the essence of these things as perceived by the self. Those understandings not resulting from individual life experiences may be identified as inherited and universal.

A City's Culture Should Include Birds : To Rethink Of Architecture With Birds In Mind, Pan Sun

Masters Theses

The truth of a city’ s culture is that Birds and Human live in a single-shared ecosystem boundaries. Architects as human always think of architecture according to human’s needs and neglect animals’ demands. However, the architecture and a city should acknowledge and response to the cultural need and value of the society of which it interacts—birds and human. Architecture needs to create spaces connecting these two species by boundaries. The thesis seeks to explore the transition area between these boundaries—a type of space providing a chance for birds and human living tog ether harmoniously.

Specific : And Practices In The Urban Periphery, Sam Wesselman

Masters Theses

This body of work attempts to revisit the American suburban condition as a potential site of healing for the United States. Polarized politics have drawn hard lines between different groups of people in the US, typically along urban and rural identities. If the suburb is potentially defined as neither urban nor rural, what can it teach us about bridging cultural gaps that have opened up in America?

The suburb, generalized into a concept I call “peripherality”, can teach practices that are decentered and heterogeneous. Architecture, as a discipline whose role could be defined in this peripheral sense, always acting in-between …

Tolerance : Material Conversations On Life & Architecture, Keyan Hansen

Masters Theses

Tolerance is an investigation of the phenomenological aspects and latency of material in architecture through physical manipulation and sensory interaction. It is an investigation into the space between society and material, in which one can find new insight and appreciation for architecture at all scales. The word tolerance holds multiple definitions that wonderfully encapsulate the elements of this work:

• The ability or willingness to tolerate something, in particular, the existence of opinions or behavior that one does not necessarily agree with.

• An allowable amount of variation of a specified quantity, especially in the dimensions of a machine or …

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 …

Vacancy Never Vacant, Marina Bibidakis

Masters Theses

Vacant buildings are never truly vacant. They might not be used as originally planned but there are still signs of life inside them. Even in a state of ruination, nature takes over or undocumented humans use them as temporary shelter. Instead of going the route of completely redesigning, I would like to embrace the qualities created from the transition periods in between to categorize and articulate the thesis, the focus will be on industrial buildings. My interest is directed on revitalizing buildings. My interest is originally designed for human occupation or appreciation, but rather for machines. Part of the research …

Change Of Plans: The Subversive Kit In The Planned Community, Hugo Caldwell

Masters Theses

My thesis seeks to investigate the relationship between the prescriptive forces of urban planning with architecture. Through extracting elements and characteristics from an existing context, I implement a subversive system/kit of parts that work together to challenge the ideas behind top-down planning while painting a new picture of Columbia, MD, and planned communities as a whole.

Field Notes On Seeing: An Archive Of Color, Mirrors, And Light, T. Deutch

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates memory through photographs, lights and mirrors.

In-Between Through : Bordering Bodies ; A Spatial Containment, Aroly Enamorado

Masters Theses

Due to the continuous struggle for undocumented migration, the U.S. Mexico border has always been on of the most misunderstood. This thesis tries to form awareness of the number of migrants that are seeking asylum in the United States. Most of these people are coming from Central and South America to experience the American dream, a concept that many do not get to achieve. Understanding the physical and cultural aspects from departing their homeland, arrival at the border, possible deportation, the admission into the country, and starting from zero. Nowadays, the southern border wall has turned into a cancerous divider …

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 …

The Official Showreel Companion To Framed Familiarity In 4 Acts : A Defamiliarization Of The Tropes Of Architectural Practice, Through An Expanded Frame Of View And Frame Rate, Julie Kress

Masters Theses

In the spirit of Resier and Umemoto’s Atlas of Novel Tectonics, this work does not propose solutions to a stated problem in the field of architecture. Instead it provokes an entry into subjects that are taken for granted, yet are in dire need of re-framing in a postdigital age of architecture.

This proposal for speculative architectures that are only possible through animation, is antithesis to the format of the printed book. The format of this document assumes that it is not viewed alone but is treated as a behind the scenes companion to the 3 minute showreel “Framed Familiarity in …

Wrinkle Architecture : The Public Relaxation Pavilions For Geriatric Community In Cities Of Zhejiang After 1980'S, Yi Lu

Masters Theses

Wrinkles of the city just like the wrinkles of human. They are symbles of aging as well as the carriers of story. They are existing in unexpecting places in the city or in human faces. The wrinkle of the city is the texture of city during its urbanization process. They are small and chopped. They are between temporary and permanent.

This thesis integrates the “wrinkle architectures” of Hangzhou to improve the relaxation space and provide a better environment for in the elderly community of Hangzhou.

Adaptive Reuse Pattern Book : Re-Evaluating Historical Capital, Taylor Mccabe

Masters Theses

Vacant buildings in post-industrial America are produced by a metabolism of neglect and disinvestment. Challenging the conventional approach of demolish and rebuild, an alternative path is possible that acknowledges the built environment as it exists.

I am specifically looking at vacant structures in the city of Baltimore. Currently there are approximately 16,000 structures consisting of mostly rowhouses. Inherent to these buildings are shared walls and continuous facades which when subjected to decay will directly impact the physical condition of adjoining properties. Baltimore City is characterized by blocks and blocks of rowhouses, which tell a history of the development of the …

Blueridgelivin' : Environmental Development And Suburban Sprawl, Chris Villalta

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on investigating how precolonial Blue Ridge Cherokee construction was resilient to time and weather, integrated place, and respected the environment, traditions, and politics, to better integrate landscape, climate, ecology, and regionally specific architecture.

Relocation Community Revival, Zhan Zhang

Masters Theses

The thesis tries to revive/re-imagine the public spaces of relocation community in Jiangsu, China by re-designing the in between spaces of the existing apartment buildings, dealing with the misfit of relocated residents to their new living environment during the rapid urbanization process.

Possibilities In Void, Fangyu Wei

Masters Theses

The interaction between architecture surfaces and urban environment is being more active, this transient boundary demarcates the inner core and external diverse environments to provide a different experience for human. The uncertainties in attitudes that have existed over time to the interior and exterior conditions, thus, the spatial tension between these 2 surfaces naturally form into several void spaces. As I observed that through individual action, ideas, and criticality, urban voids have become catalysts for social interaction and creative experiments. Re-appropriation of vacant sites by means of inhabitation or (new) subtle ecologies to emerge in the Taipei urban area. Residents …

Draw Down Books, Draw Down Books, Kathleen Sleboda, Christopher Sleboda, Zak Jensen, Nejc Prah, Daniel Eatock, Maziyar Pahlevan, Benoit Bodhuin, Bráulio Amado, Jost Hochuli, Ian Lynam

UNBOUND 2020 Archive

Draw Down Books exhibitors. Draw Down is an independent publisher located in the northeastern corner of the United States. Created in 2012, Draw Down publishes small books about graphic design, typography, illustration, photography, art, and architecture.