Architecture Commons^™

Dcamm And Capital Stewardship, Sarah Felton

UMassBRUT Community

Created in 1980, the Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance (DCAMM) manages some 68 million square feet of building space for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. This talk focuses on some of the challenges DCAMM faces in managing these facilities at the state's higher education institutions where 74% of the building portfolio were built prior to 1981. After discussing the Commonwealth's priorities in Capital Investment, the talk concludes with a look at DCAMM-funded renovations to the Claire T. Carney Library and Science and Engineering Building at UMass Dartmouth.

Towards Civic Brutalism, Daniel Abramson

UMassBRUT Community

1960s Massachusetts was a Brutalist mecca, much of it with civic dimensions, mediating through architecture citizens' rights and identities. The expanded welfare state's administration in Massachusetts was consolidated in new buildings for federal, state, and municipal workers in Boston's Government Center, a top-down urban renewal process. Government Center's buildings, including Boston City Hall and the Massachusetts State Service Center, embodied Brutalist values of material integrity, monumentality, and abstraction. Little thought was given to the architecture's civic dimensions, how people would engage politically with each other and the state. Subsequently, City Hall Plaza functioned for decades as eastern Massachusetts' civic fairground, …

Brutal Realities, Mark Pasnik

UMassBRUT Community

This presentation examines the changing tide around the reception of Brutalism in the United States during the last decade, while questioning how that change will impact our treatment of concrete buildings in the future. As concrete modernism comes into more positive focus today, will attitudes toward the future of these buildings in the architecture and preservation communities readjust? Should such structures be preserved or conserved, adapted or transformed? And how important is it to be responsive to original intentions and elements of significance? A conservation management plan for Boston City Hall is presented as a case study in which careful …

Umass Dartmouth Science And Engineering (Seng) Building Systems Upgrades Project, Jillian Cornelius

UMassBRUT Community

Although UMass Dartmouth's Science and Engineering Building has long been viewed as an architectural treasure, its aging interior and structure have presented some challenges to users nearly 50 years after it opened. This talk examines Ellenzweig's extensive retrofitting of the UMass Dartmouth SENG building for accessibility, a new envelope, updated MEP, and fire-safety measures. After looking at the design phase and interactions with the Mass Historic Commission, the talk ends with an examination of the replacement of windows in the building.

Brutalist Structures – Polychlorinated Biphenyls, Theresa Wolejko

UMassBRUT Community

Until they were banned by the Federal Government in 1978, Polychlorinated Biphenyls or PCBs, were used extensively as sealants in Brutalist structures across the United States. As a result, these hazardous chemical compounds still reside in concrete buildings and present a danger to those looking to clean or renovate Brutalist structures. This talk explains the problems the University of Massachusetts Amherst has faced in dealing with PCBs over the last couple of decades and recommends some best practices for owners, designers, builders working on midcentury buildings which are suspected to contain these dangerous chemicals.

Concrete Deterioration And Diagnosis, Matthew B. Bronski

UMassBRUT Community

Built primarily in the 1960’s, mid-century modernist concrete buildings are now at the age when we regard many as historic or architecturally significant (and thus as deserving of careful restoration and stewardship), but also at an age where many now exhibit significant deterioration. In this presentation, Matthew Bronski describes the most common maladies and deterioration mechanisms that can befall exposed concrete facades, outlines investigative and diagnostic approaches, and discuss the pros and cons of different rehabilitation treatment options, and the importance of tailoring the treatment to the malady.

Umass Amherst Case Studies – Campus Center Plaza & Lederle Graduate Research Center, Elliott Hambrook

UMassBRUT Community

This presentation discusses Gale’s recent experience with repair projects at two (2) brutalist structures on the Amherst Campus at UMass. A board-formed concrete retaining wall at the base of the Murray D. Lincoln Campus Center (Marcel Breuer, 1970) was tastefully modified, but retained, as part of a waterproofing replacement project, addressing water infiltration and improving sight lines across the Campus Center Plaza. The panelized precast concrete façades of the John W. Lederle Graduate Research Center (Campbell, Aldrich, & Nulty, 1969) received new exterior sealants, enlarged panel joints, PCB removal and encapsulation, supplemental panel anchorage, and a waterproof coating.

Concrete Diagnostics & Assessment, Michael Schuller

UMassBRUT Community

The process of repairing Brutalist architecture begins with diagnosis and assessment of the material conditions of these buildings. This talk focuses on the processes that engineers undertake in order to document and access historic concrete before conservators and designers can form a plan to save such buildings. The speaker gives insight into the diagnostic techniques, such a visual assessment, nondestructive evaluation, sounding, moisture and metal detection, and chemical analysis.

Concrete Conservation Strategies And Repair, Paul Gaudette

UMassBRUT Community

Drawing on the speaker's many years in the field, this talk gives a comprehensive overview of concrete conservation. Beginning with the goals and approaches to conserving concrete, the talk then covers common protection systems, petrographic and chemical studies, and the design of mixes used in repairs. In order to demonstrate these techniques, two case studies are examined, including a Brutalist building and building with architectural precast. The talk ends with some recommendations on how to best approach cleaning and conservation of historic concrete buildings.

Campus Sustainability, Ludmilla Pavlova-Gillham

UMassBRUT Community

Sustainability at the UMass Amherst Campus is part of a long tradition of Sustainable Development and is driven by a century of policy, culminating in the latest efforts of the Massachusetts Commonwealth to plan for climate change and carbon neutrality. This presentation provides a summary of current initiatives and processes that are underway to reduce the UMass Amherst carbon footprint and to plan for a transition to renewable energy. It gives an overview of the sustainability and campus engagement resources that Campus Planning makes available to the public and its community of faculty and students, so that they can understand …

Lessons Learned From Personal Experience In Adaptive Reuse, Blake Jackson

UMassBRUT Community

This presentation details themes, regarding sustainability, from three adaptive reuse projects of Brutalist and post-war Modernist structures, accentuating overlaps with sustainability, embodied carbon, preservation, densification, and urbanization – all hallmarks regarding the adaptive reuse of these buildings. The first project illustrates opportunities created by up-branding a 1970’s era Sheraton into a “new” W Hotel (Midtown, Atlanta), whereby the preservation of the concrete playfully juxtaposed new interior/exterior design elements. The second project looks at the transformation of a purpose-built newspaper headquarters into a “new” LEED/Fitwel certified commercial facility, which reknit previously separated neighborhoods into a pedestrian/transit-oriented destination, serving as a catalyst …

Approaches To Renewing Brutalist-Era Lab Buildings, Jean Caroon

UMassBRUT Community

Given the immense amount of embodied carbon that mid-century Brutalist structures represent, we must redirect our focus from demolishing these concrete structures to renovating them to fit our needs in the 21st century. Higher education laboratory buildings from the 1960s and 1970s are a particularly challenging type of facility. This talk describes the work that Boston architecture firm Goody Clancy has recently undertaken in renovating over 1 million square feet of lab building space. The talk not only covers specific retrofits and envelope improvements to science buildings, such as the Gant Science Complex at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, …

Humanizing Brutalism: Graphics To Identify, Inform, Orient, Interpret And Inspire, Whitney Perkins

UMassBRUT Community

Despite the reputation of Brutalist architecture being somewhat cold and imposing, the original interiors of these buildings were often covered in brightly-colored signage. In the process of renovating Paul Rudolph's Claire T. Carney Library at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, designer Whitney Perkins drew upon the colors and graphics of the 1960s and 70s in order to construct a bold program of wayfinding, signage and tapestries for the building. This talk looks at some of the influences and processes involved in designing and fabricating this signage.

Humanizing The Brutalist Interior: The Renovation Of Paul Rudolph's Claire T. Carney Library At Umass Dartmouth, Kelly Haigh, Ben Youtz

UMassBRUT Community

Members of the team that worked on the renovation of the Claire T. Carney Library, designed by Paul Rudolph and completed in 1972, share their design solutions for maintaining the integrity of the architecture and fostering an interior that is welcoming of its occupants. Discussions focus on interior attributes, human occupants, color, light and texture as approaches to humanize the massive concrete attributes that are notorious of Brutalist structures.

Humanizing The Brutalist Interior: Inspiration. Collaboration. Transformation, Leslie Saul

UMassBRUT Community

This talk covers the process behind the design of the fabric and textiles that were added to UMass Dartmouth's iconic Claire T. Carney Library during a $48 million dollar renovation of the Paul Rudolph building, completed in 2012. Interior Designer, Leslie Saul, describes how she drew inspiration from both UMass Dartmouth's genesis as a textile college and Rudolph’s original color palette to create eye-catching interior furniture and carpets in order to humanize this particular Brutalist interior.

Modern Heritage: Why It Matters, And What Gci Is Doing To Help Conserve It, Chandler Mccoy

UMassBRUT Community

The Getty Conservation Institute entered the field of conserving modern heritage in 2013, with the establishment of its Conserving Modern Architecture Initiative (CMAI). The CMAI aims to advance the practice of conserving modern heritage and feels that the best way to retain and reuse modern buildings is by knowing how to maintain, repair and upgrade them, and does this by providing useful tools, case studies, and training to help promote this effort. There has recently been a wave of notable demolition cases which raises the question about the environmental impact of replacing existing buildings with new ones, with many concerned …

Umass Brut: Re-Imagining The Plinth, John Amodeo

UMassBRUT Community

Modeled on UVA’s Lawn, Paul Rudolph’s mid-century Brutalist UMass Dartmouth buildings march down both sides of a gently sloped great lawn following the grade with one exception, the Auditorium, which is raised above the quad’s lawn on a 6’ high plinth, accessed by monumental stairs underscoring the entire building. With its entries elusively tucked into the ends of the building, the Auditorium steps were ceremonial at best and vacant, functionless and windswept at worst.

Evolving tastes, priorities and social behavior over subsequent decades, and even more recently, the pandemic, have made indoor/outdoor relationships, outdoor space, and universal access a top …

Notes Towards A History Of The Brutalist Landscape, Marisa Angell Brown

UMassBRUT Community

When we talk about Brutalism, we are generally talking about architecture. Is there such a thing as the Brutalist landscape? If so, what defines it, and who are its practitioners? How does the Brutalist landscape navigate the relationship between plantings, hardscape and public art? What is it designed to do, and for whom? If the Brutalist landscape exists as a category, was it successful? Is the history of its public reception different from the reception of Brutalist architecture? This presentation lays out notes towards a history of the Brutalist landscape, considering the work of Bertrand Goldberg, M. Paul Friedberg, Lawrence …

Beholding Brutalism: A Cultural Landscape View, Elaine Stiles

UMassBRUT Community

This talk looks at the complexities of how we encounter monumental concrete not as art objects, but as elements of the cultural landscape with social meanings, relationships, and stories encoded into their spaces. This socially-driven approach rooted in historic and cultural context, renders fuller biographies of these places than aesthetics alone, and also enriches thinking about the futures of these monumental places.

Teaching Brutalist Architecture On Campus, Lydia Brandt

UMassBRUT Community

Modern architecture on campus--especially of the Brutalist variety--provides ample opportunities to introduce and analyze the history of twentieth-century architecture with college students. This talk presents strategies for documenting, teaching, and advocating with modern architecture on American college campuses using the speaker's work at the University of South Carolina as a case study.

International Student’S Mobility And Tourism: Relations, Opportunities, And Insights For Canadian University Cities, Maria Teresa Gullace, Tom Griffin

TTRA Canada 2021 Conference

The increase in student enrollment and mobility in Canadian universities every year generates a continuous flow of people that move, study, work, and live in university cities across the country. The presence of international students contributes to the prosperity of Canada, positively impacting its socio-cultural and economic development. The multiplicity of needs and services related to this segment of the urban population also makes their way through to the travel and hospitality sectors. Indeed, students visit and travel in the country, contributing to urban tourism and the local economy. In addition, the uncertainty related to the post-pandemic period and the …

Historic Millyard Revitalization Project: Ware, Ma, Andrew Carrano, Limin Chen, Wyatt Collins, Omar Eissa, Andrew Folger, Kevin Herlihy, Kerran Holmes, Samuel Huntress, Tharanah Lundi, Emily Menard, Aidan Murray, Meaghan O'Brien, Harrington Riendeau, Corrina Rossetti, Amelia Scofield, Yichen Wan, Jinning Yan

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Studio and Student Research and Creative Activity

This project’s mission is to provide an all- encompassing destination for the needs of current and future employees, residents, and visitors of the Ware Millyard Historic District and the community of Ware, MA. The project aims to facilitate the revitalization and redevelopment of the Millyard and develop a communal campus which provides employment, housing, goods, services, as well as recreational and social opportunities for the region. The vision of this project is to facilitate the revitalization and redevelopment of the Ware Millyard Historic District by establishing an emerging industry within the site. Incorporating the cannabis industry and all of its …

Tall Timber In Denver: An Exploration Of New Forms In Large Scale Timber Architecture, Andrew P. Weuling

Masters Theses

Wood has been utilized by humans for thousands of years in the construction of our built environment. More recently, our expanded understanding of the material and the advancement of engineered wood have allowed us to use wood like never before. Concrete and steel, however, have emerged as the main materials used in large scale construction in the late 19^th and 20^th Centuries. As we are battling and searching for solutions to climate change, the importance of wood in large scale construction has increased as not only is its carbon intensity is lower than steel and concrete, but its …

Re-Envisioning The American Dream, Elain Tang

Masters Theses

The United States of America is globally known as the land of opportunity, freedom, independence, equality, and above all, the American Dream. American writer and historian, James Truslow Adams, coined the phrase “American Dream” in his 1931 book The Epic of America. The American Dream is the belief that anyone, regardless of where they were born or what class they were born into, they can attain their own version of success in society through hard work, sacrifice, and taking risks. Post-World War II, the demand for home ownership rapidly increased. The development of Levittown provided single-family homes for white nuclear …

Bridging The Gaps In Public Conversation By Fostering Spaces Of Activism, Karitikeya Sonker

Masters Theses

Spaces for protests, demonstrations, and activism are shifting under contemporary social, cultural, and governance structures. While particular conditions for physical space were once fairly unified in their ability to establish space for activism and dissent; social media and digital platforms have fundamentally changed the nature of those areas. This thesis aims to investigate frameworks of space-making that can potentially reposition spaces of activism as everyday events that represent the mood of the society. This in turn will also help in revisiting the terms of human engagement with the help of spaces that facilitate a deeper understanding of the people around …

Exploring The Use Of Grid-Scale Compressed Air Energy Storage In The Urban Landscape, Connor S. Slover

Masters Theses

Energy storage is becoming a crucial element to the renewable energy grid, and new facilities will have to go somewhere. This thesis will propose to co-locate compressed air energy storage on a site with residential units, and a community park.

This thesis will make the argument that co-locating a compressed air energy storage system with residential units could create a new start for the communities most harmed by fossil fuel infrastructure. This thesis will propose a design for a site in East Boston; a community badly scarred by heating oil and natural gas storage; with the goal of creating a …

An Assessment Of Four Selected Communities Along The Appalachian Trail In Relation To Emile Benton Mackaye's Original Vision Of Regional Planning, Jessica Ann Schottanes

Masters Theses

Planner, conservationist, forester, and geographer Emile Benton MacKaye envisioned a revolutionary, extensive foot trail that would promote the interaction between communities throughout the United States' distinctive eastern region. His 1921 plan for the Appalachian Trail (A.T.) focused on balancing the basic requirements for life in and out of the urban context by developing an ‘indigenous’ environment and developmental mold (Bower 1962, 372). However, almost a century has passed, and MacKaye's approach to the planning process, organization, environmental development, and the rural economy remains hidden beneath the mountain forest canopy extending from Maine to Georgia.

Four of the forty-nine designated communities …

From Sanctuary To Home In The Post-Interstate City, Morgan B. Sawyer

Masters Theses

The removal of New York Interstate- 81’s (I-81) 1.4 mile stretch of raised, four-lane highway in Syracuse will highlight the critical role of socioeconomics, accessibility, and community building in urban neighborhood reclamation. The removal of what had been previously deemed an urban renewal project, presents Syracuse with new opportunities for space restoration and place-making efforts, atoning for careless and traumatic historic divisions, all the while exploring more substantive design responses tailored to the realities of the City. This thesis explores these fundamental planning considerations through a design lens; by proposing a comprehensive and integrated vision of physical and spatial opportunities …

An Architecture Of A New Story, Nathan Y. Lumen

Masters Theses

As the world reckons with an uncertain future at the hands of global climate change and biodiversity loss, the question of how to proceed seems ever more urgent. Approaches to sustainability in design tend to focus on technological solutions to what is often presented as a technical problem. This approach overlooks the ways in which the forces that have led us to this point are born out of our cultural story of what it means to be human, what the natural world is, and what our relationship is to it. This is the story that has permitted if not encouraged …

The Homestead Helper Handbook, Courtney A. Jurzynski

Masters Theses

When the pandemic hit, and grocery stores and other necessities started to shut down and create havoc amongst the general public, it became clear that having the ability to rely on a self-sufficient homestead might be the only way to survive and thrive. As a graduate student who has studied architecture and sustainability, this idea seems possible. As an average human with no prior architectural or homesteading knowledge, this idea is daunting.

This thesis is asking, is there a systematic way to develop a tool to evaluate, and aid in the design of, a self-sustaining, off-grid homestead? Can this tool …