Architecture Commons^™

Suppression | Liberation: Memorial To The Lgbtq + Holocaust Victims, Justin Difabritis

Architecture Thesis Prep

Architecture + poetry are powerful forms of creativity, both exemplifying beauty, symbolism, emotion, and experience through structure + form. This thesis is interested in poetic architecture and its ability to not only narrate, represent, symbolize, or express, but also eternalize, the story of groups, individuals, and events.

Through the analysis of, but not limited to, memorials, tombs, and monuments, a deeper architectural understanding will be offered, one of architecture’s ability to emotionally affect others as a means of remembrance.

This research will focus on the literal + symbolic narrative and experience of the LGBTQ+ victims of the holocaust, placing a …

Panopticon: A Privacy Revelation, Kexin Wang, Zhexu Yang

Architecture Thesis Prep

Our thesis project studies and analyzes the control of Surveillance Capitalism over people’s privacy, and how to make people realize the importance of privacy through the means of an architectural/design narrative. This concept comes from Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, which explains how tech companies collect extra data, capture people’s behavioral surplus and sell them to third party customers, such as advertising companies, thus the predictions about people’s preferences accordingly. In this process, technology companies can make tremendous profit by stealing users’ personal information and then …

Tectonic Thresholds: Reclaiming Space Through Geomorphological Design, Amreeta Verma

Architecture Thesis Prep

This research posits that a revitalization of indigenous earth architecture practices in a contemporary context can mitigate the immense waste and embodied carbon in the construction industry. Earth materials are the focus of this research because they are locally sourced, abundantly available, and can be reused or returned to the natural environment, when utilized in a circular consumption cycle. Designing for reuse reduces the impact of construction waste on the burgeoning issue of environmental degradation and resource depletion.

The structural viability and environmental enclosure capabilities of soil throughout its lifecycle will be tested in different forms derived geomorphically from the …

My Abject Body: Dissimulating & Disheveling Fleshy Matter, Taylor Hoople

Architecture Thesis Prep

Body (as subject) and space (as object) are polarized entities in modern discourse and design. The current epoch of hygiene, control, and mass-production/ consumption renders the body and the space(s) it inhabits as whole, discrete entities. In their totality, body and space are idealized opposites, failing to experience any messy overlaps or ambiguous in-betweenness. My feminine body is particularly subject to this dualism, being tightly bound to the legal and social patriarchal dominance over my body’s autonomy and appearance.

This thesis seeks to corrupt my hyper-aestheticized and policed body by making (with) abject( ion). Understood both as an ongoing condition …

Maps!: Living With Ghosts, Ximeng Luo, Shihui Zhu

Architecture Senior Theses

The scene is set along Heilongjiang. The river feeds populations in the Russian Far East and Northeastern China, while simultaneously delineating the long and winding national border between contemporary Russia and China. The Chinese Northeast has been flattened and re-established as a cultural icon, yet when we peel off the pictures from streaming media, what kind of marks does the northeast- once called "the eldest son of the Republic" for its rapid industrial development in the last century- leave on the land? Infrastructure - such as collective farms in fields, tree farms in forests, road and electric towers- becomes a …