Architecture Commons^™

Da Ste Zhivi I Zdravi: May You Be Alive And Well An Exploration Into Play, Ruination, And Preservation, Levana Elena Rashba

Senior Projects Spring 2023

My thesis explores unconventional architectural representation and themes through the lens of memory and play. I am drawn to the everyday, less heroic moments of architecture and to the celebration of lived life. I use the thematic structure of play throughout my project as a way to approach a site and rethink its space, history, and meaning. The surface is the site with which I am operating, inspired by motifs of weathering, pastiche, palimpsest, and collage to illustrate fractured memory and layered histories. These approaches manifest in a memory map informed by two walks I took this February with my …

An Investigation Of The Car-Centric Street: Cataloging And Advocating For Misuses And Disruptions From The Users Of The Street, Harris Joseph Anton

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Constellations Of Capital: Applying Architecture’S Spatial Language To Global Networks Of Food, Armed Conflict, And Reverberations Of Violence, Oliver J. Mead

Senior Projects Fall 2023

Architecture, as the art and/or practice of designing and constructing buildings, offers an often overlooked array of representational devices that, as tested within this senior project, prove significant in reframing geopolitical perspectives in a manner that circumvents the limitations of metaphorization. The physical products and results of architectural design are the built objects that facilitate and coordinate socio-political spaces, yet it is the spatially descriptive process of architectural design itself in representing built relationships that can be valuable in constructing provocative and experimental investigations of present and future spatial environments.This project focuses on a tripartite of present-day global issues: food …

On Space, Joseph S. Mcvicker Iii

Senior Projects Fall 2023

Our architecture is becoming more and more abstract; financial speculation, square-footage, zoning, taken-for-granted shapes, and the repetition of trivially differentiated prefabricated components represent an increasingly (supposedly) adequate description of our architecture - a description largely divorced from the lived reality of its social inhabitation or, in other words, what it means to us and how we use it. Meanwhile, the extraction of more new materials and the production of more, new, and different buildings has always been unsustainable. A practice is needed that reverses and resists this force of abstraction and that does not involve new construction but instead involves …

In Defense Of “Cheap Architecture”, Henry Francis Farnum

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Audience Patina: An Enmeshment Of Architecture And Theater, Alison R. Kane

Senior Projects Spring 2022

This senior project entitled Audience Patina: An Enmeshment of Architecture and Theater explores the interconnections and juxtapositions between environmental topographies, liminal space, and imaginary dreamscapes. The project consists of interdisciplinary research used to create a large-scale installation piece, as well as the direction of the play The Stars Come Out at Night. This installation was created in conversation with the play, which was written by fellow theater department senior, Emily Kaufman-Bell. The play is the essential work that briefed the design around a dreamlike environmental imagery. The design and research explore how space and bodies communicate with each other …

Are We Home?, Blake Donald Sylvester

Senior Projects Spring 2022

I’ve never been comfortable, and I don’t expect to be. There’s a good possibility that I don’t want to be. During my time of growing and trying to consider myself an artist, comfort has never been present. When I’m comfortable I'm stable, and when I’m stable I'm stationary. I don’t want to be stationary. Being comfortable in a place often means remaining there. I’m scared of not moving and I’m scared of staying in a place that I know. I don’t want to be within walls and structures that don’t provide me with comfort, and yet I’m uncomfortable being comfortable. …

Domestic Mythologies, Natalie Lizbeth Montoya

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Domestic Mythologies delves into certain object details inside the Ameri-can home: the curtain, buttons, napkins, piles, the kitchen sink, and screens. Each essay hopes to reveal the way each object encourages certain ideological tendencies, and at their worst, ideological abuses. By investigating historical and contemporary promotions by way of their use in spaces, the effort aims at measuring our present alienation inside the space that is ready to, ideologically, burst at the seams: home.

In the style of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, explores three aspects of each object. First, the ideological analysis on “the language of so-called mass culture” relating to …

A Rejection Of Nature? Or The Natural World? An Objectless Inquiry Into The Writings Of Kazimir Malevich, Aidan Edward Galloway

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Not In My Backyard! Finding The Potent Gaps In New Urbanist Development Of Rural New York, Dorothea L. Mcrae

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Hut Annandale: Humblest Dwelling, Ruiqi Zhu

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Lots of us have a dream deep down in the heart: to get away from the congested cities and live in a hut in nature. French port Jean Wahl once wrote: The frothing of the hedges I keep deep inside me. In my project, he explored this dream and constructed a group of architectural structures by hand for those potential hermits. Studying at Bard College, I have found this region is a place with a great hermit culture. With the picturesque scene of nature and the location near the New York Metropolitan area, here the mid-Hudson Valley has attracted lots …

Some Notes On Congruency, Ryan J. Rusiecki

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Some Notes on Congruency is an examination of the seemingly arbitrary methods in which the built environment facilitates order among its inhabitants (eg., parking lot striping, roadway signs). Asphalt fissures observed at the main intersection in Red Hook, NY were used as a starting off point for making the photographs contained within this book. A lens with a focal length that closely resembles the range of human vision was used to communicate the experience of discovering fissures from my perspective as a pedestrian and motorist. I was most captivated by temporal, subtle fissures, such as the replanting of flower beds …

Cedar Hill: A Case Study In Preservation And Education In A Digital World, Lin Barnett

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Visit Cedar Hill (now Annandale-on-Hudson) as it stood over a century ago, reconstructed in virtual reality. This interactive project retells an important aspect of Hudson Valley History, its mill communities, which do not get preserved in the archeological record and are not as closely maintained as its neighboring communities of Bard College and Montgomery Place. The project analyzes the structures' changing purposes, as well as their changing architectural qualities, to trace the story of the hamlet's decline.

New York Citadel: A Future History Of Hudson Yards, Pansy D. Schulman

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Multidisciplinary Studies of Bard College.

From The Church Of Disco To Waterfront Ruins: An Analysis Of Gay Space, Liam Nolan

Senior Projects Spring 2019

My senior thesis is an analysis of gay space from the late 1970s to 1980s New York, and I’m questioning how themes of private vs. public, accessibility, race, and economic status dictated where one searched for gay self-expression and community in the built environment. In order to understand how queer spaces functioned architecturally and socially, I’ve chosen to research two opposites: The Saint and the west side piers. The former was a private club in New York City from 1980-1988 and was considered to be the “Vatican of Disco” with a planetarium that could hold over a thousand men, two …

A Hundred Houses: Pauline Leader And The Spatial Poetics Of Disability, Carl Robert Nelson

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Multidisciplinary Studies of Bard College.

Homo Ludens: Play, Subversion, And The Unfinished Work Of Constant’S New Babylon, Kristen Lee Kubecka

Senior Projects Spring 2018

This project explores Johan Huizinga’s theory of play with respect to art, space, and politics. Tracing the ways that his text, Homo Ludens, played out within the revolutionary avant-gardes of CoBrA and the Situationist International, as well as Constant’s utopian project of New Babylon, it investigates the subversive and reconstructive power of play as a counter-paradigm to the rationalist urbanism of postwar reconstruction.

The Architecture Of Confinement: An Exploration Of Spatial Boundaries In Wright, Poe, And Foucault, Samantha Feig

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Hitler's Germania: Propaganda Writ In Stone, Aaron Mumford Boehlert

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Architectural Constructions Of Memory & The Ruin In Post-1989 Berlin, Gilda Hanna Gross

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Divine Interiors: Meaning, Spirituality, And Evolution In Baptismal Ritual Space., Mirabai Dorothy Bright-Thonney

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College

No Crime By Design? Crime Deterrence And Urban Design Reform In The Usa After World War Ii, Cason Leafe Hall

Senior Projects Spring 2016

This project connects three important periods in the development of design against crime in public housing, all building on one another and connected in their own ways. Tracing the discourse from the earliest approaches of policy-making following the Great Depression in the 1940s, development of the architecturally based Defensible Space theory in the 1970s, and finally the change in policing protocols called for Broken Windows theory in the 1990s, this project demonstrates that crime and public housing are inexorably linked, though are often times not viewed in conjunction with one another.

Walls Have Ears But They Also Speak –A Comparative Study Of Two Playgrounds, Anna Hirson-Sagalyn

Senior Projects Spring 2015

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.