Architecture Commons^™

America’S Finest Housing Crisis: Racialized Housing & Suburban Development, Vicenta Martinez Govea

McNair Summer Research Program

U.S. Government operations between 1940-1950 brought unprecedented direct and indirect employment opportunities to San Diego, exacerbating an already growing housing shortage. To accommodate the thousands of new defense workers, the government produced the largest defense housing project to date in the small neighborhood of Linda Vista. However, this opportunity and largesse was extended primarily to a select group of white working-class families who had access to defense jobs and, consequently, subsidized housing. Military presence in San Diego during World War II shaped the design of homes and exclusively allocated housing, as both shelter and financial instrument, to white working-class families …

Beyond The Market: A “Public-Commons-Partnership” For Housing, Arielle Lawson

Publications and Research

The commodification of housing has led to new levels of unaffordability for tenants all over the country. With skyrocketing rents and an explosion of homelessness, we are faced with the glaring failures of our capitalist housing system to meet people’s most basic human needs. Recognizing the inherent limitations of “affordable housing” within a profit-driven system, we need a paradigm shift around housing that can change the terms of the debate, and advance a real alternative to the speculative market. A growing housing justice movement — combined with a renewed politicization of tenants — is leading the way. From new rent …

New Beijing | A Renewed Vernacular, Bowen Victor Zhang

Architecture Senior Theses

What does the term "vernacular" means? In an increasingly flay world, this thesis seeks to define the essential elements of the vernacular architecture of Beijing in order to propose a contemporary residential archetype.

In the past century, China has experienced unprecedented economic growth and development. Along with the many influences introduced by cross-cultural interactions, the phenomenon of architectural and social gentrification has begun to affect many of the populations living in urban centers. The same gentrifying forces that have drastically changed Greenwich Village and other New York City neighborhoods has rapidly moved to China and has replaced centruries-old vernacular communities …

Green Blot District | Considering Low Density Neighborhoods, Tom Arleo

Architecture Senior Theses

By adjusting the texture of now declined early 20th Century outer-urban neighborhoods to adopt low density blocks, new zoning and its resultant architecture can produce an intricate spatial fabric that mediates between individual customization and collective suburban image essential to American detached dwelling. Overlapping functions, spaces, and surfaces offer a new cohesion necessary for developing physically and socially tight-knit communities in a thinning, object-made fabric.

This thesis rethinks suburban practices at the scale of the house, lot, and block, in order to speak directly to issues of building autonomy, non-spatial surface and volume conventions, and residential-program-only zoning. Creating the scheme …

Deployable Domesticity, Daniel Hopkins

Architecture Senior Theses

Deployable homes have characterized the survivalist origins of our species, the lifestyles of disenfranchised populations, and the luxurious retreats of others. Still, a predominance of contemporary domestic space relies on the ‘permanently’ stationary and situated object. As the social and ecological conditions of our society are rapidly and continually fluctuating, we must reaffirm our association with deployable culture and expand the utilization of mobile and adaptable unit. Further, architecture must negotiate the contrasts between ephemerality and permanence.

Through speculation of the social and sustainable implications of the deployable unit, issues of flexibility, material selection and afterlife, economics, ecology, and efficiency …

Self Made City, Noel Brady

Other resources

A review of cohousing policy and projects in Berlin as published in "Self Made City” – Self Initiated Urban Living and Architectural Interventions

Towards A Collective Spatial Form:An Analysis Of Achill’S Deserted Village, Noel Brady

Conference papers

This paper examines an earlier study by Bob Kingston and along with onsite observations develops an environmental theory behind the particular siting and location of the deserted village in Achill, Ireland. The paper relies on the survey conducted by Kingston in the first instance but then by translating the material into a different format has concluded on statistically significant evidence of willful and careful planning and design in the construction of the houses.

Housing Regeneration Strategies - Dit Students' Projects For Waterford City, Ireland., Jim Roche, Orla O'Donnell, Jim Ward

Other resources

No abstract provided.

Reinvestigation Of Culture, Yi Zhang

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Due to the culture revolution, inflation of economy and globalization, China has been suffering from mass unqualified products of architecture, loss of culture and traditions, also unaffordable real estate; causing the instability of the society, in which emptiness, anxiety, uncertainty of people are occupied. Burdons must be released. And culture need to be revitalized. By studying I-Ching and Taoism, the origins of Chinese civilization, finding the philosophy of Tao which can be carried into architecture, the equilibrium between culture and globalization is established. The nation-wide uniformed apartments built under the welfare oriented housing distribution system in the 1980’s, are now …

Spatial Negotiations In A Commercial City: The Red Sea Port Of Mocha, Yemen During The First Half Of The Eighteenth Century, Nancy Um

Art History Faculty Scholarship

The city of Mocha in Yemen was one of the most important Red Sea ports of the early modern Arab world, handling the trade of spices, textiles, metals, local aromatics and coffee beans. This essay examines the urban structures that governed the needs and practices of merchants in the city during the first half of the eighteenth century. Drawing on contemporary Arabic chronicles, archival European trade documents, historical photographs, and field work in the city, it documents the conspicuous absence of a network of public trade structures, like the urban khan, the expected locus for trade in an Arab city …

Ernst May And The Campaign To Resettle The Countryside: Rural Housing In Silesia, 1919-1925, Susan Henderson

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

May's Silesian work chronicles the impact of Modernism and corporatism on Weimar housing

East Village Housing New York City, Alice J. Raucher

Architecture Senior Theses

The intent of this thesis is to develop low-rise, high density urban housing which will provide its occupants with the basic amenities of light, air, and green space, while reconstructing and extending the fabric of New York City into an area of the East Village.
There exists in the East Village, as in other areas of Manhattan, an uneasy relationship between the low-scale rowhouses and tenements [...] and the monolithic architecture of the superblock housing developments of the 1950s. These rowhouses and tenements [...] provided few amenities for its inhabitants.
The proposed development would investigate new housing prototypes for a …