Architecture Commons^™

Reconnect The Urban Surface --- By Making Landscape And Infrastructure, Ming Gao

Architecture Senior Theses

Today in the post industrial city, the connection between different places relies mostly on transportation by way of automobiles, public buses, and subway. By walking or biking, people are able to talk with nature directly. However, by modern transportation, people are confined in a close machinery space which prevents them from experiencing nature directly. They are separated from nature by consciously choosing to use modern transportation during their daily lives, and they get less and less direct access to nature. Nowadays, nature experienced space within walking distance int he city is limited to the tiny front yard garden, where landscape …

Resurfacing Infrastructure, Ewelina Peszt

Architecture Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

Architecture Of Population Flows | Localizing Tourism In The Inside Passage, Jennifer Tamblin

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis focuses on a problem that arises due to the specific flows of tourists and migrant workers into the south east Alaskan Inside Passage. Because of these population flows, situations have emerged in the small town communities that create a need for an intervention designed to cater to the specific circumstances surrounding each individual group of people, and how they coexist with one another."

A Greenway Runs Through It: The Midtown Greenway And The Social Landscape Of Minneapolis, Minnesota, Aaron M. Brown

Geography Honors Projects

Minneapolis’ Midtown Greenway is a 5.5 mile bicycle and pedestrian corridor that replaced a grade-separated railroad line in 2000 and expanded to its current length in 2007. In an era of reinvestment in American inner cities and a heightened political awareness of both urban transportation alternatives and public spaces, the academic field of geography has much to contribute to the discussion about the viability, effectiveness, and success of projects such as this adaptive reuse of reclaimed, deindustrialized space. My research investigates results from a survey of 223 Greenway users, exploring participants’ demographics, residential proximity to the trail, and purposes for …

Community Infrastructure: A Transformation Of The New Orleans Industrial Canal, Nicholas Thornton

Architecture Theses

The city of New Orleans is in need of a symbol of stability and hope. The design proposal is for a New Orleans Water Treatment Facility that focuses on purification, reclamation and desalination processes. The facility will create a pure water supply that will be distributed into public circulation as well as be made readily available during natural disasters. A public works building such as this is important to the growth of the ever rebuilding city. In 2005, New Orleans was hit by Hurricane Katrina causing flooding and destruction to a great majority of the city. Once the hurricane subsided …

Activated Infrastructure, Joanna T. Myers

Architecture Thesis Prep

No abstract provided.

[Re]-Establishing Connection: Integrating People Through Movement And Culture In Nyc, Justin Leung

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis proposes to test and re-establish how architecture can make connections between people. Through freedom of movement, transportation creates many opportunities for the congregation of people and social interaction. This thesis aims to create spaces for mixing and awareness through movement, and program."

Infrastructure Asset Management (Iam): Evolution And Evaluation, Eric Too, Linda Tay

Linda Too

Despite its rapid development in the last decade, infrastructure asset management today suffers from an identity crisis as the definition and scope of infrastructure asset management remains a contentious issue. The purpose of this paper is to trace the evolution of infrastructure asset management and evaluate the current practices. In the process, a framework defining the scope of infrastructure asset management is proposed. Notwithstanding the systematic approach that many organisations adopt to manage their infrastructure assets, this paper argues for the need to adopt a more integrated and strategic perspective in the light of the dynamic contemporary operating environment.

Critical Foundations: Providing Australia’S 21st Century Infrastructure, Michael Regan

Michael Regan

Extract:

Infrastructure is undoubtedly the least understood of the major asset classes in Australia. A tradition of public ownership and operation, its status as a public good and a lack of information about its investment characteristics in both public and private hands has contributed to limited recognition of its role in national and regional economies. However, this situation is changing. A coincidence of political, economic and financial events in the lead up to the worldwide economic recession of the late 1980s and Australia's microeconomic reforms of the 1990s b[r]ought into sharper focus the central role that infrastructure plays in both …

Moving Towards Self-Reliance: Living Conditions Of Refugee Camps In Lebanon And Opportunities For Development, Dana Masad

Master's Theses

Refugee camps in Lebanon are harsh, continuously and rapidly deteriorating environments. In addition to poverty, numerous wars and the restrictions of civil rights, refugee camps that were not designed as a long-term settlement were made to accommodate their residents in addition to their descendents for a period that has lasted over 59 years. Since the establishment of the camps in 1948 the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have fallen victim to multiple wars and as a result most camps have witnessed major destruction of homes and infrastructure, and a few were entirely destroyed. Today, the planning and development of the camps …

Constructing A Living Surface: City Hall As Connective Tissue, Benjamin Grace

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Infrastructural space offers a model for architecture which is not closed and self-contained, but expansive, continuous, and referential beyond itself. A healthy urban landscape can be produced by buildings that serve to construct sites which expand into the city, giving expression to the role of the urban surface."

Identity Factory: The Mass Production Of The Masses, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Peter W. Bartash

Architecture Theses

Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is a location whose identity is its layered manufacturing history. Within the infrastructural system of corridors that organizes its urban fabric exists a tectonic language of an architecture whose purpose is in providing opportunities for making. Operating within one of these corridors, the Identity Factory allows that an individual become aware of activity shaping his or her own identity, the relationship of that identity to a greater context, and the potential to define oneself engaged in a cultural landscape through the process of manufacturing

Synthetic Window: Game Space And The Player's Dilemma, Alejandro Perez

Architecture Thesis Prep

No abstract provided.

Landscraper, Erik Maso

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The LANDSCRAPER project challenges the re-establishment of perceptually stable and natural orders. It is specifically attracted to the claim that one of the largest infrastructural projects exists in the intermountain region of western United States with the abundance of reclaimable mining territories. The project is in the conception of organizational system that instrumentalizes mining techniques to shape, stabilize, and revegetate unclaimed waste rock edifices, maximizing the potentials of a nature whose production and consumption is perpetually fueled by cultural needs and desires. Its intentions are to consider the imaging of nature, extend the perception of nature in the context of …

Vertica 'L' Exchange: Public Interaction And Community Identity Along The 'L' In Chicago, Dena M. Wangberg

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis proposes to counter the 'genericness' of network identity in public transportation through the transformation of two nodes along the network of the 'L' in Chicago, Illinois.... Through this thesis investigation, the larger network of public transportation infrastructure is particularized by the introduction of new urban program that not only reveals the identities of a given place, but also helps to construct a richer identity throughout the entire network."

Connective Ecology: Reclaiming The Postindustrial Urban Landscape, Thomas Smith

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis contends that by considering the urban landscape as an evolving interconnected network, much like an ecosystem, architecture can create flexible, accessible public space as part of a larger scale system which affects as well as responds to specific physical and social forces of the contemporary postindustrial city.

Rural Iowa And The Transgenic Railroad, Wilson Day

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Using an understanding of transgenics and recombinant SNA technology as an analogue for exploring the architectural possibilities within a rail line in Clinton, Iowa, and its directly adjacent modes of transportation, I propose to create an intervention which bridges all modes and establishes a connection between a large portion of Eastern Iowa and the city of Clinton, which will act as an interface for the transfer of architectural goods as well as the transfer of people from various parts of rural Iowa to larger urban areas."

Mps Movement Public Space, Matthew R. Kanewske

Architecture Senior Theses

"Portland provides an opportunity to examine the way this can relate to formal construction because cities' primary sites of public spaces will be integrated with the flows of movement, but this creates a dichotomy between the nature of site as a singular entity and the requirements of multiplicity required by a system. In this lies an opportunity for architectural invention of new forms of communicative public space."

Activating The Void: Programmed Pedestrian Infrastructure In Syracuse, Ny, Karissa Kizer

Architecture Senior Theses

"To deal with the abundance of vehicles, much of the land immediately surrounding highways is occupied by parking facilities. These facilities, however, are neither spatially nor economically beneficial to the site, and are considered voids as they lack any meaningful use or activity. The scales of highways and pedestrians must be reconciled and the voids activated in order for cities to continue to survive with the ever-increasing presence of transportation infrastructure."

Urban Logic(S), Syracuse University School Of Architecture

Books

This book includes a wide range of essays and ideas concerning today's urban issues, and specifically that of Syracuse.

Gill, Massachusetts: The Mariamante Parcel, Center For Economic Development

Center for Economic Development Technical Reports

In December of 2004, the small Massachusetts town of Gill took a tremendous step to influence its own future. A fifteen acre parcel of land in the south of town, near the intersection of two important town roads, had been put up for sale by its previous owners. The land had been under an agricultural preservation restriction, a program enabled by Massachusetts General Law Chapter 61 A. As part of this restriction, if the land were ever sold, the town would have right of first refusal.

The town's recent Community Development Plan has identified the parcel as a prime site …

Haverhill Street Corridor Study: Methuen, Massachusetts, Center For Economic Development

Center for Economic Development Technical Reports

The City of Methuen’s Department of Planning and Community Development hired a team of students from the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Master’s in Regional Planning studio class to examine the growth impacts of a potential highway interchange reconfiguration. Exit 46 of Interstate 93 in Methuen is a failed interchange, and will likely be reconfigured in the next ten years. Methuen, a middle class city of 44,000 midway between Boston, MA and Manchester, NH, is currently experiencing significant growth pressures. The reconfigured interchange will only add to these pressures.

In consultation with the client, the studio team focused its analysis on …

Activating The Void, Karissa Kizer

Architecture Thesis Prep

Syracuse, New York contains an abundance of voids created by transportation infrastructure. Interstate 81 runs north-south through the city, connecting with Interstate 690 and eventually to the New York State thruway. I-81 exists in the city as an overpass, a barrier which effectively slices the city in two. Each half of the city contains a major productive zone, though the area in between the two, the district surround the highway, exists as both a physical and programmatic void. Within this area, there are numerous specific voids, most in the form of parking facilities which can be used to explore the …

Fluid Architecture : Synthesis : City, Adriana L. Zarrillo

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This proposal intends to manipulate the streams of the city and their potential overlaps and deviations in order to create an intervention that will revitalize both economically and aesthetically a localized area. By further developing the city streams that are already present, the pre-existing conditions, and subsequently introducing those streams that are not present in order to produce the desired result, a successful dynamic node of convergent streams with the potential to link back to larger scales."

Gateway To Interaction, Adam C. Mcwilliams

Architecture Thesis Prep

"American cities presently face a moment of truth. While traditional city centers continue to signify established culture, science, education, and finance, in almost every city crucial sections of originally thriving city centers have persistently decreased as a location of interaction.

The regional city, if it is to sustain itself and maintain any diversity of architecture, density, and most importantly interaction, will need to accommodate a broad range of speeds, scales, and means of movement in both directions to reactivate the city center."

The Effect Of Cinematographic Architecture On Urban Space, Jose R. Fonacier

Architecture Thesis Prep

"These ideas of cinematic architecture gate when utilized in a hierarchical network of city gates within an urban space can begin to create more complex story lines to bring order to a complex variety of experiences. It also perceptually breaks down a large urban space that is perceived as homogeneous by creating sub-defined districts through a hierarchical network of regions."

A Structure Defining Movement: Mediating Between The Past & Present, Laura Klock

Architecture Thesis Prep

Erie Canal Aqueduct, Rochester, NY - Re-forming the Identity of a Historic Urban Artifact

"Structuring the movement through space, and thus the temporal experience of that place, can serve as a mnemonic device for the recollection of the past and the reinterpretation of a site's identity as a composite of the past and present."

Rebuilding Community: Boston's North End, Maria A. Fazio

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The city is enhanced by architecture form which participates in the urban fabric as a means of connection, therefore promoting the formation of community... The intent is to propose developemnt for portions of the Central Artery Master Plan in Boston, Massachusetts. The city is currently in the process of relocating a major infrastructural element from its present location above grade to a tunnel beneath the city. Demolition of the exiting central artery offers the city an opportunity to infill much of the land and restore surface level streets reconnecting the east sire of the interstate to the downtown area...

The …

Mobility And Station: Place And Movement In A Culture Of Nostalgia And Commodities, Jonathan Hicks

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The proposal, interchanging an already detached program, resurrecting forgotten artifacts as symbols, and inverting conceptions of organization, would be one method of connecting to local networks and contexts in order to ground the project in site and place. It is not meant to be seen as a corrective measure for any aspect of the site, only as an opportunity to utilize and reinvent its unique situation and history in a new way. It is a model for the creation of a sustainable place in a mobile society."

Infrastructure And Improvisationalism, Nick Saponara

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Infrastructure serves as a milt-scaled organizing urban framework in which material practices impose an identity on a given place allowing for the activation of otherwise static conditions.