Architecture Commons^™

Reconstruct The Missing Narrative: Rethinking Contemporary Chinese Architecture Through Ancient Landscape Paintings, Taiming Chen, Yiwei Wu

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis addresses the issue of lacking self-identity and missing narrative under contemporary Chinese architecture discipline. Using ancient landscape paintings as design source, this project aims to create an environment that provides personal experience and exclusive meaning from a participant’s point of view instead of an omniscient view.

Paintings are selected from different dynasties and artists, but all based on one important cultural theme: Reclusion. Thus, the reconstructed narrative would provide a tranquil environment for inhabitant to have a temporary retreatment from the city life through making, seeking and thinking.

Decentral Park, Garrett Wineinger

Architecture Senior Theses

In this thesis, I will contemplate the necessary process of weaving the large landscape into the urban fabric. As stated within Anita Berrizbeitia’s essay, Re-placing Process, in the book Large Parks, “Yet for all their susceptibility to the ebb and flow of urban circumstances, large parks remain fundamental to cities, not only because they take on infrastructural and ecological functions displaced from densely built centers but because they are distinct, memorable places. They absorb the identity of the city as much as they project one, becoming socially and culturally recognizable places that are unique and irreproducible. Those large public parks …

Unveiling The Rural Landscape, Carolina Jimenez

Architecture Senior Theses

Within the past 50 years, industrialized farming has transformed America’s rural and agricultural landscapes. These two landscapes have taken on increasingly divergent cultural representations in language, paintings and photography. Architectural interventions within the rural landscape can act as a device to reveal these differences. In this way I am engaging in four interrelated discourses.

Defining the Rural | Linguistic, Painting, Photographic Representations In order to define the rural landscape, it is essential to understand the way it has been constructed by cultural representations in language, painting and photography. Images of nature mediate that which is outside of us, translating environment …

(Im)Permanent Landform Built: The Edge Between "Natural" And Man-Made, Katharina Hoerath

Architecture Senior Theses

"I believe that the paramount interconnectedness between architecture and site should become apparent when examining the theoretical constructions, physical, metaphysical, and sensual dimensions. Having chosen the sites at two different threshold of erosion (Matterhorn and Holderness Coast), I claim that the gray zone between “natural” and man made needs to be addressed in an intriguing way to create an aesthetic form responding to landform change over time. This thesis offers an opportunity to contextualize past events and to provoke and imagine something new. Architecture as the permanent, solid element determines the edge towards the solidifying landform. Moreover, this topic provides …

Re-Thinking The Green Belt: Sustainability And Development In Growing Cities, Maria Saavedra

Architecture Senior Theses

One of the major goals of this research is to study the relationship between nature and technology as urban generators. I agree with Lisa Tilder and Beth Bostein, who state that instead of using architectural technology to return nature to some impossible, pre-human pristine state, we should consider fully employing the power of architecture to produce new forms of nature. Instead of thinking about the River’s edge as a natural and physical barrier between the water and the city, we should consider it as an opportunity to challenge the image of nature, exploring how it limits or furthers our social …

Landscape Of Culture: Permanence And Change, Stefanie Huchzermeier

Architecture Senior Theses

"As conditions change and culture shifts to adapt, it is my contention that architecture has the capacity to provide an understanding of identity in times of change by regenerating the previously existing level of engagement between people and their natural environment through means of a reestablished spatial network and a materialization of informal social and spatial relationships."

A Sacred And Secular Landscape: Empowering Social Agency, Shreya Shah

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that landscape can provoke an idea for a productive, public space using the people of the city as social agents to create a sensitive rather than oppressive water remediation system. By inventing a program that uses landscape as a water remediation space as well as landscape as a religious and social space, the project will exhibit the idea that social agents can inform a change in the water pollution crisis."

Campus [Re]Connected: Research, Housing, And Recreation Campus In The Pristine Northern Woods Of Wisconsin, David A. Franknecht Jr.

Architecture Senior Theses

"People are becoming more and more removed from the natural world through the development of modern technologies and lifestyles... Reconnecting people with the natural environment will enable a realization of our reliance on the natural environment and its success in the future. Campus design and landscape architecture can come together to interpret the way we interact with the environment and further this connection in a positive way."