Architecture Commons^™

A Cloud Above, Jiwon Kim

Masters Theses

Even though Manhattan has a lot of green space, it is not sufficient to reduce the urban heat island effect of so much concrete and metal. This thesis proposes a new way to create more green infrastructure in dense urban areas. by utilizing the stack effect through a chimney structure as an air purifier. Additionally, it proposes the widespread use of facades with Heliostats to produce and use solar energy within the structures.

This thesis considers a four-storeyed parking lot that has two entrances on the south and the north. Its walls are merged with those of the adjacent mid-rise …

Nature-Ization Nyc, Sarah Collins

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Manhattan once was a beautiful landscape of rolling hills, forests, boulders, farms, and spaced-out homes. Over the years Manhattan has been built up and there is a sense of absence in New York City. New Yorkers walking through the city are confronted with excessive pedestrian traffic, and do not have the luxury of experiencing the sounds, smells, and natural landscape that exists a few miles outside of the densely populated city. I am proposing a series of typologies that bring a new nature to the city and change the way one walks through the city. Pathways or hiking trails will …

Look Up, City Skygazers, Yiyang Qian

Masters Theses

This is a research-design project looking for tools to rebuild the lost connection between city dwellers and the cosmos through visual effects, spatial experience and materials implemented in public spaces in a modern city. Disturbed by high-rises and their neon lights at night, New York citizens tend to look around instead of looking up. The sky has become unfamiliar to most people. Without seeing the same vastness above us, people forgot how small we are compared to the universe, as well as how much we resemble each other. This project started with a wish that everyone could remember our commonalities, …

Narratives Of Public Space : A Manifesto For Future Urban Landscape In Manhattan, Jaehong Chung

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates the history of public space and how it has changed over time. Looking specifically at how social, historical, and advances in technology have influenced and changed the meaning and use of public spaces. Studies of history and its characteristics and case studies check the validity of paradigm of public spaces in Manhattan. The modern features of Manhattan have been completed over 200 hundreds years with Industrial revolutions and influx of immigrants. Due to these reasons, the main focus was to track of causalities among life style changes, social paradigms, and changes of urban landscapes.

As cities developed, …

Grid Talk : Giving A Voice To Energy Infrastructures, Kelsey Wakefield

Masters Theses

Humans are energy hogs, intelligent purveyors of displaced electrical waves construed from ancient carbon compounds. Our built environment has let us forget this. Our collective ambivalence towards the subject has grown with the loss of these public assets to private companies under a socially engineered lack of public interest in energy production. There was once a time energy infrastructures were revered and upheld as public spaces, giant testaments to the greatness of society harnessing the natural world, gold stars congratulating the intelligence of humankind. Great designers, political leaders and visionaries created works of art, sculpture, landscape architecture which functioned for …

The Delamination Of Manhattan: Living In The Layers Of A Post-Land Society, Dylan Hursley

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Rising water levels threaten the existence of many coastal cities throughout the world, including Lower Manhattan, which is in danger of sea level rise by as much as six feet by the end of the century! Higher sea levels mean that larger storms will occur with greater frequency. Assuming that humanity does not reverse its current ecological contribution, barriers to stop rising waters will not be adequate.

Manhattan is covered by 50 feet of water, transforming New York into a new Venice. The substantial bedrock of the city provides a hefty foundation capable of supporting Manhattan’s structures for many years …

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 …

The Question Of Slim | A Critical Look At Manhattan's Recent Trend Towards Slenderness, Raymond Sova

Architecture Senior Theses

Manhattan’s real estate market since the turn of the 20th century to present day can be characterized as an extreme optimization of the economical elements of architecture. Most of the buildings in Manhattan’s diverse and complex skyline share a tenacious desire to maximize the profitability and feasibility of a site while minimizing overall building expenditure. This concept is defined in Koolhaas’s ‘Delirious New York,’ as the relationship between “the Needle” and “the Globe.” Seemingly immeasurable wealth and investment have given rise to a new sub-typology of super-tall strikingly skinny (Slim) residential skyscrapers that may very well result in the demise …

Parking, Alyssa Francis

Architecture Thesis Prep

This project re-conceptualizes the parking garage structure from a building type deemed as an utilitarian object, to a multi-functioning public service provider, to not only store cars for the individual but also as an infrastructured platform for providing urban amenity, providing much needed urban public space. This structure looks at the concept of garage to look beyond its normative function of purely car storage, and sees the potential of using the building both with and without vehicles, to ultimately act as a form of urban rehabilitation.

Decay And Opportunity Of Architecture, Alexa Hansford

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis aims to develop a connection between the newly elevated downtown Brooklyn and the cultural/civic center of lower Manhattan. One of the growth projects is known as the Urban Farming Initiative. Private areas through out the five boroughs have been redeveloped into community gardens. The public then cultivates and reaps goods for their personal use. Through the expansion of the Urban Farming Initiative this new network connection can act as the "bridge" between the two major city centers as well as creating a central hub for the farming network.

The City Is My Church: Presence And Identity For The Small Urban Congregation, Andrew Scalisi

Architecture Senior Theses

The phenomenon of church renting has grown out of necessity for small urban congregations. Churches are holding worship services in public and private places with greater regularity than some might think. It is not uncommon today to see portable church signs outside of unconventional places on Sundays. In Manhattan in particular, there is a greater need for rentable space as many congregations are struggling to find a permanent home due to density, finances, availability and politics. Typically, congregations rent until they can attain a permanent facility or develop a congregation large enough to support one. However, exercising this option comes …

Just Add Water: Rethinking The Urban Bath House For Contemporary Society, Audrey Snare

Architecture Senior Theses

"There is a need, and an opportunity now to rethink and reintroduce the public bathhouse in the contemporary urban city, and bathhouse is a ripe typology for invention and interpretation when considered against the trend of exclusive spas. I contend that a new conception of urban public bathhouse can initiate new social dynamics, new social opportunities, and new public behavior."

Architectural Healing Environments, Brian Schaller

Architecture Senior Theses

"It is the contention of this thesis that a study of the phenomenological approach to how one experiences space and by incorporating evidence-based design criteria that are acknowledged for improving wellbeing, quality of life, and reducing distress in people, a healing environment will emerge. The experienced environment will facilitate a temporal awareness of one's self and the design criteria's attention to the experienced setting will allow for a healing environment to emerge within the architecture. I am not proposing that architecture can heal, but rather the architecture can stimulate a healing environment."

The Overgrown Grid: An Alternative Zoning Proposal For The Island Of Manhattan, Thomas Day

Architecture Senior Theses

"This thesis proposes to restructure the primary agenda of the collective monument from a homogenizing force at the local scale, to an object celebrating diversity and multiculturalism. By establishing a continuous mass connecting and collecting the city's currently isolated collective monuments, the new monument will be adjusted to regain formal and cultural contrast to the urban fabric."

Orphan: Residential Educational Cultural Center For Orphaned Youth, Valerie Rachel Herrera

Architecture Senior Theses

"This thesis contends that by re-conceptalizing the spatial, programmatic, and sociopolitical forces that for the basis of the orphanage typology, an architectural framework can be constructed that can instigate and facilitate new conditions of programmatic overlap between the 'urban cultural' and the 'private/secure residential'; fundamentally altering the outdated assumptions of the orphanage type in favor of a contemporary response embeds the orphanage in the city and the city in the orphanage."

Cinematheque Hitchcock: The Theatrics Of Congestion, Cassandra E. Biehl

Architecture Senior Theses

"Cinematheque Hitchcock will despense with predisposed architectural and societal tendencies toward the segregation of the public and private realms inherent in Rear Window Ethics.

Through a cinematographic montage of action/reaction and juxtaposition of the:

public/private

Villagers/NYU and

land/sky dwellers,

Architecture will create and continually generate permutations of visual and sensorial urban stories in Washington Square Village, producing the Theatrics of Congestion."

Rethinking Cultural Institutions In Relation To The City, Monica Rodarmor

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Rather than trying to distribute culture to the masses, the cultural institution shall be a place where the masses educate one another about culture. Thinking about institutions as 'arenas for cultures of the world' better serves urban life than an institution that is simply a dusty bank of memories. The aim of the institution should be to stimulate cultural dialogue which will better serve the American City. By changing the purpose, the end result is now attainable. Education and inspiration of the masses is achieved through a new urban condition: one that promotes interaction and understanding between cultural spheres."

Architecture For A Simulated World, Clay Strange

Architecture Thesis Prep

"It is the contention of this thesis that such an architecture should be light and insubstantial, like a simulation. Architecture should appear ambiguous and fleeting."

Refocused Gaze, Gabriel Swire

Architecture Thesis Prep

"How can we study overlapping of space, and even deeper, the interactions that occur in those spaces? View becomes a powerful connection that links spaces and talks about the interaction within a singular space. Gaze, discussed by Lacan and Foucault, creates a basis of exploring possible overlapping of spaces through human interaction. The gaze is a conceptual idea that allows the dissecting of social norms of space to reveal these connections and communications between them.

The objective of a museum is to create an ideal environment for interaction of people and art. the galleries and public spaces are the major …

How The Far West Side Will Be Won, Laura Wolf-Powers

Laura Wolf-Powers

No abstract provided.

Isomorphic Correspondence: Hybrid Different Media: Music And Architecture, Ki Ho Choi

Architecture Thesis Prep

School of Crafting Instruments: Hudson Yard in Manhattan, New York, NY

"In my thesis approach to the music and architecture, I am not evoking the classical Pythagoras and Palladio. I am more dealing with architecture and music as new ground of present architecture and new hybrid medium between them...

Architecture, just linked music with simple arithmetic ratios, should confront and try to parallel to contemporary music theory...

To hybrid these different media, I have chosen the instruments and Bella Bartok's musical Theory. Instrument has architectonic form with musical character while Bartok's musical theory has visual character. These two media can …

Consuming Identity: Producing New Americans, Richard Nisa

Architecture Thesis Prep

A Structure for the Americanization League of Midtown Manhattan

'The Thesis will be an intervention on the property of the Seagram Building designed by Mies van der Rohe completed in 1958. IT will consist of several programmatic elements organized around the situations that an immigrant or refugee goes through in order to become an 'integrated American' - in short, what is proposed will be an Americanization League."

Space/Surface/Body: Surface As Device Between Inside And Outside, Samantha Whitney

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The understanding of spatial boundaries belonging to a taxonomy of fashion design tested in architecture."

Narrative Architecture, Leah E. Cohen

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Architecture reveals narrative through the facilitation of sequence and the expression of ritual. Ritual is based on archetypal actions."

How The ‘Sidewalks Of New York’ Came To Maryknoll, Janet Butler Munch

Publications and Research

This article discusses: the relocation of Maryknoll's headquarters to Ossining, NY in 1912; its favorable litigation with the Rockefeller Family; its selection of architects Maginnis and Walsh, and W.H. Fissel & Co.-- contracted to install its bluestone slate flooring originally from the sidewalks in lower Manhattan.

Thesis Preparatory Booklet - Religious Architecture, Rajeev Thakker

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The investigation of a universal archetype, in terms of the religious building, to represent the Hindu religion. The architectural re-representation of its most eternal values and ideals as seen through my own investigations and interpretations."

Thesis Preparatory Booklet -, James L. Zak

Architecture Thesis Prep

Columbus Circle is the term used towards the description of the given condition ("space" or even "place" yields quite inappropriate connotations) integrated into the mid-town zone of Manhattan. The potential of the "underlying grounds" of this condition is unlimited beyond that of any other on the island.