Architecture Commons^™

Cohousing And The Greater Community: Re-Establishing Identity In Taunton’S Weir Village, Andrew Kremzier

Architecture Theses

This proposal seeks to bring new life to the former industrial district of the post-industrial city. Existing in a society based on services and technologies, these villages must either adapt to meet the needs of business or serve another purpose within the community. The project for the Weir Village falls into the latter category, as its aim will be to create a cohousing community within Taunton. The new development will strengthen the character of the village and be able to affect the community beyond the site’s physical boundaries. It will create affordable alternatives to housing for those who do not …

Awareness At A Threshold: Urban Exchange Through Public Space, Matthew Spears

Architecture Theses

The moment of arrival becomes an important opportunity for cultural exchange in an urban environment. This exchange can be both the physical exchange between two places or it can be the experiential exchange between two or more disparate groups. These moments of exchange are an elusive experience for visitors as well as residents and are easily forgotten. Expressing the space of the traveler, an interactive space between locals and visitors, can raise cultural awareness between the most prominent groups as well as the marginalized groups, creating a more cohesive urban imaginary. The major exchange hub in Seattle, Washington speaks to …

The Real, The Spectacle, And The In-Between: Architecture As A Stage For Reality, Chelsea Adelson

Architecture Theses

The goal of the project is to explore the space in between as a place of activity. The project will compare the spectacle and reality through a theater and public plaza near Chinatown and the theater district of Boston. The theater is accompanied by a small acting school that uses both an interior venue and the plaza as stages. The theater is focused on the awareness of reality through the spectacle of performance while the public plaza can “turn the artificiality of everyday situations into a theatrical situation” and bring life to the streets. Everyday life is put on display.

Technocarpet: Supporting A Culture Of Congestion, William Andrew Weigand

Architecture Senior Theses

"The TechnoCarpet is a public space sited in a future of resource scarcity, climate disruption, and urbanization. It provides support facilities and cultural amenities necessary to sustain super dense urban populations. I establishes an internal frontier for the city as a means to provoke density, by creating an escape from it. The TechnoCarpet is a model for parks in the 21st century."

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."

Public Space Planning As A Catalyst For Dweller Initiated Slum Upgrading: Ahmedabad, India, Christopher Bystedt

Master's Theses

This research observes how public space planning can improve slum upgrading projects, focusing on two case study slums in Ahmedabad, India.

The inclusion of formal public space planning into slum upgrading schemes can act as a catalyst for dweller-initiated housing improvements. While municipalities that choose to upgrade their slums are primarily concerned with supplying bare necessity infrastructure—such as water, sewage, and paving—most upgrading schemes ignore the reality that slum communities are complex, integral components of the urbanization process. These settlements deserve and necessitate comprehensive design and planning services which will integrate the community into the larger urban fabric.

This thesis …

Bridge_Works, Chris Driscoll

Architecture Senior Theses

Building typologies are generally well defined and functionally specific. A church is for worship, a house is for living, and a theater is for performing. In certain instances, these basic building typologies have been combined to form composite structures such as mixed-use housing/retail projects, or a house on a boat. The opportunities created by composite typologies have allowed for broader economic development, more complex and integrated programming, greater utility and richer social structures. A specific combination of typologies--the mix of infrastructural bridge with housing/retail/public space--has produced a few historically successful models[...] Over time, the bridge was developed from a simple …

[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."

Resurrecting The Bauhaus: Public Interaction Through Constructive Education In Harlem, Luke Carnahan

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Architecture has the capacity to mediate the boundaries between the social territories of urban contexts. Educational programs become the vehicles that generate the dynamic social exchange necessary to do so."

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."

Constructing The Sidewalk: Municipal Government And The Production Of Public Space In Los Angeles, Renia Ehrenfeucht, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris

Renia Ehrenfeucht

The process of creating public spaces has been one of defining what constitutes public activities and how they can occur. This was as true for the sidewalks as for spaces such as the roadbed, parks and markets. The sidewalks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were used for commercial, political and social activities. During this period, the Los Angeles municipal government and urban residents constructed hundreds of miles of sidewalks along with other street improvements. In response to differing claims to the sidewalks and varying interests in the purpose of the streets, the city began to emphasize pedestrian …

Connective Ecology: Reclaiming The Postindustrial Urban Landscape, Thomas Smith

Architecture Thesis Prep

"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."

Urban Housing, Fabric, And Flows: New Connections In The Post-Industrial City, Colin Simmer

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The transition from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy in post-industrial American river cities has left extensive tracts of derelict land along urban waterfronts. After years of physical and psychological separation from the rivers, cities are renegotiating the boundaries of post-industrial landscapes and making efforts to reconnect to the riverfront. My thesis aims to generate a new model of urban housing and public spaces that will reconnect historic fabric to the water."

Social Interaction In The Digitally Networked City., Zachary Goldstein

Architecture Thesis Prep

"There is an underlying digital network that exists in our contemporary cities that affects every aspic of urban life. Technology has changed the way we perceive and activate space, and communicate with one another....

Public space will always be critical in city planning because it fosters human interaction. No matter how advanced our technology becomes, nothing will be able to replace talking to someone in person or participating in live events."

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."

Fertile Fragments: An Improvisational Urbanism For The Evolving Urban Edge, Matthew Duggan

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Often cities are developed and designed on a parcel by parcel basis without an overall master plan. Urban actors (architecture, planners, developers, municipalities, engineers, artists, etc.) are responsible for what happens on their land alone. While this can result in a series of discrete separate enclaves it is also possible to graft new developments into/onto existing ones. This thesis contends that fragments of urban form can be guiding catalysts for subsequent urban growth and transformation. It intends to explore the possibilities opened up when urban actors leave behind partial or fragmentary works for others to elaborate upon."

Today's Neighborhood Drugstore, B. Sparano

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis attempts to align architectural critique with the forces that inevitably shape it. For architecture to become a (critical) reality, the architect is forced to take on new roles. She can no longer be (solely) a manipulator of aesthetics, images and signs. She must also, in addition, become the manipulator of underlying forces beneath the surface (i.e. social, political, and economic)."

Urban Agents, New Events: A Transformation Of The Postindustrial Landscape, Kevin Toukoumidis

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Railway yards, abandoned industrial processing plants, decommissioned factories and polluted river ways are the leftovers from the industrial age. With the deindustrialization of society, a new prevailing urban condition has resulted: a marginalized landscape of residual spaces and urban voids, often with real or perceived contamination.... The potential for reclaiming these marginalized landscapes becomes a catalyst for the design of new modes of occupation and human activity."

Breaking Boundaries: The Connection Of Public Buildings To Public Spaces, Josh Linkov

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Traditionally, public buildings sit as monuments in a city and can be read as objects in a public space or boundaries surrounding it. There is often little interaction between the building and the site. I am proposing a new town hall located on a public plaza that will deal with connecting the building to the space it sits within. I will show how the ideas initially incorporated in New England town halls, up until the mid 1800's, can be investigated and reinterpreted to form a coherent unified system of built form and designed landscape."

A Waterfront Reclamation, Allen Rossignol

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Due to industry changes, once prosperous maritime towns have been abandoned. The cities have been left as they were and have not adopted new functions or uses for their valuable asset, the water's edge. Although the city's maritime history and culture attract people, the public has turned its back on the waterfront resulting in non-urban, non-public spaces such as parking, run don properties and abandoned storage sheds. This disjunction between the city and the waterfront needs to be addressed."

"A city's waterfront can be reclaimed through the Archtiecture of Recreation in which the facilities and space are designed to heal …

The Urban Neighborhood Collective: A Model For Empowerment Through Space Within The Inner City Landscape, Angel David Nieves

Architecture Senior Theses

"The study of development in traditional urban Africa is relevant to the contemporary American architect as it offers the possibility to him or her of a neighborhood form that responds to current American social problems. The form of this new American neighborhood might parallel the African village, a strong paradigm reflecting humankind in a non-alienating relationship with the environment."

"In order to promote social change, architecture must take on a new mode of operation. That is to say that architecture must come from the people, an architecture deemed some years ago in an art installation, "Architecture without Architects." The architect …

Thesis Preparatory Booklet - Suburban Civic Center, Charles Angelakis

Architecture Thesis Prep

'My intention is to investigate the reestablishment of the civic center within a typical suburban town of a major metropolitan city. This new 'town square" should be the seat of local law and government, the place of the town's library, site of public services, along with some commercial and residential functions. My goal is to take a site occupied by an architectural ruin which sits as a composition of objects in a field, and by the manipulation of the landscape, along with the introduction of a new piece of architecture, create an ordered composition which begins to become the towns …

Civic Pride And The Urban Monument: A Study Of Places For Public Assembly, Jeffrey C. Shumaker

Architecture Senior Theses

Imagine a city where people gather in the streets by choice and not by chance[...] What better place is there to witness society at its fullest than in our cities[...] The privatization of the public realm has proven to be destructive for both the city's physical form and its social structure[...] This leads us to the discussion that becomes the reason for my writing this thesis and, ironically, becomes for me the most obvious illustrations of the present urban predicament. The city is in desperate need of a civic architecture[...] a civic architecture is one that is created for the …

The Shaping Of Urban Place: The Didactic Museum And The Dialectic Between Art And Technology, Robert J. Corson

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The hypothesis being that the Museum as building type; as expressed through the ideals of the enlightenment, can shape urban place through the its form and content. The intent is to use this hypothesis to shape a significant urban place in Syracuse, NY. The premise being that Syracuse does not have a space that serves as a public forum. This is not intended to reflect the history of Syracuse, but deal with some of the architectural and social problems that currently exist."

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.

Street Life And The Pedestrian: Notes On The Design Of Urban Open Space, William John Lenyk

Architecture Senior Theses

"The deterioration of our urban cores remain an unsolved reality. This results in a loss of an active street life and disregard for pedestrian needs. Yet the street is the principal ordering device of the city and the pedestrian its more important user... This thesis will develop a physical statement which is coherent with the working philosophies and theoretical foundation of the pedestrian's needs in the city."