Architecture Commons^™

Rethinking Participatory Design: Tools For Modelling Community Potentials, Adam Liu, Stephen Marinelli

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis aims to provide an alternative method of community engagement through the process of participatory model-making. Rather than only seeking out community voices for surveys and data collection, this project’s goal is to empower a community’s sense of ownership through collective design.

The methods of this project will be tested and examined in collaboration with students from Dr. King Elementary School in Syracuse, New York. By designing a participatory method for model-making, the project will involve students in the early stages of urban design and make it more educationally and socially accessible.

Growing Syracuse: The Architect's Role In Improving Syracuse, Ny's Food Environment, Stephanie Wagner

Architecture Thesis Prep

Urbanism requires community, and community requires a platform of public space. Underutilized spaces within the urban fabric can be activated by small scale architectural interventions to create formal spaces for community gathering, interaction, and commerce. The positioning and connectivity of these interventions can lead to the creation of new urban corridors that encourage growth within and between underdeveloped parts of the city.

It is the role of the architect to develop an architecture that is contextually relevant to a community, while addressing larger-scale urban issues, in order to create an accessible and beneficial built environment and lifestyle for users. The …

Relink Tangible And Intangible, Weibin Lao, Xiaobai Zhao

Architecture Thesis Prep

Syracuse, as part of the Upstate New York used to be an essential economic center of the United States. This not only was resulting from its once influential salt industry and its easily accessed canal infrastructure, but also was heavily influenced by the industrial innovation. Without trained engineers, the people in Syracuse designed machines for excavating the earth and building the Erie Canal. And with easy transportation, goods and industrial products created and produced from Syracuse were shipped and transported. This brought prosper and wealth to the Syracuse. With new transportation technology development including the railways for trains and highways …

Contemporary Infrastructure For The Sustainable Mid-Sized City, Christian Martinez

Architecture Thesis Prep

Embedded within the Feasibility Assessment of Sustainable Transportation: Syracuse study’s goals is an interest in urban mobility particularly in mid-sized cities in America. Well referenced texts tend to deliberate on issues of urban infrastructure in great urban metropolises. This presumes infrastructure improvements can universally have a positive impact on urban mobility irrespective of city size. But is it possible for the prosperity of cities to be augmented by virtue of investing in policy and infrastructure for sustainable transportation through following megalopolis biased guidebooks? Vishaan Chakrabarti advocates for a more urban America in “A County of Cities”, because of their ability …

Imperfect Square: Reconsidering The Dialectical Condition Between Fabric And Object In Urban Environments, Richelle Gewertz

Architecture Thesis Prep

The thesis proposes to provide a new urban design approach to improve blighted areas in urban environments. It offers a strategy to patch together the fragmented physical landscape of the Shrinking City into a cohesive urban fabric.

Community Commons: Public Libraries In Digital Age, Chao Dou

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis will identify the programs for the Onondaga County Public Library in Downtown Syracuse based on the needs of the surrounding neighborhoods and organize the programs based on the navigational organization of digital information exchange platforms to connect the digital divide between improverish neighorhoods with the affluent neighborhoods of Syracuse, NY.

The articulation of the space will manifest as a commons for the demographics to access, create and exchange information in the community

Replacing The Plaza, Timothy Jeremiah Nolan

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This project uses the methods of scanning implicated by the skateboarder in a detournement of the modernist plaza. In doing so, it seeks to prove that universality is not universal. Ultimately, by reframing Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalarie in Berlin as field of spatial data through methods of scanning related to skateboarding, new ways of understanding Mies' plaza will point to a spatial reorganization of the museum and plaza."

Outerdisciplinary, Tessa Franzese

Architecture Thesis Prep

"By taking cues from quilt theory and from emergent social science theories, I will formulate a methodology for working that opens a feedback loop, exposing the discipline to outsiders and outsiders to architecture."

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."

Connecting Identity And Place: Refugee Relocation Facility, Kathryn Walsh

Architecture Thesis Prep

"architecture's place in the global flow of people, identity, and the city can no longer be taken for granted. Architecture must consider the current conditions, the past histories, and future prospects of its relationship to identity and place within the changing city."

Airport And Tense Airport, Mike Ness

Architecture Thesis Prep

ACSA Airport Design Competition entry

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 …

Experiencing An Education: Principle And Form, Matthew T. Ahlberg

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The question being investigated deals with the issue of how architecture can become the primary teaching mechanism in an educational environment and what the built forms that evolve form this approach to teaching and its relation to the built environment will take on when considered in relation to existing artistic and architectural models later on in the design process"

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."

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)."

Methods Of Perception, Caleb Mitchell

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Architecture can teach an observer about itself both physically and metaphysically; this can be managed though interactive processes which demand haptic experiences.

(Methodoloy:) To investigate the capacities of mechanistic or interactive devices to reveal meaning (physical and metaphysical); and to eventually develop at full (or large) scale an artifact capable of operating through functional and meaningful interactions with a user."

A Diamond In The Square, Christopher Guido

Architecture Thesis Prep

"When a traditional city element moves to the suburbs, it is detrimental to the element and to the city. The reinsertion of a separated city element into an urban situation, through the reestablishment of its physics, economic, and social relationship to the city, can serve to benefit the newly placed element and its context."

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."