Architecture Commons^™

Lightning Up Lives - Architecture As Conductor, Andrea Suros

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Over the last eight years, millions of Venezuelans have had to get used to living between blackouts and electricity rationing. The causes of the crisis are multiple and complex and differ depending on whom you ask. The government rejects that there are problems in the electrical system and attributes the cuts to alleged sabotage, and the rationing to the drought and excessive demand. Electrical engineers attribute power outages to power generation deficits, on the one hand, and lack of system maintenance, on the other. Because of the situation with the electrical resource, the government shuts down the power for four …

Reinventing Greyfields, William Jones

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Since the 21st century began, sports involvement within society has grown as sporting events have become significant spectacles. Thus, major stadia came to be to hold spectators. Unfortunately, many are on the city's outskirts due to the size of their parking lots, categorized as greyfields. Greyfields are 'Underused' land or a 'sea' of asphalt concrete. The problem of creating greyfields within cities harms the urban fabric and the actual relationship between the stadium and the city. They are creating a disconnection between the two. This proposal is to design an urban hub around a chosen existing stadium to enrich the …

Urban Integration, Daylan Cowart

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Human Scale has been incorporated into urban design for a long time. Now it seems as though the urban environment is going away from that. Buildings are getting taller, spaces are being designed for the sky and not the ground. This thesis will study and test ways of designing for pedestrian comfort, safety, and interaction, while activating an existing public space.

Festive Space, John C. Goddard

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Atlanta struggles with a challenge for its citizens in the form of pedestrianism. Over time, the city’s infrastructure has morphed into one that encourages vehicular movement. This leads to a breakdown in the use of streets for pedestrians outside of their strictly desired destination. Eventually this compounds to encourage against socialization. Furthermore, citizens may be affected mentally and emotionally when they come in contact with people less frequently. The design idea of this thesis revolves around creating incidental spaces in people’s path of travel that encourage stopping and even socializing. Revitalization helps not only the pedestrian scene, but also with …

Asylum In America: Designing A Relief Center For Social Integration, Edgar Plascencia

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

On the east side of Atlanta, near Krog Street Tunnel, a Vacant Freight Container parking consisting of 70 acres divides local communities from one another. Also contributing to this divide in this part of the city is a major artery Dekalb Avenue as well as the major rail infrastructure that travels through Atlanta. Due to the Sites Elevated from the ground Concrete pad, this accentuates even more how this site is interrupting the local society in the area.

Since the area of this part of town is lively and flourishing thanks to markets, business, residency and the beltline activating the …

Core Connections: Stitching Together The Heart Of Atlanta Through The Redevelopment Of Underground Atlanta., Amari Parrish

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

The heart of Atlanta, a prosperous tourist destination brimming with life, has found itself containing areas that have been commercially cut off from inner-city connections in contradiction to being in a heavy transit area. Atlanta’s longstanding history of inhabiting smaller sub-cities inside a larger context that houses a constantly growing population has become overshadowed by traffic, underutilized spaces that create massive voids, and fragmentation which prevents the city’s unification. Core Connections focuses on creating a mixed-use development comprised of parking, retail, and office that reconnects the surrounding contents of Downtown Atlanta and repairs the area as the city’s core. Core …

Building With The Floods, Kim Khanh Quan

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Throughout Vietnam's wet season, flooding is a reality that residents face annually. Vietnam's wet season is known to cause serious detriment to communities, and severe weather conditions are becoming more frequent due to climate change. The annual high tides are rising every year. Flooding within dwellings can already reach up to waist or shoulder height and even beyond. Blocking the floods with dikes and other structures can only help to an extent. Water will go somewhere. Elevating a structure also has a limit - many residents have already elevated the ground level of their home to the maximum height that …

Guaya Symbiosis, Diana Gil

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Located two degrees from the equator, west of the Amazon rain forest, and perched between the Guayas River and the Pacific Ocean, an Ecuadorian city named Guayaquil is home to the most bio-diverse environment in the world. In Red Book of Endemic Plants of Ecuador (2000), biologist Lorena Endara’s research was cataloged providing evidence that Ecuador has the highest concentration of species biodiversity. Based on this seminal report, the Ecuadorian government amended its constitution so the Red Book would be accepted as a governmental document, which was an important step for conservation planning and policy (2012). Unfortunately, the uncontrollable urban …

Re-Place The Big Box, Matthew C. Harkin

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Within the suburban environment of the United States it is not uncommon to see a large big box store, centered upon the landscape without rhyme or reason in relation to the local physical or social attributes. These big box stores are not designed at all. They are cookie cutter buildings, copy and pasted structures that give no regards to their context. The mass is plopped onto the site, and surrounded by parking, roads, and barriers cutting the shopping center off from pedestrian access and its general surroundings. These commercial zones do not hold a sense of place, but rather are …

Inner City Artscape, Michelle Nguyen

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

The research of this project deals with multiple disciplines such as art, culture, and social connection that ultimately benefits human development and well-being. Through the architectural urban design of the main street of Hapeville, GA, this thesis aims to solve the issues of vitalization and attraction to a main city street in a design of a residential community to activate public spaces through the work and input of the creative class and local community. Ultimately, this redesign of the main street will be a catalyst of economic growth and well-being of the local community, revitalizing a home into an urban …

Urban Stitch: A Game In Section, Jesse Garner

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

A city begins as a small, centralized community where everybody knows each other. Social events take place in the city square, or even on sidewalks, creating a street culture. As a city grows, so does the demand for larger roads, and eventually highways. In the late 1940’s President Eisenhower initiated the interstate system, capable of handling large amounts of traffic, creating connections to larger cities with economic centers. Over the next forty years, the interstates were installed across the United States, either bypassing, or crossing through cities. Although necessary, at what point does the interstate, if taken through a major …

Skater Conscious, Jeremy Bowen

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Skateboarding is made possible by the built environment, but without architecture necessarily being designed for its occurrence. Without knowing it, designers have created environments that facilitate a social and artistic culture to thrive. And this has happened – for the most part – in leftover pieces of landscape, infrastructure, and urban settings. Skaters move through and experience space in unique ways. While their boards enable this experience, there is more; most spaces are not designed for them – and some are even designed to keep them out – but, nevertheless, skaters persevere through invention and creativity. Skaters actively search for …

Undeveloping The City, John Jones

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

What will the city of the future look like? This thesis investigates the ongoing growth of the city of Atlanta and proposes design strategies that responsibly manage future growth with an ecological mindset. The current metropolitan area occupies thousands of square miles of land with low-density development that blankets many natural ecosystems with little consideration to the impact of this sprawl. By utilizing the applications of transit oriented development and low-impact design, a section of the city can be used as a test bench for responsible future development. This growth would need to be managed from a two-sided approach: retracting …

Cultural Embrace, Jeremy Penja

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Cultural embrace creating an identity on a larger scale in modern society. Architecture is a symbolic catalyst of a threshold, it is bound by the physical presence as well as “enriched by both the memory and dreams, past and future” Juhani Pallasmaa. It captures the sensibility of expectation and fulfillment, sense of symbols that resonated within. It evokes the absolutely necessary association of visual-tactile and identity to connect the history to present. It is an absolute cultural responsiveness and symbolism that cultural embrace strives for. Spaces have become empty container lacking true essence. The current architecture does little to address …

Hurricane Communities, Katie Masters

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Hurricane Communities: An Analysis of Florida Housing is a thesis that aims to reexamine how we can, as architects, design for hurricanes more effectively at the residential scale, through investigations of lateral forces, form, structure and site. The intent is to minimize the physical and emotional damages that are left behind. The thesis examines wind uplift and changes in water level as hurricane category rise.

Geofutures L Urban Integration, Adam Leicht

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Bring nature back to the city. Integrate neglected migration patterns in sprawling cities such as Atlanta. Mend urban fragmentation. The purpose is to make a cleaner environment in the city. My project looks at the Anthropocene as a fence. And how place has been fundamentally “displaced”. Resulting in a boundary or separation between man and nature. To study and research the Anthropocene (age of man) and how man has taken over as the main force behind the change of the environment. Looking through an architectural lens of ecology, how can we use this lens to help us slow down society …

Scalar Resiliency In The Age Of Disruption, Brandon Aultman

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Natural storm surges and global sea level rise cause devastating effects, whether it’s leaving over a million of residents homeless or dooming an entire

coastline ecosystem with little to no hopes of recovery. Current responsive methods consist the issue of unequal priortization within coastal resiliency

design because of site scalar characteristics. A design that incorporates an equity of attention towards all elements of resiliency will lead to a responsive

solution that can transcend any scale of site. I will begin to analyze the elements of effective resiliency; adaptation, affordability, community, sustainability

and customization, in order to provide a balanced solution …

Infrastructural Urbanism: Hybridizing Our Networks, Hannah Boyd

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

“The story of people can be told through our infrastructure. In the rise and fall of cities throughout history, the places best positioned for a thriving future have always been those that offer systems to create the lives that we want. And we can see that as the innovations of canals, aqueducts, railroads, and highways did in their time, the kind of infrastructure that we build today matters to our success. If we do it right, it will forever transform our way of life.”
– Ryan Gravel¹

Urban edges are created through interstices, spaces intervening between one thing and …

Divine Intervention: Designed For Social Evolution By Integrating Natural Order, Anatoshia L. Wyatt

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

There is a long tradition in architecture of using ordering systems found in nature and science to create built space. This thesis builds upon such line of thought to propose new design methods based on ordering systems with a particular focus on social relations. It focuses on the design of a community center in the city of Atlanta which is considered as a catalyst for jumpstarting the betterment of society through improvement of social bonds, community involvement, activism, meditation, and the integration of nature in the community. The design is situated on the Bellwood Quarry site and creates an ecological …

The Collective Object: Realizing Collective Space In An Era Of Bigness, Laura M. Sherman

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Architecture reacted to the Technological Revolution of the late 19th century with inspired proposals of optimistic expectation for the new era. The advancements of elevators, escalators and air conditioning meant almost limitless potential for the scale and scope of the built environment. However, society quickly realized the advantageous reality of this technology: Their buildings no longer needed the cities which surrounded them.

Endless interiors and “cities-within-cities” meant the possibility of a lifestyle where people could choose to never again interact with the undesirables of the true city. The built environment actively resisted the collective. A trend of self-interested architectures affected …