Architectural Engineering Commons^™

A Stereotomic Struggle, Jim Roche

Articles

Stone in architecture has “territorial and political implications” as its use and designation impact the human rights of the indigenous population. The craft of stereotomy is not just bequeathed from the Crusaders or more recent imperial colonists but has a diverse blended history that is deeply ingrained in Palestinian built culture. Such theses inform the experimental work of Elial and Yusef Anastas, two brother architects who operate from Bethlehem what they term a counter hegemonic practice with the stated aim of “decolonising architecture”.

Reconceptualizing Mies' Glass House, Araceli Avelar, Armando Castaneda Jr, Madison Lam, Ignatius Malari, Alejo Favero, Augusta Orlauskaite, Ella Gleason

Architectural Engineering

Our team used the glass house studio to explore class stratification, particularly using the glass as a reflection of class dichotomy in our society. The glass and Miesian design approach glorifies the clean cut, picture-perfect utopia only accessible to the wealthy few. But reality proves that there is more to this. As architects and engineers, we should strive to create environments that may uphold our values of equity and diversity and ultimately serve all sectors of society.

The Nolan House, Keiko-Ann K. Sanders, Gilbert C. Munoz, Michael A. Bahr, Titas Kalvalnis

Architectural Engineering

As a precedent, The Green Team analyzed the history of glass architecture, literature, and culture. Based on our research, we found that glass is often depicted as breakable, delicate, and a way to expose or display aspects that would otherwise be hidden. We challenged ourselves to incorporate safety and privacy into our glass house as a way to combat the pre-existing notions of glass in architecture.

The Hutongs Blooming 08, L Khawn Din

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

China’s rapid development has altered the city’s landscape on a massive scale, continually eroding the delicate urban tissue of old Beijing. Such dramatic changes have forced an aging architecture to rely on chaotic, spontaneous renovations to survive the ever-changing neighborhood. In addition, poor standards of hygiene have turned unique living space and potential thriving communities into a serious urban problem. Hutongs are gradually becoming the local inhabitants’ dumpster and the haven for the wealthy. The hutongs blooming 08, will be inserted into the urban fabric, structure like clouds, attracting new people, activities, and resources to reactivate entire neighborhoods. They exist …

Speculations On A City For Mars, Edouard Terzis

School of Architecture - Theses

This thesis proposes the reinterpretation of architectural forms as the index of the constitution of the idea of the city. “Speculations on a City on Mars” is paradoxical in a sense as it superposes both the managerial representation of a city, that is Zoning, along with the speculative aspect of an extra-terrestrial city.

Uncreative Construction | Domestic Mutations In America, Sean Morgan

Architecture Senior Theses

A shift in residential patterns in American cities have fostered a breeding ground for mutant buildings. Owners split, manipulate, and expand their houses as they create idiosyncratic constructs of great visual and spatial complexity. Originally developed for a middle class population, single-family homes have become mixed-use or multi-family complexes thanks to the resourceful implementation of commercial materials.

This thesis aims to develop a new strategy for transforming the normative American house by using the conventions of platform frame construction. Variations will emerge from a set of design constraints, which—unlike that employed for typical houses—are based on data that disregards style …

Innie/Outie | Renegotiating Figure And Structure, Maxwell Rosner

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis contends that in order to sustain its claim to be socially progressive and accessible enterprise, the discipline of architecture must resist the divorce of figure and structure.

Innie/Outie considers Architecture as a simultaneously typological and teleological proposition. Architects exploit typology as a means of classifying, diagramming, and ultimately flattening and iconicizing ideas about Architecture so as to place them within a broader cultural context, thereby making them intellectually accessible to their audiences. By contrast, architects from the advent of Modernism onwards have displayed a critical preoccupation with the discipline’s teleological potential, the creation of form that follows function …

Two Lands, One System | Redefining The Border Crossing, Matthew Trulli

Architecture Senior Theses

The Israeli and Palestinian populations each have their own distinct infrastructural system, which operates independently and fails to connect the people in this region. This thesis contends that if a two-state solution is implemented under the guidelines of the 2003 Geneva Accord, new connections can stitch the populations of Israel and Palestine together through a reimagined border system.

These divisive infrastructural networks, which are a result of tense relationships, have also sparked increased violence throughout the region, particularly in Jerusalem. The French Hill, located north of the Old City in Jerusalem, is positioned at a critical point in the infrastructural …

Never-Land | A Parasitic And Accumulative Approach To Urbanization In China, Xiaoyan Dong

Architecture Senior Theses

Ever since 1960s, European situationist and Japanese metabolist architects constantly reject the uniformity and totalitarian of modern architecture/urban design, seeking parasitic and dynamic approaches to post-war urbanization. Projects such as the Plug-In City and the Tokyo Bay dream of alternative urban scenarios by reversing traditional perceptions of infrastructure’s role in the city, combining architecture, technology and society together. However, these megastructure projects not only neglect the existing urban context but also lack political and economic driving force. As a result, they are considered utopian by many contemporary critics.

Fifty years later in China, fast urbanization process creates problems for both …

Free Encounters | Giving Form To The Informal Workplace, Ryan Williams

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis contends that the "office" as a solely economic construct is no more: Its utility as an engine driving productivity and the accumulation of capital has stalled in our present age of information where value is constructed through knowledge exchange and interaction.

Via the use of new technologies, millennial workers' transition from the college campus to the office has become more seamless and, this thesis argues, it is in this paradigm shift that it is possible to identify a blurring of the public and private spheres. The millennial worker-turned-freelancer's life exists forever suspended between work and play, place and …

Parity, Hamza Hasan

Architecture Senior Theses

Digital data contributes to an increasingly alienated aspect of our infrastructure. The complex practices of the Internet produce highly specified, engineered objects. Though their forms are ‘optimized,’ their intentions are not: the two primary considerations for the development of the infrastructure of the Internet are energy and security. Each category presents its own deliberations, but both often produce non-architectural, infrastructural elements beyond public visibility. The hidden infrastructure of data storage and mining (the indexing and analysis of data and traffic) produces spaces outside the agency of normative architectural discourse.

The key consideration for the design of the Internet is redundancy, …

Releasing The Unconsciousness | Visualizing The City, Taihui Li

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis explores how subway stations lost their identity as strategic node of connectivity which constructed the prevailing image of New York City. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Sigmund Freud famously compared the human mind to the city of Rome. He argues that both contain strata of memory and history which have accumulated over the years through a messy and ad-hoc process. Like Rome, New York City also has a layered history, albeit not as deep.

This thesis contends that the subway entrance serves as an experiential entre into the unconscious experience of the unknown elements of the past. …

Green School, Designing For Comfort And Beyond…, Andrea S. Wheeler, Naghmeh Pak, Evan Jeanblanc

Andrea S. Wheeler

Comfort is defined through human senses; sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. Each sense can lead to a greater or lesser degree of comfort. However, children experience comfort differently than adults. They experience spaces differently and have different knowledge about the performance of a building than adult users; they can also have a perspective on design quality unlike that of the architect. School is a designed environment that a child lives in for over 6 hours a day; it is it is thus argued simply a matter of a child’s right to be consulted about his or her day-to-day environment. …

Aspen Art Museum, Rumiko Handa

Architecture Program: Faculty Scholarly and Creative Activity

'I hope when people come to the New Aspen Art Museum they will sense that this building is very much at home in Aspen and could only live here', Shigeru Ban states in a short essay to visitors included in the museum brochure. Indeed, the way in which Ban's design fits uniquely within its context is nothing less than extraordinary. A full appreciation of his accomplishment, however, requires a study of Aspen's history.

What strategies are available to the architect who intends to design a museum that fits well for a community with keen interests in arts but lacking in …

Perform + Function: A Proposal For A Healthy Public Housing Community, Brandon M. Harvey

Masters Theses

PERFORM+FUNCTION: Proposal for A Healthy Public Housing Community

Architecture exists in Place, the integrated context of both the built and natural environments, including socio-economic, cultural, and political climates that influence our growth, development, and survival. As architecture necessitates around human purposes, it is important that architecture is built for and sited in an environment compatible for human well-being. My thesis focuses on human habitation and its immediate relationship with human health, assessing the performance and functionality of Place that have an impact on human health. Using public housing as the vehicle of my investigation, I will seek the appropriate application …

Inhabiting The Periphery: A Dialogue Between Individual And Site, Robert Oliver Kown

Masters Theses

What is a periphery? We can think about this word in more than one way. First off, peripheries are places that exist as spatial conditions in cities, They indicate edges and places that have been left behind. Spaces that have lost their meaning. But in this thesis I will use the word in another way as well. What does the periphery mean for us today? What are those parts of our lives that have been marginalized, and how can we begin to reclaim what has been lost? It is the aim of this thesis to address these issues of the …

Transformation Of Industrial Space, Xin Jia

Masters Theses

By the 1970s the international markets had begun to change and the region’s industries were becoming less competitive. Mines began to close. Factories that had operated night and day fell silent. Their gates closed and they became “brownfield” sites in need of restoration.

For the over past 20 years, city planners regenerated these derelict industrial lands in different ways especially focus on renaturalizing them. Less attention is being paid to them as active and strategic roles in contemporary affairs. Today, people’s thinking about this issue demands more the character of sentimental stimulus- for either the re-creation or preservation of past …

The Thinking Hand: Book Review, Jim Roche

Articles

In this new book Juhani Pallasmaa continues his phenomenological exploration begun in ‘The Eyes of the Skin (2005)’, with the ‘Thinking Hand’ here proffered as a metaphor for his contention that all our senses, have innate imbedded crucial skills which help us perform the most basic daily tasks – and to create inspired works of art and architecture.