Landscape Architecture Commons^™

Perceived Safety And Equitable Access: An Investigation Of The Northwest Arkansas Regional Greenway, Jessica Shearman

Landscape Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

In today’s world, designers, planners, and policymakers are grappling with conflicts of climate change, habitat loss, and increasing diversity all during a migratory trend towards urban areas and higher densities of living. Creating public spaces that are both resilient ecologically and environmentally, while also creating a sense of place is essential for providing a higher quality of life equitably for all citizens. Through case studies and literature review, the public’s safety perceptions when accessing public spaces is key to equitable access. Specifically, differing perceptions of safety based on gender, race, and backgrounds. Perceived safety can be defined as an awareness …

Design Is A Social Process: A Survey On Inclusive Practice, Gabriel De Souza Silva

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

This inquiry pivots the discussion on design practice toward process, and seeks to elucidate how inclusivity is achieved in it, and by what means it is maintained. The design process is interrogated through a series of case studies on contemporary practitioners that either describe themselves or are recognized by the wider design community as inclusive of gender, race, sexual orientation, ability level, and are sensitive to history of place. The case studies are selected to demonstrate a diversity of project types, management structures, and design tools, and they comprise the practices of LA Más, Assemble, and Bryony Roberts. The product …

Spaces Of The Tragic: Modern Dramatic Tragedy And Contemporary Memorial Design, Shiloh Bemis

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Humans use narrative to understand the world around us. At early ages we are exposed to storytelling with variable intent, from cautionary tales to the inspirational and everything in between. The dialectic strength of narrative mediums is well-known and well-studied. Theatre is one of the world’s oldest enduring forms of storytelling and has a strong ability to reflect and adapt with cultures as they develop, as a means of commentary and cultural reflection.

Architecture shares theatre’s ancient roots and has always been an important method of communication and expression. However, its tactics have historically been less narrative-centric than theatre and …

Young Adults In A Costly World: Can Accessory Dwelling Units Serve As An Alternative Form Of Accommodation For Recent College Graduates Amidst The Rising Cost Of Housing And A College Education?, Aaron Schlosser

Landscape Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Over the past few years, young adults have been put in a rather tough situation concerning personal finances. As college tuition has risen, so has student debt accrual, leaving many recent college graduates near-crippled financially. Along with this issue, which is large in and of itself, is the fact that housing prices have risen in many of the metropolitan areas in the United States. Both of these problems, when coupled, lead to a decrease in quality of life for most young adults, and people in general. Because of this, the approach of this thesis is to find an affordable form …

Americanization Of Islamic Cultural Design: Erasure, Orientalism/Exoticism, And Americanization, Peter L. Stanley

Landscape Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Islam arrived in North America primarily through the importation of Muslim African slaves. Subsequent suppression of the slaves, and by extension their religion and places of worship, generated a lack of understanding and misunderstanding about Islam. Over time, this misunderstanding evolved into xenophobic and orientalist representations of the religion. This Capstone project researches Islam’s roots in colonial America through the period before the Columbian Exposition of 1893, and its evolution after the Columbian Exposition, with defining time periods expressed as Erasure, Orientalism/Exoticism, and Americanization. With the help of cultural trust organizations such as the Aga Khan Foundation, the contemporary Americanization …

Re-Live Downtown Pine Bluff, Community Design Center

Project Reports

Once a prosperous cultural urban center in the Mississippi River delta, but now the nation’s second fastest shrinking city, Pine Bluff (population: 42,700) is Arkansas’ Detroit. Indeed, a study of black wealth conducted by famed sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois in 1899 found that Pine Bluff had the fourth highest rate of black wealth in the nation behind Charleston, Richmond, and New York City. The school’s community design center prepared a downtown revitalization plan, Re-Live Downtown Pine Bluff, a housing-first initiative focused on building neighborhoods around downtown “centers of strength”. While the revitalization approach is triaged around a …

Center For Farm And Food System Entrepreneurship, Community Design Center

Project Reports

The average age of the American farmer is 58. Since communities are not reproducing the next generation of farmers, universities are establishing training centers to model new concepts and technologies in farming. The Farmers Training Center is both an immersive program in the rhythms of farm life and a public facility for hosting gatherings that celebrate value-added food products. Part of the University of Arkansas’ farm operations near campus, the center is the public face of agriculture where farmers and the public meet. Student farmers learn by farming, from organic vegetable production in fields and greenhouses, to machine repair, marketing, …

Willow Heights Livability Improvement Plan, Community Design Center

Project Reports

Willow Heights is a 43-year old public housing complex owned by the Fayetteville Housing Authority (FHA) within the federal public housing portfolio administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The school’s design center was commissioned by a local foundation to study an alternative to the FHA’s plan to sell the downtown Willow Heights complex to a developer of high-income housing, necessitating relocation of low-income residents to another complex outside of downtown. Using equity as a driver of decision making, the studio introduced scenario planning to organize reluctant stakeholders in considering transformations to the five-acre complex.

New Beginnings Homeless Transition Village, Community Design Center

Project Reports

More than three million Americans experience homelessness annually. Emergency shelter capacity is limited while local governments are unable to provide even temporary housing. Informal housing involving interim self-help solutions are now popular adaptive actions for obtaining shelter despite nonconformance with city codes. Unfortunately, most informal solutions have resulted in objectionable tent cities and squatter campgrounds where the local response has simply been to move the problem around. Our homeless transition village plan prototypes a shelter-first solution using a kit-of-parts that can be replicated in other communities. Village design reconciles key gaps between informal building practices and formal sector regulations, creating …

The Freeman Performing Arts Center, Community Design Center

Project Reports

The Freeman Performing Arts Center marks the threshold between prairie and civic life. This small agricultural community of 1,300 has an outsized Anabaptist music tradition recognized nationally. The 37,000 sf hall-type building unifies a miscellaneous collection of public buildings and landscapes at the southwest corner of the town’s one-mile grid. The center’s massing projects an ascending system of familiar gable roofs, which absorb the fly tower into a composition reflective of pragmatic building forms. The principal face of the building is a translucent curtain wall that illuminates interior massing—a beacon on the prairie. A thru-Porch celebrates transitions between the prairie’s …

How Do Designers Of The Built Environment Attempt To Make Ecological Sustainability Sensory Legible?, Carly L. Bartow

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper attempts to provide a theoretical framework for making ecosystem function and ecologically sustainable design more perceptible or sensible to people through architecture and the built environment. Design features of the Bertschi School Science Wing and the Bullitt Center in Seattle, Washington are incorporated to illustrate the sensory legibility of ecological sustainability criteria.The criteria are available to designers to help educate a building's occupants on environmentally sustainable design and motivate more sustainable behavior.

Transitional Urban Voids In Austin, Texas, Courtney A. Tarver

Landscape Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

A city’s urban fabric is constantly evolving through development and decay under the fluctuating rates of habitation. Cities are growing rapidly as populations climb higher, with new demands for the incoming waves of people seeking employment and a place to call home. Austin, Texas is the fastest growing American city today, with a population growth rate of three percent per year. With this growth and its demands for open space, open spaces in the form of urban voids and temporary use spaces become an interest to designers as spaces with flexibility. The approach of this thesis is to understand these …

Aesthetics And Performance Evaluation Of Post-Industrial Public Parks, Adel C. Vaughn

Landscape Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Post-Industrial sites are often un-utilized and deserted places that are an aesthetic, social, ecological, and physical hindrance to the realm of the cities in which they lie, however they possess enormous potential. With respectful and transformative design, these new public parks gain a variety of benefits that extend well beyond the typical benefits exhibited by public parks due to their rich history, fascinating existing structures, high levels of visual and sensorial stimulation, one-of-a-kind traits, and opportunity for impactful change. By evaluating these post-industrial public parks, knowledge can be gained about what specific elements in the landscape contribute to their overall …

Ralph Bunche Agape Neighborhood Vision Plan, Community Design Center

Project Reports

The Ralphe Bunche Neighborhood Vision Plan provides a general design framework to spur reinvestment in this 100-year old historic African-American neighborhood in Benton, AR. The plan aggregates attainable housing (under $100,000/unit) around two neighborhood parks―one existing, and one proposed. Since the city cannot afford comprehensive street and drainage improvements to accommodate redevelopment, the proposal retrofits streets and open space with Low Impact Development (LID) landscapes to remediate urban stormwater runoff. Housing unit types between 1,000 and 1,750 square feet are amassed around these LID landscapes and amenitized with screened rooms, balconies, terraces, and multiple-height living spaces.

Macarthur Park Master Plan, Community Design Center

Project Reports

Like waterfronts and transit stops, parks leverage value in urban areas. While much recent attention has been given to the signature mega-park, the value of the small-scale neighborhood park in reinventing the city has been overlooked. Once connecting neighborhoods of differing character, and sponsoring more than 80 residential structures along its edges, the historic MacArthur Park at the edge of downtown Little Rock is radically underutilized as an urban neighborhood asset. Severed from its neighborhoods along two edges by interstate construction in the 1960s, this moribund 40-acre municipal park is left with only 16 residential structures along its frontage. The …

Porchscapes: Between Neighborhood Watershed And Home, Community Design Center

Project Reports

Located on the Ozark Plateau, this 43-unit housing development is a LEED-ND (Neighborhood Development) pilot project to be built for $60/sf plus $2.3 million in infrastructure costs. The studio objective is to design a demonstration project that combines affordability with best environmental practices as designated by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). Porchscapes is a pioneering Low Impact Development (LID) project funded under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Section 319 Program for Nonpoint Source Pollution. LID manages stormwater runoff through ecological engineering technologies. A contiguous network of rainwater gardens, bioswales, infiltration trenches, sediment filter strips, green streets, and wet meadows …

Habitat Trails . . . A Manual For Affordable Green Neighborhood Development, Community Design Center

Project Reports

Habitat Trails is a green affordable neighborhood development consisting of 17 Habitat for Humanity homes. The site is designed as a sponge to work in accord with existing hydrological drainage, catchment, and recharge patterns. Stormwater runoff is retained and treated through a contiguous network of bioswales, infiltration trenches, stormwater gardens, sediment filter strips, and a constructed wet meadow. The integration of a treatment landscape with open space substitutes an ecologically-based stormwater management system for the expensive curb-gutter-pipe solution in civil infrastructure.