Landscape Architecture Commons^™

A Material Cooperation Over Time, Diana Marcela Gallo

Masters Theses

The use of materials like clay, concrete and biomaterials have given a meaning and identity to the outcomes we produce through time. Materials absorb and release energy that passes through them. Transformation processes in materials can be revealed when they get in touch with a phenomenon like infiltration of water. Changing stages in materials and weathering, should not be considered as a negative condition but as a new opportunity to feel and perceive the same surface differently.

The illusion of permanence should be replaced by a more fluid idea that nothing lasts or keeps the same condition forever. Since all …

Territories Of Trash: Designing The Overlap Of Spaces Of Disposal And Acquisition, Mary Kokorda Cavazos

Masters Theses

Where should we put our trash?

Our current system keeps potentially valuable material designated as trash hidden away at the margins and edges of our built environment, and shuttles garbage vast distances into landfills, where it persists indefinitely.

Over the past year I’ve invested time into learning about our country’s history of disposal in the landscape. Historically, changes in volume, types of waste, and cultural attitudes have prompted changes to typologies of disposal in our built environment.

Currently, due to changes in Chinese recycling policy in 2018, China no longer accepts America’s highly contaminated recycled material. Americans are also caught …

Generative Landscapes: Successional And Equitable Plant Propagation On Rhode Island's Public Lands, Elizabeth Hunt

Masters Theses

This project is about participating in the life cycles of plants in order to generate more resilient and equitable landscapes. This project proposes fun, inclusive ways for a cultural shift toward taking care of our landscapes and expanding, diversifying and deepening them. From educational programming, to seed bomb tosses, invasive scavenger hunts, named tree posts, hell strip garden beds, and more, the intent is to make land management shared, productive, and scaled to the emergency of climate change and environmental inequity.

3d Simulation In Flooding Providence, Qing Liu

Masters Theses

This thesis use 3d data visualization to provide the scenarios of how global climate changes will influence people’s life if we don’t take actions as soon as possible, which provide non-professional people an easy way to understand the urban issues and engage them into the environmental protection. My proposal is to visualize the flooding issues in Providence by using kinds of simulation tools, including 3d model, augmented reality(AR), animation in order arise the awareness of climate change and the significance of human’s actions to protect the living environments. These simulations also provide the support for the designers and policy-makers to …

Dynamic Landscape: The Theatre Of Time Unfolding, Mo Kong

Masters Theses

Human’s particular perspective and scale couldn’t allow them to perceive the ever-changing quality of the landscape through their senses. As landscape architects, we lack tools to communicate and work with not only time but typically experiment with the representation of time in physical landscape images. To create a dynamic experience, what tools of representation allow landscape architects to respond to time? This thesis explores many different types of representational techniques in terms of videos and drawings and uses them in a series of experimentation back and forward to make the unfamiliar familiar. The goal of the thesis is to build …

Urban Palimpsest: Re-Placing Memory In War Torn City Dresden, Xinyi Sun

Masters Theses

Urban landscapes can be envisaged as a palimpsest of historical layers, some of which have disappeared while others remain active in constituting contemporary identities.

Yet memory is tricky and one’s memory can be false, distorted or erased consciously or unconsciously from brain. Like history, some memories can be lost, while others others might be retained and continue to influence the present.

This thesis explores memory as active construction. Construction and reconstruction are ongoing and as layered and nuanced as the history itself. Moreover, memory is both personal and collective. It is shared, appropriated, and reassigned depending on whose personal filter …

42nd Soundscaping: Sound As Media For Reshaping Urban Ecology, Chao Li

Masters Theses

This proposal aims to draw people’s attention to our surrounding acoustic environment and shift people’s awareness from “hearing” to “listening”. In urban areas, to enrich our living experiences, people choose to get rid of the noisy environments. I believe landscape architecture always has the power to connect human’s different senses with our environment. As the most dynamic and abstract phenomenon, sound has the potential to guide landscape spatial design and modify our ecological system. The investigation focuses on 42nd Street as a primary study area which is historically one of the most iconic streets in the midtown of Manhattan, connecting …

What Is Rural Design? Decentralized & Community-Driven Approaches For The Green New Deal That Value Existing Rural Land And Community, Cornelia Overton

Masters Theses

In contemporary design conversations, rural areas are discussed less than urban ones, and yet rural communities are in need of good design, and a new rural pattern language could hold the keys to a healthier human relationship with our environment. If the United States were to enact a Federal Green New Deal, rural landscapes stand to see big changes. Not only would landscape architects have new funded opportunities to design in rural places, but bolstered support of ecological urbanism would have broader repercussions in the rural landscape.

By exploring the changing meaning of rurality, translating urban design theory for rural …

Clay Beneath The Tree: An Exploration Of Design Processes In Community Development, Shiya Zeng

Masters Theses

Parents bought their kid a new toy and said: “Here you go, enjoy.” he plays with it for three hours, and then I go back to play with the clay beneath a tree. The “new toy” is an analogy of a traditional Design-Funding-Implement design process. The reason why “clay” is more attractive is that clay is flexible and manipulatable, which allows for continually engaging, reshaping, destructing, and exploring. More importantly, clay unleashes one’s imagination that unlocks thousands of possibilities. Community design process is “heartwork” that enhance well-being, equity, and agency for change. This is why the process matters.

This thesis …

Fluid Urbanism, Huachen Zhang

Masters Theses

As we stepped into the 2020s, technologies keep emerging, such as the autonomous vehicle. We can already foresee some of the future cityscapes. Some of the largest vehicle manufactures have already road-tested their autonomous vehicles and shifted their focus to electronic powered vehicles. So what will the future city look like with new autonomous vehicle technology? What does an autonomous vehicle actually mean? What's the potential of this technology? In my thesis, I am not focusing on the impact of existing autonomous technology, but am trying to dig deeper and find its fuller potential. In my thesis autonomous technology as …

Energy Convergence, Xiaoyu Xu

Masters Theses

The current state of our urban systems and infrastructure is untenable in light of ongoing urbanization, population growth and complexity of modern life, including the problem of the city’s deactivation. Current systems lack the level of integration and shared intelligence that our technology advancements allow and modern life requires.

And if we understand landscape and its systems as inherently integrated and self-sustaining and essential to the optimal functioning of our cities, then we can position urban landscapes as the foundation and framework for all future urban system redesign and development.

This Land Is Your Land: Democratizing Landscape Architecture, Adrienne Emmerich

Masters Theses

The main question posed by this thesis is: How can landscape architects give individuals and communities creative agency over their own landscapes?

This question is framed by three key concepts. First, there is the fact that throughout US history, land management and design decisions have been used to marginalize communities of color. The second concept framing this thesis is that communities of color continue to be negatively affected by decisions about their land. For example, new toxic waste sites are disproportionately placed in communities of color (Mohai and Saha 2015). The third concept framing this thesis is that landscape architects …

Urban Storytelling: Rebuilding The Understanding Of Place Via Immersive Narrative, Xue Gao

Masters Theses

This thesis explores a hyper reality- in this case, virtual and augmented reality- storytelling system, focused on individual readings and experiences, as a new method of place understanding.

Mountainous City, Yixuan Hu

Masters Theses

My thesis studies how glaciation and vegetation systems define the landscapes of Mount Gongga, and asks how these and their modes of relation and zonation might provide a model for more sustainable and fully adaptable structures to support urbanism. Using mountain systems as the metaphor, I proposed a mountainous city model focusing on efficient urban ecosystems and spontaneous human activities. By the methods of deconstructing and mimetic modeling, they triggered a series of rethinking about the formation and relation of urban spaces. The mountainous city has four distinctive vertical layered zones, which integrated with hydrological and ecological systems and vertical …

Green Arteries, Jiapan Wei

Masters Theses

My thesis asks how transportation infrastructure in a shrinking city such as Detroit, can be redefined as a malleable, generative, efficient synthetic system that can develop, manage and distribute urban resources, production, knowledge and skilled labor.

To achieve this, the highway system can be entwined with other systems in the city, such as food, energy, media, education, and water and waste. In the process, it will be reinvigorated as an engine for the city, a center of productive energy versus mere connective tissue linking former factories to outer suburbs, ports and distant markets.

The thesis uses a “cradle to cradle” …

Landscapes Of Exposure: Reframing The Connection Between Body + Environment, Kayla Murgo

Masters Theses

This project explores new relationships of the body to the landscape through understanding how the environment imprints, molecularly, on the body and how that information is stored and inherited. In this age of postgenomics, a time that is defined by big-data and technology driven approaches to medicine and public health, it is imperative that we work interdisciplinarily to address mounting health and ecological concerns.

As shapers of natural and social systems, I believe that landscape architects can bridge scales, from the molecular to the ecological, to draw new conclusions about how humans impact ecological systems and how these impacts are …

Urban Ecotone: Restoring The Water-Land Balance As A Strategy For Social Equity, Yuzhe Ma

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on Dhaka, Bangladesh, and the urban interface between the more formal developed parts of the city and the less-formal and more economically-vulnerable urban neighborhoods.

It seeks to reframe this interface as an ‘ecotone’ versus a hard boundary. By reframing this area along ecological lines, this interface is positioned as a place with a great diversity of ‘species’ and fertile conditions and collisions, which allow it to act as a generator of new opportunities benefitting both of the communities (biomes) which transition into it.

This ecotone is seen as being further fed by the presence of urban ecology …

Flowing Garments: Textile Waste Reutilization In Landscape Design, Fengjiao Ge

Masters Theses

This thesis has focused on creating a localized response to a global problem related to globalization and fast fashion. Both our amount of post-production waste and the carbon footprint left by the garment industry’s response to a global desire for novelty and affordability, and their dependence on cheap labor, loose environmental regulations, distributed raw materials and production, and markets far from places of manufacturing has created an unethical and unsustainable supply chain model.

The strategy proposed here began with one of the places that receives much of the world’s garment waste. As a country that both produces these garments and …

Restorative Urbanism: Redefining Socio-Ecosystems In Manila, Kaixin Zhang

Masters Theses

This thesis explores coastal cities and the narrow zone lying between their developing urban areas and the waters of the open sea. Worldwide, there are more than 14 cities with populations over 10 million are situated along endangered coastlines. The fact that many of these continue to experience rapid growth, are economic centers of international importance, and are increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, is a matter of global concern. In this work I examine the implications and possibilities of restoring urban coastline defenses and ask how I can learn from past efforts while adapting such strategies to …

Discovering The Potential Of The Public Realm : Revitalizing Dead Zones In Fall River, Massachusetts, Rui Xie

Masters Theses

Specifically, this thesis asks can the superimposition of opposites—applying the conditions of a small community to the conditions and scale of a large city—be a solution to examine public spaces, revitalize dead zones, and strengthen community?

Reviving The Hollowing Rural Village: Research On The Coastal Mountainous Region Of Kaihua, China, Rui Tao

Masters Theses

My research focuses on one county in China and the regional and local structure to understand the existing flows between urban and rural areas, including both ecological, industrial and social exchanges. Kaihua county, located in north-west Zhejiang Province, is currently the poorest county economically in this region and has more migrant workers and a more severe hollowing degree.

This thesis aims to revive the hollowing rural village and improve the village’s value as a hybrid public realm - a space encouraging reciprocal flows exchanged from both “rural ground” and urban “new comers,” strengthening the ecological and social ties among water …