Architectural History and Criticism Commons^™

Community Development In Emerging Cities: A Case For Lagos,Nigeria, Olaoluwa Olakunle Silva

Masters Theses

Urban spatial expansion resulting from urbanization in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is growing and will not stabilize in the near future. Sub-Saharan Africa’s urban growth rate is climbing faster than developing economies. Efforts should be concentrated on accommodating this phenomenon through the promotion of sustainable urban planning and development.

Relying on secondary data, this research examines models of indigenous Sub-Saharan African urban forms and residential architecture vernacular to understand these forms and their characteristics, and how these models and associated management, design, and planning principles can be adopted in a contemporary context. Also, studies of established indigenous building materials and technology, …

The Place Of Power: The Christian Acquisition Of The Roman Basilica, Tysen Dauer

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

Architecture provides a cultural window into peoples’ thoughts, actions, and beliefs. This is especially true of religious architecture. The modern phenomenon of the “megachurch” has resulted from a period of transition for Christians which is strikingly similar to the situation which faced Christians in the 4th century A.D. How the early Christians dealt with their building needs and how modern Christians are dealing with theirs provides an insight into how both the practice of Christianity and the culture in which it is practiced has changed. Research showed that the situations in which these structures were built had much in common: …

Buildings With Brain Power: Library Architecture In Neural Terms., Hannah Bennett

Hannah Bennett

The connection between neuroscience and the built environment is a fairly new interdisciplinary field and one in which both fields, in their respective pursuits, have worked to understand the relationship between design choices, human behavior, and biological processes. Taken together and applied in tandem, these two activities have potential to vastly improve the effectiveness of buildings designed with the healthcare facilities, laboratories, or elementary schools, all of which share objectives of healing and intellectual cultivation. This paper will extend the dialogue to library design, perhaps the most representationally loaded expression of “mental space.” The library has seen profound changes in …

Unit Of Luminous Flux: Mario Botta's Centre Dürrenmatt Neuchâtel, Andreas Luescher

Andreas Luescher

This paper examines the Centre Dürrenmatt Neuchâtel (CDN), which opened in 2000, as the site of a “dialogue” between the ideas and practice of Switzerland’s best-known Italian-speaking architect and designer, Mario Botta, and the country’s best-known German-speaking playwright, Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990). The CDN becomes a double portrait of two Swiss artists, separated by parole but not Sprache. Both felt peripheral to Swiss society, yet each was a product of the cantonal principle of strong regionalism aerated by the Federation’s facilitation of cosmopolitanism aligned in an environmental ecology that literally and figuratively mixed their respective media: the concrete for the ephemeral …

Breaking The Eviction Cycle: Rethinking Design In An Urban Homeless Campsite, Lauren R. Dunn

Masters Theses

In Knoxville, TN, in an area of decaying rail-based industry close to a cluster of homeless services, people experiencing homelessness, who cannot or will not use the shelter system, generate outdoor campsites. Every 6 or 8 months, local authorities evict the campers due to complaints of trash accumulation or disturbances. The homeless campers then move to new locations, and the cycle begins anew. Homeless service providers and policy makers discuss what to do about the perceived problem, but they do not condone the urban campsites or ask the campers what they need to improve their situations.

This is a “wicked …

Urban[E] Agriculture Developing An Architecture That Supports Hyper-Localized Agriculture In The Urban Context, Jason Michael Cole

Masters Theses

This thesis contains both the outline of the modern day problem of food deserts and nutritional injustice in urban areas, as well as my proposed solution for combatting both of those issues. Through research, investigation, experimentation and synthesis of design, I have put forth my thoughts and ideas on how we as a community can work together to shape our own nutritional destiny in the urban environment.

Make A Delirious Noise: Improvising Urbanism In New Orleans, Louisiana, Jason Michael Stark

Masters Theses

Decades of poor urban design choices and a lack of attention to the characteristics of communities have played prominent roles in the fracturing of urban communities and the relegation of those without means to the edges of the urban fabric: poverty and powerlessness abetted by geographic location. Rather than “restitching” the urban whole back together, I argue that progress can be made through the generation of local nodes of identity: a polynucleated urban condition. The development of spaces to magnify community identity with respect to localized characteristics produces a community focus to replace the unattainable (for those without means) city …

Roman Baths At Antiochia Ad Cragum: A Preliminary Evaluation Of Bath Architecture As Social Signals In The Ancient Mediterranean World, Holly J. Staggs

Anthropology Department: Theses

In Rough Cilicia, monumental public architecture was built in the initial phase of the social and political formation of Asia Minor into the Roman Empire during the Imperial Period. As bathing complexes are the most abundant and diverse types of architecture in this region, it would be beneficial to analyze the role of the baths along with their importance in this new Greco-Roman society. This study will focus on two baths at the site of Antiochia ad Cragum, seating this effort in multi-level signaling theory to understand local scale patterning and revised world systems theory to understand regional scale patterning. …

Greta Place As A Historic District, William Riggs

City and Regional Planning

This report, forwarded to the City of San Luis Obispo's Cultural Heritage Commission proposes Greta Place as a mid-century modern historic district. Greta is a small street located centrally in San Luis Obispo, CA (See Figure 1). It has a unique and distinct mid-century presence that is both a well-preserved and concentrated example of a collection of Mid-century single-family homes produced in San Luis Obispo as the City began to expand in the 1950s. It specifically called out in the City’s Historic Context Statement when it describes the street as “a cohesive collection of one-story Mid-century Modern houses along Greta …

Greta Place As A Historic District, William Riggs

William W. Riggs

This report, forwarded to the City of San Luis Obispo's Cultural Heritage Commission proposes Greta Place as a mid-century modern historic district. Greta is a small street located centrally in San Luis Obispo, CA (See Figure 1). It has a unique and distinct mid-century presence that is both a well-preserved and concentrated example of a collection of Mid-century single-family homes produced in San Luis Obispo as the City began to expand in the 1950s. It specifically called out in the City’s Historic Context Statement when it describes the street as “a cohesive collection of one-story Mid-century Modern houses along Greta …

At The Periphery Of Architectural History – Looking At Eastern Europe, Carmen Popescu

Artl@s Bulletin

Long-time absent or only briefly mentioned for those examples fitting into the schemata, Eastern Europe has started to integrate in the past few years the mainstream discourse of architectural history. The reason of this inclusion is to be sought for not only in a certain globalization – both of the practice and of the academic discipline – but also in the mutations operated recently in the field of architectural historiography. However, in spite of the renewed context, Eastern Europe remains still marginal, both geographically – though globalization turned peripherality into a relative issue – and disciplinarily. The paper looks at …

Cooperative Construction In Schools In California, John Mauck Donley

Master's Theses

Cooperative Construction in Schools in California

John M. Donley

The construction industry has lost efficiency since 1964, while becoming increasingly more litigious. Schools in California can ill afford the time to allow the construction industry time to fully evolve. It may take years or decades to fully improve the efficiency of, and reduce the conflict within the construction industry.

At the same time, the construction industry has developed new processes to improve efficiency and reduce conflict. These processes are beginning to be broadly embraced by the industry. They all contain cooperative elements. Taken together they represent a new organizing principle …

Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject Of Art And Architecture, Gavin W. Keeney

Gavin W Keeney

Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture is a series of essays delineating the gray areas and black zones in present-day cultural production with, in Part One (The Gray and the Black), an implicit critique of neoliberal capitalism and its assault on the humanities through the pseudo-scientific and pseudo-empirical biases of academic and professional disciplines. Initially surveying the shift from Cultural Ecology to Cultural Studies to Cognitive Capitalism, the essays of Part Two (What is “Franciscan” Ontology?) return to certain lost causes in the historical development of modernity and post-modernity, foremost the recourse to artistic production as both a …

The Artist And The Rebel: The Art Of Graffiti And Its Impact On Memory Architecture, Stephen A. Setman

Celebration

The lasting presence of graffiti in major cities like Berlin raises the question, what kind of perspective does such an art form have on memory? Given that graffiti are written or painted on structures and buildings, which are already their own kind of monument, and that the content of graffiti tends towards the politically and socially critical, how are we to understand the relationship of these works to places of memory creation? Why, for example, do we sometimes give monumental protection (Denkmanlschutz) to works of graffiti, and why so often not? My research investigates the roll of graffiti in cultural …

Making By Taking: An Investigation Of Architectural Appropriation, Victoria Lee

Honors Capstone Projects - All

The project contends that explicit appropriation can be a legitimate method of architectural production. The scope encompasses four canonical works of architecture: Villa Rotonda, Villa Savoye, Fallingwater, and the Farnsworth House. These works are appropriated as the basis of a retrospective analysis and as the foundation for a speculative, generative design strategy. Following the height of postmodernism, the notion of explicit formal appropriation was characterized in a negative light, seen as inauthentic imitation. However, an increasing number of contemporary artists and architects are utilizing explicit appropriation and historical reference as a primary method of production. This mode of thinking can …

American Picnickers, Yuxiang Luo

Honors Capstone Projects - All

This thesis investigates the eating practice of American commuters. The issue of food is addressed through a social lens, affected by spatial conditions. The project thus aims to reinvent the operation of roadside food business, through the design of a series of spatial conditions that activate new social relations.

Commuters’ eating practice is problematic; the drive-thru as a prevalent building and business typology has created spatial and social isolation for various parties in the society. The social isolation has two implications. On one hand, as drivers eat alone in the car, they are isolated from other eaters, thus degrading the …

Mapping As Performing Place, Aslihan Senel

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

Mapping is an emerging act in contemporary discourse to understand, criticize, and re-imagine complex cultural, social, and physical relationships in the built environment. Maps are documents nearly as old as the human history in representing the relationships of people to land. Yet, mapping rather than map-making is a newly created concept as an alternative way of thinking about this relationship. Mapping refers less to a representation than a performance, in which the maker, place, and the product redefine, reposition and reproduce each other in the process. Mapping may allow developing an embodied and critical understanding of place, which is continuously …

'Connecticut's Most Auncient Towne': A Brief History Of Homes In Wethersfield, 1634-1934, Emily Sesko

Senior Theses and Projects

This paper aims to delineate the stylistic history of Wethersfield, Connecticut’s domestic architectural culture from the time of its founding in 1634 by Massachusetts adventurer John Oldham through the completion of the Hubbard Community in the mid-1930s by visionary developer and historic home restorer Albert G. Hubbard, originally of Simsbury, Connecticut.

Due to its status as the oldest town in Connecticut, Wethersfield has the advantage of having at least one example of each major style of home building from the mid-seventeenth century age of settlement to the birth of the streetcar suburb and a class of corporate commuters and automobile …

Spans Across Time: Compliance Of Historic Maine Coastal Bridges With Modern Geometric Design Standards, Elizabeth Reynolds

Honors College

The purpose of this thesis is to study a wide range of historic bridges along the coast of Maine. Three bridges were selected for study: Sewall’s Bridge, Bailey Island Bridge, and Deer Isle-Sedgwick Bridge. The selected bridges exhibit varying historic treatment approaches, material use, structure type, and span length. This thesis establishes the compliance of these bridges with modern geometric standards, as defined by AASHTO (2011), including maximum grade, vertical and horizontal alignment, roadway width, and sidewalk width. Passing sight distance, passenger comfort and general appearance are not be included in this evaluation of geometric design.

This document outlines the …

Preserving The Historic Garden Suburb: Case Studies From London And New York, Jeffrey A. Kroessler

Suburban Sustainability

The garden city or garden suburb was a response to the social and environmental ills of cities at the turn of the twentieth century. Letchworth Garden City, Hampstead Garden Suburb, and Welwyn Garden City were built outside London in the early 1900s, and each remains a highly desirable place of residence today. From the start, each was tightly regulated, and remains so a century later. By protecting the appearance and enhancing property values, the strict application of historic preservation principles contribute to the long-term sustainability of each place. Similar garden suburbs were built in the borough of Queens in New …