Interior Architecture Commons^™

Living · Sharing · Connecting : Rebirth Of Longchang Apartments Heritage Community, Linhong Jiang

Masters Theses

The Longchang Apartments, which the British designed during the Shanghai Concession Period, is considered a building of great historical importance. However, the disconnected relationship between this historic building and the ever-developing modern society surrounding it becomes more and more evident over time. The backward living conditions of residents and management fail to meet contemporary needs, which intensifies various conflicts between different user groups within the historic site.

This thesis proposes a different way of living in high density within historic structures and explores a new program focusing on user groups’ behavior and interaction to activate the site. The adaptive reuse …

Unraveling The Living: Reframing Cramped Housing As A Social Living, Dong-Zoo Han

Masters Theses

In Seoul, people of the poorest economic status live in compressed units no larger than 32 square feet, known as “sliced housing.” The majority of these residents hope for better living conditions, but they are unable to move for multiple reasons. This is an interwoven sociological issue that requires intervention proposals that improve the physical and mental wellbeing of the people in these housing situations. This thesis demonstrates possible architectural interventions that will enhance the quality of life and support systems within Seoul’s “sliced housing” villages.

Other urban villages in Seoul in similar states of degradation have been destroyed, with …

Remember Me: How We Can Modify The Home For People With Dementia, Wenjin Wang

Masters Theses

More than 50 million people live with dementia worldwide. For reasons of familiarity, affordability, and psychological comfort, the home is uniquely preferred by people with dementia (PwD) and their caregivers for aging in place. Ample studies show that built environmental features (e.g., furnishing, lighting, layout) influence the daily lives of PwD. These features can be modified easily and with fewer disruptions to daily life at home. However, most PwD and their caregivers usually have little knowledge of what can be achieved through simple interventions to environmental features.

There is a great need for an exhibition to explain the dementia-friendly home …

Reinforcing Connection Within Collective Housing: A New Vision Of Red Steel City, Guangyi Niu

Masters Theses

Red Steel City is a historical residential complex built 64 year ago for the first workers of the Iron & Steel Complex in Wuhan, China, under the help design guidance of the former Soviet Union. Equipped with educational and medical facilities, this “City” nearly meets every need of the residents. Where residents worked boosted the development of steel, which is considered a prerequisite for industrialization, and where they lived became the template for the era when China was finding its footing in its incredible drive to industrialization.

The original plan of Red Steel City did not consider practical conditions like …

Loneliness / Togetherness : Interiority And Connection Under Isolation, Huaqin Chen

Masters Theses

Inhabitants’ perceptions can be greatly impacted when they are in an enforced space, a state of incarceration. That sense of confinement can cause mental or physical health issues on account of the loneliness, lack of interaction or confusion of time and space. Living through enforcement and isolation deeply affect human cognition and behavior. We can also easily find precedents of living through enforcement in the plots of films. By studying narrative, this thesis reconstructs domestic space by investigating the changes in our daily life after our current pandemic. A spatial sequence is created according to the relationwship among time, space …

Ascents And Descents In The 21st Century: Restoring Chand Baori, Japneet Pahwa

Masters Theses

Water is a basic human right and a resource that should be accessible to all. The largest and deepest stepwell in the world, Chand Baori in dry Abhaneri, Rajasthan, is visited by many but serves its purpose for none. This hundred foot deep subterranean structure once allowed access to fresh water during hot and dry seasons, and served as a cool sanctuary for pilgrims, caravans and villagers.Unfortunately, due to climate change and political discourse, the underprivileged, rural population of modern India often does not have access to water. Stepwells were built in India in the 3rd century CE, in the …

Woven Healing: Reimagining The Rural Health Center, Mahasweta Jayachandran

Masters Theses

Seventy-five percent of India’s population is rural. Of those rural citizens, almost nine out of ten lack access to adequate health facilities. While the existing composition of any village in India is housing, temple, and agriculture, the physical well-being of residents has no home. When the local government builds a new isolated healthcare center, these disconnected centers become deserted and a place of unhealthy activity.

How do you effectively embed a new spatial intervention within an existing system of the village that supports health, rather than extending the boundaries of the village into sprawl? Historical study of medical practice in …

Migrating Architecture: Vernacular Futurism, Yichu Jiang

Masters Theses

The history of mankind is migration: while large migrations describe groups and communities, each individual has a unique life history of migration. When moving to a new place, singly or in groups, migrants need self-identification support to adapt to a new environment. As the built environment continuously interacts with human’s everyday life, architecture provides a stable environment, which helps to build individual perceptions in space and social relations. Therefore, architecture migrates with its population and evolves according to context.

Tulou, as a result of historical turbulence and massive migration in China, exemplifies such a phenomenon of migrating architecture. The prototypical …

The Second Home: Breaking The Cycle Of Lonely Death, Woohee Kim

Masters Theses

Lonely Death Syndrome is a phenomenon in which an isolated person suffers a lack of social relationships and dies alone. This is a serious problem in modern South Korea, particularly among poor elderly people living in Seoul. Though the government has tried to help, there is an obvious bureaucratic limit in resolving the sense of loneliness. In Seoul, Nowon-gu is one of the districts that has the highest concentration of poor seniors, and high-rise rental housing built for this population. These apartments are uniform in design in order to house as many people as possible economically in a limited space, …

Overflowing Boundaries: Competition And Mutualism In Urban Villages, Chen Zhang

Masters Theses

Villages besieged by urban sprawl have been isolated and forgotten, broken from urban texture and social relationships. However, this kind of encirclement has no clear boundary and is entirely permeable. Infiltration and overflowing occur on various scales. On the urban scale, the old villages gradually abandoned the agricultural lifestyle and connected with the new industrial city. On the architectural scale, urban villages attempt to integrate with cities by imitating the urban façade wherever they come into contact along the fluid boundary. Some warehouses, small plants, and small workshops have appeared in urban villages. On the human scale, people's lives overflow …

Fostering Cultural Understanding: Mirroring Ways Of Living In Providence, Ri, Usa And Beijing, Prc, Jiarui Tina Wu

Masters Theses

Over the last several decades, the relationship between the US and China has suffered twists and turns, rooted in different ideologies and social foundations. The Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent surge of anti-Asian violence in the US contributed to the exacerbation of this global controversy, triggering an undeclared Cold War. However, in history over hundred years, there was a real dialogue between the US and China through business trade. The high classes in the US were used to buy Chinese export commodities, such as luxury furnitures and porcelain, and similarly, Chinese merchants bought American goods, which caused naturally lead to an …

Rural Acupuncture: Carefully Introducing Tourism Within An Underground Village, Shangyun Zhou

Masters Theses

Di Keng Yuan(地坑院) are traditional cave dwellings in northern rural China, with a history of over 4,000 years of use. Today, living in Di Keng Yuan represents poverty and lower social status. Most Di Keng Yuan are ignored and abandoned by local people more interested in urbanization and the evolution of society. Yaodi Village is facing such a challenge of hollowing, meaning 1.young rural labor flows spontaneously into big cities, resulting in increased rural aging and 2.residents living in rural areas have gradually moved to the surrounding areas, resulting in the abandonment of cave dwellings, and the village is becoming …

Remembering Chinatown: A Fusion Of Food, Identity, & Memory, Robert Yang

Masters Theses

In 2016, the Chinese American Restaurant Association recorded a total of 50,000 Chinese restaurants operating in the United States, far exceeding the number of McDonalds, Burger Kings, KFCs, and Wendy’s combined. In the near two centuries that Chinese people have been a part of the American fabric, our food has become one of the country’s most popular ethnic cuisines. While these restaurants stand as testaments to the tenacity and entrepreneurship of the Chinese immigrant, they are also reminders of the centuries of adversity Chinese Americans have endured. The racial divisions triggered by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 have resulted …

Adaptive Reuse As Evidence Of Scientific Progress: Recontextualizing A Space For Growing Knowledge, Kayci Gallagher

Masters Theses

With the constantly evolving initiatives of astronomical exploration comes the obsolescence of instruments conceived to support research; a sure sign of the scientific process. However, architecture constructed to shelter these constantly shifting tools often remains fixed, growing incapable of supporting advancing technology. Typically, these shelters are sidelined in favor of new infrastructure. Many optical observatories around the world face this issue and must choose between preserving the past or abandoning the site altogether. That these buildings are no longer needed for revolutionary research shouldn’t be disappointing: it is a signal of human achievement, and the scientific process requires a more …

The Retrieval Of Memory: Holding Time In The Shanghai Gasometers, Liman Wei

Masters Theses

Shanghai was primarily an industrial city from the 19th century to the 20th century. By serving as a carrier of time, the past industrial architecture in Shanghai is invested with the collective memory of its past inhabitants. Now that Shanghai has entered the post-industrial period, according to the Shanghai 2035 Urban Plan, the Yangshupu Industrial Zone will be transformed into a new Central Activity Zone. As a result of this plan, old residential neighborhoods nearby will be demolished and replaced by new high-rise residential buildings. The relationship between old residential areas and industrial buildings will be uprooted. Memories of industry …

Terminal: Through The "Windows" Of A Tram Car Museum, Yuyi Si

Masters Theses

The typical city museum is more concerned with the city’s past: focused on founding myths or historical events. The content is frozen and lacks engagement. Simultaneously, the city itself develops rapidly and shifts, just as the citizens move and change. To address this disconnection, it is necessary to create an active city museum that joins place, memory, and people by putting museum learning in context throughout the city and engaging audiences in their daily lives.

Dalian in Liaoning Province, China, is recognized as a historical and tourism district with a unique city fabric and collection of architectural styles. The city …

Ritualizing Of Space In The 21st Century: Fostering Of Communal Identity Through Celebration Of Tamil Culture, Mridula Swaminathan

Masters Theses

South India is known for its traditional belief systems and the numerous architectural manifestations of these beliefs. The scale and extravagance of temples and the palaces for the kings are an example of how important culture and ritual were in the past. Now some of these structures, such as the Thirumalai Nayakar Palace in the city of Madurai, the cultural capital of Tamil Nadu, stand in a modified societal context with no cultural or ritualized significance. Moreover, the host of this project, the Thirumalai Nayakar Mahal, situated in a city brimming with multiple sacred rituals performed along the city streets, …

Beyond Pasta: Understanding Italian American Culinary Culture In Federal Hill, Chufan He

Masters Theses

Nuances of culture are lost from an outside perspective. This one–sidedness perception brings confusion and can lead to stereotypes. As a “Country of immigrants’” it is crucial to break stereotypes born in America to understand the complexity and uniqueness of every immigrant's culture. As for stereotypes of Italian culture in America, these are always related to food. As an Italian American neighbourhood with many layers of history, Federal Hill has experienced several transitions. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Fabre Line offered the only transatlantic route which brought a large number of Italian immigrants to New England. Providence …

Going Back, Zhiyi Hilary He

Masters Theses

The acceleration of social urbanization and education universalization in the past 30 years of China has promoted the popularization of mandarin among the public. Meanwhile, the dialect, as a unique regional language, is gradually dying away. In the city where I grew up, Taizhou, only the elders are likely to speak Taizhou dialect frequently in their life, while others prefer to use mandarin rather than dialect. The truth is the usage rate of dialect has gradually decreased from generation to generation. The primary goal of this thesis is to provide an opportunity for the public to “dialogue with the past” …

Health + Efficiency House: A Take On The 50x50 Glass House, Eva Wieczorek, Krystal Bacon, Kaylee Hernandez, Jennifer Long, Moises De La Cruz, Elle Gallmann, Jurgis Vaišvila

Architectural Engineering

Under the guidance of Professor Edmond Saliklis and Professor Meredith Sattler, four Architectural Engineering students joined forces with three Architecture students from both Cal Poly and Vilnius Technical University in Lithuania. The portfolio exemplifies a complete reimagination of Mies van der Rohe and Myron Goldsmith's 50x50 Glass House as if it were designed today in Palm Springs, CA. The work completed in this interdisciplinary studio includes historical context, abstract creation, architectural and structural design all relating back to the Glass House.