Architecture Commons^™

Rethinking Participatory Design: Tools For Modelling Community Potentials, Adam Liu, Stephen Marinelli

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis aims to provide an alternative method of community engagement through the process of participatory model-making. Rather than only seeking out community voices for surveys and data collection, this project’s goal is to empower a community’s sense of ownership through collective design.

The methods of this project will be tested and examined in collaboration with students from Dr. King Elementary School in Syracuse, New York. By designing a participatory method for model-making, the project will involve students in the early stages of urban design and make it more educationally and socially accessible.

Resembling Legitimacy: Restructuring The American Civic Architectural Myth, Estefany Lona

Architecture Thesis Prep

By looking at three case studies--Esposizione Universale Roma, the New Deal, and Red Vienna--this project demonstrates that the architecture within each context to be more than subjective constructions of political ideology. They grasp at the history of nations, tangible environments, and coincide with implementation of public policy.

Living Memories: Rethinking Remembrance, Timothy Mulhall

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis will interrogate conventional types and methods of memorialization, challenging the memorial as a complete product. Developing from inquiries into alternative acts of commemoration, this investigation will seek to conceive a memorial in the making. An ever-changing memorial that embraces temporality and the process of becoming will offer a new way of rendering remembrance in the built environment.

Image Carnival, Kaixin Huang, Siting Xing

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis project will begin with a basic understanding of iconology, and research on social and technological changes, and explore the different levels of images in a certain range of Instagram-based image sharing social media, and the current social media The space design for the goal is characterized by two directions, which leads to our architectural iconology.

Entangling Manila’S Seams, Patrick De Garcia

Architecture Thesis Prep

Manila, Philippines is a city fragmented into slums and upper-class enclaves. The adjacency of their separated development contributes to intensifying class-relations; each side is fearful of the other. Symbolic manifestations of the border are made apparent due to economic inaccessibility, emphasizing social stratification. This project is interested in blurring the boundaries maintaining social segregation to enhance public spaces’ quality, specifically through redeveloping the shopping mall.

Communion Composed: Fostering Unity Through A Nourished Architecture, David Acevedo

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis looks to utilize food and its inherent social properties as a medium in which architecture can have greater agency in the unification of people, more specifically, distraught communities. Guatemala, a pillar of Central American culture, will be the chosen zone of exploration where such a collaboration can be implemented at a ceremonial scale, utilizing techniques and methods found in ecologically efficient urban food production, intimate domestic food consumption, and marrying them to methods of engaging ceremonial food preparation to create a new edible landscape of socially sustaining architecture.

Mycotecture Of Contamination, Maria Gutierrez, Elise Zilius

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis situates living organisms, specifically mycelium, as the primary designer of the built environment. The investigation uses contamination to fuel mycelium growth and create emergent forms whilst executing remediation strategies for contaminated sites.

Mutualistic Infra\Structures, Dylan Crean

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis asserts design for Infra\ Space, to override static private or public conditions of territory and manipulate Neoliberal investment patterns. The architectural output will be Mutualistic Infra\ Structures. Buildings developed on a methodology focusing on how to lead investment to interstitial spaces.

Beyond The Border: On The Contested Island, Ruxuan Zheng, Shengwei Liu

Architecture Thesis Prep

Every life is important and fragile, but what human being has done for centuries are destroying the balance between human and nature, threatening the future of every life on the Earth. Nowadays, waters are going out of control, while climates are changing dramatically, international boundaries are thickening, and regional human conflicts are tensing. New architectural forms are needed in order to restore the wounded nature, reconcile the political contests, and restructure the relation between human and non-human. We are designing architecture as an initiative to solve those problems, starting from one site and one marine creature, then extending ecologically, socially, …

Dissolving Reality: An Endless Domestic Landscape, Hanzhang Lai, Phang Lim

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis explores how the exponential growth in communication technology is changing the way we interact with the tangible and intangible spaces. The invasion of the public into the private, the collective into the domestic, the work into the leisure, and the ability to be constantly connected wirelessly have caused a dissolution of the physical domestic space. The domestic space has lost its value of privacy and intimacy and the boundary between the binaries will be no more. The gap between “the control” and “controlled” has widened and productive workers will be oppressed to be even more productive under the …

Olympic Gardens After The Games, Kaylee O'Brien

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis begins with an intense study of landscape and the garden. In addition to research on the historical, theoretical, and contemporary conditions of the garden, the thesis investigates the architectural and landscape conditions of the Olympic Games. Specifically looking into issues including Olympic Legacy, Olympic Gardens, and urban interventions associated with Olympic Parks, the project aims to understand ways in which these subjects can be studied, analyzed, and reapplied in the context of a new architectural design. This combined research into gardens and the Olympic Games serves as a foundation for the thesis design project, providing strategies and ways …

“Urban Corridor”: Growing The Connective Tissue Of Nashville, Lindsey Brown

Architecture Thesis Prep

Nashville is undergoing mass-gentrification, and certain marginalized groups are disconnected by infrastructure or distance from basic needs and resources. Architecture can reconnect underserved communities in order to empower them to participate culturally and reclaim autonomy over their community. Through this thesis, architecture can connect the city through the development of infrastructure that (1) encourages tourist exploration out of the inner ring, (2) encourages more sustainable transportation by visitors and residents, (3) increases visitor and resident access to resources through the incorporation of program to make an “active infrastructure”, and (4) highlights the wide variety of cultures in Nashville.

Hidden Narratives, Diego Becerra

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis is interested in the active interventions that affect isolated towns through new economic developments. And I'm focused in the use of architecture as a leverage to transform the city in a way that empowers their local community, by adapting the architecture to handle the economic, infrastructure and density change, by working with existing building interventions. So it maintain its character but it also becomes its tool for social and economic cohesion that empowers the community.

Latent Territories, Vasundhra Aggarwal, Jaclyn Doyle

Architecture Thesis Prep

Through accelerated processes of recording and transmitting visual data of our built environment, architecture is increasingly consumed as a series of pixels and numbers by machine modes of vision for other autonomous actors. The incessant processing and data hoarding is saturating the networks that are perceived to be infinite, leading to the inevitable physical and digital decay. As weathering is to the physical, lags and glitches are to the the digital. The effects of aging of physical degradation are evident in our environment, however, the loss of material integrity of digital files is much less visible. Due to the mutable …

The Politics Of The Trash Heap, Kyle Neumann

Architecture Thesis Prep

I propose to develop a new methodology on housing fabrication and community development and engagement in the region of northern Baja to be achieved through material sourcing and fabrication, localized infrastructure, and larger scale infrastructure throughout the border region of Mexico and California. This will be done at three scales: Macro-scale, studying ecologies, climate, and political landscapes; Meso-scale, studying infrastructure, resources, population density, and agriculture; Micro-scale, studying familial types, dwelling infrastructure and the cultural community. The Human dwelling will be the amalgamation of this border redevelopment, as refuse material from the US can be augmented to produce climactically appropriate materials …

Privacy Reconfigured: Examining Public Interactions Within Domestic Space, Vanessa Poe

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis reconfigures private domestic spaces by combining modes of privacy in order to accommodate the needs of the townhouse, resulting in a new series of private reveals through socialization.

An Interface: An Architecture That Stitches Species, Suren Sivaram

Architecture Thesis Prep

Materialized, architecture could be considered as an interface that promotes and preserves biodiversity within a site, as “all life is bound into dynamic and interrelated processes of codependency.” In addition, this thesis posits that architecture as an interface may act representationally to raise awareness of the need to embrace biodiversity and to sustain humanity. In Greater Perfections, Hunt suggests, “The garden will … be distinguished in various ways from the adjacent territories in which it is set … it will be set apart by the greater extent, scope, and variety of its design and internal organization”. Stitching elements of its …

Resilience Of School Systems Following Severe Earthquakes, Emad M. Hassan, Hussam N. Mahmoud, Bruce R. Ellingwood

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Natural disasters may have catastrophic and long-lasting impacts on communities' physical, economic, and social infrastructure. Slow recovery of educational services following such events is likely to cause traumatic stress in children, lead families to out-migrate, and affect the community's overall social stability. Methods for quantifying and assessing the restoration process of educational systems and their dependencies on other supporting infrastructure have not received adequate attention. This study introduces, for the first time, a new framework to evaluate the functionality, recovery, and resilience of a school system following severe earthquake events. The framework considers both the quantity and quality of education …

Drawing Ambulatory Cartographies: Understanding Urban Experience Through Walking, Bonnie Yu

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis contends that the act of walking, as a way of seeing, being, and understanding in the city, can be a form of urban intervention that enables the transformation of space by allowing individuals to imbue spaces with meaning. The act of walking, in conjunction with mapping practices, can be a critical tool for understanding urban space, acting as a nomadic architecture that works to subvert and smooth the striated space of the city.

This project will investigate the ways in which urban landscape representation, in particular the processes and performances of walking-based mapping practices, can reveal and assert …

Architecture Student Design Competition 2020 Final Report, Andreas Luescher

Architecture and Environmental Design Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.