Architecture Commons^™

Sculpting Time In Spatial Narrative, Hua Gao

Masters Theses

In architecture, we dwell in time as much as in space. As there is a geometry in space, so there is a psychology in time. The spatial narrative refers to a plot involved in the space design, also to the construction of the space, the arrangement of order relationship results in the effective content of space. The core of spatial narrative is to create the space order. The spatial narrative contains a mental world, in which the experienced, remembered and imagined, as well as the past, present, and future is inseparably intermixed.

Architecture is not only enfolded by the eye …

Envisioning Ecological Cities, Carlton Smith

Masters Theses

Our cities are recognized as centers for jobs, entertainment and production; as icons of human innovation. However, they are also recognized as for their consumption. Being that our cities are mechanisms of consumption, they rely on imported resources such as food, water, energy and labor in order to continue to thrive. Though this relationship has fostered technological and mechanical growth, it has also been degrading the natural ecological processes that we rely on to survive. As our understanding of our relationship to the environment deepens, there is a growing push for architecture that embodies an attention to its connections to …

[De]Construction And [Re]Construction : A Promenade Theater, Jingjing Zhao

Masters Theses

REFRAME THE COMMONPLACE

I see corners, ceilings, openings and steps. I see the whole through gathering the spatial fragmentations. I see the extraordinary phenomenon within the frame of domestic life. I see the potential for being anomaly from what we usually take for granted.

Spaces are entities propelled by the phenomenological, the conceptual and the physical. Built and spatial forms serves as functional and structural vessel to capture, balance and rearrange the multiple forces between the common and the abnormal, between the real and the abstract.

Capturing the domestic moments in daily life and reframe the fragmentations into certain from …

Surveillance City In A Post 9/11 Era, Wanting Dong

Masters Theses

Surveillance City in A Post 9/11 Era is a thesis investigation trying to understand our privacy, perceived safety and public realm in the large context of evolving terrorism worldwide by promoting a conversation about how surveillance would change our city, our new relationship with the city under surveillance, and how people will live with surveillance in the future.

Phase one seeks to understand terrorism and terrorist attack in general, and the opportunities and limitations of the existing security design strategies that have been implemented by US government. In phase two, a specific investigation direction is determined and a series of …

Grave : Landscape Necromancy, Jil Sanchez

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on the phenomenon of festivity in order to better understand the spatial qualities of platforms for experiences of release. The work is grounded in the intimate connection between post-industrial landscapes and the emergence of raves and electronic music. The design approach questions western cultural norms by creating a scenario for a combined rave venue and cemetery. The investigation’s material and spatial manifestations are applied to Red Hook Grain Terminal, an ideal latent venue for raves, concerts, and other festive and contemplative functions on New York City’s fringe. The project aspires to widen the range of conversations landscape …

Light Installations For Le, Yiqi Jiang

Masters Theses

This investigation derived from a personal childhood memory of an autistic boy, living with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). His struggles to communicate and to have people understand him drives this thesis investigation in hopes of better connecting people of all abilities through accessible design. After serving a summer term working at a special needs inclusion camp, there is the exposure to the lack of awareness and communication gap between design and people living with autism. The study develops a series of strategies that strengthen communication between people with and without ASD and ultimately seeks to educate the design profession on …

Viaduct Landscape, Juanru Wang

Masters Theses

Thesis question: can spaces under viaducts become objects of appreciation; can design promote their original characteristics?

This thesis focuses on the space created by the elevated transit infrastructure in urban areas. In recent years, the spaces under viaducts attract attention in the field of landscape architecture. There are many successful practices that transfer the negative space under viaducts to popular urban plazas. Most of those designs, however, may simply regard spaces under viaducts as dangerous spaces or as obstacles in the city. Nevertheless, the scale and spatial characteristics of the spaces under viaducts are not in other public open spaces …

Grid In Landscape Architecture, Ying Xu

Masters Theses

Driven by the interest of the cultural meaning in the landscape architecture and the fascination of the power of the grid, the inspiration of this thesis is from the landscape architecture works that obtain both characters.

Many landscape architecture works simultaneously are expressing the cultural concern while use the grid form. Thus this thesis is exploring the association between the cultural meaning and the grid as a formal device, or to say how the grid is used to express the cultural meaning.

The investigations mainly rely on the research about historical cases.

The whole thesis process is divided into 3 …

Fluid Solid : Can We Converse With Granite?, Patrick T. Beals

Masters Theses

This investigation seeks to detect sources of the quantitative granite anomalies through various methods and use available resources to allow for an immersive, qualitative, and perhaps didactic experience, which will build a conceptual foundation for design of the in-between spaces made by the negative form of granite architectures. This thesis is about timescales and lenses by which to view them in partnership. With lenses are assumed perceptions, ones that define the understanding of the object in the viewfinder of the landscape, and in this case, the timescales which will be addressed in the following three phases:

Phase 01 Background : …

Water For The Future, Ziqing Chen

Masters Theses

Water is a fundamental element for lives. Located in Long Island detached from the mainland of New York State, the densely-populated counties - Kings, Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk Counties - rely on groundwater for their sole freshwater source for a long time. The underground geology determines the groundwater movement on western Long Island: from Nassau County to Queens. When overpumping happens in Queens, Nassau County is firstly threatened by lowered water table. The thesis is aiming to propose a local solution to mitigate the problem brought by groundwater movement when overpumping.

In Phase 1, the study focuses on the underground …

Landscape As An Interactive Layer, Yifan Kong

Masters Theses

The main topic of this investigation is memory and place. The study uses qualitative and quantitative research methods with the aim of addressing the question of, “how landscape design generates interactive layers that last in a community’s memory within a constantly evolving neighborhood demographics?” This thesis is divided into three phases:

Phase I explores the evolving neighborhood in New York City. Specifically focusing on communities with high immigrant populations located in Queens. This phase helps develop a stronger understanding of the issues associated with gentrification and the impacts it has on immigrant neighborhoods and provides the groundwork for the rest …

Borderscape : Weaving Political Boundaries In The Amazon Through Water Performance, Lucila Silva-Santisteban

Masters Theses

This research project is about how to connect political bordering urban systems through the natural structure for a coherent occupation between the built environment, ecosystems and resources following the Landscape Architecture lens that can address different scale systems simultaneously to create a holistic approach between them. And the proposition of a new type of landscape of this threshold territory as its own kind. Specifically looking at the bordering cities in the heart of the Amazon Region in South America that fall between Colombia, Brazil and Peru.

Why the Amazon?

Not only because of the usual fascination, but because of the …

Remnant Landscapes As Homo Sapiens Preserves : It Is The Dystopian Utopia, The Shrine For Modernity, The Home Of Everyone, Yuan Zhang

Masters Theses

When it comes to remnant landscapes, what else can they be instead of being turned into parks, community gardens, or new architectural or urban development?

This thesis starts with a critique towards the very popular post-industrial park, the High Line, where the original materials of the site was completed removed then artificially re-fabricated. By transforming it into a publicly well accessible landscape, the design destroyed the possibility for a citizen to build his/her own intimate relationship with this piece of land because of a much visible ownership. Therefore, the goal for the thesis is to provide a powerful critique to …

Narratives Of Public Space : A Manifesto For Future Urban Landscape In Manhattan, Jaehong Chung

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates the history of public space and how it has changed over time. Looking specifically at how social, historical, and advances in technology have influenced and changed the meaning and use of public spaces. Studies of history and its characteristics and case studies check the validity of paradigm of public spaces in Manhattan. The modern features of Manhattan have been completed over 200 hundreds years with Industrial revolutions and influx of immigrants. Due to these reasons, the main focus was to track of causalities among life style changes, social paradigms, and changes of urban landscapes.

As cities developed, …

Remediating The Garment Industry, Kellie Knight

Masters Theses

This thesis culminated from an interest in addressing the pollution by the dye processes of the textile industry on the Earth’s waterbodies. The first Phase of this thesis explored the globalization of the garment industry. The movement of production was tracked over time from the 1950’s when production occurred primarily in the United States and Europe to present day when production is worldwide. With the global spread of the industry came the global spread of its pollutants.

The second phase of the thesis investigated the functioning of the fashion industry itself to determine which process from production to distribution is …

Grid Talk : Giving A Voice To Energy Infrastructures, Kelsey Wakefield

Masters Theses

Humans are energy hogs, intelligent purveyors of displaced electrical waves construed from ancient carbon compounds. Our built environment has let us forget this. Our collective ambivalence towards the subject has grown with the loss of these public assets to private companies under a socially engineered lack of public interest in energy production. There was once a time energy infrastructures were revered and upheld as public spaces, giant testaments to the greatness of society harnessing the natural world, gold stars congratulating the intelligence of humankind. Great designers, political leaders and visionaries created works of art, sculpture, landscape architecture which functioned for …

A Tale Of Lights : Light As The Visual Construct Of The Ephemeral Space, Alice M. Zhen

Masters Theses

Buildings are designed for a specific purpose. A library has large open rooms to accommodate bookshelves, schools have classrooms and auditoriums for groups of students, businesses have offices and conference rooms, homes have bedrooms and living rooms, and so on. In each situation, conventional architecture would start by establishing the boundaries of the site, defining the 2 dimensional floor plan, and then introduce other secondary aspects, such as circulation & light, which eventually create a coherent and cohesive 3 dimensional space.

In my thesis I wanted to explore the reverse process to emphasize the importance of light. I wanted to …

Openness, Yu Cao

Masters Theses

I am fascinated with the experience of drawing the openness of the mind consumes me. When an energy much much bigger than me moves me I draw. I am open and candid patient and silent deep listening to that intrinsic energy, flowing with colors, running with marks, being taken for a walk by one line until the unknown reaches precision. I still don’t know what they are; flying tigers, swimming birds breathing pink banana blue. This is my world where I encounter a me I don’t know yet. Where a child finds home. Where I can inhabit the openness of …

The Void Between Us, Xiaofan Fan

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates the sense of connection and detachment among people. The interference with sight and physical placement of the body are the two aspects that this thesis researches upon. Through a discussion of life and death, the research is able to take form in the architecture realm with a crematorium as the final deliverable.

Simultaneity Of Space, Amy Lungariello

Masters Theses

The generational gaps between the baby-boomers and millennials are a result of a number of sociobiological and economic factors. Events such as the 2008 Financial Housing Market Crash, the current political climate and the events proceeding and following the election, constantly changing cultural trends, global warming, countless international tragedies, and most importantly the ever advancing technological innovations which most connects and divides the people of our time. The position of my thesis is one which poses the question of how to bridge the gap between the numerous divides of our time through the means and practice of architecture. Distance is …