Architecture Commons^™

The Enclaving Of Dubai: An Investigation Of The Factors Governing The Emergence And Spreading Of The Gated Residential Communities In The City, Mahmoud Saeed Al Mansi

Theses

This study attempts to fill a gap within the current existing literature of the worldwide phenomenon of rise and spread of walled communities. The study primarily examines the factors relating to gated residential communities in Dubai, a city that is not covered in the literature of the subject. Specifically, it traces the emergence of gated residential communities in the urban history of Dubai, investigates their magnitude over time, locates them within the city, and investigates the various factors affecting their spread, particularly in the past few decades. To achieve these objectives, a field survey and a qualitative research were conducted …

Towards A Localized Form-Based Code For Abu Dhabi Urban Neighborhoods, Arwa Khalid Sabri

Theses

Form-Based Code (FBC) is a sustainable planning tool that helps realize sustainable urban form and sustainable communities from different perspectives, including mixing of land uses, diversifying housing types, achieving walkability and cycling as well as permitting community involvement in decision making and design processes. It is therefore considered as a comprehensive tool that regulates different planning scales from master plan to individual buildings. Locally, Abu Dhabi Emirate lacks a FBC that could help achieve its sustainability-orientated 2030 vision and thus promote its envisaged sustainable urban identity. This research aims at studying to what extent the present form-related standards and guidelines …

Bs News May/June

Building Services Engineering

No abstract provided.

Brownfield To Brightfield: Influences On Attitude, Brittni Leigh Olesen

All Theses

The purpose of this study is to analyze what factors influence a person’s attitude towards a brownfield site converted into a future solar energy farm through the RE-Power America’s Land Initiative to help increase the success of implementing solar energy farms in cities. Five different factors, including: spatial, public participation, local context, personal values, and socio-demographic factors are analyzed and tested using descriptive statistics and measures of association. Among other tests, measures of association were used to determine that egalitarian viewpoint, education and income had statistically significant relationships with acceptance towards the potential solar energy development. However, all of these …

A Sustainability Assessment Of Utah's 29 Counties: Testing A Multivariate Graphical Method Of Sustainability Assessment, Thomas Cluff

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Sustainability provides a framework to help guide future planning, policy, investment, and development actions toward achieving multidimensional development goals. The goals of planning for sustainable development aim at a future with high quality of life in a healthy and protected environment.

This paper adopts, reviews, critically examines, and tests a previously-developed methodology for sustainability assessment. The tested approach applies an interactive evaluation model to combine existing data to explain sustainable development possibilities for each evaluated locale. The model's results, presented through a graphic interface, can build knowledge to improve planning decisions and implementation actions for sustainability. The assessment can help …

This Is Not The Color Yellow | A Thesis On Projecting Materiality, Annagrace Walton

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis reimagines the traditional materiality of the architectural façade by coupling the functional and aesthetic expectations of the day-lit building face with the supplementary material and narrative possibilities of a projected night time display. Engaging the potential of new architectural technologies, the thesis celebrates both the novel and sensational qualities of physically manifested materials and textures while simultaneously exploring the future possibilities of virtual and augmented materials through digital projection mapping.

Set in spectacle-friendly Las Vegas, Nevada, the test site for this experimentation is the Flamingo Resort in Las Vegas, a pivotal intersection of pedestrian and motor traffic. Re-cladding …

A Mat Response To Deinstitutionalization | A Model For Spatial Medicine, Dominic S. Lipuma

Architecture Senior Theses

In an attempt to salvage the institution, this thesis adopts the Mat-building strategy and typology, coined by Alison Smithson in 1974, exploiting its inherent qualities as a minimal, flexible, and temporal framework, which best supports the unique program of a Community Mental Health Center (CMHC).

This is in response to the severed and contentious relationship between architecture and mental health, in regards to psychopathology. The two fields were estranged with the onset of deinstitutionalization, beginning in the 1960s, and the consequent abandonment of architectural issues has prevented their reconciliation. As a result, further social issues have manifested, with higher proportions …

Incision Of Division, Nicoletta Kyverniti

Architecture Senior Theses

Conflict is a timeless topic of conversation, rising and recurring in various parts of the world. Whether active or dormant, the conflict exists within our urban environments in multiple forms and scales. A border that cannot be crossed. A building that cannot be accessed. A view that cannot be seen. It defines how we move within our cities and creates distinct boundaries. Architecture can diverge form its current use of division to instead exhibit the potential for mediation. It can confront the divide through incisions into the existing site thus exposing the need to intervention. It can cerate a wall …

Occupy Pomo | A Citizen's Guide To Urban Excavation, Kriti Garg

Architecture Senior Theses

Traditionally, architects' definitions of solid-void conditions create a dichotomy between private, or built matter, and public, or void, spaces. Yet, this notion is a missed opportunity to understand the complex society of the twenty-first century that no longer operates within the realm of open, public space nor acts as a point of primal cohesiveness for culture and community. Rather than aggregating at instances of density, it is lost within a new ghostly cosmopolitan substitute of mass consumption and globalized culture. This new public realm is a "phantom public sphere", one comprised of "sub-publics", tailored to the demands of a mass …

Absorbency In Tidal Resiliency | The Thickened Pier, Shauna Strubinger

Architecture Senior Theses

The inevitable truth of climate change has placed coastal cities at great risk. Past natural disasters in the United States such as Hurricane Sandy and Katrina, displaced many people because these communities’ only protection was their failed infrastructure.1 Although hard and soft infrastructure strategies have addressed the rising sea level, architecture at the building scale creates static surfaces and divisions that are slow to adapt to flooding and leave little to no room for the ambiguity of tidal flooding and storm surge. Though numerous areas are at risk of sea level rise across the globe, the Chesapeake Bay area is …

Phasing Permanence Through Flux, Estefania Maldonadov, Andrew Filkoff

Architecture Senior Theses

The "post-industrial revolution" has, in its wake, given rise to a swath of cities suffering economic decline and social deterioration. These "shrinking cities" have experienced a loss in population to their surrounding suburbs and other dormitory settlements. Once thriving cities have been reduced to functioning as overdeveloped business parks where people come to work for five days a week - but then leave each evening to return to suburban ideal. It is unreasonable to assume that any masterplan alone can promote the future success of a shrinking city. Rather, this thesis contends that by dissecting the historical narratives and spatial …

China's New Weird, Bangyuan Shi

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis offers a critique of the diminishing communal life int he contemporary Chinese city which is created by the gap between large-scale master planning strategies and the contemporary need to focus on the individual instead of the structure of communities.

China's New Weird proposes an alternative to large-scale urbanism through the use of micro-urbanism strategies that preserve the relative scale and character of traditional urban settlements, like those of the "hutong", while also addressing the contemporary need to increase inner city population densities. The intention is to adapt the patterns of space and use that are found in these …

Redeveloping Commerce | Comuna 20 As The Commercial Gateway Of The City, Carlos Restrepo

Architecture Senior Theses

Colombia has long been suffering a debilitating civil war. Lasting more than 51 years, this continuing conflict has brought suffering and hardship to millions of people. Indeed, countless civilians have been forcefully displaced from their rural homes into informal settlements on the outskirts of major cities. These densely populated, ad hoc constructions surround the cities as unstructured enclaves festering with crime and disease exacerbated by isolation and government indifference. The vast social, economic, and cultural divide between these settlements and the contiguous cities pose a major problem for contemporary Colombia that must be addressed. In spite of these conditions, the …

Memory + Architecture | The Act Of Forgetting, Mariel Mora Llorens

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis proposes the activation and repurposing of buildings associated with traumatic memories as a means of studying the ways in which architecture embodies memories and aids in the process of forgetting. Architecture and the built environment are linked to the creation and recollection of memories because they trigger four of the senses that are related to memory.

To forget is an active, not passive endeavor. Conscious forgetting is not an act of erasing memories, but transforming them by removing the emotional responses that are produced by our recollection of these memories. Like memories in our brains, buildings that have …

Anarchy City, Zhuocen Yao

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis is a political manifesto that seeks to address the current chaotic and undesrable politcal environment on the border between Hong Kong and Shenzhen (Anarchy City). Acknowledging that:

-Anarchy City has evolved from political borders whose purpose was to create division.

-Anarchy City possesses width and depth, is a 3-dimensional space of physical presence.

-Anarchy City is a "zone of exception" independent from the entities it sets out to separate.

-Anarchy City is anarchic, free of formal rules and regulations and thus free for interpretation.

-Anarchy City is deliberately distinguished from, and …

Private Room Of The Wheel | A New Form Of Transient Dwelling, Kathy Teng

Architecture Senior Theses

The cross-country highway and road trip are deeply rooted in the American psyche, supported by the rapid growth in ownership of automobiles by American families since the 1940s, establishing a sense of freedom and leisure in their mobile lifestyles. However, other highway users have less control and freedom over their daily routine. These users are part of a vast network of international commerce reliant on the long haul.

The time long-haul truck drivers are away from home is prolonged, with the end of each day spent sleeping in fixed truck cabins and eating at banal truck stops. “ ‘I can …

The Synchronous City, Patricia Olivera

Architecture Senior Theses

Architects’ conceptualizations of cities reference and reflect trends in contemporary culture. During the early 1900's, architects such as Ebenezer Howard, and Tony Garnier speculated on modernist visions of cities, while in the mid-late 1900's radical visions of cities by Archigram, and Archizoom emerged. This project will operate along the framework of previous visions of cities by architects and envision a city rooted on the use of digital information and communication technologies (ICTs).

In order to best engage the provocation of a city based on ICTs as the primary means of exchange and interaction between citizens (as opposed to cars, pedestrians, …

Ambient Intelligence | Cognizant Architecture For The Restless, Anne Judkis

Architecture Senior Theses

In recent decades, technology has proliferated throughout our architectural spaces, from personalized handheld gadgetry to smart systems and appliances. This constant barrage of screens and interfaces that humans interact with for large portions of our day has grown to define our very living conditions, particularly by disrupting our circadian rhythms. It is well documented that lack of sleep can lead to numerous long and short term health problems such as weight gain, irritability, to more sever acute conditions like hallucinations and organ failure. This thesis will address architecture's potential to interact with individuals utilizing smart environments that drive kinetic architecture. …

An Escape | Threshold Space Design In Bath, Xihao Chen

Architecture Senior Theses

Threshold, conventionally referring to the line of the door jamb, serves to mark the transition between exterior and interior, or between two separate spaces. Contemporary thresholds are most often underplayed, being deployed as a thin surface, or intentionally minimized in terms of thickness. This thesis argues that the term threshold should be applied to a broader sense of architectural space. When a threshold is stretched and thickened conceptually from a surface to a volume, it can become a threshold space.

This thesis argues that threshold space is simultaneously a place, a puncture in an architectural boundary, and as the in …

Performative Architecture | A Measurable Means Of Evaluating Formal Systems, Garrett Marini

Architecture Senior Theses

The Gothic, Baroque, and Rococo architectural styles relied on perception and an underlying adherence to classical formulas to provide merit and deem an architecture valid. Up through the 19th century before the emergence of modernism these established canons would reemerge both in isolation and as an amalgam of styles. Henry Russell Hitchcock describes this latter episodic phase of building as exhibiting an eclecticism of style, where features of different styles are used together on a single building like those in the Beaux- Arts tradition. In the early 20th century, Louis Sullivan’s modernist dictum of “Form Follows Function,” while seemingly providing …