Architecture Commons^™

Walking Box Ranch Custodianship Quarterly Progress Report: Period Ending October 10, 2012, Margaret N. Rees

Walking Box Ranch

• UNLV provides stewardship of Walking Box Ranch (WBR) by employing a caretaker who oversees the property, facilitating use of the property by researchers and educators, developing a use and research policy for the property, and coordinating these activities with BLM and in accordance with TNC restrictions.
• UNLV currently addresses security issues for the property through the presence of the caretaker and two Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department officers who reside on the property in two recreational vehicles.
• UNLV continues to work with BLM, supplying content for interpretation at the future WBR museum.
• BLM visited the ranch on 7/05/12 and again …

Walking Box Ranch Planning And Design Quarterly Progress Report: Period Ending October 10, 2012, Margaret N. Rees

Walking Box Ranch

• BLM and UNLV met with AECOM on 7/12/12 to review Walking Box Ranch (WBR) project progress, timing of posting of project bid documents, and the anticipated project calendar through December 2012.
• BLM and UNLV met on 9/25/12 to update Mark Spencer, BLM’s new Field Manager for the Red Rock/Sloan Field Office, to brief him on UNLV participation at WBR, and to discuss the status of the operating agreement and major concerns that include timely completion of the operating agreement, which will allow completion of business plan and release of $500K for IT and security by UNLV’s president.
• UNLV is continuing …

Revitalizing Cities: Adaptive Reuse Of Historic Structures, Sara E. Sharpe

Mid-America College Art Association Conference 2012 Digital Publications

Adaptive reuse is employed when revitalizing an existing infrastructure while maintaining important aspects of the cultural architectural heritage and promoting sustainability. The option to turn away from older structures and build new is a large problem in cities such as Detroit. Historic preservationists are trained to observe a structure’s potential before walking away. Meanwhile interior designers obtain the skills to rejuvenate such buildings for a new use. Case studies have shown the benefits of these two professions teaming up to apply adaptive reuse on historic structures for modern purposes. By studying the creative space planning methods and historic preservations standards …

Survey Of Surface Fault Rupture And Structure Interation, Lucy Redmond

Master's Theses

This report aims to raise awareness of the hazards of surface fault rupture and to identify parameters that influence structural performance during earthquake fault rupture. In researching structures subject to surface rupture, both damaged and sound, guidelines and procedures to evaluate buildings in potential hazard areas are developed herein. Little to no guidance on how to design for surface fault offset exists in current codes and design guides. Thus it is important create tools for designers to appropriately analyze structures by developing guidance and requirements to aid designers in their strength assessment of a structure subject to this particular hazard. …

Perception Of Space In Topological Forms, Dincer Savaskan

Architecture Thesis Prep

"With recent development of computer technologies there has been change in our notion of materiality. We can define our age as flow of information and architecture capture this flow and creates more complex conceptions and interactions through the space. Recent researches on materialism, typological forms, field gradients and diagramming define a new methodology in design approach, which can respond the dynamism and flow. However architectural form is still inseparable from the way we experience the world, which involves our senses and perceptions. It is possible to adopt cinematic techniques of collage and sequencing in computer-generated forms to create continuous references …

Fashioning The Unfashionable: An Architecture Of Waste, Alyson Canal

Architecture Thesis Prep

"It is evident that there exists a connection between architecture and fashion,

and more significantly fashion and waste. Fashioning a material recovery

facility through exhibition space, art, and social interaction will

bring infrastructure back into the designed environment while maintaining

an industrial identity that the site demands. Designing an architecture of

waste through the cultural ideologies of fashion facilitates collectivity and

public engagement."

Residential Square In The 21st Century: Applying A Typology To Create A New Urban Morphology, Elizabeth Whittington

Architecture Thesis Prep

"As a low-rise high-density mixed-use typology, the reconsideration of the residential square can provide a new urban morphology that densifies residential zones, while providing safe public spaces. In addition, I assert that through its combination of juxtaposed functional uses, unit typology the language of the façade, the historical European residential square, can articulate the identity of residents."

Representing The Experiential, The Anticipatory, And The Unreal, Laya Pattana

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The methodology will be tested in the cinema type because of its promise of escapist hyperreality. It is spatial, highly personal and privatized, and firmly anti-architecture. Because the film is self-contained, its space is irrelevant. The representation of experience can be reclaimed as a design strategy to activate the movie theatre typology--a typology that architecture has long since lost."

Surpassing Spectacle: Architectual Representation & Image-Based Society, Patrick Ruggerio

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The project will critique current modes of operation by a linear problem-solving design process. By acting through representation as both a vehicle for developing design and as a means of communicating and experiencing it, the project will engage the design of a tactile deployment of architecture and effective means of communicating its intent. The architecture will function in the way that the visual arts do in terms of their scale and engagement in cultural issues. Research into tangible artifacts of the site will yield a combination of image, drawing and model forms of representation. Through this analysis, a strategy of …

Deconstructing The American Embassy, Stefan Kaiser

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Contemporary diplomatic functions have outgrown the typological embassy building. The barricaded sidewalks and streets are evidence that additional space is required to conduct business safely. Retrofitted embassies in London, Paris, and Berlin expand their security perimeter into the urban condition to maintain the architectural icon of diplomacy. New embassies should utilize the contested zone between the building and the city instead of relocating in rural neighborhoods. It is the purpose of this thesis to enable functional and symbolic diplomatic exchange at the location of intersecting sovereignty."

Sensitive Design, Elizabeth Raar

Architecture Thesis Prep

"I contend that the architecture we produce should be a

framework that is informed by our senses in order to create an

experience for the user to better utilize and live in a space."

Architecture Of The Virtual Corpse: National Lifetime Archive, Will Stattman

Architecture Thesis Prep

"I believe that architecture cannot continue to ignore new technologies and their spatial, social, and tectonic consequences, and must incorporate them in order to stay pertinent. Additionally, the boundaries between the physical and simulated can be blurred to unite the human experience. We have acknowledged some aspects of this crisis, but architecture must fully respond formally, organizationally, spatially, ideologically and conceptually. I’d like to explore these implications within a new Architecture."

Midnight City And Other Urban Mythologies, Mark Eichler

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Midnight City explores the physical and representational framework of fantastic architecture as a productive mode for architectural and urban design, specifically focusing on the nocturnalized city as a space of exaggerated fantasy and escape from the mundane of the diurnal."

Essen(Ce)Tially Authentic: Contemporary Design Within A Historical Context And The Parameters Of The “Preserved”, Danielle Ciccone

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Contemporary architecture needs to solidify its role amongst the pressures of preservation. It is crucial to build reflective of our time, even within a historical area. Though the past should be appreciated, it cannot be revived. Architectural design should exhibit a successive evolution instead of white washing its progression. The essence of a place must be interpreted, distilling and capturing its characteristics while establishing a more authentic architecture of the present. Identity endures not in appearance but with the culture, tradition, technology and people of a particular time."

Distributed Workplace For Facebook. Inc: A New Office Typology For The 21st Century Workstyle, Haotian Liu

Architecture Thesis Prep

No abstract provided.

Twenty First Century Form: Disrupted Continous Surface, Wiqas Ahmed

Architecture Thesis Prep

"In order to respond to the needs and demands of the twenty-first century, dual architectural thinking must be abandoned in favor of form & multiplicity. Here form should act as a canopy under which multiple functional aspects including programmatic, performative, cultural, economic, historical, geographic, infrastructural, and climate considerations can coexist simultaneously. Form can no longer be thought of as a counter argument to function, visa versa, but rather as an independent medium in which function operates. Since function is now defined as multiplicity, consequently, form becomes the study of the method of articulating multiple conditions. There may be several ways …

Housing Indeterminacy: Responsive Design For Diverse And Changing Households, Mark Sousa

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This project hopes to create a new outlook on the future of housing design. Ray Forrest wrote, “The pace of demographic change need not be that dynamic to outpace the capacity of markets or states to provide appropriate dwellings in appropriate locations. […] Dwelling placement or adaptation is always likely to lag.”2 The preceding statement reflects the belief that housing is static and rigid, and that dwelling replacement or major structural adaptation is necessary to accommodate a continually evolving population. On the contrary, responsive housing can release significant pressure on housing systems by anticipating change and providing a lower cost …

School As Community Center: Redefining The Relationship Between The Community And The School In Minsk, Belarus, Kate Talkachova

Architecture Thesis Prep

"A society that values education should place emphasis on the facilities and incorporate in them the values and progress, not blindly stick to the traditional. For a country fighting to regain its identity, it is important that the divisions between the neighborhoods are blurred and a sense of a whole is created. With the school as community center, education remains the central focus, as well as provides the necessary link to the surrounding neighborhoods, becoming more than just a physical center, but an activity center as well."

Sourcing Scarcity, Muneerah Alrabe

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Water is an essential element to human development and urban vitality. As a response to future oil depletion in cities, a new appearance of water emerges in cities: Hydro-urbanism. Through rethinking the potential of water infrastructure in cities, HydroUrbanism situates itself as a spectacular functional event that aims to collect, purify, store, and generate energy within a city. The project reconsiders the production process of water on the periphery of the city and hypothesizes for an integrated process of the production of water to work within the city at an urban scale. Exposing the water infrastructure, fantasizing water, and re-connecting …

Beyond The Object: The Phenomenon Of Memory In Architecture, Greg Bencivengo

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The goal is not to replace our understanding of collective memory, but through fostering an awareness of self and one’s relationship to the past and site, to distinguish memory as an entity distinct from representation and objectification."