Architecture Commons^™

The Exchange: A Celebratory Space For Commodity Exchange Via The Hyper-Mall, Jaime Magaliff

Architecture Senior Theses

"The consumer object reigns supreme in American Society. Shopping and consumption have become the trademark of identity. The social act of exchange makes value. The social phenomenon of the mall has cultivated a Mecca for commodity exchange."

Inner City Junction: Public High School As A Multifaceted/Flex Structure, Daniel Chang

Architecture Senior Theses

"By understanding these factors and implication of the urban public educational institution, does architecture have a role in reversing the public education crisis? Can school design foster educational techniques that counteract learning deficiencies? Looking at the negative symbiotic relationship between the post-industrial inner city school and its surrounding community, can the design of a school reverse the cycle towards a more positive relationship?"

A Comparative Study Of Three Feedback Devices For Residential Real-Time Energy Monitoring, Mahmoud Alahmad, Patrick G. Wheeler, Joshua Eiden, Adam Brumbaugh

Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction: Faculty Publications

Residential energy consumption accounts for 21% of the total electricity use in the United States. Unfortunately, research indicates that almost 41% of this power is wasted. Changing the way that consumers use energy may be important in reducing home energy consumption. This paper looks at whether the implementation of certain real-time energy monitors has an impact on the residential rate of energy consumption in a metropolitan area with relatively low electricity rates. In the following case study, 151 Omaha residences were equipped with two variants of the Aztech In-Home Display (Aztech) as well as the Blue Line Power Cost Monitor …

A Numerical Investigation Of Two Phase Solar-Collector Pipe, Seyyed Hashem Abedini

Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In the United States, major portions of the annual electrical and primary energy are consumed for buildings. To help reduce the energy consumption of non-renewable energy sources, this study investigates a new technology for harvesting solar energy using a boiling-condensing cycle with water in a solar collector. The fluid circulation is under natural forced convection. A solar collector is made of a black lacquer copper with 2 meters in length is used. The design of the system is presented to simulate heat transfer rate in a cold climate an average daily solar irradiation of 4.5kWh/m²/day, e.g. for Omaha …

The Assessment Of High Dynamic Range Luminance Measurements With Led Lighting, Yulia I. Tyukhova

Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This research investigates whether a High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDRI) technique can accurately capture luminance values of a single LED chip. Previous studies show that a digital camera with exposure capability can be used as a luminance mapping tool in a wide range of luminance values with an accuracy of 10%. Previous work has also demonstrated the ability of HDRI to capture a rapidly-changing lighting environment with the sun. However these publications don’t investigate HDRI’s ability to capture a bright light source with a narrow light distribution (LED lighting).

Some of the existing concerns in LED technology today include low …

The Overgrown Grid: An Alternative Zoning Proposal For The Island Of Manhattan, Thomas Day

Architecture Senior Theses

"This thesis proposes to restructure the primary agenda of the collective monument from a homogenizing force at the local scale, to an object celebrating diversity and multiculturalism. By establishing a continuous mass connecting and collecting the city's currently isolated collective monuments, the new monument will be adjusted to regain formal and cultural contrast to the urban fabric."

From Exacerbated Difference To Productive Difference: A Parasite Market That Survives Informal Vendors In Shenzhen, Phoebe Zhang

Architecture Senior Theses

Proposition to resolve the crisis facing informal activities in China

Liberated Confinement: Puertorican Hacienda And Prison Environments, Adriana Concepcion

Architecture Senior Theses

"Understanding the similarities between constrained environments in colonial Puerto Rican Haciendas and the typological needs of prison architecture, the exploration of both confinement systems and programs can lead to the re-activation of a typological puertorican plantation. Consequentially a shift from prison's historical identity, from panopticon's main purpose of controlling the masses to a de-centralization of surveillance through the provision of personalized spaces within confined environments can re-structure constrained architecture to produce liberated, flexible spaces, without sacrificing security."

Literally Figurative: Architectural Manifestation Of The Written Word, Carrie Leneweaver

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that architecture and literature can enhance one another, not only as methods of storytelling and creating narrative, but in their capacity to establish metaphors and themes which provide realizations of larger social conditions...

To test my thesis, I propose designing a library based on the life of author Antoine de Saint-Exupery and his allegorical story: The Little Prince."

Just Add Water: Rethinking The Urban Bath House For Contemporary Society, Audrey Snare

Architecture Senior Theses

"There is a need, and an opportunity now to rethink and reintroduce the public bathhouse in the contemporary urban city, and bathhouse is a ripe typology for invention and interpretation when considered against the trend of exclusive spas. I contend that a new conception of urban public bathhouse can initiate new social dynamics, new social opportunities, and new public behavior."

American Home: Shelter Optimized For Climate, Karen Kentile

Architecture Senior Theses

"Architecture attuned to building form and energy production and consumption can, in turn, suggest an alternate landscape for the country...

This book addresses architecture's role in the energy crisis, recognizing that residential buildings account for 53.7% of the built environment and their gridded energy produces over 21% of the United States' carbon emissions. This thesis begins to implement a process for design which can essentially optimize shelter based on climate, and further develop a local context for dwelling."

New York : Mount Morris

Kansas: Saline River Valley, Smokey Hills

Arizona: Salt River

Florida: Moonshine Bay

Building The Soundscape In The Age Of Visual Distraction - Audio/Visual Supplement, Jack Solomon

Architecture Senior Theses

"This project demonstrates how implicating the soundscape within the visual primacy of design can produce a richer architecture for facilitating awareness, discourse, and learning."

Audio/Visual supplement to the thesis presentation and book.

Sens(E)Ible Education: A Sensory Approach To An Inclusive Kindergarten, Mary Delaurentis

Architecture Senior Theses

"Architecture that is designed with the intended occupants full sensorial needs in mind ultimately enhances the occupants' experience. Architecture that engages all our senses will create spaces that transcend the purely visual. This higher order of perception will make occupants more self aware, conscious of their embodied experience of the world around them, and create informative experiences."

Corporeal Meeting Place, Brandon Maldonado

Architecture Senior Theses

"The modernist movement was able, through the industrial revolution, to eliminate the role of facade as load bearing member, fetishizing transparency. However, this new preeminence of visuality was not applicable to the suburban home, with its predisposition toward the creation and control of privacy. What separate the suburban condition from the urban, in addition to the role of the single-family home as purchasable symbol representing an ideal, is the front yard. Instead of a simple A-B division across a singular surface, the yard creates a "deep" facade, a series of layered spaces serving as filtration' sidewalks, fences, plantings, yards, and …

Informal, Scott Reynolds

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that architecture can offer agency in new forms of urban relationships to engage the edge condition between formal and informal, critical to the success of today's in-situ slum up gradation and integration to the formal city. Dismantling the spatial segregation will socially, economically, and politically integrate the two cities for sustainable growth of the metropolis."

Orphan: Residential Educational Cultural Center For Orphaned Youth, Valerie Rachel Herrera

Architecture Senior Theses

"This thesis contends that by re-conceptalizing the spatial, programmatic, and sociopolitical forces that for the basis of the orphanage typology, an architectural framework can be constructed that can instigate and facilitate new conditions of programmatic overlap between the 'urban cultural' and the 'private/secure residential'; fundamentally altering the outdated assumptions of the orphanage type in favor of a contemporary response embeds the orphanage in the city and the city in the orphanage."

Building The Soundscape In The Age Of Visual Distraction, Jack Solomon

Architecture Senior Theses

"This project demonstrates how implicating the soundscape within the visual primacy of design can produce a richer architecture for facilitating awareness, discourse, and learning."

A Sacred And Secular Landscape: Empowering Social Agency, Shreya Shah

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that landscape can provoke an idea for a productive, public space using the people of the city as social agents to create a sensitive rather than oppressive water remediation system. By inventing a program that uses landscape as a water remediation space as well as landscape as a religious and social space, the project will exhibit the idea that social agents can inform a change in the water pollution crisis."

Technocarpet: Supporting A Culture Of Congestion, William Andrew Weigand

Architecture Senior Theses

"The TechnoCarpet is a public space sited in a future of resource scarcity, climate disruption, and urbanization. It provides support facilities and cultural amenities necessary to sustain super dense urban populations. I establishes an internal frontier for the city as a means to provoke density, by creating an escape from it. The TechnoCarpet is a model for parks in the 21st century."

Aerotopia, Mark Shahlamian

Architecture Senior Theses

"Architecture can critically embrace systems of surveillance, security, and sorting to construct a new collective model for an increasingly kinetic population.

As Airports gain more autonomy from their served cities, they also gain more power, catalyzing growth by expanding services, connections, and employing thousands of people. Through a political re-alignmet, untied from a contextual servant-served relationship, the airport typology will begin to take on qualities of a new type of society, constantly in flux. This new frame work for living will in turn test new ideas about security and surveillance as it applies to global mobilities."