Digital Commons Network^™

Film For Landscape Architecture : Learning From Alfonso Cuarón's Roma, Ramon Solis

Masters Theses

Introduction:

How can film inform landscape architectural thinking? In narrative film, we are spectators of unfolding space. In landscapes, our bodies enable us to author its unfolding.

In many ways, film is a well-suited and under-theorized territory for landscape. Its intersections are not without precedent, and in the following pages, I hope to describe the experiments, failures and potential scenarios I have uncovered for future practitioners of landscape architecture. A secondary intention of this thesis is as an articulation of my own practice, walking toward disciplinary edges, but always looking back to landscape architecture.

Site:

Roma (2018), directed by Alfonso …

Edge Of Emergence : Landscape As A Journey Of Memory, Jiayue Wang

Masters Theses

These principles formulate the strategies and finally create the six themes in the design. The whole journey in landscape is a linear system, but the stimulation in each theme is a networked system. During the whole journey, people’s emotions will be triggered when they encounter a new theme. Between each theme, they have space and time to process their emotions and adjust their experiential state. In the end, when people finish the whole journey, they will not only have their past memories brought back but also will have built new memories for future events. In this way the past, present, …

Field In Adaptive Reuse : Discussion Of The Existence Of The Field And Its Influence, Yilun Shao

Masters Theses

In a building like a pavilion, the walls are abstracted into pillars, and this hollowed -out design aesthetically reflects the concept of negative space in Asian aesthetics. The creation of the field is not by the enclosure of wall, but through the radiation of the pavilion’s spirit to create a negative space with fuzzy boundaries. If the spirits which dwell in the pavilion cannot radiate outward but must be contained within, visitors will not see this buildings, but sculptures form.

What is fascinating about architecture is that it can divide the space so that people enter and feel the effects …

Playfulness : Exploring Experience Through A Trajectory, Yingjing Qu

Masters Theses

People of all ages feel from time to time a lack of freedom because of spiritual, physical and material constraints. The young are anxious about the future, while the old are bound by the body and both feel the pressure of the social and economic context. The desire to escape the social order makes public space
a window to catharsis. People’s behavior in public spaces like streets, surrounded by strangers, tends to be more uninhibited.

Playing games embodies several benefits such as the increasing of one’s imaginative ability, mind-hand coordination, enhancing of creativity, passing time and ‘play’ characteristics of seeing …

Body Of Work, Oliva De Salve Villedieu

Masters Theses

This yellow book filled with short stories, indexes, and a bright body of work, is a little bit rebellious, a little bit scandalous, but mostly self-indulgent. It is an invitation to release, unhinge, and get, consensually, tied up. Here graphic design is not a thinking tool, but rather an attitude—a desire to engage and skew. It is a place where affection translates into practice and lifts an eyebrow to modernism. The work is one of contrast; it contradicts and plays. By excavating simple systems for complex reasons, it deconstructs the fundamental primaries of graphic design and recontextualizes them by holding …

Among : A Series Of Enactments, Joel F. Kern

Masters Theses

AMONG captures the practice of a constructionist designer, one who oscillates between the characteristics of typography, multi-materiality, and spatiality yet does not attach solely to the physical or digital. The fundamental principles of this practice include open platforms that foster generative collaboration through modular systems. AMONG straddles the borders of graphic design, environmental design and social sculpture. At its core, this practice encourages new ways of connecting communities.

Cosmosis, Angela Torchio

Masters Theses

Cosmographies deal with the order of nature. They are general descriptions of the universe, and this thesis is a cosmography, dealing with visual content, constraints, and the complexity of symbolism.

Visual experience is dynamic, interrelated, and inherently tied to a value hierarchy. On a micro level, design is my way of understanding the world, while on a macro level, it is a tool to generate new perceptual structures for engaging with, not merely seeing, design.

The work is based on the idea that multiple symbolisms are inherent to all things, and these symbolisms will shift based on context. Cosmographies are …

Let's Meet Over There / Eury Kim., Eury Kim

Masters Theses

Small communities that were once reliant on the land for basic sustenance progressively grew into large urban states. Our current cities manufacture items that are exchanged for other goods, by building factories that exploit resources from the ground. These commodities are providing much more than just food and shelter. Industry makes sustenance a secondary need to production by objectifying nature.

Italian writer Italo Calvino compares the weight of two Industrial Revolutions, depicting the first with “rolling mills” and “molten steel,” the second “with bits of information that flow” also noting that everything we “value for lightness quickly reveals … unbearable …

Re-Creation : A Package Design For Daily Life, Wei-Hao Wang

Masters Theses

This thesis grows out of my observations of and inquiries into daily scenes,+ which are wrapped within what I am calling a package. The human mind often puts daily encounters into manageable packages to facilitate interaction with them. This process, however, makes us dull or neglectful. Looking into daily scenes allows me to unpack these packages and reflect on ubiquitous objects, notions and actions so that I am able to see them anew. To me, it offers a break from the habitual responses in life.

Re-creation: A Package Design for Daily Life intends to create a similar occasion for my …

Spontaneous Laughter, Laughter Without Reason, Evan Gilbert

Masters Theses

What is the function of humor in today's society? What is the role of the comedian in increasingly clownish times? How does humor challenge power structures in contemporary life and art? How can painting deploy these methods in an effective manner?

The archetype of the trickster has appeared in myth and literature around the world for many centuries. In all instances it represents the disruptive side of the human imagination, a being that lives outside the rules of conventional behavior who seems to have hidden knowledge or secret understanding of how society truly functions. The archetype of the trickster can …

Game / Landscape / Us, Dongqi Zhang

Masters Theses

Assumption: Today’s game companies often try to hire landscape architects to do virtual environment design. With the prompt expansion of technology, gaming has already become a unique and huge industry worth billions of dollars. More and more people have become immersed in video and computer games. If we acknowledge this is true, what are the reasons?

Rationale: People lose focus on the physical landscape when they participate in it. In contrast, “A game, of course, is a constructed world with a narrative already baked in.” (King, 2015) Some people love virtual games because the real world lacks what they long …

When We Are Old : A Mutualism System For The Canal Network And Its Aging Community, Jiali Li

Masters Theses

Population aging is a severe problem. The whole world is aging and especially in China. As of the 2010 census, the number of people in China over 60 has reached 178 million, which is 23.6% of world’s aging population. It means 1/4 of the aging population live in China. This thesis will focus on the third-tier cities which have more urgent aging issues and more vulnerable commercial and political statuses, which leads us to Yangzhou, a typical third-tier city in Jiangsu Province. In the context of aging society, the government of Yangzhou keeps moving the elderly from the livable canal …

The Social Life Of Working Waterfronts : Strategies For Renewing The Social Value Of Productive Harbors, Evan Davenport

Masters Theses

The Social Life of Working Waterfronts is an independent thesis project that envisions the expanded role of an urban waterfront as a landscape for both industry and everyday life. The project calls for new synergies between public and private stakeholders to challenge the cultural perception of industrial landscapes and renew social and ecological value of productive harbors. By integrating industrial processes with civic life, working waterfronts can begin to operate mutually for industrial and societal needs. This proposal aims to establish spatial and systemic commons between a declining city and its thriving commercial fishing port by engaging and celebrating the …

Architecture As Magnet : Extension To Fort Adams, Mingyi Hu

Masters Theses

According to a study from KADK (The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture), social interaction mainly depends on whether people have common interests, such as the economy, politics or ideology.¹ However, it is difficult for some who feel they have different experiences or beliefs to interact within a group, which will affect their psychological state. These people need a physical environment designed to create conditions for more extensive and effective communication opportunities.

Architecture can provide a platform to help people gather together, share ideas, and create a sense of community. Architecture that holds visitors in an enclosure …

Stepping Aside, Juan Pablo Gutiérrez García

Masters Theses

Over time, our connection with materials has changed. Centuries ago, artists interacted with just one material for years, gradually integrating the knowledge of its different properties into their existing expertise. They were learning processes which were acquired through the sum of different personal experiences and the reciprocal action between artist and material. Now, times run fast; we are exposed to a wide range of materials, and knowledge is indirect. We learn through books or by copying established industry processes, replacing our practical experiences. New potentialities of material are not sought frequently, and we end up validating only what has already …

Slowness In The Fray : Architecture That Orients To Nature, Colin Christensen

Masters Theses

We currently live in a digital age that is marked by the rise of virtual reality and instant access to information and entertainment through smartphones. These technological developments are not inherently bad, but they have reduced our attention span and ability to focus on the world around us. This phenomenon is best stated by social scientist Herbert Simon,“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a …

Awe-Struck, Emily Robertson

Masters Theses

Awe-struck is an exploration at the intersection of embodied and situated cognition, sight, sense-making and nature with an additional layer of artistic interpretation and emotional response. Adapting elements of Terrapin Bright Green’s biophilic design principles, this work pushes past the well researched benefits of incorporating nature into a designed space, to uncover an individual’s personal connection to an environment. The connection is multi-faceted—layered with observations of space, color and location, filtered through a lense of physical, philosophical and psychological reactions and then translated into an individual personal history. With a specific focus on wild spaces, where humans have designed and …

Landscape As Framework : Downtown Revival Through Rebuilding Spatial Identity, Dawei Tang

Masters Theses

In developing revitalization strategies for depopulating, shrinking districts, the economic and psychological disciplines remain the key focus. In contrast, landscape architecture has long been underestimated as a guiding framework in city revitalization. This thesis book presents how landscape architecture could function as a framework to revive a city through spatial comfort and spatial identity. Using downtown Fall River as an example, this book speculates how landscape transforms a city physically and mentally. By rebuilding Fall River’s spatial comfort and spatial identity, landscape architecture could drive social engagement, revitalize local economy, recall lost history, and ultimately, allow the city to revive …

Distance Is A Place, Zhiqing Guo

Masters Theses

Distance is a Place documents a body of work and a process — a journey in translation, where a quality of feeling becomes an effort of physical capture in jewelry.

The desire to reveal how a deep responsiveness to the atmospheric distance of the sky is associated with an innermost nonverbal place of refuge motivates me to make perceptible this awareness for contemplation. Incorporating photographic images of the immeasurable dimensions of sky within translucent resin, a spatial distance collapses into wearable, tangible stillness to be worn on the body as an eternal present. 8

Breaking Barriers, Opening Doors : Integrating The Formerly Incarcerated With Community, Ruoyi Song

Masters Theses

We have all experienced the trauma of building new relationships from little or nothing. Some of us were able to blend in quickly, while others remain outsiders or foreigners. As a student studying interior architecture, I believe that design can influence human behavior and help to reshape the relationship between communities.

485 Plainfield St, a historical building built for ice cream production is currently owned by an organization called “Open Doors,” who provides temporary housing and skill classes for the formerly incarcerated to re-enter society. Interactions between the surrounding community and formerly incarcerated are infrequent, and due to the lack …

Floating, Nina Shishkina

Masters Theses

My writing is influenced by the concept of Montage. It has bits of readings, thoughts, memories. Everything is carefully picked and curated to inform the viewer of the ideas behind the work.

This book is aiming to explain the context of the time and space I was born and raised. The nineties in Russia were an extremely dynamic space. The flow of information, ideas, cultural events were enormous. Everything coexisted. the real democracy and freedom, as now it would be described. It was a dark time, full of hope and expectations.

Unfortunately for the reader, this text is not that …

Sky Is Sinking Below The Trees : Two Years Of Documentation And Observations, Xuelun Li

Masters Theses

I see landscape through my own eyes, hands and body, and also through the lenses of Chinese poetry, calligraphy and ink painting. These art forms are rich in metaphor. The way they imagine and depict landscape is romantic, often including observations on dual concepts as lightness and heaviness, movement and stillness, change and stability, all of which have inspired this collection of work.

These furniture pieces include benches, tables and lamps. They are abstracted landscapes, to spark imagination about natural forces and transformations, both through the process with which they’ve been made and through their final forms. I engage with …

Grid As A Frame, Young In Sa

Masters Theses

A grid is a type of framework applied to an area in order to articulate information through coordinates and units. Nowadays, the world we experience has become overwhelmed by digital displays. How can we perceive the different form of reality when both experience and our perspective are shaped by digital representation? What if our life continues in virtual topography where I can see my GPS location, or in a rectangular camera frame instead of on the spherical earth? I walk with my feet touching the ground and I see the landscape around me, but still, now, I navigate myself in …

American Slavic : And Other Writings, Zac Banik

Masters Theses

My current cycle of work deals with the exploration, digestion and reinvigoration of traditional Slavic craft and material culture with goal of contributing to a contemporary design vernacular which eschews the idealization of Western-European forms and stands on its own: aesthetically discrete and externally respected. This line of inquiry arose from my own journey to understand myself as a Slavic-American; what it means to be such a thing; how to reconcile assimilation against perceived authentic identity and what value the voice of the diaspora can bring to the discourse of the old world. The outward mission of this project is …

Pekka : Social Software To Improve In-Game Dynamics, Yu Mo

Masters Theses

Video games are like virtual cities. Similar to towns in the real world, virtual cities contain facilities and communities represented by game elements and players. There is a question for us: Can a game be a better city?

To answer the question, we need to understand what a good city looks like. Generally, a good city needs sound facilities and harmonious communities. Similar to a real city, we need to build more advanced game elements and peaceful game communities to make the game to be a better city. Games like Paragon have failed because they lacked game communities, even though …

Interface Philosophy, June Yoon

Masters Theses

During a Grad Studio II crit in the spring of 2018, I presented my project Measurements of Space and Time (page 132) and right after I finished, someone said, “This is like interface philosophy.” I didn’t even know what that meant, but it just felt right. At that very moment, I knew Interface Philosophy would be the title of my thesis.

Interface Philosophy was built as much as it was written and designed. Its function is to define “interface philosophy.” To describe interface as a meeting point for communication; philosophy as a cognitive reasoning of structural patterns. What I have …

Abjad Orientations, Mohammed Nassem

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates verbal and visual language through a lens of translation, queerness, and diaspora . Looking at graphic design as a reconciliatory space , I make use of its formal and typographic systems as devices to tell stories , examine cultures , and negotiate conflicting principles .

Abjad Orientations is a process of shifting the focal viewpoint to reorient myself and/or my audience and allow for a closer probe of our cultural reality . My eclectic identity as a Queer , Muslim , multilingual Arab living in the United States drives the form and content of my design inquiries …

Record : From Signal To Atmosphere, And The Spaces Between Silence And Noise, Amy Auman

Masters Theses

Record is both a noun and a verb. Its meaning shifts through pronunciation, beginning with our cognitive interpretation and then emerging as a translation that we project from our mouths. This thesis book is an artifact, or record, of the past two years of artistic inquiry. My work, however, lives through movement in time—it records my impulses. This thesis is merely an open archive.

A range of stimuli competes for our conscious attention. The signals we choose to notice emerge from the periphery of our atmosphere, which includes everything from noise to silence. I use design to amplify and alter …

Making Common, Elaine Lopez

Masters Theses

Making Common sets conditions for communication around cultural diversity and inequality. Through my practice, I create new ways to share, honor, and celebrate the stories that have been neglected for too long due to white supremacy, patriarchy, and other forms of structural oppression. I create immersive graphic design experiences that challenge people to question and expand their worldview. This methodology models an alternative way for designers to work towards a more just society

Lateral Movements : In Multifaceted Time And Space, Jieun Kim

Masters Theses

Orient, shift, calibrate, and soar—these four lateral movements provoke new ways of seeing beyond flatness: the single fixed point of view. I question the reasons and consequences of the dominant point of view and suggest interpretative and playful versions of possibilities.

The distribution of the internet and satellite photography has heightened the perception, interaction, and access to the world—time and space have become flexible. I use these tools deceptively to shift toward dynamic and multiple perspectives both in physical and digital space.

I create graphic environments into which people can enter, inviting people to maneuver in this multifaceted time and …