Architecture Commons^™

Body Positivity: A Case For Corporeal Form, Jose Sanchez

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Born from architecture’s increasingly shattered conceptual foundations, the formal project of bodily objects presents an interesting case study into the emerging dialectics surrounding considerations of representation, technology, and affect. This thesis examines the genealogical origins of corporeal form in order to further understand the stake that bodies hold within the production and reception of architecture. By tracing the pedigree of corporeal form back to the two types of architectural signification that emerged after modernism, bodies can be validated as a project able to extend and advance architecture’s potential for individualized and collective engagement. By situating bodily objects within the histories …

Speculative Spoliation: Spolia As An Instrument Of Locus Making And Identity Mediation, Amelia Gan

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

This thesis puts forward the provocation to employ spoliation as a form of preservation and as a tool of locus making and identity mediation. This is done by syncretizing architectural artifacts and remnants from different timelines, oscillating between operations of defamiliarization and memorialization. This thesis test and explores its contention on a site of contested memory, where the idea of reclaiming cultural ownership is done through a formal, spatial and orderly spoliation. The artifacts ‘on site’ and ‘off site’ is relayed through different mediums and dimensions through parameters of resolution and assimilation.

Sunset.Zip Popular Preservation And Learning From Roadside Architecture In Southern California, Ethan Russell-Benoit

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Outside of the spaces we inhabit daily, the car is the frame through which the majority of Americans experience the majority of architecture. Most architecture, especially as viewed from the car window is mere scenography, mere image; but images are democratic, they are compressible, transmissible, infinitely reproducible, and therefore immortal1 . Using film, animations, models, and drawings, Sunset.zip translates the experience of architecture from the car into a highly compressed architectural artifact that preserves popular cultural memory of a place as a constructed image. This project situates itself within multiple disciplinary discourses without preferencing one over another. Sunset.zip is in …

Re* Presenting Dharavi, Anuradha Desai

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The recycling of plastic is a critical informal economy in Dharavi, one of Asia’s largest slums located in the heart of Mumbai. Waste from dumping grounds is manually collected, sorted and prepared by recyclers who transform trash into a commodity to be sold back into the city as a substance with value. As part of top-down efforts to redevelop Dharavi’s valuable land with condominium towers, the Mumbai government has tarnished the industry’s image by labelling it as “polluting,” and has increased the cost of utilities such as electricity in an effort to drive it out of the community. As it …

Situation Comedy, Domestic Situation: The Design Of American Domesticity In Television Comedies, Aaron Guttenplan

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

In this paper, I examine the design of homes on television sitcoms and their relationship to reality and what viewers recognize as “home.” This is done through referencing sources from the realms of architecture and television/media studies. Additionally, multiple interviews with professionals in the production design industry inform many of the paper’s most important points. This serves as a companion piece to an architectural design thesis, which is a design of a space that combines living and television production programs. The aim of this is to ask how and why television homes are designed the way they are, and what …

Vestigial Vedute: Manipulating Warsaw’S Palimpsest To Reveal Ambiguity, Benedykt Ezlakowski

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The urban core of Warsaw today is a string of autonomous and unambiguous artifacts. Parts of the city were rebuilt after World War II, others built over during communist rule, and some created during times of rapid westernization after the fall of communism. The thesis concerns itself with representing these changes in the urban fabric over time. It aims to question this representation of Warsaw and through the use of layered maps and manipulated historical painting seeks to reveal a simultaneous reading of the city’s past and present states. I argue that this layered, hyperbolized reading is a tool to …

Speculative Spoliation: Spolia As An Instrument Of Locus Making & Identity Mediation, Amelia Gan

Architecture Senior Theses

In this thesis, spolia is defined as the repurposing of found artifacts or material with ingrained place identities to new building matter in novel contexts. This includes architecture remnants or fragments from sites of historical ruins, urban derelicts and artifacts currently displayed in museums.

Architecture's impermanence results in demolishment, reconstruction, or exhibition of its fragments in museums or ruin parks. Attempts at preservation often only look at the surface-level significance of these artifacts without allowing for the addition of meanings over time. While displaying an artifact in a museum or turning ruins into tourist parks directly addresses the history of …

Beyond Architecture: Architecture’S Alternative Role In Architecture Image, Zexi Tang

Architecture Senior Theses

Images/drawings of architecture primarily act as documentation of structures to help the audience (architects or clients) understand how architecture functions: the sense of space, physical relationship with the context, and circulation through different programs. Nevertheless, architectural images that focus not on functionally determine spaces but rather on an idea or provocation, also play a significant role in the representation of architecture. The role of architecture in these kinds of images can be beyond a shelter or accommodation. It can set up a stage to deliver messages; discuss historical, social, economic or political issues; or to express emotion or desire. Architects/artist …

Encapsulated Fantasy:A Dystopian Future Of Segregation By Technology, Shihua Xuan

Architecture Senior Theses

Objects...previously only available through interpersonal relationships, such as daily food and sexual partners, can now be obtained extremely easily with the help of fast food and sex industries without any troublesome interpersonal relationships. At this point, it can be said that our society has been constantly moving towards animalization... - Azuma Hiroki, the post-modernization of animalization: Japanese society in the eyes of the otaku

In an era of losing the grand narrative and the development of technology in Japan, many people no longer search for life's meaning, easily amazed by superficial products created by the capital market. Desire describes a …

Towards A Floating Urbanism: Adapting To Water As A New Ground, Chris Autera

Architecture Senior Theses

Climate change offers myriad challenges to society, including a rising sea level and increasingly intense storms. Resilience to climate change, particularly the reliance on hard barriers, only protects certain areas and raises the risk of catastrophic failure. More deeply, these approaches reflect an attempt to preserve society as it exists today, denying the reality that the multi-millennia process of climate change necessitates a more profound reevaluation of how society operates. Adaptation takes this need as a given, arguing for the retrofitting of infrastructure to regular inundation when possible and the abandonment of at-risk areas when not. However, these strategies are …

Growing Above The City: Application Of Open-Source Urban Agriculture System To Different Boroughs In Nyc, Jiyoon Bae

Architecture Senior Theses

The metropolitan area we live in faces the environmental as well as social issues such as air pollution, high density, or broken work-life balance, which cause our unhealthy lifestyle. New York City is one of the representative areas where faces social and environmental problems. At the same time, many of the social movements are uprising to overcome those issues. Urban agriculture is part of these movements to restore their healthy life, resisting against food discrimination, or educating the public about health and environmental significance. According to official reports, the number of urban farms reaches 550 through the entire city. However, …

Mediating Propagated Consumption: Integrated Shielding For A Wireless World, Olivia Humphrey

Architecture Senior Theses

Manifesting architecture in the physical realm and using simulation technologies that can model specific spatial or programmatic adjacencies will both influence the way we design material performance in response to electromagnetic radiation (EMR). The project intention is threefold: to measure, shield, and visualize, mediating propagated consumption. Design and data visualization strategies used by architects can convey social, medical, and environmental messages about the impact of how information is stored and accessed. These messages inform both the occupant and the designer. The college campus is becoming a breeding ground for wireless devices, from academic buildings to residence halls. Growth in residential …

Mirage: Architecture's Confounding Experiences, Nuofan Xu, Ziyao Zhang

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis explores experiences created from mixing architectural elements with projections, in order to make projections melt into architecture as an inseparable element. By proposing an architecture that integrates the effects and infrastructures of digital displays at the starting point of the design process, the project seeks to explore the ability of digital displays to blur physical boundaries, to apply temporality on eternal structures, and to isolate the exterior from the interior.

The project uses mirage, an optical phenomenon that produces illusory images of distant objects, as an analogy to speculate about digital displays in architecture. On the one hand, …

Architectural Ecotone: The Edge Effect, Holly Metzger, Tara Nuqul

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis aims to study the relationship between architecture and its environment. Specifically, this thesis will explore symbiotic relationships between architecture and surrounding ecosystems in many different terrains. Iceland presents a particular important case for this idea because it is a hotbed of geological activity. The country itself is a patchwork of desert, glaciers, geysers, lava fields and active volcano, which has led to Iceland developing intelligent systems of vernacular architecture throughout history to mediate this environment.

This thesis studies systems of domestic vernacular architecture by examining the qualities and characteristics of craft, materiality, structure, and a symbiotic relationship to …

Reconceptualizing The Urban Artifact, Ricardo Rodriguez Huerta

Architecture Senior Theses

This is a study of the architectural and historical construct of the Urban Artifact. For the purposes of this exploration, an Urban Artifact is to be understood as the physical manifestation of the city and its collective memory. It is the product of the history and character of its place and the embodiment of an idea of its type and the memory of its lineage. In contrast to the fixed intention and permanence of a monument, an Urban Artifact has its own autonomy and value gained over time until it ultimately becomes also identified as a monument. These concepts, defined …

Embracing The American Atlantis: Designing For A Post-Disaster New Orleans, Mikayla Beckwith, Katherine Truluck

Architecture Senior Theses

In the year 2100, New Orleans is flooded and reduced to a fraction of its previous grandeur. The rising sea level has reduced the city to an archipelago settled between the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. Through the implementation of a transportation and program core system, the archipelago of territories is reconnected and the programmatic organization of the land is redistributed. This project combines architectural, infrastructural, and utopian case studies to move beyond the mitigation of water and instead create a new condition that adapts to the water in a more symbiotic fashion. Through this intervention, New Orleans …

Building Reconfigurations, Alex Allen, Scott Krabath

Architecture Senior Theses

In a contemporary society saturated with images, photographs of physical artifacts are intermixed with inaccurate drawings and low-res copies. These new images challenge the associations between buildings and their representations. While Robin Evans writes about the translation of drawings to buildings in the past, this thesis extends this exploration to include the reconfiguration of images using several current digital formats. This aligns to Joselit's statement in After Art, which argues that "an image is a visual byte, vulnerable to virtually infinite remediation." This thesis contends that the reconfiguration of active images into static material can be exploited as a design …

Territories Of Matter: Revealing The Economies And Ecologies Of Aluminum, Noah Anderson

Architecture Senior Theses

This project seeks to understand matter through the environments it creates. These environments, created through production, end-use, and disposal, extend to the scale of the world, the territory and the product. In a globalized world, the separate environments of a single material are highly external, and while we may know where a material comes from, the consequences of its extraction and manufacture are out-of-site, out-of-mind. This externalization is evident for Aluminum, which has a diverse and often contradictory range of environments.

Re-Imagine Air: Transforming Zoning Around Landmarks, Brian Hurh

Architecture Senior Theses

Today’s New York City skyline has been developed as a result of over a century of zoning resolutions and changes. Zoning code were first established in 1916 to regulate the building of skyscrapers. These resolutions act as “harm preventing” 1 measure to provide limits, meaning the zone prevents extremities in building dimensions to have some control. However, today’s skyscrapers are built higher and higher through exploits and loopholes. The transfer of development rights from adjacent lots or landmarks allows developers to break regulations. It also allows structures to reach unexpected heights to the most recent zoning resolution in 1961 . …

Vimana: A Crisis Of Translation, Apoorva Rao

Architecture Senior Theses

The architecture of the Hindu temple, as we know it today, has become a caricature of applied style and a theater for rituals rather than the symbolic representation of the core concepts of Hinduism. There is a disconnection between the beliefs and their translation into architecture, which has resulted in a dissolution and erosion of the temple as a vehicle for the ritual spiritual journey1. The temple is built on a literal and conceptual framework of core essential elements such as the sanctum sanctorum, the roof, the plinth, its orientation on earth, and its function to, metaphorically, transport people from …

Casting Contradictive Landscapes: The Objects Of An Obsolescent* Future, Sarah Catherine Beaudoin

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis pays homage to the longevity of the ordinary yet iconic elements of the German Ruhr Valley, aiming to bring its functionally obsolescent architectural characters to the forefront of design analysis. The investigation catalogs, dissects, and speculates a series of conditions that arise from the mixed array of economic, geographic, and cultural pressures of the contemporary Ruhr Valley. Rather than merely describing and critiquing the found industrial objects, a series of paradigms visualize a fictitious world in which a family of could-be-architectures can take stage. They act as prototypes for unspecified places while still exploring the consequences of their …

The Treachery Of Architectural Matter, Weiqiao Lin

Architecture Senior Theses

Besides giving objects a physical form, material qualities contribute to and codify the way we understand architecture. From the pictorial aesthetics of the picturesque and the sublime expressed in Henry Hobson Richardson’s rusticated stone, to the purity of whiteness declared by Le Corbusier in “The Law of Ripolin”, to the brutalist roughness expressed in Alison & Peter Smithson’s raw concrete surfaces; materiality is delivered through imitation or dissimulation in the semantic field of architecture. Beginning in the late 18th century, Carlo Lodoli’s doctrine of truth in materials launched a rebellion against imitated materiality and decorated wallpaper. While this polemic sough …

Death Of A Posthuman, David Bullard, Carolina Hasbun Elias

Architecture Senior Theses

Some of the first marks humans left on the planet were the architectures of death and remembrance. From the pyramids of Ancient Egypt to the burial landscapes of the 20th century, today’s architecture of death manifests itself mainly as cemeteries and crematoriums. However, we contend the culture of death in the 21st century has evolved to demand an architecture that acknowledges changes in its culture and its impact on the natural and technological environment. Humans are no longer just human. Our recent evolution has presented two realities, to which the discipline of architecture needs to respond. First, the split presence …

Emoji Disorder, Doria Miller, Irving Shen

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis posits with the contemporary context of a rising digital and visual dialect, the emoji, the elastic architectural design language has the capability to be updated. The duck, based on form, and the decorated shed, based on signage, are no longer adequate to project meaning on architecture. The emoji is neither purely symbol nor sign and thus it becomes a fusion of the two: a duckerated shed. By referencing a familiar language rather than canonical architectural precedents, those outside of the discipline can better relate to the buildings they inhabit.

P.E.T.S.: Personal. Empathic. Topological. Series., Ian Mulich, Jose Sanchez

Architecture Senior Theses

Within the current conditions of our globalized society, market structures and logics have come to organize culture, economy, and politics in an increasingly interrelated manner. Contingent to this triangulation, architecture needs to be critical about its turn towards the market and the commercialization of its production. By performing as a brand that expands and evolves serially, architectural practice can maneuver commercial systems of exchange and act as a cultural agent that promotes deeper engagement with design. Corporeal forms that induce empathic relationships can serve as the architectural products necessary to fuel consumption practices that craft individualized disciplinary interaction. The empathic …

But Soft! Fabricating Adaptive Urbanism, Caroline Barrick, Arezo Hakemy, Sabrina Logroño

Architecture Senior Theses

We contend that a performative fabric that combines strategies of comfort and adaptation and deployed as large-scale soft architecture can challenge the approach to urban infrastructural issues currently only managed by hard architecture. We are investigating both soft and hard architecture through the human scale and experience, the urban scale, materiality, adaptability, and temporality. Soft architecture produces comfort and ergonomic design for both physical and mental benefit and affects the built environment through its tactile materiality, its ephemeral temporality, and its swift adaptability. Hard architecture resists environmental and human adaptation through its rigid materiality, its lasting temporality, and its reluctant …

Sunset.Zip: A New Proposal In Architectural Reconstruction, Ethan Russell-Benoit, Wilson Slagle

Architecture Senior Theses

More often than not, architecture is in the background, rather than in the foreground. Architecture is a stage set for life, and much of it we only get to look at from the outside. Non-architects do not remember buildings by their plans, sections, and details - instead, people remember buildings by their plans, sections, and details - instead people remember fragments, pieces, and generalized characters. Architecture is compressed in our memory in ways that often differ substantially from reality. The automobile further exacerbates this phenomenon. The automotive tourist experiences the landscape in fleeting glimpses, and buildings are reduced to their …

Sinoconn: Merchandising Of Architecture And Rearmament Of Labor, Furui Sun

Architecture Senior Theses

The project is situated in the context of contemporary China, where tremendous production power and a huge labor force have been accumulated through decades of rapid economic growth. In recent years, China's persistent growth has begun to slow, which challenges the administration with an imminent socio-economic crisis and the potential for a massive scale of surplus capital and its consequences. This conflict emerges out of the complementary "inner connection...between the developments of capitalism and urbanization" identified by British-born Marxist scholar David Harvey. Such a problem and its resolution can be seen in France in the mid-19th century right after an …

Material Density: A Radical Approach To Adaptive Reuse, Madeline Laberge

Architecture Senior Theses

Through disassembly and reconfiguration, this thesis proposes to create new relationships between existing materials and their typical forms, using a material-focused densification specific to the site. This radical approach to adaptive reuse contrasts the current over-designed and over-theorized architectural projects, aiming to use a pragmatic approach in how materials on historical sites can be reclaimed. Situated on a site with forgotten architecture, the building’s “ruins provide the incentive for restoration” where one can re-immerse themselves with the grand, sublime space. But sites like these are typically demolished for new construction due to costly rehabilitation, with new designs ignoring or not …

Faculty Publications For Academic Year 2018-19, Kathleen Brandt, Brian Lonsway, Lori Brown, Junho Chun, Sekou Cooke, Gregory Corso, Julia Czerniak, Lawrence Davis, Mitesh Dixit, Jonathan Louie, Nicole Mcintosh, Marcos Parga, Daekwon Park, Fei Wang, Amber Bartosh, Jean-Francois Bedard, Lawrence Chua, Molly Hunker, Roger Hubeli, Julie Larsen, Elizabeth Krietemeyer, Mark Linder, Sinead Mac Namara, Yutaka Sho, Ted Brown, Joseph Godlewski, Kyle Miller, David Shanks

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

Faculty publications of School of Architecture for the academic year 2018- 2019