Architecture Commons^™

Gold: Stories Of A City, Vivek Vijayan Njanappilly

Architecture Senior Theses

The thesis explores the latent influences of gold and its value systems on the urban geo-politics of a South Indian city. It is an anthology of sporadic narrations recording the growth and transformation of a city over time. These narrative compositions contain traces of the past, the city of the present and speculative futures. They indicate change without erasure. Their values are embodied in gold; malleable, ductile and fungible in its different forms.

The intention of the thesis is not to merely speak of a specific commodity nor is it to narrate the history of a city. It is an …

[Ar] You Ready?, Trang Tran

Architecture Senior Theses

This project challenges the obsolete existence of signage and billboards and seeks to explore how augmented reality (AR) advertisements change the relationship between signage and buildings.

Iiid: A Detailed Look Into System Integration Of Material Types Through The Use Of 3d Printing, Johnathon E. Phillips

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis wishes to pursue the potential of 3D printing ornamented designs with the use of shale/clay powder. This material compound, through this research, had been shown to be compliable with 3D printing technology so that it can be sculpted by the tools of the architect into complex geometric “blocks.” These can then be printed and red allowing them to become the tectonic building bricks for a new way of building. Through researching this material, I will demonstrate the usefulness and possibilities of this time-tested substance in the creation of new architectural spaces.

Reconnect: Amplifying Circulation Typologies To Radically Rethink Urban-Aqueous Relationships, Tiffany Pau

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis proposes a radical rethinking of city-water relationships to leverage existing infrastructural and architectural divides; because it holds great architectural and social value to work within and challenge existing systems, and because access to the waterfront– for sustenance, transportation, commercial, or leisure purposes– is a core human need. The project questions what happens when connections are scaled extra-large, yet aim to maintain the qualities that are imbued within them at the micro scale to generate increased public activity at the water’s edge. It looks to create a new type of urbanism, one that prioritizes the very act of circulation …

I Want This! I Want That!: A Speculation On The Future Context Of Architecture, Olivia Flores-Siller, Steven Worthington

Architecture Senior Theses

We are hypothesizing a potential future reality where architecture is in the hands of the common person, projecting the idea of mass customization and the expanding scope of DIY into the larger scale of ‘building.’ Hyper-individualism, experimentation, and expressionism characterize this ‘world’ because increases in technology have led to there being little commitment and consequence attached to actions and ‘building’. Technology works harder for us; and as we work less, we play more.

Our values and lifestyles are echoed in our architecture; what, then, is the condition an urban landscape focusing on individualism and mass customization? In this story, architecture …

Layered Scamming: Exposing How The Desires Reflect In The Architecture Design, Alejandra Charrabe

Architecture Senior Theses

Based on the essay “Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Forms” by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour the terms “decorated shed” and “duck” take on a different meaning when speaking of architecture. These terms specifically described a relationship between the program and the façade of a building. By taking such terms an applying them to an analysis of brothel facades, an interesting relationship can be created between the marketing strategy desired for such brothel and the way in which the façade represents such strategy. I will be analyzing the relationship between public/private, commercial/cultural, container/content …

For The Love Of Concrete: Embracing The Ugly Duckling, Not The Decorated Shed, Steven Carlson

Architecture Senior Theses

For the Love of Concrete is at its heart an homage to concrete, advocating beauty, versatility and durability; celebrating concrete's ability to create spatial experiences that are compelling, varied, acoustically attuned and thermally tempered. In the face of increasing superficiality, in architecture and the world at large, this thesis celebrates the authenticity and substantiality of concrete.

Axon-Orama: A New System Of Architectural Representation, Fei Wang

Architecture Senior Theses

A codified architectural representation, the axonometric drawing is objective, yet an audience's reception of a building is perspectival and constructed through a spatial narrative over time. In response to this paradox, Axon-orama is proposed as a new representational technique - a set of variational drawings with pliable arrangement and hybrid expression - explored through the use of the British board game, Myriorama. The work blurs the boundary between objective and subjective representation and perception, offering a new system of architectural inquiry.

Details Matter: A Pavilion For India In Venice, Rajkumar Kadam

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis proposes a national pavilion for India at the Venetian Arsenal, one of the sites for the Venice Biennale. The design of a pavilion for India at the Venice Biennale is an opportunity to understand architecture as a vehicle that illustrates values that are simultaneously universal, and culturally specific. While the proposed Indian pavilion incorporates the details that define Indian architecture, they are appropriated to the highly articulate Venetian context because principally, Indian architecture is malleable and fits within its local environment. This cross-cultural representation is accomplished through symbolic relationships to natural elements and site, abstract architectonic form and …

Blur Out, Hye Rim Shin

Architecture Senior Theses

Blur Out explores ideas about architecture that seeks ephemerality rather than legibility, eidetic affects rather than demand of focused attention and atmospheric or emotional spaces rather than conventional spaces.

The exploration of Blur Out is situated within the research topic of different states of snow that are generated from avalanche phenomena of Iceland, which develops site specific understandings of the phenomena and effects. The project aims to build a blurred boundary both literally and experientially between the built and natural environment to challenge representing and re-presenting the spectrum of tangibility to intangibility. By exploring the dichotomy between the built and …

The Oppelaland: An Underground Refugee Theme Park In Aleppo, Rui Bao

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis operates on the perception of Syrian refugees as a threat and a burden to European countries by architectural means.

In emergency situations, architecture tends to act only after the conflict by providing temporary aid, such as refugee camps. This kind of emergency remedy displaces a large number of refugees to countries all over the world. Refugees may be discriminated and treated as second class citizens in the host countries. They may be restricted in small areas like prisoners rather than citizens with equal rights.

This thesis propose a hyper-real project in the form of "Refugeeland" to call attention …

Y'All Come Back Now, Ya Hear: A Reflection On Nashville's History And The Carnivalesque, Kolby Forbes

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis seeks to utilize the technique of allegorical image in understanding both the past and present histories of Nashville. By collaging aspects of past and present, the images produced seek to present the emerging alternative. This otherness constructs an in between in which the narratives of both instances begin to merge and mutate. These collages establish a landscape of Nashville which is no longer constricted temporally or spatially, remaining open to interpretations and resisting a clear sense of closure. The designs that I propose are meant to clarify the neglected traumas and occurrences of the past to demonstrate that …

Ritual Place, Dabota Wilcox

Architecture Senior Theses

What is a ritual? Its connotations are rooted in the vocabulary of religion, but essentially a ritual is a repeated or singularly significant act meant to instill a deeper meaning or reinforce a belief. Beliefs are supported through the practice of rituals. Rituals are special because they facilitate experiences that separate us from the mundane. They serve to pull its participants to recognize and participate in something of worth. But what would it mean to imagine the new ritual? If for a moment this distinction were expanded there are countless moments, activities, or seemingly insignificant acts that could be considered …

A Simulation-Assisted Workflow For Outdoor Thermal Comfort Design In Downtown Syracuse, Pouya Zhand

Architecture Senior Theses

Cities are not just about the buildings and skylines. Cities are also about the space be­tween buildings (the ground in figure-ground). More importantly and fundamentally cities are about people and the life that happens between buildings. Simulation tools can inform the design of attractive public spaces by pro­viding insight about the environmental conditions.

Framing The Future: Imagining The City Through The Lens Of Film, Sofia Zavala Ferreira

Architecture Senior Theses

With a great interest in the relationship between film and architecture, this project establishes its subject matter on the possibilities presented in science fiction cinema and speculative design. By extracting attributes from these that would influence design and architectural concerns, a bridge between the disconnected imagined and real, current and future, can be created through the creation of a speculative scenario and a narrative.

It seeks to utilize cinematic design and storytelling conventions to successfully convey the desired atmosphere, architectural realities, and life conditions of a fictional city. By utilizing advanced digital techniques often used in cinema itself, including but …

Rural Retreat | Urban Myth, Celeste Pomputius

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis proposes a destination for recreation and retreat on Plum Island, New York that references the model of the National and State Park Services and whose intended audience is primarily residents of New York City who are without the means or methods of easily seeking other experiences of nature outside the realm of city limits. The first step of this design process involves reexamining the traditional definition of “urban” to shorten the leap from the comforts of the city to the unknowns of nature. From there, the project identifies and resolves three challenges that stand between urban residents and …

Learning From The Informal: Designing A New Housing Typology For Informal Development In Cairo, Cherif Farid

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis examines what to design when designing for the informal and questions the role of the architect. The project combines the inherent qualities of the informal; self-built, incremental construction, and flexibility of spatial uses, with alternative urban design strategies.

The design strategy is to control the ground plane and roof scape, while leaving an open frame in between to be incrementally filled with housing. This frame allows residents to voice their identity by physically constructing their homes. It introduces an urban system that is composed of blocks that consist of an aggregation of identical units. The blocks are connected …

Wrong Features: Re-Framing The Everyday Through What It's Not And What It's Near, Paul J. Lee

Architecture Senior Theses

In the world’s ubiquity of images and growth of visual culture, it is appropriate to reconsider images as a source for producing architecture. Search engines and image-based social media illustrate Jacque Ranciere’s alterity of images - that images are autonomous from and other than the objects they represent - to a degree like never before. Given this vast field of images that make up our perception of reality, this thesis exposes and embraces the inherent distinctions between images and their represented objects to arrive at an architectural sensibility of distinction and otherness. By re-drawing, re-imaging, and re-presenting Bernd & Hilla …

@The_New_House: An Online-Offline Manifesto, Ana Hernandez Derbez, Domenica Velasco

Architecture Senior Theses

The house, is one of the most fundamental architectural archetypes, has long been used as unbuilt or built manifestos to declare the avant garde of the discipline. As designers, we need to re-visualize design concepts to create architecture that integrates and corresponds to the way we dwell. Innovating design in the same way technology and digitalization have been innovating production and the way we live. This thesis investigates a return to the design of a house as a manifesto, focusing on today’s advanced modes of fabrication and evolving ways of living to challenge the current design mindset.

Breaching The Divide: An Inquiry Into Border Passage, Russell Scheer

Architecture Senior Theses

The wall that divides intertwining borders of Israel and the West Bank is such a division. Palestinians and Israelis pass along and cross through the wall everyday, engage in trade, and lay claim and pray in the same ancient, religious places. But the wall separates, marking stark difference in resources, access and freedom of movement. This project is an inquiry into the existing threshold that currently separates Israelis from Palestinians in the West Bank. Through the dismantling of the Israeli border checkpoint and reinterpretation of its parts, this project reimagines the sequence of passing through the threshold. By framing the …

Regenerative Refugee Housing: Creating Temporary Housing With Low Environmental Impact, Erika Guldner

Architecture Thesis Prep

Refugee settlements often have a negative environ­mental impact; by promoting options for sustainable development from the outset, this can be avoided. A plan for a refugee settlement was made, along with a plan for the individual residential units. To expedite the construction process, units were divided into compo­nents. These components could be easily assembled on site. Once the refugee settlement is no longer needed, components can be used for other purposes, such as, affordable housing or the components themselves can be broken down to be either recycled or used for other purposes.

Metabolism For Cyborgs, Christopher Bressler, Colin Hoover

Architecture Senior Theses

The networked device is becoming an integral part of the ways in which human beings interface with their environment. This project seeks to explore the architectural implications of this trend as it reaches its logical conclusion in the cyborg mind. Access to information concerning specific geographic and architectural locations is already a tool used in the creation of communities and defining spatial boundaries. The ability to do so relies on the interconnected layers of virtual and physical objects. This relationship is described in Benjamin Bratton’s “The Stack” which labels the mass of connected devices and users as an “accidental megastructure.” …

Zones Of Entanglement: Nigeria's Real And Imagined Compounds, Joseph Godlewski

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

This article is part of TDSR, Volume XXVII, Number II, 2017

From the article abstract: This article examines the architectural and discursive configurations of traditional walled compounds in Nigeria. It begins by discussing the spatial and social organization of compounds in different regions of the country, focusing on the impermanent structures of the Èfik in and around the southeastern port city of Old Calabar. It then examines archival evidence to highlight the ways that compounds have been rhetorically constructed by European observers and post-independence scholars. It concludes that a more productive reading results from understanding the compound as a zone …

Vierzehnheiligen (1742-1744), Jean-François Bédard

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

This article traces the ways in which competing architectural plans for the Vierzehnheiligen (currently known as the Basilica of the Fourteen Holy Helpers) in Southern Germany evolved from its 1735 until 1744. These changes reflect changing ideas of church architecture and the pragmatic realities of the site.

Schloss Sanssouci (1743-1745), Jean-François Bédard

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

This article is a general overview of Schloss Sanssouci, a summer palace of Fredrick II, King of Prussia. The architect, Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, depended heavily upon Fredrick's idiosyncratic designs, giving Scholoss Sanssouci a unique character.

The Shenzhen Activist Program`, Hyunggyu Kim, Jae Hyun Kim

Architecture Senior Theses

There is a gap between being an architecture student in western countries and working as an architect in underrepresented communities. Architect Teddy Cruz defines the role of an activist architect as "expanded mode of practice", and the task of "deigning the protocols or the interfaces between communities and spaces".

This thesis contends that architecture schools need to continue to embrace the widely-accepted norm of studios studying abroad and working in an international studio. Current study abroad programs tend to skew towards being touristic field trips and there is not a curriculum or programmatic investment in cultivating relationships between the visiting …

Aftermarket Supermarket | A Speculative Retrospective, Alexander Kim

Architecture Senior Theses

In the preface to Delusive Spaces: Essays on Culture, Media and Technology, media theorist Eric Kluitenberg writes that “the delusion of the new”1 pollutes our theorizations of new media. This sort of technocratic fetishization of emergent technologies can only amount to a surfatial investigation of its effects or capabilities. Architectural investigations of virtual reality and other new media systems suffer from this tendency as well. Content-based experimentation and criticism obsess over the simultaneously exciting and daunting prospects of what we can now do or make with recent digital developments. There’s definite value in such endeavors, but frankly, in the grand …

A Plan Of The Louvre's Cour Carrée And The Making Of The Architecture Française, Jean-François Bédard, Pierre-Édouard Latouche

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

In November 1894 an album of drawings of the Louvre was auctioned in Paris. Contained within the album is an anonymous and undated plan of the ground floor of the Cour Carrée. This article argues that the survey for this plan was sponsored by educator and architect Jacques-François Blondel, and give evidence for this attribution.

Reconstruct The Missing Narrative: Rethinking Contemporary Chinese Architecture Through Ancient Landscape Paintings, Taiming Chen, Yiwei Wu

Architecture Thesis Prep

In this thesis, we will continue to address the issue of self-identity and missing narrative in contemporary context. Differently, we will use landscape paintings as our design source to revive the narrative quality. We will use the methodologies developed from the research to deconstruct the selected landscape paintings, transform them into narratives, and reconstruct the narratives into architecture.

By extracting events, atmosphere, and spirits from original painting narratives, and by borrowing the principles of paintings to transform them into sequences, we will set up architectural narratives in contemporary context for people to experience.

Details Matter: Architecture Is Understood As A Sum Of Its Details, Rajkumar Kadam

Architecture Thesis Prep

Architecture is understood as a product of its details. It is inseparable from its components and the characteristic ways in which they are assembled. The scalar and material consistency of the components is important as to how architecture is read. In this regard, the best detailing is one where each part has the same language and character as the whole as detailing is about the construction of a part to whole relationship. To construct this argument, this thesis looks at Edward Ford’s “55 Door Handles, or What is a Detail?” and the four schools of thought about the relationship of …