Architecture Commons^™

Divided Cyprus, Nicola Kyverniti

Architecture Thesis Prep

Creating urban interventions in the city at different scales and sites strategically chosen to attract the city population would have the potential to expose the state of the urban fabric. Nodes designed to alter the perspective of the occupant. Exposure created through the language of architecture. Revealling dividing elements emphasizes the need for a true symbol of dialogue and freedom of discussion between the separated communities. At a global scale, conflict is not something that can truly be resolved or diminished. The notion of conflict occurs in certain locations at different periods, following the evolution of political, social, economic, and …

Subversive Supermarket: Tactical Interjections Into The Everyday Experience, Taylor Johnson

Architecture Thesis Prep

The architecture of the supermarket and the landscape of food production, processing, distribution, and consumption it is situated within, further isolates the relationships consumers have with their food and routines. Investigating the intersection between socio-political, and economic constructs that shape the supermarket, the psychology of the interior constructs, and uses of spatial theory to frame architectural tactics of intervention, the thesis aims to embed a narrative subscript into the existing supermarket experience, to expand beyond its systemic constructs and user policies.

Collaborating With Catastrophe: The User's Guide To, Patricia Cafferky

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis contends that the narrative nature of architecture gives it the potential to act as a jeremiad, taking the present day failings of society in the face of climate change and extrapolating out a potential future dystopia to instigate a critical dialogue and challenge the status quo. Here, architecture will act as a medium, as opposed to more typical literary works or photojournalism techniques which are usually associated with communicating social critique.

Architecture On Parade: Rejuvenating Venice Biennale, Fan Fang

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis is interested in speculating on new ways to exhibit architecture. As it is a culturally relevant event, the thesis will borrow strategies in other forms of popular cultural production to determine how to rejuvenate architecture exhibition. Parade and traveling circus are cultural rituals that have unique formats that give actual shape to culture. They present in a live and lively manner, and they travel among places to enlarge a wider audience.This thesis project seeks to learn from these cultural rituals such as the parade and the traveling circus to improve and expand current formats of exhibition and celebration …

This Is Not The Color Yellow, Annagrace Walton

Architecture Thesis Prep

"I bet I can create a casino in the themed environment of Las Vegas that is a sign of 'actual' use-value and 'artificial' sign-value."

Algorithmic Settlements, Benjamin Anderson-Nelson

Architecture Thesis Prep

Utilizing a typological understanding of the spatial conditions of informal settlements to help suggest how interventions will affect conditions is the goal. Understanding the beneficial aspects of communal space created as well as the nature of adaptability within the settlement provides architects with a better understanding of where and how they might intervene. Simulating the conditions of an informal settlement digitally would help to better understand the individualistic agency involved in their creation. Modeling the inter-relational actions between neighboring entities within the system allows for the system to be understood more complexly than before. Designers would be able to add …

Millenial Housing, Jonathan Reisman

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis contends that growing cities around the world are out pricing the younger demographic from the urban fabric. Contends that constantly rising real estate markets are forcing Millenials outside of city centers. Understands that socially, the younger demographic provides the energy and income required to keep the city alive. And believes that in order for the younger demographic to reclaim their position in the housing market, a new typology of living needs to be created.

Unreal Urbanisms, Temitope Olujobi

Architecture Thesis Prep

As virtual cities are made in the transnational image of physical cities the same claims about legibility, public image and the five elements of a city’s can be asserted to virtual environment, however; the bottom up approach to building these virtual cities means the appearance, use and interplay of these elements will operate differently. The research of the virtual cities featured on Unreal Urbanisms will be executed in methods similar to the experiments conducted by Kevin Lynch. The first method will be field research in which we navigate the city and map out my own ways of movement and legibility …

The Phenomenology Of Contemplative Space, Frank Fuentes

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis contends that architecture has the potential to script a hyper specific spiritual experience catered toward both the individual and the collective. Architecture can invoke an essence of spirituality regardless of one’s own affiliation towards religion. It is my contention that there is potential for design in architecture within agency to perform the thesis, a contemplative space for individuals with or without a religious identity. Architecture can perform as a device to invoke a sense of spirituality in individuals that would not consider themselves neither religious, nor spiritual - by providing a place of awe, contemplation, and mysticism.

Into Instrument: A Case For The Musical Tectonic, Alex Lievens

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis will observe and investigate the relationship between musical objects and architectonic construction. It will begin to test relationships between musical notational systems and architectural notational systems. Musical instruments can provide key insights into how architecture might possess the same qualities of interactivity, action and personal value that musical instruments inherently own.

The Self Sufficient Pod, Brenna Merola

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis presents a typology of temporary relief housing that will be self sustaining and will better address the procedure and process of housing individuals affected by disasters. The proposed pod will be adaptable in order to fit the needs of different types of environmental conditions, while still encompassing the architectural necessities of light, heat, and energy.

The Burning Building, Winnie Tu

Architecture Thesis Prep

When fire is controlled, research confirms that hearth and campfires induce relaxation as part of a multi sensory, absorptive, and social experience. Because fire ties heavily with community formation, this thesis aims to directly re-introduce the element of fire as a social phenomenon measured through four scales of human proxemics: public, social, personal, and intimate. Since fire involves flickering light, crackling sounds, warmth, and has a distinctive smell, the architecture will be designed around the exploration of these characteristics and its spatial qualities through the control of construction as well as heat and light dissipation to result in the design …

A Mat Response To Deinstitutionalization, Dominic Lipuma

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis references the wave of new ideas for architecture’s response to mental health during the 1960s, based on a new understanding and approach to mental illness in society, with the proposals for Community Mental Health Centers (CMHCs). These facilities formed the architectural basis of the Community Mental Health Act of 1963, which was ultimately never fulfilled, marking the wave of deinstitutionalization and the closing of psychiatric hospitals without these CMHCs in place. Therefore, this thesis picks up where the ball was dropped back then, proposing a new architectural solution based on further research and insight that has since taken …

Never-Land, Xiaoyan Dong

Architecture Thesis Prep

The thesis re-imagines the operation and impact of construction sites under fast urbanization in China, by studying the live + work practices of migrant construction workers. The thesis criticizes the existing introverted “Wall + Hut” construction paradigm, proposing an adaptable architectural structure around construction sites, which provides spatially an alternative urban nomad lifestyle for Chinese construction workers, and in return reconstruct the urban experience in China based on the increasing demand for migrant-dwellings and omnipresent construction sites.

The Architecture Of Consumption: A New Transient Shopping Space, Ensam Lee

Architecture Thesis Prep

Research shows that while most malls aren’t actually dying off, the 3.4% that are failing are older malls relying on singular programming and older dumbbell plans with retail anchors referred to as Class C and D malls (Hurley 2015). Studies show that, as a result, more competitive malls in Class A and even some Class B malls are shifting their focus to branding a memorable experience for shoppers in the mall. And due to the volume of programs and activities that take place in Class A malls they are almost always very large. If a new type of shopping space …

Private Room On The Wheel, Kathy Teng

Architecture Thesis Prep

The American highway is nationly used for commerce and commuting, but it creates diverse lifestyles as well. The cross-country highway and road trip are deeply rooted in the American psyche, supported the vast Federal Highway Network and the rapid growth in ownership of automobiles by American families since the 1940s, establishing a sense of freedom in their mobile lifestyles. Other highway users have less control over their daily routine.

Truck drivers spend a majority of their times on the road, while the remaining part of their day is spent sleeping in fixed truck cabins or eating at all-night truck stops. …

Breathing Architecture, Yichao Kang

Architecture Thesis Prep

Breathing architecture use the physical property of nature to solve the problem from environment and replace the traditional mechanical system of the existing building in Beijing. Architecture is the expression of the nature and interaction with people.

Renegotiating Figure And Structure, Maxwell Rosner

Architecture Thesis Prep

Innie/Outie considers architecture as a simultaneously typological and teleological proposition. Architects from the advent of Modernism onwards have displayed a critical preoccupation with the discipline's teleological potential, the creation of form that follows function - a renunciation of authorship, a denial of intuition that pursues an architecture of transcendence that adheres only to the principles which govern that which is, rather than that which appears to be.

The Museum Of Ideas: Fantastic Wilderness Park, Alyssa Goraieb

Architecture Thesis Prep

The history of wilderness is the history of an idea. A missing element of the natural history museum is the human attitude within which nature is captured and displayed. This project wants to put the historical displays of the museum within a context by making an addition to the natural history museum that archives the historical attitudes, experiences and perceptions towards wilderness.

An Escape, Chen Xihao

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis contains that threshold space anticipates sensational enhanced experiences. An Escape propose a thresh old building that is composed majorly by thresh old space that directs people via sensory experiences and diverts them to a fantasyland — — a thermal bath house. Conventional programmatic space is underplayed – instead , this thesis emphasizes threshold space as the primary spatial design factor.

Subtraction: A Construction In Reverse An Event Of Metamorphosis, Sherina Zhang

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis initiates with debates between entropy of a building’s finite ending and metamorphosis of a building’s new beginning. According to Robert Smithson entropy is “an irreversible condition, where everything is gradually wearing down”. The works of Gordon Matta Clark, infused with understanding resulting in the increase of entropy, prevents architecture to pass beyond the point of irreversibility. Clark performs a set of minimalistic acts that provide architecture in obsolescence with an after life.

The Border Land, Zhuocen Yao

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis aims to explore the issue of the conceptual space for the establishment of difference: the border, in both literal and phenomenal term. What can architecture do to change the way we perceive borders. How can the border politics construct border architecture and can the new border architecture in another way result in new border politics. How can we transform the indeterminate nature of the border from a threshold that demarcates into a new in between landscape typology that mediates between the need for quality space of hosted events and influences and security?

The Ottoman Han: Recovery Of A Lost Typology, Asli Germirli

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis will focus on the architectural interventions for the 17th century structure of Buyuk Valide Han. The project will be shaped through the multiple lenses of Critical Regionalism, urban planning, conservation and sustainability. The aim is to add value to the Hans District and to revive the commercial and cultural identity through the preservation of the older structures and the introduction of modern architecture.

New Beijing: Learning From New York, Bowen Zhang

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis aims to address the housing problem generated by the previously mentioned contradicting stimuli to create a new housing typology that is appropriate for a modern Beijing.

The Image Machine, Jeremy Min Burns

Architecture Senior Theses

Architecture has always been an image machine. From the Lascaux cave paintings to the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris to the multimedia installations of the Eameses to the early projects of Diller Scofidio, images and architecture have cohabited persistently and productively for centuries. However, since the dawn of the digital age, the ontological status of images has changed; and in turn so has the relationship between images and architecture. Rather than being anchored to a specific material support, images exist as manipulable data. While some have viewed the digital turns as the transcendence of information beyond the human subject, an era of …

Parity, Hamza Hasan

Architecture Senior Theses

Digital data contributes to an increasingly alienated aspect of our infrastructure. The complex practices of the Internet produce highly specified, engineered objects. Though their forms are ‘optimized,’ their intentions are not: the two primary considerations for the development of the infrastructure of the Internet are energy and security. Each category presents its own deliberations, but both often produce non-architectural, infrastructural elements beyond public visibility. The hidden infrastructure of data storage and mining (the indexing and analysis of data and traffic) produces spaces outside the agency of normative architectural discourse.

The key consideration for the design of the Internet is redundancy, …

Magna Architecture, Xue Yang

Architecture Thesis Prep

The Thesis will explore the method of utilizing manga narrative as a story base and space generator for creating new architecture, and a methodology of extracting narratives from urban spaces, through the study of specific techniques and the materialization of archetypal narrative space in Manga.

Hacking The Urban Village | Architecture As Board Game, Xuyun Liu

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis proposes the board game as a new research methodology and platform for the study of southern China's urban villages.

Hacking the Urban Village examines the urban villages that have, in recent decades, become a common but informal settlement type in China as a result of China's unprecedented period of urbanization.

This research forms the contextual core of a board game where game settings present the current urban conditions and players may explore alternative forms of urbanism. The board game offers players the opportunity to investigate both he formal conditions of the urban village life along with it attendant …

Sponge Logics | Rethinking Thresholds Through A Porous Mass, Tanvi Sanghvi

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis contends that the separation and distinction between the envelope and the mass in contemporary architecture is to be resisted. Architect and theorist, Greg Lynn, argues that mass “is not only the outward shape of a building; it’s also the projection of shape, plan organization, spatial and sectional type, and façade”1.This critical reevaluation of the mass, and its relationship to the interior spaces and the building’s face, is particularly pertinent to the modern construction in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India. The character of the historicist and postmodern buildings that make up Jaipur is made solely based on the applied façade. This …

Releasing The Unconsciousness | Visualizing The City, Taihui Li

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis explores how subway stations lost their identity as strategic node of connectivity which constructed the prevailing image of New York City. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Sigmund Freud famously compared the human mind to the city of Rome. He argues that both contain strata of memory and history which have accumulated over the years through a messy and ad-hoc process. Like Rome, New York City also has a layered history, albeit not as deep.

This thesis contends that the subway entrance serves as an experiential entre into the unconscious experience of the unknown elements of the past. …