Architecture Commons^™

(Re)Creating The Worldgame: An Architectural Exploration Of Risk, Lynsie Cantwell

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The ultimate goal of the project is to create a "game stadium" where all the risk factors and building methods can be tested one by one or all at once on real buildings and building components. A stadium of this nature will allow the United Nations to test its structures on a country by country basis in order to aid the nations most at threat before a risk becomes realized, while still keeping the facility itself safe from harm. In this way, the project will live up to Fuller's own approach of being comprehensive, anticipatory, a design strategy, and a …

Architecture Power: Towards A New Transparency Of Energy Infrastructure, Shaun Leon Selberg

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Over the last 150 years our landscapes have been defined by the production and transportation of energy. A complex network of railroads, canals, highways, tunnels, bridges, and viaducts are the result of energy consumption and the distancing of negative or unaccepted effects of energy to remote places. Deforestation and TV broadcasting reveals the scars of energy abuse and displays catastrophes and disasters in real time. Our ordered energy landscapes, defined by their separation and reliant on a level of invisibility, now appear to invade the ‘terrestrial skin’ and are signs of infection and waste. 1 Crippled by the necessity of …

Mind The Gap, Beryl T. Johnsen-Seeberger

Architecture Thesis Prep

"I intend to create these appreciative moments in the context of desired program in the Long Beach Area. Long Beach offers a unique opportunity of density of modes of transportation, and types of people by touching on a major highway, the Port of Long Beach, and an active riverfront. The highway in question, Interstate 710, is one of the most clogged roads in Los Angeles. A major commuter route, it starts at the proposed site. The Port of Long Beach also has a rail yard and loading docks, as well as the start of its major freight train corridor on …

Keeping The Lights

Syracuse University Magazine

No abstract provided.

Su's Who - Baltimore Nesting Place, Mary Ellen Mengucci

Syracuse University Magazine

No abstract provided.

Sustainable Ephemeral: Temporary Spaces With Lasting Impact, Jacqueline Armada

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

From the Far East to the Western world, architecture has historically strived toward permanence and monumentality. Recent “sustainable” design practice is likewise concerned with preservation, seeking to maintain quality of life for future generations by conserving both built and natural environments. However, in an age of rapid technological advancement, designed objects and buildings are quickly rendered obsolete, and in effect, our culture has become disposable. Buildings are designed to be replaced or updated according to technological progress, and that which is no longer useful or relevant is simply discarded. An ephemeral architecture has the ability to mediate between aspired permanence …

Technocarpet Supporting A Culture Of Congestion, William Andrew Weigand

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

No Abstract

Corporeal Meeting Place: The Racialization Of The Suburban Demographic, Brandon Lee Maldonado

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The Modernist movement was able, through the industrial revolution, to eliminate the role of façade 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 separates 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” façade, a series of layered spaces serving as filtration; sidewalks, fences, plantings, yards, and …

Modus Vivendi: Ecological Intervention In The Future Korean Dmz, Sunchung Christine Min

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The demilitarized zone between North Korea and South Korea has been absent of any human development for 53 years. When the reunification between two divided nations occurs in the future, the land that stands as a buffer zone will become of interest to many as a potential open site for the beginnings of a new urban city, industrial complex, consumerism, and massive infrastructure. In other words, the DMZ is most likely to be consumed by its neighboring urban cities to meet the immediate needs of urban development and growth. However, it would be a shame if the last untouched landscape …

Fast/Fresh Food: Feed Syracuse Communities, Dorothy Ann Buttz

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Industrial agricultural practice coupled with urban planning and infrastructural development over the past century has placed an unfair environmental burden on low income urban communities across the United States of America. As Majora Carter explains in her 2006 TED talk titled “Greening the Ghetto,” race and class correlate directly with the availability of parks, space and quality of public programming, as well as proximity to undesirable things such as highways, dumps, power plants, distribution centers etc. Furthermore, the development of said highways, distribution centers and the like has precipitated the exodus of economic opportunity including healthy food programming from the …

What Do You Call A Place Where Books Are Kept?, Taryn Elizabeth Mcgann

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The public library as a single grand building, gated by massive columns and filled with rows of dusty tomes, is a severely outdated conception. The model of library as a permanent, stable landmark in the city has been debased with the advent of digital technology and a new model is forming that embraces the ephemeralness of modern media. However, the image of a building filled with books still holds power over architects and bibliophiles and continues to wield influence over the design of new libraries. Consequently, the modern library is caught between trying to provide adequate technological and educational resources …

01 / Stack: Framework For Social Stuff, Stephen Wesley Nowak

Architecture Senior Theses

"This project calls for the tactical realignment of the library as no longer being exclusively dedicated to its collection, but rather the environment it provides as a catalyst for study, research, and exploration."

After The Queer Enclave: Masking Vernacular, And The Architecture Of Sexual Minority, Peter Randolph

Architecture Senior Theses

"Queer architecture doesn't exist. That is, there is no such thing as a designated space for sexual minorities and sexually transgressive acts. Queer space is based in opportunistic insertions into dominant frameworks. It does not exist in permanent, formalized space but appears and disappears, subject to relationships of the context. This prompts the question: what is the agency of Architecture in constructing the space of others? How can architecture allow a queer inhabitation of liminal zones, creating private publics and interior exteriors?

"I contend that the discipline of architecture can articulate transient or provisional queer enclaves. If the research is …

Occupying Spatial Dimensions In Media, Lina Bondarenko

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that in a context in which the protester is warded the minor title of Time Magazine's Person of the Year, multi-agent production of news media outnumbers the institutionalized, and unemployment among educated youth soars, architecture must be capable of fusing the shared appetites between a freshly ambitious urban demographic."

Architectural Healing Environments, Brian Schaller

Architecture Senior Theses

"It is the contention of this thesis that a study of the phenomenological approach to how one experiences space and by incorporating evidence-based design criteria that are acknowledged for improving wellbeing, quality of life, and reducing distress in people, a healing environment will emerge. The experienced environment will facilitate a temporal awareness of one's self and the design criteria's attention to the experienced setting will allow for a healing environment to emerge within the architecture. I am not proposing that architecture can heal, but rather the architecture can stimulate a healing environment."

When Commerce Met Culture, Waeeny Dessources

Architecture Senior Theses

"This thesis contends that an armature project can revitalize the city's existing wall condition and potentialize the present typology of the site by allowing [things] to occur. In doing this; the site disappears and acts as a catalyst: an architectural adhesive; stitching everything in [place]."

Landscape Of Culture: Permanence And Change, Stefanie Huchzermeier

Architecture Senior Theses

"As conditions change and culture shifts to adapt, it is my contention that architecture has the capacity to provide an understanding of identity in times of change by regenerating the previously existing level of engagement between people and their natural environment through means of a reestablished spatial network and a materialization of informal social and spatial relationships."

It Takes A Village: The Decentralized School, James Ben Harrison

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that architecture should act as a threshold that mediates between education and community in order to create a "decentralized educational facility" that revolves around the concept of educational space, that Jhn Dewet describes as a communal environment which fosters interaction. The resulting programmatic overlap will create something that is more than a school, by incorporating existing community accessible activities that work with the school. This intervention will create an opportunity to enhance the performance of the school and redefine the educational situation as [school as community] rather than [school or community]."

The Architecture Of The Profane, Dylan Forester

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that it is vital to understand this shift in the role of secularization in order to anticipate what the implications of such changes will be for an ever-growing secular-minded society in the future. Furthermore, it is my contention that this movement must be realized through a new nondenominational architecture - a spatial manifestation that provides a universal setting for both contemplative and spiritual action; a sanctuary that provokes the tension between singularity and multiplicity."

Reframing The Caribbean Picturesque, Bianca Tulloch

Architecture Senior Theses

"Current resort architecture in Jamaica fails to engage the local community and regional culture; depending largely on historically established perception of the landscape to attract tourists for economic development. I contend that architecture has the ability to enrich a cultural perception of island culture through cross-programming activities that cater to both types of island inhabitants. Redefining traditional spatial relationships between programs, landscape, society, culture, and nature can foster new interactions between island natives and tourists, resulting in a touristic consciousness, moulding the tourist into a visitor. An architecture that responds to sire through strategies of both eco and heritage tourism …

Illegal Linkage: Transition Of Beijing Informal Economy, Wanjing Xiao

Architecture Senior Theses

"This project contends that the transitional urban fringes are places where the informal economy grows in the most spontaneous and efficient form. By investigating the transitional urban fringe, one can study its informal urban behavior at local and long-term effects, enabling the social awareness and political force to manifest in an informal linkage leading illegal economy towards legalization, while encouraging a new form of 'formal'"...

"This thesis proposes a statistic informality that is able to resist the clearance from urbanization. The new paradigm will be extracted form existing informality models acting as a field condition to bridge the formality and …

Intensity Without Density, Nicole Blasetti

Architecture Senior Theses

"Within the field of residual space, a reactive public infrastructure is the setting for intense public intervention."

When It Comes To Design, People Matter: A Search For Defensible Space And Its Application To Public Housing, Jamie Goldstein

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that unsuccessful public housing projects have failed because the projects did not identify with the urban morphology and cultural context of the cities they were built in. They were only identified by attempting to house a maximum density of people and their basic needs of living at the minimum budget...

The goal of the project will be to design a housing type that applies the qualities of defensible space from the urban fabric, as well as considering the design decisions that caused other precedents of housing types to fail. This analysis will culminate with a home considered more …

Traversing The Urban Landscape: Connecting The Pedestrian Grid, Carly Augustine

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that the advent of the super highway, reliance on the automobile and large scale infrastructure has further disconnected the shrinking city of Baltimore, Maryland by creating borders, barriers and vacancies within the pedestrian grid directly affecting the vitality of cultural street life, cohesion of communities and future densification."

Architecture News: The Newsletter Of The Syracuse School Of Architecture, N.12 Spring 2012, Mark Robbins

Newsletters from School of Architecture - ArchitectureNews

Architecture News: The Newsletter of the Syracuse University School of Architecture No. 12, Spring 2012.

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."