Architecture Commons^™

American Home: Shelter Optimized For Climate, Karen Kentile

Architecture Senior Theses

"Architecture attuned to building form and energy production and consumption can, in turn, suggest an alternate landscape for the country...

This book addresses architecture's role in the energy crisis, recognizing that residential buildings account for 53.7% of the built environment and their gridded energy produces over 21% of the United States' carbon emissions. This thesis begins to implement a process for design which can essentially optimize shelter based on climate, and further develop a local context for dwelling."

New York : Mount Morris

Kansas: Saline River Valley, Smokey Hills

Arizona: Salt River

Florida: Moonshine Bay

Building The Soundscape In The Age Of Visual Distraction - Audio/Visual Supplement, Jack Solomon

Architecture Senior Theses

"This project demonstrates how implicating the soundscape within the visual primacy of design can produce a richer architecture for facilitating awareness, discourse, and learning."

Audio/Visual supplement to the thesis presentation and book.

Sens(E)Ible Education: A Sensory Approach To An Inclusive Kindergarten, Mary Delaurentis

Architecture Senior Theses

"Architecture that is designed with the intended occupants full sensorial needs in mind ultimately enhances the occupants' experience. Architecture that engages all our senses will create spaces that transcend the purely visual. This higher order of perception will make occupants more self aware, conscious of their embodied experience of the world around them, and create informative experiences."

Corporeal Meeting Place, Brandon Maldonado

Architecture Senior Theses

"The modernist movement was able, through the industrial revolution, to eliminate the role of facade 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 separate 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" facade, a series of layered spaces serving as filtration' sidewalks, fences, plantings, yards, and …

Informal, Scott Reynolds

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that architecture can offer agency in new forms of urban relationships to engage the edge condition between formal and informal, critical to the success of today's in-situ slum up gradation and integration to the formal city. Dismantling the spatial segregation will socially, economically, and politically integrate the two cities for sustainable growth of the metropolis."

Orphan: Residential Educational Cultural Center For Orphaned Youth, Valerie Rachel Herrera

Architecture Senior Theses

"This thesis contends that by re-conceptalizing the spatial, programmatic, and sociopolitical forces that for the basis of the orphanage typology, an architectural framework can be constructed that can instigate and facilitate new conditions of programmatic overlap between the 'urban cultural' and the 'private/secure residential'; fundamentally altering the outdated assumptions of the orphanage type in favor of a contemporary response embeds the orphanage in the city and the city in the orphanage."

Building The Soundscape In The Age Of Visual Distraction, Jack Solomon

Architecture Senior Theses

"This project demonstrates how implicating the soundscape within the visual primacy of design can produce a richer architecture for facilitating awareness, discourse, and learning."

A Sacred And Secular Landscape: Empowering Social Agency, Shreya Shah

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that landscape can provoke an idea for a productive, public space using the people of the city as social agents to create a sensitive rather than oppressive water remediation system. By inventing a program that uses landscape as a water remediation space as well as landscape as a religious and social space, the project will exhibit the idea that social agents can inform a change in the water pollution crisis."

Technocarpet: Supporting A Culture Of Congestion, William Andrew Weigand

Architecture Senior Theses

"The TechnoCarpet is a public space sited in a future of resource scarcity, climate disruption, and urbanization. It provides support facilities and cultural amenities necessary to sustain super dense urban populations. I establishes an internal frontier for the city as a means to provoke density, by creating an escape from it. The TechnoCarpet is a model for parks in the 21st century."

Aerotopia, Mark Shahlamian

Architecture Senior Theses

"Architecture can critically embrace systems of surveillance, security, and sorting to construct a new collective model for an increasingly kinetic population.

As Airports gain more autonomy from their served cities, they also gain more power, catalyzing growth by expanding services, connections, and employing thousands of people. Through a political re-alignmet, untied from a contextual servant-served relationship, the airport typology will begin to take on qualities of a new type of society, constantly in flux. This new frame work for living will in turn test new ideas about security and surveillance as it applies to global mobilities."

Stationed For Disaster, Lindsay T. Woodson

Architecture Thesis Prep

A hybrid architectural model for combatting the social injustice of natural disasters in urban coastal cities: civic infrastructure in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The Exchange: A Celebratory Space For Commodity Exchange Via The Hyper-Mall, Jaime Magaliff

Architecture Senior Theses

"The consumer object reigns supreme in American Society. Shopping and consumption have become the trademark of identity. The social act of exchange makes value. The social phenomenon of the mall has cultivated a Mecca for commodity exchange."

Inner City Junction: Public High School As A Multifaceted/Flex Structure, Daniel Chang

Architecture Senior Theses

"By understanding these factors and implication of the urban public educational institution, does architecture have a role in reversing the public education crisis? Can school design foster educational techniques that counteract learning deficiencies? Looking at the negative symbiotic relationship between the post-industrial inner city school and its surrounding community, can the design of a school reverse the cycle towards a more positive relationship?"

The Continuing Exodus: The Synagogue And Jewish Urban Migration, Samuel D. Gruber

Religion - All Scholarship

Catalog essay in Silent Witnesses: Migration Stories Through Synagogues Transformed, Rebuilt or Abandoned (Farmington Hills, MI, 2012) that deals with Jewish settlement and migration in American cities (especially New York, Boston and Cleveland) and the religious and community buildings erected and left behind in the process.

Review: Dairy Queens: The Politics Of Pastoral Architecture From Catherine De' Medici To Marie-Antoinette By Meredith Martin, Jean-François Bédard

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

Bédard gives a review of Meredith Martin's Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de' Medici to Marie-Antoinette (Harvard University Press, 2011). This book traces the history of the pleasure dairy, a feature of the pastoral movement in Europe from a feminist perspective. Martin study draws on the literature dealing with the role of the visual arts in the construction of female subjectivity in Modern France to make the case of the importance of pleasure dairies as sights of empowerment from French Noblewomen. Bédard states that Dairy Queens is a strong contribution to discussions of how architecture and …

Architecture News: The Newsletter Of The Syracuse School Of Architecture, N.11 Fall 2011, Mark Robbins

Newsletters from School of Architecture - ArchitectureNews

Architecture News: The Newsletter of the Syracuse University School of Architecture No. 11, Fall 2011.

Review: Jules Hardouin-Mansart; Jules Hardouin-Mansart, 1646–1708; Bâtir Pour Le Roi: Jules Hardouin-Mansart (1646–1708), Jean-François Bédard

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

In this review, Jean-François Bédard examines two book projects that look at Jules Hardouin-Mansart, who became First Architect to the King in 1681 and Superintendent of Works in 1699. His tenure was marked by a great flurry of activity and the generation of an immense quantity of documents. However, Hardouin-Mansart's professional and social success had a negative impact on the critical reception of his work. In fact many architectural historians doubted that he was behind many of the projects. The projects attempt to reevaluate Hardouin-Mansart's legacy as a designer. Bertrand Jestaz's two volume Jules Hardouin-Mansart is a greatly expanded and …

Border City, Gabriel Thomas Jewell-Vitale

Architecture Senior Theses

Thesis submitted by Gabriel Thomas Jewell-Vitale for completion of the B.Arch degree. Border city does not acknowledge border as a line, but as a territory. Border city opportunistically looks toward the merging of cultures and the exchange of people and flows. Border city is both port, souk, caravanserai, city and border crossing. Border city is a framework for a borderless city.

Social Infusion: The Theatre Of Spatial Diplomacy, Daley Wilson

Architecture Senior Theses

Due to the present global condition, urban environments that do not conform to

late-capitalistic desires, have faced the threat of gentrification. Through methods of

spatial diplomacy such as Brechtian programmatic pairings, this thesis will allow the

existing Kunsthaus Tacheles, which faces a crisis of squatter/artist culture versus

private commercial, to coexist in tension with new capital-producing programs

forming a social and spatial dialectic.

Casa Como Yo, Gabriela Montilla

Architecture Senior Theses

"The key to addressing Puerto Rico’s increased life expectancy is to provide housing that improves people’s quality of life while growing older. I contend that the role of architecture is to encourage people to embrace aging through a re-conceptualization of senior housing: designed as “not so senior” (which stigmatizes the older individual as being less capable) and more focused on life satisfaction- promoting free will, flexibility, and program integration. Housing for the aging population should accommodate spatial needs over time in a self-directed personal environment, as well as provide interest and connection to the larger urban community."

Mangrove Housing: Ecosystem As A Housing Typology For Culebra, Pr, Jose Manuel Marti

Architecture Senior Theses

"This thesis will address ways in which design can provide safe shelter for the local residents of Culebra. It promotes an architecture that provides safe shelter during hurricanes, which creates an awareness of the danger and effects this natural force has."

Interactive Environments: Redefining Sense Of Place In The ‘Noosphere’, Kathleen Callaghan

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The rapid growth of the internet and the far-reaching ubiquity of our virtual networks within the last decade have spurred an entirely new generation of interactive devices and technologies; these include the technologies seen in cell phones, video games, televisions and computers. Furthermore, online social networks such as Facebook and our portable Internet devices, mainly the iPhone, have begun to redefine our sense of time and place in a world of global connectivity and instant-access. This phenomenon results in a constant flow of communication and information that blankets the globe and marks a cultural paradigm shift to a much more …

Crisis Expo, Stephen Patrick Klimek

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The contention of this thesis is that architecture can create a venue for new forms or forums of civic and political engagement in a post industrial urban environment. Executing democratic processes of discussion, debate, and dissent is more important than the resolution to a given crisis. Yet in a world of impending crises architecture has yet to envision a truly contemporary form of assembly for the resolution of these issues by the Phantom Public. There is a politics of space because space is political⁴. Politics needs space. It exploits space as a resource, a site of debate, a …

Infrastructured: Opportunistic Infrastructure, Urban Revitalization, And Socioeconomic Reconciliation At Boundaries In Downtown Syracuse, Ny., Nilus Klingel

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The contention of this thesis is that large-scale infrastructures, such as highway systems, energy networks, or water supply complexes – as well as more abstract infrastructures, such as the infrastructures of capitalism or mercantilism – have, as the ‘harbingers’ of Modernity, an indelible impact upon the lives of the human beings who exist under their influence. Eradicating the traditional way of life that preceded them, these structures provide only one point of reference: the unknown future, in which the human struggles to find an identity.

Recent recuperations of infrastructures illustrate how the transformation of former agents of alienation can build …

A Didactic Architecture For Rural Early Education, Vasiliy Lakoba

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

CONTENTION It is possible to create a physical environment which will serve as a didactic tool for both pupils and educators. The tectonic language will be didactic on three levels: that of explicatively detailed timber framing, that of participatory and reconfigurable play modules, and that of demonstrative sustainable resource management. It will merge playground and classroom space, both modulated within a timber frame and allowing reconfiguration of physically and intellectually educational partitions. DESIGN PROBLEM The kindergarten is to be sited in Saranac Lake, NY, at the Jackrabbit Trailhead, near Moody Pond. The building will merge playground and classroom programs for …

Graduate Sessions 6: Televisuality, Jon Yoder, James L. Hepokoski, James Utterback

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

The Televisuality symposium was organized by Jon Yoder and the students of Architectural Theory + Design Research, a core component to the graduate curriculum in the School of Architecture.

A Didactic Architecture: Rural Early Education, Vasiliy Lakoba

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

A thesis on rural early education. An architectural intervention in a winter climate.

Liquid Infrastructure: Transnational Spaces Of Water, Timothy Gale

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

As a response to the geopolitical issues of water importation into London UK, a new political entity emerges: theThink Tank. Through coupling political architecture and water infrastructure, the Think Tank legitimizes itself as a dominant institution for water governance. The project reveals the existing spatial subversion of Think Tanks and physical subversion of Pumping Stations to alter existing political structures by allowing the public to access the territorial.

It does not attempt to solve conflict or tensions, it instead seeks to utilize the architectural methods of coupling new programs and functions in the city to create a political and public …

The Company: Carnival Urbanism For Shrinking Cities, Brandon Peterson

Architecture Master Theses

THE COMPANY is a framework of urban intervention that seeks to stabilize shrinking neighborhoods through a large number of small-scale, temporary occupations of vacated buildings. Its process of quickly phasing in architecture and program over time, through testing and experimentation, is preferable to the slow, top-down planning of large-scale, more permanent initiatives. Its identity is that of spectacle and pleasure. Its architects are designers, developers, planners, sponsors, eventholders and actors.

The historic neighborhood of Brush Park in Detroit, Michigan is the first testing ground for THE COMPANY’s interventions. Its forty-four abandoned buildings will be adapted from post-industrial leftovers into catalytic …

Re: Integrated Identity: The Spatially Defined Ground Place In Social Housing, Katie Lynn Carroll

Architecture Master Theses

"In this thesis project I propose that a re-integrated identity for social housing projects can evolve through a spatially defined and sequenced ground plane that is activated through a program response to current demographics within an existing community. This definition and re-organization of the ground plane occurs from an analysis of the surrounding community fabric and the existing community identity and demographics."