Architecture Commons^™

Alternative Americanisms, Ella Michelle Arne

Architecture Senior Theses

This project investigates the circular influence of architecture, meaning and place across the built American landscape of Route 66. It focuses on the route as an uniquely American invention, reflection, and now obsolete piece of cultural infrastructure.

Architecture Of Narrative, Yinem Day

Architecture Senior Theses

A historic building should be adapted to the existing context and its character should be encouraged to evolve and transform. The addition and intervention to existing building is an inventive and creative process which provides great opportunities to transform an obsolete building into a propelling agent through particular ways, although at the same time restricted by numerous limitations. Architecture should become a tool of highlighting the relationship between the old and new and a bridge that connects the past, present, and future, becoming a point in the timeline of a place and culture. Also, visual storytelling displays a history of …

15th Ward North, Baxter Hankin

Architecture Senior Theses

THIS THESIS ARGUES IN FAVOR OF WALKABILITY AT THE SCALE OF THE CITY, NEIGHBORHOOD, BLOCK, STREET, SPACE, BUILDING, AND DETAIL. WALKABILITY IS A CONDITION THAT ALLOWS FOR INTERESTING AND USEFUL WALKS ON A DAILY BASIS. THIS IS CREATED FROM A MIX OF STRATEGIC, PLANNED CIVIC CONDITIONS, AND AN URBAN FABRIC OF UNPLANNED, FINE-GRAINED, BOTTOM-UP DEVELOPMENTS. THE WALKABLE CITY IS NECESSARY IN TERMS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE, SUSTAINABILITY, AND CONNECTIVITY. THE INTERESTING ASPECT OF THE WALK IS DETERMINED BY PARALLAX AND THE PICTURESQUE. PARALLAX IS THE “DISPLACEMENT OF THE APPARENT POSITION OF A BODY DUE TO A CHANGE OF POSITION OF THE …

Folie A Cinq: Performative Systems Exhibited Through Theatrical Means., Madison Cannella

Architecture Senior Theses

Performative Systems Exhibited through Theatrical Means

Bunker Reclamation, Demosthenes Sfakianakis

Architecture Senior Theses

-an analysis and documentation of the extremes of the communist regime of Albania

-a political exploration into the dictatorship of the proletariat in which the working class holds power in a post-Hoxha environment

-a design implementation in which the bunkers are reclaimed from the charged symbolism of oppression and become agents towards a collective catharsis and healing

Manifested Tectonic 'In Search Of Theatricality', Ching Huen Leung

Architecture Senior Theses

A column at a scale of a chair, a door half-opened in front of that column. Dancing, spectating, running, etc. Can an open-ending narrative be generated through the interaction between these disembodied objects and subjects? Treating building elements as set pieces, improvisations are generated by both signified objects and participants. The show is currently on play in different locations: You can find it in a field of landscape; in a chaotic street of Tokyo, or even at the back alley near your neighborhood…Don’t hesitate to create your own plot when you encounter them! My thesis mainly focuses on the implementation …

Spatializing Erasure: Forging A New Commemorative Typology, Sarah Quinn, Isabel Munoz

Architecture Senior Theses

Spatializing Erasure is an investigation into and a critique of current traditional memorialization techniques and the erasure of counter-historical narratives from the urban fabric. We are seeking to use architecture as a lens to critique our current socio-political climate by employing techniques of memorialization, sensationalism, and certain spatial tactics relating to memory onto the typologies of the courthouse and the archive, actively reinforcing memories of trauma, injustices, and activism onto a typology that has historically been negligent towards its contribution to systemic erasure and oppression of counter-history. This project aims to impose the collective memory of erased narratives onto the …

Hidden Realities, Nashwah Ahmed, Prerit Gupta

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis uses preexisting local phenomena in Dubai to construct a near-future scenario where political systems are exploited to demonstrate the politics of aesthetics and their ability to alter the context and its existing socio-economic infrastructure. By imposing unfamiliar forms and systems, familiar aesthetics are recast to redistribute the sensible and create a new reality out of underlying social, economic, and cultural power structures. As a result, form, composition, and aesthetics can begin to operate politically to uncover hidden realities and project alternative futures.

Re-Designing Gentrification, Elena Whittle

Architecture Senior Theses

In Paris sans le people, a book on the gentrification of Paris, Anne Clerval writes (in a French to English translation) that, “gentrification reflects the dynamics of class relationships in the urban space” (p. 10). This thesis explores this dynamic in the context of American cities and additionally points to race relations, and private-public interests’ relations as other important factors in the American urban sphere. This thesis is an exploration of how capital plays a critical role in the morphology of the built environment. One of the ways that this is most obviously observed is through the commonly occurring phenomena …

Occupy, Nitya Charugundla

Architecture Senior Theses

Union Square, originally called “Union Place,” was a former site for public forum, parades, public addresses and much more. However, the newest design of the park that can be seen today has attempted to make a space that is far less conducive to public forum and assembly than it once was. This thesis seeks to change that and allow for Union Square, as well as a news media center, to be a vehicle for public forum once again. The public space will be used as a vehicle for different types of forums, protests, and even public address in conjunction with …

Rethinking Home Waste, Elena Echarri Myers

Architecture Senior Theses

Ever since the emergence of capitalism, followed by trends of conspicuous consumption and the boom of plastics and preservative packaging, household waste production has become an issue of public concern in which the US has achieved to champion the podium. Ever since the 1800's world shift from a society focused on consumption for basic necessities to one directed mostly by consumption by leisure, individuals have lost their ability for consumer control, shopping mostly for pleasure and for items with unprecedented short lifespans whose final destination is the land­fill. The world's economic system change too, feeding off these impulsive consumer behaviors, …

Uncomfortably Numb, Camila Andino, Daniela Andino

Architecture Senior Theses

Modernist Architecture is characterized by its ambition to miraculously heal the “diseases”1 of society. Along with this desire to heal, “Design was formed as a way to deal with the increasingly dominant logic of the industrialized and globalized world while resisting the perceived dehumanizing impact of the world.”2 This pursuit of numbness has always been at the center of design. It reveals the complicity between design and capitalism. Following the shock of the war and the machine age, design sought to fight the negative climate of the world around them. No outcome is prescribed, but it is desired. With this …

Subterranean Intermission, Yiwen Dai

Architecture Senior Theses

Every space serves a purpose; therefore, all space should be valued and cherished, including what is typically perceived as the foul, dark, unstable, abandoned corners and dead ends. As designers we should take these places and make the most of them so they too can be enchanting. New York city like many other metropolitan areas are faced with shortage of available space. For example, underground development became unavoidable in order to build a reliable subway system that trans-ports and connects its daily commuters to the spatially growing city. Along with the new infrastructure, waiting areas and platforms that form strips …

An Agricultural Ruin, Patrick Smith

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis uses ruin to a radical alteration and preservation of obsolete industrial sites through the process of stripping back, in order to highlight and explore the history and potential of an industrial site’s temporal identity. Through alteration, the specific, utilitarian, and abandoned typology will be altered into a new, productive, and sustainable “difficult whole”.

Continuous Interior Space Architecture, Natasha Liston-Beck

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis speculates a changed relationship between bodies and information access, mediated by an omni-orientable, continuous spatial information-interface. The closed world of the spacecraft is a digiphysical reality where these two spatial experiences are utterly entangled such that a person’s movements and engagement with and within this space is defined by the two simultaneously. In preference of depth and specificity of the thesis, this work is not focused on the mechanics or engineering of a spacecraft. But instead it focuses on the spatial and experiential environment, augmented with information.

Alternative Shelters, Sukhmann Kaur Aneja

Architecture Senior Theses

In the spring of 2018, a small group of homeless people took shelter underneath the scaffolding at 1441 Broadway in Times Square after a massive rainstorm made its way through New York City. They hung their wet clothes on the steel bracing and slept on unfolded cardboard boxes. This makeshift encampment lasted for a few days before the police officially kicked everyone out.1 Two years before that, homeless New Yorkers set up a similar camp underneath the scaffolding in NoHo. Residents of NoHo blamed a surge of local construction for the implementation of sheds under which people could hide out.2 …

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 …