Architecture Commons^™

The Architecture Of Resistance: Pivoting The Informal Economy, Michael Langone

Architecture Senior Theses

"In the struggle for growth, the architecture of informal commerce is complicit in the perpetuation of an impermanent and uncertain existence that favors acquiescence over resistance. More is required of it.

An architectural intervention can provide pivot points upon which to direct the flow of unregulated commerce and subvert state-sponsored efforts to peripheralize it."

On The Tracks: Design Strategies For Urban Shrinkage, Holli L. Janoski

Architecture Senior Theses

"Architecture has the capacity to assist the post-industrial city and support smart decline through the design of a low maintenance recreational network that adapts vacant space and excess infrastructure for public use. This network is composed of a series of interventions that capitalize on existing landscape conditions and material availability while promoting inter-connectivity, cross-connectivity, and activity."

Conspicuous Space: Parking Lot Suburbanism, Ian Nicholson

Architecture Senior Theses

"Locating neighborhoods of housing in currently underutilized surface parking lots which serve successful commercial shopping centers and big box stores can synergistically improve the American suburb by allowing opportunities to maintain the suburban idea (rugged individualism, privacy, and mobility) while mitigating its problems (automobiles dependence, distance, and isolation)."

Bridge_Works, Chris Driscoll

Architecture Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

This Will Kill That: Building Agility / Maneuvering The Inevitable Trasition Between The Present Day Library Of Paper Book And Digital Library Of The Future, Daniel Elmore

Architecture Senior Theses

"When fixed (inflexible) spaces are constructed based on variables, these spaces become outdated and eventually cease to be relevant... in architecture, when the variables that comprise a building change, the building itself needs to be flexible enough to adjust to said change. By creating non-static spaces, we can insure that our buildings are 'in the game' for the longest time possible."

Conditions Of A Simulated Society:Reorienting The Real Estate Of The 1 Times Square Tower, Bryan J. Bellissimo

Architecture Senior Theses

"The proposed intervention is to redesign and redevelop the currently vacant 1 Times Square tower with the program of a visual and performing arts school. The highly internalizes characteristics of this program will offer opportunities for the lively local culture of the area to exist not only on the interior, but also on the exterior of the building."

Cultural Layering, Paloma Rodriguez-Torres

Architecture Senior Theses

Architecture, history, and identity in Mexico City

"Even though different pieces of architecture that range from the Ancient to the Contemporary era can be found sharing the same physical space, they have not yet created any source of interaction, causing a lack of understanding in the region. These pieces are the key players to what one sees or identifies as the identity of the pace and by it not having an common thread that linkg them together, it creates a false sense of identity."

Undermining Impasse: The Role Of Architecture In The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Laura Ondrich

Architecture Senior Theses

"The building strategies in the West Bank, culminating in the construction of the separation barrier, are politically aimed at temporary separation, but their built reality is resulting in a continuing and unbalanced coexistence. This investigation seeks to understand the social implications and hostile perceptions arising from these patterns of government-imposed political architecture with the ambition of responding though critical intervention."

Metamorphose, Elijah Yoon

Architecture Senior Theses

"This thesis will test how Metamorphose Architecture can intensify a multi-program space as it changes over time. Metamorphose Architecture will transform as it responds to the purpose, inhabitation, and structure of changing programs to allow maximum efficiency. This transformation will in turn create changes in the appearance and character of the space."

Be All You Can Be! Then Two Steps To The Left And Scopic Operations In Military Theatre, Alex Coulombe

Architecture Senior Theses

"The criteria for which I would ask to be evealuated include three essential categories, all relating back to how well i have modified Fort Jay to be a theater within its context. First, I would like to be judged by how well I exploit the latent theatrical opportunities of the site, both on urban and local scales. Second, I would like it to be considered how well the design would function as a performance venue, especially when compared to a conventional design. Finally, I would like my critiquers to judge the theater from a purely experiential standpoint."

Architecture Cover To Cover [Entry To Exit], Ryan Kowalczyk

Architecture Senior Theses

"By making an architecture that offers successive ideas to complete a coherent whole, the true art of architecture can be re-realized."

Campus [Re]Connected: Research, Housing, And Recreation Campus In The Pristine Northern Woods Of Wisconsin, David A. Franknecht Jr.

Architecture Senior Theses

"People are becoming more and more removed from the natural world through the development of modern technologies and lifestyles... Reconnecting people with the natural environment will enable a realization of our reliance on the natural environment and its success in the future. Campus design and landscape architecture can come together to interpret the way we interact with the environment and further this connection in a positive way."

Performative Design: Investigating Form In The Natural And Capitalist Environment, John M. Santoro

Architecture Senior Theses

"Rethinking the design process from conception and allowing natural forces, such as wind, solar exposure, and rainfall to drive the initial design will generate a structurally and environmentally efficient form."

Didactic Architecture: A Tectonic Response, Elizabeth Kankainen

Architecture Senior Theses

"Using the tectonic nature of architecture as the vehicle, architecture can educate its users of material life cycles., Through revealing particular stages of production by exposing, exaggerating and juxtaposing the connections between materials, the physical process of a buildings formation can be understood, along with architecture's inherent connection to nature."

[Dis] Lodge: A Transformation Of The Contemporary Ski Lodge In Response To Site And Function, Jacob Schneck

Architecture Senior Theses

"Through an understanding of the complex functions found in the contemporary ski lodge and their relationship to site, architecture can effectively integrate the multiplicity of functions found in the ski lodge with site, while introducing a contemporary formal language that analogically references the advanced technology of ski equipment."

The Nutalism, Brendan Gabriel Rose

Architecture Senior Theses

"It is the continued contention of this thesis that through material investigations that attempt to dissolve the perceived boundary between the acts of art, design, and construction, an architecture student can offer a significantly robust demonstration of their competency as an architect in training. Furthermore, such an investigation, carried out through full-scale design implementations on urban sites, offers much greater potential for demonstrating competency in the skills of collaboration, tectonics, site engagement, and economics than a traditional thesis consisting of testing through drawings, models, and words."

Cinematheque Hitchcock: The Theatrics Of Congestion, Cassandra E. Biehl

Architecture Senior Theses

"Cinematheque Hitchcock will despense with predisposed architectural and societal tendencies toward the segregation of the public and private realms inherent in Rear Window Ethics.

Through a cinematographic montage of action/reaction and juxtaposition of the:

public/private

Villagers/NYU and

land/sky dwellers,

Architecture will create and continually generate permutations of visual and sensorial urban stories in Washington Square Village, producing the Theatrics of Congestion."

Urban Stitch: Reinventing Housing In The Globalized Urban Realm For Chinese Migrant Workers, Jennifer Hoi Ling Ha

Architecture Senior Theses

"This thesis contends that architecture can reclaim individual and community expression within the globalized urban realm through the integration of unique programs in a live/work community environment."

[Re]Formulating The Informal, Sebastien Coles

Architecture Senior Theses

The identity associate with the inhabitants of the "Bidonvilles" of Haiti is arguably nonexistent aside from its connection to the impoverished conditions of the Haitian slum/shantytown. This thesis contends that with the insertion of a reformative intervention in the heart of the community promoting a conducive and educational environment while overlaying a currently absent infrastructure, will help in creating a positive inner growth within the informal typology. More specifically architecture will act as a form of "pride of place," enticing interaction through the direction connection to culture.

Didactic Architecture Of The Caribbean Resort, Erwin Riefkohl

Architecture Senior Theses

I believe that architecture is a communicative artifact that has the capacity to carry meaning. Architecture has the capacity to reconnect us to nature and sympathetic to local Culture. The reconnection is made by the phenomenological experiences that an architectural artifact has the potential to provide. This architecture should be seen as a didactic tool that fosters a hyperawareness of the occurrences in the natural environment. This artifact also reflects to local culture through the engagement of the theory of critical regionalism. As a sum of these two ideas the artifact will be designed with intent to foster meditation on …

Bridge_Works, Chris Driscoll

Architecture Senior Theses

Building typologies are generally well defined and functionally specific. A church is for worship, a house is for living, and a theater is for performing. In certain instances, these basic building typologies have been combined to form composite structures such as mixed-use housing/retail projects, or a house on a boat. The opportunities created by composite typologies have allowed for broader economic development, more complex and integrated programming, greater utility and richer social structures. A specific combination of typologies--the mix of infrastructural bridge with housing/retail/public space--has produced a few historically successful models[...] Over time, the bridge was developed from a simple …

Prototyping Community, Daniel Di Dio

Architecture Senior Theses

'This thesis focuses on implementing this system for the Chad refugee camp of Iridimi located along the border of the conflict stricken Darfur region of Sudan. Its climate and soil content are idea for rammed earth construction and its population is in need of better solutions to the increasing struggle for adequate shelter."

Flip_Space, Wendy Wade

Architecture Senior Theses

"The flip book, a device for viewing moving images, has unique characteristics that can be analyzed and translated into the built environment. In order to understand what is truly unique about FLIP_pace, the flip book moving image needs to be analyzed in contrast to the cinematic moving image to see where one form of media ends and the other beings. Based on the analysis of the flip book, the most conductive architectural space is the elevator. The speed of the elevator, the proximity of the image, the potential for human interaction, and the ability to control views are the primary …

Replacing The Plaza, Timothy Jeremiah Nolan

Architecture Senior Theses

"The modernist plaza is a site of multiplicity. Through intense and informed scanning, alternative orders latent within these constructions are revealed. This project uses these latent orders to propose a series of alternate realities that find productive potential in the failures of modernist architecture to fully manage factors such as construction, weathering, and occupation."

Interactive Architecture: Creating Opportunities For Our Future, Gregory Levy

Architecture Senior Theses

"It is the contention of this thesis that developing more interactive relationships will create new opportunities for a building to respond and adapt to the rapid pace of change. Through means of flexibility and efficiency, his expanded dynamic process can generate direct engagement between a building and the users and the natural environment that interact with it."

Snafu - Spectacle Of Celebrity Injustice, Matthew Robert Finn

Architecture Senior Theses

"In this issue of SNAFU we take you through the conception and construction of one of the most scandalous architectural creations ever built. Situated in Hollywood, the project understands Hollywood as a place that has blurred the lines between its cinematic fiction, and its physical existence. This discrepancy continuously challenges our perceptions of reality and imaginary, familiar and not, and right and wrong. The project offers a means for audiences to produce behaviors that reveal and confront moral positions."

No Child Left Inside: Environmental Education Through A Reciprocal Relationship Between Architecture And The Natural World, Leah Kleinman

Architecture Senior Theses

"Through a reciprocal relationship between architecture and the natural world, this thesis contends that environmental education programs can teach children to appreciate and preserve our natural environment. Architecture becomes an instructional tool itself and a way of experiencing the natural world while sustaining it and providing a healthy and comfortable setting in which to learn and have fun."

Sun City Blues: The Contemporary Urban Realization Of Sun City, Usa, Patrick Lundberg

Architecture Senior Theses

"While providing a marketable, popular, and economically successful municipal entity, Sun Cities and Active Adult Communities manifest problems. Through their strict planning, restrictive ordering, and operative rules, these communities produce issues of: population segregation, formal homogeneity, discouraged density, and programmatic disconnect."

The District: Sight/Sire Lines // The War Of Tourisms: Back To The Panopticon, Charles Michael Frederick Proffit

Architecture Senior Theses

"Because of the shortcoming of visual and non-visual technologies, it is necessary to return to the Panopticon in order to engage any conversation of vision and control. It is the contention of this thesis that the sinister interpretations of the architectural community fall short of the authors intentions and that it is possible to consider vision as being used simultaneously by different agencies. This simultaneous vision can create visual encounters that lead to unforeseen hybridizations, turning Granada into a laboratory of hybrid cultures, tourist and citizen, nomadic and sedentary."

{Perm] House: Performance Of Recycled Materials, Cristina Alonso

Architecture Senior Theses

"The construction of single-family housing units will prodive an opportunity to design using recycled materials. This thesis seeks to evaluate the effectiveness of the unit's performance in a tropical climate, through means of passive cooling; in particular the promotion of comfort ventilation during the daytime."