Architecture Commons^™

Casting Contradictive Landscapes: The Objects Of An Obsolescent* Future, Sarah Catherine Beaudoin

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis pays homage to the longevity of the ordinary yet iconic elements of the German Ruhr Valley, aiming to bring its functionally obsolescent architectural characters to the forefront of design analysis. The investigation catalogs, dissects, and speculates a series of conditions that arise from the mixed array of economic, geographic, and cultural pressures of the contemporary Ruhr Valley. Rather than merely describing and critiquing the found industrial objects, a series of paradigms visualize a fictitious world in which a family of could-be-architectures can take stage. They act as prototypes for unspecified places while still exploring the consequences of their …

The Treachery Of Architectural Matter, Weiqiao Lin

Architecture Senior Theses

Besides giving objects a physical form, material qualities contribute to and codify the way we understand architecture. From the pictorial aesthetics of the picturesque and the sublime expressed in Henry Hobson Richardson’s rusticated stone, to the purity of whiteness declared by Le Corbusier in “The Law of Ripolin”, to the brutalist roughness expressed in Alison & Peter Smithson’s raw concrete surfaces; materiality is delivered through imitation or dissimulation in the semantic field of architecture. Beginning in the late 18th century, Carlo Lodoli’s doctrine of truth in materials launched a rebellion against imitated materiality and decorated wallpaper. While this polemic sough …

Death Of A Posthuman, David Bullard, Carolina Hasbun Elias

Architecture Senior Theses

Some of the first marks humans left on the planet were the architectures of death and remembrance. From the pyramids of Ancient Egypt to the burial landscapes of the 20th century, today’s architecture of death manifests itself mainly as cemeteries and crematoriums. However, we contend the culture of death in the 21st century has evolved to demand an architecture that acknowledges changes in its culture and its impact on the natural and technological environment. Humans are no longer just human. Our recent evolution has presented two realities, to which the discipline of architecture needs to respond. First, the split presence …

Emoji Disorder, Doria Miller, Irving Shen

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis posits with the contemporary context of a rising digital and visual dialect, the emoji, the elastic architectural design language has the capability to be updated. The duck, based on form, and the decorated shed, based on signage, are no longer adequate to project meaning on architecture. The emoji is neither purely symbol nor sign and thus it becomes a fusion of the two: a duckerated shed. By referencing a familiar language rather than canonical architectural precedents, those outside of the discipline can better relate to the buildings they inhabit.

P.E.T.S.: Personal. Empathic. Topological. Series., Ian Mulich, Jose Sanchez

Architecture Senior Theses

Within the current conditions of our globalized society, market structures and logics have come to organize culture, economy, and politics in an increasingly interrelated manner. Contingent to this triangulation, architecture needs to be critical about its turn towards the market and the commercialization of its production. By performing as a brand that expands and evolves serially, architectural practice can maneuver commercial systems of exchange and act as a cultural agent that promotes deeper engagement with design. Corporeal forms that induce empathic relationships can serve as the architectural products necessary to fuel consumption practices that craft individualized disciplinary interaction. The empathic …

But Soft! Fabricating Adaptive Urbanism, Caroline Barrick, Arezo Hakemy, Sabrina Logroño

Architecture Senior Theses

We contend that a performative fabric that combines strategies of comfort and adaptation and deployed as large-scale soft architecture can challenge the approach to urban infrastructural issues currently only managed by hard architecture. We are investigating both soft and hard architecture through the human scale and experience, the urban scale, materiality, adaptability, and temporality. Soft architecture produces comfort and ergonomic design for both physical and mental benefit and affects the built environment through its tactile materiality, its ephemeral temporality, and its swift adaptability. Hard architecture resists environmental and human adaptation through its rigid materiality, its lasting temporality, and its reluctant …

Sunset.Zip: A New Proposal In Architectural Reconstruction, Ethan Russell-Benoit, Wilson Slagle

Architecture Senior Theses

More often than not, architecture is in the background, rather than in the foreground. Architecture is a stage set for life, and much of it we only get to look at from the outside. Non-architects do not remember buildings by their plans, sections, and details - instead, people remember buildings by their plans, sections, and details - instead people remember fragments, pieces, and generalized characters. Architecture is compressed in our memory in ways that often differ substantially from reality. The automobile further exacerbates this phenomenon. The automotive tourist experiences the landscape in fleeting glimpses, and buildings are reduced to their …

Sinoconn: Merchandising Of Architecture And Rearmament Of Labor, Furui Sun

Architecture Senior Theses

The project is situated in the context of contemporary China, where tremendous production power and a huge labor force have been accumulated through decades of rapid economic growth. In recent years, China's persistent growth has begun to slow, which challenges the administration with an imminent socio-economic crisis and the potential for a massive scale of surplus capital and its consequences. This conflict emerges out of the complementary "inner connection...between the developments of capitalism and urbanization" identified by British-born Marxist scholar David Harvey. Such a problem and its resolution can be seen in France in the mid-19th century right after an …

Material Density: A Radical Approach To Adaptive Reuse, Madeline Laberge

Architecture Senior Theses

Through disassembly and reconfiguration, this thesis proposes to create new relationships between existing materials and their typical forms, using a material-focused densification specific to the site. This radical approach to adaptive reuse contrasts the current over-designed and over-theorized architectural projects, aiming to use a pragmatic approach in how materials on historical sites can be reclaimed. Situated on a site with forgotten architecture, the building’s “ruins provide the incentive for restoration” where one can re-immerse themselves with the grand, sublime space. But sites like these are typically demolished for new construction due to costly rehabilitation, with new designs ignoring or not …

A School Design: For Homeless Children In Nyc, Tingjie Zhou

Architecture Senior Theses

By the end of 2017, more than fifteen thousand homeless families with over twenty-three thousand children lived in shelters in New York City (Coalition for the homeless, Facts About Homelessness). Receiving education in a school, a daily activity for school age children, can easily become an unachievable thing for homeless children. Though many programs and acts are carried out to help these children, their educational situation is still severe.

Noticing the circumstance that homeless children are facing, I’m interested in the role that architecture can play in responding to homeless children’s educational concerns. When looking at the schools with high …

Blurring The Divide: Architecture That Encourages Socially Inclusive Urban Environments, Erin Benken

Architecture Senior Theses

Segregation in the United States has existed for many decades. As a result of social, economic, and political factors, community members of different races, ethnicities and social classes tend to congregate and live together in the segregated neighborhoods of America's cities. While social values now are more open to integration than they were a century ago, tradition, familiarity, and social ties keep this segregated distribution alive today. This thesis explores the topic of segregation in cities by asking, how do we create an architecture that breaks through social divides to create more socially inclusive urban environments?

Using Chicago as a …

Fantasy Park: Mode Of Reality, Sai Lyu

Architecture Senior Theses

In the book Privacy and Publicity, Beatriz Colomina (1994) states that with the development of railways and photography, travel culture - as the beginning of mass media - has changed the relationship between people and urban space, making the place into non-place. Place then becomes a commodity to be consumed by the masses, breaking the relationship between people and urban space into fragments, replacing the linear relationship that existed in the Renaissance period.

Moreover, with the beginning of mass media, advertising architecture has had a significant influence on the urban fabric and on the relationship between people and the urban …

Re-Treeting Detroit: Return Of A Blighted City Back To Nature, Nivedita Keshri, Shreeya Shakya

Architecture Senior Theses

Detroit’s complicated history of corruption, racial tensions and economic decline have made conventional strategies for growth, repopulation and infill inadequate for dealing with ongoing and overwhelming urban vacancy. Dealing with voids within shrinking cities have been difficult because it lies outside the existing experience and vocabulary of urban planning, architecture and socioeconomics. Our thesis explores the potential of voids within a blighted city. We recognize the value in intentionally keeping voids as voids in a city and allowing the built environment to take a step back and allowing “nothing” to take its place.

What is the current conditions of these …

Activating Place: America’S Former Beer Capital, Elise Chelak

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis contends that the tool of mapping, as well as its various techniques and typologies, can uncover historical identities in the urban landscape, so as to generate rich, spatial narratives of place. Through alternative and contemporary methods of mapping, (e.g. drift, layering, game-board, thick-mapping, ghost-mapping, and counter-mapping), community stories are layered to reveal a complete and unaltered genius loci (spirit of place). Fragments of the urban fabric that were once erased, excluded, or edited, are now reframed for the work they do to contain and convey, and reinterpret to revitalize this neighborhood while drawing on its past. Acknowledging what …

Re*Presenting Dharavi: Activism And Agency Of Architecture In Informal Settlements, Ahnaf Chowdhury, Anuradha Desai

Architecture Senior Theses

Plastic recycling is a critical informal economy in Dharavi, one of Asia's largest slums in the heart of Mumbai. Waste from dumping grounds is collected, sorted and prepared by recyclers who transform trash into a commodity to be sold back into the city. As part of top-down efforts to redevelop Dharavi's valuable land, the Mumbai government has tarnished the industry's image, labeling it as "polluting," and has increased the cost of utilities such as electricity in an effort to drive it out of the community. As it becomes more expensive for recyclers to operate, the labor unions that organize the …

Your Second Home: Re-Thinking Of Post-Disaster Housing, Evelyn Brooks

Architecture Senior Theses

Natural disasters such as tornadoes, wildfires, earthquakes, and hurricanes destroy our infrastructure, civic buildings, public amenities, and homes. These disasters create problems of homelessness, but they also create environments within the city that are unlivable due to a lack of electricity and potable water. People displaced by disasters often find themselves living in a government- or non-profit-run evacuation shelter, at the mercy of bureaucratic organizations for assistance to begin the recovery process. People forced to evacuate neighborhoods where they have perhaps been established for decades often also lose their ability to commute to work (if their employer still exists) as …

Territorial Transgressions: The (New) New Jersey, Ryan Oeckinghaus

Architecture Senior Theses

Understanding the operation of a Territory as opposed to conceiving solely of urban and non-urban/rural areas illuminates the underlying flaws present in the built environment that are caused by this assumption. Infrastructure is a vital component of planning that is significantly downplayed and disjointed when looking at areas independently, and as such should be linked back into a proper understanding of the territory. This Thesis seeks to provide an example of a possible territorial reconfiguration in New Jersey that utilizes an updated conception of territory, creating a Holistic Proposal to remedy outdated planning and infrastructural practices stemming from the misconception …

Spatial Agency For Migrant Workers: Rethinking The Dynamics Of Urban Villages In China, Yan Liu

Architecture Senior Theses

“Throughout history, expanding cities have always run over villages, hamlets, estates, gardens, and soft elements that constitute the countryside, the domain that hosts agriculture and nature.” Urban Villages, essentially a composite of these “soft” elements, remained as one of the hardest anchors among the residual or by-product in China’s urban development. Until 1985, the Pearl River Delta region had been mainly dominated by farms and small rural villages. The onset of economic reform and the open-door policy brought an influx of foreign investment which fueled the unstoppable train of urbanization. Rapid urbanization let to the formation of Urban Villages, a …

Learning From Wes Anderson: On Artificial Memory And Detail, Abigail Campion

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis focuses on the reproduction of detail, through compression and misarticulation, an artificial memory of its reference. The project culminates on three films of Wes Anderson: The Royal Tenenbaums, Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel. These specific films were chosen due to their cult following within the Anderson canon. Wes Anderson articulates his cinematic universes very meticulously. He uses unique methods to capture certain emotions in his films. A huge part of Anderson’s film worlds is his attention to detail. All parts of his films are deeply invested in maintaining the illusion of the film world he has …

False Actually: Constructing The False-Hyper-Real In The Quotidian American Landscape, Rose Maalouf

Architecture Senior Theses

The thesis contends that imagery, deployed through the deliberate staging of an architectural scene, can misrepresent actuality for the creation of cinematic illusion.Through the consideration of matter as imagery, my project aims to design a set of fictive traces of life/occupations that mimic the limits of realism. It is about designing a hyper-real landscape through narrative.

The author chose the site of Erie Boulevard in Syracuse as a place to catalog over time through a series of photographs. My observations over the course of 6 months gave me an image catalog to extract from and a set of actions that …

2047 City: Hong Kong’S Identity In A Space Of Disappearance, Mike Liu, Raul Sadhwani

Architecture Senior Theses

Hong Kong has always been colonial; its existence is shaped from the confluence of East and West. After 158 years of British rule, Hong Kong's handover to the Chinese Government, catalyzed by the expiration of its 99-year lease of the New Territories, began in 1997 whereby the city operates under a "one-country-two-systems" policy. These events have created a culture and identity of disappearance as the people of Hong Kong have scrambled to define their identity due to the imminence of its disappearance, as discussed by Ackbar Abbas. This is exemplified in the Umbrella Revolution in 2014 when citizens, mainly students, …

Amazon Vertical City: The Fulfillment Center Of The Future, Jessica Casero Lopez

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis looks for at the projection of Amazon's patent drawings for vertical fulfillment centers and speculates on their design to evolve into a significant typology in the present day.

Amazon is the world's largest online retailer. In June of 2017, Amazon released one of their most compelling patents, a multi-level fulfillment center with a beehive structure for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. The release of the drawings made international news. These could change the way distribution centers are perceived and designed. In 2017, Amazon had 300 million users worldwide. Rapid growth has enabled Amazon to expand to different continents and forced …

Getting There: The Return Of A Public Infrastructure, Yun Qing Hu, Sizhe Wang

Architecture Senior Theses

The Greek agora was a crossroad, a civic center, a marketplace. The colonnade stoa lining the Agora of Athens was, as John Camp has written, "a true public building, designed for no specific magistrate, group or function..anyone could pass the time of day there. It was, therefore, a popular meeting place..." An agora was a social space, a place to meet or a stop while en route to other destinations. Such public space naturally formed at the intersection of social, political and commercial activities and promoted a diversity of constituents.

Public space is where society is shaped and where the …

The Denuded Image: A Critique Of The After-Image, Danya Li

Architecture Senior Theses

The Denuded Image aims to create a conversation between a photograph and its viewer by adding back the third dimension. It is not a proposal of how architects should design space, but a model for observation and study of how to create new ways of seeing. The dioramas at 1:8, 1:4, and 1:2 scales expose the reality of the forced perspective and the denuded photograph's distorted characters. As scale increases, the observer is invited to engage with the in-visible parts of the image that differ in materiality. The final spectacle includes all models and their respective images, to expose the …

Encyclappedia: Confronting Sidewalklabs Digital Physical Community, Katharina Elisa Körber

Architecture Senior Theses

Google's Sidewalk Labs claims that its plans for Quayside in Toronto will result in the "most measurable community build from the Internet up" [Dan Doctoroff, CEO Sidewalk Labs]. How can we understand the realities and implications of an urbanism that so radically challenges the current physical and mental relationship between humans and architecture, and architecture and digital devices? This thesis examines the roles of architects when a city and its architecture are planned as a community of digital devices. It explores ways to disrupt and conceptualize Sidewalk Labs' strategy of a community where humans and non-human devices "live" among systems …

Finding A New Center: A Study Of Neo-Industrial America, Juliet Domine, Virginia Paulk

Architecture Senior Theses

As a result of globalization, manufacturing in America moved overseas. The coasts, with greater access to international markets, have flourished, creating a distinct divide between the middle and the edge. Moving from the post-industrial era into the current age of the neo-industrial, revitalization of the middle can occur by introducing an industry utilizing previous skill sets. Therefore, the center of the United States can be made relevant again through the programmatic revitalization of post-industrial sites.

In the post-industrial era, St. Louis has suffered from economic decline, unemployment spikes, and population decreases. Revitalizing forgotten industrial spaces with a new mode of …

Urban Rangers: The Scope Of Medellin Through Informal Waste Collection, Christina M. Rubino

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis critiques the city of Medellin through the scope of an informal waste collector. This research defines a waste collector as a person who resides within informal settlements and relies on disposed belongs of others as exchange for income. Their act of informal waste collection often occurs in residential communities. The subjects, informal waste collectors, are traced in their everyday routes and urban experiences; their actions, means, and methods are then quantified in order to determine an algorithm for an optimized collection technique and performance. This critique reveals the obstacles that waste collectors face in transportation and storage to …

An Intelligent Smart City, Erik Sanchez

Architecture Senior Theses

How intelligent is the typical smart-city design approach? In an era when artificial intelligence and big data promise to improve urban life in unprecedented ways, are smart cities being imagined and designed in ways that are actually inspiring and truly innovative? This project examines the proposals and approaches of Sidewalk Labs’ designs for Quayside, located in Toronto Canada, and asks how intelligent, really, is the city the propose. Sidewalk Labs (the city-building subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company), in partnership with Waterfront Toronto (a government-appointed nonprofit development corporation), claims to be reimagining cities from the internet up.” But is their …

A Material Affair: The Intimacy Between Materials And Affective Space, Rex Hughes, John Mikesh

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis argues that an architecture embracing innate material qualities, deployed for choreographed sensory experiences, will open a more intimate dialogue between humans and their environment. This thesis is rooted in the idea that the most powerful experiences are those that stimulate all the senses at once. This is illustrated by architect Lisa Heschong, who explains that fire fascinates humans because it glows, crackles, smells of smoke, and gives off heat. This intimate sensory experience provides an archetype for the way users may be seduced into engaging affective environments through haptic materials.

In an investigation of material qualities (density, hardness, …

The Disputed Territories: An Alternate History, Rasan Taher

Architecture Senior Theses

Architecture and the built environment are the mediums onto which political and physical events and forces are registered. This thesis explores the potential of Drones (UAVs) as a tool to launch a spatial investigation into disputed territories of the built environment. The objective of this specific work is to produce and represent spatiotemporal analysis and architectural evidence of the unlawful systematic destruction of Arab neighborhoods and villages in the disputed territories—here in relation to the continuous power shifts in the disputed internal boundaries between the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and Iraqi Federal Government in Iraq. The increasing availability and advancements …