Architecture Commons^™

Spatializing Erasure: Counter-Histories On The Verge Of Disappearance, Isabel Munoz, Sarah Quinn

Architecture Thesis Prep

Our thesis ambitions are centered around the investigation of memory and architecture as it relates to the narratives of erasure in urban space. Over the course of the academic year, we are seeking to use architecture as a lens to critique our current socio-political climate regarding gender inequity and political regression. Our site of speculation and research will be the city of Chicago, as it has a rich history of feminism and civil rights with many historic spaces of protest that accommodated intersectional identities and historic protests. In today’s political climate, where Roe v. Wade is facing reversal in the …

Alternate Americanisms, Ella Arne

Architecture Thesis Prep

Architecture is actively crafting reality, culture, and identity. It is simultaneously constructed from and constructing meaning. Route 66 exists as an American invention, ruin, and manifestation of American Identity. The objects on the route sit innocently on the landscape, covering their complex histories and power networks that lead back to the dominant government administration.

Alternate Americanisms shows the agency of architectural objects in creating new realities, identities, and histories.

The game explores how every single decision changes the entire built landscape. It reflects and translates alternate histories to project alternate versions. It examines the relationship between meaning and architecture, identity …

An Authentic Reality, Genevieve Dominiak, Hannah Rachel Michaelson

Architecture Thesis Prep

We, as a society, have chosen to erase and neglect the problematic images and narratives of these wastelands from our, American, history. Therefore, the thesis aims to offer an authentic reality in which Human Ecology coexists with the previous erasures of Toxic Ecology. Currently, these wastelands are portrayed as foreign entities that American companies engage with, rarely do the cameras turn to our own backyard though. Rather than remediate these industrial sites and thus revive nature, the work looks to coexist with the consequences of our past and ongoing present through myth.

When challenged with the imagery of these damaged …

Intentionally Unsustainable Forms For Crisis Design: Planned Obsolescence, Daniel Hogan

Architecture Thesis Prep

The ShutDownDC protest that stopped traffic on Monday, September 23rd demonstrated a significant shift in the debate for climate justice. The movement targeted not only the culpable institutions but the physical infrastructures which both monumentalize and enable factors responsible for global climate change (in this case automobile infrastructure). This is a particularly relevant example of how built form not only reflects our cultural preferences for private transportation but also informs/enables the processes which are actively working against public good. In this example, road infrastructure is both a symbol and an active player in the game of continued environmental injustice.

This …

Waiting: Sidewalk Sheds And Urban Identity, Sukhmann Aneja

Architecture Thesis Prep

In New York City, a sidewalk shed is a structure that covers a sidewalk immediately adjacent to a site under construction in order to protect pedestrians from falling debris. There are currently about 9,000 sheds in the entire city, with a lifespan of about 300 days. In total, all of the sidewalk sheds take up about 1,000,000 feet of space.1 Their existence is unwanted but inevitable, and, over the last four decades, these sheds have become an integral part of the City’s identity. This thesis proposes an intervention that allows the shed to better engage with the general public, particularly …

Naturalizing The Neoliberal Subject, The Object: To Change The Soul, Hanneke Van Deursen

Architecture Thesis Prep

Neoliberalism exists in two forms: policy and ideology. On the policy side, a crusade of deregulation, privatization, and the competition was ushered in by Neoliberal politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. On the ideology side, Neoliberalism constructs for us a series of truth games. It tells us: our society is too complex for us to understand, and therefore it can not be ordered by humans. In contrast, the market is itself a mechanism of spontaneous order, and therefore is better suited to calculate, process, and order our society. Subsequently, it is humans who must adapt to the needs of …

Matter Dis//Assembled: Revealing The Economies And Ecologies Of Aluminum, Noah Anderson

Architecture Thesis Prep

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.

Imitation & Dissimulation, Weiqiao Lin

Architecture Thesis Prep

Imitation plays a fundamental role in cultural development, and it’s an instinct that human-being born with. Because of its fundamentality, forms of imitation are infiltrated in many fields, including the art and design industries. For example, philosophers have used the term, mimesis, to discuss the criticality of imitation in art and literature. Theories of imitation and mimesis have been addressed in an academical manner since ancient Greece, however; imitation is also something we encounter on a daily basis. In the field of user interface design, designers use the term, Skeuomorphism, to represent the type of design methods of making items …

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

Architecture Thesis Prep

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. Most have failed to recognize that voids are not useless and there is potential value in keeping them as voids.

What is the current conditions of these voids? How do we make use of it without erasing it? How can we revisit ideas of a city that embraces …

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

Architecture Thesis Prep

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 …

Multiplicitous Realities: Hybridizing The Virtual And The Physical, John Carino

Architecture Thesis Prep

User spatial experience is no longer solely determined by objective physical realities in today's architecture. A new set of tools allowing for seamless virtual overlay and a new architectural disciplinary and industry interest in creating "virtual" environments are changing the way users understand and experience physical space. These tools include elements such as projection mapping, augmented reality, holograms, and digital display systems. These tools are able transform static physical spaces into dynamic spaces creating multiplicitous realities that transcend spatial physicality.

Researching nightclubs and discotheques as a precedent has revealed the many scales, programs, and possibilities of virtual materials to transform …

Growing Syracuse: The Architect's Role In Improving Syracuse, Ny's Food Environment, Stephanie Wagner

Architecture Thesis Prep

Urbanism requires community, and community requires a platform of public space. Underutilized spaces within the urban fabric can be activated by small scale architectural interventions to create formal spaces for community gathering, interaction, and commerce. The positioning and connectivity of these interventions can lead to the creation of new urban corridors that encourage growth within and between underdeveloped parts of the city.

It is the role of the architect to develop an architecture that is contextually relevant to a community, while addressing larger-scale urban issues, in order to create an accessible and beneficial built environment and lifestyle for users. The …

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

Architecture Thesis Prep

Waste Collectors: Urban Rangers proposes that looking at Medellin through the scope of an informal waste collector allows for the visualization of the relationship between the user and distribution of repurposed values in the city. The analysis focuses on the existing infrastructure and legislation that frames this practice; it provides a critique of current working elements that could be designed to function as a network to assert a new spatial agency with user specificity. This thesis uses the scope of the waste collector, an urban phenomenon, to reexamine the city of Medellin and its legislative practices regarding this issue. Addressing …

Drone Mapping The 140: A Narrative Of Architecture In The Conflict Zone, Rasan Taher

Architecture Thesis Prep

Since the Kurdish regional government in Iraq was established in 1991, the border between the federal government and the KRG has shifted and is in constant dispute. In 2003, under the new Iraqi constitution, article 140 identifies the mechanism to settle the disputed areas through the restoration of all demographic changes and by referendum to decide land claims, to be held no later than 2007. Since then, many attempts to change the demographics and the cultural characteristic of the disputed area have been attempted by both governments in order to secure their political and economic interest in the area. The …

2047 City, Mike Liu, Raul Sadhwani

Architecture Thesis Prep

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, …

Mirage: Architecture's Confounding Experiences, Nuofan Xu, Ziyao Zhang

Architecture Thesis Prep

The thesis explores the experiences created from mixing architecture 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 start point of the design process, the project seeks to explore digital displays’ ability to blur physical boundaries, to apply temporality on eternal structures and isolate the exterior from the interior.

The project uses mirage, an optical phenomenon which produces illusory images of distant objects, as an analogy to speculate digital displays in architecture. On one hand, mirage shows an ordinary …

Public Space With Character: A Late, Late Entry To The Chicago Central Public Library Competition, Kokeith Perry Ii

Architecture Thesis Prep

The city of Chicago has a complex relationship with the aesthetics of civic monuments and infrastructures. The cities most canonical projects validate its apparent biases - an oscillation between iconic modern and postmodern figures proliferate the urban fabric. The dynamic between these two paradigms creates a complex relationship between architecture, urban space, and the public mirroring the cities longstanding and complex history of segregated urban space and peoples. This project draws precedent from the format of the 1980 Stanley Tigerman exhibition Late entries to the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition, a then-radical competition set to reinvigorate the discipline the way the …

Crude Urbanism, Ahnaf Chowdhury, Anuradha Desai

Architecture Thesis Prep

Mumbai’s formal and informal components operate in interdependence. Matter from the formal is absorbed by the informal, where it is hacked, recycled and repurposed. The output, now lucrative, is spat back into the formal. For example, the city’s trash is collected, sorted and prepared by the informal as a commodity that is sold back into the formal. This cycle creates crucial nodes, where the formal relies heavily on the informal for its flexible and resilient systems.

Though these systems may be independent and engrained in Mumbai’s economy, the worker’s relation to the system’s matter reveals needs that the informal sector …

Embracing The American Atlantis: Designing For A Post-Disaster New Orleans, Mikayla Beckwith, Katherine Truluck

Architecture Thesis Prep

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 Translations: Narratives On Bizarre Preservation, Alexandra Allen, Scott Michael Krabath

Architecture Thesis Prep

In today’s globalized society, we’re confronted with a flood of images and data at a speed that strains our ability to fully process the information. This messy network often gives way to misreading’s and poor interpretations. In the architectural discipline, a suspension of critical disbelief is necessary to accommodate the lack of fidelity, clarity or resolution that exists in many of the documents we encounter.

We contend that there’s a productive tension between the object and its mediated representation and that the translations that occur between the two are embedded within the way that architects communicate with one another.

Robin …

Relink Tangible And Intangible, Weibin Lao, Xiaobai Zhao

Architecture Thesis Prep

Syracuse, as part of the Upstate New York used to be an essential economic center of the United States. This not only was resulting from its once influential salt industry and its easily accessed canal infrastructure, but also was heavily influenced by the industrial innovation. Without trained engineers, the people in Syracuse designed machines for excavating the earth and building the Erie Canal. And with easy transportation, goods and industrial products created and produced from Syracuse were shipped and transported. This brought prosper and wealth to the Syracuse. With new transportation technology development including the railways for trains and highways …

Volcano: Tools + Projections, Sang Ha Jung, Young Joon Yun

Architecture Thesis Prep

The core of this project is the idea of humankind as a geological force. By imagining the active ground in relation to the creation of new ground and environment, this thesis seeks to reclaim the formal language of the geological through volcanism. As we create a series of spaces within this new ground, using lava as our natural tool for architecture, the goal is to create architecture and landscape that reconciles the geological and the biological, merging the natural and the artificial. Architecture can be formed naturally, like a stone built over time, through sedimentation and erosion. This idea of …

The Synchronous City, Patricia Olivera

Architecture Thesis Prep

Architects’ conceptualizations of cities reference and reflect trends in their societies at their time of conception. During the early 1900's architects speculated on modernist visions of cities, during the mid-late 1900's radical visions of cities emerged, and now, this project will operate among the framework of previous visions of cities by architects and envision a city based on digital information and communications technologies. We are living a Digital Revolution and exist in the age of Information. This thesis will explore the ways in which a city will be conceptualized if it was based on digital information and communication technologies (ICTs) …

Architecture On Parade: Rejuvenating Venice Biennale, Fan Fang

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis is interested in speculating on new ways to exhibit architecture. As it is a culturally relevant event, the thesis will borrow strategies in other forms of popular cultural production to determine how to rejuvenate architecture exhibition. Parade and traveling circus are cultural rituals that have unique formats that give actual shape to culture. They present in a live and lively manner, and they travel among places to enlarge a wider audience.This thesis project seeks to learn from these cultural rituals such as the parade and the traveling circus to improve and expand current formats of exhibition and celebration …

Into Instrument: A Case For The Musical Tectonic, Alex Lievens

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis will observe and investigate the relationship between musical objects and architectonic construction. It will begin to test relationships between musical notational systems and architectural notational systems. Musical instruments can provide key insights into how architecture might possess the same qualities of interactivity, action and personal value that musical instruments inherently own.

The Ottoman Han: Recovery Of A Lost Typology, Asli Germirli

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis will focus on the architectural interventions for the 17th century structure of Buyuk Valide Han. The project will be shaped through the multiple lenses of Critical Regionalism, urban planning, conservation and sustainability. The aim is to add value to the Hans District and to revive the commercial and cultural identity through the preservation of the older structures and the introduction of modern architecture.

(Urban) Waste Producing (Urban) Space, Mrunmai Fulambarkar

Architecture Thesis Prep

Although heat is the primary waste produced by industrial processes, designers can transform this by-product into energy that can allow for the creation of new public amenity and data center hybrids that integrate, celebrate and provide benefits to the urban realm.

Shrine Analysis, Anastasia Benko

Architecture Thesis Prep

Shrines are used throughout different cultures to mark graves, sites of importance, and or events that may have occurred, and any number of things that may holds significance to an individual or a group of people. The interest in studying these constructs, however, comes from the shared aesthetic qualities that are utilized in many different families of shrines to create a sense of spirituality, or more specifically, to create a heightened awareness of an individual’s understanding of him/her self. Architecture can learn from the vernacular of shrines in order to understand the inherent spirituality of a structure. This vernacular is …

Cuba: Architecture And The Social Order, Jessica Obregon

Architecture Thesis Prep

As the Cuban society emerged and developed, the combined forces of slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism had a great impact on its architecture. When architecture ceases to be an “effect” to become a “cause”, architecture becomes a tool to affect social change.

An Architecture Of Dimensions: 2d, 3d, 4d, Etc., Tiffany Montanez

Architecture Thesis Prep

A funhouse, a building equipped with trick mirrors, shifting floors, and other devices designed to scare or amuse people as they walk through is the program of choice. Funhouses are designed for the perception of the user. They provide an amusing architecture, as well as an architecture driven by position, form, and most importantly, experience.