Architecture Commons^™

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 …