Architecture Commons^™

Sustainable Portland: Implementation Series 2, New England Environmental Finance Center

Climate Change

The Portland Municipal Climate Change Working Group prepared a report in March 2008 that outlined several recommendations as a commitment by the City to address greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) produced during daily municipal operations. The Municipal Climate Action Plan was written in partnership with Clean Air – Cool Planet and Portland officials, and acknowledges under Recommendation #2 that an employee energy efficiency program would provide significant positive impact on the City’s reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Best practices from three cities show that focus on the greening of City Hall is critical in developing a program that promotes partnerships, community …

Allston Artist Village, Meaghan Earner

Architecture Theses and Projects

Architecture should evoke community. The built environment should encourage engagement between people in both public and private realms. We will teach, learn, sell, and celebrate art. This artist village explores the idea of the individual and their relationship to the whole. The project delineates individual and community spaces through their separations and connections. The goal is a more diverse engagement of all members of the community.

Sustainable Portland: Implementation Series 1, New England Environmental Finance Center

Climate Change

When the Sustainable Portland Task Force Report was released in November 2007, under the leadership of Mayor Jim Cohen, Portland Councilor Kevin Donoghue had the idea that students at the Muskie School of Public Service might be able to help implement recommendations from the report. It may have helped that Kevin was himself a graduate of the Community Planning and Development Master’s program at the Muskie School, but it was a good idea nevertheless. He approached Professor Sam Merrill in the CPD program, who spoke with the new Mayor Ed Suslovic about a possible partnership between the City and the …

Outerdisciplinary, Tessa Franzese

Architecture Thesis Prep

"By taking cues from quilt theory and from emergent social science theories, I will formulate a methodology for working that opens a feedback loop, exposing the discipline to outsiders and outsiders to architecture."

Reconnecting Schools And Neighborhoods: A Proposal For School Centered Community Revitalization In Baltimore Maryland, Cody Miller

Architecture Theses and Projects

This project explores the concept of school-centered community as a key aspect in assisting urban renewal through architecture. It employs this concept through the architectural design of a middle school in Baltimore, Maryland that has a focus on music. The existing context of an urban site in the Oldtown area is analyzed to generate a solution to the area’s educational problems as well as to provide an urban renewal plan. In order to develop a project that has great potential to succeed, the projects site was specifically chosen based on its context.

Foreign Body Politics: Inflammation Of Micro Cities In The Urban Environment, Ariana Douso

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis focuses on the intense rigidity of government affordable housing and the homogenization of those designs that condemns them to become foreign bodies in the more flexible surrounding urban environment. Mike Davis categorizes these foreign bodies as modern-day slums. Project housing bracketed in the slum category associates it with the condemning qualities of its predecessors. Such developments are dangerous and unhealthy; they become massive sores on the city. How can this be remedied without offering project developments up to the same fate that their predecessors in the 1930's suffered (slum clearance)? "

Selected Lid Projects In New England, New England Environmental Finance Center

Planning

Examples of low impact development (LID) projects in each state in New England.

Village Methodology For Grandfamily Housing, Meghan O'Reilly

Architecture Senior Theses

"The study, analysis, and use of a village as a model for housing, specifically grandfamilies housing, allows the opportunities to see the bridge between community spaces in a village, a community spaces in housing. Villages operating as a community through the creation of spaces [such as: town squares, meeting halls, churches, stores, schools, and places of worship] can be used as an architectural model for how in the housing typology of grand families, the same spaces [such as: gathering halls, gardens, communal kitchens, counseling centers, after school care, and spiritual spaces] can allow the community to operate as an analogous …

Mansfield Ct: Planning A New Village Center, Maggie Jones, Richard Barringer

Planning

The case follows the development of a plan for a new village center in Storrs, the central village of Mansfield, Connecticut. A process that was transparent and inclusive of the community members yielded a plan that gained the approval of the Town, the landowner (the University of Connecticut), and the citizenry. The process relied on the mending of fences, the leadership of key participants, and an innovative strategy that included development of a nonprofit corporation and creative use of grant money. While zoning changes are still in the works, the first stage of building goes forward.

Rebuild New Orleans, Sean Karns

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The development of a city depends on its ability to rebuild. In many cases planners have been unaware of future threats to their city that may occur. Often times in order to rebuild one must rethink and replan in order to fully utilize while learning and taking away valuable lessons from the past. In the case of a natural disaster, such lessons usually stem from precautions that could have been made to proactively resolve the situation."

Promoting Low Impact Development In Your Community, New England Environmental Finance Center

Planning

Low Impact Development (LID) is an approach to stormwater management and site development that is gaining popularity throughout the country. Its attractiveness lies in its potential to lessen off-site stormwater impacts, reduce costs to municipalities and developers, and promote development that is “softer on the land” compared with typical traditional development. The approach, which is applicable to residential, commercial and industrial projects, and in urban, suburban and rural settings, often is linked with efforts by governments and citizens to foster more sustainable communities.

The Interface Of Two Extremes: Preserving The Local, Connecting To Global - The Question Of Architecture In A Third World Environment, Ella Scheuer

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Striving for global equality, uniformity and at times, excessive luxury has led to ignorance and neglect of regional character and authenticity.

"Understanding this, I found the need to create an architecture that embraces local heritage as well as global progress. This duality will be expressed through the language of the architecture by studying both equatorial African building techniques and contemporary building technologies of the West.... By maintaining a focus on both local and global constituents, a world awareness can be fostered without losing sight of the sense of community."

Incubator Architecture: Jazz Center, Harlem, Tyler Hinckley

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This proposal I will outline the framework for all of the local centers, and more specifically I will address the crucial juxtaposition of the base and a local center by designing the two together in Harlem...

By creating an adaptive yet integral facility the local jazz center will not only be able to flourish and grow in its own incubation period, but will also become a contributing factor to the incubation of new jazz developments in the future of the community."

Analysis Of Per Capita Expenditures Of Suburbanizing Communities In Maine, New England Environmental Finance Center

Economics and Finance

This study analyzes per capita expenditure trends among selected fast-growing Maine towns from 1970-2004. The ten communities studied are termed as “suburbanizing” towns. This term is used to describe towns that over the past 30-40 years have been in the process of transition from rural to suburban – in terms of their population and housing densities, their forms of government, and the services they provide, as well as other characteristics.1 Such towns are of particular interest because they have been absorbing a healthy percentage of the state’s population growth during this time period, often at the expense of Maine’s service …

Community United Methodist Church: United Methodist Regional Ministry Campus Master Plan, Saori Endo

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The United Methodist Church has sought for the place that members can worship, learn, social and recreate. The purchase of 24 acres of land in South Weber, Utah made its opening to the place, and they are looking for their identity that they can be proud of ultimately. The intention of this project is generating ideas to help them to find out what they are looking for, yet guide the ideas properly.

Creating Identity Within A Residential Community Using Open Space, Jason W. Harr

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Popularity of suburban developments is not new to most communities of today. Many have come to the understanding that suburbia is the only way to go, and the only place to live and raise a family. What suburbanites don't understand and choose to avoid are the demanding requirements suburbia requires of our natural resources and open space.

In recent years, many have come to the understanding that our natural resources and open space are very valuable and must be preserved now and in the future. People have also noticed that implementation of basic design principles of residential communities are advantageous …

Experiencing An Education: Principle And Form, Matthew T. Ahlberg

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The question being investigated deals with the issue of how architecture can become the primary teaching mechanism in an educational environment and what the built forms that evolve form this approach to teaching and its relation to the built environment will take on when considered in relation to existing artistic and architectural models later on in the design process"

Masscap And The Caa Role In Advocating For Change, Joseph Diamond

New England Journal of Public Policy

Cites the efforts of the Massachusetts Association for Community Action Inc. and community action agencies (CCA) to alleviate poverty in the state. Programs offered by CCAs that aim to improve the quality of life of low income people; Efforts of the organization to call for changes in federal and state policies directed to the poor; Details of several initiatives assisted by the organization; Support for the adoption of the Massachusetts Self-Sufficiency Standard.

Community Action In Massachusetts, Jim Canavan

New England Journal of Public Policy

Evaluates the contribution of community action agencies (CCA) in alleviating poverty in Massachusetts from its creation during the term of former U.S. President Lyndon Johnson until 2004. Description of the programs to the poor offered by CCAs; Operation of CCAs across the state; Affordable housing offered by the CCAs.

Rebuilding Community: Boston's North End, Maria A. Fazio

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The city is enhanced by architecture form which participates in the urban fabric as a means of connection, therefore promoting the formation of community... The intent is to propose developemnt for portions of the Central Artery Master Plan in Boston, Massachusetts. The city is currently in the process of relocating a major infrastructural element from its present location above grade to a tunnel beneath the city. Demolition of the exiting central artery offers the city an opportunity to infill much of the land and restore surface level streets reconnecting the east sire of the interstate to the downtown area...

The …

Architecture As A Social Art: A School Of Visual Art In Washington, D.C., Rachel A. Roellke

Architecture Thesis Prep

"It is the contention of this thesis that architecture is a vehicle for communication that strengthens community identity by bringing art and the public together.

The thesis research explores the social role of visual art within community, including its social effects, its relationship to the surrounding physical and social context, and the formal elements of visual language. Architecture, as a form of public art, can be explored under the same parameters."

Vorhizomeid: Nodes Of Community Services Connecting Albany, Ny, Andrew Watkins

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The contention is to reposition terrain vague into the urban fabric recreating a continuum of the urban system while attempting to detract neither from the scale of the infrastructural system, nor that of the human body. Terrain vague muse be approached in a different manner than that of the traditional urban city. Establishing community through terrain vague should be done by measure of the forces, flows, and rhythms of space."

Creating Community Greenbelts Through Tdr Zoning, Tim B. Watkins

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Many cities and towns in the lntennountain West were founded on the ideals of clustered community development with surrounding greenbelts by Morn1on settlers in the mid nineteenth century. Since the twentieth-century development of the automobile, increased mobility has enabled residential and commercial development to disrupt surrounding rural lands with scattered growth. Correctly applied, TOR (Transfer of Development Right) strategies could reverse negative sprawling development trends by channeling growth towards existing communities to simulate the abandoned pioneer town and country model. A community development transfer strategy can respect private property rights, and allow fanners to keep their land in agriculture while …

Bastard Brand Civility, Mclain Clutter

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This investigation springs from a simultaneous interest in two parallel trends int he contemporary city:

1. The loss of the primacy of architectural and urban form in lieu of economic, market driven understandings of the city...

2. The related necessity of the city to adapt to this move towards the economic, and subsequently market itself as a commodity attractive to the consumer...

My contention, instead, is that we must embrace market forces and sell the city as a spectacle.

Analyzing The Sustainability Of Puppets To Create A Puppet Theater, Emily Buttrick

Architecture Thesis Prep

'The revitalization of an urban community can begin with a public building and can incorporate sustainable design. Sustainable architecture is not only ecologically sound but programmatically flexible and utilizes the resources of the neighborhood. Sustainable design can therefore incorporate ideas of future use of a building. It can also be used in a way to inspire the people using the building so that their own lives become subsistent.

"This thesis contends that through the analysis of the sustainability of puppets, the construction of a community theater building can be fashioned. A puppet's flexibility, layers, scale, structure, and joints make it …

Community Design Center 1998-2000, Syracuse University

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

This short publication documents a community development project within Syracuse that involved the School of Architecture students from 1998 - 2000

Roosevelt Island: Completing An Urban Community, Karin M. Kilgore

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The thesis became an architectural exploration of what makes neighborhoods and community at two scales: at the scale of the city (macrocosm), represented by the urban plan; and at the scale of the individual (microcosm), represented by the concept of house and housing. At these two contrasting scales, the main focus of the study was:

To explore how an urban design can shape community; To explore the role housing plays in the making of urban fabric/neighborhood."

Benefits Of Community: Housing For People Living With Aids, Paul R. Coffman

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The notion of a beneficial community is the primary concern in the creation of a program to provide housing and health care for people with AIDS (PWA). The program will provide long term housing for PWA as well as hospice care during the time of their dying.

Given the fact that the disease strikes without prejudice at all levels of society, not discriminating upon race, age or gender and that the victims tend to be concentrated within dense urban condition, the program will be located in a mixed socio-economic, residential, urban neighborhood: Boston's South End."

A Waterfront Reclamation, Allen Rossignol

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Due to industry changes, once prosperous maritime towns have been abandoned. The cities have been left as they were and have not adopted new functions or uses for their valuable asset, the water's edge. Although the city's maritime history and culture attract people, the public has turned its back on the waterfront resulting in non-urban, non-public spaces such as parking, run don properties and abandoned storage sheds. This disjunction between the city and the waterfront needs to be addressed."

"A city's waterfront can be reclaimed through the Archtiecture of Recreation in which the facilities and space are designed to heal …

Pennsylvania Folklife Vol. 45, No. 1, Joan Saverino, Joseph Bentivegna, Nicholas V. De Leo, Catherine Cerrone, Janet Theophano

Pennsylvania Folklife Magazine

• "Domani Ci Zappa": Italian Immigration and Ethnicity in Pennsylvania
• A Study of the San Cataldesi Who Emigrated to Dunmore, Pennsylvania
• A Look at the Early Years of Philadelphia's "Little Italy"
• "An Aura of Toughness, Too": Italian Immigration to Pittsburgh and Vicinity
• Expressions of Love, Acts of Labor: Women's Work in an Italian American Community