Architecture Commons^™

Loosening The Ties That Bind: Grangegorman Masterplan, Noel Brady

Articles

Interview with James Mary O'Connor, Architect and Masterplanner with Moore Rubel Yudell designers of the Masterplan for DIT at Grangegroman, Dublin

Fort Point Channel: Maglev Transit Hub And South Station Expansion Master Plan, Steven Seminelli

Architecture Theses and Projects

This project entails the design of a Magnetic Levitation (or ‘maglev’) transportation hub that interacts with the urban environment of Boston, becoming a modern terminal for this new form of travel as well as a threshold into the heart of the city. Included is the focus on the junction of many scales of transportation (i.e., maglev, train, metro, bus, pedestrian…) currently present at South Station, while stimulating a community with many levels of commercial development and social interventions.

Metropolis Necropolis: Building A Ritual Of Memorial For The Urban Homeless, Michael Marchand

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The intervention of architecture, through a cultural and contextual understanding, can create a relevant ritual for the memorial of the deceased that is meaningful to the communities it is intended to serve - the marginalized people of the streets of New York - while bringing the needs of the communities into the public light."

Urban Housing, Fabric, And Flows: New Connections In The Post-Industrial City, Colin Simmer

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The transition from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy in post-industrial American river cities has left extensive tracts of derelict land along urban waterfronts. After years of physical and psychological separation from the rivers, cities are renegotiating the boundaries of post-industrial landscapes and making efforts to reconnect to the riverfront. My thesis aims to generate a new model of urban housing and public spaces that will reconnect historic fabric to the water."

33.3% - Creative Entrepreneurship In Buffalo, Ny, Bruce Molino

Architecture Senior Theses

"This work has emerged out of an interest in the idea of the resilient city. It is an experiement intended to test ideas and suggest ways in which to reconsider architecture within a directed urbanism. Directional urbanism is a term that I use to describe how insertions can redirect or reinvent the trajectory of a city. This thesis privileges resiliency as the objective of that new trajectory; not as a moment of realization, but rather a continually changing adaptive process that allows cities to act, and react, in a constructive way."

Building Urban Texture, Fernando Pabon-Rico

Architecture Senior Theses

"This investigation is based on the contention that a city is made up of an urban construct where certain elements are continuous in their presence. This continuity provides legibility to an urban environment. The fact that elements or parts are an integral part of the legibility of the city fosters the reading of the city as a function of their integration. The role or place of architecture therefore lies on the formation of the city through its parts."

Suburban Adaptability: Urban Context, Joshua Seidner

Architecture Thesis Prep

Creating an Architecture that permits flexibility within a system of controls through the design of an urban mixed-use building in Hoboken, NJ

"The urban context historically fosters anonymity among urbanites denying individual expression, user flexibility, and family adaptability. The result is the draw to the suburban house model which inherently concedes one's expression of individual identity."

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 …

Urban Logic(S), Syracuse University School Of Architecture

Books

This book includes a wide range of essays and ideas concerning today's urban issues, and specifically that of Syracuse.

The Effect Of Cinematographic Architecture On Urban Space, Jose R. Fonacier

Architecture Thesis Prep

"These ideas of cinematic architecture gate when utilized in a hierarchical network of city gates within an urban space can begin to create more complex story lines to bring order to a complex variety of experiences. It also perceptually breaks down a large urban space that is perceived as homogeneous by creating sub-defined districts through a hierarchical network of regions."

Children's Perception Of Racial Urban Boundaries: A Case Study In Baton Rouge, Aspasia Xypolia

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis explores the urban landscape of Baton Rouge through the eyes of the children. It seeks to understand the affect that planning and design decisions have on the lives of the children and the way that children perceive their urban environment. By examining the way others have studied the urban space I develop my own approach of exploring cities and understanding the urban life. Originally, I conduct informal observations in the study area and I generate my questions relating to the spatiality of the children. Secondly, I research to find possible design and planning decisions that may explain or …

Architectural Sociology And Post-Modern Architectural Forms, Ronald Smith, Valerie Bugni

Sociology Faculty Research

Architectural sociology examines how architectural forms are both the cause and effect of sociocultural phenomena. As illustration of both but especially the former relationship, we could examine the role of architecture in the creation of contemporary Las Vegas, a city that has experienced almost unparalleled growth in residents (1.4 mil.) and tourists (35 mil.annually) since 1990. We consider the postmodern characteristics of Las Vegas and architecture’s role in creating this image.

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."

Traces Of Time: Urban Palimpsest And Transformations, Tomas B. Fernandez

Architecture Thesis Prep

"I contend that the city is a deeply scored palimpsest that through specific natural, social, and cultural changes reveals its traces of permanence and temporality; therefore, to create in the urban realm is to respond to these vestiges of time through decoding and transformation, as if one was gently manipulating the genome of the city."

Urban Agents, New Events: A Transformation Of The Postindustrial Landscape, Kevin Toukoumidis

Architecture Thesis Prep

"Railway yards, abandoned industrial processing plants, decommissioned factories and polluted river ways are the leftovers from the industrial age. With the deindustrialization of society, a new prevailing urban condition has resulted: a marginalized landscape of residual spaces and urban voids, often with real or perceived contamination.... The potential for reclaiming these marginalized landscapes becomes a catalyst for the design of new modes of occupation and human activity."

Joint Venture: The Production And Reproduction Of The Fragmented City, Mark Rhoads

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis proposes an investigation into the fragmented city and what Henri Lefebvre terms as the specialization embedded in the creation of the contemporary urban condition... The museum for censored photography is proposed to occupy Pennsylvania Avenue, a threshold in the city of Philadelphia... The architectural joint or hinge becomes the vehicle for the spatial "insertion.""

Terminus A Quo: An End From Which A Starting Point: The Auto-Terminal, Garrett M. Singer

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The intent of this thesis is to develop a new civic order for parking structures in the urban context. The thesis investigation will exist on two primary parts. The first area of investigation will deal with an urban design and analysis of parking as gateways of arrival to Manhattan. Tis will serve as entry nodes for all automobile passages into the city. The second half of the thesis is an investigation of the transformation of the parking garage, which has typically been seen as an eyesore, into an elegant structure."

In Response, Chip Young

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The thesis is architecture (host of program, activity, and event) as a catalyst to disrupting urban boundaries. The goal is to create an architectural response to contemporary urban developemt that has created boundaries and decreased the dynamism of 'city'."

A Diamond In The Square, Christopher Guido

Architecture Thesis Prep

"When a traditional city element moves to the suburbs, it is detrimental to the element and to the city. The reinsertion of a separated city element into an urban situation, through the reestablishment of its physics, economic, and social relationship to the city, can serve to benefit the newly placed element and its context."

Review Of: The City As A Human Environment (Duane G. Levine & Arthur C. Upton Eds., Praeger Publishers 1994), Claudia Grimes

RISK: Health, Safety & Environment (1990-2002)

Review of: The City as a Human Environment (Duane G. LeVine & Arthur C. Upton eds., Praeger Publishers 1994). ISBN 0-275-94659-2; LC 94-1146. About the authors, bibliography, foreword, index, preface, tables. [216 pp. Cloth $55.00. 88 Post Road West, Westport CT 06881-5007.]

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 …

The Providence Renaissance Center, Dante J. Boffi

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The intent of this thesis is to create an urban gateway through the architectural manipulation of a city's edge. Physical and visual linkages will be carried from an urban center to the surrounding context by using a specific piece of architecture as the focal point. Issues such as the pedestrian/city relationship and the notion of architecture as a cultural symbol will help to inform and direct the thesis."

The Monument And The Square: Evolving An Identity For Harvard Square, Kathleen Kulpa

Architecture Thesis Prep

"This thesis will demonstrate the making of a civic building as a resolution between urban conditions and as a focal point in a urban square. It proposes to create an identity for the place by using abstraction of the meeting house as a recognizable type which can allow for the reproposition of the community within."

A Meeting House In Boston: A Vehicle For Reconnection, Roseanne Hennessey

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The thesis project will explore the reconnection of the urban core to the periphery. It will deal fundamentally with the relationship of center to edge and the sue of architecture as connective tissue. The vehicle for this exploration if a meeting house in Boston. This vehicle presents an opportunity to investigate the topic of reconnection as an urban/site proposition as well as a use/program proposition."

Prototype: A Community Center For The Slums Of Sao Paulo, Brazil, Andre' Mellone

Architecture Senior Theses

"Poverty can be viewed through 5 different perspectives: urbanism, economy, sociology, politics, and legislation. Architecture can refer to all of them, but my decision is to deal with primarily urbanistic problems."

The Paul Revere Mall: The Synthesis Of The Ideal And The Circumstantial, John B. Burse

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The intent of my proposal for thesis is an investigation of the synthesis of the ideal and the circumstantial. In the collage of these distinct and different qualities, a demonstration of how urban building can not only respond to but enhance the given conditions of a city will be presented. The resultant coexistence of the two I believe to be an ideal in and of itself."

Where Land And Water Meet, Mark N. Rhoades

Architecture Thesis Prep

"The intention of this thesis is to study the waterfront typology, and how the interplay of land and water through the insertion of architectural elements, can reform a sense of place from the shattered urban fabric. The purpose of the waterfront fabric is twofold; to present a facade to the waterfront, and activate the waterfront while maintaining a relationship back to the fabric of the city."

Urban Prospects: A Search For Poetry In The American City Part 2, Gerard D. Damiani

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis is about establishing an attitude about design which argues building organization, appearance and meaning. Architecture should be a reflection of culture rather than being an instagator of change.

How To Make Architecture Today In Yesterday's Cities, Andres A. Hirmas

Architecture Senior Theses

"I tihnk that just by reading the title, one can know what the objectives can be: 'How to make architecture today in yesterday's cities.' Any architectural task requires the consideration of a series of variable; now, if we add to this the respect for what exists, which , by the way, should never be left aside, then we get across two prevailing positions..."

Light, Air, And Space Within The "Urban Poche" : Investigations On Housing For Western Cities Of Today's Society, Werner Hofmann

Architecture Thesis Prep

"High quality city dwelling units in a dense structure of public streets, squares, parks, and private or semi-private outdoor spaces could be an alternative to the endless suburbia."