Architecture Commons^™

Hacking Bioluminescence: A Living Laboratory In Puerto Mosquito, Blanca Roura

Architecture Senior Theses

Following a study of the chemistry and biology behind the process of bioluminescence and an understanding of the components of a bioluminescent bay, the project proposes a living laboratory in the Puerto Mosquito biolumi nescent bay for the appreciation of bioluminescence. activity will be recycled to become the imput for another. To prevent detrimental effects upon the ecology resulting from the anthropogenic presence, a feedback system that redirects waste and resources among the programmatic components is implemented. The waste from one “There are places in the world where diving into the water on a moonless night is like diving into …

Leakiness: Literal And Phenomenal, Jesse Ganes

Architecture Senior Theses

By designing a series of house-like pavilions that leak (fluids and information) in specific ways, this thesis will develop an explicit lexicon for architects to employ in managing the ‘metadata’ that buildings perpetually emit. As a matter of design, these structures will operate on the leaked visible, non-visible, and absent metadata generated incidental to our occupation of buildings. The pavilions will ultimately probe similar sets of conditions, each conveying a radically different tone. Whether stopping or amplifying, scrambling or spoofing, deceiving or decoding, they seek to effect a measurable change on the metadata leaked from within. In order to objectively …

Myths Of The Near Future: A Flaneuric Remapping Of The Post Modern City, Marco Piscitelli

Architecture Senior Theses

AT THE HEELS of heroic Modernist planning, fully institutionalized by the start of the Second World War, an investigation on the desires of Urban Subject emerges as a critical response to architects’ moralistic fixation on composition, function, and programmatic separation. Walter Benjamin’s exploration of the subject takes the form of an analysis of the nineteenth-century Parisian flâneur, as celebrated by poet-essayist Charles Baudelaire. Passagenwerk discusses architecture’s potency in both supporting social rituals and crafting a Subject itself. “Paris,” specifically the arcade, “created the Type of the flâneur.”(BEN, 416). Continuing in this vein of research, the Situationists develop a framework describing …

Dubai: Re-Designing Labor Worker Communities, Can Cakmak

Architecture Senior Theses

In an effort to provide humane living conditions for immigrant workers in Dubai who are trapped in the flawed immigration system, I will design a ‘worker community ’ to replace the ‘ labor camps’ where workers live today. These communities will be tested at a variety of levels, from planning, infrastructure, modularity to materiality; and while certain elements such as planning will play a much more significant role than, for example, infrastructure, the goal will be to generate a worker community which will provide necessar y amenities and act as a temporar y city - immediately next to the construction …

Ciudad Disidente: Addressing Social And Infrastructural Deficiencies In Villa Salvador-- Part 2, Victoria Brewster

Architecture Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

S/H{I+P-S, J. Conrad Hu

Architecture Senior Theses

Ships (specifically interested in cruise ships, cargo ships, tankers and carriers) are constantly being built around the world but at the same time, thousands of ships are recycled, transformed, destroyed, or abandoned. Annually, around 1,000 large endof- life ships are dismantled on tidal beaches causing environmental issues. These vessels simply become objects or artifacts left without purpose or function. Just this year there has been an increase of 9.5% of cargo ships being built and ordered. The Cruise ships have shown even greater growth due to the cruising industry, 167 new ships have been built since 2000. The National Defence …

Unveiling The Rural Landscape, Carolina Jimenez

Architecture Senior Theses

Within the past 50 years, industrialized farming has transformed America’s rural and agricultural landscapes. These two landscapes have taken on increasingly divergent cultural representations in language, paintings and photography. Architectural interventions within the rural landscape can act as a device to reveal these differences. In this way I am engaging in four interrelated discourses.

Defining the Rural | Linguistic, Painting, Photographic Representations In order to define the rural landscape, it is essential to understand the way it has been constructed by cultural representations in language, painting and photography. Images of nature mediate that which is outside of us, translating environment …

Thick Images: Rendering Digital Dimensions- Part 2, Jeff Nedelka

Architecture Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

Thick Images: Rendering Digital Dimensions- Part 3, Jeff Nedelka

Architecture Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

Thick Images: Rendering Digital Dimensions- Part 1, Jeff Nedelka

Architecture Senior Theses

Thick Images is an investigation into the creation, perception, and possibilities of digital architectural representation. Rethinking the relationship between rendering and building, among other design possibilities, Thick images considers the qualities and characteristics both inherent to and demanded of the digital, and suggests new ways of reading and deploying common, contemporary image making tools.

Borderline- Part 1, Francis Mckloskey

Architecture Senior Theses

A large transitional body of water shared by Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the Aral Sea was once the fourth largest inland Sea on Earth, dried due to Soviet Irrigation practices.

Nine years ago, with the support of the World Bank, the Kazakh government finished the construction of a 14km dyke to raise the level of the sea in the North, restoring its ecology as a massive constructed landscape.

Since then, the water level, and therefore regional ecology, is regulated by a 50m concrete spillway.

As a currently inexistant interface between tourism and fishing industries on site, this project investigated the capacity …

The Urban Evolution: Stiching Mumbai's Eastern Waterfront With The Incremental Symbiosis- Part 1, Betsy Daniel

Architecture Senior Theses

“Thus, the cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as an envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement block, and scrapwood.” 1 “[The market] is based on small scales and tiny increments of profit, yet it produces, cumulatively, a huge amount of wealth. It is massive yet disparaged, open yet feared, microscopic yet global. It is how much of the world survives, and how many people thrive, yet it is ignored and sometimes disparaged by most economists, business leaders, and politicians.”2 There is …

Permeating The Void: Establishing A New Order Of Informality- Part 1, Lisa Kombakis

Architecture Senior Theses

WHAT IS TRANSIT, AND ITS RELEVANCE TO THE URBAN INFORMAL? Transit, in an urban atmosphere, is a system used to mobilize mass amounts of population in the most efficient way possible. In terms of the urban informal, some of the transit elements used in a formal, static city are re-instated into the informal. Many times these elements (such as taxis, buses, motorcycles, cars and bicycles) are implemented in their hybridized form, creating new and localized forms of transport.Reconnecting and fostering the urban density are a few of the most important aspects that should be considered when exploring the urban informal’s …

The Immersive Spectacle: Performance And The Audience In Pop Music - Part 4, Emily Roupp

Architecture Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

Surveillance, Spectacle, Michael Ma

Architecture Senior Theses

Perhaps the most scripted way of seeing is fully characterized by the field of cinema. The development of film grows out of moving images where experimentations with illustrations and multiple freeze frame photographs can be traced back to Eadward Muybridge, E.J. Marey, and Thomas Edison. Through the development of tropes and scopes, optical illusions are created and the eyes begin to see motion images. Cinema, a spectacular event, owes its origins to the evolution of these devices and photography. The other variation of these devices of spectacle are surveillance tools. These devices transform the audience from mere spectators to observers …

The Immersive Spectacle: Performance And The Audience In Pop Music - Part 3, Emily Roupp

Architecture Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

Permeating The Void: Establishing A New Order Of Informality- Part 3, Lisa Kombakis

Architecture Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

Transient Solutions: Responding And Adapting To Rapid Change Through Temporary Design- Part 2, Casie Kowalski

Architecture Senior Theses

PART 1: RAPID CHANGES

The American City is characterized by a history of industry, rapid growth and stagnant economy, and a quick adaptation to consumer culture. In cities once characterized by specific industries, they now attempt to cling to their cultural identity and the arts to preserve their image beyond their industry, readdressing and reinvigorating permanent cultural entities such as the library, museum, and theater. This reviving is done in variety of ways, all of which require heavy funding both privately and publicly and primarily result in interventions of permanence. [Chicago's Millennium Park, Cleveland funding waterfront activity, New York City …

The Immersive Spectacle: Performance And The Audience In Pop Music - Part 2, Emily Roupp

Architecture Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

Knowledge Accident- Part 1, Alanna Rosenblatt

Architecture Senior Theses

The increasing un-sustainability of the built university and the rise of the apparent mass democratization or synchronization of higher education through the virtual Massive Open Online Course [MOOC] is occurring concurrently with the mutation of the historically grounded Accident into the Knowledge Accident. The standardization of higher education through the MOOC has created the conditions for the Knowledge Accident, the “integral accident”, of the built university. This is where we find the present state of the university, in a moment of crisis grounded in unconstrained "progress". The current form of the MOOC, begun in 2011, has expanded and evolved with …

Permeating The Void: Establishing A New Order Of Informality- Part 2, Lisa Kombakis

Architecture Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

Permeating The Void: Establishing A New Order Of Informality- Part 4, Lisa Kombakis

Architecture Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

Rebranding The Brooklyn Navy Yard: Market + Place, Lauren Buckheit

Architecture Senior Theses

Historically, market and place had continuity. Market was defined by place - a commercial program shaped by its surrounding social and cultural environment.1 Market was realized at the overlap of commerce and religion, markets and feasts; all were interrelated. However, as we switched to a consumption based economy the coherence between the two diminished. Markets no longer were shaped by the surrounding micro-cultures, but by temporal consumer trends. When assessing current branding strategies this separation between market and place is also apparent. In one instance, market branding includes creating corporate identities through product, image/semiotics, and built form. This brand identity …

Ciudad Disidente: Addressing Social And Infrastructural Deficiencies In Villa Salvador-- Part 1, Victoria Brewster

Architecture Senior Theses

Within the next twenty years, the Global South will account for 95% of urban growth, and nearly half of that will be within the informal sector.1 The population living within slums is expected to increase to two billion people by 2030, and if left unchecked, it may reach three billion by 2050.2 This extreme growth requires an URGENT response in order offset its adverse effects on the urban environment. Thus far, architects’ interventions in informal settlements have focused almost entirely on designing housing in order to improve the quality of life, and to meet the demands of the growing population. …

Community Commons: Public Libraries In Digital Age, Chao Dou

Architecture Thesis Prep

This thesis will identify the programs for the Onondaga County Public Library in Downtown Syracuse based on the needs of the surrounding neighborhoods and organize the programs based on the navigational organization of digital information exchange platforms to connect the digital divide between improverish neighorhoods with the affluent neighborhoods of Syracuse, NY.

The articulation of the space will manifest as a commons for the demographics to access, create and exchange information in the community

Matters Of Air, Franklin Romero Jr.

Architecture Thesis Prep

Air pollution is an imbalance of airborne terrestrial matter that produces unwanted effects on other material bodies. This boundary-less, scale-less and heterogeneous entity is an invasive matter/energy residue that supersedes political, social, spatial, territorial, glandular and even cellular boundaries. It is a transcontinental system that envelops and intoxicates insides and outsides rendering the architectural object a benign form of protection.

This airborne matter is changing the physical, social, political, sensorial, and emotional life of our cities, and in many cases the experience of urbanity is lost due to its own degraded air. Pollution renders the most vital necessity for living …

Empire State Plaza, Christopher Kovel

Architecture Thesis Prep

De Arce constructed a system--an experiment--that could be applied to the Corbusian city to elicit new meaning from the set pieces. The process of additive transformation allowed the existing monuments to become engaged in a new conversation with their context. The superimposed fabric--‘urban poche’-- created a uniform vertical surface, or datum, against which to read the set pieces. Thus, the city of street and square was educed as fabric and figure were once again allowed to mutually reinforce one another. Public space, understood as the place of confrontation and discussion, has arguably been devalued in the contemporary city.

The ancient …

Downtown Dexter Historic Survey, Scott Slagor

Historic Preservation Final Projects

No abstract provided.

Objekt Banesor - Afarist, Feim Beqiri

Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Evaluating Cultural Vitality In U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas: Implications For Cultural Planning, Tingying Lee

Community and Regional Planning Program: Theses

The purpose of this study is to understand cultural planning’s current status in the United States. In this study, I used cultural vitality indicators as a tool to evaluate the cultural resources of cities in the United States. I also explored how planners have responded to the concept of creative cities by reviewing the cultural planning activities of the top 60 metropolitan statistical areas (MSA) in the United States. Lastly, I conducted a statistical test to see if an additional department such as cultural affairs, which focuses primarily on cultural planning, positively impacts cultural vitality. The result shows there is …