Architecture Commons^™

Cultural Infrastructure, Public Space, And The Contemporary Library In Toronto, Zoë Ritts

Masters Theses

Public space is an aggregate of differences, a place of exposure and adjacency to other lived social realities. The potential of public space is the confrontation or mediation of differences through interaction.

Public spaces are therefore about intersections and visual transparency between publics. Through architecture, we can create the conditions for contact with difference: with openness, transparency, density of program, and merging and splitting trajectories, we can work toward greater engagement in society.

As civic institutions, the bus station, an affordable method of transportation and movement, and the library, a crucial component of cultural infrastructure, can collide to create a …

The Flood : Another Note Of Humanity, Muyi Fan

Masters Theses

Site is an inhabitable system, in which forces are generated by sets of rules which dictate all the natural and human histories, perceivable and unperceivable. The manipulations of these existing forces are always based on the comprehensive understanding of this system, rather than the willing of a single (group of) inhabitant(s) of occupying, ruling and colonizing. This process is always suggestions rather than solutions, and allows further editing. Through continuous manipulations, site is evolving.

Living On The Edge : Failure By Design, Odile Schlossberg

Masters Theses

This Thesis Project starts a conversation between the coastal edge and the built environment in order to develop a new approach towards transformable architecture design.

Erosion has an inevitable impact on coastal inhabitation. Over time, the water edge erodes and the shoreline retreats, pushing back development or causing existing buildings to collapse. Raised architecture has been a proposed solution to mitigate the impact of oceanic forces on buildings, but I believe there can be a different alternative to this approach.

Erosion could be seen as a ‘transformation that takes place over a period of time’, rather than as an environmental …

Resilience On Wall Street, Rahul Ghera

Masters Theses

On October 29th, 2019, the most substantial economic depression of the modernized world abruptly began, as the international financial market and the global GDP took a plunge. Over the course of the next decade, all that continued to rise were unemployment and suicide rates.

The Wall explores the question of what happens when the lights go out on a society that is irrevocably halted. Questions of responsibility, reparations, and conviction are all weighed as ‘Wall Street’ is revealed as ground zero, and the once-powerful bankers are uncovered as the addicts who have gone too far, gambled too much, and are …

Motion And Architecture : Transition Between Spatial Fluidity And Body Language, Tong Li

Masters Theses

Architecture is always changing. Seeing birds flapping the wings, horses running across the grassland, leaves falling down from the tip of the tree, clouds being blew away by a gust of wind, a drop of water sliding down from a flake of flower...I see architecture.

Killing The Angel, In The Mind, Body And Home, Vaishnavi Ramesh

Masters Theses

There is something reassuring about belonging to a space. In patriarchal societies, there is a perceptible manifestation of gender that is constructed into spaces. The street and a public life contain within it the notions of movement that is unrestrained and free. These are attributes of a space that men identify with and an unintended consequence has resulted in public spaces being demarcated as male domains. This notion is embedded in how women experience life everyday, as they are accustomed to the idea that public spaces and streets are only spaces they pass through to reach destinations and not enjoy …

Unfolding : Architecture As Dwelling In A Folded Space-Time Continuum, Feiyi Bie

Masters Theses

Architecture can be described as the relationship between exterior form and interior space — typically a representation of desire by both architect and inhabitant. However, when architecture responds specifically to issues of transportation, it must unfold in time and space, creating different spatial experiences that provoke an evolution in human habitation.

Perceptible Ambiguity : Learning Center, Zhurong Qian

Masters Theses

This project investigates the possibility of using the concept of projection to blur a boundary, as well as the potential to create an ambiguous transition between various spaces. In this project, the differentiation between floors, inside and outside, solid and void, starts to fade away.

Projection is a way to understand the world. Through “looking”, we “collapse” the original object, and reconstruct the image in our head.

Learning is in the same way, we “break down” the phenomenon in order to comprehend the logic, and through experiments, we examine the theory repetitively. Learning is also about seeing the same thing …

[De]Construction And [Re]Construction : A Promenade Theater, Jingjing Zhao

Masters Theses

REFRAME THE COMMONPLACE

I see corners, ceilings, openings and steps. I see the whole through gathering the spatial fragmentations. I see the extraordinary phenomenon within the frame of domestic life. I see the potential for being anomaly from what we usually take for granted.

Spaces are entities propelled by the phenomenological, the conceptual and the physical. Built and spatial forms serves as functional and structural vessel to capture, balance and rearrange the multiple forces between the common and the abnormal, between the real and the abstract.

Capturing the domestic moments in daily life and reframe the fragmentations into certain from …

Surveillance City In A Post 9/11 Era, Wanting Dong

Masters Theses

Surveillance City in A Post 9/11 Era is a thesis investigation trying to understand our privacy, perceived safety and public realm in the large context of evolving terrorism worldwide by promoting a conversation about how surveillance would change our city, our new relationship with the city under surveillance, and how people will live with surveillance in the future.

Phase one seeks to understand terrorism and terrorist attack in general, and the opportunities and limitations of the existing security design strategies that have been implemented by US government. In phase two, a specific investigation direction is determined and a series of …

Grave : Landscape Necromancy, Jil Sanchez

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on the phenomenon of festivity in order to better understand the spatial qualities of platforms for experiences of release. The work is grounded in the intimate connection between post-industrial landscapes and the emergence of raves and electronic music. The design approach questions western cultural norms by creating a scenario for a combined rave venue and cemetery. The investigation’s material and spatial manifestations are applied to Red Hook Grain Terminal, an ideal latent venue for raves, concerts, and other festive and contemplative functions on New York City’s fringe. The project aspires to widen the range of conversations landscape …

Light Installations For Le, Yiqi Jiang

Masters Theses

This investigation derived from a personal childhood memory of an autistic boy, living with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). His struggles to communicate and to have people understand him drives this thesis investigation in hopes of better connecting people of all abilities through accessible design. After serving a summer term working at a special needs inclusion camp, there is the exposure to the lack of awareness and communication gap between design and people living with autism. The study develops a series of strategies that strengthen communication between people with and without ASD and ultimately seeks to educate the design profession on …

Viaduct Landscape, Juanru Wang

Masters Theses

Thesis question: can spaces under viaducts become objects of appreciation; can design promote their original characteristics?

This thesis focuses on the space created by the elevated transit infrastructure in urban areas. In recent years, the spaces under viaducts attract attention in the field of landscape architecture. There are many successful practices that transfer the negative space under viaducts to popular urban plazas. Most of those designs, however, may simply regard spaces under viaducts as dangerous spaces or as obstacles in the city. Nevertheless, the scale and spatial characteristics of the spaces under viaducts are not in other public open spaces …

Grid In Landscape Architecture, Ying Xu

Masters Theses

Driven by the interest of the cultural meaning in the landscape architecture and the fascination of the power of the grid, the inspiration of this thesis is from the landscape architecture works that obtain both characters.

Many landscape architecture works simultaneously are expressing the cultural concern while use the grid form. Thus this thesis is exploring the association between the cultural meaning and the grid as a formal device, or to say how the grid is used to express the cultural meaning.

The investigations mainly rely on the research about historical cases.

The whole thesis process is divided into 3 …

Fluid Solid : Can We Converse With Granite?, Patrick T. Beals

Masters Theses

This investigation seeks to detect sources of the quantitative granite anomalies through various methods and use available resources to allow for an immersive, qualitative, and perhaps didactic experience, which will build a conceptual foundation for design of the in-between spaces made by the negative form of granite architectures. This thesis is about timescales and lenses by which to view them in partnership. With lenses are assumed perceptions, ones that define the understanding of the object in the viewfinder of the landscape, and in this case, the timescales which will be addressed in the following three phases:

Phase 01 Background : …

Water For The Future, Ziqing Chen

Masters Theses

Water is a fundamental element for lives. Located in Long Island detached from the mainland of New York State, the densely-populated counties - Kings, Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk Counties - rely on groundwater for their sole freshwater source for a long time. The underground geology determines the groundwater movement on western Long Island: from Nassau County to Queens. When overpumping happens in Queens, Nassau County is firstly threatened by lowered water table. The thesis is aiming to propose a local solution to mitigate the problem brought by groundwater movement when overpumping.

In Phase 1, the study focuses on the underground …

Landscape As An Interactive Layer, Yifan Kong

Masters Theses

The main topic of this investigation is memory and place. The study uses qualitative and quantitative research methods with the aim of addressing the question of, “how landscape design generates interactive layers that last in a community’s memory within a constantly evolving neighborhood demographics?” This thesis is divided into three phases:

Phase I explores the evolving neighborhood in New York City. Specifically focusing on communities with high immigrant populations located in Queens. This phase helps develop a stronger understanding of the issues associated with gentrification and the impacts it has on immigrant neighborhoods and provides the groundwork for the rest …

Borderscape : Weaving Political Boundaries In The Amazon Through Water Performance, Lucila Silva-Santisteban

Masters Theses

This research project is about how to connect political bordering urban systems through the natural structure for a coherent occupation between the built environment, ecosystems and resources following the Landscape Architecture lens that can address different scale systems simultaneously to create a holistic approach between them. And the proposition of a new type of landscape of this threshold territory as its own kind. Specifically looking at the bordering cities in the heart of the Amazon Region in South America that fall between Colombia, Brazil and Peru.

Why the Amazon?

Not only because of the usual fascination, but because of the …

Remnant Landscapes As Homo Sapiens Preserves : It Is The Dystopian Utopia, The Shrine For Modernity, The Home Of Everyone, Yuan Zhang

Masters Theses

When it comes to remnant landscapes, what else can they be instead of being turned into parks, community gardens, or new architectural or urban development?

This thesis starts with a critique towards the very popular post-industrial park, the High Line, where the original materials of the site was completed removed then artificially re-fabricated. By transforming it into a publicly well accessible landscape, the design destroyed the possibility for a citizen to build his/her own intimate relationship with this piece of land because of a much visible ownership. Therefore, the goal for the thesis is to provide a powerful critique to …

Narratives Of Public Space : A Manifesto For Future Urban Landscape In Manhattan, Jaehong Chung

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates the history of public space and how it has changed over time. Looking specifically at how social, historical, and advances in technology have influenced and changed the meaning and use of public spaces. Studies of history and its characteristics and case studies check the validity of paradigm of public spaces in Manhattan. The modern features of Manhattan have been completed over 200 hundreds years with Industrial revolutions and influx of immigrants. Due to these reasons, the main focus was to track of causalities among life style changes, social paradigms, and changes of urban landscapes.

As cities developed, …

Remediating The Garment Industry, Kellie Knight

Masters Theses

This thesis culminated from an interest in addressing the pollution by the dye processes of the textile industry on the Earth’s waterbodies. The first Phase of this thesis explored the globalization of the garment industry. The movement of production was tracked over time from the 1950’s when production occurred primarily in the United States and Europe to present day when production is worldwide. With the global spread of the industry came the global spread of its pollutants.

The second phase of the thesis investigated the functioning of the fashion industry itself to determine which process from production to distribution is …

Grid Talk : Giving A Voice To Energy Infrastructures, Kelsey Wakefield

Masters Theses

Humans are energy hogs, intelligent purveyors of displaced electrical waves construed from ancient carbon compounds. Our built environment has let us forget this. Our collective ambivalence towards the subject has grown with the loss of these public assets to private companies under a socially engineered lack of public interest in energy production. There was once a time energy infrastructures were revered and upheld as public spaces, giant testaments to the greatness of society harnessing the natural world, gold stars congratulating the intelligence of humankind. Great designers, political leaders and visionaries created works of art, sculpture, landscape architecture which functioned for …

A Tale Of Lights : Light As The Visual Construct Of The Ephemeral Space, Alice M. Zhen

Masters Theses

Buildings are designed for a specific purpose. A library has large open rooms to accommodate bookshelves, schools have classrooms and auditoriums for groups of students, businesses have offices and conference rooms, homes have bedrooms and living rooms, and so on. In each situation, conventional architecture would start by establishing the boundaries of the site, defining the 2 dimensional floor plan, and then introduce other secondary aspects, such as circulation & light, which eventually create a coherent and cohesive 3 dimensional space.

In my thesis I wanted to explore the reverse process to emphasize the importance of light. I wanted to …

Openness, Yu Cao

Masters Theses

I am fascinated with the experience of drawing the openness of the mind consumes me. When an energy much much bigger than me moves me I draw. I am open and candid patient and silent deep listening to that intrinsic energy, flowing with colors, running with marks, being taken for a walk by one line until the unknown reaches precision. I still don’t know what they are; flying tigers, swimming birds breathing pink banana blue. This is my world where I encounter a me I don’t know yet. Where a child finds home. Where I can inhabit the openness of …

The Void Between Us, Xiaofan Fan

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates the sense of connection and detachment among people. The interference with sight and physical placement of the body are the two aspects that this thesis researches upon. Through a discussion of life and death, the research is able to take form in the architecture realm with a crematorium as the final deliverable.

Simultaneity Of Space, Amy Lungariello

Masters Theses

The generational gaps between the baby-boomers and millennials are a result of a number of sociobiological and economic factors. Events such as the 2008 Financial Housing Market Crash, the current political climate and the events proceeding and following the election, constantly changing cultural trends, global warming, countless international tragedies, and most importantly the ever advancing technological innovations which most connects and divides the people of our time. The position of my thesis is one which poses the question of how to bridge the gap between the numerous divides of our time through the means and practice of architecture. Distance is …

Collective Consumption : A Game For Living, Zachary Rochman

Masters Theses

“The time-lapse fluctuation of our societal floor plan has accelerated. Now you can almost watch the walls go up and down in real time.” -Rem Koolhaas, Elements

There is an efficient and beneficial way to collectively consume resources, but our houses and apartments do not function this way. The commons still exist, but their locations are sparse and specific. What if we established communal spaces that connect private dwellings and blur the lines between them? What new responsibilities and freedoms would arise? If we establish new commons and new abilities to share spaces and resources, we can help alleviate the …

In Between Forces, Jungyun Lee

Masters Theses

In order to live, humans make buildings in nature and live in there. This fact has not changed since the birth of mankind. It means to live in a certain space, because a medium of building is necessary for man to survive safely in nature. Based on these mediators mankind has been living. In addition, villages and cities were created and continued to grow in size. As a result, the building, which is the mediator, has been different in shape and size. In an expanding city, are city and nature now balanced? How do we balance it? How can we …

Tsirik - Fold The Leaves So That Others May Be Guided: A Study Of How The Bribri Women Are Preserving Their Culture To Ensure A Sustainable Future For Their Community, Emily R. Blau

Capstone Collection

Bananas are one of Costa Rica’s largest exports, along with coffee, palm oil, and cocoa. The banana plantations are large-scale, are most often run by multinational companies, and are considered to be run as enclave economies (Equal Exchange, 2016). This monoculture crop production has been globally accused of human rights abuses said to include, but not be limited to, violating the rights of indigenous people and loss in culture and tradition. For this paper, I studied the effects that large-scale agricultural corporations have on the BriBri, a matriarchal and indigenous group who live on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. …

The Impact Of Housing Insecurity On Community Health Outcomes: Exploring Collective Community Solutions And Housing Models In The Western Addition, Jacqueline V. Brown, Jacqueline Victoria Brown

Master's Projects and Capstones

In a city where housing is scarce and prices continue to rise, the lower income residents of the Western Addition are in panic. Historically, the Western Addition/Fillmore is ground zero for Urban Renewal. This community is still bouncing back from the negative effects of the out migration of Black residents, Japanese internment, and rapid gentrification. For twenty years, this part of the city was known as Harlem of the West due to its world-renowned Jazz and Blues composers, and is informally known as “Tha ‘Mo”. San Francisco has set the tone nationally for public, mixed income, and private housing that …