Architectural History and Criticism Commons^™

Template Housing: A House For The Next 100 Years, Sophia Rico, Jb Barrientos, Armando Munoz

McNair Summer Research Program

This research examines over a century of prefabricated housing to understand how standardized housing production has changed over time and how it continues to influence housing today. By investigating archival records of historical prefabricated housing, alongside contemporary pre-approved housing plans, this study shows how housing has been designed across different time periods.  By comparing historical and modern examples, the research identifies recurring strategies for increasing efficiency, reducing construction time, and expanding access to housing. As communities across the United States continue to face a housing shortage, this research is especially relevant following the passage of the 21st Century ROAD to …

Jadughar: The House Of Magic, Dhruvi A. Shah

Masters Theses

Jadughar or the House of Magic is what people call a 'museum' in parts of South Asia. The practice of museum making, at its origin, is the act of collecting, preserving, interpreting and representing a culture’s tangible and intangible heritage to make it accessible to diverse audiences. Since the early 19th century such practices have been performed at various kala bhandars (art centers) in India, without the need of a formal or institutional organisation. The British introduced the model of a ‘museum’ in South Asia, with the aim of not only preserving ethnographic collections, but also showcasing their power and …

Objects In The Sunset, Iskander Guetta

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

This research explores everyday design practices in the Maghreb shaped by economic, political, and ecological struggles amid transnational debates on decolonizing design. To do so, it looks at objects in, through and with the sunset. Taking المغرب — the place where the sun sets — as a conceptual lens, Objects in the Sunset illuminates the savoir-faire born from dispossession, scarcity, and epistemic violence. Working across different scales of the built environment — infrastructures, spaces, objects, and materials — it shifts design away from Eurocentric conceptions: from rationalization to resourcefulness, homogeneity to heterogeneity, optimization to adaptation, disposability to repair, and universal …

Accessibility On Campus: How Universal Design Can Make A Difference, Samantha Wittenberg

Honors Projects

This research is meant to showcase how survey those who self-identify as having a disability so see how feedback they provide can help guide changes to make to the Maurer Center on Bowling Green State University’s campus. By utilizing principles found in Universal Design, much of the feedback was able to be applied. Much of what was found are small modifications to help with general accessibility such as visualization to help with navigation.

Actas Seleccionadas Del Simposio Arte 4.2: Migraciones En La Imagen Prehispánica: Transitando Territorios Del Pasado Al Presente. 58º Congreso Internacional De Americanistas, Novi Sad, Serbia, 2025, Victòria Solanilla Demestre, Annabel Villalonga Gordaliza

Zea E-Books Collection

El presente volumen reúne una selección de contribuciones derivadas del simposio «Migraciones en la imagen prehispánica: transitando territorios», coordinado en el marco del 58º Congreso Internacional de Americanistas (ICA58). Nuestro simposio propuso detenerse ante un fenómeno a la vez antiguo y vigente: la travesía de las imágenes. Imágenes nacidas en la América prehispánica que, a lo largo del tiempo, atravesaron paisajes, rutas y memorias para (re)aparecer en territorios distintos de aquellos que las vieron surgir. Cada autor, desde su propio territorio intelectual, contribuye a desentrañar los movimientos, apropiaciones y metamorfosis que experimentaron las imágenes amerindias al viajar de una sociedad …

Adaptive Refuge: Reimagining Biophilic Settlements For Sudanese Refugees In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Neeya Yahaya, Robin Pottock

Symposium of Student Scholars

Every day, thousands of people are forced to flee their homes escaping war, disaster, and instability. What begins as a temporary refuge often becomes a lifetime condition. In Ethiopia, over 4.6 million refugees live within this state of protracted displacement, with more than one-fourth arriving from Sudan after the 2023 conflict. Most remain in remote, rural camps along border regions far from the educational, economic, and social opportunities of the city. These spatial and social divides reinforce dependency, limit access to livelihood, and erode personal dignity. Yet proximity to urban infrastructure could offer a pathway toward belonging, participation, and long-term …

Spaces Of Empowerment: A Study On University Multicultural Spaces & Civil Rights, Keana Balalio

McNair Summer Research Program

Following the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, American universities dedicated offices and centers to multiculturalism. This project questions how identity-centered spaces for empowerment operate in relation to efforts for institutional integration. This study proposes the term space(s) of empowerment to describe identity-based areas at universities [and other institutions] that encourage gathering of historically marginalized communities, their allies, and institutional supervisory support. The concept draws on architectural literature regarding political and economic power dynamics of space. Beginning with the University of San Diego’s United Front Multicultural Commons (UFMC), study includes reproductions of floor plans and memories. Analysis draws from Michel de Certeau’s …

A Tale Of Two Worlds: A Framework For Translating Literary Fiction Into Architectural Space, Timothy D. Anderson

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Authors and orators have employed fictional stories for thousands of years as a crucial method for translating narratives, lessons, and intangible culture. These take shape through diverse art forms such as spoken word, visual art, dance, and sculpture. However, in the current age, architecture often neglects its immersive and spatial potential, allowing stories of a site’s heritage to become lost beneath the layers of urban development. This thesis explores design as storytelling, examining how fictional narratives can be translated into architectural space.

The research draws on fictional and speculative narrative architecture, analyzing the use of metaphor, symbol, and allegory as …

Living Heritage, Aysenur Cetin

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on urban interventions designed to enhance the functionality and public engagement of Istanbul’s historic Golden Horn walls, while restoring their cultural presence in the city’s collective memory. Although these walls represent centuries of historical and architectural significance, from their Byzantine foundations to their layered Ottoman adaptations, they remain largely overlooked by those who encounter them daily. Fragmented, hidden, or absorbed into informal urban development, the walls have become background elements in a rapidly evolving city.

Through a combination of lightweight, site-sensitive design strategies and educational initiatives, this project aims to reinterpret the Golden Horn walls as accessible, …

A Timber Tradition: Pacific Northwest Architecture And The Role Of Local Wood Sourcing In Oregon, Kaleb Patrick Paiker

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Within the study of Portland’s architectural heritage, there is a deep connection to

materials local to the region. The use of these materials, combined with sensitive

architectural design, delineates a building as being from a place rather than an

imposition. The impetus to define the local wood architecture of Portland, Oregon led

me to an understanding that the health of the forest is predominant in design and

construction. I have found that environmental stewardship promotes a distinct typology

of architecture; one that can be recreated and derived from the same source—a tree.

Inferring from local wood sourcing, I have determined …

Spatial Echoes, Joy Cherichel

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

This abstract critiques the limitations within the U.S. education system, arguing that its selective preservation of history often obscures crucial narratives, particularly regarding systemic racism. Focusing on the suppressed history of Oscarville and the expulsion of Black residents from Forsyth County, Georgia, in 1912, the proposal advocates for architectural intervention to combat this historical amnesia. The central research question explores how architecture can preserve and convey unbiased racial history to enhance education. The thesis posits that intentionally designed architecture can serve as a powerful and enduring educational tool, making it harder to ignore marginalized histories. To address this, the abstract …

The Changing Kitchen: Analyzing Sears Mail Order Home Kitchens And Gender Inequality In The United States Between 1908 And 1940, Ella G. Penney

Interior Design Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Sears Roebuck & Co mail order home was no exception to the idea that architecture and design are products of culture and society. Penny Sparke, a scholar of domestic interiors, writes that design is informed by “economics, politics, technology, culture, society, our psychological make-up, ethics, and the world’s ecological systems” (Sparke 8). In 1908, Sears responded to an increase in demand for single-family housing by releasing a home that could be delivered right to your door. This study investigates the ways in which gender inequality, particularly, the confinement of women to domestic space and housekeeping labor, manifests itself in …

Living Surfaces, Ryan R. Sotelo

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the role of architectural surfaces as a staging ground for personal objects that carry with them aspects of memory, narrative, and personal histories. The lived experience within architecture is often dismissed with the architect’s role in a building’s life ending at its physical conception. Architectural representations are often devoid of time, motion and personal histories in sake for spatial clarities. With precedent representations such as period room drawings, motion studies, and photographic guns, there was an interest in developing a representation to better examine the lived experience within our architecture.

By incorporating personal testimonies, accurate bedroom documentations …

Unconditioning Air, Weijia Deng

Masters Theses

Unconditioning Air rethinks the boundaries contrived through environmental control. For more than a century, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) defined the boundaries of interior air. The regime and tools of mechanical conditioning promise stability and manageability of indoor air quality at the expense of external phenomena, and by extension, any complexity or fluctuation in the environment. As a result, air conditioning premises that ideal interior comfort is “bubble-like”, requiring increasingly standardized and highly regimented regulatory tools. The plethora of patent drawings, duct specifications, and ASHRAE comfort codes produce an oppressively tightening grip over indoor air and comfort, rendering both …

Rhythm Of Space, Brian Carrillo

Masters Theses

This project innovates architectural representation by exploring the rhythm and flow of spaces, focusing on staircases in the Bayard Ewing Building, the RISD Museum courtyard, the Waterman Building, and Woods-Gerry. It captures the body’s dynamic sequence in these spaces, using drawings or animations to challenge traditional techniques. Emphasizing kinesthetic perception, it offers a fresh perspective on architectural experience. Ultimately, this work enriches our understanding of how architectural elements shape movement and perception, enhancing architectural representation and experience.

Searching For The Hyperobject: Crystals As Transscalar Vehicles, Jay Costello

Masters Theses

When I touch the street outside my house, I'm touching Los Angeles—a contiguous vector of material bisecting a continent. A slab, a stone, dust and oil, a googolplex of tightly packed anisotropic particles... At nightfall, I sneak to the edge of the highway and break off a piece. 'What does it mean for a worm to be aware of the scale of the planet?' Bruno Latour's evocative questioning of scalar jumps prompts an existentialism that places me somewhere between the hyperlocal and the massively distributed. Like a cosmic traveler floating through the universe, I feel adrift. I look around, grasping …

House Calls, Gregory Goldstone

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the unique architectural challenges and opportunities present in rural communities, with a focus on addressing the crisis of affordable housing. Grounding the discussion in the author's personal experiences growing up in the rural town of Cambridge, New York, the thesis illuminates the diversity of identities, needs, and values that coexist within the rural context.

The thesis critically examines the architectural academy and its urban-centric biases, which have led to a neglect of rural design issues. It highlights the shortcomings of standard affordable housing approaches, such as public housing and mobile homes, in meeting the independent spirit and …

A Dispatch From The Site Office, Adrian Pelliccia

Masters Theses

In the middle of the 20th century, a rare confluence of political, economic, and cultural forces aligned to produce a slate of highly progressive policy and design agendas for social housing in the United Kingdom. A widely shared utopian ambition to house all people with dignity was made real by a motivated government and its well-resourced planning and architecture offices, tasked with bringing this vision to bear in the built environment. In London, the London County Council Architect’s Office and later local council-led architecture and planning offices were at the forefront of designing and delivering high quality, formally ambitious housing …

Dreampool, Xia Li

Masters Theses

DREAMPOOL is a spatial experience of virtual architecture based on the public bathhouses of northern China during the 00s - 10s. It focuses on the significance of nostalgia and the connection between architectural space and the spiritual world. The dreampool began with my interest in Bathhouse and Dreamcore videos that were popularized on the Chinese internet during the pandemic.

Like every nostalgia trend emerging, such as steampunk, some young Chinese people are starting to miss their childhood life around the year 2000 at a time when they are losing their public space and socialization. Public bathhouses, as a collective memory …

Folding (And Unfolding): A Site-Responsive Strategy For Reusing Construction And Demolition Waste, Jennifer Ansley

Masters Theses

Discarding—in its most reductive formulation— is a sorting operation that makes distinctions between materials (as well as objects, people, communities, and landscapes) based on perceived value. In her book Waste of the World, Nicky Gregson, therefore, argues for a more careful collection-curation strategy that revalues and re-signifies “waste” to make it available for repair and reuse. Gregson, however, points to limited space and infrastructural capacity as a potential barrier to the development of new material handling strategies. My design responds by proposing a network of walls and paths that operate in each of the sites I’ve identified as an …

Icons Of Solitude: Peace, Quiet, And The Urban Condition, Jack Schildge

Masters Theses

The urban environment lacks sufficient public places to be alone, where individuals can feel free to seek respite from the intensity of city life. While solitude is easily achievable in the vast landscape of the natural world, it is something that must be carefully and deliberately carved out within the confines of the city and remains inaccessible to many. We’ve all heard of follies in the landscape, both sitting in remote places and dispersed throughout public parks in either case taking advantage of open space, but why couldn’t we carve room for follies in denser environments? What can be extracted …

Towards Sustainable Architecture: Exploring The Potential For Mold Making In Cob Building, Sarah Halldorson

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

With the call for sustainable design appearing to be on the rise in recent decades, cob can offer a unique solution for creating sturdy, long-lasting, environmentally friendly, and moldable homes. With the need for sustainability in architecture and construction becoming more evident, a return to well-documented ancient building practices that have proven to stand the test could create a unique solution for some wanting to find an alternative to modern construction and design. Traditionally a method of construction lacking an architect’s input and seen as a pure vernacular form of architecture, could added awareness and the ability to create more …

Towards A New Urbanism- Using Artificial Intelligence To Reconcile Modernist Aesthetics With New Urbanist Principles, Nicholas Hurley

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

As urbanization and densification of cities have become undeniable trends of the past few centuries, designers have theorized ways of building the ideal environment for its inhabitants to thrive. These methods include the Garden Cities, Late Modern Housing Estates, and New Urbanism. This study will focus on New Urbanism. Known for its reluctance to embrace new architectural styles and ways of building, incorporating contemporary architectural styles presents a challenge to the future applicability of New Urbanism.

To analyze this issue, this study will leverage the ability of Artificial Intelligence image generation software to evaluate the compatibility of New Urbanism principles …

Geometric Principles In Architecture Aesthetics, Vincent Gemmiti

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

This study focuses on geometric formalism in three major monuments across different architectural eras in time. The use of three distinct geometric principles to outline the use of pure or manufactured shapes and figures helps to discover and isolate an aesthetic component of architecture within which it is contained. A collection of studies are implemented and are focused on orthographic drawings from each monument in horizontality and verticality, consisting of a dual set of overlay and interpretative drawings for each type of orthographic representation for each monument. A discussion follows and highlights the changes or similarities over time the role …

Spatial Justice: Deductions, Demonstrations, And Derivations, Fabio Capra-Ribeiro

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Mapping Stratcom: The Architecture Of Offutt, The U.S. Military, And Strategic Command, Anna Miles

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Architecture and the military have always been intertwined. The built environment both on and off U.S. military installations responds to the events, history, and influences of the military. This project explores one example of this by investigating the history of the United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), headquartered at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, through the lens of architecture.

When exploring USSTRATCOM, this project aims to understand not only its history, but also its impact: on Offutt, on the world, and most importantly, on architecture. Firstly, the project explores the history of the military in the state of Nebraska and …

Photography, Architecture, And Environment: An Architectural Analysis Of Edward Ruscha’S 26 Gasoline Stations, Rebecca Tonguis

[Archive] Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

This presentation explores Edward Ruscha’s photobook 26 Gasoline Stations through an architectural lens. Specifically, it treats Ruscha’s work as historic evidence of how consumption, industry, and commodity have infiltrated all kinds of environmental contexts through architectural manifestations. Known for being the first artist’s book, 26 Gasoline Stations ambiguously exists as both fine art and documentation of everyday conditions, with the overall graphic character highlighting its perceived focus on overarching narrative. Since gasoline stations are the primary subject of each of the 26 photographs, the subject of this work is arguably architecture, suggesting that the historic relationship between mass gas consumption—or …

Visual Privacy As An Approach To Improve Human Needs In Residential Buildings In Egypt, Inas Samir Ibrahim, Walaa Nour, Mustafa Alwan

Journal of Engineering Research

Architecture reflects a nation’s cultural, social, and environmental characteristics. As a result of the recent globalization, countries have lost their distinctive architectural identities; due to this, it is difficult to identify A country’s unique identity locally and regionally. Specifically, in Egypt, houses in the traditional style are considered one of the most iconic architectural styles. There is an amazing local identity and a unique spatial quality in the region that characterizes Egypt. On the other hand, Western influences have caused many of the values and attributes of houses to fade. One of the most prominent values is the home’s loss …

Namesake: An Ekphrasis On La Sagrada Familia Basilica In Barcelona, Spain, Rachel Henry

Obsculta

Ekphrasis is a literary description of a work of art or architecture—a kind of over-the-top ode. The Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family, commonly known as La Sagrada Familia, in Barcelona, Spain, has been under construction for 142 years and is expected to be completed by 2032. With its integral sculptures, soaring towers, and feats of engineering, Architect Antoni Gaudí’s masterpiece is unlike any other church or cathedral in the world. Pope Benedict XVI consecrated the temple as a minor basilica in 2010. This article delves into La Sagrada Familia and aims to aid the reader in imaginatively exploring the …

Designing Affordable And Viable Housing Solutions, Jean Jeremie, Juliana Maxim

McNair Summer Research Program

Abstract:

There is a consistent housing crisis that is affecting our society today. Nearly 582,462 are homeless alone in the United States, with San Diego having the 4th highest unhoused population in the country (Hud, 2022). My research this summer seeked to understand the current living conditions of low-income families within our local community, with an emphasis on the El Cajon neighborhood in the Eastern part of San Diego County, and develop new architectural designs for sustainable and affordable housing. Through this lens I was able to see how a class in society just above homelessness lives day to day …