Architectural History and Criticism Commons^™

Disrupting Routine: The Expansion Of Precedent, Olena Yarmolyuk, Olena Yarmolyuk

Masters in Architecture Program: Theses

Iconic architecture has presented a preferential nature to the establishment of architectural work. Academically, only the architectural a-side is presented to students. It is used as a means to develop, measure, and identify good work. Meanwhile, the architectural B-side is deliberately hidden away and censored by the profession. It exploits the perverse - displaying all of architecture’s failures, glitches, and anomalies.1 However, the notion of the a and b sides also presents problematic consequences. Prescribing architecture as either a or b side is problematic - it creates a divide between iconic architecture and all the other works deemed ‘insignificant’. Even …

Designing The American Dreamscape: Suburbs Of Worship And The American Dream, Rebecca Virgl

Masters in Architecture Program: Theses

This thesis explores suburbia as the physical manifestation of the American Dream as a pseudo-religious system. This religious system and contemporary suburban ideology are explained and disseminated through a historical review and analysis of suburban media. Pop culture serves as a signpost that directs public opinion and cultural value; much of media today wrestles with the ideas of the American Dream, fore fronting these cultural values in our collective identity. Once the baseline of socio-economic religious ideology has been established in the American Dream, the extremes of these beliefs were explored in three suburban environments: home, labor, and retail. Each …

Modding Suburbia - Guided Principles To Challenge The Established Social And Political Norms Of The American Midwestern Suburbs., Brenton Rahn

Masters in Architecture Program: Theses

Responding to the unchallenged sprawl of suburban cities in the Midwest, the proposed principles seek to densify and further diversify the established social and political norms which currently still stagnate progress toward more autonomous neighborhoods. Through application of a specific set of principles that serve as guidelines, Modding Suburbia seeks to create dense, usable space from previously unused and forgotten interstitial areas hiding in the suburban landscape surrounding the socially and politically protected single-family home.

This project focuses on the transformation of the immediate context surrounding the single family home to promote density and diversification of housing and community. Through …

Julia Morgan: Forgotten, Omitted, Overlooked, Or Celebrated, Renee Meyer

Masters in Architecture Program: Theses

Julia Morgan (1872-1957) was the first female registered architect in the state of California (1902). Despite her prolific independent practice, recognition for her work came late even for her most known project, Hearst’s Castle in San Simeon, California.

Throughout history, women have been repeatedly left out of the history of architecture and design, often being overshadowed by their male partners. This paper will seek to clarify reasons to decipher why this particular architect was left out of history and the media during her lifetime and will show that her omissions were not solely due to the fact that she was …

Parafiction And The Architectural Imagination, Ashley Glesinger

Masters in Architecture Program: Theses

I observe current architecture practice to be too reality-driven. As a response to this issue, this thesis demonstrates parafiction as one productive method of exercising architectural imagination. I define parafiction as a type of fiction that begins with a fact and is presented as a fact in order to demonstrate what the world could be. To create parafictions, I have used multi-medium techniques of representation. Through the representations, this thesis strives to “make present” one person’s imagination.

I see parafiction and architecture both as projective activities. Specifically, that both redefine relationships to what already exists and create tension between the …

Type Theory, Paris Mood

Masters in Architecture Program: Theses

The concept of type and typology are at the heart of Architecture. Type is the simple act of drawing similarity and difference between a group of artifacts. Typology, on the other hand, is a bit more complicated. When one engages with typology, they are taking the information they gather from observing the artifacts and transposing it into a new context. Most designers and architects refer to this act as type/typology. The distinction between the two terms is necessary for my work. My work looks at the relationship between these two events. As a collective they are Type Theory.

With the …

Dimensions Of Surveillance, Prisoners Of The Planetary Panopticon, Mallory R. Lane

Masters in Architecture Program: Theses

This project explores the Prisoners of the Planetary Panopticon. Surveillance no longer exists solely within an architectural scale, but has expanded to the urban, territorial, and planetary scale.

At the beginning of this thesis I began researching the contemporary issues of prisons and found that issues now extend far beyond the walls of the grounds. When comparing the architecture of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon to today's society, what separates our exposed, surveilled bodies from those within the Panopticon Prison of the 1800's? This subject is relevant at a time when surveillance has taken over the city and created another spatial world …