Architectural History and Criticism Commons^™

Body Positivity: A Case For Corporeal Form, Jose Sanchez

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Born from architecture’s increasingly shattered conceptual foundations, the formal project of bodily objects presents an interesting case study into the emerging dialectics surrounding considerations of representation, technology, and affect. This thesis examines the genealogical origins of corporeal form in order to further understand the stake that bodies hold within the production and reception of architecture. By tracing the pedigree of corporeal form back to the two types of architectural signification that emerged after modernism, bodies can be validated as a project able to extend and advance architecture’s potential for individualized and collective engagement. By situating bodily objects within the histories …

Sunset.Zip Popular Preservation And Learning From Roadside Architecture In Southern California, Ethan Russell-Benoit

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Outside of the spaces we inhabit daily, the car is the frame through which the majority of Americans experience the majority of architecture. Most architecture, especially as viewed from the car window is mere scenography, mere image; but images are democratic, they are compressible, transmissible, infinitely reproducible, and therefore immortal1 . Using film, animations, models, and drawings, Sunset.zip translates the experience of architecture from the car into a highly compressed architectural artifact that preserves popular cultural memory of a place as a constructed image. This project situates itself within multiple disciplinary discourses without preferencing one over another. Sunset.zip is in …

Vestigial Vedute: Manipulating Warsaw’S Palimpsest To Reveal Ambiguity, Benedykt Ezlakowski

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The urban core of Warsaw today is a string of autonomous and unambiguous artifacts. Parts of the city were rebuilt after World War II, others built over during communist rule, and some created during times of rapid westernization after the fall of communism. The thesis concerns itself with representing these changes in the urban fabric over time. It aims to question this representation of Warsaw and through the use of layered maps and manipulated historical painting seeks to reveal a simultaneous reading of the city’s past and present states. I argue that this layered, hyperbolized reading is a tool to …

Making By Taking: An Investigation Of Architectural Appropriation, Victoria Lee

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The project contends that explicit appropriation can be a legitimate method of architectural production. The scope encompasses four canonical works of architecture: Villa Rotonda, Villa Savoye, Fallingwater, and the Farnsworth House. These works are appropriated as the basis of a retrospective analysis and as the foundation for a speculative, generative design strategy. Following the height of postmodernism, the notion of explicit formal appropriation was characterized in a negative light, seen as inauthentic imitation. However, an increasing number of contemporary artists and architects are utilizing explicit appropriation and historical reference as a primary method of production. This mode of thinking can …

American Picnickers, Yuxiang Luo

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

This thesis investigates the eating practice of American commuters. The issue of food is addressed through a social lens, affected by spatial conditions. The project thus aims to reinvent the operation of roadside food business, through the design of a series of spatial conditions that activate new social relations.

Commuters’ eating practice is problematic; the drive-thru as a prevalent building and business typology has created spatial and social isolation for various parties in the society. The social isolation has two implications. On one hand, as drivers eat alone in the car, they are isolated from other eaters, thus degrading the …

Fun-Ctional Mega-Structure: A Formula For What Is Beyond Necessities In East Asian Cities, Sooji Jung

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

No abstract provided.

Sustainable Ephemeral: Temporary Spaces With Lasting Impact, Jacqueline Armada

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

From the Far East to the Western world, architecture has historically strived toward permanence and monumentality. Recent “sustainable” design practice is likewise concerned with preservation, seeking to maintain quality of life for future generations by conserving both built and natural environments. However, in an age of rapid technological advancement, designed objects and buildings are quickly rendered obsolete, and in effect, our culture has become disposable. Buildings are designed to be replaced or updated according to technological progress, and that which is no longer useful or relevant is simply discarded. An ephemeral architecture has the ability to mediate between aspired permanence …

Fast/Fresh Food: Feed Syracuse Communities, Dorothy Ann Buttz

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Industrial agricultural practice coupled with urban planning and infrastructural development over the past century has placed an unfair environmental burden on low income urban communities across the United States of America. As Majora Carter explains in her 2006 TED talk titled “Greening the Ghetto,” race and class correlate directly with the availability of parks, space and quality of public programming, as well as proximity to undesirable things such as highways, dumps, power plants, distribution centers etc. Furthermore, the development of said highways, distribution centers and the like has precipitated the exodus of economic opportunity including healthy food programming from the …

What Do You Call A Place Where Books Are Kept?, Taryn Elizabeth Mcgann

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The public library as a single grand building, gated by massive columns and filled with rows of dusty tomes, is a severely outdated conception. The model of library as a permanent, stable landmark in the city has been debased with the advent of digital technology and a new model is forming that embraces the ephemeralness of modern media. However, the image of a building filled with books still holds power over architects and bibliophiles and continues to wield influence over the design of new libraries. Consequently, the modern library is caught between trying to provide adequate technological and educational resources …

Interactive Environments: Redefining Sense Of Place In The ‘Noosphere’, Kathleen Callaghan

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The rapid growth of the internet and the far-reaching ubiquity of our virtual networks within the last decade have spurred an entirely new generation of interactive devices and technologies; these include the technologies seen in cell phones, video games, televisions and computers. Furthermore, online social networks such as Facebook and our portable Internet devices, mainly the iPhone, have begun to redefine our sense of time and place in a world of global connectivity and instant-access. This phenomenon results in a constant flow of communication and information that blankets the globe and marks a cultural paradigm shift to a much more …

Infrastructured: Opportunistic Infrastructure, Urban Revitalization, And Socioeconomic Reconciliation At Boundaries In Downtown Syracuse, Ny., Nilus Klingel

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The contention of this thesis is that large-scale infrastructures, such as highway systems, energy networks, or water supply complexes – as well as more abstract infrastructures, such as the infrastructures of capitalism or mercantilism – have, as the ‘harbingers’ of Modernity, an indelible impact upon the lives of the human beings who exist under their influence. Eradicating the traditional way of life that preceded them, these structures provide only one point of reference: the unknown future, in which the human struggles to find an identity.

Recent recuperations of infrastructures illustrate how the transformation of former agents of alienation can build …

Theatre For A New Theater: A Play On Architecture, Alexander Coulombe

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Not Included

Undermining Impasse: The Role Of Architecture In The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Laura Ondrich

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Undermining Impasse: The Role of Architecture in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Abstract

Laura Ondrich

Architecture is political, in that it can be used to further an authority’s agenda, and the relationship between peoples under that authority can be affected by it. As the political tool of a ruling power, architecture in a place of ongoing conflict may propel the conflict and submit to its perpetuity at the detriment of participating peoples. Though politics are often considered intangible, certain conflicts exist in real space, thus there is an opportunity for architecture to create an influence. In this case where architecture - concrete …

Rise And Fall Of The Continuum Revivalism In Architecture, Tyler Caine

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Abstract not Included