Architectural History and Criticism Commons^™

Innie/Outie | Renegotiating Figure And Structure, Maxwell Rosner

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis contends that in order to sustain its claim to be socially progressive and accessible enterprise, the discipline of architecture must resist the divorce of figure and structure.

Innie/Outie considers Architecture as a simultaneously typological and teleological proposition. Architects exploit typology as a means of classifying, diagramming, and ultimately flattening and iconicizing ideas about Architecture so as to place them within a broader cultural context, thereby making them intellectually accessible to their audiences. By contrast, architects from the advent of Modernism onwards have displayed a critical preoccupation with the discipline’s teleological potential, the creation of form that follows function …

Two Lands, One System | Redefining The Border Crossing, Matthew Trulli

Architecture Senior Theses

The Israeli and Palestinian populations each have their own distinct infrastructural system, which operates independently and fails to connect the people in this region. This thesis contends that if a two-state solution is implemented under the guidelines of the 2003 Geneva Accord, new connections can stitch the populations of Israel and Palestine together through a reimagined border system.

These divisive infrastructural networks, which are a result of tense relationships, have also sparked increased violence throughout the region, particularly in Jerusalem. The French Hill, located north of the Old City in Jerusalem, is positioned at a critical point in the infrastructural …

The Foreign Complex | A Cross-Cultural Vernacular, Dexter Cicchinelli

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis investigates transforming a decommissioned military site into a productive part of its host nation’s context. Okinawa consists of a group of islands that make up the southern-most prefecture of Japan. MAP It is situated midway between Tokyo and Manila, and called the “keystone of the Pacific” by military planners because of its strategic location. AERIAL FLIGHT MAP It was the site of the devastating Battle of Okinawa in WWII which prompted an ongoing history of military intervention and occupation. TIMELINE Immediately after the war, displaced Okinawans were put in camps while the military claimed land for bases. Some …

Rebuilding After A Natural Disaster: Housing Strategies For Minority Communities In Post-Tsunami Sri Lanka, Katherine E. Dombek

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

On December 26, 2004, an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale caused one of the most catastrophic disasters in recent history: the Indian Ocean Tsunami. Also called the Boxing Day Tsunami, this event devastated communities along the coast of the Indian Ocean killing around 230,000 people and displacing around 1.7 million. One of the worst affected countries was Sri Lanka which suffered the greatest loss in relative terms. In Sri Lanka 36,000 people were killed and about 500,000 were displaced by the tsunami with five percent of the population being directly affected. The initial relief activities were relatively successful …

Exploring The Contemporary Use And Understanding Of Precedent In Architectural Design Via A Comparative Analysis Of Brunelleschi And Le Corbusier, Shaelyn J. Vinson

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Abstract

As a student of architecture, conducting precedent research before diving into the design phase of a project is something that I am very familiar with. But, following each project’s precedent research, is often an overwhelming feeling of uselessness for the material found. For each project, assignments call for students to find a certain number of buildings on which to base their project. While historically this step makes sense, 21^st-century architecture students are taught that there is no “new” architecture, and that copying and collaging together existing buildings is the best way to achieve a successful design. This …

The Ottoman Han: Recovery Of A Lost Typology, Asli B. Germerli

Architecture Senior Theses

Developing countries around the world are coping with rapid population growth, the negative effects of globalization and the resultant political stress. Many of these cities have unique historical heritages and cultural identities that are being compromised by the monoculture and sameness of architecture that has come along with globalization. To preserve this historic fabric and cultural legacy, these cities must be willing to shape their future through self-expression driven by the local context. Yet, change is inevitable. The challenge is to find a balance between safeguarding the historical heritage while building new layers of history. In brief, the challenge is …

Free Encounters | Giving Form To The Informal Workplace, Ryan Williams

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis contends that the "office" as a solely economic construct is no more: Its utility as an engine driving productivity and the accumulation of capital has stalled in our present age of information where value is constructed through knowledge exchange and interaction.

Via the use of new technologies, millennial workers' transition from the college campus to the office has become more seamless and, this thesis argues, it is in this paradigm shift that it is possible to identify a blurring of the public and private spheres. The millennial worker-turned-freelancer's life exists forever suspended between work and play, place and …

Uncreative Construction | Domestic Mutations In America, Sean Morgan

Architecture Senior Theses

A shift in residential patterns in American cities have fostered a breeding ground for mutant buildings. Owners split, manipulate, and expand their houses as they create idiosyncratic constructs of great visual and spatial complexity. Originally developed for a middle class population, single-family homes have become mixed-use or multi-family complexes thanks to the resourceful implementation of commercial materials.

This thesis aims to develop a new strategy for transforming the normative American house by using the conventions of platform frame construction. Variations will emerge from a set of design constraints, which—unlike that employed for typical houses—are based on data that disregards style …

New Beijing | A Renewed Vernacular, Bowen Victor Zhang

Architecture Senior Theses

What does the term "vernacular" means? In an increasingly flay world, this thesis seeks to define the essential elements of the vernacular architecture of Beijing in order to propose a contemporary residential archetype.

In the past century, China has experienced unprecedented economic growth and development. Along with the many influences introduced by cross-cultural interactions, the phenomenon of architectural and social gentrification has begun to affect many of the populations living in urban centers. The same gentrifying forces that have drastically changed Greenwich Village and other New York City neighborhoods has rapidly moved to China and has replaced centruries-old vernacular communities …

A Mat Response To Deinstitutionalization | A Model For Spatial Medicine, Dominic S. Lipuma

Architecture Senior Theses

In an attempt to salvage the institution, this thesis adopts the Mat-building strategy and typology, coined by Alison Smithson in 1974, exploiting its inherent qualities as a minimal, flexible, and temporal framework, which best supports the unique program of a Community Mental Health Center (CMHC).

This is in response to the severed and contentious relationship between architecture and mental health, in regards to psychopathology. The two fields were estranged with the onset of deinstitutionalization, beginning in the 1960s, and the consequent abandonment of architectural issues has prevented their reconciliation. As a result, further social issues have manifested, with higher proportions …

Incision Of Division, Nicoletta Kyverniti

Architecture Senior Theses

Conflict is a timeless topic of conversation, rising and recurring in various parts of the world. Whether active or dormant, the conflict exists within our urban environments in multiple forms and scales. A border that cannot be crossed. A building that cannot be accessed. A view that cannot be seen. It defines how we move within our cities and creates distinct boundaries. Architecture can diverge form its current use of division to instead exhibit the potential for mediation. It can confront the divide through incisions into the existing site thus exposing the need to intervention. It can cerate a wall …

Occupy Pomo | A Citizen's Guide To Urban Excavation, Kriti Garg

Architecture Senior Theses

Traditionally, architects' definitions of solid-void conditions create a dichotomy between private, or built matter, and public, or void, spaces. Yet, this notion is a missed opportunity to understand the complex society of the twenty-first century that no longer operates within the realm of open, public space nor acts as a point of primal cohesiveness for culture and community. Rather than aggregating at instances of density, it is lost within a new ghostly cosmopolitan substitute of mass consumption and globalized culture. This new public realm is a "phantom public sphere", one comprised of "sub-publics", tailored to the demands of a mass …

Absorbency In Tidal Resiliency | The Thickened Pier, Shauna Strubinger

Architecture Senior Theses

The inevitable truth of climate change has placed coastal cities at great risk. Past natural disasters in the United States such as Hurricane Sandy and Katrina, displaced many people because these communities’ only protection was their failed infrastructure.1 Although hard and soft infrastructure strategies have addressed the rising sea level, architecture at the building scale creates static surfaces and divisions that are slow to adapt to flooding and leave little to no room for the ambiguity of tidal flooding and storm surge. Though numerous areas are at risk of sea level rise across the globe, the Chesapeake Bay area is …

Phasing Permanence Through Flux, Estefania Maldonadov, Andrew Filkoff

Architecture Senior Theses

The "post-industrial revolution" has, in its wake, given rise to a swath of cities suffering economic decline and social deterioration. These "shrinking cities" have experienced a loss in population to their surrounding suburbs and other dormitory settlements. Once thriving cities have been reduced to functioning as overdeveloped business parks where people come to work for five days a week - but then leave each evening to return to suburban ideal. It is unreasonable to assume that any masterplan alone can promote the future success of a shrinking city. Rather, this thesis contends that by dissecting the historical narratives and spatial …

Memory + Architecture | The Act Of Forgetting, Mariel Mora Llorens

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis proposes the activation and repurposing of buildings associated with traumatic memories as a means of studying the ways in which architecture embodies memories and aids in the process of forgetting. Architecture and the built environment are linked to the creation and recollection of memories because they trigger four of the senses that are related to memory.

To forget is an active, not passive endeavor. Conscious forgetting is not an act of erasing memories, but transforming them by removing the emotional responses that are produced by our recollection of these memories. Like memories in our brains, buildings that have …

Anarchy City, Zhuocen Yao

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis is a political manifesto that seeks to address the current chaotic and undesrable politcal environment on the border between Hong Kong and Shenzhen (Anarchy City). Acknowledging that:

-Anarchy City has evolved from political borders whose purpose was to create division.

-Anarchy City possesses width and depth, is a 3-dimensional space of physical presence.

-Anarchy City is a "zone of exception" independent from the entities it sets out to separate.

-Anarchy City is anarchic, free of formal rules and regulations and thus free for interpretation.

-Anarchy City is deliberately distinguished from, and …

Never-Land | A Parasitic And Accumulative Approach To Urbanization In China, Xiaoyan Dong

Architecture Senior Theses

Ever since 1960s, European situationist and Japanese metabolist architects constantly reject the uniformity and totalitarian of modern architecture/urban design, seeking parasitic and dynamic approaches to post-war urbanization. Projects such as the Plug-In City and the Tokyo Bay dream of alternative urban scenarios by reversing traditional perceptions of infrastructure’s role in the city, combining architecture, technology and society together. However, these megastructure projects not only neglect the existing urban context but also lack political and economic driving force. As a result, they are considered utopian by many contemporary critics.

Fifty years later in China, fast urbanization process creates problems for both …

Green Blot District | Considering Low Density Neighborhoods, Tom Arleo

Architecture Senior Theses

By adjusting the texture of now declined early 20th Century outer-urban neighborhoods to adopt low density blocks, new zoning and its resultant architecture can produce an intricate spatial fabric that mediates between individual customization and collective suburban image essential to American detached dwelling. Overlapping functions, spaces, and surfaces offer a new cohesion necessary for developing physically and socially tight-knit communities in a thinning, object-made fabric.

This thesis rethinks suburban practices at the scale of the house, lot, and block, in order to speak directly to issues of building autonomy, non-spatial surface and volume conventions, and residential-program-only zoning. Creating the scheme …

Another Milstein Hall, Daniel Lin

Architecture Senior Theses

A certain Chinese encyclopedia wrote: Animal are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor (b) embalmed (c) tame (d) sucking pig (e) sirens (f ) fabulous (g) stray dogs (h) included in the present classification (i) frenzied (j) innumerable (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush (l) et cetera (m) having just broken the water pitcher (n) that from a long way off look like flies. –– Jorge Louis Borges

Jorge Louis Borges’ list of animals supposedly drawn from his fictional Chinese Encyclopedia the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, highlights the potent absurdities and lacunae to be identified in …

Hijacked | Reclaiming Legislative Loopholes, Lara Moock

Architecture Senior Theses

ARTICLE 1: GENERAL PROVISIONS.

SEC. 100. PURPOSES.

San Francisco’s current political legislation has critical loopholes that have constructed a predominant shift in the city’s identity and urban fabric, as well as an obvious neglect of the public realm and social agenda. The recent move of the Silicon Valley tech headquarters to the city’s center has dramatically changed the architectural landscape as well as reinforced a growing push for corporate privatization. This thesis aims to expose and confront the hidden political and social dynamics of the constructed environment and reclaim the existing loopholes in order to propose a project without major …

Small Houses, Big Ideas, Caroline Jean Winn

Student Scholarship

Architecture is the unavoidable art form.It permeates everyday life and wholly shapes lifestyle; it reflects culture and location as well as the economic power of a region. At its core, architecture is a testament to its surroundings, its design naturally requiring a series of decisions regarding space, form, and use – decisions born within a crucial and telling social context, decisions that quickly reveal the social climate of an era. Indisputably, architecture serves as a lens through which scholars can peer into a time past.

In the course of this thesis, I will examine how the designs of half …

Anyone Can Architect, Christine Wright

Honors Projects

Because people often assume that one has to know architecture in order to study it, this interactive text makes it more approachable. Anyone Can Architect is an interactive sketch book introducing the basics of architecture to anyone from middle- and high-school students who are starting to explore different fields of study to those already studying and practicing architecture who might want to have fun with some of the basic principles. Not only does this text provide useful definitions of terms alongside some well-known examples, but it takes readers a step further by asking them to complete some specific tasks that …

Usc South Campus: A Last Look At Modernism, Lydia M. Brandt, Paul Haynes, Andrew Nester, Robert Wertz, Ana Gibson, Margaret Mcelveen, John Benton, Adam Bradway, Hatara Tyson, Caley Pennington, Carly Simendinger

Faculty Publications

This is a class project from ARTH 542: American Architecture taught at the University of South Carolina by Lydia Mattice Brandt in Spring 2016.

With more Americans attending college than ever before; urban renewal; racial integration; the expansion of coeducation; and the architecture community’s advocacy for holistic relationship between planning, architecture, and landscape architecture, the American college campus developed rapidly and dramatically in the mid twentieth century. Using the University of South Carolina’s Columbia Campus as a case study, this project explores the history of American architecture in the mid-twentieth century.

Architecture In The Humanities: A Biography Of Architect James Hoban, Eileen Gray, Scott Tallon Walker Architects, Mariah J. Tobin

UCARE: Research Products

Architecture In The Humanities is an online database through University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s website. It strives to connect architecture to works of literature, film, theatre and art either through a historical or fictional event that is portrayed as having taken place in or around the architecture. Every year a UCARE student picks an area of interest to research. This year I have chosen to focus on modern architecture specifically designed by Irish architects or Irish architecture firms.

Review: Saving Place: 50 Years Of New York City Landmarks, Jeffrey A. Kroessler

Publications and Research

This piece is a review of "Saving Place: 50 Years of New York City Landmarks" at the Museum of the City of New York from April 2015 to January 2016. It discusses the presentation of the history of preservation in New York City and how the landmarks law has been implemented and challenged over its first half century.

Article of record is at http://jsah.ucpress.edu/content/75/1/119.abstract

The Cerdà Plan For The Expansion Of Barcelona: A Model For Modern City Planning, Judith Urbano

Focus

Modern city planning started with the Industrial Revolution and the scientific advances of the ��19th Century. At the time, Catalan engineer Idelfons Cerdà coined the word "urbanism” as a new and necessary science to deal with cities, having three major preoccupations:� hygiene, traffic, and equality. In this article, Judith Urbano discusses Cerda's plan for the expansion of Barcelona and why it is considered an icon of modern planning�

James Joyce's Model Dublin, Barry Sheehan

Academic Articles

“You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space.” (Joyce,1986, p.31).

James Joyce wrote about Dublin from a position of exile. He created a model Dublin, one in which he mixed people and places, events and activities, real and imagined and combined them into a city that suited his own ends.

This imagined city has been examined remotely in a multiplicity of ways, and by people in a way that the real city has not. One can ask whether it is Dublin at all? …

Profile Of Business In The Traditional Design Sectors, Con Kennedy

Reports

This research report illustrates the findings form the “Profile of Business in the Traditional Design Sectors”. This research was commissioned by the Design and Crafts Council of Ireland as part of the Year of Irish Design (ID1025) which is supported by the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation and was under taken on their behalf by Con Kennedy. The aim of this research is to develop an understanding of the size, location and demographic of design practices and business in the Republic of Ireland. For the purpose of this report, the agreed sectors and design sectors to research were: • …

Untimely Thinking Of Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Peter Olshavsky

Architecture Program: Faculty Scholarly and Creative Activity

This is the foreword to the two-volume collection of essays by the eminent architectural historian Dr. Alberto Pérez-Gómez titled, Timely Meditations: Select Essays on Architecture (2016). It examines his work on hermeneutics to reconsider "innovation" in architecture by privileging architecture’s performance of cultural orientation over innovation for its own sake. This shifts attention from action based on information to a hermeneutic position that draws on a less articulate background.

The Synthesis Of Architecture And Decor, Jean-François Bédard

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

This chapter discusses the influences on Charles Percier's style and the ways in which there were continuities between his design aesthetics during the post-French Revolution period and earlier architects. Furthermore, with the accession of Napoleon Bonaparte, Percier fully deployed his ornamental strategy to give legitimacy to the upstart imperial court.