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Full-Text Articles in Architectural Technology

Threshold Tectonics: Reclaiming Space Through Geomorphological Design, Amreeta Verma May 2023

Threshold Tectonics: Reclaiming Space Through Geomorphological Design, Amreeta Verma

Architecture Senior Theses

This research posits that a revitalization of indigenous earth architecture practices in a contemporary context can mitigate the immense waste and embodied carbon in the construction industry while engaging practices of land return and reclamation. Locally sourced earth materials are the focus of this research because when utilized in a circular consumption cycle, they can be reused or returned to the natural environment. Designing with a temporal understanding of material decay, changing site conditions, and project life cycle reduces the impact of construction waste on the burgeoning issue of environmental degradation and resource depletion. Material experimentation is used to develop …


Aftermarket Supermarket | A Speculative Retrospective, Alexander Kim Dec 2016

Aftermarket Supermarket | A Speculative Retrospective, Alexander Kim

Architecture Senior Theses

In the preface to Delusive Spaces: Essays on Culture, Media and Technology, media theorist Eric Kluitenberg writes that “the delusion of the new”1 pollutes our theorizations of new media. This sort of technocratic fetishization of emergent technologies can only amount to a surfatial investigation of its effects or capabilities. Architectural investigations of virtual reality and other new media systems suffer from this tendency as well. Content-based experimentation and criticism obsess over the simultaneously exciting and daunting prospects of what we can now do or make with recent digital developments. There’s definite value in such endeavors, but frankly, in the grand …


Collaborating With Catastrophe | A User's Guide To Post-Apocalyptic Farming, Patricia Cafferky May 2016

Collaborating With Catastrophe | A User's Guide To Post-Apocalyptic Farming, Patricia Cafferky

Architecture Senior Theses

“Collaborating with Catastrophe” contends that architecture has the capacity to visually manifest unseen forces through design’s reaction to them, allowing people to more fully comprehend and engage the intangible. Climate change, arguably the largest threat to modern day humanity, is not visible, existing only as a collection of data and patterns in a statistical construct. Taking stock of the present day failings of society in the face of crisis, this thesis then extrapolates a potential future dystopia precipitated by man-made pollutants in order to engage the problem at its most severe. Architecture is then able to make the toxic visible …


Absorbency In Tidal Resiliency | The Thickened Pier, Shauna Strubinger May 2016

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 …