Architectural Technology Commons^™

The Shenzhen Activist Program`, Hyunggyu Kim, Jae Hyun Kim

Architecture Senior Theses

There is a gap between being an architecture student in western countries and working as an architect in underrepresented communities. Architect Teddy Cruz defines the role of an activist architect as "expanded mode of practice", and the task of "deigning the protocols or the interfaces between communities and spaces".

This thesis contends that architecture schools need to continue to embrace the widely-accepted norm of studios studying abroad and working in an international studio. Current study abroad programs tend to skew towards being touristic field trips and there is not a curriculum or programmatic investment in cultivating relationships between the visiting …

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

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 …

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 …

Redefining The Constraint | Designing Control To Support Rehabilitation, Jessica Borri

Architecture Senior Theses

The concrete lined cells of a contemporary prison do not lend themselves well to processes of rehabilitation. This thesis contends that it is time for architects to rethink the architecture of the prison. When an inmate knows he is being watched, he tends to exhibit positive behavior out of fear of the consequences of any action deemed to be negative. This thesis contends that by incorporating the apparatus of surveillance seamlessly into a prison's architecture it may be possible to provide spaces that feel more open and less oppressive.

One way to generate a feeling of openness is to create …

Where Wellness Begins, Chelsea M. Wheeler

Architecture Senior Theses

A public need for improved health has called into question the manner in which one's built environment has the ability to affect a person's health and well-being. Recent studies have revealed a correlation between health and residence, suggesting that the built environment has a significant influence on occupant health and well-being. As a result of such studies, Delos Living, a well-building consulting firm, has proposed a set of deign standards that can be used to promote occupant health. The problem with such methods is that there are processes of certification relying primarily on post-deign evaluations. This thesis seeks to align …

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 …

Imaging The Near Future, Fang Fan

Architecture Senior Theses

Instead of critiquing the danger of globalization, it propose a rather positive and Utopian version of it. The role of architecture and infrastructure being ambiguous in a future world after globalization, in which infrastructure is heterogeneous and inhabits a global space.

Also it response to the issue of cultural identity in a globalized world, believing that technological interventions will not only adapt to the needs of traveling and migration for a dense population, but also making infrastructure as a space for entertainment and a place celebrates both global and local cultures in a constantly changing world.

Unreal Urbanisms | A User Guide To Engagement Gaming For Community Planning, Temitope Olujobi

Architecture Senior Theses

The virtual environment is the digital manifestation of user’s transnational image of the city. It is an image conceived through small scale and short term interventions that prompt experimentation and iteration. Its development is implemented solely through active participation, community engagement and crowd sourcing. Adversely, planning experimentation in the built environment is a climate that conceives slow, costly and often unimaginative progress. Unreal Urbanisms contends that cities in the built environment can use the User Generated image of city created in virtual environments to collaboratively reinvent and re-imagine the design of the urban environment. In the absence of reality (ie. …

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 …

The Renaissance Of The Railway | Towards A Global High-Speed System, Xiaoyu Li

Architecture Senior Theses

The railway has shown its unique character as a mode of transportation since its invention in Europe during the Industrial Revolution. In the beginning, its carrying capacity made it stand out, transforming human behavior, and stimulating economic productivity. During the 20th century, air travel, the railways, and long-distance road networks have shared the burden of human transportation - in many countries the car and plane have won out. In recent decade, however, new interest in the railway's potential has been generated as a result of the emergence of new technologies like high-speed rail and the maglev system. Greater speeds are …

Private Room Of The Wheel | A New Form Of Transient Dwelling, Kathy Teng

Architecture Senior Theses

The cross-country highway and road trip are deeply rooted in the American psyche, supported by the rapid growth in ownership of automobiles by American families since the 1940s, establishing a sense of freedom and leisure in their mobile lifestyles. However, other highway users have less control and freedom over their daily routine. These users are part of a vast network of international commerce reliant on the long haul.

The time long-haul truck drivers are away from home is prolonged, with the end of each day spent sleeping in fixed truck cabins and eating at banal truck stops. “ ‘I can …

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 …

The Synchronous City, Patricia Olivera

Architecture Senior Theses

Architects’ conceptualizations of cities reference and reflect trends in contemporary culture. During the early 1900's, architects such as Ebenezer Howard, and Tony Garnier speculated on modernist visions of cities, while in the mid-late 1900's radical visions of cities by Archigram, and Archizoom emerged. This project will operate along the framework of previous visions of cities by architects and envision a city rooted on the use of digital information and communication technologies (ICTs).

In order to best engage the provocation of a city based on ICTs as the primary means of exchange and interaction between citizens (as opposed to cars, pedestrians, …

A Shifted Perspective On Affordable Micro Housing, Jonathan Reisman

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis contends that growing cities around the world are out-pricing the younger demographic from the urban fabric. It recognizes that constantly rising real estate markets are forcing millennials outside of city centers. It understands that socially, the younger demographic provide the energy and atmosphere required to keep the city alive, and ultimately believes that in order fro young professionals to reclaim their position int he hosing market, a new typology of hosing need to be established.

Such housing takes increasing urban density into consideration, and provides an appropriate dwelling supply for expensive cities moving forward. It is a typology …

Deployable Domesticity, Daniel Hopkins

Architecture Senior Theses

Deployable homes have characterized the survivalist origins of our species, the lifestyles of disenfranchised populations, and the luxurious retreats of others. Still, a predominance of contemporary domestic space relies on the ‘permanently’ stationary and situated object. As the social and ecological conditions of our society are rapidly and continually fluctuating, we must reaffirm our association with deployable culture and expand the utilization of mobile and adaptable unit. Further, architecture must negotiate the contrasts between ephemerality and permanence.

Through speculation of the social and sustainable implications of the deployable unit, issues of flexibility, material selection and afterlife, economics, ecology, and efficiency …

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 …

Algorithmic Settlements | Modeling Informal Settlement Through Automated Generative Design, Ben Anderson-Nelson

Architecture Senior Theses

The position of the architect when designing is to arbitrate which information is relevant and which is not, and to do so across a broad spectrum of fields. Considering this, Christopher Alexander claimed as long ago as 1964, that “design problems are reaching insoluble levels of complexity.”This thesis focuses on informal settlement growth and how architects can investigate growth as a part of master-planning new housing. Drawing on case studies of settlements, video game logics, and existing architectural tools, a tool was developed to study the growth of settlements. This tool is based on cellular automata, a spatial and algorithmic …

Philep | A Self-Sufficient Pod, Brenna Merola

Architecture Senior Theses

Since 2011 civil war has erupted in Syria causing many Syrians to flee the county. About 9 million people have been internationally displaced causing disruption to the surrounding countries, which have had to create new accommodations. Primary issues have been shortage of basic such as shelter, food and water. Through analysis of disaster situations and refugee conditions, the types of infrastructural systems needed for survival can be better understood. This analysis can determine how to integrate systems into an architectural solution to this global issue: temporary housing pods.

Michael McDaniels, EXO Reaction Housing founder, has created a prototype of a …

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 …