Landscape Architecture Commons^™

Young Children's Play In High-Rise Housing: A Window Into The Changing Lives Of Urban Middle-Class Families In Pune Metropolitan Area, Sruthi Atmakur-Javdekar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation aims to identify the combinations of spatial arrangements and physical features that influence young children’s access to play and the quality of their play opportunities in a heterogeneous sample of high-rise housing in India. Using Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Model of Human Development as a framework, the study examines two large umbrellas that contribute to young children’s play opportunities in high-rise housing developments: (1) The play environment that is made available for children by developers and design professionals; and (2) Parents’ and caregivers’ ways of using the designated and undesignated spaces based on their own play values and beliefs. A …

Walkability Of Suburban Retrofits Of The Washington Dc Area: Immersion Into Qualitative Constructs, David Sweere

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

The majority of the United States population is living in the suburbs, and yet the suburban built fabric has developed with spatial conditions that have failed to prove their efficacy on environmental, social or economic terms. Most contemporary architectural and urban theorists agree that the suburban condition is inherently problematic. In a 2010 Ted Talk, architect and urban designer Ellen Dunham-Jones discusses the problematic state of the suburban built condition, citing dependence on the vehicle, sparseness of built form, environmental costs, transportation costs, and even increased obesity rates (Dunham-Jones 2010). Because the suburbs comprise the majority of our “urbanized” areas …

Skater Conscious, Jeremy Bowen

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Skateboarding is made possible by the built environment, but without architecture necessarily being designed for its occurrence. Without knowing it, designers have created environments that facilitate a social and artistic culture to thrive. And this has happened – for the most part – in leftover pieces of landscape, infrastructure, and urban settings. Skaters move through and experience space in unique ways. While their boards enable this experience, there is more; most spaces are not designed for them – and some are even designed to keep them out – but, nevertheless, skaters persevere through invention and creativity. Skaters actively search for …

The Wheel House - An Intergenerational Space Creating Bonds Between At-Risk Teens And Seniors, Jessica M. Keegan

Theses and Dissertations

MOTIVATION

Two main groups in American society today are floundering: adolescent children of low income families and the elderly.

Between the hours of 3:00 and 6:00 p.m., one in five children are unsupervised. Left to their own devices, many become involved in negative behaviors such as drug and alcohol abuse, sexual activity or in the worse cases, delinquency (Afterschool Alliance, 2016). It is proven that when children are alone after school, they not only miss out on valuable learning opportunities, but also their parents are affected as well by having to lose as many as eight work days annually to …

Surveilled, Rachel Swetnam

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Debord's "Society the Spectacle" and Delouze’s Deleuze's "Society of Control" both imagine a dystopian future for humanity in a world governed by excessive self-advertisement and mass surveillance. This thesis begins with the observation that, sadly, their two visions have become a reality. Current technologies log our movements through GPS satellite data, and photographs taken by closed-circuit security cameras, or by passers-by on a public street, are constantly cross-checked against databanks of previously-compiled biometric profiles. Every movement and transaction is digitized and recorded, accessible to ever-widening networks of information exchange and surveillance. These data-networks are altering the manner by which people …

Hurricane Communities, Katie Masters

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Hurricane Communities: An Analysis of Florida Housing is a thesis that aims to reexamine how we can, as architects, design for hurricanes more effectively at the residential scale, through investigations of lateral forces, form, structure and site. The intent is to minimize the physical and emotional damages that are left behind. The thesis examines wind uplift and changes in water level as hurricane category rise.

The 21st Century Energy Hub, Farhaan B. Samnani

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Developing countries face problems like pollution, unsafe construction, poverty and lack of clean stable energy. These areas are the most in need of sustainable and net positive design since they lack the resources to design long-term solution. An architecture that can make energy affordable through onsite rapidly renewable resources, help reduce on site pollution and provide stable housing would be a welcome intervention. As we approach the new century, buildings will aim to become an energy hub. Cities do not look at a building as an energy source. Currently Energy production centers sit on the outskirts of the city. But …

Re-Live Downtown Pine Bluff, Community Design Center

Community Design Center Project Reports

Once a prosperous cultural urban center in the Mississippi River delta, but now the nation’s second fastest shrinking city, Pine Bluff (population: 42,700) is Arkansas’ Detroit. Indeed, a study of black wealth conducted by famed sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois in 1899 found that Pine Bluff had the fourth highest rate of black wealth in the nation behind Charleston, Richmond, and New York City. The school’s community design center prepared a downtown revitalization plan, Re-Live Downtown Pine Bluff, a housing-first initiative focused on building neighborhoods around downtown “centers of strength”. While the revitalization approach is triaged around a …

Center For Farm And Food System Entrepreneurship, Community Design Center

Community Design Center Project Reports

The average age of the American farmer is 58. Since communities are not reproducing the next generation of farmers, universities are establishing training centers to model new concepts and technologies in farming. The Farmers Training Center is both an immersive program in the rhythms of farm life and a public facility for hosting gatherings that celebrate value-added food products. Part of the University of Arkansas’ farm operations near campus, the center is the public face of agriculture where farmers and the public meet. Student farmers learn by farming, from organic vegetable production in fields and greenhouses, to machine repair, marketing, …

New Beginnings Homeless Transition Village, Community Design Center

Community Design Center Project Reports

More than three million Americans experience homelessness annually. Emergency shelter capacity is limited while local governments are unable to provide even temporary housing. Informal housing involving interim self-help solutions are now popular adaptive actions for obtaining shelter despite nonconformance with city codes. Unfortunately, most informal solutions have resulted in objectionable tent cities and squatter campgrounds where the local response has simply been to move the problem around. Our homeless transition village plan prototypes a shelter-first solution using a kit-of-parts that can be replicated in other communities. Village design reconciles key gaps between informal building practices and formal sector regulations, creating …

Willow Heights Livability Improvement Plan, Community Design Center

Community Design Center Project Reports

Willow Heights is a 43-year old public housing complex owned by the Fayetteville Housing Authority (FHA) within the federal public housing portfolio administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The school’s design center was commissioned by a local foundation to study an alternative to the FHA’s plan to sell the downtown Willow Heights complex to a developer of high-income housing, necessitating relocation of low-income residents to another complex outside of downtown. Using equity as a driver of decision making, the studio introduced scenario planning to organize reluctant stakeholders in considering transformations to the five-acre complex.

Legends, Myths, And Facts Of Kylemore Abbey, Jennifer J. Fink

Faculty Curated Undergraduate Works

Nestled in the side of a mountain in the west of Ireland is the iconic Kylemore Abbey Castle. This paper explores the history of this structure by examining the legends, myths, and facts behind it and the surrounding land. The myths and legends are linked to Ireland’s old Celtic beliefs and explain much of the interesting landscape surrounding the massive structure. Majority of the paper focuses on the factual history of Kylemore which starts from the first construction of the castle all the way to how it is being used today. The Victorian castle has had many owners throughout the …

The Freeman Performing Arts Center, Community Design Center

Community Design Center Project Reports

The Freeman Performing Arts Center marks the threshold between prairie and civic life. This small agricultural community of 1,300 has an outsized Anabaptist music tradition recognized nationally. The 37,000 sf hall-type building unifies a miscellaneous collection of public buildings and landscapes at the southwest corner of the town’s one-mile grid. The center’s massing projects an ascending system of familiar gable roofs, which absorb the fly tower into a composition reflective of pragmatic building forms. The principal face of the building is a translucent curtain wall that illuminates interior massing—a beacon on the prairie. A thru-Porch celebrates transitions between the prairie’s …

Future Oriented Sustainable Design. Design Purpose: What Is Design And Who Is It For? [Please Note: This Is A Large File And May Be Slow To Download.], Barry Sheehan

Academic Articles

In November 2016 I was asked to make a presentation at the Future Oriented Sustainable Design International Conference in Wuhan in the People's Republic of China. My topic was Design Purpose: What is Design? And who is it for?

The presentation examines the wider aspects of design and its categories and asks who were are actually designing for.

I made a powerpoint presentation that I narrated in English whilst it was simultaneously translated into Chinese for the attendees at the conference. On my return to Ireland I created a soundtrack to accompany the presentation slides for people to watch the …

Dark Site Observatory, Aaron W. Uhe

ASA Multidisciplinary Research Symposium

This project for our Architecture Studio was completed in collaboration with the Physics Department to create possible concepts for an observatory for the Solar Eclipses in 2017 and 2024.

Through These Gates: Buffalo's First African American Architect, John Edmonston Brent - 1889-1962, Christine A. Parker

Museum Studies Projects

ABSTRACT

THROUGH THESE GATES: Buffalo’s First African American Architect

John Edmonston Brent

The purpose of this research is to reintroduce the architectural and historic cultural contributions that John Edmonston Brent (1889-1962) made to the city of Buffalo, Western New York and beyond. A significant number of renderings, artifacts and photos from Mr. Brent’s forty-seven year architectural career were unearthed. This cache of rediscovered forgotten contributions made by John Brent would align him with other African American architectural pioneers during the mid-20^th century.

John Brent was educated by the first class of professionally educated and trained African American architects of …

Other Wildernesses, Other Realities | A Framework For Shrinking Cities, Alyssa Goraieb

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis is an experiment to imagine the possible realities that emerge from a redefining of the "idea of wilderness".

Wilderness is an idea.

Its definition is slippery. It is neither a physical place nor a state of being (as the "-ness" suggests). Wilderness is a human construct defined by varying cultural and social attitude. This fluid meaning drove numerous paradigms throughout American history - from eighteenth century romanticism's sublime doctrine to today's environmentalism.

Inspired by past American paradigms, this thesis invents five other wilderness ides that exist as a parallel alternatives to our own. Each produces a …

Identity And Urban Design: The Path To Meaningfulness In The City Of Concepción., Laura Yazmin Rodriguez

Focus

In her research leading to this article, Laura Rodriguez studied the urban design and place making qualities of the University of Concepción campus in Chile. Based on interviews with a select group of experts and field observations, the results indicate that the campus' strong meaning within the city image is partly due to its original conception as an overall consistent project and as part of the city grid and life.

Moor Movement: Automated Docking On Drought-Stricken Reservoirs, Daniel Beck

Landscape Architecture

Moor Movement establishes a mechanized docking system for unpredictable shoreline fluctuations on inland lakes and reservoirs. Due to climate change and warmer global temperatures, the threat of ocean level rise has initiated massive proposals to address the interface between ocean and man-made infrastructure. While this is a monumental problem, ocean level rise is not the only immediate threat. The recently declared emergency drought conditions in California are finally bringing attention to inland lakes and reservoirs. While ocean levels might rise 2-7 feet in 100 years, a lake could drop 100 feet in 5 years. What happens to access roads, marinas, …

Speed And Resolution In The Age Of Technological Reproducibility, Shawn Taylor

Theses and Dissertations

The rate of acceleration of the biologic and synthetic world has for a while now, been in the process of exponentially speeding up, maxing out servers and landfills, merging with each other, destroying each other. The last prehistoric relics on Earth are absorbing the same oxygen, carbon dioxide and electronic waves in our biosphere as us. A degraded .jpeg enlarged to full screen on a Samsung 4K UHD HU8550 Series Smart TV - 85” Class (84.5” diag.). Within this composite ecology, the ancient limestone of the grand canyon competes with the iMax movie of itself, the production of Mac pros, …

A New Suburban Elysium: A Headstone For The Dying Periphery, Samuel David Chertock

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The proposed “cemetery” and retail center for the Idora neighborhood of Youngstown, Ohio is the result of one research semester and one design semester. The design proposal arose from dissatisfaction with the architectural community’s propensity for using jargon and clichés when describing the contemporary suburban condition. Many critics and commentators understand suburbia through the lens of the postwar period. It has been suggested that suburbia was developed for use as a media weapon – and thus, at the conclusion of the Cold War, should have been rendered architecturally irrelevant. However, suburbia has remained stagnant. Design standards employed by developers continue …

Representing Rurality, Carolina Esther Jimenez

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Architecture is a system of representation. Architecture’s power is that through representation we may change previously constructed conceptions and misperceptions, and ultimately it can transform patterns of spatial inhabitation. Through words, images, drawings, and built work, we define modes of experiencing space. This project seeks to redefine Nebraska as a territory of critical social, political, economic, and physical importance through architectural representations.

Factors Related To Women's Undergraduate Success, Tanya Michelle Baker

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Play In Place: The Role Of Site-Specific Playgrounds In Community Space, Allison Nkwocha

Scripps Senior Theses

Playgrounds do not have to be static sites, but safety standards should not be the only force that guides their evolution over time. Just as the ongoing transformation of any city is a product of many interwoven factors, the collection of smaller sites that delineates one city from another should reflect the same holistic influences. This is not an argument for the abandonment of the safety standards that influence playground design. Instead, it is an argument for the adoption of and stronger adherence to community standards that influence city design. This paper argues that a park area (and more generally, …

Formerly Urban: Projecting Rust Belt Futures, Mark Robbins, Stephanie Miner, Nancy Cantor, Julia Czerniak, Darren Petrucci, Jane Wolff, Mclain Clutter, Hunter Morrison, Damon Rich, Toni L. Griffin, Don Mitchell

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

A two-day conference on the benefits of creating urbanity in weak-market cities gathers twenty-one international experts in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design, as well as planning, policy, finance, economics, and real estate development. Participants share strategies for cities whose urban character has devolved radically due to economic, demographic, and physical change - cities that are now considered "formerly urban."

Ralph Bunche Agape Neighborhood Vision Plan, Community Design Center

Community Design Center Project Reports

The Ralphe Bunche Neighborhood Vision Plan provides a general design framework to spur reinvestment in this 100-year old historic African-American neighborhood in Benton, AR. The plan aggregates attainable housing (under $100,000/unit) around two neighborhood parks―one existing, and one proposed. Since the city cannot afford comprehensive street and drainage improvements to accommodate redevelopment, the proposal retrofits streets and open space with Low Impact Development (LID) landscapes to remediate urban stormwater runoff. Housing unit types between 1,000 and 1,750 square feet are amassed around these LID landscapes and amenitized with screened rooms, balconies, terraces, and multiple-height living spaces.

Resistance: Contemporary Architecture:Sustaining Identity 2, Jim Roche

Articles

Economic globalisation has facilitated a glut of ‘spectacle’ works of architecture worldwide that often fail to celebrate the genius loci of places or the divergence of human culture. With the current crisis in world capitalism causing a meltdown in the mad rush to overbuild our physical environment it is pertinent to consider once again that architecture can actually contribute to a broader existential understanding.

A recent one-day conference at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London posited such a proposition. Curated by the Finnish writer and theorist, Juhani Pallasmaa and moderated by Jonathan Glancy, the Architecture and Design Editor of …

Green | Instruction, Christine C. Ritson

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

If society shows the need for a re-engagement with its surrounding nature in order to develop conscious environmental decisions, then a pre-kindergarten through fifth grade school, with the careful design and testing of materials, courtyards, and circulation strategy, will be the vehicle through which everyday decisions are taught at the earliest age.

Problem | Statistics | 20 percent of Americans go to school every day, equating to 55 million students and nearly 5 million teachers and staff. More than 25 percent of those students and teachers are going to school in inadequate facilities where their health is at risk.[1] …

Macarthur Park Master Plan, Community Design Center

Community Design Center Project Reports

Like waterfronts and transit stops, parks leverage value in urban areas. While much recent attention has been given to the signature mega-park, the value of the small-scale neighborhood park in reinventing the city has been overlooked. Once connecting neighborhoods of differing character, and sponsoring more than 80 residential structures along its edges, the historic MacArthur Park at the edge of downtown Little Rock is radically underutilized as an urban neighborhood asset. Severed from its neighborhoods along two edges by interstate construction in the 1960s, this moribund 40-acre municipal park is left with only 16 residential structures along its frontage. The …

Porchscapes: Between Neighborhood Watershed And Home, Community Design Center

Community Design Center Project Reports

Located on the Ozark Plateau, this 43-unit housing development is a LEED-ND (Neighborhood Development) pilot project to be built for $60/sf plus $2.3 million in infrastructure costs. The studio objective is to design a demonstration project that combines affordability with best environmental practices as designated by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). Porchscapes is a pioneering Low Impact Development (LID) project funded under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Section 319 Program for Nonpoint Source Pollution. LID manages stormwater runoff through ecological engineering technologies. A contiguous network of rainwater gardens, bioswales, infiltration trenches, sediment filter strips, green streets, and wet meadows …