Other Architecture Commons^™

Suppression | Liberation: Memorial To The Lgbtq + Holocaust Victims, Justin Difabritis

Architecture Thesis Prep

Architecture + poetry are powerful forms of creativity, both exemplifying beauty, symbolism, emotion, and experience through structure + form. This thesis is interested in poetic architecture and its ability to not only narrate, represent, symbolize, or express, but also eternalize, the story of groups, individuals, and events.

Through the analysis of, but not limited to, memorials, tombs, and monuments, a deeper architectural understanding will be offered, one of architecture’s ability to emotionally affect others as a means of remembrance.

This research will focus on the literal + symbolic narrative and experience of the LGBTQ+ victims of the holocaust, placing a …

My Abject Body: Dissimulating & Disheveling Fleshy Matter, Taylor Hoople

Architecture Thesis Prep

Body (as subject) and space (as object) are polarized entities in modern discourse and design. The current epoch of hygiene, control, and mass-production/ consumption renders the body and the space(s) it inhabits as whole, discrete entities. In their totality, body and space are idealized opposites, failing to experience any messy overlaps or ambiguous in-betweenness. My feminine body is particularly subject to this dualism, being tightly bound to the legal and social patriarchal dominance over my body’s autonomy and appearance.

This thesis seeks to corrupt my hyper-aestheticized and policed body by making (with) abject( ion). Understood both as an ongoing condition …

Incu-Bus: A Live-Working Internet Incubator, Muci Yue

Architecture Senior Theses

The framework for this company includes three main components: development, human resource, and finance. In the Finance aspect, it is an Internal circular economy; people Only can use credits for food or all the resources. Development and human resource are taking part in evaluating employee's work, rand and deciding their credits. It is running in the winner take all system. The company only provide living space resources or facility. The Worker: produce internet/mobile-related profitable ideas. The Venture capitalist: provide funding to the company but also discover the potential project for early stage.

Terra Dispositions: A Lithospheric Investigation Of Wet-Matter, Alec Rovensky

Architecture Senior Theses

Human intervention of the landscape by damming, filling wetlands and over-extracting is resulting in the rapid perversion of water bodies through the desertification or flooding of terrain and the ensuing contamination of reservoirs. In turn, these changes are disrupting ecosystems, reshaping geological borders, and causing irreversible damage that poses a threat to clean water supplies. As humans exert agency over local hydrology, there is scarce consideration of the ensuing ecological consequences. This thesis aims to expose the ecological transformations of territories laced with human agency by examining the residues left by water in order to deviate from the misplaced nostalgia …

Living Memories: Rethinking Remembrance, Timothy Mulhall

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis will interrogate conventional types and methods of memorialization, challenging the memorial as a complete product. Developing from inquiries into alternative acts of commemoration, this investigation will seek to conceive a memorial in the making. Memorials must be alive, changing, constantly developing as a result of interaction. The reliance on overly abstract, rhetorical conditions of design will become obsolete. The static condition of the image-friendly object will be replaced with a dynamism influenced by time and participation.

Socializing Vacancy: An Architectural Thesis, Greg Winawer

Architecture Senior Theses

A large portion of office space has been left vacant, and thus provides no beneficial program to its remaining occupants or the local urbanity it is surrounded by. When considering what can be done with this vacant space, the primary motivation should be to integrate a program which does the opposite: a program which positively disrupts its existing context to hybridize and improve the current outdated programmatic arrangement. To insert a residential program into an existing office tower both disrupts and enhances the rigorous flows of our working and our domestic lives. The predefined universal concept of the ‘working-day’ is …

Contaminated Mycoscapes: Designing With Living Organisms, Maria Gutierrez, Elise Zilius

Architecture Senior Theses

The Anthropocene has stripped the planet of its resources, leaving behind an abundance of contamination. The built environment no longer meets the standards set by our turbulent planet. Humankind has lost the privilege of agency in design and construction. Construction methods have failed to evolve concurrently to the intense accumulation of waste; remaining firmly rooted in the materiality of the past, they have upheld architectural notions of stagnancy, cleanliness, and hygiene and ignore the rapidly changing conditions of the environment. This investigation uses contamination to fuel mycelial growth and construct emergent forms whilst executing remediation strategies for polluted sites of …

What Will Future Housing Be Like After The Covid19- Pandemic?, Ahmad Ai-Dafar

International Programs

This poster discusses how the Covid19-Pandemic has influenced rapid changes in housing design trends with a greater focus put on the multiple uses of interior spaces. The post-pandemic house will be ready to serve as an office, a school, a park or even a meditation space. It will have to operate independently making it possible for inhabitants to generate their own electricity and water and grow food.

Spatializing Erasure: Forging A New Commemorative Typology, Sarah Quinn, Isabel Munoz

Architecture Senior Theses

Spatializing Erasure is an investigation into and a critique of current traditional memorialization techniques and the erasure of counter-historical narratives from the urban fabric. We are seeking to use architecture as a lens to critique our current socio-political climate by employing techniques of memorialization, sensationalism, and certain spatial tactics relating to memory onto the typologies of the courthouse and the archive, actively reinforcing memories of trauma, injustices, and activism onto a typology that has historically been negligent towards its contribution to systemic erasure and oppression of counter-history. This project aims to impose the collective memory of erased narratives onto the …

Occupy, Nitya Charugundla

Architecture Senior Theses

Union Square, originally called “Union Place,” was a former site for public forum, parades, public addresses and much more. However, the newest design of the park that can be seen today has attempted to make a space that is far less conducive to public forum and assembly than it once was. This thesis seeks to change that and allow for Union Square, as well as a news media center, to be a vehicle for public forum once again. The public space will be used as a vehicle for different types of forums, protests, and even public address in conjunction with …

Uncomfortably Numb, Camila Andino, Daniela Andino

Architecture Senior Theses

Modernist Architecture is characterized by its ambition to miraculously heal the “diseases”1 of society. Along with this desire to heal, “Design was formed as a way to deal with the increasingly dominant logic of the industrialized and globalized world while resisting the perceived dehumanizing impact of the world.”2 This pursuit of numbness has always been at the center of design. It reveals the complicity between design and capitalism. Following the shock of the war and the machine age, design sought to fight the negative climate of the world around them. No outcome is prescribed, but it is desired. With this …

Alternative Shelters, Sukhmann Kaur Aneja

Architecture Senior Theses

In the spring of 2018, a small group of homeless people took shelter underneath the scaffolding at 1441 Broadway in Times Square after a massive rainstorm made its way through New York City. They hung their wet clothes on the steel bracing and slept on unfolded cardboard boxes. This makeshift encampment lasted for a few days before the police officially kicked everyone out.1 Two years before that, homeless New Yorkers set up a similar camp underneath the scaffolding in NoHo. Residents of NoHo blamed a surge of local construction for the implementation of sheds under which people could hide out.2 …

Speculative Spoliation: Spolia As An Instrument Of Locus Making And Identity Mediation, Amelia Gan

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

This thesis puts forward the provocation to employ spoliation as a form of preservation and as a tool of locus making and identity mediation. This is done by syncretizing architectural artifacts and remnants from different timelines, oscillating between operations of defamiliarization and memorialization. This thesis test and explores its contention on a site of contested memory, where the idea of reclaiming cultural ownership is done through a formal, spatial and orderly spoliation. The artifacts ‘on site’ and ‘off site’ is relayed through different mediums and dimensions through parameters of resolution and assimilation.

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 …

Proximate Environment, Prominent Impact, Stephanie Portmann

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Proximate Environment, Prominent Impact looks closely at the history and development of learning environments, and, more specifically, early childhood classrooms. While there is much debate around teacher versus child centered learning and pedagogies that have developed in the past century, this capstone focuses on the immediate environments of classroom spaces. I use history, architectural case studies, and scientific research to discuss the ways the physical environment of early childhood education classrooms can impact learning, well-being, and behavior.

Hatch Is Hatch: Building Building Drawings, Thomas Kuei

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The relationship of drawings to built architecture has changed drastically with the advent of technological advances that have automated drawing practices that once required skill, time, and effort. The focus of this body of research is on the hatch as an image-making tool, examining its current relationship to the translation from drawings to buildings. This paper will explore the implications of the hatch’s complex history in relationship to the mediating technologies and techniques through which they have been produced to recapture lost intention with the use of the hatch today. The paper will then focus on the hatch’s capacity to …

Infrastructure As Fabric: Integrating Autonomous Vehicle Highways In Urban Environments, Samuel Dye

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

In an age of advancing transportation technology, the redevelopment of I-81 in Syracuse will be a local condition set as a blueprint for infrastructural solutions at large. This will be done through increased density and a pedestrian friendly environment to repair urban fabric and sprawl. The project accepts highways and viaducts not as barriers of the city but as a seam – an anchor that the city develops around. This research paper will first lay out the scenario to which new infrastructure can succeed in positively reshaping the urban environment. Secondly, this paper will dive deeper into the effects of …

Adaptive Typologies For Permanent Crises: Options For Rehabilitating Aleppo, Katherine Barymow

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

There is little doubt that the Syrian civil war has catalyzed what experts and onlookers now consider the greatest humanitarian crisis in the 21st century. Per the UNHCR, the UN Refugee relief agency supporting refugee camps across the globe, roughly half of Syria’s 22 million pre-war population has been displaced, most which have fled to neighboring countries of Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and beyond to seek refuge. 13.5 million of these people, whether unable to leave their homes or awaiting permission to do so, are in dire need of international support from non-for-profit relief agencies struggling to provide basic necessities of …

Zones Of Entanglement: Nigeria's Real And Imagined Compounds, Joseph Godlewski

School of Architecture - All Scholarship

This article is part of TDSR, Volume XXVII, Number II, 2017

From the article abstract: This article examines the architectural and discursive configurations of traditional walled compounds in Nigeria. It begins by discussing the spatial and social organization of compounds in different regions of the country, focusing on the impermanent structures of the Èfik in and around the southeastern port city of Old Calabar. It then examines archival evidence to highlight the ways that compounds have been rhetorically constructed by European observers and post-independence scholars. It concludes that a more productive reading results from understanding the compound as a zone …

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 …

It's Not Easy Being Whole | Reevaluating The Relationship Of Part Whole In Pursuit Of A New High-Rise Vernacular, Josh Bransky

Architecture Senior Theses

Architecture has the power to structure societal relationships. Specifically, architecture's form can bring the balanced relationship between community and individual identity, as exhibited in vernacular single-family homes, to the housing tower. This thesis plans to achieve such a social orchestration through a nuanced understanding of formal part-to-whole relationships, or "differentiated" parts within the whole, exhibited in a 300' housing tower in Seattle, WA.

By carefully balancing the relation, material, scale, and form of each part, this project will achieve this difficult whole (of differentiated parts). Mining this middle ground will produce a housing tower in Seattle, which actively balances the …

Multidimensional Dialogue Through Architecture | An Exploration Of The Possible Dialogue Between Humans And Walls, Fengqi Li

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis proposes that architectural design no longer has to be primarily static, but rather it can be dynamically responsive to multiple information streams and conditions.

Multidimensional Dialogue Through Architecture is developed from the understanding of human factors and ergonomics. The dispersed works on research and inference are different ways to explore the interaction between the discipline of architecture and the other fields, such as psychology, engineering, bio-mechanics, physiology, cognitive science, and anthropomorphic. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is not to design a specific building that works perfectly in particular conditions but rather to use architectural elements to mediate …

The Allopoiesis Of The Urban Artifact And The Palimpsest Of Context, Cristina Abondano

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis contends that Pathological Urban Artifacts , as defined by Aldo Rossi, could be made Propelling through Allopoiesis in combination with the palimpsest of the urban context. The proposal consists of a dialogue between the two strategies of growth, aiming to reconnect the Artifact to the city.

Allopoiesis is the process by which a system produces something other than the system itself. In this thesis, allopoiesis is the mapping of the artifact’s underlying geometry as catalyst for urban development.

Rossi sees in the Propelling Urban Artifact a formal structure that confirms the presence of the city and persists through …

Total Fiction | The Artifice And The Armature, Anrai Pearson

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis views architecture as a total fiction. It aims to explore the representational and communicative qualities of the architectural surface. Architects have always abstracted raw materials in order to create a larger conceptual basis for architecture but the relationship between abstraction and reality has not always been concrete. In the past, ideals of “truth” and “authenticity” have played a central theoretical role in defining how architects approach building. For example, John Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc decry various forms of material deceit, in favor of an authentic and truthful architecture. Alternately, architects interested in the communicative agency of architecture have questioned …

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 …

Atlas Reimagined | Richter, Flusser, Architecture, Blake Capalbo

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis is built from the materials of Gerhard Richter's "Atlas," a collection of 802 image plates (and couting) that the German visual artist has been assembling since the mid 1960s. Comprised of newspaper cuttings, sketches, drawings, photographs, and paintings, "Atlas" is both a companion to Richter's other work and a work in and of itself.

Atlas Reimagined applies the theories of Vilem Flusser, the late 20th-century philosopher and theorist of image and media, to Richter's work to devise alternative forms of architectural imaging. Richter's "Atlas" when examined in terms of Flusser's distinction between technical and traditional images becomes a …

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 …

Subtraction | Construction In Reverse, Sherina S. Zhang

Architecture Senior Theses

The life of a building does not begin at the creation of the new; it starts with the subtraction of the old. As the pace of technological development accelerates, buildings are erected and demolished at an unprecedented rate. Cities use their urban artifacts like skyscrapers, to portray economic and political prowess. For example, the ghost cities of China are relics of a burst financial bubble while Venezuelan ruling party elites name business towers after themselves as a show of power and prosperity. Many parts of the world today are now overbuilt with artifacts that decline into obsolescence. Demolition procedures erase …

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 …