Other Architecture Commons^™

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 …

2041: A Communal Life, Nathaniel Thomas Danciger

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

I posit that an architecture of collective cultural spaces, shared human and animal habitat, and affordable local building techniques, implemented through the design of a co-housing community, would promote a collaborative and communal way of life in harmony with the natural landscape and offer a model for the future development of former agricultural and suburban sites in a manner preferable to the current practices of the American suburb. This project is concerned with redefining the way that people in the United States will occupy rural landscapes in the future. The site for this new co-housing model is a field outside …

The Manifest Narrative, Kelsey Requeña Devries

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

I posit that architecture can serve to expose the vital immigration, labor, and consumption processes underlying food production in the United States through a clear narrative made evident by techniques of sequence, mimesis, and composition in a functional monument containing an Immigration Advocacy Center, Community Garden, and Farmer’s Market for the city of Sacramento.

In architecture, narrative is the observation, interpretation, and implementation of ideas developed through stories. The architect formulates an observation about something in a society that exists or should exist in the form of a story, finds a time and place where the narrative is applicable, and …

Making By Taking: An Investigation Of Architectural Appropriation, Victoria Lee

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The project contends that explicit appropriation can be a legitimate method of architectural production. The scope encompasses four canonical works of architecture: Villa Rotonda, Villa Savoye, Fallingwater, and the Farnsworth House. These works are appropriated as the basis of a retrospective analysis and as the foundation for a speculative, generative design strategy. Following the height of postmodernism, the notion of explicit formal appropriation was characterized in a negative light, seen as inauthentic imitation. However, an increasing number of contemporary artists and architects are utilizing explicit appropriation and historical reference as a primary method of production. This mode of thinking can …

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.

Engaging Holistic Health Through Active Design In Public Space, Alec J. Hembree

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The design proposal for a health center and urban network of active pathways in Pittsburgh, PA is the cumulative result of two semesters of research and a partenership between myself and Emily Sholder (non-honors; B. Arch. May 2014). The ideas behind the research and design work included within originated from the pressing need to address physical health issues, educational shortcomings, and community disparagement present in many cities in the United States today. By addressing these issues at the scale of the individual, the school, and the urban environment through design in public space, we feel that architecture can empower people, …

The Knowledge Accident Situating The Built University Within The Virtual, Alanna Beth Rosenblatt

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Abstract

The increasing un-sustainability of the built university and the rise of the apparent mass democratization or synchronization of higher education through the virtual Massive Open Online Course [MOOC] is occurring concurrently with the mutation of the historically grounded Accident into the Knowledge Accident. The standardization of higher education through the MOOC has created the conditions for the Knowledge Accident, the “integral accident”, of the built university. This is where we find the present state of the university, in a moment of crisis grounded in unconstrained "progress".

The current form of the MOOC, begun in 2011, has expanded and evolved …

Five Rings To Rule Them All / Olympus The Architecture Of The Olympics & Global Media, Harsha Royyuru

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

900 million people across the globe tuned in to watch the London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony on television. The International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) own broadcasting division circulated over 100,000 hours of coverage to respective national networks, extending the breadth of the Olympic telecast into every one of the 204 participating countries. At the conclusion of the Games, more than 1 billion views had been recorded on NBC’s YouTube webpage specifically designed for Olympic coverage. In a time when occupation of space via digital media is the preferred method of experience, what is the agency of the architect? Stadiums once designed …

Guerrilla Tourism|The Anti-Resort In Cuba, Michael Kowalchuk

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Guerrilla Tourism: Between the Resort and the Casa Particular The justification for guerrilla tourism in Havana draws from the political experiences of the urban guerrilla movements of the 1970s which transplanted rural guerrilla strategies to the city. The same basic rules continued to apply: a working knowledge of the terrain and local communities, an ability to strike and retreat quickly and a network form of military-political power. The anti-resort is a collection of micro-hotels in the city that rely on public support programs and fit within communities instead of dominating them. The current tourist infrastructure of Havana is socially unsustainable: …

Technocarpet Supporting A Culture Of Congestion, William Andrew Weigand

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

No Abstract

Crisis Expo, Stephen Patrick Klimek

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The contention of this thesis is that architecture can create a venue for new forms or forums of civic and political engagement in a post industrial urban environment. Executing democratic processes of discussion, debate, and dissent is more important than the resolution to a given crisis. Yet in a world of impending crises architecture has yet to envision a truly contemporary form of assembly for the resolution of these issues by the Phantom Public. There is a politics of space because space is political⁴. Politics needs space. It exploits space as a resource, a site of debate, a …

Architecture For Disparate Communities In Transitional China: Urban Housing Stitch For Chinese Migrant Workers And City Dwellers In Rapidly Urbanizing Cities, Jennifer Hoi Ling Ha

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Problem:

Two housing types in China’s urban cities serve two specific demographics, the city dweller and the migrant worker. The high-rise and the urban village reside on the same block of land but cannot coexist. In order to save the urban villages from being demolished and to keep the migrant worker population within the city, there needs to be a more appropriate and aggressive housing concept to address China’s “changing contemporary social reality” between the two demographic.

Methodology:

The first step is to understand the two typologies of housing. Through the study of migrant housing typologies in different major …

Conspicuous Space: Parking Lot Suburbanism, Ian Nicholson

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

What can be accomplished without a car? In a city: everything. In a suburb: nothing. Without a car, one cannot escape the city. Without a city, one cannot escape the car. Neither city nor suburb is an ideal habitat. The city has no nature. The suburb has no culture. What’s good about the suburbs over the city? According to economics: houses.

The American dream has long been “one’s own house with a private yard” (Nelesson xi); an acre and a mule for every free citizen. But this dream has created distance; a nightmare of endless commutes and oil addiction. What …

Urban Fabrication: The Architectural Heightening Of The Urban Tactile Sensibility A Fiber Arts Fabrication & Exhibition Center In Dublin, Ireland, Elizabeth Fallon

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The discipline of fiber arts has been in existence since the beginning of civilization to produce both functional equipment as well as aesthetically driven art pieces. The craft, at times highly specialized, often produces elements at the scale of the human body, due to the personal level by which fiber artifacts are produced. The making of artifacts and implementation of fiber art strategies have simultaneous cultural, environmental, formal, and gender-related relationships and implications. The design, construction and experience of buildings and inhabitable space at all scales can benefit from these relationships.

It is the contention of this thesis to merge …

Undermining Impasse: The Role Of Architecture In The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Laura Ondrich

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Undermining Impasse: The Role of Architecture in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Abstract

Laura Ondrich

Architecture is political, in that it can be used to further an authority’s agenda, and the relationship between peoples under that authority can be affected by it. As the political tool of a ruling power, architecture in a place of ongoing conflict may propel the conflict and submit to its perpetuity at the detriment of participating peoples. Though politics are often considered intangible, certain conflicts exist in real space, thus there is an opportunity for architecture to create an influence. In this case where architecture - concrete …

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] …

The Naturing Spa: Recovering An Ecological Kinship With Newtown Creek, John Jedzinak

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Abstract not Included

Design Outfit An Interdisciplinary Think + Act Tank, Douglas Jack

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The Design Outfit is a real project derived from a conceptual program. The program, or set of concepts from which the project sprang, critically approached three aspects of design practice:

I) reality: how design proceeds from initial sketches to finishing touches, with all steps and scales given comparable attention

II) collaboration: how designers interface with one another and others throughout a design process

III) social awareness: how designers can shape and place their efforts in relation to social significance

The project was designed to explore and test these aspects of design.

Based at Henninger High, a public Syracuse City school …