Urban, Community and Regional Planning Commons^™

Corporeal Meeting Place, Brandon Maldonado

Architecture Senior Theses

"The modernist movement was able, through the industrial revolution, to eliminate the role of facade as load bearing member, fetishizing transparency. However, this new preeminence of visuality was not applicable to the suburban home, with its predisposition toward the creation and control of privacy. What separate the suburban condition from the urban, in addition to the role of the single-family home as purchasable symbol representing an ideal, is the front yard. Instead of a simple A-B division across a singular surface, the yard creates a "deep" facade, a series of layered spaces serving as filtration' sidewalks, fences, plantings, yards, and …

Informal, Scott Reynolds

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that architecture can offer agency in new forms of urban relationships to engage the edge condition between formal and informal, critical to the success of today's in-situ slum up gradation and integration to the formal city. Dismantling the spatial segregation will socially, economically, and politically integrate the two cities for sustainable growth of the metropolis."

A Sacred And Secular Landscape: Empowering Social Agency, Shreya Shah

Architecture Senior Theses

"I contend that landscape can provoke an idea for a productive, public space using the people of the city as social agents to create a sensitive rather than oppressive water remediation system. By inventing a program that uses landscape as a water remediation space as well as landscape as a religious and social space, the project will exhibit the idea that social agents can inform a change in the water pollution crisis."

Technocarpet: Supporting A Culture Of Congestion, William Andrew Weigand

Architecture Senior Theses

"The TechnoCarpet is a public space sited in a future of resource scarcity, climate disruption, and urbanization. It provides support facilities and cultural amenities necessary to sustain super dense urban populations. I establishes an internal frontier for the city as a means to provoke density, by creating an escape from it. The TechnoCarpet is a model for parks in the 21st century."

Reconnect The Urban Surface --- By Making Landscape And Infrastructure, Ming Gao

Architecture Senior Theses

Today in the post industrial city, the connection between different places relies mostly on transportation by way of automobiles, public buses, and subway. By walking or biking, people are able to talk with nature directly. However, by modern transportation, people are confined in a close machinery space which prevents them from experiencing nature directly. They are separated from nature by consciously choosing to use modern transportation during their daily lives, and they get less and less direct access to nature. Nowadays, nature experienced space within walking distance int he city is limited to the tiny front yard garden, where landscape …

The Architecture Of Resistance: Pivoting The Informal Economy, Michael Langone

Architecture Senior Theses

"In the struggle for growth, the architecture of informal commerce is complicit in the perpetuation of an impermanent and uncertain existence that favors acquiescence over resistance. More is required of it.

An architectural intervention can provide pivot points upon which to direct the flow of unregulated commerce and subvert state-sponsored efforts to peripheralize it."

Conspicuous Space: Parking Lot Suburbanism, Ian Nicholson

Architecture Senior Theses

"Locating neighborhoods of housing in currently underutilized surface parking lots which serve successful commercial shopping centers and big box stores can synergistically improve the American suburb by allowing opportunities to maintain the suburban idea (rugged individualism, privacy, and mobility) while mitigating its problems (automobiles dependence, distance, and isolation)."

Bridge_Works, Chris Driscoll

Architecture Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

Bridge_Works, Chris Driscoll

Architecture Senior Theses

Building typologies are generally well defined and functionally specific. A church is for worship, a house is for living, and a theater is for performing. In certain instances, these basic building typologies have been combined to form composite structures such as mixed-use housing/retail projects, or a house on a boat. The opportunities created by composite typologies have allowed for broader economic development, more complex and integrated programming, greater utility and richer social structures. A specific combination of typologies--the mix of infrastructural bridge with housing/retail/public space--has produced a few historically successful models[...] Over time, the bridge was developed from a simple …

Fragmented City: The Intersection Of Surrealism And Urban Reality, Lauren Hackett

Architecture Senior Theses

"The concept of the experience becomes relevant in the surrealist view of the city. It is one that has been embraced by the situationists in their concept of the derive. The psychological understanding of urban space can supersede the retinal understanding of rationalized space. The search for truth within the city is what guides a civilization toward absolutism.

In treating the city as a field for discovert and the formulation of ideaas and pure thought, urban space enters a realm of surreality."

Connective Ecology: Reclaiming The Postindustrial Urban Landscape, Thomas Smith

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis contends that by considering the urban landscape as an evolving interconnected network, much like an ecosystem, architecture can create flexible, accessible public space as part of a larger scale system which affects as well as responds to specific physical and social forces of the contemporary postindustrial city.

33.3% - Creative Entrepreneurship In Buffalo, Ny, Bruce Molino

Architecture Senior Theses

"This work has emerged out of an interest in the idea of the resilient city. It is an experiement intended to test ideas and suggest ways in which to reconsider architecture within a directed urbanism. Directional urbanism is a term that I use to describe how insertions can redirect or reinvent the trajectory of a city. This thesis privileges resiliency as the objective of that new trajectory; not as a moment of realization, but rather a continually changing adaptive process that allows cities to act, and react, in a constructive way."

Mps Movement Public Space, Matthew R. Kanewske

Architecture Senior Theses

"Portland provides an opportunity to examine the way this can relate to formal construction because cities' primary sites of public spaces will be integrated with the flows of movement, but this creates a dichotomy between the nature of site as a singular entity and the requirements of multiplicity required by a system. In this lies an opportunity for architectural invention of new forms of communicative public space."

Building Urban Texture, Fernando Pabon-Rico

Architecture Senior Theses

"This investigation is based on the contention that a city is made up of an urban construct where certain elements are continuous in their presence. This continuity provides legibility to an urban environment. The fact that elements or parts are an integral part of the legibility of the city fosters the reading of the city as a function of their integration. The role or place of architecture therefore lies on the formation of the city through its parts."

Suburban Adaptability: Urban Context, Joshua Seidner

Architecture Senior Theses

The urban environment historically fosters anonymity among urbanites denying individual expression, user flexibility, and family adaptability. The result is the draw to the suburban house model which inherently concedes ones' expression of individual identity. The urban landscape has historically formed with the core and periphery. Over the last sixty years the periphery has harbored the creation of suburbia. Traditionally, the urban landscape has, and continues to suppress individualism and flexibility to create uniformity and homogeneity[...] Arguably by default, suburbia creates a basic template which the end-user can customize. On the contrary, the urban environment does not foster the ability to …

Roosevelt Island: Completing An Urban Community, Karin M. Kilgore

Architecture Senior Theses

The thesis became an architectural exploration of what makes neighborhood and community at two scales: at the scale of the city (macrocosm), represented by the urban plan; and at the scale of the individual (microcosm), represented by the concept of the house and housing. At these two contrasting scales, the main focus of the study was to explore how an urban design can shape community and to explore the role that housing plays in the making of urban fabric/neighborhood. These two main issues of urban planning and housing prototypes, and the set of questions they generated, became the framework for …

Sensitive Urban Mass, Thomas Zoli

Architecture Senior Theses

Even with little remaining industrial presence in Amsterdam, NY the relics of industrial prosperity still hold an important urban identity. They represent the city as it was originally designed. I propose that by reprogramming a large section of integrated, industrial urban fabric, it is possible for the city to reclaim its identity and grow. Most early American industrial architecture is inherently urban. only later when planning boards purged industry from the city center because of the side effects if an industrial core, did the evolution on the industrial satellite city emerge. The mill (grist, textile, powder, etc.) was the urban …

Civic Pride And The Urban Monument: A Study Of Places For Public Assembly, Jeffrey C. Shumaker

Architecture Senior Theses

Imagine a city where people gather in the streets by choice and not by chance[...] What better place is there to witness society at its fullest than in our cities[...] The privatization of the public realm has proven to be destructive for both the city's physical form and its social structure[...] This leads us to the discussion that becomes the reason for my writing this thesis and, ironically, becomes for me the most obvious illustrations of the present urban predicament. The city is in desperate need of a civic architecture[...] a civic architecture is one that is created for the …

A Proposal For Pisa: Cisanello, Andrea Martinelli

Architecture Senior Theses

An Urban Design proposal for the city of Pisa, Italy

"The problem o be addressed is the renovation and revitalization of Cisanello.... Cisanello, as defined, has so far been dealt with only in bits and pieces, in parts of the whole, which have been determined in an unfortunate and sometimes questionable manner."

Harlem On My Mind, Shawn L. Rickenbacker

Architecture Senior Theses

The thesis involves directly establishing a coherent dialogue between participants and architecture. The site and architecture involved are only a catalyst to the area it is representing, Harlem. However, the project will have the responsibilities of designating itself as a primary theshold to the famous ditricts and attracting would be participants. It is for this reason the program of cultural progress centre has been chosen in the interest of providing a stimulation program. The intention of the proposed centre is not to compete with the district or communty in which it lies, but to act as its subordinate. This will …

A Gateway To The Campus, Caterina Frisone

Architecture Senior Theses

"The thesis proposal is the design of a master plan for Syracuse UNiversity. The S.U. Campus was my vehicle to experiement and apply the ideas and principles derived from my previous historical research and urban analysis: The subject of these two, in fact, has been the American College Campus, not only as a type of Architecture Planning, but also as a reflection of the american educational system."

Urban Stadium, Eric Moss

Architecture Senior Theses

Certain major urban elements have been pished into suburban environments to the detriment of cities. The thesis proposed that through investigating the implications of reinserting such a building into the urban condition, it can be demonstrated that both the city and the facility will benefit. The vehicle is the design of a public building which must mediate between its needs and its urban conditions. The project therefore should have a program which has specific requirements and the site should have a strong urban dynamic.

Rejuvenation For Manhattan's West Side, Richard J. Kahn

Architecture Senior Theses

It is the intent of this proposal to redevelop a specific waterfront site, rejuvenating the area into one that people will want to be a part of, rather than shy away from. It will be through thorough exploration and experimentation of this special site condition (pier) that this will be achieved. It is intended that this proposal will develop a catalyst that willl generate further development along the zone of the water's edge. This catalyst will attempt to break away from the form and function of the existing pier buildings, which will make the further development of these sites a …

East Village Housing New York City, Alice J. Raucher

Architecture Senior Theses

The intent of this thesis is to develop low-rise, high density urban housing which will provide its occupants with the basic amenities of light, air, and green space, while reconstructing and extending the fabric of New York City into an area of the East Village.
There exists in the East Village, as in other areas of Manhattan, an uneasy relationship between the low-scale rowhouses and tenements [...] and the monolithic architecture of the superblock housing developments of the 1950s. These rowhouses and tenements [...] provided few amenities for its inhabitants.
The proposed development would investigate new housing prototypes for a …

Hotel In Nyc By Christopher Ruck, Christopher Ruck

Architecture Senior Theses

A hotel located in New York City.

Thesis Board, Britton Award Winner.

Thesis Proposal For An Austrian Embassy On The Via Gulia In Rome, Martin Dermady

Architecture Senior Theses

"The basic premise underlying this thesis is my conviction that we have lost sight of the traditional relationship of architecture and the city. The cause of this loss is obvious when we compare cities of the past with those of the present. Urban spaces have become more and more abstract and less articulate. The prevalence of the parts over the whole has reulted in the weakening of the urban spatial structure."