Thesis Prep

School as Community Center: Redefining the relationship between the community and the school in Minsk, Belarus

Kate Talkachova — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 10:03:29 PST

"A society that values education should place emphasis on the facilities and incorporate in them the values and progress, not blindly stick to the traditional. For a country fighting to regain its identity, it is important that the divisions between the neighborhoods are blurred and a sense of a whole is created. With the school as community center, education remains the central focus, as well as provides the necessary link to the surrounding neighborhoods, becoming more than just a physical center, but an activity center as well."

Mind the Gap

Beryl T. Johnsen-Seeberger — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 10:03:28 PST

"I intend to create these appreciative moments in the context of desired program in the Long Beach Area. Long Beach offers a unique opportunity of density of modes of transportation, and types of people by touching on a major highway, the Port of Long Beach, and an active riverfront. The highway in question, Interstate 710, is one of the most clogged roads in Los Angeles. A major commuter route, it starts at the proposed site. The Port of Long Beach also has a rail yard and loading docks, as well as the start of its major freight train corridor on the site. The port expects its traffic to increase, but is also being held back by the congestion in surrounding channels. By tapping into the rich diversity of transports, and taking inspiration from Los Angeles love of theatre, I hope to draw attention to the community of the city."

Waiting and the Architecture of Pre-Occupation

Grant Davis Foster — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 09:33:53 PST

"Architecture can accommodate the condition of queuing by spatially translating the factors that make it a positive experience, ultimately increasing human psychology and curing the city of toxic waiting space."

Midnight City and Other Urban Mythologies

Mark Eichler — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 09:33:52 PST

"Midnight City explores the physical and representational framework of fantastic architecture as a productive mode for architectural and urban design, specifically focusing on the nocturnalized city as a space of exaggerated fantasy and escape from the mundane of the diurnal."

(Re)Creating the WorldGame: An Architectural Exploration of Risk

Lynsie Cantwell — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 09:33:50 PST

"The ultimate goal of the project is to create a "game stadium" where all the risk factors and building methods can be tested one by one or all at once on real buildings and building components. A stadium of this nature will allow the United Nations to test its structures on a country by country basis in order to aid the nations most at threat before a risk becomes realized, while still keeping the facility itself safe from harm. In this way, the project will live up to Fuller's own approach of being comprehensive, anticipatory, a design strategy, and a science-based methodology that works to benefit all of humanity."

TWENTY FIRST CENTURY FORM: Disrupted Continous Surface

Wiqas Ahmed — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 10:12:13 PST

"In order to respond to the needs and demands of the twenty-first century, dual architectural thinking must be abandoned in favor of form & multiplicity. Here form should act as a canopy under which multiple functional aspects including programmatic, performative, cultural, economic, historical, geographic, infrastructural, and climate considerations can coexist simultaneously. Form can no longer be thought of as a counter argument to function, visa versa, but rather as an independent medium in which function operates. Since function is now defined as multiplicity, consequently, form becomes the study of the method of articulating multiple conditions. There may be several ways by which form can act as a tendon between different aspects but the condition I want to explore is of jump cuts and sharp breaks in continuous surface projects."

Architecture of the Virtual Corpse: National Lifetime Archive

Will Stattman — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 10:12:10 PST

"I believe that architecture cannot continue to ignore new technologies and their spatial, social, and tectonic consequences, and must incorporate them in order to stay pertinent. Additionally, the boundaries between the physical and simulated can be blurred to unite the human experience. We have acknowledged some aspects of this crisis, but architecture must fully respond formally, organizationally, spatially, ideologically and conceptually. I’d like to explore these implications within a new Architecture."

Rurality Within the City: a study of the interrelationship between urban and rural areas

Suho Lee — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 10:12:09 PST

"My project proposal is to produce a new type of contemporary self-sufficient architectural place to deal not only with the economic and education issues that the rurals are lacking in but also with environmental and unemployment issues that the big cities are lacking in. While it is important to retain the countryside feel in the current suburbs, some issues to improve on for the new city area are to cater towards a younger generation’s needs. As opposed to those who are retired and are looking for a quiet place to settle down for the rest of their life in the suburbs, those moving out of the cities are looking for jobs, education for their children, and an affordable but satisfying quality of life."

Deconstructing the American Embassy

Stefan Kaiser — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 10:12:06 PST

"Contemporary diplomatic functions have outgrown the typological embassy building. The barricaded sidewalks and streets are evidence that additional space is required to conduct business safely. Retrofitted embassies in London, Paris, and Berlin expand their security perimeter into the urban condition to maintain the architectural icon of diplomacy. New embassies should utilize the contested zone between the building and the city instead of relocating in rural neighborhoods. It is the purpose of this thesis to enable functional and symbolic diplomatic exchange at the location of intersecting sovereignty."

Architecture Power: Towards a New Transparency of Energy infrastructure

Shaun Leon Selberg — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 10:08:04 PST

"Over the last 150 years our landscapes have been defined by the production and transportation of energy. A complex network of railroads, canals, highways, tunnels, bridges, and viaducts are the result of energy consumption and the distancing of negative or unaccepted effects of energy to remote places. Deforestation and TV broadcasting reveals the scars of energy abuse and displays catastrophes and disasters in real time. Our ordered energy landscapes, defined by their separation and reliant on a level of invisibility, now appear to invade the ‘terrestrial skin’ and are signs of infection and waste. 1 Crippled by the necessity of energy and the incessant documentation by the media, the architecture of energy is forced into visibility."

Simultaneous City

Robert George Little — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 10:03:37 PST

"The description of something happening, often of significance, can be understood by the word ‘event.’ I am not interested in the notion of a large gathering with cocktails and food on toothpicks; instead the kind of event that shapes the city. Since the beginning of man’s conscious creation of the built environment, there has been a combative relationship between the human and physical world. “There is no architecture without action, no architecture without events, no architecture without program. By extension, there is no architecture without violence.” Bernard Tschumi discusses notions of event in his essay “Violence of Architecture.” He describes two distinct orders, the order of architecture, defined by rigorous geometry and ideal spaces, and the order of the human, which is loosely defined by a field. By taking a hierarchical position on an order, it can be forcibly intruded on another. The reaction, human bumping into walls or corridors too narrow for large crowds, becomes the event of violence. Simultaneous Cities exists independently of each other but inhabit the same physical world. At the moments when two or more of these conceptually independent cities collide, a point, building, block, or park become the resulting site of event."

Political space: an opportunity within the Lima food system

Santiago A. Dammert — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 10:03:37 PST

“I propose a more complex project composed of hybrid programs that reflect a deeper analysis of the site and its relations to the city and its food system, as well as programmatic interfaces that result in interactions between the different users to be located there, without compromising the market’s need for efficient transactions. An other important factor is time. Since market activities tend to take place at different times than more generic office hours within which most people work, it is important to design program with time slots in mind, generating not only spatial interfaces but chronographic interfaces”

SURPASSING SPECTACLE: architectual representation & image-based society

Patrick Ruggerio — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 10:03:32 PST

"The project will critique current modes of operation by a linear problem-solving design process. By acting through representation as both a vehicle for developing design and as a means of communicating and experiencing it, the project will engage the design of a tactile deployment of architecture and effective means of communicating its intent. The architecture will function in the way that the visual arts do in terms of their scale and engagement in cultural issues. Research into tangible artifacts of the site will yield a combination of image, drawing and model forms of representation. Through this analysis, a strategy of intervention will be established and provide foundations of instillation-scaled project. The project seeks to engage production by culture, rather than a discipline of site-specific problem technical solution."

Sourcing Scarcity

Muneerah Alrabe — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 10:52:10 PST

"Water is an essential element to human development and urban vitality. As a response to future oil depletion in cities, a new appearance of water emerges in cities: Hydro-urbanism. Through rethinking the potential of water infrastructure in cities, HydroUrbanism situates itself as a spectacular functional event that aims to collect, purify, store, and generate energy within a city. The project reconsiders the production process of water on the periphery of the city and hypothesizes for an integrated process of the production of water to work within the city at an urban scale. Exposing the water infrastructure, fantasizing water, and re-connecting the people back to the element of water. This project will not try to solve an energy problem; instead it is an attempt at looking at the latent potential of a combinatory system of water and the city to create a public and an industrial infrastructural archetype. It is an attempt at exploring methods of imprinting a hybrid of spaces that facilitates the engagement of the society, the urban infrastructure (water infrastructure) and the natural elements that could benefit the city in terms of energy, water access, and public space."

HOUSING INDETERMINACY: Responsive Design for Diverse and Changing Households

Mark Sousa — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 10:52:09 PST

"This project hopes to create a new outlook on the future of housing design. Ray Forrest wrote, “The pace of demographic change need not be that dynamic to outpace the capacity of markets or states to provide appropriate dwellings in appropriate locations. […] Dwelling placement or adaptation is always likely to lag.”2 The preceding statement reflects the belief that housing is static and rigid, and that dwelling replacement or major structural adaptation is necessary to accommodate a continually evolving population. On the contrary, responsive housing can release significant pressure on housing systems by anticipating change and providing a lower cost alternative. The development of mixed-household dwellings leads to increased socio-economic diversity, thus increasing the potential for healthy, vibrant communities."

RE-THINKING THE GREEN BELT: SUSTAINABILITY AND DEVELOPMENT IN GROWING CITIES

Maria Saavedra — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 10:52:08 PST

"One of the major goals of this research is to study the relationship between nature and technology as urban generators. I agree with Lisa Tilder and Beth Bostein, who state that instead of using architectural technology to return nature to some impossible, pre-human pristine state, we should consider fully employing the power of architecture to produce new forms of nature. Instead of thinking about the River’s edge as a natural and physical barrier between the water and the city, we should consider it as an opportunity to challenge the image of nature, exploring how it limits or furthers our social desires. A reconceptualization of the River’s edge will help to both establish a more specific control over flooding and create new social spaces that enrich the urban fabric and strive for a sustainable development. This vital realm of the city shouldn’t be ignored during developing process, however, it should be considered a priority equal to that of create the incorporation of new architecture and infrastructure, in order to establish a city that serves all of its inhabitants- both the current residents and those still to come."

REPRESENTING THE EXPERIENTIAL, THE ANTICIPATORY, AND THE UNREAL

Laya Pattana — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 10:01:37 PST

"The methodology will be tested in the cinema type because of its promise of escapist hyperreality. It is spatial, highly personal and privatized, and firmly anti-architecture. Because the film is self-contained, its space is irrelevant. The representation of experience can be reclaimed as a design strategy to activate the movie theatre typology--a typology that architecture has long since lost."

inFormatting Architecture: incorporating urban public space into private infrastructures to create didactic environments in the information age

Lionel Camacho — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 10:01:37 PST

"inFormatted ARCHITECTURE incorporates public spaces into the data

center’s existing infrastructure to create didactic environments in the

information age"

FORUM CONTEMPERANUEUS: re-connecting society through public interaction

Jonathan Bruno — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 09:56:34 PST

"This new typology will serve a great social significance

in any city it is placed in. Its ability to gather and withhold a

large number of people is its fundamental importance. Today’s

society has lost its interactivity. Through digital technologies,

more and more of us are glued to smartphones, laptops and

tablets. If this trend continues without any intervention, it will

result in us living “along together.” The public forum was the first

feature of any and all forms of “civitas” for thousands of years.

We are responsible for bringing this urban feature back to our

contemporary cities before it is too late."

THE TECTONICS OF TURNING THE CORNER: A New City Hall for Boston, Massachusetts

Hilary Barlow — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 09:56:33 PST

"In today’s society, the relationship between architecture and political

behavior is largely undetected. Such is the case with Boston, Massachusetts’

present City Hall, where the brutalist structure was once believed to broadcast

Boston’s power and importance however time has shown it to be an unengaged

object in Boston’s historical landscape with a plaza devoid of activity. This

project proposes a new city hall and plaza design for Boston that proves through

the lens of the corner, physical architectural attributes can make Boston’s City

Hall a successful civic space that embodies Boston’s history, democracy and

public."