School of Architecture
Collections in this community
Recent Submissions
-
Perpetual Care
(2023-04-21)Cemeteries are spaces where life and death are rendered materially. Despite death’s omnipresence, American burial customs are rooted in outdated traditions that push burial spaces to the outskirts of our cities and the grievers into spaces of isolation. Attitudes toward death have changed radically, and we need more democratic practices and new spaces ... -
Dirty Assemblies
(2023-04-19)This thesis is a critical analysis of the existing building culture in Houston, including the material choices and lifespans that make up the current conditions. Rather than accepting the anonymity of construction materials and practices, this project disrupts the seemingly inevitable inertia of these norms. This project speculates about an alternative ... -
Power Stack
(2023-04-21)This is an urban project that seeks to redesign the value of energy infrastructure. The obsolescence of oil and gas in Pasadena, Texas provides an opportunity to critically examine how energy infrastructure might be used as a net-positive urban agitator. How might we use infrastructure as a medium for progress? By considering not only what the ... -
Cultivating Commons Adaptive Reuse of a Parking Garage
(2023-04-19)ABSTRACT Parking garages are part of the invisible infrastructure of urban centers. Tectonic masses that are relatively unnoticed until needed. Interest in alternate transportation and urban planning methods make them increasingly obsolete, leaving the skeletal remains to assume a new identity. They are situated on desirable real estate, ... -
Reflective Expansion
(2020-04-22)By putting the performance space between two service poché spaces, in front of a reflecting surface: Glass, and tuning light effect on both sides of the reflective surface, the definition of performance is expanded to include the daily behavior of the audience’s self, neighbors, and people on opposite side of the reflective surface. While the depth ... -
counter-franchise^tm
(2021-01-26)This thesis counters the existing model of fast-food franchising by addressing private property, real estate speculation, and the myth of trickle-down economics through a subversion of an existing architectural typology. The intent is to create something that is both local and global as a result of a typological change in spatial product which, at ... -
-
Black Bridge: Reclaiming the Public Ground
(2022-04-22)The construction and the removal of big urban forms are operated by massive quantities of human labor and material movement, but their presence in the city has been mostly erased. The workers often live in these uncharted grey zones at the city’s periphery. In return for their labor and production, what the migrant workers get in their temporary ... -
Engagement with Aging
(2022-04-19)Both buildings and their intended uses have finite lifespans. Standard architectural practice typically favors a fragmented view of time, one that fails to acknowledge the unpredictability and tension that arises from the aging of materials due to neglect, weather or appropriation. Decay is often met with disposal or nostalgia-induced commodification, ... -
Paradise Waiting: Shaping Experiences of Wait via Piraeus Port of Athens
(2022-04-21)Design of a multimodal transportation hub that engages with the phenomenon of waiting -
Missing Middles
(2022-04-18)Toronto is a major city in Canada that displays many of the characteristics of global cities. In a context where many large cities around the world are experiencing affordable housing scarcity, this thesis develops a new methodology—using Toronto as a case study—for architecture to insert itself in dialogue with extra-disciplinary forces shaping ... -
Lingering
(2022-04-21)This thesis explores what it means to address a space of lingering through a former industrial site and its surrounding neighborhood in Houston’s Greater Fifth Ward. Addressing the discomforting or unwanted lingerers as well as the innocuous and overlooked lingerers – ranging from the toxic industrial waste that persists in the groundwater to the ... -
Better Pedestrian City
(2022-04-20)The image of high-rise buildings sitting on an isolated island has become the desired format for new urban developments in Chinese cities. This thesis proposes a new kind of city, that by freeing the ground plane of traffic and commerce, permits the realization of urban qualities unexpected in the current metropolis. In the time of new media ... -
Room(s) for Care
(2022-04-20)Room(s) for Care explores an alternative housing model with a focus on two seemingly disparate Norwegian populations. Seniors (pensioners) and young individuals who came to Norway as unaccompanied minor refugees often face similar challenges of loneliness and isolation due to physical and cultural/social factors respectively. The project departs from ... -
Vaults in Deserts and Swamps
(2022-04-22)The project aims to promote urban agriculture and create new public spaces that introduce play, fresh produce, and entrepreneurial opportunities for historically disinvested communities. By developing a multiscalar structure that serves as a vertical farm, outdoor classroom, and distribution center / local store, the project aims to help introduce ... -
Rites of Passage
(2022-04-21)This design for a material-focused culture center monumentalizes the use of timber, and catalyzes a change in the way forest resources are distributed while creating new ties between the local community and its resources. -
Architecture Sans Commodity: Food, Construction, & Social Capital
(2022-04-21)This project investigates the architecture and social implications of the modern grocery store. The design of a food cooperative in Houston's Fifth Ward considers site, context, and building obsolescence through building tectonics. -
The Heart of the Texas Triangle: Strategies for Open-Landscape Preservation
(2022-04-22)The interurban landscape of Central Texas is undergoing a rapid transformation as metropolitan centers reach out to one another along the interstate highways of the Texas Triangle. Rural communities, farmland, and ranchland are quickly subsumed by low-density suburban development that is oriented toward the economic needs of Texas’s major cities. ... -
Hydrosocial Spaces
(2022-04-19)This project concerns the many forms of water in Houston. Existing in dual states—referencing Ivan Illich’s H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness—water is both life-giving and treacherous. Houston’s water exists as a resource for living and playing, in its parks, bayous, and public pools. Alternately, water threatens life and property, as the city has ... -
RSS 1.0