Archinect - Features

Perceptions of Safety: Weronika Zdziarska Questions Urban Design and Its Impact on Gender-Based Violence Experienced by Women in Cities

2021-09-27T11:43:00-04:00

How safe can one feel in a city? To be more specific, how safe do women feel in the city? While discourse around public space and the perceptions of women's safety in urban and rural areas have been an ongoing topic, one student utilized her appointment as the 2021 RIBA Norman Foster Travelling Scholarship recipient to expand on these issues. Weronika Zdziarska's research proposal, "Don't Stay Out Alone: Addressing women's perception of safety and freedom in cities by design," focuses on urban safety and how better design strategies benefit the well-being of women as well as others. She adds, "special attention is devoted to design solutions that successfully evoke the sensation of safety and freedom."

Zdziarska explains the reason for her research stemmed from conditioning women around the world are all too familiar with when it comes to public spaces and cities. During our interview, she shared that her intention was to explore a topic important to her. She dives into her own exp...

Tulane School of Architecture Graduates Reference Haiti's 2010 Earthquake to Address The Importance of Essential Infrastructure Design For Disaster Relief

2021-08-18T09:00:00-04:00

On August 15th, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti. With news still unfolding, at the time of publication, over 1,400 people have been confirmed dead and over 6,000 injured. However, this isn't the first time a massive earthquake destroyed homes and impacted lives within the region. For this iteration of Archinect's Summer 2021 Thesis Review, we connected with B.Arch students Jorge Blandin & Joanne Engelhard. The duo from Tulane School of Architecture used their thesis project "A Developing Framework - Rethinking the Displacement Housing Crisis in Developing Countries" to explore how to approach essential infrastructure and affordable housing after a natural disaster like the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

Blandin and Engelhard's thesis project question the excessiveness within architecture and the disparity between accessible and functional architecture that also fosters community development and equity. The duo explains, "The 2010 earthquake in Haiti damaged and destroyed 295,000...

University of Toronto M.Arch Graduate Jessica Ying on "Reading Between the Lines" of Architectural Drawing

2020-06-24T12:15:00-04:00

Jessica Ying is a recent M.Arch graduate from the University of Toronto John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. Archinect connected with Ying to learn more about her final project and its focus on architectural drawings' power. According to Ying, "digital design culture places great importance in the design process for emerging architects; our method of generating new possibilities in architecture depends on how we are using our digital design tools. Yet, drawing remains the primary instrument to realize our imagination into reality, a form to express our visual thought in the process."

Ying talks of her process behind her thesis project, Reading Between the Lines, and her inspiration to explore line drawing geometries due to Giovanni Battista Piranesi and his Carceri drawing series. Ying also shares her thoughts on what she hopes the future will bring as a recent graduate during the pandemic.

Archinect's Spotlight on 2020 Thesis Projects: 2020 has been an ex...

A Day At Space Saloon: Exploring Experimental Architecture in the High Desert of California

2019-06-26T12:54:00-04:00

Tucked between Palm Springs and Joshua Tree lies the Morongo Valley. This desert landscape may be an obscure location to hold a week-long student workshop. However, if there is one thing architects like Arata Isozaki and Albert Frey have taught us, it is that the desert is often a perfect backdrop for exploring materials, form, color, and spatial design.

The non-profit organization founded by Danny Wills and Gian Maria Socci provide a unique design laboratory experience for students to collect, explore, research, and experiment new potentials for design education. Not only do the students have the ability to prototype, build, and engage in transdisciplinary forms of architecture and design knowledge, they are also able to engage with practicing architects through site-specific projects. This year's Space Saloon experience titled "FIELDWORKS" allowed students to question various processes and techniques through data and data application.

Nader Tehrani on Thesis and Its History at Cooper Union

2018-11-18T09:56:00-05:00

On Tuesday, October 23 2018, The Cooper Union opened a new exhibition entitled Archive and Artifact: The Virtual and the Physical, presenting 50 years of undergraduate architectural thesis projects by students of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture. Immediately before the opening, Donna Sink and I spoke with Dean Nader Tehrani about his perspective on the tradition of thesis, and how the new show reflects Cooper Union's 50-year history of undergraduate thesis under the direction of Hejduk, Vidler, and himself.

This story was originally published last year. We're re-featuring it today in light of Cooper Union's recent unveiling of The Student Work Collection.

A Conversation with Jack Stewart-Castner on Architectural Jekyll and Hydes

2018-11-15T12:41:00-05:00

Thesis Review is a collection of conversations, statements and inquiries into the current state of thesis in academia. Thesis projects give a glimpse into the current state of the academic arena while painting a picture for the future of practice.

Each feature will present a contemporary thesis project through the voice of those that constructed it. This week, we talk to Jack Stewart-Castner about his thesis, "Rend, Mend".

At USC's 'Homeless Studio', Students Work Towards Real Solutions to the City's Homeless Crisis

2016-11-30T12:21:00-05:00

Just a few miles from the University of Southern California campus, Skid Row contains a significant portion of the homeless population of Los Angeles, a city in the midst of a declared state of emergency with nearly 47,000 people in total living in shelters and on the street. For R. Scott Mitchell and Sofia Borges, two instructors at the USC School of Architecture, this city-wide crisis demands an architectural response. “The homeless are always thinking about architecture. It's time we started thinking about them,” they wrote in the syllabus for their course, Homeless Studio.

Student Works: 'Ensemblespiel' Makes Uncanny Architecture from Everyday Objects

2016-10-25T12:07:00-04:00

“In an ensemble, the tone of a singular instrument becomes difficult to distinguish at the moment when all of its players strike a note,” explains the German-born, LA-based designer Paul Krist, a recent graduate of the Southern California Institute of Architecture’s M.Arch II program. “Each sound vibrates to produce a unifying harmony, an emergent sensation.”

The students behind 'Liquid Shard' – a dynamic sculpture for downtown Los Angeles

2016-08-22T10:05:00-04:00

Liquid Shard was raised on July 28, 2016 as the product of the students of the Los Angeles Visiting School of the Architectural Association in London (AAVSLA) and Poetic Kinetics, an L.A. based company specialising in large-scale art installations and experimental design.

SCI-Arc students step out of the studio to build an affordable, eco-friendly home with Habitat for Humanity

2016-07-25T09:56:00-04:00

It’s not that often that architecture students get to actually build a house while still in school. But a class of SCI-Arc students led by faculty member Darin Johnstone got to design and build a new home—and an affordable, eco-friendly one, at that.

One student's solution to the permanent limbo of refugee camps

2016-06-08T08:37:00-04:00

As conflicts continue to rage in the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere, millions of people have found themselves without papers, a state, or a home. Architecture is directly implicated in this humanitarian crisis—providing shelter is, after all, a primary onus of the disciple—and it’s taken notice, as the projects rolling out of Venice make clear.

An alternative, smart "Homestead" for Kansas City

2016-06-06T13:43:00-04:00

What makes a truly smart city? Just as importantly, how do designers help revitalize older urban cores without repeating past mistakes that led to displacement and inequitable urbanism? These are some of the questions raised in Andrew Bruno's master's thesis project for the New Jersey Institute of Technology, submitted to May's open-call for equitable architecture proposals.

Student Works: Questioning monumentality at Cal Poly Pomona

2016-01-29T11:41:00-05:00

What defines a monument? According to “The Heresy of Function, Reprise,” a senior project studio at Cal Poly Pomona run by Frank Clementi (of Rios Clementi Hale Studios), the essence of a monument isn’t based on its utility (or overt lack thereof), but rather its intangible qualities or “meaning.” In order to investigate the apparent meaning of a monument, this Student Works explores the metaphysical import and power of various famous monuments by attaching architectural “prosthetics” to them, applying a programmatic addition to “create a complete, if however incongruous, symbiosis of function and meaning.”

Student Works: Cellular Tessellation pavilion lights the way in Sydney

2014-12-30T13:15:00-05:00

Part of an 18-day arts festival in Sydney, Australia, the Vivid Lights pavilion explores the pedestrian dynamic in touch and light. A collaborative research effort led by the Abedian School of Architecture at Bond University, the Vivid pavilion Student Works puts a human scaled experience in conversation with local architectural icons.

Student Works: "Townization", a new Chinese urbanization paradigm from the GSD

2014-12-26T10:43:00-05:00

It would be something of an understatement to say the last thirty years of urbanization in China have been rough. Rapid and often unsustainable growth made newly transitioned cities difficult to maintain and economically fraught, burdened by their own heft. So when the Chinese government revised its strategy in 2013, it focused on more subtle and adaptive goals. Dingliang Yang, an urban planning student at the GSD, has a plan to make sure that happens.

Student Works: This house made of trash teaches a lesson in green housekeeping

2014-08-04T10:10:00-04:00

The Waste House at the University of Brighton's Faculty of Arts is stated to be the UK's first permanently built home made of over 85% discarded materials, including 20,000 toothbrushes, 2,000 carpet tiles, and 4,000 plastic DVD cases. But its focus on student involvement in realizing the house is also worth noting. The project leader, BBM Architects' Director and University of Brighton Senior Lecturer Duncan Baker-Brown, collaborated with a total of 253 undergraduate students, apprentices, and volunteers in the designing and constructing of the Waste House. As students experimented with new applications for these everyday materials, they also learned that it doesn't just have to end up in a landfill.

Student Works: Fantasy and reconstructed realities in MIARD's "Interior Atmospheres"

2014-07-30T17:56:00-04:00

Sometimes, 3D models and sectional diagrams aren’t the best means for an architect to communicate their design. Sometimes fantasy and memoir take the reins, motivating a different approach run by personalized narrative, exhibited solely through images. A couple of standout theses from the Piet Zwart Institute’s Masters of Interior Architecture and Retail Design took this route, creating studies of interior spaces steeped in memory and new possibilities.

Student Works: 3D printing the new millenial domicile with UCLA and HUD

2014-05-16T11:20:00-04:00

Taking a minimalist approach to both design and production, students in UCLA’s 3M futureLAB studio condensed micro-housing to an even smaller scale, with their 3D-printed, one-person, transportable housing unit. Conceived for the ideals of a fiercely mobile young professional, the full-scale model measures a lilliputian 4.84sq meters, and manages to include a multi-media interface in addition to a bathroom, kitchen and bedroom.

Student Works: "[X]City: Making Interior Cities" from the Piet Zwart Institute

2014-03-20T16:59:00-04:00

Focusing on a defunct submarine wharf in the Port of Rotterdam, students in the Masters of Interior Architecture and Retail Design program at the Piet Zwart Institute explored whether interior design can give way to urban redevelopment. As part of last fall's [X]City studio, students proposed a spectrum of redevelopment strategies for the wharf, varying from commercial to artistic to recreational.

Student Works: Tectonic Studio from Tsinghua University

2014-03-07T11:03:00-05:00

The “pop-up” shop has long been a steadfast option for small-scale enterprises to sell their wares, creating a flexible and relatively cheap venue for businesses. The challenge is to build space that is not only efficient, but mobile and expressive of that business’ personality. Students at Tsinghua University in Beijing were tasked with just that, designing and building three distinct pop-up storefronts on a tight budget, over the 8-week “Tectonic Studio”.

Student Works: "Eidos" Housing Project - GSAPP

2014-02-23T21:56:00-05:00

The “Eidos” housing complex collapses communal and individual extremes into a ruthlessly mathematical structure, that somehow manages to be both homogenized and personalized at once. The building structure is equipped with its own means of production, enabling new spaces to be grafted into the old, all at the whim of the inhabitants, but in the restricted formal algorithm of the building.

Student Works: rub-a-dub's "Space Oddity"

2013-12-05T11:01:00-05:00

“Space Oddity” meditates on what architecture can be in deep space. In such an indifferent and inhospitable vacuum, architecture as static form loses meaning, and must instead rely on a self-sustaining momentum of adaptable materials.

Student Works: Resilient Public Housing from Parsons

2013-11-06T15:05:00-05:00

Responding to a daunting list of post-Sandy urban concerns, M.Arch students at the Parsons New School for Design proposed a variety of affordable housing complexes in an under-developed patch of Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Student Works: "Saltworks" from Washington University in St. Louis

2013-10-02T20:21:00-04:00

Finding inspiration in the genetics behind a giraffe’s neck, students at Washington University in St. Louis used parametric design methods to build a flexible piece of public furniture for the university campus.

Student Works: Building Soft takes on the L.A. River's infrastructure

2013-08-23T21:30:00-04:00

SWA’s Summer Student Program challenges students to reconfigure established systems of infrastructure and landscape, adapting regional developments within a preexisting cultural environment. In its fifth year, the program has dealt mostly with California’s diverse terrain, and now turns its focus to the bedraggled yet beloved Los Angeles River. Seven students from universities worldwide join SWA for four weeks of on-site practice, followed by five weeks of internship in an SWA studio.

Student Works: AI | AA Athens & AA Istanbul Visiting Schools 2013

2013-06-17T12:15:00-04:00

by Elif Erdine (AA Istanbul Visiting School Program Director) and Alexandros Kallegias (AA Athens Visiting School Program Director)

AA Athens | Istanbul Visiting School (AI) defines architecture as "an art of suppositioning ideas, architectural principles which are being performed repeatedly". Its foundations lie on combining theory and practice and shared knowledge, with the goal to go beyond individuality and address today’s challenges via dialogue.

Student Works: Singapore University of Technology and Design Library Pavilion

2013-06-13T20:30:00-04:00

The Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) library pavilion is located on a sloping lawn on the temporary Dover Campus.

Accommodating three mature trees and forming a noise barrier toward the Ayer Raja Expressway in the north, the gridshell structure of the pavilion harnesses the site constraints and activates an outdoor space behind the existing library building.

Student Works: Beyond Prototype

2013-03-21T13:27:00-04:00

Beyond Prototype is an advanced digital fabrication seminar developed at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation by Jason Ivaliotis and Nicholas Kothari. This course focuses on the development of hybridized, folded meshes that simultaneously serve as both structure and building envelope. Students develop parametrically controlled tessellations and transform them into building component systems that can be built using conventional sheet stock materials. These tessellated systems are extracted from the digital realm and built at full scale.

Student Works: New Horizons Iceland Expedition

2013-02-04T14:01:00-05:00

In late November 2012, London's The Bartlett School of Architecture Unit 3 embarked on an expedition to Iceland.

Warmed by the Gulf Stream, endless geysers and caught between two major tectonic plates, this land of endless volcanic activity is also home to Europe's largest glacier.

Twelve 2nd and 3rd year students designed, built and tested a series of shelter/surveying devices to research and charted varied aspects of Iceland.

Student Works: The Petropolis of Tomorrow: Drift & Drive

2012-12-10T01:11:00-05:00

Drift & Drive proposes a new model of water-based urbanism by readdressing the technological and logistical challenges of offshore oil extraction. Our project is a solution to the desire on the part of Petrobras, the Brazilian petrochemical company, to relocate workers offshore, as rigs are established ever further from the coast, increasing the transportation cost of both workers and oil.