Browsing by Author "Colman, Scott"
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Item 37+(2015-04-21) Trotty, William M; Schaum, Troy; Wittenberg, Gordon; Colman, ScottWalls are edges between two distinct entities; urban forms that attempt to express neutrality as infrastructure while firmly rejecting interaction between opposing constituencies. Walls are usually contiguous lines; establishing absolute boundaries and absolute limits. Belfast, Northern Ireland is no stranger to walls. Over 100 currently exist in the city as peace-keeping mechanisms separating Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods. These highly visible urban forms create parallel communities with parallel services; producing redundant infrastructures and multiplying territorial subjectivities. The City of Belfast wants all the Interface Walls removed by 2020, but the citizens want them to stay. Of the 100 walls, it is estimated that 37 will remain. As Belfast struggles to create a new marketable image for world of a city moving forward, the interface walls spread out across the city remain a marker of its conflicted past. But there may be hope for reclaiming the city, and in turn, pushing Belfast into a more transnational urban landscape. Unlike the Berlin Wall, the walls in Belfast are non-contiguous boundaries between communities; navigating the city means commuting around and through the walls on a daily basis. The Interface Walls in Belfast do not act as literal walls dividing the city, but as symbolic walls. And as a symbol, the meaning and function of the walls can change. 37+ proposes creating this shift in the symbolic nature of the Interface Walls in Belfast by introducing more walls; a network of 221 insertions in the walls that house schools, clinics, pubs, and parks. These new lengths of Interface Walls create a datum in the city that redefines the symbol of the Interface Wall as a divisive edge; exacerbating the multiplication of infrastructures and subjects to a positive effect through serial deployment of shape, materiality, and program. This new urban identity for Belfast acknowledges and rejects the contentious territoriality extant in the city, converting urban forms dedicated to separating communities into attractors for the city that negotiate contentious space.Item A Commons Lobby(2015-04-15) Biroscak, Samuel; Whiting, Sarah; Wittenberg, Gordon; Colman, ScottThe social context of mobile work has dissolved the physical dominance of the workstation. The city, once anchored and animated by the clockwork activity of the downtown office, today absorbs this mobile workforce within coffee shops, parks, and public spaces, blurring distinctions between spaces of leisure and spaces of production. As the most visible threshold between the office desk and the city street, the lobby is uniquely positioned to establish social forms of work as a generator of architectural form. By concretizing public/corporate blurring within a highly visible container in the city, A Commons Lobby leverages the social nature of the mobile workforce to reclaim the office as a hub of social activity and a laboratory for new types of work. Lobbies typically serve as a publically occupiable control point, welcoming visitors while restricting their activity, aiming to impress without inviting anyone to stay. It is a spatial type perpetually at odds with itself. The lobby’s potential to transform the office is no more evident than in San Francisco, where the exponential growth of the high-tech industry has led to an internalization (and economic stratification) of the social and commercial activity that once animated downtown streets. As a site, this thesis operates on a new San Francisco live/work district in need of a formal and programmatic counterpoint to the bland anonymity of the typical office. An increasingly mobile workforce places more, not less, importance on the context and urban implications of production. By opening up the lobby as an expanded threshold supporting social, commercial, and corporate program, a new workplace typology emerges to reestablish the office as an urban protagonist.Item Abounding Interiors(2014-04-24) Hergenroeder, Alicia; Wittenberg, Gordon; Witte, Ron; Colman, ScottWithin the history of the graphic plan, cell-based and wall-based plans comprise a dialectic of definition and openness. A new type of architectural project whose formal legibility operates predominantly in the plan has emerged and combines the logics of the cell and the wall. As a formal study, the abounding interior plan falls into this third category, leveraging the open-ended wall and the celebrated object-room. As a result, both implicit and literal forms define the abounding interior in which distinct formal configurations become legible depending on a perceptual bias. The design of the abounding interior posits that the plan drawing has value as a composition and as a generative, perceptual device. In fact, the graphic plan can exceed its two-dimensional capacity and create an architecture which upholds and elaborates that graphic character in a three-dimensional way.Item Agency : A Diplomatic Gap in Havana(2013-09-16) Batista, Maria; Colman, Scott; Hight, Christopher; Wittenberg, GordonThis thesis examines the territorial, spatial, and political Gaps inherent in the Embassy as program and type. Located in Havana, the project transforms such Gaps into an architectural strategy for the Embassy of the 21st century. An Embassy serves a practical and symbolic purpose. It administrates Visa applications, at the same time representing a country’s culture and projecting its political power. In an Embassy one country’s sovereign territory is embedded in the physical territory of another, making the Embassy the spatial embodiment of a political boundary. The exterior is charged with the politics of the boundary while the space inside is a neutral limbo – a territorial and political Gap. The Embassy is sited in Havana. A politically isolated country, Cuba provides a fertile ground to explore the changing Cuban-American relations. There is now the political possibility for diplomatic interaction, but without an American Embassy in Cuba, there is no physical space for this exchange. An Embassy is needed to facilitate Cuban immigration while at the same time engaging a new diplomatic relationship between the two countries. The time is ripe for a new Embassy.Item Along the Line(2015-03-12) Lu, Na; Colman, Scott; Geiser, Reto; Wittenberg, GordonThe thesis focuses on the plan and design of a new urban axis based on the HSR at the suburban town, Baohua town, along the HSR between Shanghai and Nanjing. With the HSR as an urban trigger, the project redefines the function of infrastructure as a public promenade. Through design and plan of the axis and the landmark space it connects, the future satellite city will not only embrace the resource brought by high-speed rail, but also rethinks and adapt vernacular culture and industry to create a variety of leisure and low-density spaces for the residents. The project redefines the relationship between city and infrastructure. The infrastructure is not simply designed for transportation, but transformed into occupiable public space. Through the planning of the urban axis, the infrastructure efficiently supports people to commute locally, regionally and nationally. Through architectural intervention, the infrastructure is designed to connect and blend into the landmark spaces. It become an urban promenade to experience the city.Item Amplifying Atlanta(2020-04-22) Nazli, Mediha Aylin; Colman, Scott; Finley, DawnEmerging from Atlanta’s historical rail line infrastructure, the Atlanta Beltline, a twenty-two-mile ring of multi-use trails, parks, and light rail system is shaping a new way of life within the city’s urban core. The Beltline is challenging critical issues such as suburban sprawl and traffic congestion through strategies of connectivity, walkability, and environmental sustainability. This thesis embraces these challenges, amplifies the city’s existing urban fabric and capitalizes on emerging infrastructure to provide a possible framework for the city’s future growth. This speculative framework provides a platform for a scalar approach to increasing density, implementing a patchwork zoning strategy, preserving prominent characteristics of the city, and prioritizing space within the urban core for a new type that represents the “missing middle”.Item Arctic Aerotropolis(2014-07-15) Glass, Emily; Wittenberg, Gordon; Hight, Christopher; Colman, ScottArctic Aerotropolis is a proposal for a new airport city in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. The ambition of the project is to investigate the urban and architectural implications of the aerotropolis (an airport that has effectively become a city apart from the metropolitan area it serves) as both an economic and architectural device for generating new local markets. In doing so, this thesis also seeks to expand upon disciplinary questions regarding the design of the airport and its typology. Nuuk, Greenland, population 16,000, was chosen as the site for this project because of its unique climatic and economic circumstances. Greenland is one of the few countries whose landmass extends deep into the Arctic Circle, and it has long been thought to contain a large portion of the region’s rare earth, mineral and oil deposits. Until recently, these deposits were inaccessible due to the thick Arctic ice but because of global climate change, they are being uncovered as the ice thaws. Implementing an international airport in a town of this size, one with very particular patterns of development determined by its extreme climate, unpredictable weather and little flat land is a challenge. I propose that it is possible to rethink the airport by situating it as close as possible to the town and locating its components in the city, thus using the airport to catalyze future development and investigate how architecture and urban design can inflect, engage and link with economic development. Greg Lindsay and John Kasarda write in their book Aerotropolis that “[i]n Amsterdam, home to the world’s first aerotropolis-by-design, Dutch planners have a saying: the airport leaves the city. The city follows the airport. The airport becomes a city.” In this case, the opposite is true. The airport comes to the city, and the city becomes the airport.Item Better Pedestrian City(2022-04-20) Zhu, Beixi; Finley, Dawn; Colman, ScottThe 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 technologies, culture has undergone a radical transformation that has yet to be reflected in the realities of the city. The proposal, based on an existing site in the Hongkou district of Shanghai, assumes current urban trends in urban circulation, demography, and density. By reimagining the movements and uses of the contemporary city this thesis envisions a possible new urban reality.Item Beyond Shelter, Situations of Connectivity(2019-04-17) Elamin, Mona; Wamble, Mark; Colman, Scott; Whiting, SarahSocial housing is often viewed as a pocket for the urban environment deterioration. It is typically designed with a sense of uncertainty as public and real estate policies have developed two strategies to deal with such projects; to reduce or to displace. Public criticism about social housing claims that it is incapable of embracing context, composition and the economy of its surroundings. Thus, various social housing projects were marginalized while pushing its unfortunate residents away from the city’s center. However, if social housing was addressed contextually rather than socially, it will allow for a more appropriate prototyping that mobiles the social market while allowing its residents to navigate the city creating an opportunity for investment and revitalization.Item Breaking Cycles, Building Connections: Rethinking Market Edges in Abidjan for Sustainable Urban Transformation(2024-04-17) Ndoumy-Kouakou, Isabelle Nora; Colman, Scott; Finley, Dawn; Jimenez, CarlosMy thesis focuses on markets in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, specifically the reworking of the edges of the Marché de Marcory to better serve the market, its people, and the city as a whole. The different elements comprising this new edge can be implemented in other markets throughout the city to reconfigure their edges as well. The ground floor of this new edge is dedicated to the market, incorporating infrastructure such as storage, sinks, and refrigeration spaces to support the day-to-day activities of the market. The first floor is dedicated to the women of the market and their children. Since the markets are predominantly run by women, and unfortunately, many of them lack formal education, they often enter a cycle from a young age. Initially brought to the market by their mothers, who are working there, they gradually assume more responsibilities and eventually take over their mothers’ stalls. This perpetuates a challenging cycle, making it difficult for them to break free as they, too, end up having their own children.Item C (cube) C (square): A Civic, Cultural and Commercial City Center(2017-04-20) Simhadri, Srijaya Sai; Colman, ScottCollective urban spaces have historically been a mixture of civic, cultural, and commercial programs. These urban spaces and the programs themselves benefited from their physical proximity and architectural integration. An intimate coexistence of C³ constituted the traditional city center. This formula for social and economic sustenance is well tested. However, in the present day megalopolis, segregated zoning and a shift toward the privatization of public space has changed the nature of collective urban space. Civic, cultural, and commercial institutions have been isolated; we no longer benefit from their mutual imbrication. This project uses an immanent shift in the scale of city-building to produce a new form of collective space that reintegrates C³.Item Cast of Civic Characters(2015-04-14) Altshuler, Joseph; Finley, Dawn; Wittenberg, Gordon; Colman, ScottThe Cast of Civic Characters is a civic complex for Houston that couples municipal service counters with other public amenities including an auditorium, dining hall, outreach center, gym, and pool. Each program is housed in a separate small building that takes on the likeness of an animate creature. The collective “herd” occupies a single city block. This thesis posits that creature-buildings intensify architecture’s communicative and storytelling potential; by soliciting a fictional vitality, they mythologize architecture’s agency and enable public institutions to craft narratives about their identities. Formally, each Character is generated from an extruded profile that is broken along a central seam, hinged, and partially rotated according to a shallow angle. This technique conjures an image-able figure that is graphic and immediate, but also temporal and modulating from multiple vantage points. The simple act of slightly rotating the elevation condenses both pictorial and sculptural perception into a single architectural form.Item Cincinnati Shuffle: Subhierarchies in the Stagnant Grid(2012-09-05) Westermeyer, Amy; Whiting, Sarah; Colman, Scott; Schaum, Troy; Wittenberg, GordonThis thesis investigates the use of an operational formal architectural strategy to reinvigorate instances of failing city fabric. By introducing hierarchy and nodal destination elements into the urban grid, the existing field is transformed into a network of catalytic centers. Frame is employed as a permeable mediator between the existing grid and insertion, creating a permeable superblock that is both contextual and stimulating. The Over-the-Rhine district in Cincinnati, Ohio, is one of these failing city fabrics. Directly adjacent to downtown, this once vibrant neighborhood has experienced massive depopulation and deterioration. It’s population has dropped from 45,000 to less than 5,000. Currently, 66% of the buildings in the area are vacant or have been demolished. Over-The-Rhine lies between downtown and the University of Cincinnati. There is potential in creating a growth corridor between these two poles through Over-The-Rhine, stimulating the stagnant grid. A nodal infrastructural transit corridor is inserted between Downtown and the University of Cincinnati. Stops along the corridor act as point insertions in the fabric, forming nodal hierarchy. Incision activates the existing context through connection, deploying both a top down and bottom up approach. It creates a large centralized entity framed by and connected to context. It creates a range of scales, allowing for programmatic variety, an urban characteristic that the enclave lacks. It is strategic in working with the fabric, mediating flows and taking advantage of the porous grid condition. Each incision, in order to successfully attract from both downtown and the university, contains programmatic elements from each pole. This integration creates a complex interaction of program, as well as new partnerships between Downtown and University entities. It is a new approach for both Downtown and the University to address the failing fabric between.Item Civic Superstructure: A Networked Public Sphere(2012-09-05) Chan, Timmie Tin Bik; Colman, Scott; Whiting, Sarah; Hight, Christopher; Wittenberg, GordonThis thesis’s networked public sphere - the Civic Superstructure - transforms the public sphere by reconsidering the pace and purview of the civic. Contemporary public institutions are typically disconnected and isolated islands dispersed throughout the city. Our fast-paced, plugged-in lifestyle, however, is evermore inconsistent with such inconvenient geographical dispersal. By incorporating isolated public institutions into a networked system, this project provides a connective layer across an existing site and takes advantage of the interstitial zones between private institutions to offer the civic realm in places where you least expect it. This sprawling network acts as a platform for accessing public services and information, while also providing a new common space for the public to meet, to learn, to play and even to protest — in short, to be a public, even in this most unlikely of places rendered newly civic through a combination of digital and physical access.Item Codes of conduct(2019-04-12) Yeung, Hannah; Colman, Scott; Finley, Dawn; Whiting, SarahHeterogeneous public space in Zuccotti Park, NYC.Item Combinatory Modular System for Integral Forms(2020-04-20) Cheng, Yuqing; Castellon, Juan Jose; Finley, Dawn; Colman, ScottThe relationship between form and structure is a topic that, historically, has been broadly discussed in the disciplines of architecture and engineering. Taking some of these precedents as reference, this thesis focuses on the development of a combinatory modular system that integrates expressive forms and structural principles. This is achieved through the implementation of geometric and structural parameters as well as industrial processes and material properties from the early stages of the design process. Through this design approach, expressive forms move away from personal and figurative references. Moreover, this modular system reevaluates the role of industrial mass production and the new opportunities offered by digital prefabrication methods through the development of a combinatorial assembly system of structural modules at multiple scales.Item Constructed Void(2015-04-22) Anwar, Nimet; Turan, Neyran; Colman, Scott; Wittenberg, GordonBeyond the notions of the natural and the urban, there has been limited speculation about the landscapes that are in between. These sites, ranging from dams, canals, open-pit mines or any other resource production landscapes, are vital components that enable our cities. These colossal resource extractions on the earth’s surface define a new kind of sublime of the artificial. It constructs a new type of curiosity, in which the public actively explores these voids, instead of solely seeking the traditional natural landscapes of the sublime. This pursuit of awe and wonder by the artificial has resulted in an increase of tourism within cities, transforming much of the city’s ‘residue’ into preserved landscapes, much like monuments of ancient civilizations, to encourage continued revenue for these sites. The mining industry in particular has transformed the excavation of these permanent forms into a temporary mode of production, therefore exponentially increasing the quantity of mines throughout the world. This thesis asks the question, once the temporary mode of production is discontinued, what happens to the permanent traces of production in the earth? Also, how does territorial preservation, beyond a sort of naïve nostalgia of these past forms define new futures for the present? The Big Hole Mine is one in a series of abandoned open-pit diamond mines in the city of Kimberley, South Africa. The exceptional quality of this mine is that it is an external element, which is internalized within the city fabric. This displacement defines a contestation of scales, the colossal mine at the territorial scale next to the intimate small-scaled city fabric. This thesis exploits the contrast between the giant and the miniature, to continually distort scalar perception. The university campus is confined to a thickness, which does not act as a transition between the small, medium, and large; rather it produces a delay to redefine how big is big.Item Cultivate Collective(2014-04-25) Yi, De; Wittenberg, Gordon; Vassallo, Jesus; Colman, ScottAnt tribes are a social phenomenon of young college graduates that group together in large Chinese cities, defined equally by their dreams of upward mobility and their precarity. They have achieved a critical mass and identity that has fueled widespread media coverage, and the combination of reality and utopianism that fuel their motivations make them a viable subject for an architecture that cultivates a contemporary collective. Throughout the twentieth century, architects have used mass housing as a testing ground for new forms of collective living, resulting in archetypical buildings such as Ginzburg's Narkomfin and Corbusier's Unite. While the necessity of such a project remains, the mode of operation has shifted. To defy the dense processes of privatization that govern housing today, architecture needs to operate from marginalized points of society, and create archetypes from which ideas can be distilled for the mainstream. Such a position allows architecture to pursue utopian ambitions through pragmatic causes. The Soviet Constructivists, operating in the utopian-pragmatic moment of realizing a socialist state, redefined the program (or life) embodied in housing and gave the resultant collective a representational form. Contemporary China is undergoing an equally radical social transformation, and while the dominant political structure is far too complex to reinterpret directly, there are many isolated moments of social marginalization that allow for architectural opportunism. This project proposal adopts the ant tribe as the prompt for a new archetypal housing block that cultivates a way of life for this multi-various collective. In addressing the human mass that comprises a contemporary subject, this project takes a new approach to its architectural equivalent - the mass of housing units. Here, the potential of mass unit aggregation in its organizational and symbolic capabilities is pushed to new limits and possibilities - straddling the same line as the ant tribe itself - between dreams and reality.Item DE-CENTER(2012-09-05) Kizy, Sean; Colman, Scott; Pope, Albert; Whiting, Sarah; Wittenberg, GordonDetroit continues to stand out as emblematic of failing urban economies, infrastructure, density, and form. But its spatially dominant urban relationships also provide the opportunity required to transform unsustainable, expanding megalopolises. Taking lead from the recently established Detroit Works Project, De-Center transforms existing urban conditions to propose a network of urban islands that respond to the extreme conditions created through modern planning. It demands that architecture and urbanism act as a single project.Item Deeply Superficial(2013-09-16) Searcy, Christopher; Schaum, Troy; Colman, Scott; Wittenberg, GordonThrough an exploration of the architectural aperture, this thesis seeks to abandon a representational understanding of the image and restore a more performative one. Architecture’s imageability – its capacity to create vivid and operative mental images – oscillates between two tendencies: the need to reflect a contemporary world view, and the desire to produce altogether new ways of seeing. Architecture’s history could be summarized as an endless cycle of the latter’s ossification into the former. In general, our recent paradigm is in a rut of representation. Whether we are championing the discipline’s political efficacy or acquiescing to the forces of capital, the architectural image is either pushed so far into the background as to be insignificant, or it is fetishized into an icon. This thesis defines a performative image as one which engages the user in a conceptual flip from the experience of space to the perception of an image, where depth momentarily snaps into perceived flatness. By examining the architectural aperture and focusing it onto the quotidian aspects of our lives – collecting and collapsing the world into fragmentary and simultaneous images – Deeply Superficial seeks to blur the distinction between subject and object, and collapse the relationship between publicity and privacy.