R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "El-Dahdah, Fares"

Browsing by Author "El-Dahdah, Fares"

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A museum for a small town
(2007) Ervin, Dewey; El-Dahdah, Fares
What role does a museum play in small towns in the United States? This thesis uses as a case study the town of Florence, South Carolina (population 30.248 in 2000) and proposes a design for a museum in the former commercial district of the town. By assessing the developmental trends of the town and its infrastructure, a site was chosen that reflected the desire of the town to retain and/or establish an identity through its built environment. Though suburban trends have moved the commercial activity and residential centers of the town away from the historic commercial district, interest in revitalizing the old downtown has led to the construction of several cultural facilities in that area, including a new public librany, a new playhouse for the local acting troupe, and a new performing arts center for the local university. This thesis acts upon this trend by choosing a site in the old commercial district, and further integrates an existing building, the abandoned public library, into the design. The problem of dense parking requirements in the former pedestrian infrastructure is considered.
Alley Memphis
(2006) Igarashi, Reiko; El-Dahdah, Fares
As the Memphis downtown saw the wane of the cotton trade and the death of an active Mississippi Riverfront commerce, it also witnessed the emergence of an unsanctioned, extremely successful trade of music, leisure, entertainment, and culture in its in-between spaces. In this context, the alleys of Memphis provide the concept for a uniquely Memphis, extremely urban approach to planning within the historic Memphis downtown; one that can meet the river's edge rather than merely gaze upon it, and can be applied incrementally yet absorb the city fabric, and its history, on a larger scale.
Amphibious landscapes
(1999) Fisher, Lynn Lucille; El-Dahdah, Fares
The ground in Houston is a shifting landscape of heavy clay soils, flat topography, and intense rainfall. When this environment is overlaid with fixed, man-made infrastructures, the two systems interact to exacerbate natural phenomena such as subsidence, faulting, and urban flooding. In response to an investigation into the relationship between Houston's infrastructure, its ground, and its climate, this thesis proposes the development of mid-scale flood control basins. Retention basins in the Houston area exist at the two scalar extremes: very large, regional facilities, and small, scattered, individual ponds. Generally, these facilities are not only inaccessible when flooding occurs, but also divorced from their surroundings; they are not designed to be used even when dry. In contrast, the proposed basins are enmeshed with a range of programs and infrastructures, designed to simultaneously accommodate urban life and water, and work to create a fluctuating character and intensity of program and activity.
Amplified encounters at high speed
(2011) Sibley, Rebecca Marie; Pope, Albert; El-Dahdah, Fares; Schaum, Troy
This thesis expands upon the dialogue between speed and architecture, investigating how architecture reinterprets the linear city, originally defined by the continuous fabric of the freeway and more recently reconfigured by the high speed rail line. Using the linear city as a site of exploration and high speed rail as a ground to test new typologies of architectural insertions at amplified speed, this thesis produces an extended civic space along the proposed high speed rail line connecting Tampa and Orlando. Combining a series of performance and commercial programs, this new typology will make the obscured visual experience along the extended territory of the rail line legible, through a sequencing of specific architectural intersections, exploring how monumental civic space will be made and occupied in the sprawl of the American city.
Architectures of pestilence: Smallpox, tuberculosis, and the spatial control of epidemic disease
(1998) Davis, Diana Kay; El-Dahdah, Fares
By examining the spatial dialogue that arose to reconcile the opposing figures of smallpox and tuberculosis, it has been possible to trace a spatial or architectural transformation in which methods for protecting the body from disease have evolved into methods for protecting disease from the body. However, given that the threat of pestilence has always inspired defensive strategies based on redundancy, this transformation may be traced not only as it was unfolded at the scale of the individual body, but at the scale of the building, the city, the international network, and the natural order, as well. In separation out the products of these various scales of defense and allows them to read independently, it has been possible to show how solutions follow from the representation of the threat: the problem of pestilence having always been, however, that there was, at any time, more than one representation.
Boxing domesticity
(1997) Traeger, Stephen E.; Lerup, Lars; Pope, Albert; El-Dahdah, Fares
As society evolves so should its housing. Today's family is diversified, mobile and subject to change, while the typical detached single family suburban house remains the same. Bound by economic constraints, mortgage/ insurance practices, tradition, and history, the suburban house has been resistant to change. It was designed with a particular type of consumer in mind and therefore has a particularly familial grain to it. It seems to work marginally well for most families who meet the specified two parents, 2.5 kids, and a dog consumer profile but breaks down for that family which does not. It therefore becomes necessary to repackage the house and offer an alternative - yet another new model. Something that functions more like a garage or loft while hinting at a new domesticity. The garage marks the beginning of the investigation. The house and garage once separated for various reasons, have migrated and merged. Since the latest mutation, the garage has been contained within the house. The project reverses this relation by locating the house within the garage. The contained becomes the container, the recessive becomes the dominant.
Capsizing the flagship: A study in PHARMETICS
(1999) Finley, Dawn; El-Dahdah, Fares
P H A R M E T I C S dispensary is a prototype retail facility developed by combining one drugstore chain conglomerate and one international cosmetic company. The dispensary is sited as an operational component in commerce, utilizing economic and regulatory systems, marketing strategies, and cultural identification conditions as means to investigate and articulate a physical retail environment. Strategic cross-industry exchange results in innovative hybrid products and services, while expanding the categorical particularities of practice.
Contingent patterns
(2010) Cross, Robert Jason; El-Dahdah, Fares
Contingent Patterns looks to challenge the classical assumptions of variation and contingency in todays urban model. Starting with a lineage of conceptual planning and occupation strategies---the highway is antagonized as a new point of departure as an occupiable domain. Environmental, Economic, and Social constraints are reconsidered through the use of complex material systems. Traditionally change and variation is confined to the realm within the envelope; and where there is variability outside of the envelope it is confined, typically, within the footprint of the surrounding street grid. Environmental edges are typically framed by grid periphery and separated from pieces of the larger ecosystem. The use of complex material systems creates the foundation for a continuity of biological and environmental conditions. The use of water and phase change as a vessel to create a frozen surface in winter to an floral scaffolding. Contingency and variation are the tools to develop a new occupational space in the horizontal sphere, as well as, a continuity of systems between interior and exterior domains.
"Every text, after all, is a lazy machine asking the reader to do some of its work. What a problem it would be if a text were to say everything the receiver is to understand - it would never end." Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
(2002) Nikolov, Nikolai Panteleev; El-Dahdah, Fares; Krumwiede, Keith; Bulman, Luke
We all have the desire for architecture that is fleeting, that is not fixed, hard to capture, even impossible to master. And build. But we also have the desire, the impulse, to surpass that impossibility, to dwell in our imagination. In Umberto Eco's opinion, the only place where this is possible is fiction. In order to understand stories I need to construct their architecture and at the same time, in order to understand architecture I need to place a story in it. In this film the project pursues the desire for an animate architecture. Like the impossible desire of the would-be lovers in the play The Malady of Death by Marguerite Duras, this desire also proves impossible; the architecture is found in that impossibility. The movie has to suffer from the same malady of impossible yearning. This film is a lazy machine---asking the viewer to construct the space of the narrative.* *This dissertation includes a CD that is compound (contains both a paper copy and a CD as part of the dissertation). The CD requires the following applications: Windows Media Player.
Exchange in the barranco: Organizing the internal economy
(2010) Herrera Duran, Yvette; El-Dahdah, Fares
This thesis problematizes the infrastructural and social boundaries of informal settlements established in anomalous depressed tissues within the gridded city. It does so by proposing a new urban strategy that intends to dissolve the edge condition as well as reconnect extracted points of the settlement as a means to pulsate the activity of the slum dwellers and to incorporate the informal settlement to the city. This new urban approach weaves the inverted topography of the barranco with two pieces of urban fabric that are interrupted. It explores La Limonada, one of Guatemala City's densest and most dangerous asentamientos situated in a barranco. The thesis grows out of three constants of this informal city: informal economies, steep grounds and lack of connectivity and proposes an acupunctural construction of exchange promenades that act as connective infrastructures, exchange platforms, and new public grounds. This Mobilizer engenders a new tectonic paradigm that serves a mediator in this gradient of exchanges between the consolidated city and the asentamiento.
Exploiting the edge: Infrastructure and development of Sandia Pueblo's southern border and casino
(1998) Armstrong, Krista Lee; El-Dahdah, Fares
Recent manipulations and exploitations of the law have allowed the Indian tribes to operate and profit from casinos and gaming activities. The resulting juxtapositions question the relationships between Reservations, Cities, and States. These moments of reorganization expose new possibilities for the future relationships between these overlapping governments and the community they influence. The intention of the project is to establish a framework to organize the urban development of the border between the Sandia Pueblo and the City of Albuquerque in such a way that the form of future development along the strip will facilitate economic and physical interaction across and through this border zone, avoid the pueblo landscape and define the edge of the city. Future development of the strip would further negotiate the relationship between City and Pueblo. In part, this project outlines one alternative for the city to respond to the pueblo's strip. The city could choose to ignore, modify, or follow this proposal--the formal reaction of the city development would become part of the story.
Fatal attractions: The pleasures of spectacular terror
(2010) Husain, Asma; El-Dahdah, Fares; Franch Gilabert, Eva
Each spectacularly publicized terrorist event strengthens our fascination with death and destruction. Barricaded behind architectures of control, our anxieties and fears escalate. Rather than diminishing our dread, we watch with morbid pleasure as distant events unfold right before us. The terrorist eagerly performs for an attentive audience. For the tourist no longer satisfied with the mediated experience of terrorism, this thesis offers an alternative architectural response. It is the year 2010 and terrorism has popularized the city of Karachi in the international imaginary. Seized amidst the battle between progress and regression---barricaded and torn apart by terror---Karachi becomes the site for a new architectural typology of concentrated targets of terrorism. Understanding the relationship between the tourist and the terrorist as one of supply and demand, Fatal Attractions aims to balance the oscillating equilibrium that ultimately absorbs the fatality of terrorism, replacing the traditional relationship of oppression with one of liberation.
Hotel - Beirut: Architecture in the conflict city
(2008) Byrnes, W. Ryan Matta; El-Dahdah, Fares
The post-conflict city is both a tragedy and opportunity; an environment of suffering, yet a fertile landscape for reconstruction. An architect's typical relation to an armed conflict environment is as an agent of reconstruction once fighting stops. But what of a city where conflict is continuous and interminable? How does an architect intervene in a conflict city? My thesis proposes an architectural intervention that recognizes an urban condition where hot and cold conflict are states of a fluctuating environmental condition. As the conditions change, spaces might adapt and architectural elements react, whether by physical operations, shifts in program, or accommodation of different users and occupations. Much of the conflict logic that is embedded throughout is inspired by strategies and spatial reappropriations that civilians employ to cope with a never ending conflict condition. Designing for the conflict condition does not suggest perpetuating its continuance. Rather, propositions which recognize varying degrees of hostilities within the urban fabric allow for the generation of unique spatial configurations, both formal and programmatic, with potential for diverse social and cultural use when conflict is cold, or what the idealist would consider times of relative peace.
Houston lives the life: Modern houses in the suburbs, 1952--1962
(2002) Koush, Ben; El-Dahdah, Fares
From 1952 to 1962 it seemed that modern houses might become the standard choice for middle class suburban housing in Houston. This is apparent from a survey of architectural articles in the local newspapers and the national press. Of these houses, twenty three were given special attention. From an examination of this group of modern houses, all built in the newer, outlying subdivisions, an understanding of the attitudes Houstonians had towards the postwar suburban city is apparent.
Houston needs a mountain: Towards a new monumentality
(2009) Oliveros, Lysle L.; El-Dahdah, Fares; Morrow, Michael
Garbage is a global problem. In Texas, soft regulations and landfill closures have made way for the dawn of the mega landfill. The reduction of landfill locations multiplied by extreme suburban sprawl, has forced the landfills to take on a vertical mountainous form to accommodate consumption and land boundaries. Such a metamorphosis has spawned coalitions to fight against the visual and sensory upheavals growing in their own communities; ironically it is only due to their own making. This thesis looks at three new paradigms of garbage organization and disposal that produce alternatives and finds positivity in the inevitable we already face.
Landscrapes
(1997) Wilson, Christina Ann; El-Dahdah, Fares; Pope, Albert; Chang, Yung-Ho
Whether in architecture, exhibition design, furniture or film, each of Charles and Ray Eames' projects attempts to expose a particular view/experience of objects using a series of organizational and graphic techniques. It is a utopian view that seeks to frame a heterogeneous world of things. The Eames' design matrix/framework draws out information that clarifies what is latent and makes it possible for an object to be rendered more evident through a new set of relationships. This approach to design allows one to redesign the world using a structured framework of observation and experience. Environmental Installation/Exhibition: Working from a contemporary perspective, the project redescribes a particular world that is evidently bleak, yet not without aesthetic and political possibilities. The project is an installation to be mounted on a clearcut site. It consists of two enclosed gardens and exhibition area. After ten months, or one full blooming season, concrete elements and plants are left as remnants on the site while the rest of the building is transported to another environmentally devastated location.
Making Waste Public
(Rice University, 2009) Gambetta, Curt; El-Dahdah, Fares
This thesis questions the boundaries that define waste as a public or private dilemma, investigating these boundaries as productive sites for the imagination of social life. Learning from methods of processing, conveyance and disposal, I investigate a number of possible sites where the architectural mediates the life of a wasted object and the social life that is produced around an engagement with that object. Waste has largely been disappeared from the city and the senses by mechanisms of modern sanitation and architecture, moved to the urban periphery and concealed inside increasingly refined membranes of storage and movement. Though ruptures or discrepancies in the waste stream are often read as signposts of failure of a certain project of the modern city, I read these ruptures or excesses as productive irritants for working and reworking how we conceptualize public space. It is within the friction of overlapping claims made to an issue such as waste that public life emerges.
Making waste public
(2009) Gambetta, Curt; El-Dahdah, Fares
This thesis questions the boundaries that define waste as a public or private dilemma, investigating these boundaries as productive sites for the imagination of social life. Learning from methods of processing, conveyance and disposal, I investigate a number of possible sites where the architectural mediates the life of a wasted object and the social life that is produced around an engagement with that object. Waste has largely been disappeared from the city and the senses by mechanisms of modern sanitation and architecture, moved to the urban periphery and concealed inside increasingly refined membranes of storage and movement. Though ruptures or discrepancies in the waste stream are often read as signposts of failure of a certain project of the modern city, I read these ruptures or excesses as productive irritants for working and reworking how we conceptualize public space. It is within the friction of overlapping claims made to an issue such as waste that public life emerges.
Many many many many parking spaces
(1999) Albers, Andrew Shannon; El-Dahdah, Fares
"Houston is the first major city without streets"$\sp1$ It is a city of parking space, and mostly surface parking at that. Economic incentives and automobility dictate the ground rules by which the contemporary city is created. It is cheaper and easier to have a surface parking lot. It is more advantageous for a developer to build farther and farther out from the city. Cars are relatively standard items. Architectural Graphic Standards will tell you the types of spaces they need. Parking designers have a codified system, Levels of Service (LOS), to dictate design. The automobile is perhaps the most convenient form of personal transit ever invented. Automobiles are becoming more accessible to more people. These same cars remain parked for 18-20 hours a day on average. Our city is created by these rules. In order to change the city--the ground rules must be adjusted. ftn$\sp1$Ingersoll Richard, "The death of the Street; The Automobile and Houston," Chapter 14 of Roadside America: The Automobile in Design and Culture, ed. Jan Jennings copyright 1990 Iowa State University Press Ames, Iowa.
Mega distributed dealership: Transforming the Houston car dealership into an autoscape
(2008) Acemyan, Alexandre Sevan; El-Dahdah, Fares
In the past decade, car manufacturers have shifted advertising techniques from motor sports to creating grandiose architecture that is meant to be seen and published as a way of promoting their technological abilities, heritage, and forward thinking. Despite these recent advances in global scale marketing techniques, the traditional local dealership has been left untouched for decades resulting in a fragmented and poorly organized buying experience for the consumer. This thesis project aims to reinvent the modern day car dealership in the form of a mega dealership; it encompasses twenty or more car brands that function independently, but as a whole they create a fluid consumer oriented space. Additionally, the project is infused with other car related attractions such as a race track, exhibition halls, showrooms, museums, and merchandise stores to allow the site to become the prime destination for anyone interested in buying, viewing, researching, and dreaming about cars.

Browsing by Author "El-Dahdah, Fares"

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