R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Geiser, Reto"

Browsing by Author "Geiser, Reto"

Now showing 1 - 19 of 19

Allegories of Repair
(2024-04-19) Sanders, Christopher; Geiser, Reto; Finley, Dawn
"Allegories of Repair" explores the complex dynamics of marginalized communities, focusing on West Dallas. Embracing Donna Haraway's "situated knowledges," the thesis proposes a resilient methodology to understand the intertwined context. Utilizing storytelling tools, the narrative unfolds, depicting the challenges faced by West Dallas, from industrial proximity to rapid displacement. This causes for the rejection of simplistic architectural solutions. Instead, a network of interventions is proposed, including adaptive reuse and small-scale creative spaces. The thesis emphasizes subtle acts of redistribution and reorganization to promote community care. Despite diverse outcomes, the interventions collectively contribute to fostering a new collective attitude in West Dallas.
Along the Line
(2015-03-12) Lu, Na; Colman, Scott; Geiser, Reto; Wittenberg, Gordon
The 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.
Black Bridge: Reclaiming the Public Ground
(2022-04-22) Cui, Jianing; Utting, Brittany; Finlay, Dawn; Geiser, Reto
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 shelter is urban debris - landfill, sand mining pit, or a makeshift coal yard. It is where the city dumps its dirt. Studying Black Bridge village, a “work-site” that has been removed, and following the trace of the dirt, might reveal an alternative imagination of what urban life could be. Taking inspiration from the communal experiment at Black Bridge, the project imagines a heterogeneous community consisting of layers of occupiable structures of different permanency that supports programs including permanent collective housing, workspace, and public space of various enclosures that would recognize the marginalized people’s unmovable place in the city and become a space of resistance.
counter-franchise^tm
(2021-01-26) Oetzel, Alexandra; Ng, Amelyn; Finley, Dawn; Geiser, Reto
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 even the smallest scale, holds a significant impact on the character of the franchising system as a whole. It is through an implementation of a worker's cooperative business model that this typological shift is supported. By collapsing the physical, logistical, and bureaucratic distance between corporate ownership and individual stores/employees, the counter-franchise^tm becomes an equitable, self-determined, intergenerational system of food, work, and land. It is only with this systemic change that the suite of architectural products is able to respond and serve specific constituents and spaces, unencumbered by the top-down management of saleable product. An entirely new burgerscape, comprised of this diverse suite of products, will be imagined as a network for collective, co-operative action across vast physical space, unworking the legacy of franchises, empires, and other colonial practices.
Department of Wellness
(2020-04-23) Murphy, Jack P; Geiser, Reto; Finley, Dawn; Colman, Scott
The Department of Wellness is a new institution that exists to care for citizens. This thesis is the design of a headquarters facility for that agency in Washington D.C. It explores the productive overlap between the concerns of wellness and those of government. Rather than wellness being a topic of individual pursuit, this work imagines that actions of care are collectivized. The effort investigates how these operations can be organized, accessed, and imaged architecturally. This thesis works from existing conditions at three scales. At the scale of the body, it asks, "What if wellness services were offered universally to citizens, rather than through conspicuous consumption by individuals?" At the scale of the government, it asks, "If care is our goal, how might we build institutions differently, both physically and conceptually?" At the scale of the building, it asks, "What possibilities are enabled through radical alteration, instead of starting from scratch?"
Existing, Enlivened
(2019-04-03) Turnage, Lauren Katherine; Geiser, Reto; Finley, Dawn
This thesis offers a more assertive strategy for the adaptive reuse of existing buildings where the original development is not looked at as a precious, identifiable entity but rather is evaluated for its spatial qualities and ability to accommodate new programs. These conditions can then be enhanced through the juxtaposition of added spatial typologies which allow for a range of contemporary programs to be addressed, site density to be increased, and a profitable economic status to be achieved.
Giedion and America
(gta Verlag, 2024) Geiser, Reto
Sigfried Giedion (1888–1968), one of the main protagonists of the architectural avant-garde in Europe, paradoxically achieved this reputation in America, far from his homeland. Nearly all of Giedion’s books written after his initial stay at Harvard University were published in English long before they became available in his native German. Reto Geiser sheds new light on Giedion’s life and reassesses his work through the lens of cultural transformation and modernization processes. The author questions the unbroken line of developments portrayed in the historiography of modern architecture, and argues that Giedion’s position in between two cultural spheres not only caused ruptures and contradictions in his work but also productively shaped its reception on either side of the Atlantic.
Embargo
Lingering
(2022-04-21) Okimoto, Mai; Utting, Brittany; Finley, Dawn; Geiser, Reto
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 residents who continue to live above the waste -- the lingering patch pays attention to and offers space for the things that have been shaped by but forgotten by a society driven by accumulation, speed, and instantaneity.
Making the Invisible Visible: An Ecological Thought
(2021-04-30) Latif, Daniyal; Oliver, Douglas; Finley, Dawn; Geiser, Reto
In order to address the ecological crisis we face a paradigm shift in ecological thinking is needed. This project investigates the aesthetic philosophic, and political implications of waste by proposing a built above ground storage framework for nuclear waste turned into spectacle.
Momentary Place A City For Ten Thousand
(2019-04-02) Collard, Steven Michael; Geiser, Reto; Finley, Dawn
This investigation centers around how a city of 10,000 residence could form from a reinterpretation of the train station not only as a gateway but as a destination in and of itself. My project questions the urban potential of a train station inserted into a small rural community between two of America’s largest metropolitan hubs, Houston and Dallas. This city acts as a framework to test and push ideas of an almost "tabula rasa" like condition, in which architecture, infrastructure, and urbanity, are thought of not as disparate parts but as a synthetic culmination of highly dense, yet porous neighborhoods, within a city not dependent on the automobile but the pedestrian.
Oblivion Research: An Interdisciplinary Index of Spatial Poetics
(2023-04-21) Bullis, Jimmy; Geiser, Reto; Finley, Dawn
This thesis reframes meaning and interpretation in architecture as a function of poiesis and the poetic and begins to explore the spatial implications therein. Much has been made of narrative in architecture. We see it deployed as a way of building fictions, of projecting the future, and of imagining what we design as it might one day exist in the world. On some level, projecting narrative is as fundamental to architecture as drawing itself. But within all fictions is the urge for what can be called the lyric moment. This is the point where the prosaic transcends narrative as such and achieves something more fantastic than just “what happens next.” This project hopes to uncover the way that the poetic is involved with cultural production in visual and spatial modes. Narrative provides details of a world, but the poetic is what convinces us of it. And if the use of narrative in architecture is relatively widely discussed, what of the lyric moment? Through surveying and analyzing some of the ways language and space have been addressed historically, we can begin understanding notions of poiesis (creation) and the poetic as deeply entrenched in architectural and spatial discourse. The project hopes to demystify the term poetic and its associates and to offer a fuller understanding of what forces tend to conjure it, and to propose that a spatial conception of poiesis, the poetic, and the lyric moment is a critical and scarcely addressed step towards understanding the modes of cultural production undertaken by architects.
Paradise Waiting: Shaping Experiences of Wait via Piraeus Port of Athens
(2022-04-21) Li, Carrie; Schaum, Troy; Finley, Dawn; Geiser, Reto
Design of a multimodal transportation hub that engages with the phenomenon of waiting
Something Natural
(2022-04-20) Neuffer, Cole Pan Yenxi; Geiser, Reto; Finley, Dawn
An investigation of the aesthetic and material potentials of wood
Sugar, Lumber, Labor: Material Histories
(2021-04-28) Scott, Emma; Schaum, Troy; Finley, Dawn; Geiser, Reto
At stake in this thesis is how architects engage with multiple histories, and the material expression of this entanglement. This thesis makes its design project out of an existing sugar union in Crockett, California. It draws upon the material histories of sugar, lumber, and labor embedded in this building to produce a generative relationship with the past. Ultimately, a material method is developed that can be applied to historic buildings beyond this project. By embracing multiple entangled histories, we as architects gain new rich possibilities to engage the histories of a place. Through unordinary material methods we can inspire public curiosity and provoke reflections, even re-evaluations of the historical foundations of our discipline. With such techniques, we can draw upon the many aspects of the past—not to preserve it, but to critically engage with how we got here and how we move forward.
Third
(2020-04-22) Wilkinson, Jon; Geiser, Reto; Finley, Dawn
In our perception, the built environment tends to disappear into the background through habit and routine. In this thesis, artistic explorations in manipulating our perceptual field serve as the basis to investigate for architecture to do the same. The project takes a sociological definition of space, positing the latent potential of third places to mediate between the privacy of our domestic environments and our public spheres within the context of our everyday social environment. Representational techniques, including repetition and doubling, are used to create a sensory awareness of ‘sameness’ that allows subtle differences to foreground in our perception. Sited in a fictional urban context, the project disguises itself as a normative five-story building containing spaces for domestic, professional, and social activities. The result is a limited palette of planimetric and three-dimensional representations that stage mundane scenes of habitation and routine as something unfamiliar or that which requires closer inspection.
Vaults in Deserts and Swamps
(2022-04-22) Barajas, Estefania; Castellon, Juan Jose; Finley, Dawn; Geiser, Reto
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 an alternative collective space within public schools.
Viewfinder
(2014-04-25) Casper, Mary; Geiser, Reto; Wittenberg, Gordon; Colman, Scott
Elderly housing remains one of the few viable social housing types in the United States today; and yet, its social quality is often obscured. The historic heart of social life—the residence—hides behind solid facades that isolate residents from their broader networks and comprehension within the city. Viewfinder is a retirement home in Los Angeles, California. The retirement home offers a highly diverse group of users: residents, support staff, and visitors, amplified in this project through ancillary programs including a daycare center and a branch library, located at the highly visible intersection of US Hwy 101 and Vermont Avenue. The design uses a meta-prism that breaks into pieces and formalizes aprogrammatic places for seeing and being seen. Residential units push to the edges, where three levels of care assert unique facade conditions in the residents’ private exterior spaces. Private spaces, celebrated at the project’s boundaries, lend the center its openness, apertures, and freedom of geometry.
Walk Don't Run
(2017-04-20) Hazinski, Amelia; Geiser, Reto
This thesis is a public swimming pool on a bridge that spans the Los Angeles River. As Southern California attempts to remake its water infrastructure in response to the ongoing drought, the introduction of public program to these infrastructural investments can make their urban effects more explicit. This thesis suggests that public bathing and swimming can provoke a new understanding of the city’s water as a shared resource and assert a new social life for the city that Los Angeles will become.
Wetscapes: The Archipelago of Houston
(2024-04-18) Gomes Raymundo, Gabriel; Geiser, Reto; Finley, Dawn
This thesis engages with the phenomenon of urban sprawl and its climatic impacts. Urban sprawl is the term used to describe the unchecked and rapid expansion of cities into their surrounding areas, often at the cost of natural habitats and resources. In this work, the specificity of the term is studied in the context of Houston. Houston suburbs comprise the city’s most dominant force in land area while being the least dense, where urbanization is a product of specific political intentions—ie. Market-driven developments. This project aims to establish a new perspective of urban growth for Houston by establishing new limits to the city. The goal is not to discourage Houston’s natural growth process but instead guide this process inwards, focusing on extreme density of the consolidated urban fabric.

Browsing by Author "Geiser, Reto"

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