Browsing by Author "Hight, Christopher"
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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 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 Atlas of Sustainable Strategies for Galveston Island(2009) Hight, Christopher; Anderson, John; Robinson, Michael; Wallace, Davin; Rice UniversityItem Brenta: The structure of brand-scaping one's image(inary)(2005) Armstrong, W. Brent; Hight, ChristopherArchitecture and design is not exempt from the laws of branding in the day and age of image identity and mass consumerism. Brenta is a network that maps, structures, projects and identifies the relationships of branding in the realm of modern design.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 Commons(2005) Bidaisee, Sharen; Hight, ChristopherIn a knowledge economy, a fundamental tension exists between the incentivization of proprietorship, and the freedom of access to intellectual products that fuels further creativity. Institutional and disciplinary protectionism encounters its greatest challenges in the convergences of research targets and the increasingly athletic capabilities of communication media. Ultimately, the vast expenditure and low yield associated with certain R&D enterprises call for a more consolidated total effort. The Commons is a vehicle for synthesizing these considerations about a changing paradigm of research. It offers a physical framework for bridging discontinuity and intensifying exchange, as a catalyst for foregrounding ideas about collaboration. Adopting speculative laboratory space for bioscience research as a pilot program, the Commons is the product of the combined implementation of formal and leasing strategies to generate a hub of interfaces---between the physical and the virtual, between research and learning, between disciplines and institutions, and between the site and its immediate physical environment and beyond.Item Commons knowledge: A library for rare books yet to be written(2010) Dewane, David Patrick; Hight, Christopher; Franch Gilabert, EvaThis thesis is a typological investigation of the library, specifically examining how the digitization of information informs design. The agency of the book, which has historically been the protagonist of library design, has been radically transformed by the migration to the electronic, which cause specific spatial ramifications. This library is imagined as a place that enhances access to materials available online, while also providing opportunities for access to materials that cannot be digitized. It acknowledges that current patrons are using libraries to rapidly reconstitute information and, although the majority of the materials they produce will ultimately exist in the realm of the electronic, the building itself celebrates in its own physicality those rare objects, whether existing or yet to be created, that stand against the tide of the virtual.Item Datastructures: Physical form for community knowledge(2004) Bacus, John Michael; Hight, ChristopherThe shape and function of the contemporary library is approaching a structural crisis, as the rate of publication continually increases and the media of publication diversifies and digitizes. In this thesis, I propose a number of alternatives to these looming problems. The proposals result from investigations into basic structural properties of information, especially as expressed in academic research and publication, where meaning is largely the result of linking ("this idea furthers this related idea") and context (as a field of study, a body of work, and institution or research group, etc.). The proposed library system, called a "datastructure" in a melange of cultural practice, public policy, structural system and technological infrastructure. Additional research notes (beyond those contained in this document) are kept in a project wiki that can evolve and adapt as the work requires in the future. You can access this wiki at http://think.rice.edu.Item Delayed Object: Havana's Post-Mercado(2011) McDonnell, Melissa; Hight, ChristopherThis thesis seeks to produce space resistant to hegemonic ordering, as a means to reconcile co-existing histories and ideologies in Havana. The architectural proposal is a co-occupied retail field, hung above the datum of existing fabric. The field is both ground to the department store above and canopy to the market below. While the department store produces a space of endless, universal flows.Item Entrepot 69(2006) Kellner, Joseph A.; Hight, ChristopherEntrepot 69 is a linear community of travelers and transporters segregated for speed and industrial efficiency, remarkable due to the scale and complexity of interchange. It is a new landscape of revenue generating semi-permeable landmarks, mitigating this openly privatized intrusion through service and transfer areas where the benefits from this concentration of flows, both human and material, take place in heretofore under utilized dead zones---the location for the entrepot. An entrepot is defined as a place where goods are stored or deposited and from which they are distributed. Historically, they were seaports where goods moved from ship to ground transportation. This project appropriates an existing proposal to expand the transportation network of Texas, combines it with the variables that generate the parametric of optimal freeway design and then adds programs to serve this multi-modal system in order to create a super-effective corridor, satisfying all in-network demands.Item Field of edges(2006) Robinson, John Michael; Hight, Christopher"Field of Edges" investigates how design modulates social and material worlds. Operative systems, infrastructural (freeways, roads) and ecological (bayous, land mosaics), provide objects of study to investigate territoriality and colonization. These systems are examined at the regional scale, the scale that connects the local with the global. Planimetric and sectional strategies are developed to maintain continuity and functioning as differing systems must navigate one another and the larger context. The strategies also offer methods of systems mapping one another through the design of performative substrates such that edges between systems manifest territoriality as thresholds or gradients, and thus the social world of interacting and competing agencies is manifested in material assemblages. The project takes as its site the existing urban condition of Houston and attempts to re-integrate or re-optimize fragmented regional networks.Item Heaven or Las Vegas: An excursion after hyperreality(2010) Govela Martinez, Alberto; Hight, ChristopherHeaven or Las Vegas Seeks to question, reconsider and project the existing conditions, contemporary techniques and future constructions of the hyperreal. The hyperreal site, initially a destination apart from the everyday life, has undergone a crucial transformation during the last 20 years. As a product of the experience economy, the techniques of the hyperreal have leaked into the everyday and the everyday life into the hyperreal, creating diffuse consumer environments where everyday human activities are enhanced and staged through specific atmospheres. Heaven or Las Vegas takes the exhaustion of the hyperreal as a starting point and as an architectural opportunity. In search for what could be the equivalent to the destination apart in the XXI century, this thesis goes back to Las Vegas in an excursion into its past/future and projects the existing spatial, temporal and organizational devices of the hyperreal to construct a new set of architectural tools ("the continuous stage", "urban timelines" and "the hyperduck surface") that could construct a next layer for Las Vegas and a foundation for what a destination apart could be in the XXI century.Item Houston's Hydrotopographic Horizon(Rice Design Alliance, 2005) Hight, Christopher; Lally, SeanItem Implement interface architecture(2006) Moore, Judson Wilkins; Hight, ChristopherImplement explores the productive relationships between an architecture of exchange and its connection to existing systems of environmental forces. Integrating organizational and developmental logics of embedded performativity to control and produce urban hydroecologies, Implement seeks to unearth new ways to anchor and instrumentalize overlapping ecological and programmatic adjacencies at effective material and temporal scales. Developed for Houston, Texas, in an environment where 65 inches of annual rain inscribes its territorial elevation with approximately 30% of usable land falling within flood plains, implement operates as an architectural substrate and translational device, incorporating watershed dynamics to collect, remediate and store urban runoff while allowing the simultaneous occupation of architectural program. By leveraging the logics of water control and remediation with developmental strategies and construction techniques, this project proposes a machinic hybrid that produces a new landscape of interchange.Item Industrial Green. Providing an Alternative for a Shrinking City(2018-03-14) Plyusnina, Alina; Hight, Christopher; Wittenberg, Gordon; Colman, ScottThis thesis proposes alternatives urban strategies for the phenomenal shrinking city. This proposal addresses the issues of urban decline through the nexus of industry, agriculture, and urban infrastructure. This thesis explores the urban conditions of the post industrial cities of American Rust Belt, focusing on Youngstown, OH. These cities have been losing population, social capital, and political power for decades. Current strategies targeting the decaying cities fail to address the problems of the population of shrinking urban quarters, whether these strategies are growth-oriented or pursuing the idea of planned recession. This thesis provides an alternative for a shrinking city exploring the notion of resilience, its interdependence, and relation to the identity of the city. Through establishing a closed loop economy, Industrial Green enables Youngstown to be equally ready to expand or contract.Item Multiformity: Toward a Multiparamater Effectiveness(2011) Taylor, Matthew A.; Hight, ChristopherThis thesis produces new strategies for forming aggregations of units based on environmental factors. This is achieved by redefining the relationship between the public and private realms based on environmental performance and programming the formal performance; performance is defined as the dynamics between differentiated parts and their collective behavior. While typical strategies based on redistributing the unit, and recent architectural explorations in environmental performance, focus on single variable optimization; I'm interested in using multiples within environmental, programmatic and formal elements, to produce differentiation rather than optimizationItem Niche life(2005) Radune, Matthew; Hight, ChristopherThis design project attempts to enlarge the role of urban codes to deal with issues relevant to the condition of the metropolis as a type of ecological niche. It is my view that urban codes are the most useful design mechanism for post-environmental relations between humans and the urban fields they reside within. These codes must be written not to designate that which cannot be done, but to provoke successful innovation by those following them. This is especially the case in a metropolis without zoning such as this. The project is a master planned community in an urban instead of ex-urban context as is typical, formed on a brownfields site, which is currently the oil services company Halliburton's mostly vacant headquarters just Northeast of downtown Houston. Coding of this site to be used by developers of the site must take into account parameters inherent in the site itself, in this case a polluted parking lot lying in a floodplain. To a certain extent these conditions pervade the landscape of Houston itself, and so this is in a sense a case study for a wider field of operation.Item North Port(2019-04-18) Kiefer, Ryan; Hight, Christopher; Colman, Scott; Wittenberg, Gordon; Finley, DawnNorth Port is a projective port city on the Northern Canadian Coast reacting to the circumstances of climate change and resultant landscape instability. Continuing languages established by historical precedents for new-ground urban environments, it posits a negative utopia in a unique northern context; a way-station at the furthest extant of habitation where architecture works as a mediator and sanctuary in a changing terrain. It is a product of an unbalanced economy and reflects the infiltration of mining development pursuance in the north, an increasing pressure contrary to existing modes of habitation.Item Parliament/Park: Civic space for a multitudinous democracy(2008) Morel, Paul James; Hight, ChristopherIn civic architecture, public assembly space has become completely separated from the representational space of government. At the same time, political theorists have noted a proliferation of groups and issues that are not being adequately represented in political discourse. Parliament/Park is an attempt to imagine a collective space for the metropolis that supports a multitude of simultaneous and successive activities. Drawing on a pair of historical precedents—Cedric Price's Fun Palace and Prouvé's Maison du Peuple de Clichy—it uses transforming elements to provide programmatic opportunities for a great variety of public activities. As a para-legislative space, it would be a microcosm of political representation.Item Performance Mall(2012-09-05) Daley, Andrew; Wittenberg, Gordon; Oliver, Douglas; Colman, Scott; Whiting, Sarah; Hight, ChristopherThe architectural object is concerned with its image. However, as Yves Alain Bois notes, the flatness of the photograph “denies the real content of the work.” This thesis unpacks the collapse of object and image by exploring the relationship between the path and the object: the path offers an experience not simply a view. In the emerging mega-city of Manila, malls are ever-present entities. Mainly for the upper class, they form an episodic network, where seeing and being seen is as important as shopping. By combining a series of theaters with the Filipino reliance on shopping centers, a new typology is formed: the PERFORMANCE MALL. Adapting Garnier, Scharoun, and the mall, this project establishes space for the few and the many simultaneously. The motion within the theater complex creates a continuous spectacle of performance and circulation. Rather than separation of circulation and performance, they exist in a symbiotic state.