Browsing by Author "Jimenez, Carlos"
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Item A Talk With Rafael Moneo: The Beck's Architect(Rice Design Alliance, 2000) Jimenez, CarlosItem A waste water treatment plant as a contemporary public space(2007) Ziegler, Claudia Jeanne; Jimenez, CarlosThe piazza is failing as a typology of public space in Florence, Italy due to sprawl, tourism, and the profuse use of the car. However, the city of Florence keeps building new piazzas to act as a public space inside the Centro Storico and in sprawling Florence only to find them empty and unused. Instead of creating new piazzas, the city should be looking towards the successful types of public space which include the parks outside of the historical center. What if needed infrastructure is used to fund public space? Currently Florence dumps all of its untreated wastewater into the Arno and consequently pays 1/2 billion euros annually in fines to the European Union. In addition, the Arno floods catastrophically with the last major flood occurring in 1966 causing over 10 billion euros in damage to date. While the city image of Florence is very different than the realities of Florence, even tourists can not escape the consequences of the sewage filled Arno which floods. Building a wastewater treatment plant within the city limits and turning it into a contemporary public park would fulfill the Florentines' needs for communal/public space while also cleaning the water.Item Architecture Is About Life: A Conversation with John Zemanek(Rice Design Alliance, 2008) Jimenez, CarlosItem Aurorium, the architecture of a phenomenon(1999) Gordon, Timothy Brooks; Jimenez, CarlosWading through the knee-deep snow, the air is cold, stinging your cheeks and sharpening the world around you to a crystalline clarity. Far from the artificial lights of human habitation, the night becomes subtly illuminated by colors cast across the pristine canvas of snow. You wait breathlessly and are rewarded by a dance of light that surpasses the imagination. The auroral phenomenon seems at first incomprehensible and chaotic, but is upon further study interwoven with a complex collection of patterns and is itself merely the tip of an even larger system. Beginning with an examination of the viewers' connection to the phenomena, filtered through his or her personal context within the relationship of ground, horizon and sky. The design of the Aurorium derives from an exploration of how space can physically modulate and emphasize the viewers understanding and experience while maintaining the inherent mystery of the phenomenon itself.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 Building a new plot cartography(2006) Supiciche, Ricardo; Jimenez, CarlosThe plot is the basic delimitation where a diverse range of systems (natural or artificial) interact and begin to form the cartography of the land. "Building a new plot cartography" is a proposal to understand the interaction of a diverse range of systems (economic, ecological, and technology), and with this data start to create a new narrative of the land. "Building a new plot cartography" would be series of sustainable strategies, methods and tools, that allow us to form and understand new and old synergies between forces that shape the process of creating a new landscape which has its own contemporary, beauty, ecology and grammar.Item Casting the void(2005) Brady, Megan; Jimenez, CarlosVoid implies an edge or boundary condition, an absence within a substance, a space between. It is defined not by what it is but by what it is not. The act of filling in, of infilling, be it with new structures, defined park space, or even just a name is a sign of progress in that it connects and makes whole that which already exists. It densifies. But here density is not defined by simply filling a space, building a building, creating a unified facade along the street. Here density is a fluctuating state rather than a prescribed construction. It is measured by its ability to transform and to incite activity. Density is cast. The process of casting becomes the methodology both for analyzing the void and bringing a density to it.Item Citeations(Rice Design Alliance, 1992) Webb, Bruce C.; Robles, Eduardo; Jimenez, CarlosItem Citings(Rice Design Alliance, 2009) Jimenez, Carlos; Koush, Ben; Hager, Jesse; El-Khouri, Marc; Kacmar, DonnaItem Co-op Interieur(2021-04-30) Liu, Tian; Jimenez, Carlos; Finley, DawnToday, our city is developed based on a clear distinction between workplace and housing. This dichotomy reinforces the framework of the 9-5 schedule, narrowing down the possibilities of how people live and work. The thesis proposes a prototype for collaborative living, within which work, live and leisure overlapped within the same space. Situated specifically in the abandoned warehouses, the industrial building is readapted into a new urban infrastructure which encourages the nomadic and uprooted lifestyle, so as to facilitate deterritorialization. The design challenges the traditional definition of domestic space, explores a new way of how people live and work together. Rooms no longer have fixed identity, but being continuously redefined by boundary objects. Within the new homescape, architectural elements including the wall, furniture and roof are reshaped and unified by a dynamic mechanical system, in which the architectural elements regulate the dynamic balance between work, live and leisure.Item Cultivating Commons Adaptive Reuse of a Parking Garage(2023-04-19) McGlone, Kim; Castellon, Juan Jose; Finley, Dawn; Jimenez, CarlosABSTRACT Parking garages are part of the invisible infrastructure of urban centers. Tectonic masses that are relatively unnoticed until needed. Interest in alternate transportation and urban planning methods make them increasingly obsolete, leaving the skeletal remains to assume a new identity. They are situated on desirable real estate, provide an occupiable structure and opportunities to reduce the economic and environmental impact of demolition. Cultivating Commons transforms an underutilized parking garage into a hybrid condition, accommodating current parking needs and incorporating ecological programs to create a public center that promotes social and community interaction in a healthy and balanced building ecosystem.Item Cultivating Sound: Experimental Music Conservatory(2011) Rudat, Genevieve; Jimenez, CarlosThis thesis examines the link between sound and perceptual space via the mechanism of the body, through an exploration of experimental music and the design of a conservatory expressly dedicated to its techniques. The use of poché space -- here defined as the space between major components of a specific program -- is critically considered, and ultimately turned on its head to provide the kind of spaces that support experimental music education and its processes. This new poché space is further linked to circulation, both of the students and faculty as well as the general public. Through the use of these circulation and experimental-space elements, combined in the poché, a new kind of porous field-object is inserted into the landscape of the city of Atlanta, specifically tuned in to its existing cultural spaces, that cultivates experimentation and participation to create entirely new forms of music.Item Dirty Assemblies(2023-04-19) Cook, Anna; Castellon, Juan Jose; Finley, Dawn; Jimenez, CarlosThis thesis is a critical analysis of the existing building culture in Houston, including the material choices and lifespans that make up the current conditions. Rather than accepting the anonymity of construction materials and practices, this project disrupts the seemingly inevitable inertia of these norms. This project speculates about an alternative future of building working within the framework of the seemingly banal existing construction assemblies through the exploration of a case study house as a lab of living building materials, capturing a testing ground in a moment of transition. This new understanding of assemblies, materials, and processes changes the relationship between the natural and built worlds. By creating a messy living situation, we are forced to consider our surroundings and the messiness of living in the world. As this system takes over the building, it will eventually compost the existing construction. In the same way, this system is eating away at existing practices to transition to a more holistic system of biomaterials. After testing these systems on the case study house, the vision is that these interventions are strategically deployed across many building types in order to slow down the damage of construction while building up a counter-reality. I want to acknowledge that this presentation essentially shows a moment in time probably a few months past the installation. The users of this Lab House record their experiences in many terms: experiential, thermal, and maintenance. They plan to start similar interventions on other local buildings using these studies to produce a strategic, targeted application of materiality. Although their built environment has been subsumed with the natural, not all buildings using these assembly processes will be quite as heavy in terms of application. Introducing the results of the case study house into the mainstream construction market creates new methods and systems that can be broadly applied and eventually replace our existing materials and assemblies. This exploration of a transitional mode of building revolutionizes the value systems and methods that designers and construction professionals use. As we rework this paradigm, it raises the issue of the continuous labor of care and the question of who and what else should be considered in the creation and maintenance of buildings . By treating soil, buildings, and humans as equal companions, the given paradigm is no longer valid, and the creation of a new system lends itself to an industry of building care. This thesis is a stance on individual and collective relationships with the environments in which we live. A key supporting document is the catalog of dirty assemblies which details building processes, experiences and metrics from the case study house, and insight into how to move forward. It shows how to tangibly confront pressing issues of environment, material, and existing building culture. The catalog offers an accessible framework that makes us deeply examine what it means to inhabit the world today.Item Excavated Sanctuaries (Subtracting Ground By Program)(2015-04-09) Kamal, Rasem M; Jimenez, Carlos; Wittenberg, Gordon; Colman, ScottThis thesis focuses on subtraction not addition, subtracting voids and spatial volumes according to users’ need of functions, circulation and natural light. These voids will be excavated in the natural ground in order to create a concealed and non-distracting architectural presence above ground, along with an unlimited flexibility to subtract underground. The motivation behind this subject in particular was based on a debate related to the relationship between external form and internal space. Lately, a great many of prominent architectural practices have been focusing on developing dynamic forms, new building materials, sophisticated details and tectonics as well, while only the minority of these contributes to their internal spaces. Consequently, this thesis aims to flip the relationship between the explicit and implicit, by diminishing the power of external form along with exploiting all the previous efforts that were used for it to subtract spaces where we will live, experience and enjoy. Rum Valley in south Jordan is a vast empty desert, surrounded by series of fascinating colorful mountains, the selection of this site was for two key reasons; it is an ideal location to excavate natural ground with a high flexibility of horizontal expansion. Furthermore, this site needs a very minimal and sensitive intervention -since it was declared a world heritage site by UNISCO in 2011 without adding new structure above ground that might compete with the existing mountains and distract visitors visually. Throughout natural and architectural history, there were various precedents ranging from the scale of ants colony nest to underground museums. However, the challenge of thesis was to experiment excavation in more complex programs - (train sub-station, museum and hotel) as a response for Rum Valley needs-in order to exploit all the opportunities provided by building underground, unrestricted vertical or horizontal expansion along with a new definition for building slabs, walls, and maneuvering between spaces by convenient ramps. The design concept was based on excavating a series of fragmented yet interconnected courtyards which remained exposed to the sky despite being under the sand‘s datum line. These courtyards control all the hotel rooms and museum halls around them in addition to the underground circulation network of ramps, but with variations in volumetric experience and lighting quality in each one, because every courtyard was subtracted according to its surrounding functions, circulation’s requirements with distances being set according to a network of convenient ramps, topography, orientations towards site views and intensity of natural light. This “Excavated Sanctuaries” announce themselves from their interior not exterior, in other words, this it is a new redefinition of the modernists’ phrase “form follows function” into “subtraction follows function”.Item Hybrid PARK(ing): The parking structure as urban park. Exploring the mediation between infra-structure, architecture and the public(2004) Farr, Marcus M.; Jimenez, CarlosThis thesis seeks to identify a specific place within the urban landscape of Houston, Texas where a set of infra-structural connections and relationships within a "dead" or "under-utilized" site can be brought into focus, evaluated, and reintroduced to the city as a catalyst for the betterment of urban society and how we, as a public, interact with it. It will aim for the creation of enabling urban fields that accommodate processes that may or may not be expressed in physical form, subsequently the site will become fused and engaged, rather than separated, creating hybrid conditions and entities. Using landscape-urbanism and architecture, a hybrid condition can be established where the segregated city sites created by infrastructures can be blurred successfully with the public and pedestrian domain. This union has the potential to transform dying city spaces into vibrant, thriving promenades and public domains.Item Immersion(1999) Howard, Eliza; Jimenez, CarlosThis thesis evolved from the discovery of a specific building type called a mikvah, a Hebrew word, for which the primary translation is pool or gathering of water. Generally used for spiritual cleansing and purification, the mikvah is an immersion pool, that dates as far back as the Torah where the basis for its design and construction is first articulated. My interpretation and re-contextualization of the mikvah has spawned a building with an agenda and that differs from that of the traditional institution. Ultimately, my proposal attempts to reconsider this age old ritual and simultaneously incite thought about the potential for architecture to graft itself into an environment by engaging a context on a different set of terms; from this, a new level of meaning and relevance might emerge. A larger goal is to integrate the form, the experience, the function and the site to the point where the existence of one depends on the presence of the others.Item Loose Adaptations: A New Strategy for Parkland and Cooperative Housing in Austin(2023-04-21) Tudor, Margaret; Finley, Dawn; Jimenez, Carlos; Friedman, NathanThis thesis responds to the housing in crisis in Austin, TX by proposing a new urban and architectural strategy for cooperative housing. Defined as a renter controlled and consensus-based housing system, the Co-Op provides a structure for not only living at an affordable rate but living within social systems that offer additional support and care through shared domestic labor. In order to promote or mirror the shared, collaborative lifestyle of the Co-Op within the urban fabric, this thesis proposes a new collaboration between the city’s Parks Department and a non-profit co-op developer, Community Housing Expansion of Austin (CHEA) to create the City Park Co Ops. This new strategy targets open lots within the Park’s Departments proposed greenbelt zones for development. An architectural strategy that uses a repeatable footprint and basic plan diagram allows users to control how much or how little of their space is shared with fellow residents. The effect of all of these choices aims to produce both variety and comfort. In doing so, the City Park Co-ops hopes to encourage its users to engage with their surroundings, invest in their place of living, and strengthen their communities.Item Material standard(2004) Reese, Gage Patton; Jimenez, CarlosMaterial Standard is an investigation into dimensional and material construction standards by developing an intimate understanding of the standard 4&feet; x 8&feet; dimension of a single engineered material, gypsum wallboard. The thesis seeks to uncover relationships between the specific performative criteria of an engineered material and the spatial capabilities implicit in its dimensional characteristics as a modular unit of construction. Endless possibilities exist within the physical manifestation, or manipulation, of those relationships through the exploration/exploitation of standard materials, their production processes, material composition, and installation techniques. The thesis has evolved through the development of a series of material exercises. These exercises have consisted of small scale 'sample' material studies as well as 'prototype' full-scale manipulations of gypsum wallboard. Each experimental material study has sought to uncover, reveal and define possible formal logics of order inherent within this seemingly reserved, concealed, ubiquitous, standard material.Item Mexico City Surging: D.F. Architecture(Rice Design Alliance, 2010) Jimenez, Carlos; Parra, CamiloItem Mise-en-scène(2023-04-21) LaBarbera, Jessica Renee; Schaum, Troy; Finley, Dawn; Jimenez, CarlosMy thesis is interested in a hybrid approach to design and representation. How does the built environment we imagine through the existing architectural toolkit correspond to that of the lived experience? What phenomena do we find in our everyday wanderings that can be newly understood and sought after in practice? How is atmosphere achieved through the space we carve out, and what scenes do they inspire to play out? To address these questions and bridge the divide between what we draw and what we experience I am looking to techniques found in cinema, specifically the method of understanding space as determined by four types: deep, flat, limited, and ambiguous. In doing so, I hope to gain a more nuanced understanding of the control we have over the spaces we produce through both formal and atmospheric qualities. This thesis supposes that a new design methodology may illuminate hidden potentials in the built environment. It seeks to imagine a reciprocal design process utilizing an expanded toolkit of models, photographs, perspectives, and diagrams which emphasize a multiplicity of views rather than a single iconic image.