R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Last, Nana"

Browsing by Author "Last, Nana"

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Active agents
(2005) Smith, Kari; Last, Nana
Discussions of architectural education invite consideration of assumptions concerning the purpose and definition of an architectural education. Such pursuits raise questions that each of us should confront regarding our assumptions about what kinds of knowledge, values and relationships are deemed legitimate educational concerns.1 This thesis gives shape to the architectural student campaigns of the 1930's and the 1960's, their efforts to make sense of their experiences as well as their search for meaning in architectural education. In many of these instances, students began by drawing strength from a number of leftist protests which swept university campuses, but in the course of the ensuing controversy students ultimately concluded by raising questions about the nature of architectural education and developing a radically new consciousness concerning the purpose of education. Students emerged from these campaigns with fresh thinking about the objectives and methods of an architectural education. Such investigations invite consideration for contemporary student engagement in architectural education to undergo a similar sense of self examination and are encouraging of the fundamental changes such an examination often demands.2 1Henry A. Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education, Westport: Bergin, 2001, p 193. 2William Deresiewicz, Garrett S. Finney, Sam Kirby, Clay Miller, ed., "Into the Fire," Perspecta (29), 1998. p. xiv.
Agencies of reassurance
(2004) Carney, Jason Michael; Last, Nana
With the onset of nomadic threats and non-state terror networks in the twenty-first century, ideas of centrality and monumentality in American metropolitan architecture must be re-examined. The attacks of September 11th identified the destruction of architecture, specifically 'signature architecture,' as the primary ambition of these networked threats. So it is necessary then for a re-evaluation of the protective measures applied to architecture, edifice, and culturally symbolic built forms. Network theory argues the only way to successfully fight a networked organization is with another networked organization. Therefore, this thesis proposes the networking of civic institutions in modern metropolitan Houston. The freeway system provides the organizational distribution for these portals, and the monumental scale of the freeway interchange offers a surrogate edifice on which the institutions may be grafted. In this manner new mythologies of safety and security are embedded within the metropolitan landscape. While not necessarily providing complete and real security, perhaps an impossibility, these agencies of reassurance (protective measures) fortify and diversify the municipal field, reinforcing civic identity and purpose.
architecture : appalachia
(2005) Dietz, Andrea Hunter; Last, Nana
architecture : appalachia, a juxtaposition to elicit awareness and reflection, is a proposal for the diversion of the Appalachian Trail into the coalfields of southern West Virginia. While West Virginia is the only state fully encompassed by the Appalachian region, of the 2150-mile footpath that stretches from Georgia to Maine, only four miles of the Appalachian Trail pass through it, with twenty-four (24) miles straddling its border. Born of a utopian vision to link a series of "community camps" along the Appalachian skyline with a nature circuit, the Appalachian Trail originates from a land-use planning endeavor introduced by Benton MacKaye in the 1921 Journal of American Institute of Architects. Presently, the long, narrow United States Forest Service park hosts between three and four million day-hikers and three to four hundred thru-hikers annually. A shifting of this throughway into West Virginia is suggested as a catalyst for consideration. Culturally backwards, distressed, exploited, impoverished, isolated...West Virginia, between actuality and perception, occupies a marginal position betraying a complex reality. The architecture : appalachia Appalachian Trail diversion opens a passage into the space of this repressed narrative. Divided into twelve (12) sections corresponding to nodes of historical and/or contemporary significance and covering 485 miles of hiking, the route encourages discourse and development from exploration of the facets and implications of the West Virginia condition.
As found: Perception and play
(2004) Linden, Michael Brent; Last, Nana
as found? is the investigation of a design process. The work of the project---its research and production---was undertaken with an ethic of play. As in any game, multiple agents acted and reacted over time, a simple set of rules defined the performance of play, and unfettered exploration (breaking the rules) elicited innovative production. The main consultation of 'other' agents manifested itself as an investigation into mechanisms of perception; specifically the connection between individuals and their environments as it is molded through attention. A proliferation of photographs, overlays, and montages were taken, performed, and exhibited. This procedure engendered an evolutionary process that allowed images, their subject, the procedure of their construction, the size of the product, the consuming audience, and myself as the designer to influence the experience of the exhibit in an ecology of attention.
B(u)y the sea
(2003) Montag, John Dominic; Last, Nana
This thesis proposes an alternative development for the Odaiba reclamation site. This alternative consists of terrain manipulation and modified infrastructure, as well as procedural guidelines. By forgrounding the artificiality of the landfill site, and providing spaces for occupation outside those typical for consumption, these alterations will allow the citizens of Tokyo to experience the site as a unique territory outside of the traditional systems of Tokyo. It is a new system, that will continue to exist---and be transformed---as the site is inexorably assimilated into Tokyo itself.
Copy-and-Paste
(2005) Atas, Zeynep; Last, Nana
Copy-and-Paste is a self-sustaining system generating sameness in different locations. The same urban grid, the same outfit, the same house, the same car appear everywhere; copies of each other pasted all around. Copy-and-Paste is there, unquestioned, and seem-to-be arbitrary. This thesis explores and experiments copy-and-paste as a design method, applied strategically, considering the already existing condition and its own potentials, to create beneficial architectures and environments, while introducing a bit of disturbance to the system to turn it back over itself.
Curating identity: A new Rijksmuseum
(2006) Crowe, Susan Leigh; Last, Nana
The traditional role of national museums for cultural history (particularly within the recently formed EU) is of question as these institutions operate increasingly within a blurred cultural landscape. The future success and potential of the 'new national museum' will depend on how the institution reinvents itself. This thesis considers the role of the national museum today by proposing renewal strategies (exhibition, organizational, and spatial) to reinvent and reorganize the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. The project considers the way in which its collection is curated as well as the way in which its curation and organization communicates identity.
[D]urbanism: The revelation of repressed transgression
(2010) Hickey, Donald; Last, Nana; Franch Gilabert, Eva
Detroit lays stunned as the product of abusive parenting. The loyal workhorse of the American Dream wallows in the dedicated obsolescence of an economic monoculture and fiends for the opiate of capitalism. Yet despite the neglect, a new vitality is brewing amongst the shadows of post-fordist residue. Within the labeled obsolescence breeds a new existence which emerges out of the deviance from the skeletal remains of modern urbanism. A city branded as devastated is actually the epitome of owning the margin. This thesis amalgamates disenfranchised city islands by accelerating Detroit's underlying and inherent urbanism of transgressive circulation and communication pathways through such techniques as urban scarring, blanketing, disruption, and smoothing. The development does not erase the contemporary attempts at reconciling the norm of the city image but in turn fortifies the inventions spurred by its shortcomings. By reframing a city's legibility, [D]Urbanism engenders a new urban ideology attentive to the local collective.
Fear of the in-between: Interstitial space in Edgar Allen Poe's "William Wilson"
(2003) Gerrick, Christopher Joseph; Last, Nana
"You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead---dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst thou exist---and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself." -William Wilson in Edgar Allen Poe's "William Wilson" This quote marks a moment of palpable horror as the reader discovers that an apparent murder is actually a suicide. "William Wilson" is a story about boundaries: the distinction between the self and the other, between William Wilson and his doppelganger, but also in the way these boundaries break down. In many of Poe's stories, such as "The Tell-Tale Heart," we are enthralled by the building of suspense until the repressed becomes revealed. The vehicle of study will be a re-presentation/re-construction of "William Wilson" the text/character. This architectonic double suggests multiple readings of the interstitial spaces, events, sounds, characters, and objects featured in "William Wilson." The product of this investigation cannot be divorced from a process of production which explores the concept of doubling---such as printing, xeroxing, photography, casting---and what the ramifications of these methods have for the design of space.
Hybrid housing
(2005) Schroeder, Thomas; Last, Nana
A new strategy is needed in the housing industry. With a flux of unconventional residents moving back into the city an entire industry of "urban" housing has emerged. The products of this production housing are advertised as an alternative to suburban housing, but perhaps the only alternative it has is the vicinity to downtown. Construction techniques and design strategies deployed by the "urban" housing industry are no different than their counterparts working on Houston's periphery, producing a homogenized and compartmental housing as found in conventional suburban housing. Hybrid Housing is an alternative strategy for production housing. It uses industrialized techniques to produce a range of units that serve a variety of lifestyles. Assembled as a whole, these units react and grow into a complex body that nests private, public and communal territories within a mat of housing. By crossing social and physical relations, hybrid housing presents an alternative urban living.
Latent city: Potential infrastructures in the new urban economy
(2007) Gilmartin, Wendy; Last, Nana
What are the procedures, bases, effects and potentials of small, collective activity? What are the economies of such activity? And what chances of propagation for more activity exist within these systems? Gathering places, temporal events, empty land and urban policy loopholes are implicated in this project to generate short-term activity zones in East Downtown Houston with the intention of encoding longer-term territorial scenarios there as an alternative to conventional forms of city development.
Locating Houston's Museum for Missing Places
(2006) Leshinsky, Eric J.; Last, Nana
In Houston, Texas, a vibrant museum culture dedicated to the preservation of precious artworks and antiquities is oddly juxtaposed against a turbulant economy and an ethos propelled by short-term vision, rapid and unregulated change, and the uncertainty of enduring architectural landmarks. The museum of missing places is a new museum and cultural archive in Houston, Texas, attempting to exist as part of this unstable environment rather than in spite of it, and aspiring to be what this city's other renowned museums are not: an institution that can activate the public life of the city but also study it, and in turn propose a new set of cutatorial practices that might allow a museum to better integrate itself with its surrounding environment. Sharing the mission of existing museums in gathering, ordering, and exhibiting cultural information that is of broad public interest, the museum for missing places distinguishes itself by turning outward to the city; by initiating dialogues with a public-at-large in places where they've never existed before; and by employing a variety of experimental curatorial tactics to allow the boundaries between museum and its audience to disappear.
Mel Bochner: Painting outside the frame
(2002) Harner, Jessica Payne; Last, Nana
Recent painting exhibits reveal an expanded definition of painting. Though it does not appear to fit within the category of painting, Mel Bochner's 48&inches; Standards is included in this expanded definition. Clement Greenberg's modernist criticism attempted to limit painting to its formal elements, which led to the rejection of painting in minimalist and conceptual art movements. Mel Bochner integrates methodologies used by conceptual art to oppose modernist painting in order to open painting to theoretical discourse. In works such as 48&inches; Standards, Theory of Painting, and Theory of Boundaries, he brackets out the material signifiers that allow us to recognize painting in order to investigate its structure. In this way, painting acts as 'the missing signifier' in these works and place them firmly within the category of painting.
PHARM_STAD: Fieldworks for Somkhele
(2005) Luong, Quyen; Last, Nana
PHARM_STAD proposes a comprehensive planning strategy for the Somkhele community in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa as it grapples with volatile patterns of migration, HIV/AIDS infection, and economics. Synchronically and diachronically, PHARM_STAD harnesses the responsive and generative mechanisms of field cultures as a means of choreographing agricultural production, healthcare services and soccer schedules. These three forms of land occupation enable the site to evolve into a productive pharmaceutical farm and community stadium.
Reel houses of horror: Film, body and architecture
(2006) Triggs, Riley Grant; Last, Nana
An exploration of the emotional intertwining of character and architecture in two horror films of the 1960s, The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1964) and Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965). In these films we find fully rendered illustrations of architecture that include the non-visible element of emotion that is essential in the becoming of architecture and place.
Sea change or, impending dune
(2003) Schuster, Kristin Akkerman; Last, Nana
The slow disaster of shoreline erosion has been met with various human attempts to control the relationship between Galveston Island and the Gulf of Mexico. In territorializing the island as private property, the main economic draw (the beach) is being sacrificed as the sandbar is increasingly expected to behave like a stable landmass. Private Property Rights and Public Beach Access clash as the difference between the land and the sea refuses to manifest itself as a line drawn through space. There is latent potential within the land itself to work with a beach access infrastructure that operates as a mesh. Such a system can transgress problematic territorial boundaries and mark out multiple processes of reterritorialization as they are occurring on the site. In this way, the forces at work in shaping the island can become culturally relevant in a constructive way, altering the human relationship with the land.
Shifting archi(text)ure: Notes on a discourse
(2005) Flatt-Hickey, Jamie; Last, Nana
The final issue of Assemblage marks a new form of discourse in architecture: compilations of short responses to general provocations about architecture from numerous writers active in the field. Why are polls of this nature being taken now? The provocations imply a fundamental uncertainty, a gnawing existential angst. This trend relates to a current fascination in the broader architectural discourse with self-organizing systems. Yet self-organizing discourse fails to resolve the fundamental issues concerning architecture. In fact, soliciting input and disseminating it in this fashion, with no attempt at synthesis, provides a false sense of accomplishment. This shifts focus away from the question generating crisis and may contribute to dissolution of the discipline of architecture as we know it through appropriation by an emerging body of thought on the broader role of creativity and aesthetics in culture. The question then becomes, who cares? Architectural autonomy and critical practice are at stake.
Simplicity and complexity through a progressive ordering system
(2002) Lee, Kwanhee; Last, Nana
Proportion is a way to perceive a whole world as parts, and to change the parts into a system in terms of human thought. As a relationship between form and number, meaning can be eliminated and then, reinvented by human intelligence to interpret the world continuously, but formation of order and disorder always exists by themselves. Therefore the thesis is to research the possibility of how a system, which has its own rule set up initially, makes up its own meaning and form in terms of a proportional concept which is self-referential, growing pattern, and order and disorder through several attempts. To give form to number and number to form, the process in which a unit was set up, and changed, varied with simple permutations several times, and get a number of forms and shapes, then give order and name to make complexity from simplicity and pattern from seeming chaos is done. And in doing so, there are two ways to represent the order in a system: space progression and time progression.
Structures of agency: Contradiction, parallel, paradox
(2002) McQuitty, Elizabeth Burns; Last, Nana
'Structures of agency' takes as its model the expanding cone of simultaneous pathways the photon travels through as it propagates through space. That image, together with the expanding cones of Richard Serra's Clara-Clara (1983) provides a framework from which a discourse on form, spectatorship, geometry and mathematics expands. Clara-Clara produces two sets of contradictory views: the conflicting apperceptions never intersect but rather propagate through the force of their conflict. In so doing, they forge a cognitive structure that is parallel. A review of the history of parallelism yields a multiplied reading of the sculpture itself and the cognitive structure it produces. Finally, the notion of contradiction as paradox reveals how formal systems---aesthetic or mathematic---give rise to alternative propositions that extend beyond the system that created them. Conscious experience recognizes, develops, these extensions even as the systems that created them break down in the emergence.
The Baytown Museum of Network Archaeology
(2003) Schuette, Paul E.; Last, Nana
The city of Baytown, located approximately 30 miles to the east of Houston, can be described as one of the primary generators of Houston's post World War II rise from city to megalopolis. The city sits adjacent to the Houston Ship Channel, which has spawned the international port of call, the Port of Houston. Within its borders, Baytown has witnessed the rise and proliferation of what might be called the 20th century's super-commodity, oil. Oil producers extracted millions of barrels of oil within Baytown in the first half of the twentieth century and processed them within the city's many refineries. As demands for synthetic products grew during World War II, Baytown's refineries and oil processing facilities produced plastics that would be used for a wide-range of synthetic products. Baytown contains the largest refinery in the United States and the second largest in the world. The Baytown Museum of Network Archaeology seeks to uncover the physical infrastructures that allow Baytown to function as a huge oil-based economic generator. Its primary goal is one of revealing, a revealing of both the mechanisms of production an how ultimately those lead to the consumption of a goods that the first world consumer may encounter hundreds of times per day. Although the Museum is centered in Baytown, its subject, petrochemical infrastructure, continues out endlessly in the world around us.

Browsing by Author "Last, Nana"

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