R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Lerup, Lars"

Browsing by Author "Lerup, Lars"

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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.
Detroit: Return of the cityzen
(2006) Ratkowski, Eric; Lerup, Lars
Detroit has steadily declined as a city since the height of its greatness in the 1950s. Deindustrialization, suburbanization, divisive racism, and disenfranchisement have taken a toll on a city that once stood for the American Dream. Democracy and urbanization have been marginalized in favor of a pursuit that is no longer possible. Any plan for Detroit must address its vacancies, both political (and communal), and physical. These aspects deserve their own attentions, under the dire circumstances they face. However, any solution to the problems facing Detroit must also adhere to a larger vision - history tells us this is Detroit's way. Detroit has lost more than money and housing - It has lost people, optimism, and will. Once built on an idea. Detroit must present itself once again as more than just a city. It must reassert its symbolism as a promised land for a new version of the American Dream.
Dirty blue on not-so-white walls for the Wittgenstein house
(1997) Parke, David; Gammard, Elysabeth; Farouki, Sohela; Lerup, Lars; Casbarian, John J.
Extended family housing: On suture in the formal and social construction of housing
(1995) Hill, Douglas Eric; Lerup, Lars
The lack of zoning in Houston weakens typological identity in the architecture of the city and precipitate new morphologies in urban form. A formal analysis of commercial development in the residential area of Montrose shows the mixed fabric of the city, both in scale and type. This analysis is the basis of an alternate strategy of suture in the development of the block in the fabric of the city and is applied to housing design. In conclusion, such a strategy is by necessity ad hoc if it is to be responsive to unforeseen growth patterns in a city without zoning.
Four bridges, one trench, a few cars and lots of people (Texas)
(1994) Rudloff, Francis Xavier; Lerup, Lars
When U. S. Highway 59 was constructed through Houston, Texas in the 1950's a trench was dug. One neighborhood became two, as a third community of automobile commuters filled the gap. The proposition of the design thesis is to heal this "wound" by physically and conceptually expanding an existing public park currently sited on the north side of Highway 59 into the right-of-way on both sides of it and onto the bridges that cross it. The new "park" facilitates the development of different relationships between people on the highway and people off it, and between people on one side of the highway and those on the other. The thesis is an exploration of issues of scale, speed, "place-ness" and of architecture's role in the facilitation of human interaction. I come to the project as one who participates in the place both as a highway driver and a neighbor-hood resident, as a traveler and a dweller. I also come to the project as an outsider trying to observe the energy that makes up the system (the machinic assemblage, if you will) so that I might effect it with minimal means. My objective is to engage architecture and the process used to create it to facilitate the development of community among people.
Futures of an Autonomous Houston
(2018-04-16) Phelps, Corey S; Lerup, Lars
The autonomous vehicle is here, and how it is envisioned in daily life drastically changes the way we perceive the city and its inhabitants. Whether seen as an autonomous mover of people or products, the implementation and policies of autonomy shift the interaction with this novel robotic vehicle, and, in turn, redefine societies to come. My thesis, Futures of an Autonomous Houston, foresees the autonomous vehicle through varying conceptions, engendering multiple possibilities of urbanity within the heavily car driven form of Houston. These scenarios are contradictory in nature, exploring hyper suburban sprawl, the adaptation of current suburban form, nomadic housing, and densification of downtown. Through vignettes though of these conditions brought about by various iterations of autonomous vehicles, we are able to explore the intrinsic relationship between technology, infrastructure, and inhabitation within our ever-connected society.
House 00
(1999) Zamore, Brett Elliot; Lerup, Lars
The Shotgun house is a distinct American house type associated with African-American communities in the South. It derives its power and its timeless, universal appeal from the rhythmic recurrence of simple geometric forms. The Texas Shotgun type, which was built as an affordable solution, still offers qualities we can appreciate in contemporary living. This Thesis aims to rethink this type as an a alternative to suburban domesticity. I have found, in Houston's Fifth Ward, an existing double occupancy Shotgun-type house to rehabilitate, reprogram and reinsert a viable space for a family of low income. By removing its parting walls and allowing for its modules of space to flow into one another, the plan and organization of the house is kept simple. The interior is not over prescribed allowing for a greater flexibility. Respecting the existing understanding of the house as a duplex, the refill weaves the opposing two sides into a single home. The central dividing wall stays as the driving force of the design allowing for the two sides to take on the roles given by its lived in tenants. There are 3 parts to the Thesis. The first is the role I assume as designer and builder and how I inject an architectural value into the house, the second is the economics/cost of the project, and the third is how this project confronts social issues which plague our city.
Migrating forms (Philippines)
(1994) Castro, Ginette B.; Lerup, Lars
With the cultural theories embodied in the ideas of Gianni Vattimo, this thesis attempts to explore the relevant assessment of exchange value (versus absolute value) in re-evaluating the present cultural situation in the Philippines. Replete with influences and cultural transformations from previous groups of colonizers, the optimum time for re-evaluation is now and resolutions to the state of an appropriate attitude towards a Filipino national identity has never before been challenged. There are, in the minds of the Filipinos, aging and irrelevant symbols of national heritage that need renovation so as to express this new opportunity of somewhat total autonomy. At this crossroads of possible cultural shifts, hypotheses arise in the search for appropriation. It is possibly the time to express that shift rather than develop a prescription for a new national identity.
Mobilization of the multi-tasking machine: Up-cycling the interstate and defense highways
(2001) Frantom, Wyatt Jacob; Lerup, Lars
The metropolis is governed by a certain internal logic, an ' operating system' that we are often blind; initiated at the command line and materialized through mass mobility. The code for this operating system is realized through both very specific and more esoteric social rules and practices, conventions (local code restrictions, signs and semantics) which encode our motive environment, directing our movement, allowing or more often determining our personal inertia. This operating system has more to do with timing and the interactivity of planned coincidences than with built form. While speculative, this thesis preemptively explores a potential amendment to the jurisdictional constraints between architects and developers, planners and policymakers; seeking a collaborative and comprehensive approach to reconditioning the metropolis by up-cycling our highways for alternate occupation, multiplicity and intermodality. This thesis is both a speculation into one area of the metropolitan 'operating system'---it functions as a precursor to a larger manifesto, an initial attempt to decipher, decode and recode the metropolis. Mobilization of the multi-tasking machine.
Modeling ideology
(1994) Wu, Jean C.; Lerup, Lars
Our perspective, which in the past has been accepted as common sense, does not work under all circumstances. Many of our individual actions still have this characteristic. The spontaneous variation of sense has occurred, or is occurring now. Are those the effects of human experience on their surroundings, or is it no longer adequate to concentrate on the primary effects and neglect all secondary influences? This constant change from order to disorder is a product of textuality. There is no set amount of order or disorder in reference either to the text or to the receiver's memory, just as a communication machine gets its experience from all the information icons in our environment. The experience becomes the unfragmented memory flow through in the extension space, all in a unidirectional flow. This means swifter connections, through self-reproducing learning, become a whole experience.
Permutation
(1997) Nichols, Christopher; Lerup, Lars; El-Dahdah, Fares; Bell, Michael
This is a story of two spatial designers: The Mathematician and the Architect. In the four dimensional space of a Mathematician, most physical realities must be ignored in order for the space to remain pure. The visual, one of the most powerful tools of the Architect, can coexist within the Mathematician's four dimensional world without affecting its purity. However, the Architect must ignore his/her physical realities, such as gravity, mass, and human scale. The Mathematician establishes the rules within which the Architect must operate. The Architect manipulates form through a structure that is defined by the Mathematician. The Architect explores spatial qualities through the tools that the Mathematician gives him/her. The Architect tries to understand the meaning of the form that both of them have created. He/she pushes the form in order for it to achieve spatial qualities. Together, the Mathematician and the Architect try to understand the meaning of such spatial qualifiers as: big/small, wide/narrow, inside/outside, and light/dark. The Architect starts to understand why spaces achieve these qualities in his/her physical world.
Poetic interventions in the open city: Homo Viator and landscape in Houston and Randstad, Holland (Texas)
(1996) Driessen, Erik Otto; Lerup, Lars
The Haarlemmermeer Polder resembles the Sleeping Beauty awaiting the Prince's kiss: it is a void filled with opportunity in the dispersed metropolitan landscape of Randstad, Holland. Like Houston, it is densely urban, yet its urbanity is for the most part placeless. This dual personality is an exciting constant in a model of transformation into an 'empty' metropolitan area in which urbanity is exploited to its extreme: the density of the void. Two aspects will be significant to its future. The first is Homo Viator who has constructed a new domain linked together by motion. Second, there is the landscape of the open city. Exciting opportunities abound in stretching the contrast between the human and natural orders to an uncomfortable extreme by Dutch measures. The resulting landscape through colonization will be a new chapter in the Dutch tradition of treating the landscape as a work of art, continuously reinterpreted and rewritten.
ReCite
(Rice Design Alliance, 1997) Scardino, Barrie; Lerup, Lars
Speedzone
(Rice Design Alliance, 2003) Lerup, Lars
The cook, the farmer, his wife, and her grocer: Plotting a new urban/rural interface
(2007) LaRocca, Jonathan Vail; Lerup, Lars
Plotting a new urban/rural interface provides a design proposal for a new kind of sustainable landscape within built-up areas: urban agriculture. The reintroduction of productive landscapes into the contemporary city changes the appearance of modernday urban conditions towards an unprecedented economic, social, and environmental productiveness. Such landscapes adopt a strategy of systemic intensification which searches out reclaimable (unproductive) space with the existing urban fabric. By growing food within an urban rather than exclusively rural environment, productive landscapes within city boundaries reduce the need for industrialized production, packaging and transportation of foodstuffs from rural areas to the city dwelling consumers. This project offers an examination of food as a fundamental aspect of a city, the study of how food relates to the economic, political, social and cultural environments of a city, and the study of how food imprints on the built environment. Urban agriculture is a theory that positions food is a primary transforming force capable of organizing the city and enhancing the urban experience. The possibilities of urban agriculture in the United States are presented through a proposal for active farming and food retail projects in Houston as strategies for achieving sustainable growth.
The Many World Manifold
(2014-04-23) Brisendine, Sam; Wittenberg, Gordon; Lerup, Lars; Colman, Scott
This thesis produces an architecture that relates to the way in which digital technologies have changed our lives over the past twenty years. My interest lies specifically in the digital media devices that allow us to occupy multiple “worlds” simultaneously. Beyond multi-tasking, these technologies produce a phenomenon I call “multi-placing”; a mode of existence that has become a dominant characteristic of the developed world. In an effort to produce similar effects the architecture of my thesis is characterized by a broad horizontal space populated by discrete architectural worlds that interface with the horizontal planes of the floor and the ceiling. With little visual disruption the horizontal expanse connects all worlds together into a single manifold. These worlds introduce specificity into the horizontal vacuum while preserving the equalizing effects of the universal space. Located in Houston, Texas, this project connects the vertically striated worlds of the city’s downtown (the office tower, city street, and the underground tunnel system) by the addition of a single manifold at street level. Rather than creating public space with urban voids, this project inserts itself into a proliferated highrise typology. The horizontal space interfaces with each of the city’s worlds simultaneously and allows for “multi-placing“ events to occur within the architectural field.
The open superblock
(2011) Mickey, Elizabeth; Lerup, Lars
THE OPEN SUPERBLOCK looks towards the unused land within the existing superblock grid as an opportunity to introduce public space into the suburban fabric. By gathering and juxtaposing a variety of programs and activities into specific sites, the Open Superblock acts in contrast to its surrounding context. Unlike the current mono-functional superblock which is bound by the grid, the proposed intervention challenges the endless infrastructural gridiron, stitching together existing blocks, and overtime inverts the initial closed superblock into a dense, yet open development. In the end, this proposed intervention combines multifamily housing, programmatic density and planned open space in order to address the public realm within the suburban fabric.
When form resists function
(1996) Cormenzana-Baltza, Angel J.; Lerup, Lars
Architecture is a bridge field between Science and Art, between the objective and subjective. It is up to the individual to define and locate Architecture between these two opposites. For me, the beauty of the field is its subjectiveness and that is precisely what makes Architecture. The main goal of the project, a seminary in Barcelona, is to design a permeable architecture despite contextual density and programmatic opacity. The design will challenge the existing "closed" architecture of the site by creating an architecture that is "open" to the city.

Browsing by Author "Lerup, Lars"

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