Browsing by Author "Oliver, Douglas"
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Item Any given Sunday(2007) Hughes, Eric; Oliver, DouglasThe megachurch is the ultimate convert in a family typology which finds its ancestors within the very origin of architecture. It thrives as a collector of "seekers", creating enticing venues that capitalize on disconnected suburban environments to form a micro-city of services (gym, daycare, support groups, etc.) offered by the church. Currently, megachurches conservatively follow the organizational model of malls while restricting ownership to a single anchor church offering all services/products. This thesis forces a break which favors full inclusion of multiple tenant churches while maintaining a coop of services. As an evolution of a prevalent form in suburban Houston, this megachurch is recast as vertical urban infrastructure that re-contextualizes the mall section as a programmatic procession/filter of programs offered to the community. Exploiting the opposing time and scale of this daily/service based urbanism with the weekly event, it redefines the relationship of worship spectacle to anti-spectacle to community services.Item Appropriating [negative] space(2004) Lee, Lina Jisun; Oliver, DouglasThis thesis will preserve and exploit the inimitable urban condition of the High Line by suggesting that its current alien presence in the city can be reclaimed and experienced while simultaneously maintaining the integrity of the historic structure. The High Line is an artifact; it represents a time in history when New York was bustling in a transportation fueled economy. History has constructed its current segregation and its 20 years of isolation from the city has allowed for ecology to self-seed a native prairie. Its integration back into the urban fabric via a series of public and private access nodes will serve to bracket between the artifact and the city as well as provide access to an elevated territory of much needed green space in Manhattan. Moving people sectionally through the city along these nodes is essential to the cultural and historical experience of the city. Its exploitation will in turn embed the artifact so deeply as a support system into the urban fabric that it will be able to sustain itself through the life cycles of the city.Item BIOcity(2005) Harrington, Anthony Joseph; Oliver, DouglasThis thesis seeks to offer strategies for the densification of various American cities developing its hypothesis through the use of biomimicry and the analysis of indigenous ecosystems. Solutions will be devised and tested based on methodologies of negotiation between man-made and natural systems and infrastructures. Metropolises to be studied will include New Orleans, Denver, Portland, New York and Phoenix. These cities were selected based on their locations within specific ecosystems (Wetlands, Prairie/Tundra, Evergreen, Broadleaf, Desert---respectively), their large populations, and expansive suburbs. Coherent research material on relevant issues will be presented (land use, population, pollution, transportation, etc.) and compared among the cities. Following, a comprehensive investigation of indigenous plants for each of these regions will be carried out, whereby strategies and hypothesis will be developed for interventions in each city/ecosystem variation. Physical planning strategies can be gleaned from these varying micro and macro ecosystems that have already existed, grown and adapted long before our cities were founded. Current localized systems of each city will be studied and alterations proposed to take advantage of unique indigenous conditions while allowing for farmland and natural area preservation, inclusion, and support of and within the system. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)Item Conflux: Infrastructure for a hyper-connected urbanism(2010) Umansky Brener, Ricardo; Oliver, DouglasThe last decades, have seen Mexico's City's urban conditions change, from what many people believe to be a place of untapped possibilities to what now many refer to as a failed state. It's hyperdense conditions coupled with a government unable to control socioeconomic issues have created urban and social disruptions that manifest themselves as severing devices of its infrastructural networks, resulting in a segregated city, "decaying and its core", as crime, social gatherings, and vehicular traffic paralyzes the cities transportation infrastructure, disconnecting one of the largest most vibrant cities of the world. This project explores and manipulates the correlation between the crowd, infrastructure and technology to mitigate these challenges by impacting the city in three scales [local, metropolitan, and virtual] through notions of interstitiality, fluidity and crowd surveillance.Item Unknown DE-VOID: Tracing shadows in the American desert(2007) Schanbacher, Michael; Oliver, DouglasIn 1945 President Truman carved out 860,000 acres of the Nevada desert to create the Nevada Test Site, our continental nuclear proving ground. Since that time the DOE performed a total of 928 nuclear tests. Littered across the Nevada desert are the records of these 928 tests, and given the scale of each intervention and their relatively stable geologic location they may be our longest lasting marks on the land. DE-VOID serves as a way of understanding this site, a site that until recently existed only as a void in the American desert. It amplifies the existing conditions of the site weaving together the scales of human intervention with the geologic and atmospheric conditions which alter them. As the atmospheric conditions change, the project reacts and allows for a new and varied understanding. DE-VOID serves as a laboratory for understanding how we mark and use the surface of the land.Item Unknown Enabling the wild Be[ij]ing: Try-out for the future of hyper-density(2006) Wang, Shuo; Oliver, DouglasEWB is a direct attempt to deal with numerous uncontrolled urban emergences in Beijing; instead of the current stratifying process, it offers strategies for intensifying the dynamic density through enabling the massive subversive forces. In turn, EWB exposes the city's future of unprecedented three-dimensional congestion---a hyper-dense city. EWB respond to the all-encompassing wildness with an approach that merges two opposing concepts of urbanity into one: the top-down plan that treats developments as lockdown enclaves; the unregulated activities that flood the urban ground. It propagates a new urban process by using the vast developments as a framework to proliferate street commerce---instead of being parasitical, unregulated activities can weave into the rigid structure of existing residential blocks and disturb it like a virus infection. Once they reach the critical masses, the city will reinvent itself as an uninterrupted hyper-dense urban landscape capable of accommodating all manners of street life.Item Unknown Fat City (a post-movement manifesto)(2005) Sheridan, Christian Nikirk; Oliver, DouglasThe suburbs are making us fat. Fat is driving the suburbs. In an age when most things are measured by their efficient movement, suburban design spirals inward to a terminating node where stored equipment augments an increasingly static lifestyle. This high degree of sedentariness has brought with it obesiotic trends that have increased the girth of homes and bodies sitting around Houston. We are living in an environment expressing the end of movement---an era where physical activity is being engineered out of our lifestyles. Fat City examines fattening expansion, immobile movement, and where it may lead. Cross sectioning through the metropolis, it analyzes where the chronic problem lies: within the microenvironment of the single-family home. It is a journey from community to singularity. Understood historically and contemporaneously, it will be shown how anti-urban, pathogenic, causal views created the desire for the single-family detached home. The results of the retreat from community have personal effects encompassing public consequence. Through the historical unraveling of urban growth and the contemporary contextualization of that expansion, the end of movement is revealed. Within this field of abundance, embryonic patterns have begun to emerge and become tangible. This is the age of post-movement and Fat City is the debut of those solidified trends.Item Unknown FOME: Broadening Chemical Architecture(2015-04-14) Key, Scott Austin; Oliver, Douglas; Colman, Scott; Wittenberg, GordonIn his essay, Chemical Architecture (Log 23), Greg Lynn writes that “[t]here is a sea change going on in the world of construction: the shift from assemblage to fusion. In material terms this translates into a shift from mechanical to chemical attachments. More simply, things are built without bolts, screws, nails, or pegs; instead, they are glued." Lynn's positing centers around composites and panels, however, such materials mimic in many ways the assemblages they replace and stops short of a truly chemical architecture. My project explores the implications of expanding foams in light of Lynn and broadens Chemical Architecture. It is a material that ignores the stick and sheet mentality. It is "not a chase toward new materials but toward a new aesthetic sensibility that has material, formal, typological, and spatial implications." Foam has a number of attributes that make it beneficial for this exploration. Foam sticks to itself, it sticks to other things, it expands into place and represents a form of pure poche. Foam, much like concrete is a material in need of formwork. Unlike concrete which needs to be supported on 5 sides, is incredibly heavy, and requires a high level of skill to work successfully, foam's light weight and adhesive nature allows for a large exploration of "formwork" types. My project utilizes pneumatics for formwork. The combination of pneumatic formwork and expanding foam allows for an architecture without seams, without orthogonality, without assemblages or composites.Item Unknown Healing the circulatory wound(2005) Jones, Ryan D.; Oliver, DouglasHealing the circulatory wound is not a project embedded in architectures contemporary preoccupation with romantic relationships between highway and building through circulatory fluxes, speeds, and flows. Rather, this thesis is about developing a more socially responsible urban relationship between the highway and its immediate context by understanding the latent potentials to be found in the lost spaces under, along, and above the circulatory network of our cities. This new urban relationship is one of healing rather than treatment. It is a process of organizing the future metropolis and its physical, social, economic, and political environment in order to create civic amenities at points of existing trauma.Item Unknown Hijacking Generic Space: The Expanded Airport Hub(2012-09-05) Barlow, Kelly; Oliver, Douglas; Colman, Scott; Wittenberg, Gordon; Whiting, SarahThis thesis examines the formal and programmatic expansion of one of the most efficient generic spaces, the international airport hub, by serving the specific needs of an increasingly common mobile citizen, the medical tourist. International airport hubs are comprised of a network of interlinked corridors where large transient populations are received, held and then dispersed again. The medical tourist is a product of the rapidly increasing cost and specialization associated with medical treatment procedures. Recognizing that the density of airport hubs now rivals that of contemporary city centers, this project expands the capacity of the international airport hub, thus enabling the airport to compete for citizens in a manner similar to cities. As one iteration of a potential airport expansion system that could serve multiple mobile citizen types, this project exploits the security requirements of an existing airport and an innovative program to hypothesize a new type of airport terminal.Item Unknown IAH: Reconstituting the coordinates(2006) An, Elaine; Oliver, Douglas"A demented amoeba [that has] turned itself inside out" (Banham) is one way to describe the living organism we call the contemporary airport. It has a habit of growing haphazardly and unplanned. It combines the infrastructure of politics, technology, economy and ecology into a single urban artifact without an urban framework. Despite their scale, very few airports have been able to define edges, routes and the nature and configuration of centers, leaving passengers and other users in a bewildering megastructure. The airport has not only enabled worldwide transit, it has also served as the "centripetal city whereby a transient population forever circles its notional center" (Ballard). "IAH: Reconstituting the Coordinates" uses program to interpose between two distinct parts of an existing airport; the terminals composed of overly systemic processes and the residual spaces leftover from the five disconnected terminals that make up Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport. Normally in conflict, due to scale, function and character, a resultant programmatic and spatial transformation creates an urban generator that allows new spatial links with the existing airport. This concept can encourage new and unpredictable programmatic factors that still relate to this unique site, yet fulfill programmatic demands of any variety.Item Unknown Making the Invisible Visible: An Ecological Thought(2021-04-30) Latif, Daniyal; Oliver, Douglas; Finley, Dawn; Geiser, RetoIn 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.Item Unknown Per-plexus: Engaging Slippages of Socio-Spatial Awareness(2012-09-05) Fleming, Jason; Alford, Grant; Wittenberg, Gordon; Whiting, Sarah; Oliver, Douglas; Colman, ScottThis thesis investigates the role of architecture upon the perception of its subject. It is particularly concerned with the perceptual “flickers” that result when the subject is confronted with simultaneous and opposed socio-spatial phenomena. It asserts that when the subject is confronted with such phenomena, a single state flickers to the foreground while all others recede to the background of perception, causing the subject not only to recontextualize socio-spatial awareness in light of the foregrounded state, but also to labor in order to totalize the sum of all states. Ultimately, this thesis is interested in activating the subject and creating an experience that is not defined physically but rather perceptually, not accessible through instant apprehension but rather through labored comprehension. It tests these assertions and advances these interests by speculating on a living center that foregrounds the impact of geometry and form on the subject’s perception of private and public.Item Unknown 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.Item Unknown Post game: Reappropriating America's jettisoned stadia(2009) Stanley, Peter; Oliver, DouglasThe politics and economics of professional sports in the U.S. have managed to shorten the effective lifespan of stadia to that of a wood frame house. The multi-purpose stadium in particular has come to be targeted for eradication as team owners coerce cities into building single-use facilities and forcing their predecessors into obsolescence. This is largely done with municipal funds, and at a time when spending on all other infrastructure languishes. These are publicly-owned facilities that have historically served as great social condensers in their often suburban settings. These stadiums have demonstrated flexibility far beyond their original goals. They have also become points of reference for their respective cities. To many they represent those cities. Their demolition is largely a function of skewed economies and narrow valuation. The adaptive re-use of these stadia is the key to re-activating their urban function and changing the way we value them.Item Unknown Recasting the convivial tool(2006) Valadez, Tony; Oliver, DouglasThe state of Zacatecas sees more outmigration than any other state in Mexico, due to a reliance on U.S. labor demand. The towns of Zacatecas are underpopulated and not maintained as they were in the era before free trade with the U.S. Traditional agricultural and building skills are all but extinct, becoming impractical to continue in the face of a flood of cheap U.S. imports. The rural farm is quickly losing its social and economic significance. This project, sited within the state of Zacatecas, Mexico, will involve the design of an organization and the implements it produces. Revising Ivan Illich's "convivial tool," these products would take advantage of efficiencies in methods of production and product delivery, enabling Zacatecans to live more autonomously, anticipating a resuscitation of vast areas of arable and domestic environments. Building upon programs that the Zacatecan government has already put in place to restore local public works, this project will propose alternatives to the existing system of interchange with the U.S. Architecture is examined as a process that employs resources---human, environmental, and material. I will attempt to design the management of certain resources that could plug into and interrupt existing systems.Item Unknown Retreating the megachurch(2008) Naeher, Brad; Oliver, DouglasAs a model of corporate worship, the megachurch is seen as a production oriented and hyper-programmed ministry. The megachurch is also considered to be a community oriented venue. Yet, because of its spectacle nature, the megachurch carries over many of the social ills that are common-thread in a perpetually entertained culture. As an entertainment oriented venue the megachurch has arguably increased the need for a place of private worship that emphasizes silence and solitude. The major dilemma found within a church made up of over 2,000 congregates is how to create new or strengthen existing relationships among its members. Through an examination of private worship I have proposed a retreat center focused on accommodating private worship for the individual and community development for the existing groups within the megachurch. The retreat center's focus is for those seeking a short-stay spiritual refuge.Item Unknown Soft zoning: A floodplain development strategy for a high-performance urban watershed(2006) Gilliam, Joel; Oliver, DouglasThe floodplain development strategy of "soft zoning" seeks to leverage the forces of unregulated development and flood disaster potential in order to incite the formation of a high performance urban landscape that accommodates both the natural process of flooding and the urban processes of rapid population growth and development. The testing ground of this landscape technique is an intensive FEMA Buyout zone near the convergence of White Oak Bayou and Vogel Creek, a heavily flood-prone area of White Oak Bayou Watershed in Houston, Texas.Item Unknown The 13th Compound: Co-operative development of an industrial urban village(2009) Raborn, Kimberly; Oliver, DouglasThis thesis critiques the tabula rasa typology of 'slum' redevelopment which utilizes master planning to erase and rebuild slums. It proposes to enact a system based on smaller, contextual intervention within the 13 th Compound in the Dharavi slum of Mumbai. Focusing on the creation of trade based workers' co-operatives; this thesis intends to reinforce the 13th Compound and its symbiotic relationship to Mumbai. The proposal utilizes the context and resources of the neighborhood while focusing on the existing recycling industry as a continued means of livelihood. By enacting smaller scale interventions through erasure and addition, it inserts trade based workers' co-operatives as a means of organization, both spatially and politically. These co-operatives will represent the recycling trader which thrive in the 13th Compound and will integrate infrastructural amenities such as rain-water harvesting and gray water filtration into the existing industrial fabric in order to facilitate continual development.Item Unknown The snake that swallowed an egg: A network of parks for Houston's wasted spaces(2005) LaRocca, Jason Scott; Oliver, DouglasIn a privatized city, open land is wasted land. Houston suffers from a lack of public open space. What it does have is a glut of wasted space. I propose to restore Houston's blighted, abandoned, and underutilized sites to productive, public use as cultural parks. Bayous, railroads, pipelines, and electric lines string/stitch everything together. Brownfields and other abandoned industrial sites, along with parks, are points/mats along these lines. This is the network; the parks stitch and bulge, like a snake that swallowed an egg.