Browsing by Author "Pope, Albert"
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Item A dynamic figure ground(1994) Guga, Jeff M.; Pope, AlbertThe question this thesis explores is what could the relationship be between subject, the participant, and object, architectural form, other than fixed. This question arises from a consideration of the relative value of the perceptual field within aesthetic events. Alternative methods of interpreting the figure-ground relationship can cause a break in the definition of observer and object as static entities. Twentieth century painting and sculpture have challenged the conception of a stable figure-ground relationship in favor of a dynamic view. Increasingly within this view the subject has been called upon to become a part of the composition, through the involvement of perception as an integral part of the aesthetic event and/or by the subject becoming part of the event. Underlying this question is the notion that when the cognitive is actively engaged with the physical, the possibility exists of creating an autonomy for subject and object. Autonomy is coincident with a freedom, an enablement, based not solely on an emotional connection through metaphor but one based on the virtual.Item A house of the city, Tarragona, Spain(1989) Delclos, Luis (b. 1926); Waldman, Peter; Pope, Albert; Cannady, William T.Tarragona is a city with a 2 year urban history, building up successive urban settlements literally on top of previous ruins. Its history reveals a city in section. It is proposed that the extreme sectional and chronological structure of this city might be “housed” as the construction site of both an archaeological excavation and the fabrication of urban models. One is therefore factual while the other is representational. The city already has a variety of "Houses" of History scattered from citadel to port as a consequence of previous discoveries/interventions into what was thought to be the anonymous fabric of the city that revealed the existence of a variety of urban fragments. The site for this project was chosen for its proximity to the new Cultural Center and because it is the only anonymous site available on the previously unexcavated 19th century Rambla. There are two organizational methods to be explored in this project, both sectional in character. One is to reveal the archaeological stratas (layers) through the .sectional excavation of the ground and the other is the fabrication of a tower to reveal the documentation of the evidence through urban models culminating in an observation platform to study the contemporary city.Item A public landscape for Galveston, Texas(1996) Engblom, Stephen Carl; Pope, AlbertA lack of non-commodified public space in Galveston was revealed through a series of analysis. The current state of a town that is undergoing a transformation from an agro-industrial economy to a tourist based economy is fertile ground for urban hypotheses. Responding to this need, a site was identified: a fringe area of downtown Galveston, left vacant because of the demise of the agro-industrial economy. Seeing potential for this site to perform as a public landscape for Galveston I use a process of abstraction to develop an architectural transformation strategy. The abstract nature of the proposed design is rooted in a very real comparison to the existing condition of the city tissue.Item A reinvestigation of the modern shopping center : (The search for public space)(1989) Emer, Stephen M.; Waldman, Peter; Pope, Albert; Ingersoll, RichardThis thesis uses the ancient model of the marketplace to re-investigate the potential for providing public space within the context of the decentralized urban landscapes of post-war America. It is proposed, herein, that the study of the modem shopping center, a product of twentieth century suburbanization, represents a potential reevaluation of the role of such a typology with regard to public life. Throughout history, the marketplace has been a catalyst for communal activity. As the marketplace evolved, it reflected the changing pattern of urban development and shifting attitudes towards community and recreation. In light of the recent trend of privatization that has become emblematic of American urbanism, it is clear that public interaction occurs less frequently, and in fewer places, than ever before. The modem shopping center, however, is one of the few prevalent catalysts of public activity in the suburban realm. Many shopping centers have, indeed, managed to foster a sense of community, in spite of the fact that within such confines, public life is actually controlled by private enterprise. As a result, the implicit rules of decorum that are established* ultimately serve to hinder the quality of public activity that may occur. Because of this deficiency inherent in the shopping center, it may be suggested that true public life in suburban America may yet be found in the outdoor realm of the public park. In terms of facilitating communal activity and recreation, the public park has often been compared to the traditional European square. By establishing nodes of open space carved out of dense urban fabric, squares and plazas represent exceptional places of social stability and civic pride. Similarly, the American park, as well as the shopping center both provide focal points of public order and interaction within an otherwise chaotic context. The Olmstedian tradition of the park as a representation of nature, was seen as a way of contrasting the filth and density of the industrial city with a pastoral landscape intended for public recreation. A suburban equivalent to the Olmstedian landscape is the neighborhood park, which preserves fragments of public recreational space amidst the continuous fabric of private dwellings. Like the neighborhood park, the shopping center supports a sense of public life, albeit, privately controlled, and also provides refuge from the suburban context of single-family residences and high speed thoroughfares. Such a parallel between the park and the shopping center suggests the potential for combining aspects of both in order to elevate the communal essence of public space in suburbia. In so doing, the relationship of building to landscape becomes an issue of primary concern. This is an issue that has been often overlooked within the model of the regional suburban shopping center. In many cases, the need for adequate parking tended to eclipse the potential for preserving or enhancing the natural landscape. In order to reevaluate the.role of the shopping center with regard to public life, this thesis proposes a more intimate relationship between building and landscape, by simultaneously acknowledging the external contextual conditions of the highway and the retail establishment, and the potential for providing well defined outdoor space, devoted to recreation, fitness and public interaction.Item Aggressive Buffer(2011) Bremer, Tracy Catherine; Pope, AlbertThis thesis exploits the latent opportunities that are found in buffer zones. While typical buffers are static, passive entities, this thesis treats the buffer as a territory that is able to act aggressively. The buffers' current function is to separate incompatible but adjacent zones of the city; however, as cities evolve over time, the buffer can become a catalyst, acting as an agent of transformation. In Baytown, Texas, industry is effectively the nucleus of the city, serving as its black heart. However, the green buffer that surrounds this black heart suggests a possible future for Baytown in which the buffer expands not into the city as it has done historically, but rather into the former industrial zone, opening up a new realm of possibility. The result is a new type of urbanism in which a city is defined not by a dense core, but rather by a productive green heart that ties together the disparate urban enclaves that once served the city's industrial core.Item Amplified encounters at high speed(2011) Sibley, Rebecca Marie; Pope, Albert; El-Dahdah, Fares; Schaum, TroyThis thesis expands upon the dialogue between speed and architecture, investigating how architecture reinterprets the linear city, originally defined by the continuous fabric of the freeway and more recently reconfigured by the high speed rail line. Using the linear city as a site of exploration and high speed rail as a ground to test new typologies of architectural insertions at amplified speed, this thesis produces an extended civic space along the proposed high speed rail line connecting Tampa and Orlando. Combining a series of performance and commercial programs, this new typology will make the obscured visual experience along the extended territory of the rail line legible, through a sequencing of specific architectural intersections, exploring how monumental civic space will be made and occupied in the sprawl of the American city.Item Amplified Encounters at High Speed(Rice University, 2011) Sibley, Rebecca; Pope, AlbertThis thesis expands upon the dialogue between speed and architecture, investigating how architecture reinterprets the linear city, originally defined by the continuous fabric of the freeway and more recently reconfigured by the high speed rail line. Using the linear city as a site of exploration and high speed rail as a ground to test new typologies of architectural insertions at amplified speed, this thesis produces an extended civic space along the proposed high speed rail line connecting Tampa and Orlando. Combining a series of performance and commercial programs, this new typology will make the obscured visual experience along the extended territory of the rail line legible, through a sequencing of specific architectural intersections, exploring how monumental civic space will be made and occupied in the sprawl of the American city.Item An autobigraphical ecology/an architectural method(1997) Koski, Keith A.; Roy, Lindy; Pope, Albert; Fox, StephenThis project began as an autobiography. In addition to that, it became a study of the history of autobiographies. Somewhere in the comparison, it became necessary to locate the autobiography within an ecology. I reinhabited and measured a place of my youth, a suburban super-block in west Houston. The investigation took on a variety of scales. I studied aerial photographs, took lots of snapshots, shot videos, drove around, walked around, collected artifacts, and talked to people. I processed part of that information into a written and graphic history. The site had experienced cycles of advance and recession between man and nature. It had also experienced radical transformations in the landscape which were largely the results of myopic land development.Item Appropriating architecture(1997) Zuchman, Allison C.; Casbarian, John J.; Gammard, Elysabeth; Pope, AlbertItem Architectural discourse and practice at the end of the twenthieth century (Gilles Delueze)(1996) Juros, Matthew E.; Pope, AlbertA flaw in the use of difference in the semiotic basis of deconstruction is exposed. The finer grained, flexible notion of difference described by Gilles Delueze is inserted in its place. Freed from illustrating difference as a goal, deconstruction becomes a flexible method of analysis that can inform a wide range of architectural solutions. Reinterpreting deconstruction focuses attention on extant architectural discourse.Item Architecture, incarceration and penal ideology :a model prison for Houston(1989) Modisi, Neo; Pope, AlbertI was drawn to the colossus of criminal man. The wealth of penal history, theory, experimentation, and questions made me reconsider some widely held assumptions. Illustrations of sixth century Italian monasteries show single carceri, the more severe being for more heinous offenders.The common use of these carceri in Europe belie reports that early prisons did not have a punitive function in addition to the detentive, did not classify inmates,and that cellular confinement is a modern American invention. Attribution of punitive and solitary incarceration to modernity might be taken as an indication,perhaps,of their greater use in it, not of negligibility in earlier times. Foucault’s brilliant writings also blind one to the fact that the modern penal code was not suddenly created in a leap from dramatic spectacle to pervasive institutionalization in nineteenth century Europe. I was dissatisfied, because my tremendous effort showed me that incarceration as a tool for criminal regulation,if not an evil failure, was fraught with ugliness. Yet we could not do without it. But I was still interested. Because the incarceration of Man by Man is, deeply, a measure of ourselves. I used the penal history of the West to locate architecture within contemporary penal practice because, worldwide, the modern prison, in meaning and form, grew largely from post-sixteenth century developments in, Europe and Britain. The term Colonial States denotes the USA before independence.Item Beyond Doomsday: Designing a post-natural preserve(2007) Bailey, Callie Lynn; Pope, AlbertOver the course of the last few centuries human use and settlement has restricted many natural ecosystems to isolated clusters. Our Third nature---the biota and natural environments that accompany modern human uses---has become the connective tissue---a medium ill suited to this unintended new function. Consequently, the last thirty years have seen an exponential increase in the collecting and indexing of the natural world through the preservation of inert data and natural objects. While ex-situ preservation of inert or dead matter is relatively easy, the preservation of living systems (in situ or ex situ) presents a paradox: preservation implies a static condition, and living requires change. Preserving natural systems that evolved under one set of conditions and that are now suddenly in another requires a great deal of human management---a perversion of time and space---creating distinctly post-natural environments as simulations of past or desired landscapes. The Doomsday Annex is located in the midst of one of these preservation sites---A UNESCO Biosphere preserve on the island of Menorca. Preserving these systems in situ requires that we become invisible stewards, operating through temporary and mobile control mechanisms. Preserving them ex-situ requires a high degree of process control---indeed, it necessitates the creation of entire worlds, where gases, sunlight, and biota are all regulated. The annex attempts to privilege, facilitate, and showcase these methods of constructing a landscape.Item Boxes(2000) Casey, Chris M.; Pope, Albert"Actually a box, in appearance, is purely and simply a right-angled parallel-epiped, but when you look at it from within it's a labyrinth of a hundred interconnecting puzzle rings. The more you struggle the more the box, like an extra outer skin growing from the body, creates new twists for the labyrinth, making the inner disposition increasingly more complex."* *Abe, Kobe. The Box Man. New York: North Point Press, 1974.Item Boxing domesticity(1997) Traeger, Stephen E.; Lerup, Lars; Pope, Albert; El-Dahdah, FaresAs 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.Item Branch administrative cente, Venice, California(1988) Cottle, Mark; Pope, Albert; Sherman, William H.The thrust of this thesis is the relationship of the built artifact to its context, both physical and cultural. Through the combination of research and a design project, I have set out to explore the correspondence between the formal, aesthetic treatment of the margin in architecture and the political, ethical treatment of the margin in the social contract. I have been especially interested in how the treatment of the edges is addressed by the center. In other words, how the body politic builds for its citizens. And how public spaces accommodate various segments of the populace. The city is the appropriate place to begin, I think, because it constitutes both a social, political framework and a physical, built environment. In the city it is immediately apparent that site refers not only to a specific place, but also to the artifact’s location in time and culture. Related to this is the question of the monument -- its appropriateness and uses for our time. On the one hand Bataille has accused architecture of "covering the scene of the crime with monuments." I suppose the "restoration" of New York’s Union Square could stand as a good example. On the other, the projections of Krzysztof Wodiczko and the quilts of The Names Project seriously challenge the validity of the recent spate of monument design competitions. In architecture per se, especially civic structures, this leads to issues of representation. What picture does the building present of the people who made it -- and the people for whom it is intended? I have considered these issues of context, urbanism, and monumentality through a thesis design projects a Branch Administrative Center for Venice, California. The program is derived from that prepared for the recent West Hollywood competition -- a mixture of government services and offices, public assembly spaces, and a variety of outdoor recreation facilities -- adapted to accord with the Branch Administrative Centers, proposed for various districts of Los Angeles since 195. I chose Venice because of its strong urban diagram, its edge condition (edge of continent, fringe of society), its cultural and ethnic heterogeneity, its manageable scale for intervention, the high profile there of marginal and homeless persons, and the community’s ambiguous political relationship to greater Los Angeles.Item Building fabric: Weaving a new student union for New York University(2008) Baird, Laura; Pope, AlbertStudent Centers are typically iconic to a University, but are not always designed with their importance in mind. A student center serves anyone looking for a place to study, surf the web, be entertained, relax, shop, play billiards, eat, purchase books, meet, bank, or make travel arrangements. The program elements are distinct in function and require compartmentalized spatial organization. The services provided in a student center have various usage frequencies and times of activity. How can the design respond and create a relationship between program elements that have little relationship other than the fact that they are forced under a single roof? This thesis proposes a new Student Union for New York University's Washington Square Park campus in Manhattan. This project began with an exploration into the strategies of building fabric, and specifically weaving. Besides answering the need that NYU has vocalized for this building, the design attempts to translate the strategies used in building fabric to the scale of the building in an effort to create a "union" out of this set of compartmentalized programs.Item Capturing the city/spatializing the captured: An animated documentary of Hong Kong(1999) Cheung, Yim-Fun Lucia; Pope, AlbertThe incredible density and the ever-moving round-the clock public transport constitute the vibrant character of Hong Kong. In this totally consumptive city where the turnover rate is unbelievably fast, people have no time and no room to think. Compactness is no longer a function of lack of space but has become a system of its own. Static representation is no longer sufficient to document a city like HK in which every single parameter is animatable. Various computer animation techniques were explored to spatialize the raw footage of the city. These exercises sought to capture the ambiance rather than the physical constructs of the city. "Studios" generated in computer were stacked to form a tower in which the experiences and events of the city were encapsulated. The fixity and objectness of the tower (architecture) is effaced through visually animating the surfaces. Tower was also the metaphor of the compactness of the city.Item Common Ground(2017-04-20) Kuehn, Daniel; Pope, Albert; Wittenberg, GordonAcknowledging the social, political, and cultural implications rooted in the historical relationship between land, architecture, and urbanism, Common Ground expands upon these relationships in order to accommodate the pressing subjects of urban and environmental discourses. Exploring these historical relationships today requires us to rethink the rhetoric of sustainability. The thesis envisions a flexible urban framework situated on Treasure Island, San Francisco that tests the potential of augmenting coastal cities — buttressing their social, cultural, and environmental ecology — against the immediate influences of climate change. Explored is an alternative to cities’ propensity to obfuscate the effects of sea level rise, and to instead develop a speculative urbanism where environment, urbanism, and infrastructure are interdependent and intertwined. The thesis is manifest as a temporary community for first world climate refugees that poses the city as contingent, transitional, and evolving in order to accommodate more robust measures for combating the effects of climate change. >Item Conflicting systems: A mediation of the natural, the man-made, and the in-between(1998) Phillips, James Eric; Pope, AlbertArchitecture and the conceptions of urban and rural space have been drastically transformed by the continuous expansion of the man-made into the natural rural landscape. The collision of man-made and natural environments come together as a continuous overlay of conflicting systems. Complex fields are thus formed, creating systems of "in-between" landscapes that blur the boundaries between the natural and the man-made. The acknowledgment that inhabitants are continually within the city calls into question how society visualizes, constructs, and uses their surroundings. The "in-between" landscape has given way to the possibility of dismantling the common ideas of urban and rural in order to formulate a new type of hybrid landscape. The landscape proposed here, an Environmental Park, becomes a highly interactive field of natural and man-made systems that communicates new ways of thinking, making, and building within the natural, the man-made, and the "in-between."Item Conjuncture in urban design and architecture(1989) Stout, Randall; Pope, Albert; Mitchel, O. Jack; Cannedy, William T.A critical issue of contemporary urban design is that of the transformation of ringroad and highway development on the periphery of urban centers into elements of urban connection. There is a search for a generative syntax to bind together the urban fabric and traffic routes as a solution to the problem of the threshold between that which is urban and extra-urban. This search also seeks an architecture which is coherent with infrastructures and for a correspondence between fast traffic roads, urban morphology and the landscape. It is the development of this correspondence and its impact on urban morphology that could potentially translate the current disorientation of cities such as Los Angeles and Houston into a positive urban experience. Using the Galleria Post Oak area of Houston as arena for this thesis, a conjunctive process will compensate for the negative impact of piecemeal development driven by economic and engineering decisions. This project engages components of both the private and public sectors. Proposals are made at the scale of the district, a specific development area, and a generative architectural component