R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Waldman, Peter"

Browsing by Author "Waldman, Peter"

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A critical application of traditional urban patterns and housing typologies in a desert urban town: the case of Majes City, Peru
(1985) Torres Soto, Miguel A.; Underhill, Michael; Waldman, Peter; Wittenberg, Gordon
This thesis deals with a critical application of urban patterns and housing typologies through an urban design study for a new town in a desert region.The effects of an arid climate on urban life and the functional organization of a new town are examined together with the impact of cultural traditions of city building. Majes City is to be a component of the Majes Irrigational Project planned for the coastal desert of Peru. The climatic conditions and the geographic situation of the site are seen to be major factors in defining criteria for the spatial configuration of this town. Peruvian urban traditions and urban traditions common in other desert regions in terms of urban patterns are also studied in order to define further criteria for the design proposal. In addition, the design is based on a grid-block system which is an urban pattern with specific housing types in developing Peruvian cities. Hence, the design seeks to simultaneously respond to several contextual issues including: the site, the climate, people's culture and needs, Peruvian urban traditions and modern attempts to improve the urban environment.
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.
A reinvestigation of the modern shopping center : (The search for public space)
(1989) Emer, Stephen M.; Waldman, Peter; Pope, Albert; Ingersoll, Richard
This 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.
An analysis of daylighting in the works of Alvar Aalto and Louis I. Kahn
(1989) Peters, Patrick A.; Waldman, Peter
This thesis focuses on the manner in which two contemporaries, Alvar Aalto and Louis I. Kahn, each recognized the potential for and developed techniques toward the realization of daylighting's efficacy for the clarification of the architect's spatial concept. Although the architectural responses of these two architects differed greatly, common tendencies may be found to underlie the work of both. While in Aalto's case, the architect's interest in daylighting initiated with an investigation of functional illumination, and in Kahn's case, began with an investigation of spatial characterization, the interest of each matured toward the pursuit of a compound daylighting program dependent upon both the techniques of chiaroscuro for the emphasis of texture and mass and of silhouetting for the emphasis of profile and spatial layering. In the work of both a commitment to a compound, rather than a singular manner of integrating daylighting contributed to the fragmentation of mass and the merging of the artifact with the landscape.
An architectural demonstration of the principle of transformation
(1984) Warwick, Gregory; Waldman, Peter; Turner, Drexel; Todd, Anderson
This thesis demonstrates the principle of transformation, which is based on a contention that the creation of effective symbolic communication in the visual realm is a process of combining and modifying known visual elements to represent new conceptual meaning. The demonstration of the principle is in the form of an architectural schematic design.
Analogies between nature and architecture (Texas)
(1993) Diz, Joaquin Ignacio; Waldman, Peter
Nature is a wealthy source for referral during the creative process of architecture. It has thus been employed throughout history in different ways by different architects, each time providing new foundations for further interpretations. In this project, both, the site (Big Bend National Park, Texas) and the program (World Center for Birds of Prey), inform the architecture. The first through its geology, topography, history, and spirit, the second through the historical relationship between humans and falcons as well as the difference in their inherent freedom of spatial displacement. This information is abstracted into architectural forms based on essences and not on literal interpretations.
Changing communal habitat patterns in the Tzotzil region of the Chaipas highlands in Mexico
(1984) Roman Pina, Cristina, Ma; Waldman, Peter; Rowe, Peter G.; Taylor, Julie
For the past forty years, Chiapas, Mexico has undergone industrialization and modernization, due to both the development of natural resources and the social programs of the Mexican government. These recent changes are altering indigenous culture through changes introduced without serious consideration of the consequences of such national integration. The survival of traditional settlement patterns is a major problem for the cultural continuity of these societies during their period of adaptation to modern life. The problem of development and modernization with respect to evolving cultural patterns in the Chiapas Highlands is addressed. Hence, primacy is given to the study of the indigenous population's construal of natural and social environments in determining physical patterns of settlement. Specific analysis and recommendations are made with the aim of insuring cultural continuity and self-sufficiency, as well as the preservation of viable forms of cultural expressions.
Connections in architecture
(1984) Bleck, Robert Frank; Cannady, William T.; Waldman, Peter
The environment is composed of many parts. Growth occurs through the incremental addition of new parts. During this process there is a desire on the part of the architect to establish order in the environment through a process of unification. Unity is a metaphysical concept. It is the essential quality needed to give man orientation to the human experience. During the modern movement it was popular to articulate the various elements of a building. The walls were separated from the ceilings, structure was independent from elements of enclosure, and the buildings themselves were often separated from the ground. The result is an architecture consisting of various juxtaposed parts. In reaction to this attitude, I propose an architecture which celebrates connections rather than revealing them, resulting in a synthetic rather than analytic expression of the meeting of the architectonic elements. Of course, not all built elements need to be or should be tangibly connected. Many elements are truly independent and need to be physically separated. For these cases, 1 propose the use of implied connections to accommodate both the physical needs of separation and the psychological needs of unity. Through the use of both celebrated and implied connections I intend to exploit both the dependent and independent systems in architecture.
Downtown Houston parking garage interventions
(1989) Feiersinger, Martin C.; Cannady, William T.; Waldman, Peter; Sherman, William H.
The wheel of the design-process was brought into movement rapidly with the "discovery” of potential landscapes within the city of automobile accessible roof terraces in Downtown Houston, 12 feet above street level. Polaroid series, most of which were shot from the car, documented the various "journeys" through these places. Thereafter three parking garages were chosen for three experiments. Three projects, independent of one another, were commenced at once, reflecting my interest in the simultaneity of different processes as well as in the dynamic influences within the process. The three programs: From a catalog of imagined functions, triggered by the "discovered landscapes", the following were selected: First, 3 houses for one person who seeks orientation and observes the city but lives in the greatest isolation; with the starting-point in "personal sensual experience". Second, in opposition to the above, "public architecture" was discussed with specific performance places; with the starting-point in "collective experience/communication". Third, in between the aforementioned poles a rather conventional program of an athletic club as well as a night club was given form.
Empty and sacred architecture : a small parochial school for Houston, Texas
(1988) Bernhard, Scott D; Mitchel, O. Jack; Pope, Albert; Ingersol, Richard; Shennan, William; Todd, Anderson; Waldman, Peter
No abstract
Feng shui, Chinese geomancy
(1990) Ho, Belinda Oi-Yee; Parsons, Spencer; Waldman, Peter; Balfour, Alan
Chinese geomancy (feng shui) has been an important underlying concept behind ancient and modem Chinese architecture. As a parallel to Le Corbusier's Golden Section, principles of Chinese geomancy assist in the determination of various design decisions; such as the location of a site, the geometry of a building or room, and even the arrangement of furniture. Through the means of feng shui, Chinese architecture is able to establish a harmony between heaven, earth and man. I would like to extend this set of principles to design a Chinese embassy in the western setting of Washington D.C. The embassy not only symbolizes the political relationship between the eastern and the western cultures, but it also offers the potential for a harmonic juxtaposition of the eastern concept with a set of western criteria such as zoning and building ordinances. The design would serve as a demonstration of the interaction between eastern and western values; or, more specifically, the interplay between the ideal and spiritual and the realistic and functional. Through complimentary and conflicting dualities, a harmony will be sought through design.
From Miocene to Inland Scene
(Rice Design Alliance, 1989) Waldman, Peter
Houston aquarium and water garden
(1989) Gowe, Richard J; Waldman, Peter; Shennan, William
This thesis proposes to use the water gardens of the mid-sixteenth century Italy as a paradigm for building a water garden in Houston, Texas. Specifically, the Villa Adriana in Tivoli, 131 A.D., the Villa Giulia in Rome, 1550, the Villa D'Este in Tivoli, 1555, and the Villa Lante, 1565, are investigated through a site visit, historical research and formal analysis. The site of the Houston water garden is in the dense fabric of downtown on the site of the vacated convention center between Texas and Capitol Avenues and between Louisiana St. and the western edge of downtown, Buffalo Bayou. This site provided the opportunity for creating a connection between Jones Plaza, the cultural center of downtown, and the edge of downtown, the bayou…
In-corporeal-ating architecture: The living body and a place of death
(1992) Svedberg, Robert Joseph; Waldman, Peter
The history of the senses will be looked at in terms of a concept of viewing emerging from the visual, and domination that this viewing holds over the other senses (and sensing in general) in architecture. A change in the hierarchy of the senses becomes evident during the late Gothic period, it is institutionalized in architecture by Durrand and in philosophy and art criticism by Kant. What this separation of viewing from vision (as a sense) and the isolation in Kant of the cognitive faculty from the aesthetic, does is impose a severe mind/body split. It is this dialect that informs the very basis of modernity, science, and architecture within the university. Architecture has the power to deny this mind/body split, and this potential has been realized concurrent to the domination of the visual.
Interpreting Calvino: Salon and Studio, a methodology for discovery (Italo Calvino)
(1992) Ennis, Kristina Lynn; Waldman, Peter
Using the concepts of Being as described by Calvino and the evaluation of Velasquez's painting Las Meninas in Foucault's, The Order of Things, a series of analytic exercises is initiated. Calvino speaks about Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility and Multiplicity; Foucault addresses the shortcomings of language. Interpreting the concepts inherent in these agenda, a methodology for re-seeing the spaces of a Salon and a Studio is proscribed. The results of these exercises provides a program for the construction of a vestibule: reconstructing the space of Las Meninas. This reveals the fundamental truth behind Calvino's writings: the vestibule serves as a tool for examining an environment. No one tool can embody the principles of Calvino; but only in the process of creating or viewing can the methodology for discovery be determined. Ultimately, the purest form of the vestibule lies in the phenomenal, the experiential and the language of the individual's imagination.
Museum for the American Indian
(1990) Naumann, Kristin R.; Sherman, William H.; Waldman, Peter; Balfour, Alan
The dialectic of indigenous tradition and modern innovation is neither a new phenomenon, nor is it one which can easily be resolved. American democracy depends on the integration o-f the local and individualist with the general and the common. Shared values and tastes fortify the American status quo while the idiosyncratic is modified or gentrified for common consumption. In America where freedom of expression is celebrated, the issue of cultural expression in architecture has been met with ambivalence or has produced kitsch. Regional work is either too individualistic or too homogenized to constitute a genuine contribution to American architecture. A balance must be struck between the cultural richness of the country’s regional architectural expression and that of the perceived ideal. The U.S. has a very real, living indigenous architecture, that of the Native American. A rich opportunity exists for assimilation and reinterpretation to occur as regional work confronts that of a universal or modern nature. Such interaction will result in renewed expression for America’s indigenous people while providing others with a basis for critical exploration. A critical framework would allow all to examine themselves and their relationship to the dominant society. The proposal to design a museum for the American Indian is intended to provide a hypothetical situation where these concerns may be pursued. Washington D.C. as the proposed site provides ample opportunity for such exploration. The city is a study in paradox, scale and ideology. The Mall has become a national symbol, a sacrosanct region where public institutions celebrate America’s achievements and unified diversity. The siting of the Museum of the American Indian on The Mall provides the appropriate context for this investigation. As The Mall’s institutions have additional significance in their celebration of American achievements and shared heritage the museum proposal must participate and contribute to the area’s national and ideological role.
Myth and collage, continuity and zeitgeist : strategies for the reoccupation of ruins
(1990) Condon, Patrick; Waldman, Peter; Shennan, William; Balfour, Alan
The task of finding a meaningful architecture for urban America is difficult. The American city constantly reinvents itself, destroying that which preceded it. Populist architecture has turned to preservation and reconstruction as a means to provide an architecture linked to place and past, but this effort distances us from our history, perhaps more so than the architecture to which it IS a reaction. An architecture of collage, which incorporates fragments of memory, would be true to both the nature of the American city and the need to locate oneself in place and history. Our obsession with erasing our past derives from an inability to perceive the positivistic bias in architectural theory. This bias results not only in excessive ground-clearing but denies the possibility of a meaningful architecture which speaks through dream and myth. An architecture of collage, incorporating fragments of memory, has great potential for the creation of mythic images. Such an architecture links not only to the past, but also the present; it can be read much like the grafting in works by contemporary authors and artists. Architecture as a practice between bricolage and science allows the creation of works which: require the clearing of the ground yet reveal history; deconstruct and existing order while creating another, operate in both the worlds of science and myth; and provide for cultural continuity and the expression of the zeitgeist.
Redefining urbanity in a city of discrete centers (Houston)
(1991) Baumann, Philippe Gerald; Waldman, Peter
This thesis examines the viability of developing a localized area of high-intensity pedestrian activity for Houston--an exceptionally non-pedestrian, automobile-oriented city. I formulate one model of development in response to the unique character of Houston. This model synthesizes the energy of older city models and their compact, vital urban cores, within the constraints of a dispersed city. I study the market as an enduring example of successful urban interaction and diversity, and suggest that an equally vital center that is pedestrian in orientation can exist in Houston's neglected metropolitan core. A confluence of public and private amenities and activities should increase social interaction, causing other urban elements to proliferate. The central business district of Houston can reasonably support a denser center than those which currently predominate in peripheral locations. I attempt to resurrect a specific part of the city as a dominant center for a wide cross-section of the urban population.
Representation and utility can be rejoined through structure
(1984) Palmer, Ellen; Cannady, William T.; Todd, Anderson; Waldman, Peter
My thesis proposes that current architecture, in its search for character, has overlooked the contributions and opportunities of the Modern Movement. In its resurgent use of representation, primarily through a pluralistic adoption of historical references and stylistic images, this current architecture fails to provide the clarity of intention that a Modern attitude towards truth, technique and production would demand. This architecture has separated representation and utility to the extent that "how" a thing is made is no longer an issue. The resulting lack of integration is producing an architecture that is inappropriate for our time. I intend to prove that by rejoining the elements of representation and utility we can produce an architecture that will be a better response to, and reflection of, our cultural values and building technologies. I intend to prove that the means of this rejoining lies in the use of structure, both structure as the technical device which defines space and, on a larger scale, as the ordering of the built environment. Clarity of structure will produce an architecture that embodies an appropriate character for our own time.
Rhetoric, ruin and mapping topographic incidents :an architectural inquiry into the archaeology of memory
(1988) Wall, Scott Wheland; Ingersoll, Richard; Pope, Albert; Waldman, Peter

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