Browsing by Author "Whiting, Sarah"
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Item A Commons Lobby(2015-04-15) Biroscak, Samuel; Whiting, Sarah; Wittenberg, Gordon; Colman, ScottThe social context of mobile work has dissolved the physical dominance of the workstation. The city, once anchored and animated by the clockwork activity of the downtown office, today absorbs this mobile workforce within coffee shops, parks, and public spaces, blurring distinctions between spaces of leisure and spaces of production. As the most visible threshold between the office desk and the city street, the lobby is uniquely positioned to establish social forms of work as a generator of architectural form. By concretizing public/corporate blurring within a highly visible container in the city, A Commons Lobby leverages the social nature of the mobile workforce to reclaim the office as a hub of social activity and a laboratory for new types of work. Lobbies typically serve as a publically occupiable control point, welcoming visitors while restricting their activity, aiming to impress without inviting anyone to stay. It is a spatial type perpetually at odds with itself. The lobby’s potential to transform the office is no more evident than in San Francisco, where the exponential growth of the high-tech industry has led to an internalization (and economic stratification) of the social and commercial activity that once animated downtown streets. As a site, this thesis operates on a new San Francisco live/work district in need of a formal and programmatic counterpoint to the bland anonymity of the typical office. An increasingly mobile workforce places more, not less, importance on the context and urban implications of production. By opening up the lobby as an expanded threshold supporting social, commercial, and corporate program, a new workplace typology emerges to reestablish the office as an urban protagonist.Item Beyond Shelter, Situations of Connectivity(2019-04-17) Elamin, Mona; Wamble, Mark; Colman, Scott; Whiting, SarahSocial housing is often viewed as a pocket for the urban environment deterioration. It is typically designed with a sense of uncertainty as public and real estate policies have developed two strategies to deal with such projects; to reduce or to displace. Public criticism about social housing claims that it is incapable of embracing context, composition and the economy of its surroundings. Thus, various social housing projects were marginalized while pushing its unfortunate residents away from the city’s center. However, if social housing was addressed contextually rather than socially, it will allow for a more appropriate prototyping that mobiles the social market while allowing its residents to navigate the city creating an opportunity for investment and revitalization.Item Cincinnati Shuffle: Subhierarchies in the Stagnant Grid(2012-09-05) Westermeyer, Amy; Whiting, Sarah; Colman, Scott; Schaum, Troy; Wittenberg, GordonThis thesis investigates the use of an operational formal architectural strategy to reinvigorate instances of failing city fabric. By introducing hierarchy and nodal destination elements into the urban grid, the existing field is transformed into a network of catalytic centers. Frame is employed as a permeable mediator between the existing grid and insertion, creating a permeable superblock that is both contextual and stimulating. The Over-the-Rhine district in Cincinnati, Ohio, is one of these failing city fabrics. Directly adjacent to downtown, this once vibrant neighborhood has experienced massive depopulation and deterioration. It’s population has dropped from 45,000 to less than 5,000. Currently, 66% of the buildings in the area are vacant or have been demolished. Over-The-Rhine lies between downtown and the University of Cincinnati. There is potential in creating a growth corridor between these two poles through Over-The-Rhine, stimulating the stagnant grid. A nodal infrastructural transit corridor is inserted between Downtown and the University of Cincinnati. Stops along the corridor act as point insertions in the fabric, forming nodal hierarchy. Incision activates the existing context through connection, deploying both a top down and bottom up approach. It creates a large centralized entity framed by and connected to context. It creates a range of scales, allowing for programmatic variety, an urban characteristic that the enclave lacks. It is strategic in working with the fabric, mediating flows and taking advantage of the porous grid condition. Each incision, in order to successfully attract from both downtown and the university, contains programmatic elements from each pole. This integration creates a complex interaction of program, as well as new partnerships between Downtown and University entities. It is a new approach for both Downtown and the University to address the failing fabric between.Item Civic Superstructure: A Networked Public Sphere(2012-09-05) Chan, Timmie Tin Bik; Colman, Scott; Whiting, Sarah; Hight, Christopher; Wittenberg, GordonThis thesis’s networked public sphere - the Civic Superstructure - transforms the public sphere by reconsidering the pace and purview of the civic. Contemporary public institutions are typically disconnected and isolated islands dispersed throughout the city. Our fast-paced, plugged-in lifestyle, however, is evermore inconsistent with such inconvenient geographical dispersal. By incorporating isolated public institutions into a networked system, this project provides a connective layer across an existing site and takes advantage of the interstitial zones between private institutions to offer the civic realm in places where you least expect it. This sprawling network acts as a platform for accessing public services and information, while also providing a new common space for the public to meet, to learn, to play and even to protest — in short, to be a public, even in this most unlikely of places rendered newly civic through a combination of digital and physical access.Item Unknown Codes of conduct(2019-04-12) Yeung, Hannah; Colman, Scott; Finley, Dawn; Whiting, SarahHeterogeneous public space in Zuccotti Park, NYC.Item Unknown Cultural Inflations(2011) Gottsch, Marti; Whiting, SarahIf the 19th century urban center was a city of manufacturing, and the early 20th century city was one of corporate capitalism, today's downtown can best be characterized as a site of culture and consumption, from the Guggenheim Bilbao to Times Square in Manhattan. Downtown Houston is at a disadvantage in this contemporary context, for it lacks any density of cultural institutions. Sites of entertainment and culture are instead spread throughout the greater Houston metropolitan area. This dispersal creates islands of culture, but leaves downtown Houston without a cohesive cultural identity. By tweaking municipal policy and exploiting untapped sites, this thesis seeks to inflate cultural space in downtown Houston (and by cultural space, I mean everything from the symphony to contemporary art to Karaoke). Inflations promote a new way to transform the city. Rather than make big change through big cultural projects, Inflations are small iterative structures where transformations occur through a set of connections: infrastructural and visual. Already in place in downtown Houston is a seven mile system of tunnels and skywalks that has led to an evacuation of the street and a fragmented downtown public. By slowly infusing forms into this downtown infrastructure a new culture map is made. Through an accumulation of Inflations these small structures become sites of consistent visible exchange: point moments of cultural activity placed in a once banal infrastructural system.Item Unknown DE-CENTER(2012-09-05) Kizy, Sean; Colman, Scott; Pope, Albert; Whiting, Sarah; Wittenberg, GordonDetroit continues to stand out as emblematic of failing urban economies, infrastructure, density, and form. But its spatially dominant urban relationships also provide the opportunity required to transform unsustainable, expanding megalopolises. Taking lead from the recently established Detroit Works Project, De-Center transforms existing urban conditions to propose a network of urban islands that respond to the extreme conditions created through modern planning. It demands that architecture and urbanism act as a single project.Item Unknown Domestic InFlux(2013-09-16) Tannenbaum, Samuel; Wittenberg, Gordon; Alford, Grant; Whiting, Sarah; Colman, Scott“Domestic InFlux” is a thesis that, through study of past typologies and modern technologies, creates a platform to produce new forms of privately owned houses that allows the user to accommodate their changing needs with minimal effort. “Domestic InFlux” overlaps typologies and program so that the occupant can use the house for any function by collapsing certain program and allowing others to expand. Although today’s house is larger than in the past, the average family is smaller. Houses today have also become more segmented, isolating program that has been limited to a predefined area by the architecture. Technology is partially responsible for this change. With improved technology we have become less interested in taking advantage of the site and environment in our life at home, and more interested in using that technology to help us block out the rest of the world and disregard the potentials of the site. As technology develops and the world becomes more efficient, so should the house. As a society we have conflicting desires. We want to live in the city, but we also want to live in a mansion. We want more stuff, but we don’t want to look at it. Special occasions require increased occupancy in a space that is unoccupied for most of the year. With “Domestic InFlux” a mansion can be fit into a row house, turning it in to a Swiss Army house or a house for every need. The “Domestic InFlux” house is no longer passive. It is interactive and dynamic, influencing the way we perceive space at every scale, including the scale of the neighborhood. As these houses aggregate, the residual spaces become outdoor rooms that can be occupied by the community.Item Unknown Expansive Identity(2015-04-23) Jonson, Sophie; Colman, Scott; Wittenberg, Gordon; Whiting, SarahThe identity of a building type is historically, and remains largely, tied to program. Recognizable by functional use, residential, commercial and educational buildings acquire their identity from a concentration of, seemingly, distinct programmatic spaces. This thesis exploits the hybrid building, increasingly typical in contemporary architecture, and the unexpected mixing and sharing of functions to challenge typological identity on the basis of program. Instead, this thesis opposes a mono-functional configuration to propose that the organization of space and the reading of form, working together as an architectural system, can supersede program in the representation of typological identity. The legibility of a building type; therefore, comes from a constructed spatial image: one that is both perceptual and conceptual. This thesis merges four overlapping, but conceptually distinct building types, into a singular hybrid tower: hotel, office, residential apartments, and a continuing education school. Taking advantage of shared programs to yield shared spaces, hybridity allows the physical space of each typological part to be condensed. However, the careful negotiation of separated and shared space produces parts that are interdependent, while seeming independent. The result is an environment that is equally occupied by all four types, yet is dominantly perceived by each. The organization of space, composition of form and orientation of circulation transform a generic Cartesian column grid into a hybrid environment with four readable biases. Each architectural bias constructs a distinct spatial image that is associated with a specific building type, but which overlaps with the other types in shared spaces. The architectural bias allows shared space to become legible as exclusive space. Consequently, the perceptual and conceptual representation of typological identity, which mentally expands the extents occupied by each building type, produces a composite building with four dominant parts.Item Unknown Face Down/Ground Up: Activating the Sixth Facade and Amplifying Public Space(2012-09-05) Benzon, Courtney; Finley, Dawn; Colman, Scott; Wittenberg, Gordon; Whiting, SarahThis thesis condenses open public space on an urban site in order to create an animated environment for public use. Maximizing use of an open lot in Sao Paulo, Brazil, an elevated concrete plate layers the site into a covered plaza below with sport and recreation program above. By lifting a programmable ground surface above street level, the project maintains the ground plane as an extension of the urban surroundings. The underside of the elevated plate becomes a horizontal elevation, or sixth façade, which is the new public interface of the project. Essentially a double-sided surface that is formally manipulated, the elevated structure both defines and unifies the two zones, mediating between them while creating different conditions and atmospheres, each with their own potential to invite public activity.Item Unknown Fat facade: Vertical public space(2011) Tankard, Jessica Hope; Whiting, SarahThis thesis proposes that the facade of a building, typically seen as a boundary, can become volumetric and inhabited with program. Shanghai's library, currently a sprawling, horizontal megaform, is reconfigured as a thin vertical envelope that attaches to the facade of an existing building. The inner, existing tower uses the efficiency of stacked floor plates for office and book storage, while the facade becomes a cultural interface with the city, bringing porosity and collectivity to the high-rise. The new nested tower typology invigorates Shanghai's crowded city center with an institution that lacks space on the ground plane, while providing a layer of climate control for the tower through a programmed, structural façade. Two latent byproducts of capitalism, skyscrapers and skin systems, are exploited to produce a typology for a high visibility, but low-footprint, institution for the city.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 History, Repeating(2013-04-19) White, Duncan; Roberts, Bryony; Wittenberg, Gordon; Whiting, Sarah; Colman, ScottThis project is a study in doing the same thing again and again and again. It experiments with a purposefully reductive design strategy limited to the repetition of a single idea. Taking cues from other disciplines, it uses this incessant repetition to introduce a new affect to architecture based upon the experience of self-similar spaces in an uninterrupted and seemingly endless sequence. Finally, it reimagines the typology of the large history museum, proposing an open-ended series of moments of historical totality as an alternative to the cumulative or narrative unfolding of content. This thesis project is at once a primitive formal game and a spatially complex reinvention of a venerable American institution. It is an architectural contraption that reorders a universe of artifacts.Item Unknown Los Angeles, 2030(2018-04-11) Chung, Michelle; Colman, Scott; Wittenberg, Gordon; Whiting, SarahLos Angeles, 2030 is an intensified version of itself, a city of two American fictions: the detached house and the skyscraper. Two walls within walking distance of Wilshire Corridor formally demarcates and exacerbates this paradoxical suburban-metropolitan condition. Between the walls, unfettered density is encouraged to develop a metropolitan strip; outside the walls, the suburban tapestry remains. The metropolitan strip narrows to allow suburban artifacts to remain in a suburban neighborhood, or widens to intensify the urban experience of major cultural facilities and to maintain already urbanizing and distinct districts. The walls themselves are operative boundaries: infrastructure that produces thousands of vertical plots for housing, public amenities, and urban connectivity along its roof. Though starting along Wilshire, this infrastructure is projected to continue along all of Los Angeles’s corridors, cultivating a network of urbanism and islands of suburbia. The new vision for the American Dream is this operative boundary, the medium that allows two of the most salient American symbols of freedom to coexist.Item Unknown Manifesting Exchange(2012-09-05) English, Elena; Colman, Scott; Bhatia, Neeraj; Whiting, Sarah; Wittenberg, Gordon; Pope, AlbertExchange is at the core of public space. Whether trading products or sharing information, exchange between people produces social interactions and spatialized hubs of activity. Without exchange public spaces fail. Today, the Internet threatens older methods of spatialized exchange as people communicate through email, pay bills electronically, and shop online. These despatialized forms of exchange are having a damaging impact on previously functioning public spaces such as the post office and retail stores. Distribution centers, meanwhile, are thriving as product exchange points but they remain completely invisible and inaccessible to the customer. With the United States Postal Service in rapid decline, once monumental buildings will soon be abandoned. Taking advantage of the existing infrastructure of post offices, I am proposing a centrally located public distribution center; giving online companies a physical presence in the city, monumentalizing the currently despatialized market, and reintroducing the public to the exchange process.Item Unknown P.L.A.T.F.O.R.M. The Public of Lagos Agency of Trash Formation, Organization, Remediation, and Management(2012-09-05) Lee, Brian; Whiting, Sarah; Bhatia, Neeraj; Colman, Scott; Wittenberg, GordonLagos, Nigeria is a city of rapidly shifting conditions and perpetual crises with issues of over population, pollution, limited circulation, waste management, density, poverty, and social disparity. These conditions have resulted in the proliferation of slum settlements along the coastal edges of the megacity. However, the radical conditions of Lagos promote new solutions for the city. Waste provides the mass for coastal expansion, and defense from sea-rise. Expansion of the coastline provides new territories for the growth of slums. Geometry can maximize efficiency and minimize contamination. P.L.A.T.F.O.R.M., makes use of the processes associated with Lagos waste management and the expansion of the slums, while mitigating the harmful effects of contamination and providing a defensive barrier against sea-level rise.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 Porous Autonomous(2013-07-10) Mussett, Jack; Wittenberg, Gordon; Wamble, Mark; Whiting, Sarah; Colman, ScottPorosity is program, circulation, light, views, scale, occupation. Autonomy is sculpture, logic, container, shelter, indifference. The contemporary public institution must be porous and autonomous. While this goal has never been fully realized in representational architecture, it is a potent impetus for inquiry into the relationship between the public and its institutions. Porous Autonomous is one continuous scaffold--one continuous party wall--in the aims of a robust, fully functioning institution perforated by a thriving onlooking public. The institution is allowed to function autonomously and taps into the power of the cohabiting public at decisive moments. The architecture is robustly expressive, announcing the arrival of a new public institution.Item Unknown Public Infrastructure(2019-02-27) Rader, David; Whiting, Sarah; Finley, Dawn; Colman, Scott“...The question is, “how then to open the avenue of great debates, accessible to the majority, while yet enriching the multiplicity and the quality of public discourses, of evaluating agencies, of ‘scenes’ or places of visibility?” ... Perhaps the question can be addressed with less a sense of inevitable contradiction and impasse if one moves away from the universalizing ideal of a single public and attends instead to the actual multiplicity of distinct and overlapping public discourses, public spheres, and scenes of evaluation that already exist, but that the usual idealizations have screened from view.¹” Contemporary Publics The contemporary megalopolis is comprised of diverse collectives. These collectives, or “bubbles,” within the city contain self-similar socioeconomic and demographic groups with little overlap. We live and work amongst others who are like ourselves. The geographically isolationist tendencies inherent in our megalopolitan condition are mirrored in digital media. Rather than enriching civic discourse and participation, media networks have been shown to populate homogeneous platforms in which various collectives group themselves according to shared interests with the benefit of excluding others². Habermas’ “public sphere,” which relied upon conversational engagement amongst socially diverse groups, is absent³. The result is a fractured society in which the value of physical interaction is not reflected in our built environment. Public institutions which provide moments of overlap among diverse groups must expand this critical role. The community college is one example of a centralized model which may better serve contemporary publics through decentralization. The Role of the Community College The community college is a public institution that serves many collectives comprising students and the general public. Accordingly, community colleges are pursuing strategies which fill gaps in education, provide professional training, and expand social services. These shifts require innovation in form and function. The centralized campus typology is unfit to support these new roles as suburban campuses are physically isolated and benefit only those within the immediate vicinity. This is problematic in any megalopolis where access is further complicated by congestion. The community college, already a relatively decentralized institution, should be further decentralized and integrated with public transportation to form a network which extends access and multiplies moments of social intersection. The Function of Public Transit American cities have neglected public transportation in favor of the automobile. Rapid urban growth has exacerbated street congestion, challenging the feasibility of vehicular infrastructure. As streets designed for cars become dysfunctional, cities which had neglected public transportation are now investing heavily in below-grade transit. The expansion of public transit systems into car-dependent cities provide critical sites for architectural engagement; transit infrastructure must expand beyond its traditional function. Transit hubs with overlapping collectives have been exploited for commercial gain, and valuable urban sites are often underutilized by hosting tiny shelters over a single route from street to platform. Integrating transit infrastructure with public institutions will ensure expanded access and social engagement for contemporary publics, allowing public institutions and urban infrastructure to evolve simultaneously and serve diverse publics in new ways. The thesis makes three assertions: 1. Urban environments are populated by homogeneous collectives with little overlap. We need a new public sphere, a physical space in which diverse collectives may overlap and engage one another. 2. The decentralized community college will increase public access and maximize education, training, and community support while increasing moments of overlapping collectives. 3. The insertion of new transit networks into auto-oriented cities demands that we rethink their functionality. Transit will become a facilitator for engagement by capitalizing on the overlapping of diverse collectives at points of intersection while extending access to public institutions. 1 Robbins, Bruce. The Phantom Public Sphere. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 2 Schroeder, Ralph. Social Theory after the Internet: Media, Technology, and Globalization. UCL Press, 2018. 3 Admittedly, the spectrum of social diversity of his 18th c. example was perhaps not that great either.