2019-2020 Senior Honors Theses
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This collection contains theses produced by Class of 2020 Honors students
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Browsing 2019-2020 Senior Honors Theses by Department "Architecture and Design, Gerald D. Hines College of"
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Item After Kahn at IIM(2020-05) Bhatt, RishmaAlexandra Tyng describes her father's design approach at the Indian Institute of Management as a combination of building typology and program. Library, classrooms, dormitories and teacher’s residences are designed as separate objects but are organized ‘around the idea of meeting’ in Tyng’s words.(Tyng,141) She writes that Kahn is also interested in the ‘pols’ of Ahmedabad, the semi-public alley cluster of homes for a larger family unit, and sought to bring some of the formal qualities into the organization of the program elements. The formal geometry of forms and voids make the reading of the informal pol network difficult to read in the final design, however. This thesis reintroduces the pol network into the geometric campus in order to project an urban, hybrid habitation of the isolated university, and investigates the problem of European design sensibilities grafted onto Gujarati space.Item Amman: Jordanian Identity after Modenrism(2020-05) Salameh, Petra K.The Municipality of Greater Amman sought from the early 1950s to frame Amman as the Modern City of the Middle East. To reach such a goal, they instated five urban planning commissions over the course of fifty years. The base of all five plans was laid out in 1955 by Max Lock and Gerald King, two British planners, to produce urban plans and guidelines on how the city should expand, build new structures, and a site plan for Lock’s Civic Center. The following master plans reorganized the same components of the civic center while ignoring the neighboring demographic. The establishment of institutional buildings in the middle of a dense, low-income neighborhood has left the site sterile and unused. The relocation of the Friday market, from its original site to a smaller and less accessible site, was the most recent addition to the site. My thesis proposes the placement of the National Library, the last unbuilt component from the 1955 master plan, on the same site as the Friday Market.Item Bathing in History - Damascus(2020-05) Alhakeem, Gada“England knows Egypt; Egypt is what England knows; England knows that Egypt cannot have self-government; England confirms that by occupying Egypt; for the Egyptians. Egypt is what England has occupied and now governs; foreign occupation therefore becomes “the very basis “ of contemporary Egyptian civilization.“ (Said 34) Knowledge in the hands of the powerful is a tool to shape the identity of the weak. Identity is shaped firstly through dominant environments and secondly through reason. Multiple overlapping imperial cultures (Aramean, Greek, Roman, Umayyad, Ayyubid, Ottoman, and French) in Damascus demonstrate the tie between knowledge, identity, crisis and the space of the city. Colonial planning and social elements of the city are molded and adjusted over time to fit the values of each empire. A surviving archetype- the bath- is the most dominant social evolutionary element in the city, although under a threat due to the development of modern Damascus, private residential baths, and the lack of Skin-ship values and traditions, especially between 1940s- 2004. Today’s civil war and the constant fear of death brought modern residents to value social traditions of the old city and gave rural and suburban refugees of Damascus a social and hygienic refuge . This thesis proposes revealing a contemporary Syrian identity by re-imagining the bathhouse.Item Ghosting I. M. Pei(2020-05) Rabitoy, ColetteIn 1980 I. M. Pei completed his design of the Chase Tower, a building that has still holds the title as the tallest in Houston. The project was built with funds from the late 70's Oil boom along with a surplus of other banking and office infrastructure. In 1984 Pei designed a drive-through bank as an addition to the Chase Tower, built four blocks away at Milam and Congress Street. The pinwheel one-story structure ignores its potential connection to Buffalo Bayou. Today, online banking as well as real estate pressure on a one-story full block site makes the drive-through obsolete, and the location on the bayou leaves the building vulnerable to flooding. The building is abandoned, and its lot is used for parking and loitering. This project explores obsolescence in architecture and aims to build on I. M. Pei's legacy by reimagining the future use of the drive-through bank and its connection to the sub-grade surrounding landscape.Item Qatar Beyond Doha(2020-05) Katami, SaraIn the book “The Heritage of Qatar”, authors Peter Vine and Casey Paula provide an insight into Qatar’s history through its natural history and culture. The artificiality of landscape in Doha has replaced the once bare desert land of Qatar. In Doha, development and building technology focuses on integrated and master-planned communities, a generic building type that shifts from Qatar’s local tradition. In the area outside Doha, technology is seen through its historical and ecological context. The desert of Qatar, with its vast open landscape, is structured by a series of land depressions, sinkholes or caves, sand dunes, mangroves, and salt flats known as “sabkhas”. Aside from Qatar’s desert ecological context its historical context is expansive. Bedouins, abandoned fishing villages, coastal mosques and ruins of ancient forts makeup its heritage. Modernization has brought much change to the Bedouins who occupied the desert. This thesis critiques the mechanistic manipulation of the inhospitable landscape and proposes live and learn space in conjunction with the ecology of the desert land.Item Seun Sangga: Seoul in 1.2 km(2020-05) Ramirez, Kimberly M.Traditional Korean siting strategies place heavy emphasis on nature and specifically take advantage of topographic changes within the site. Further, studying the hybridization of Seoul’s public spaces within Jongno helps understand the balance between site, landscape, and community. The Seun Sangga, Korea’s first mixed-use residential and commercial complex, consists of eight buildings along half a mile. When constructed, the complex lost a lot of the traditional values tying the site back to nature. Studying the effects of rapid modernization and the hybridization of public spaces within the Jongno district, this thesis proposes to re-imagine the Seun Sangga buildings while studying their connection to nature and the Jongno community.Item The Dichotomy of Atmosphere and Nature(2020-05) Alverson, Warren J.The Ship Channel acts as a life line for the petroleum industry on the Texas Gulf Coast. It is ranked 1st in the U.S. for foreign waterborne tonnage, 6th largest U.S. Container Port by total TEU’s, and the largest Gulf Coast container port handling 69% of U.S. Gulf Coast container traffic. Nearly 200 private and public industrial terminals line the 52-mile-long ship channel. In a year, nearly 8,200 vessels and 215,000 barges pass through the port. Amidst all the chemical industrial complexes and gas guzzling barges are residential neighborhoods. In 2019, according to the Houston Chronicle, Houston ranked 9th worst city in the country for ozone pollution, and the water is polluted with dioxins from unregulated dumping and multiple brown sites along the waterway. The Port of Houston is in need of a research center that investigates and addresses the issues that have persisted from the oil and gas industry. Alexander Island, a dredge waste island in the center of the Houston Ship Channel, is the ideal location for this research center. Facilities on the island will include research laboratories, dormitories, vertical farms, solar farms, wildlife habitat, and remediation. The first step in understanding how to create a research center as an architectural solution in the context of the Port of Houston is to investigate the mechanization of architecture over time. Starting with Willis Carrier; then “Mechanization Takes Command”, by Siegfried Giedion; “Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment”, by Reyner Banham; “Projective Ecologies”, by Nina Marie Lister and Chris Reed; and finally, “After the City”, by Lars Lerup. Further analysis of the layers of Houston revealed the layers Sky, Smog, Highway, Canopy, Ground, and Water. Utilizing the layers of Houston as a guidline for designing and organizing a research center creates a building that is well grounded and suited for its site specifically and to monitor, filter, and clean the soil, air, and water.Item The Theatre of Politics: The Streets as the Stage(2020-05) Pedreschi, Giuliana“The truly orphic moment, the scene history is most apt to recall, took place just beyond the designated space of performance, on the sweeping staircase leading up from the lobby to the auditorium doors.” (Townsend 138) At the moment in which the poet, Mário de Andrade, stands at the staircase of the Municipal Theatre in 1922 and reads parts of his works, the audience in the theatre stops to listen as though he is the performer of the night. While the architecture of a theatre intends for the impactful moment to happen at the stage, Andrade challenges that intention by assigning a new performance space in the staircase. There is a disconnect between design and use. In the same way, the disconnect is seen in the Catedral da Sé, the designated seat of ecclesiastical authority. A space originally created for religious control becomes, over the years, a space where the people take control and becomes a spatial expression of political power, first by the church, then by the people. Similarly, the Avenida Paulista, designed as a site for mansions of politically powerful coffee barons, has become the host of numerous movements by the people that ultimately shape the country’s history. This thesis proposes to connect traditional architectural performance in theatre with architecture as an interactive artifact capable of inspiring the social power of the vulnerable masses.