Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2015. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 74-83). / My thesis examines the urban transformation of Beirut between 1830 and 1930. Evolving from a local market city importing European goods and exporting local produce into a transit city for the re-export of European commodities, Beirut developed from a quadrilateral of thick crusader walls enclosing a labyrinth of narrow streets into a modem commercial center highlighted by the French-designed Place de l'Étoile. The new center connected the city with the port and with its hinterland through two major thoroughfares lined up with modem office buildings that, for the first time, accommodated underground storage spaces. My core questions are: What made Beirut develop in this direction? Why were the markets centered the way they were? I argue that the urban transformation of Beirut in the nineteenth century through World War I was a manifestation of a French imperial policy that had been at play a century before the French Mandate. Seeking to extend infrastructural networks, France saw Beirut, particularly through its port, as an economic base that would facilitate trade with the region. 'Beirut al- Jadida' (New Beirut) was ultimately created to provide a gateway for France to regain access into the region after an era of decline in French economic dominance in the Levant, in the wake of the Napoleonic Expedition into Egypt and Syria (1798-1801) and the abrogation of the Achelles du Levant system of trade by Ahmad Pasha Al-Jazzar (r. 1775-1804). In the second half of the nineteenth century, with the expansion of the port (1887-1890) and the construction of the carriageway (1857-1863) and railroad (1895) between Beirut and Damascus, French dominance rose once again-this time in a new political (colonial) form. The French agent intervening in the development of Beirut evolved from it being a financial investor-through private companies sponsoring the silk industry and other trades-in the early nineteenth century, to a major concession holder of various public works in the mid- to late-nineteenth century after the silk trade with the Levant had declined, to a military colonizer in the early twentieth century, when French economic dominance became a governmental pursuit no longer restricted to the operations of private businesses. My thesis seeks to explore how the change over time in economic and political activities, and in the interests of the colonizers in both the pre-colonial and colonial periods, was reflected in urban design and planning of the city. In my work, I propose a framework of analysis that sees the nineteenth- and early-twentieth- century development of Beirut as a continuous process of modernization and engagement with the international economic system in which both the Ottomans and French were invested, contrary to a significant number of scholarly works that tended to partition the city's history into two separate historical narratives tied to the two governing regimes. / by Chantal El Hayek. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M. in Art, Culture, and Technology)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2012. / Page 103 blank. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 90-93). / Work narratives haunt the architecture of our shared built environment, urging me to visualize the humanity attached to materials that define space and use. Unregulated, human labor markets are deeply embedded into necessary components of contemporary global, societal infrastructures. This relationship plays itself out in plain sight, and yet can be silent. I imaginatively liken laboring bodies to the inner workings of the built environment; bodies, like pipes, are put to use in an underground that is equally seen/unseen literally as well as figuratively. Domestic laborers on the street, buried pipes, underground. There are visual, sonic, physical, and linguistic relationships between informal domestic labor and material infrastructure. Functional sounds of informal labor and physical infrastructure are often similarly muffled. Frameworks of material and informal labor are described by beneficiaries as necessary for economic sustainability. Physical infrastructure is tangible and ephemeral, awash with images of labor, fragmented. Labor and the built environment are infused with subdued narratives of work and love as they facilitate the daily exchange of goods, services, and currency in any functioning society. This thesis explores these relationships, examining the aesthetics of infrastructure through observation, study, and artistic production. / by Tomashi Jackson. / S.M.in Art, Culture, and Technology

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 103-105). / Contemporary, architectural forms which are constructed upon the landscape of a pre-existing structure or built fabric can make important connections with our past and give us a vital, visual expression of historical change. This thesis explores the nature of interventions into old buildings and the importance they play in maintaining an architectural continuity through time in our built landscape. The study of historical and contemporary examples of building reuse and transformations provide the basis for a proposal to design an addition to the National Museum of Rome. The museum, housed in the ancient remains of the Baths of Diocletian - allows the opportunity to investigate the connections between contemporary and ancient materials and the way in which they are deployed to form a cohesive whole. This project demonstrates the necessity of building in a way which restores and maintains a connection with the past in order to create meaningful places for our future. / by Kristin Karli Leader. / M.Arch.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. Thesis. 1971. M.Arch. / Bibliography: leaves 99-101. / M.Arch.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. Thesis. 1969. B.Arch. / B.Arch.

Thesis (S.M. in Architecture Studies)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2013. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-93). / Los Cerros Orientales, a ridge of mountains that spans the eastern edge of Bogota are the most iconic and monumental feature of the city. They were also critical in the city's history as they provided the resources to support the original settlements, supplied the materials to build the city and dictated its urban form. Because of their symbolism and visual prominence preservation policies have been implemented to protect them from urbanization. Starting in 1977 the government instituted an urban growth boundary to prevent urbanization in Los Cerros. However, the large rural to urban migrations that began in the mid-twentieth century created an erratic urban expansion that the boundary was unable to contain. Informal and formal developments have continued to expand into protected land regardless of the different containment policies that have been institutionalized. The aim of this thesis is to reexamine Bogota's urban boundary in order to devise alternative strategies that can better address the inevitable urbanization of Los Cerros. The argument is rooted in the premise that social, political and economical conditions will prevent containment strategies to succeed. As a result, urbanization is acknowledged and used as a proxy to design strategies that will bolster and improve existing social and natural ecologies. Informality, infrastructure and architectural monuments are the lenses through which this thesis explores and articulates alternative strategies for the urban boundary. / by Juan Andres Bernal. / S.M.in Architecture Studies

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1991. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 41-43). / by Natalio Carlos Pincever. / M.S.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 160-173). / This thesis addresses the critical terrain on which the colonial and post-colonial narratives of identity take shape. Taking Gayatri Spivak's aphorism that imperialism requires a rereading "not because Empire ..... is abstract, but because Empire messes with identity" as its premise, it attempts to map the spatio-temporal territory of identity expression inscribed between colonial New Delhi - "The King's God Child" - as the capital city of Imperial British India, and post-colonial Islamabad - "The City of Islam" - as the capital city of the nation-state the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The paper identifies a colonial legacy in Islamabad, and establishes the dialogic persistence of socio-spatial structures congruent in both cities. The independent nation status attained by much of the developing world in the last fifty years can be taken as a change in consciousness: breaking with the past is inextricably linked with the sense that tradition has been dismembered. This has led to a crystallization of memory at the particular moment of independence, and an effort to embody memory within a sense of historical continuity. Effacement of identity, which was once the only means of survival for the colonized, has been replaced by the legitimation of identity. The return to a denied heritage requires a re-invention of traditions which project an apparent coherence. Public architecture, as a form of cultural production, allows the suppression of inherent contradictions within the constitution of a nation. In this capacity it functions in much the same way as ideology. Capital cities as signifiers of a projected national identity thus provide an appropriate site of intervention for this discussion. It is the contention of this thesis that New Delhi in its epitomic narrativization of colonialism foreshadows the narrative mechanisms of post-colonial Islamabad. Sara Suleri has written: "If English India can serve as a discursive model of any interpretive resonance, then it must illustrate a disbanding of the most enduring binarism that perplexes colonial cultural studies: it must provide an alternative to the assignation of 'cultures' to colonialism; of 'nation' to post-colonialism". The sorry contiguity of the two terms evokes the post-colonial presence of the socio-spatial idiom of Imperial British India within the contemporary situation; this is the transitional social reality of postcolonial "modernity" as manifest in the architecture and urbanism of Islamabad. / by Imran Ahmed. / M.S.

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1983. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH / Includes bibliographical references (p. 178-183). / Through the design of an architecture school for Harvard University on the site presently occupied by Gund Hall, this thesis seeks to address the issue of defining architecture as an expressive endeavor--as a way of naming the essence of a given place, in all its cultural, sociological, historical and geophysical complexity--while simultaneously making a personal and contextually responsible statement. / by Marilys R. Nepomechie. / M.Arch.

Thesis (M.Arch.) Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture, 1949. / Accompanying drawings held by MIT Museum. / Bibliography: leaves 44-45. / by Gordon A. Phillips. / M.Arch.