Thesis (B.Arch.) Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture, 1952. / MIT copy bound with: Desert housing / Jan Piotr Kowalski. 1952. Accompanying drawings held by MIT Museum. / Title supplied by cataloger. / Includes bibliographies. / by Salem K. Shaheen. / B.Arch.

Thesis (M.C.P.) Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture, 1954. / by James M. Small. / M.C.P.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1987. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-92). / This thesis focuses on urban design issues germane to downtown shopping center design. The underlying concept is that, all new downtown shopping centers should attempt to build upon the existing fabric in such a way as to become an integral part of the city. This study first examines the nature of retail districts, the shopping center as a building type, and the recent emergence of the downtown shopping center. Two recently constructed downtown centers will be reviewed, to uncover urban design concerns that are pertinent to the conceptual design of shopping centers in the context of downtowns. The intent of this study is to formulate design guidelines that address the problems of implementing this suburban retail model in the context of a downtown. These guidelines are then applied to a specific site in the form of a sketch problem. This study concludes with an evaluation of the guidelines and some recommendations for designing shopping places that are conceived as an integral part of the city. / by Billy Kevin McGhee. / M.S.

Thesis: S.M. in Architecture Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. "June 2017." / Gilded City appropriates seven copperplate etchings produced by Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin between 1982 and 1990 in the pursuit of their preservation through reinterpretation and recontextualisation. Gilded City reacts to the political events in the United States of the past six months. Gilded City explores the potential of architectural animation as a tool for both design and representation as well as a powerful tool for (anti) propaganda while making use of traditional cel animation, 2D Vector based animation, 3D computer animation as well as motion graphics. In 1978, disenchanted with the bleak prospect of the faceless, unadorned, utilitarian architectural doctrine of the Brezhnev and Khrushchev years, Brodsky and Utkin began to produce fantastical landscapes and structures in exquisite and detailed drawings. Imaginative, light-hearted, subversive, their body of work freely referenced historical precedents ranging from Greek Mythology to 18th Century architects. Brodsky and Utkin utilized paper architecture to subvert the requirements of soviet ideology by inventing a form antithetical to existing power structures. In a similar act of subversion, Gilded City reinterprets this paper architecture in the form of architectural animation, a form that often seems to lack a critical dimension seeking to actively comment on current state of affairs in the North American context. It develops five distinct archetypes each constituting one chapter of the "Gilded City": Tower, Golf Course, Wall, Casino, and Prison. This thesis stakes a claim for the timely relevance of Utkin and Brodsky's body of work to contemporary architectural and socio-political discourse while also arguing for the legitimacy of animation in architectural design. Furthermore, Gilded City also speculates that architectural animation will soon occupy a more significant role both in architectural practice as well as in architectural pedagogy. / by Jan Casimir. / S.M. in Architecture Studies

Thesis: S.M. in Architecture Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. "June 2017." / Includes bibliographical references (pages 118-122). / Scholarly discourse around the work of French architect and urban planner Michel Ecochard in the early days of the Lebanese nation state frames his master plans for the capital Beirut as modernist tools for an ailing urban agglomeration, without considering the possible ramifications these plans could have had on the social and sectarian structure of the city. Throughout the scope of this thesis, I will present a re-reading of Ecochard's work, detailing how he introduces an urbanity of social integration in a sectarian city rife with sporadic acts of urban violence. I will also argue that Ecochard's planned interventions are based on a careful reading of Beirut's socio-political and economic divisions following Lebanon's independence in the 1940's, and throughout the nation-building era in the 1960's. By studying and analyzing Ecochard's personal archives, notes and drawings; I will maintain that Ecochard's plans for the city reflect his vision for the peaceful integration of communities by promoting access, functionality and the articulation of communal public spaces, rather than viewing the plans solely as the agents of urban modernization. Reflecting upon the broader discourse of Ecochard's planning initiatives across Lebanon, at the time, I seek to position the architect/planner within the shifting political contexts of post-independence Lebanon. I will also address the nuances experienced by Ecochard as he attempts to intervene on Beirut within two spatial and temporal moments. The first concerned with planning a colonially inherited city. And the second, occurring at a time when Beirut becomes an economically driven safe haven, coinciding with the presence of a nationalist political agency attempting to restructure the capital with the intention of strengthening social and urban integration. The similarities and discrepancies surrounding the shifting architectural and urban dynamics between the 1941 and 1963 Plans will be key to this study. / by Ali Khodr. / S.M. in Architecture Studies

Thesis (M.S.V.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1985. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Bibliography: leaves 43-45. / While a videocassette recorder allows a television viewer to decouple the viewing of a television program from its broadcast, its use would be much more rewarding were it able to "understand" what it had recorded and to utilize this information to vary the presentation of broadcast television programs in a personalized manner. A hardware/software system is developed which uses closed-captioning information as a data input and allows variation in the presentation of television newscasts, with results applicable to the locally-intelligent recording and personalized presentation of other sorts of programming as well. The research described in this thesis has been supported in part by the International Business Machines Corporation. / by Victor Michael Bove, Jr. / M.S.V.S.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2010. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 249-252). / Historically the study of architecture has experienced reiterative marriage and divorce with the arts. Some avant-garde architects once tried to flirt with the arts in the late of twentieth century by artwork analysis and philosophical exploration, but the result unwillingly belies the architects' reluctant surrender - artists seem constantly capable of bringing about innovative pieces with sharp insight and inspiration, while architects strive to question the world but only come up with mimicry form. What is more is that the influence of this incompetence has directly or indirectly led to the current common ignorance of art in the architectural world. My thesis interrogates the traditional perspective considering architecture served as a vehicle of art and proposes a new equality between the identity of art and that of architecture. The thesis argues that the "technical support" coined by Rosalind Krauss in the post-medium condition of art is also a support that confirms or modifies the perceptual and mental process of intellectual creation of architecture. It is not about the "brilliant" idea architecture has to convey but the meditation about the mechanism and "supports" permitting them to act on an idea - the rudiments of a language that express their attitude towards the world. The thesis uses my observations and understandings on diverse examples from contemporary art and architecture practice not as models to imitate but illustrations of what specific "technical support" might signify. Then it employs semiotic square as the generative diagram to compare and distinguish these mechanism and hence to look for a more open, flexible "support" for an architectural practice that is confident in its own modes of operation and intrinsic disciplinary knowledge. The narrative of this thesis is in a form of but not only limited in 'know-how' report for practice but also present a process to communicate my intellectual adventures of what I think of what I have already seen and what I still have not seen, so that the reader can learn by the same process and rely on the explosive power of the semiotic square to search for a continual source of innovation and change. / by Yao Zhang. / S.M.

Thesis (M.Arch)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1962. / Accompanying drawings held by MIT Museum. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Richard L. Martin. / M.Arch

Thesis (M.Arch.) Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture, 1953. / Accompanying drawings held by MIT Museum. / Bibliography: leaves 7-8. / by Lloyd H. Siegel. / M.Arch.

Thesis: S.M. in Art, Culture and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. "June 2017." / Includes bibliographical references (pages 156-162). / The production of knowledge has been immensely tied to the production of space in both language and application. Through the use of metaphors and metonymy coupled with spatial strategies of exclusion and delimitation, knowledge has been ramified into disciplines and fields whose continuous corollary integration in the distribution of labour reproduces taxonomies evident in the political and topological organization of the world. According to Max Weber, modernity dangerously establishes a fundamental disunity of reason that through rationalization creates three spheres of value: the differentiated zones of science, art and law. This arises not simply from the creation of separate institutional entities but through the specialization of cognitive, normative, and aesthetic knowledge that in turn permeates and fragments everyday consciousness. Today this process is accelerating: 'interdisciplinarity', 'smart' architecture and the 'open lab' projects increasingly happen under the sway of a seemingly new ideology whose goal is to form a 'social physics' that controls, optimizes, and predicts both labor and dwelling. As a cybernetics that alleges to cognitively capture the environment and reproduce the self through data accumulation, surveillance and the ever-changing representations of AI becomes more opaquely predominant, labor is further obfuscated by capital while more territories are asymmetrically raided and enclosed for new primitive accumulations to take form. How to break from these epistemological boundaries that, heavily propelled by an enlightened expertism, occupy cognizance with pervasive claims to master and differentiate it from life? In this thesis, I will propose an 'indisciplinary' epistemology that studies and grapples While presenting indisciplinary studies on the legacy of polymath Ibn Al Haitham, the spatial politics and knowledge produced around a post-war landfill and its reconstruction, and the use of war as testing grounds in Al, I will ruminate on my work under the indisciplinary platform I have founded, The Society of False Witnesses. Through occupying disciplines in incomputable collaborations, expropriations, writing and cryptography, The Society of False Witnesses playfully probes exilic spaces and their epistemological repercussions on the performance and lexica of attestation. Hereby, both evidential and imaginary as well as past and preemptive genealogies will be limned to suggest an indisciplinary thinking that is in constant negotiation with its potential spatialization in relation to the cognitive and hidden arrangements of life, future and trace. / by Jessika Khazrik. / S.M. in Art, Culture and Technology