Thesis (M.Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1958. / ACCOMPANYING drawings held by MIT Museum. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [58]-[61]). / by Sigmund A. Brudevold. / M.Arch.

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 51). / This thesis is an exploration in the relationships between material and site, history, nature, & culture. I seek to explore the nature of material selection for architectural projects. The project is a place of healing for the human spirit - a meditation/ meeting space located in the dunes of the Provincelands on the peninsula of Cape Cod, MA. Although primarily influenced by the necessity for expression of ceremony, community, and contemplation brought about by the AIDS (auto-immune deficiency syndrome) crisis, it serves as a welcoming place of gathering for many. In this thesis I examine some of the ways that material influences design and design modifies material leading to a greater understanding and development of design method. / by Susanne M. May. / M.Arch.

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1986. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 106-107). / Erich G. Theophile. / M.Arch.

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2012. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 144-145). / Due to budget issues, the Central Arizona Project (CAP) canal has been left exposed to the arid desert environment since its construction in the 1970s. As a result, 5% of the amount of water diverted from the Colorado River is lost to evaporation and seepage from the exposed aqueduct and Lake Pleasant reservoir. This amount of loss is equivalent to the amount of water required to supply 75,000 households annually. With increasing pressures on the Central Arizona canal, we should restrategize and reinvest in this infrastructure in order to prevent further inefficiencies and further loss of water. The objective of this thesis aims to engage architecture with water infrastructure in order to transform the canal into a water-efficient repository and recreational venue while recuperating the amount of water loss from the canal. Through the act of hybridization, a regional amenity is created, serving as support for the water infrastructure as well as creating spatial experience of water collection. A series of architectural interventions along the canal serve as nodes for rainwater collection. These nodes function as public spas that combine the act of swimming with the act of collecting and cleansing water in order to create spatial experience and awareness of the issues of water. / by Alex Atwood. / M.Arch.

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1989. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-76). / Human beings are part of the ecosystem. They are interrelated with nature. But in the past few generations, the environment has lost its intrinsic fitness for ecosystems, organisms, and land uses; partially due to the fact that contemporary built forms have often denied the place of nature in their designs. Presently, the human population at large is alienated from nature, their wellbeings are degraded, and they are living less meaningfully than before. This thesis is to propose a new set of design principles in which built forms will once again recognize the place of nature. It is hoped that through the built environment, the harmony of man-nature will be augmented. This document is not to merely reinforce what many other contemporaries have already brought out. It will also take a concrete example to demonstrate how the knowledge may be applied to an actual environment -- because what this generation needs is not a better view on ecology, but a better working method. There are five parts to this document: an introduction; a discussion of my personal view on the relationship between man, nature, and the built environment; a set of design principles to augment the harmony of man-nature through the built environment; a design project applying those principles to an actual site; and finally, a conclusion retrospecting to the thesis process as well as envisioning the future. / by Anthony Si-Lai Ho. / M.Arch.

Thesis (M.Arch.) Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture, 1947. / by William M. Hunt. / M.Arch.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. Thesis. 1971. M.Arch. / Part of the pages are numbered as leaves. / Bibliography: p. 74. / M.Arch.

Thesis (M.S.V.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1986. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Bibliography: leaves 125-130. / Timothy E. Shea. / M.S.V.S.

Thesis: S.M. in Architecture Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. "June 2017." Pages 106 and 107 blank. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 102-105). / This thesis contends that basic architectural design training requires malleable aesthetic and spatial sensibilities which in turn can cultivate a pliable and multiple sense of self. "A sense of self" here draws on William James's and Ulric Neisser's plural ways of conceiving and knowing oneself through self-knowledge, self-consciousness and self-agency, all of which combine to motivate our actions in the world. "Aesthetic", borrows from Mark Johnson's definition of constituting the patterns, images, feelings, qualities, and emotions by which meaning is possible for us in every aspect of our lives. "Spatial" captures the ways in which we situate and orient self in the world. How we are trained to perceive, apprehend, cogitate, examine, reflect, record, and practice these sensibilities guides how we piece together our experiences in the world as a series of aesthetic and spatial fragments. I argue that 1. The cultivation of multiple and pliable attributes of self is prescient and relevant to fields beyond design. 2. The site of cultivation lies beyond the mind. I build a case that these two contentions are picking up on recent waves in situated and embodied cognition and posthuman discourse, that have each reclaimed the body, physical, digital and virtual environments, and the nonhuman respectively as extended sites of perception and cognition. Posthumanism here, in the terms of physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad, extends agency to the nonhuman by prefiguring neither human nor nonhuman in interactions. Both situated cognition and posthumanism are engendering new aesthetic and spatial abilities that exemplify the multiplicity and malleability of self. In order to productively instrumentalize their common findings, we need new methodologies and materials that escape individual disciplinary silos which proliferate canons and inhibit the creation of common ground. Design pedagogy has the ability to subsume the motivations of various fields in order to develop such methodologies. I embody cognitive science and posthuman discourse, in order to make visible their pursuits, knit together their underlying values, and frame their common calls as design problems. Through this, I develop a new methodology called Performative Experiment, that primes the malleability of aesthetic and spatial sensibilities by estranging one from canons and rote moves. Like parkour for imagination, displacing the center of thought from the mind into the surroundings that are appropriated as an extension of self, performative experiments arrest the spatial and aesthetic aptitudes growing out of a malleable sense of self. I present the shadow and shaded silhouette as materials with which to engage these priming methodologies. In order to implement the case I've built, I present Hogarth's Silhouettes as a proof of concept of a foundational experiment in design education. My claim is that it puts into play a malleability of aesthetic and spatial sense of self, which constitutes a new form of design thinking/doing, across disciplines. / by Akshita Sivakumar. / S.M. in Architecture Studies

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 91-92). / This thesis proposes a novel system for the design, fabrication, and assembly of the single-family home. Driven by the American mortgage crises of the early-20th Century, the proposal selects for its client-type the foreclosed ex-homeowner and thus the constraint of a mortgage-free homeownership solution. The thesis presents a holistic view of residential architecture, taking into account the social, economic, technical, and geographical constituents comprising the current realities and the present possibilities of American homeownership. Specifically, this thesis demonstrates the technical possibility for a do-it-yourself design and assembly system for the mass-customized expansion of a single-family over its lifetime and the positive effects of such customization at the level of the suburban development. / by Dennis Michaud. / M.Arch.