Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2009. / Page 214 blank. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 209-213). / Problems associated with the massive adoption of automobiles have become the center of a world-wide debate. While new technologies will eventually discover a sustainable solution to the environmental concerns (pollution, depletion of energy sources), cities will continue struggling to accommodate the increasing number of cars. The ability for people to move quickly across large distances and the infrastructure required by the automobile (mainly roads and parking) have also created an unsustainable urban landscape in many countries. The argument of this work is that these problems are partly the result of an outdated set of design premises for the automobile which have not changed since it appeared in the late 1800's. A typical car is too big, too heavy, most of the times it only transports one person for a few miles, and then it remains unused for 95% of the time. These inefficiencies multiplied by the staggering number of vehicles in circulation have resulted in huge energy losses, pollution and vast portions of the city lost in support systems for the car. The work discussed here proposes a different approach to urban transportation, by combining the advantages of mass transit with the convenience of personal mobility. Instead of designing automobiles to fullfil any kind of travel need and additional parking structures destined to accommodate 85% of these automobiles, this work proposes a reconfiguration of the car based on the characteristics of the majority of vehicular urban travel. / (cont.) The design of the car operates on a shared-ownership model, with a collapsible structure that allows vehicles to contract and park in stacks. Based on the available data, results indicate that such a design could potentially reduce the actual space requirements for a car between 1/20th and 1/75th. The design of the car is complemented by the use of electric in-wheel motors, developed in connection with the Smart Cities group run at the MIT Media Laboratory under the supervision of Professor Mitchell, for additional efficiency, especially in terms of energy consumption. / by Fanceo Vairani. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1989. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 156-165) and index. / by James Raymond Davis. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 339-353). / This dissertation examines the critical role played by modern architecture and planning in shaping the discourse on Third World development after the Second World War. At stake here is an ignored dimension of the history of modern architecture and planning as well as that of the development discourse that sheds important light on the relationship of both these discourses to the trajectories of global domination and control. Critiques of development have largely focused on how the economic approaches proposed by international institutions such as the World Bank and the UN have favored the financial and political agendas of global industrial powers. This dissertation argues that design practices like architecture and planning-usually thought to be concerned only with shaping the physical environment-have also played a significant role in shaping the key assumptions of the development discourse, from the existence of urbanizing masses caught between demands of tradition and modernization to the exploding Third World city that is unable to manage its emergence into modernity. After the Second World War, as modern architecture began to lose its disciplinary footings as a medium of social reform in the industrialized world, modem architects and planners found tremendous opportunities as "experts" in programs of Third World development. The United Nations Housing Town and Country Planning section (HTCP), headed by Ernest Weissmann, a member of Congrns International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM), sent out hundreds of missions, featuring famous housing and planning names such as Charles Abrams, Otto Koenigsberger, Catherine Bauer, and Jacob Crane, among others. / (cont.) These missions produced master plans for cities from Singapore (recounted most famously by Rem Koolhaas in SMLXL) to Kabul to Beirut to Lima to Lagos, organized numerous conferences, and set up planning and public administration bodies, building research centers, and schools of architecture all over the decolonizing world. This dissertation examines this wide range of activity to identify particular modes of social and economic intervention, such as self-help architecture, "core" housing, and regional planning, that were able to negotiate the demands of postcolonial nation-states, the Cold War geo-political context, and the agendas of institutions of international finance emerging after the war. / by M. Ijlal Muzaffar. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 284-302). / This dissertation introduces a group of mutable institutions of research which emerged along the coast of France in the nineteenth century. The setting of these stations gave rise to a manner of occupation, both in the sense of physical inhabitation and of intellectual orientation, distinct from but related to the cultural institutions of the city. Their very remoteness resulted in structures with an unusual "double program": one of research and one of habitation. In examining the architectural, visual, and scientific components of this double program, the dissertation reveals a profound connection between the domestic and natural economies which ordered these places of research. This connection, I argue, provides the basis for a new understanding of ordering space on the related scales of architecture, landscape, and region. The first part of the study identifies a moment of cultural criticism in which a group of naturalists vacated the existing edifice of knowledge. Physically and intellectually abroad in a new field of research, their efforts to accommodate themselves there constituted a particular understanding of place in the production of knowledge. A tension between mobile and fixed modes of experiencing place determined the structural features of these accommodations. This tension is shown to be an important conceptual feature of nineteenth-century architectural, historic, and scientific accounts of man's place in nature. The second part of the study presents the thesis that these stations did not merely facilitate a research discipline but served as its premise. Focusing on the development of two stations which were "annexes" of the Paris Sorbonne, it shows how they were shaped by a practical and political bias against scientific institutions conceived as monuments. It argues instead that in comprehensively managing the elements of time, place, and circumstance these stations were instruments for mediating the natural world. The unique and undocumented visual practices for which they were the site ultimately revealed the physical and philosophical limits of the project of knowledge that they set in motion, and of vision itself. / by Edward A. Eigen. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2010. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 212-221). / This dissertation is an architectural history of Russian everyday life, or byt, in the first two decades after the October Revolution. In this period, the investigation and reform of byt was a project that vastly crossed the limits of the architectural profession. I survey ways in which the quotidian environment was understood, ordered and envisioned in a variety of practices: bureaucracy, literature, theatre, film, urbanism, and design. The dissertation explores the architecture of discrete geographies, sets of tactics and strategies, employed in mapping the terrain of the quotidian. It explores how the official rhetoric of labor and productivity was translated into ethics and aesthetics of existence. The study is ordered chronologically, and according to scale. In the first chapter I explore the manipulation and invention of the everyday object. The second chapter is about the performance of the everyday in Meyerholds's biomechanical theatre, its ties with the Central Institute of Labor, and the charting of the agitated body in action onto the space of the stage. The third chapter captures a moment in the development of the Soviet bathhouse, or banya, , in which the bath, resembling a factory, was conceived of as an efficient, working building, which processed citizens' bodies in their entirety, and in some cases, presented replicas of the world at large. In the fourth chapter I read collective workers' histories to reconstruct the aesthetic of the Moscow Metro and particular modes of perception needed to capture and behold its magnificence. The final chapter is about the efforts of wife-activists, or obshchestvennitsy, to represent a society of surplus and overproduction through their management of nature's bounty. / by Tijana Vujosevic. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2005. / Page 230 blank. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 225-229). / The interrelationship between the technology and architecture of tall buildings is investigated from the emergence of tall buildings in the late 19th century to the present. Through the historical research, a filtering concept is developed - original technology and remedial technology - through which one can clearly understand the interrelationship between the technological evolution and architectural esthetic and further stylistic transition of tall buildings. More desirable visions for the future can be constructed based on this concept. Contemporary design practice of tall buildings is reviewed, and design guidelines are provided for new design trends. Investigated in depth are the behavioral characteristics and design methodology for diagrid structures, which emerge as a new direction in the design of tall buildings with their powerful structural rationale and symbolic architectural expression. Moreover, new technologies for tall building structures and facades are developed for performance enhancement through design integration, and their architectural potentials are explored. Special emphasis is placed on the research on the structural dynamic motion control using double skin facades / distributed tuned mass dampers. Design integration among architecture-related disciplines is emphasized throughout the research process as a means to more effectively overcome or at least minimize contemporary technological limitations and to create architecture of higher quality. / (cont.) While each study makes its own contribution theoretically and in a particular design situation, from a wider viewpoint, the contribution of this thesis is to create more constructive relationships of architecture-related disciplines to produce better architecture through synergistic effects. / by Kyoung-Sun Moon. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2005. / Vita. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [123]-129). / A morphological description of illegal housing built by homeowners in the Metropolitan Area of Lisbon between 1974 and 1984 is presented. This description is based on a parametric set grammar that attempts to formulate both topological and geometric aspects of the house. Therefore, the grammar is made of shapes, symbols, and their relations in space. The architectural description herein considers aspects of structure, function and use. The main characteristic of this illegal housing is that design and building are here the inhabitant's responsibility. These houses are usually seen by society as a chaotic and ugly constituent of the built environment. Yet for the users these are dream houses, shaped with symbolic references that helped assure each homeowner a good assimilation into the big city. Three basic goals led to this study: first, to search for a better understanding of these dream houses despite their many contradictions, second, to find a formal representation despite the chaotic appearance and genesis of these illegal houses, and third, to contribute to the formalizing of a computer implementation that could help to prevent further echoes of this scenario. / (cont.) As analyses and synthesis may not have the same type of description, relating the substance of representation, both inside or outside computation, and the processes that should work with that representation became an important issue for the work herein. The result creates a speculative framework which, it is hoped, will help to define a computer representation of an architectural chain that can deal with the complexity of scaling house representation from abstract to concrete. Therefore, some considerations are made regarding shape grammars and their ancillary grammars, as well as the heuristic processes that may operate with those grammars. / by Luís António dos Santos Romão. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 167-171). / Commercial office buildings predominantly are designed to be ventilated and cooled using mechanical systems. In temperate climates, passive ventilation and cooling techniques can be utilized to reduce energy consumption while maintaining occupant comfort using natural ventilation. However, current modeling techniques have limitations and assumptions that reduce their effectiveness in predicting internal building performance. There are few tools to predict the thermal performance of and resulting airflow patterns in naturally ventilated office buildings accurately. This thesis presents three significant contributions for the evaluation of natural ventilation in buildings: * A methodology for assessing the performance of naturally ventilated buildings through a reduced-scale air model was developed based on dimensional analysis and similitude criteria. Buoyancy, wind, and combined ventilation strategies for a multi-zoned commercial office building with an open floor plan layout were evaluated using the reduced-scale model. * Guidelines were established for monitoring natural ventilated buildings as a means to evaluate their operation, based on field measurements of a prototype building were established. * A framework for evaluating current techniques for modeling airflow patterns in naturally ventilated buildings was developed, including guidelines for model development and analysis. Data from the reduced-scale model were compared to the data obtained from monitoring a prototype building and then used in creating numerical simulations. / (cont.) Certain building characteristics, such as atrium stack vents and railings, influenced the resulting simulation predictions and simple analytical model results. Lack of detailed temperature stratification and surface temperature data in the prototype building prohibited the exact comparison of the methodology for more complex design characteristics, such as thermal mass. / by Christine E. Walker. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 402-412). / This thesis demonstrates a rethinking of urban mobility through ecological design. Human mobility and ecological accountability are inextricably linked in city design; our current world ecological crisis underscores this fundamental connection. Through original design exploration ranging in scale from automobiles to tall building clusters, this work proffers a critical vision towards green urbanism. These conceptions challenge the everyday practices of city planning and design by offering an interdisciplinary framework for design production. The work concludes with the necessity for a new design field entitled "Ecotransology". Ecotransology is still in the nascent stages. It has the potential to become a far-reaching awareness that bonds the disciplines of road ecology, urban design, transportation planning, automotive engineering, and energy consultation. This work establishes the theoretical foundations for Ecotransology in four parts. Part one, Ideation, is a survey of visions on cities illustrating original concepts such as "Gentle Congestion", "Transport User Interface (TUI) Valley Section" and "Netwheels". Part two, Eco, illustrates the principles of ecological design in projects such as "MATscape" and "Fab Tree Hab". / (cont.) Part three, Trans, conveys the principles of smart mobility in "Soft Cars" and "Omni-Flocking" vehicles. Part four, Ecotrans, synthesizes these approaches in a series of designs for circulation in bridged tall building clusters such as "PeristalCity". The work describes a burgeoning field, Ecotransology, which promotes ecological transitions within urban contexts. By linking tall building clusters and cars, unique green design proposals for urbanization were produced, which promote a new role in defining the ciphers of future design thought. / by Mitchell Whitney Joachim. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, February 1993. / Includes bibliographical references (p.371-389). / This study identifies some of the factors and conditions that can encourage the development of sustainable and equitable urban environments. It argues that cities will continue to grow and that it is not productive to view that growth as a crisis or a tragedy; instead it must be seen as a challenge for the future. The urban policies that have evolved over the last several decades have combined the role of government agencies, private-sector investment, and community involvement. Projects undertaken in developing countries are often supported by international development agencies seeking to promote cooperative ventures through pilot or demonstration projects. This study, however, suggests that it is time to move on and to incorporate the lessons learned from these demonstrations into full -scale local and national urban-management strategies. Developing criteria for sustainable and equitable housing and urban services is the next goal. Among them, this study argues, is the need to reduce inequity in the way housing and urban services are planned and developed. To do this two interrelated approaches are suggested: one is to increase choices that the community is given and create conditions that promote community decision-making; the other is to optimize the role played by governments agencies, private-sector organizations, community groups, non-government agencies, and other local groups. Several projects in Asia and South Asia were evaluated to determine the process by which new housing programs are planned and developed, the kinds of decisions taken, and the roles played by the various participating groups. The role of non government organizations and community organizations in settlement upgrading programs; the advantages and risks of private sector involvement; and the potential role of community groups, non-government organizations, private developers, government agencies, and housing finance institutions in new housing projects, were also evaluated. The study concludes by showing that housing and urban-services programs have a better chance of becoming sustainable and equitable if they are developed through consensus rather than confrontation, and when private-sector involvement is encouraged and promoted under conditions that are clearly understood and instituted. The study also concludes that community accountability and decisionmaking must be increased, local-management promoted, and program components in which the community has a larger implementing role introduced. Similarly, the role of small-scale building contractors must be enhanced; and the needs of the broadened client groups understood and reflected in planning and design. Finally site design for urban developments has to be integrated into the larger community and respect the needs of its immediate surroundings. Many of the suggestions and proposals offered here are not broad strategies, but suggestions for feasible ways of improving society's chances of solving its urban development problems. They are not blueprints, but simply ideas for generating new approaches that will deal more adequately with the immediate and increasingly severe housing shortage, and recommend actions for preventing difficulties that may otherwise arise in the future. Finally, the recommendations in this study are strategic, not project-oriented; in their implementation the locus of responsibility rests with the cities themselves. / by Akhtar Abdullah Badshah. / Ph.D.