Thesis: M. Arch., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Page 73 blank. / Includes bibliographical references (page 72). / "As we have said, the majority of people consider architecture and space as an essentially visual experience. Architecture: these are buildings - and space is the emptiness contained within its walls. It is precisely where the misunderstanding resides, because space is not emptiness but rather an environment for life contained within the walls, an environment that is stimulating to the senses. It is obviously light and shadow, proportion and color, perspective and decoration, but also sounds that reverberate, surfaces that our feet walk upon, textures that we touch, temperatures that determine our degree of comfort and smells that surround and seduce us. All these things together multiply one another into an ensemble that we perceive as a whole surrounding." <Sense of Smell> Marc Crunelle. Why is it that our visual sense is so emphasized rather than the collaboration of all senses? For the convenience of visual information dissemination, we mostly perceive the outside world by seeing. And it is no doubt that the visual sense has the priority among rest of our senses. In terms of architecture, we always rely on our eyes when we are designing or experiencing architectural spaces. It is so convenient and fast to draw sketch, build Rhino model, and making renderings. But, at the same time, it's reducing the fact that architecture is such a three-dimension art should be experienced and created by the multi-sensory of our bodies. And somehow, the priority of visual sense is becoming the limitation for us to understand and pursue architecture in a broader way. Our conventional design process places emphasis on drawings and ocular representation, subverting our capacity to engage the other senses in the design process. It proposes to rouse the understanding of multi-sensory architectural design process and experience. So, in a word, by doing this thesis, I'm making the effort on challenging our ocular way to read architectures. It's challenging our conventional design methodology. And it's also challenging our existing architectural representations. / by Liang Liu. / M. Arch.

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 98-99). / This thesis shows the possibilities of staging operas in unexpected yet accessible places. The location, no longer neutral, as most theaters try to be, becomes an important factor in each performance. It affects the development of the narrative, the relationship of the audience to the performance, and the technical requirements of the stage. Like the stage sets, musicians, and costumes that are renewed seasonally for the staging or an opera, the site and architecture constitute another, dynamic component in the creative process, while giving a new form and meaning to a familiar site. Three places in Tokyo are the site of the project: 1. an urban lot (Shibuya Ward, commercial and residential neighborhood) 2. an open riverbank (Tama River, Western Tokyo) and 3. an interior space (the glass hall lobby, Tokyo International Forum). The staging of one opera, Debussy's Pelléas et Melisande, provides the project's program. / Mona V. Tamari. / M.Arch.

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 57-60). / Currently, the synthesis of landscape architecture and architecture is tenuous at best. Though considered separate disciplines with separate agendas, the two fields have the possibility through interaction to enrich and enliven the experience of design and form through formal, physical and spatial considerations. The designer has the ability to manipulate the user's experience through sequence, context and form in both disciplines in ways that evoke philosophical, introspective and sensual levels of perception. That which lies beyond the interaction of landscape and the built form is a synthesis that is more than a sum of its parts. This thesis proposes the creation of an environment that is richer than the autonomous solutions of the purely "landscaped" site or built form. A cemetery is the vehicle to explore the poetic, narrative and ritualistic aspects of architecture and landscape architecture. / by Kristen L. Ahern. / M.Arch.

Thesis (M.Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 52). / This thesis will focus on how urban housing design reflects the new one-child family population policy in the traditional urban context in Beijing, China. The population policy has changed the size and structure of traditional family, and further affected children's growing up environment. Children, used to grow up in a joint family of three generations in a traditional courtyard house, now have isolated by apartment box. The traditional social and spatial relationships among children, families, and neighbors have been extremely weakened. My intention is to restore the lost relationships for lonely children in a high density residential complex. This complex, transformed from the traditional single story courtyard house, becomes one big house, where all neighbors live under one roof as one big family. As a consequence, children in a one child family still have the same feeling of multi generations living together as their old generations had before. / by Mingzheng Gao. / M.Arch.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1986. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH / Bibliography: leaves 46-47. / by Gregory Beck. / M.S.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1988. / Title as it appeared in MIT Graduate list, June, 1988: Information and design considerations for holographic television. / Includes bibliographical references. / Supported by the USWEST Advanced Technology, Inc. / by Joel S. Kollin. / M.S.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 202-207). / Radziah Mohamad. / M.S.

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 121-125). / The contemporary urban condition has placed a great deal of stress upon American cemeteries. Many cemeteries, once sited at the edge of cities and towns, are now surrounded by urban sprawl and development of surrounding land. Boundaries become blurred and undefined, and incompatible programs are placed at the edges of the cemetery. Development and exploitation of land has resulted in the fracturing of a sacred environment in urban cemeteries, and some cemeteries have been displaced in the pursuit of developing land. The rituals and attitudes surrounding death and burial are also changing. Cremation is beginning to precede over burial for economic and practical reasons, and the rituals of death are becoming less personal. This thesis will address these issues through the critique and design of a new extension for the Blue Hill Cemetery, in Braintree. The process of design will consist of two investigations: the initial design of a crematory complex and burial ground, and an exploration of natural and artificial light in the complex's structures. The latter investigation is conducted through computer modeling, and it will also explore the computer's potential as a design tool. The first design investigation will recognize the pressures of the urban condition surrounding the old cemetery. An informed response is required-one that recognizes past and present uses of the site as well as the need to redefine the cemetery as a sacred space. Excavation of an existing land form is necessary to expand the cemetery, and the exploited land will need to be reclaimed as a sacred place. The movement towards the industrialization of the rituals surrounding death and burial have a counterpoint in the human aspects of the industry of excavating the land. / Richard Edward Stump. / M.Arch.

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2012. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 152-156). / The title "Exodus alludes to a restricted exclave encircled by a forbidding wall -- effect, a prison on the scale of a metropolis, and one in which people sought refuge voluntarily. Over the past forty years, similar walls have grown in the city of Belfast in an increasing effort to divide its Catholic and Protestant populations. Although the troubles have subsided, the walls continue to grow creating interface zones along their edges, where civic infrastructure becomes abandoned and left to ruin. Such zones become the stage for a new urban culture invigorated by invention and subversion, each with an objective of territorial gain through a type of architectural warfare that stakes its claim on the conterminous ruins along its edge. The result is manifested in adaptive architectural typologies that reinforce the edge condition of the wall through the re-appropriation of critical infrastructure, forced to confront its intersection with barrier lines. / by Jordan Lloyd Norman Allison. / M.Arch.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2015. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / What possible response to the last forty years of depressed wages can the American middle-class have? Along with long established tactics on the consumption side of the production equation -- namely collective housing and collective purchasing -- a new form of economic autonomy is emerging from within the very tool-kit of Neoliberalism. Due to its vastly smaller scale and increased productivity, minimal environmental impact, and rapidly decreasing costs, automation technologies provide opportunity for collective ownership of joint factories. Here, the vast array of skilled middle-class workers can converge to share a base system of advanced production, consequently renewing their economic competitiveness. While individually the three forms of collective action might only require a diffuse spatialization, or no collocation whatsoever, the combination of all three collective strategies within the same spatial container suggests a potentially new form of living, one which goes beyond the simple abutting of live/work spaces, to the definition of a total life-world. To mediate this complexity I have appropriated a subtle archi-tectonic device, the plenum, as the infrastructure that simultaneously buffers and connects the two typically disparate worlds of material work and social re-production. The plenum does this by providing a flexible super-structure for services, people, and material to pass through, for program to attach to and utilize for its own specificity, and as a zone of mediation which allows spaces of industry and living to collide. With the collective control over these new spaces of both simple reproduction and extended production, founded on the appropriation of advanced forms of automated production, my thesis proposes the return to older modes of communal living and resilience through co-production and co-habitation, and hence the rebirth of the collective life-world. This design project is a first step in envisioning a new, American middle-class polis, defined here as the prior definition of a social and political form of existence. It harkens back to the very origin of the American mythology of self-sufficiency, to the Mayflower Compact, which set up a self-governance which understood that this self-sufficiency was not possible at the scale of the individual, but only at the scale of the community. / by David Birge. / S.M.