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thesis: The Latest Architecture and News

The Second Studio Podcast: Preparing for Architecture Thesis

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© The Second Studio Podcast

The Second Studio (formerly The Midnight Charette) is an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. Hosted by Architects David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, it features different creative professionals in unscripted conversations that allow for thoughtful takes and personal discussions.

A variety of subjects are covered with honesty and humor: some episodes are interviews, while others are tips for fellow designers, reviews of buildings and other projects, or casual explorations of everyday life and design. The Second Studio is also available on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube.

This week David and Marina discuss undergraduate architecture thesis projects and studios, covering the differences between thesis projects, capstone projects, and dissertations; how to select a thesis topic; how to choose the right studio/professor; the value of doing a thesis; the unique challenges of thesis; and more.

Charles Correa’s 1955 Master Thesis Uses Animated Film to Explain Public Participation in Urban Processes

Charles Correa Foundation has recently released several snippets of ‘You & Your Neighbourhood’, Charles Correa’s 1955 Master Thesis at MIT, an animation film for which the architect was scriptwriter, animator, photographer and director. The thesis put forward the idea of a participatory process for the betterment of neighbourhoods, with a strong emphasis on creating a framework for improving urban conditions in a bottom-up approach.

Call for Submissions: Architecture Thesis of the Year | ATY 2020

The Charette has launched ‘Architecture Thesis of the Year | ATY 2020’ - an international architecture thesis competition that aims to extend appreciation to the tireless effort and exceptional creativity of student thesis in the fields of Architecture, Urban Design, Landscape, and Restoration. We seek to encourage young talent in bringing their path-breaking ideas to the forefront on a global scale.

UnBuilding Building | 2020 Post-Professional M.Arch Thesis Virtual Exhibition

Princeton School of Architecture is pleased to announce UnBuilding Building, an online exhibition by the 2020 Post-Professional M.Arch Thesis class coordinated by Professor Jesse Reiser. The website showcases projects by five students—Catherine Ahn, Esra Durukan, Sarah Etaat, Kyle Weeks, and Olga Zakharova—collectively named "V".

UnBuilding Building

Our built environment is in a constant state of destabilization by changing environments, influences, and functions. In a landscape where architecture is often pushed to sublimate into other types of creative practices, permanence in architecture is no longer something that can be taken for granted. We confront this question of permanence of buildings through actively constructing

Architectural Thesis Award - ATA2020

Archistart promotes the fourth Architectural Thesis Award, the international thesis award, launched with the aim of promoting, rewarding and giving visibility to young talents in architecture.
The three last editions of the Architectural Thesis Award were a great success among young talents in architecture. There were, in the last one edition – ATA2019, 202 participants from different nationalities with 148 projects.
The ATA2019 winning thesis project was MOSUL POSTWAR CAMP (https://www.archistart.net/portfolio-item/mosul-postwar-camp/ ) by Edoardo Daniele Stuggiu and Stefano Lombardi. The project excels for the completeness of the methodological approach, with a proposal that analyzes and solves all the design scales.

Prize-Winning Harvard GSD Thesis Questions the Skin-Deep Application of Vernacular Design

Each year, the Boston Society of Architects offers the James Templeton Kelley Prize to the best final design project for the MArch degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. This year, the March II recipient was Ziwei Song for their thesis titled “Not so skin deep: vernacularism in XL” for exploring alternative ways of integrating the Chinese vernacular with modern “XL” developments.

Ziwei’s thesis sought to re-approach the typical developer project in China, and demonstrate the capacity of the vernacular image to positively-effect the sequence, perception, and exposure of space. To test this, the project was placed on Chongqing, a typical second-tier city in China with a concentration of XL developer projects.

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"Plastic Island" Imagines the Possibilities of Reusing Oceanic Waste in Architecture

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Courtesy of Emily-Claire Goksøyr

With rising sea levels and incessant consumption of plastic, the state of the earth's oceans is rapidly deteriorating. Instead of discarding or burning this plastic, architects Erik Goksøyr and Emily-Claire Goksøyr questioned whether any architectural potential exists in this neglected material. By conducting an extensive material study, the duo designed three prototypes to postulate this theory. 

Though starting out as a humble thesis, this project is being actualized under the organization, Out of Ocean. From the shores of the Koster Islands in Sweden, plastic samples were collected and studied for their various material performance in areas such as color, texture, light, and translucency.

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UnIATA - Unfuse International Architecture Thesis Awards 2018

UNFUSE serves as a platform to create a global community of architects and designers who are pushing the boundaries of architecture discipline to enrich our built environment. At UNFUSE we promote exceptional works, ideas, experimentations in the field of architecture, landscape, urban Design, society, culture and ecology.

"Faith Estates" Proposes a New Approach to Religious Pilgrimage by Excavating Holy Sites

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Machaerus religious development. Image © Akarachai Padlom, Eleftherios Sergios, Nasser Alamadi

In a time of what seems to be ever-increasing religious and political conflict, Bartlett students Akarachai Padlom, Eleftherios Sergios, and Nasser Alamadi instead chose to focus on collaboration between religions in their thesis project entitled “Faith Estates,” which outlines a new method of mass religious tourism. In an area around the Dead Sea characterized by disputed boundaries and conflicting ownership claims, the group aims to reimagine the relationship between the world’s three monotheistic religions, but also to rethink the relationship between religion, tourism, and the landscape. The design consists of large-scale excavation sites which form tourist resorts along a pilgrimage route with the goal of forming a mutually beneficial relationship.

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Self-Aware Nanobots Form Futurist Megastructures in this Thesis Project from the AA

Architecture is a swarm, and a self aware one at that. That's the vision presented by noMad: a built environment made of Buckminster Fuller-like geometric structures that compile themselves entirely autonomously, according to data gathered and processed by the units. Developed by Architectural Association students Dmytro Aranchii, Paul Bart, Yuqiu Jiang, and Flavia Santos, on a basic level noMad's concept is fairly simple - a small unit of motors that is attached to several magnetic faces, which can be reoriented into different shapes. Put multiple units together, however, and noMad's vision becomes an entirely new form of architecture: non-finite, mobile and infinitely adaptable.

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"Engineered Paradises" Takes an Imagined Look into the Possibilities Between Palestine and Israel

“Engineered Paradises”, a thesis by Zarith Pineda from Tulane University, looks into a possible future for Hebron, exploring the condition where peace never comes to the West Bank, but where the mutual destruction of both sides is addressed through the creation of safe spaces for the expression of universal emotions. The thesis proposes that in this way, both parties may be unified by their plight. The project was created based on observation of the city of Hebron and on-site interviews with Hebronites. Their true stories then became the narrative dictating the program of the project.