Browsing by Subject "School of Architecture"
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Item Building a Bi-Communal Bridge: Nicosia, Cyprus(2010-04-21) Hanson, WoodyThe passage of centuries of foreign influence through the Mediterranean Sea developed a unique urban fabric on the island of Cyprus, which acts as a global link from Christianity to Islam, and Eastern to Western civilization. In response to an attempted coup backed by a Greek military junta in 1974, Turkish troops invaded Cyprus resulting in a United Nationscontrolled Buffer Zone that separates Turkish-speaking, military-occupied northern Cyprus and the Greek-speaking Republic of Cyprus. The Buffer Zone slices through the island’s capital city of Nicosia and compromises the condition of hundreds of buildings dating from the fourteenth century. Municipal leaders came together to salvage the devastated Cypriot identity and formed the Nicosia Master Plan (NMP), a “bi-communal” effort to preserve and restore buildings as a heritage preservation method of conflict resolution. During July and August, I met with Nicosia Master Plan team members, architects, planners, and Nicosia residents on both sides of the Buffer Zone. The numerous social spheres I became involved with allowed me to understand the conflict in Cyprus from many different perspectives. My field study focused on two neighborhoods as case studies for community development in places of ethnic division. The rehabilitation efforts in each neighborhood began immediately after the NMP developed because of their direct adjacency to the Buffer Zone and former vibrancy. The NMP has revived centuries of Cypriot history and has paved the way for “reconciliation”. Division in the urban landscape has disrupted communities internationally, and the preservation of their built environments are required to salvage their identity. The Nicosia Master Plan is an important precedent study as an urban planning approach to drawing people together through heritage preservation.Item Evaluation of Four Design for Community Resilience Projects(2011-04-13) Kelley, MarkDCR is a program within theCenter for Sustainable Building Research in the College of Design. The goal of DCR is to turn civic challenges into sustainable opportunities. This is done in the pre-design phase by developing goals and design ideas which can later be utilized by architects or consultants. This UROP project seeks to identify ways improve the services of the DCR program while also creating a better understanding of the local needs, strengths, and barriers in implementing sustainable design. It seeks to study the needs of four Minnesotan communities and delivery of the DCR program and its potential gaps. Better understanding the local conditions and their effects on the design process the project seeks to reach conclusions which will further the implementation of sustainable design.Item The Grand Theater: A Case Study of Architecture and Community(2010-12-06) Helgerson, BrookeHow do the buildings around us really affect our lives? This is a question we rarely ask ourselves. The objective of this study is to discover just how a building can influence us by investigating how people interact with it over time. The architectural adaptations made to historic buildings are an excellent record of shifting aesthetic and technological needs of their users and are informative to this topic. The one-hundred year old Grand Theater in Crookston, Minnesota exhibits a compelling story of continuous use as both a theater and a place for community interaction. Evidence for this takes the form of interviews with current and past owners, as well as historical newspaper articles from the Crookston Daily Times and Sanborn Fire Insurance maps from the archives and State Historic Preservation Office at the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul. The evidence reveals that the theater adapted to many technological and stylistic changes over the years. As film technology developed, new spaces had to be created for the projection and sound equipment. Similarly, the interior and exterior facades of the building were modified to fit in with the style of each decade. The theater’s place in Crookston as a destination for entertainment exhibits that it affected its community. In turn, the ways the building responded architecturally to its social context show that it also came to embody the community’s values of leisure, style, and progress. These realizations can be extended to other buildings that we live and work in.Item Making Downtown: Nicollet Mall’s Collaborative Design Response for a Vital City Center(2010-04-21) Fredrickson, MarisaNicollet Avenue had been the heart of downtown Minneapolis’ retail district for almost a century before it was designed to be a pedestrian mall in the 1960s, and thousands of people still circulate through it daily. While the Mall received a lot of publicity and attention in the years surrounding its construction, the story for us today is fragmented. The archival material from this period of Minneapolis’ history is found in a variety of places, and the span of eleven years meant a lot of people were involved in the design process. My goal is to reassemble its history during the 1950s and 60s.Item The Role of Architects Working in Slums of the Developing World(2010-12-21) Nickerson, MichaelThe contemporary architectural profession has little to say about at least 1/3 of the world’s population (UN-Habitat, xxv). These are the people who live in slums, favelas, gecekondus, squatter settlements, and shantytowns of the developing world. The names for these places vary, but their living conditions are similar around the world: slums – as we will call them in this paper – are housing settlements, typically in cities of the developing world, with inadequate access to safe water; inadequate access to sanitation and other infrastructure; poor structural quality of housing; overcrowding; and insecure residential status (UN-Habitat, 12). Why are architects unable, or perhaps uninterested, in helping to improve living conditions for this vast chunk of humanity? And should the architectural profession even be involved in slum improvement efforts in the first place? What can architects offer? This paper addresses these questions. First, we will outline the architectural profession’s social agenda in history, tracing the lineage from early Modern social reformists to the Postmodern obsession with form and style, through to the contemporary resurgent concern for social and humanitarian design. Next, we will look at the historical formation of actual on-the-ground slum improvement programs, as applied by international development agencies like the UN and the World Bank, nation states, politicians, and urban planners. In the final section, we will attempt to draw connections between the architectural profession’s renewed interest in social issues and the already-established practice of slum improvement. This paper argues that architects currently have little place in institutionalized slum improvement practices, partly because planning and development discourses have advanced without the participation of architectural specialists. Their voice has been absent for a number of reasons – admittedly, often for good reason. However, there seems to be ample room for architects to reinvent and reapply their skills, alas contributing to the physical, environmental, and social improvement of slums in the developing world.Item Sustainable Design Case Studies(2011-04-13) Moss, MeganCase Studies have been used by architects and engineers to make public data they wish to highlight from a particular building. There is a wide variety of styles and formats that can be used for case studies and each convey their own message. Starting in the fall semester of 2010 until currently I have compared different styles of case studies, and tried to pick out what I found was most effective. I used the Psychology of Sustainable Behavior written by Christie Manning as a guideline to that I found useful. These thoughts were then put forward to formulate a basic case study of Wallin Medical Biosciences Building at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Campus. First, to become acquainted with the biosciences building, I transferred documentation data for the B3 State of Minnesota Sustainable Building Guidelines (B3-MSBG). I transferred this data from an Excel workbook to an online tracking tool, which was designed by the Center for Sustainable Building Research with the Weidt Group. The facilities manager of the biosciences building allowed me to get an in depth tour and interview him about important aspects of the building. Through these various processes over the last school year I was able to become more familiar with sustainable terminology and case studies, allowing me to better understand the impacts sustainable design holds.