Organizational Unit:
School of Architecture

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Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Growth and expansion in post-war urban design strategies: C. A. Doxiadis and the first strategic plan for Riyadh Saudi Arabia (1968-1972)
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-11-19) Middleton, Deborah Antoinette
    This dissertation resituates C. A. Doxiadis in Post-War urban design history with a detailed examination of how urban growth and change was addressed by urban design strategies as applied in the master plan for Riyadh Saudi Arabia, undertaken between 1968 and 1972. The Riyadh master plan commission is important within Doxiadis' career, occurring in the midst of his prolific writing projects and approximately eight years after he completed the Islamabad master plan, his most renowned project. Most Post-War architects focused on the socio-spatial components of urban life, elaborating architectural projects that intertwined transportation, infrastructure, and concentrated on mass housing strategies. This dissertation argues that Doxiadis' contribution to urban design theory and practice during the Post-War period was to define a rational scientific methodology for urban design that would restructure settlements to enable urban expansion and change while addressing issues of community building, governance and processes of development. The applied urban design for Riyadh Saudi Arabia strongly exemplifies Doxiadis' rational strategy and methodology as outlined in Ekistics theory and the conceptual model of Dynapolis. The comparative analysis examines how Doxiadis applies the Dynapolis model in the urban spatial planning of Riyadh to organize urban territory at the macro and local urban scales, define neighborhood communities, and connect the new master plan to the existing spatial territory of the city. The longitudinal analysis contrasts the Doxiadis master plan, Riyadh's first urban development strategy, to the most recent comprehensive approach MEDSTAR to understand how the Doxaidis' urban design has sustained its spatial continuity over time. This dissertation makes two significant contributions. The first is to broaden knowledge of Post-War urban design specific to the spatial problem of urban expansion and change, and second to resituate Doxiadis within the Post-War history of urban design specifically revealing his previously unrecognized project of the Riyadh master plan undertaken from 1968-1972.
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    Dense urbanism at the old edge: conflict and reconciliation of streets and buildings
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-05-18) Jiang, Peng
    In the last few decades, new centers have emerged at the edges of traditional cities and pre-World War II suburbs. As these evolve, do they converge towards the urban forms of traditional cities? This question is explored based on a study of urban areas in the Atlanta Metropolitan Region. Atlanta Downtown, Decatur and Marietta, are compared to the new centers in Buckhead, Cumberland and Perimeter. The evolution of the street network of Buckhead is examined in detail. The morphological history of a particular urban block in Buckheadâ "the Tower Place blockâ "is documented. Morphological analysis, focusing on street patterns, block shapes and sizes, property boundaries and building footprints, is complemented by Space Syntax, focusing on the structure of street networks and connectivity. It is shown that new urban centers tend to grow on very large blocks accessed through major transportation infrastructure, but situated in otherwise sparse and fragmentary street environments. As these centers grow and as the density of land use increases, a secondary private road system is created, to take advantage of development potential and provide access to major building investments. The effective fragmentation of the large blocks suggests a pattern of metric convergence towards an optimum block size. In traditional cities, however, the street network is stable over time and acts as the framework for changes in architecture and land use. In the new centers, the secondary road system serves to access particular private investments without regard to the creation of a public framework of connections. From a syntactic point of view, the new centers are spatially unintelligible, thus substantially diverging from traditional cities, even as they accommodate dense mixed use developments. The thesis points to the need of developing and using subdivision regulations and zoning classifications in order to better regulate the spatial structure of new urban centers in the future.
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    Views across boundaries and groupings across categories: the morphology of display in the galleries of the High Museum of Art 1983-2003
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008-12-01) Zamani, Pegah
    Exhibition design conjoins distinct architectural and curatorial requirements. It is proposed that the common language of architecture and curatorship is space: how displays are arranged to be viewed in particular sequences and visual frames, placed in fields of co-visibility or grouped according to their spatial arrangement as well as their stylistic, historical or other classificatory labels. As visitors become immersed in exhibition space they are exposed to an informally staged pedagogy aimed at enhancing their enjoyment and understanding of the exhibition. The second floor of the High Museum of Art, with the permanent collection of objects, opened in 1983, is chosen as a case study. Meier designed the original building and decorative arts exhibition. Scogin and Elam produced a significant modification in 1997 to house a thematic exhibition. Lord Aeck and Sargent restored a simplified version of the original layout in 2003. Rigorous quantitative analyses document these successive changes and identify the fundamental shifts in exhibition design principles that they represent. Visual relationships, the break up of space and patterns of movement are analyzed using standard space-syntax methodologies. New techniques are proposed in order to describe and quantify overlapping patterns of spatial grouping. It is shown that the original design encouraged visitors to view and compare objects in alternative ways, generating open-ended readings and multiple understanding. The 1997 layout dictated sequences of viewing and framed frontal views in order to communicate how art engages human experience, including the body or the environment. The 2003 layout re-instated multiple viewing points and comparative groupings while emphasizing the individual work. The dissertation examines how architecture and curatorship interacted in a unique building which provides great experiential richness as well as design constraints. In addition, it demonstrates how descriptive theory can help bridge between architectural and curatorial intents by capturing the principles of arrangement which are fundamental to both.
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    The Formulation of Design: The Case of the Islip Courthouse by Richard Meier
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2006-04-11) Dahabreh, Saleem Mokbel
    The thesis asks whether the constrains imposed by complex functional programs and associated design guidance limit the ability to deploy design languages with entail their own precise compositional requirements. The Islip Federal Courthouse designed by Richard Meier under the General Services Administrations Design Excellence Program is chosen as a case study for two reasons: First, the functional constraints are explicitly documented, and their effects can be studied through a comparative analysis of recent Courthouses also built under the same GSA program; Second, Meiers language has received much scholarly attention, is well understood, and can be described with rigor. Both the functional requirements or constraints and the compositional principles associated with the design language are described as formal structures. The thesis shows that, in this instance, all functional constraints can be satisfied without compromising the elaboration of the language. Thus, the thesis contributes to our understanding of design logic and supports the idea that design intentions as well as design considerations can be reconstructed through a systematic study of the designed object
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    Floorplate Shapes and Office Layouts: A Model of the Effect of Floorplate Shape on Circulation Integration
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2006-03-28) Shpuza, Ermal
    This thesis proposes a model of understanding the constraining effect of floorplates on the integration of office layouts. The proposed model is based on the analysis of floorplates and layouts which is simultaneously configurational, global and robust. The study departs from two observations: first, there is a difference between the lifespan of shells and layouts; second, shells influence but do not determine the layouts than can be accommodated in them. The thesis proposes two descriptions of shape which gauge their compactness and convex fragmentation based on configurational relations among modular units of shape. Shapes of actual floorplates are described according to the proposed measures leading to a typology of office buildings. The space syntax research on workspaces has demonstrated that the integration of layout circulation affects the patterns of movement, encounter and interaction, which are linked to organizational performance. Actual layouts are described according to skewness and density of connectivity of linear maps leading to three alternative types of office layouts: sparse grids, dense grids and fishbones. Two ideal layouts of grids and fishbones, extracted from the typology, reflect opposing ways of increasing the layout integration and best represent open-plan layouts. Experiments with hypothetical grids and fishbones generated systematically on theoretical shapes demonstrate strong but differing effects of shape on layout integration. These are subsequently confirmed by the analysis of hypothetical grids and fishbones generated into a large sample of actual office buildings in the US. The relationship between floorplate shape and layout is mediated by the generative principle applied to the generation of layout. There exists an underlying congruence between a morphological typology of layouts (which distinguishes between fishbone and grid as alternative principles for increasing integration) and a morphological typology of shapes (which distinguishes between more compact and convexly unified shapes and shapes with wings). The findings highlight the distinction between constraint and determination. Floorplate shapes exercise underlying constraints upon the layout integration but they do not determine it. The proposed model enhances the evaluation of existing building portfolios for their suitability for different types of office layouts and aids the design and planning of new work environments.
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    Flatness transformed and otherness embodied: a study of John Hejduk's Diamond Museum and Wall House 2 across the media of painting, poetry. architectural drawing and architectural space
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2005-04) He, Weiling
    To study architectural space in relation to other works of art, the author aims at understanding how meaning depends upon the medium within which it is formulated. More importantly, the process of re-stating a work from one medium to another requires analytically rigorous study at the level of design thinking. In this thesis, Piet Mondrian’s sixteen Diamond Compositions, George Braque’s Studio Series, and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s Comptesse d'Haussonville will be studied as points of departure of John Hejduk¡’s two sets of architectural projects: the Diamond Series and the Wall House Series. Compositional similarities among these works will be discovered as the design means of Hejduk’s architecture. Moreover, these paintings suggest two design ends: C flatness and otherness. Hejduk’s poems about paintings and his architectural drawings will be examined as working media in which the two design ends are formulated. On this basis, the Diamond Series and the Wall House Series will be analyzed once again on the basis of how flatness and otherness are constructed in architectural space. In a way, Hejduk defines his own design means in the medium of architecture. It is noted that the re-statement of meaning in the medium of architecture involves both a retrospective understanding of the spatial structure and an embodied experience of the immediate spatial condition. Only when space makes sense independent of the references back to existing works in other media such as painting or poetry and the key design move is made will the readings of such works become architectural concepts. In the media of painting, poetry, architectural drawing, and architectural space, John Hejduk designs intention in its own right as part of the design process. Therefore, working across media entails far more than superficial references or fanciful representations. Rather, it is a serious investigation into the construction of medium-specific meaning, which the work of Hejduk clearly exemplifies. For the same reason, Hejduk’s work can be understood beyond personal or mystical expressions, becoming a tangible, logical, and thereby shared construction.