Architecture Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2743
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Item Harboring Identity: Community-Informed Design for Belonging in Westport and Curtis Bay(2023) Abe, Danielle; Filler, Kenneth; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis is a community-informed exploration of South Baltimore’s Westport and Curtis Bay neighborhoods. It is about listening, empathizing, and starting the design process with these communities and then exploring forms and spaces that can serve current community anchors and community needs while acknowledging complicated histories. In the U.S., the pattern of redlining and disinvestment of resources from communities of color is sometimes followed by re-investment that leads to physical and/or cultural displacement of long-time residents. The Baltimore Harbor is experiencing pressure of potentially speculative gentrifying re-investment that would serve future hypothetical residents instead of existing ones. The design intent is to empower residents to stay, strengthen, and feel a sense of belonging in their home neighborhoods.Item Critical Juncture: Revitalizing Baltimore's Penn Station with MagLev(2017) Alli, Sarah Roetzel; Tilghman, James W; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis seeks to examine what happens when a purposeful intervention is made at Baltimore’s Penn Station, an intervention that accommodates Mag-Lev Rail as part of the Northeast Corridor. With an augmented and fully integrated mass transit system, Penn Station can become an important economic node for the city and the Greater Baltimore Region. The expansion of the station and the design of the surrounding plazas can revitalize the urban fabric and make Penn Station a destination unto itself.Item Druid Hill Park: The Next 150 Years(2016) Mundroff, Lili; Bell, Matthew J; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As architects, planners and citizens embrace sustainability and preservation at an urban scale for improved social conditions and interactions, they begin to re-evaluate the urban fabric: building, infrastructure and open space to inform the dialogue. This thesis seeks to explore and re-evaluate the potential of the urban public park: edge, access, program, and interaction with neighboring community to preserve and sustain itself, to positively affect the larger city. An ideal case study for this evaluation is Druid Hill Park in Baltimore, the third oldest urban public park in the nation. In this park, issues of surrounding neighborhood crime and infrastructure disinvestment, along with historic structure and park edge erosion can be examined. An evaluation of their interdependence with proposal to connect urban fabric to park and vice-versa will protect the future park: a more accessible, inclusive and well-preserved place for active and passive recreation and catalyst for a vital neighborhood.Item The Other Side of the Tracks(2012) Pirali, Angelo; Bell, Matthew J; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Industrial cities depend on the landscape to provide the conditions and resources necessary for their existence. In the process, this industry has eradicated the landscape. This thesis heals this landscape. Interstate 83 in Baltimore, Maryland epitomizes the affects of contemporary and historical infrastructure on a site. Roads, train tracks and sewers allows for efficient transportation and a measure of control over the elements; yet it does so with little sensitivity to the uniqueness of a place, local physical or historical connections and the natural processes that contribute to the health of people,organisms and landscapes. This thesis intends to use Baltimore and the I-83 corridor as testing grounds to assess and address issues present in a post industrial age of machines. This thesis analyzes aging industrial cities by proposing connections, defining edges, re-integrating natural processes and revealing the unique potential embodied in a place.Item Symbiosis: An Interconnected Region for 2050(2013) Bialek, Jacob Walter; Stanton, Michael; Simon, Madlen; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)For the first time in history, the majority of the world's population is residing in its cities. Expended resources and climatic concerns are prompting a shift from traditional patterns of growth, predicated on the burning of fossil fuels, in favor of innovative, sustainable strategies. This thesis demonstrates the implications of this trend in the DC | Baltimore area, in the proposal of a closed-loop symbiotic-network city that will be linked both by alternative means of transit but more importantly by a lifeblood of inter-relational sustainable systems. The project's design develops at three scales; [xL] regional - through the establishment of an infrastructural and transit network between developable brownfield and greenfield sites in and around Baltimore and Washington DC, [L] district - in the development of one site into a mixed-use neighborhood, and [s] building - by the design of a civic edifice that serves as a pronounced model for the whole.