Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Green Beer: Preserving Dayton's Industrial Legacy Through Sustainable Brewing Practices(2019) Schrantz, Emma Theresa; du Puy, Karl; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Small-scale “craft” brewing is experiencing a renaissance in American culture and has caused a cultural shift in urban communities. The movement has rapidly impacted urban development in American Rust Belt cities, and in many ways, has promoted the rehabilitation of historic buildings and districts. This project explores ways in which craft brewing has increased economic redevelopment of historic places, as well as investigating larger trends and benefits of sustainable preservation and brewing. These findings will be synthesized through the design of a proposed ‘sustainable craft brewery’ and business collective, representing the intersections of urban agriculture, historic preservation, and sustainability. Style, materiality, and brand management will be inspired by the history and culture of the Wright-Dunbar Village, which is at the cusp of economic redevelopment in Dayton, Ohio. The goal of this design intervention is to preserve the legacy of a forgotten place, while creating a new urban community and tourist destination for Dayton.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 Violence and Obscurity; Asylums and the Transformative Experience from Feminine Misfortune to Healing(2013) McRainey, Katrina; Gournay, Isabelle; Linebaugh, Donald; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Psychiatric institutions have been notorious for the neglect, experimentation and abuse inflicted on patients throughout the field's development. Historically, asylums were not so much a place of healing as a place of harm and maltreatment. From London's Bethlem Hospital to the first psychiatric hospital in the US, historical record provides many examples of violence against patients. While this violence was not discriminatory in choosing its victims, women were uniquely vulnerable. With a status of minimal personal rights, women were commonly institutionalized for a variety of suspicious, often trivial reasons, whether their spouse simply grew tired of them or they proved to have a "disagreeable nature." The violence perpetrated within the walls of these institutions is typically attributed to human behavior while the structural characteristics of the environment are not commonly considered. From the decisions made in space planning to the social culture of the staff, the harm done by patients was reinforced as much by non-tangible factors as it was by any individual's hand. As discussed in a series of articles in Architecture and Violence, "The notion of spatial violence as a mute incorporation of power into the built environment has been voiced by a number of theorists, critiquing architecture's complicity with bureaucracy . " Evidence of this complicity is written into spatial organization, planning and quality. Paupers were housed in substandard conditions because it was believed by designers that they "would not desire or benefit from the luxuries that were essential for the cure of the wealthy . " Deeply troubled individuals were left in isolation in the basement where their sounds or outbursts of violence would not trouble the outside world. Now, many of these structures have become melancholy relics on the land, sitting ducks for vandalism and vagrancy. There is a significant missed opportunity in allowing these structures to decay instead of applying their vast square footage to an important use. Though their history is mired by sorrow and abuse against women, the story of the asylum need not end there. The mission to provide a place of healing failed, but by adaptively reusing the old asylum, that mission may be reinvigorated. These buildings can be reborn as positive environments by fulfilling critical needs for struggling women today. By researching the history of thought and design of asylums from the 1800's to today, I aim to pull away the fundamental principles that led to the violence against patients and demise of the structures around them. With this set of fundamentals in mind, I will analyze the theoretical doctrine in the history of psychology, gender equality and the cognitive effects on self in order to determine how these institutions became such a perfect storm of disregard. Once established, I will take the doctrine and fundamentals of old asylums and compare them to principles of healing environments. This will provide me with a rubric of positive space I can use to transform the abandoned asylum into a true haven for women in need. Kenzari, Architecture and Violence, 101. Yanni, The Architecture of Madness Insane Asylums in the United States, 24.Item Mister Rogers' Neighborhood Goes Upscale: Redevelopment as Neighborhood Cleansing(2010) Bergman, Ruth O.; Sies, Mary C; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Despite an abundance of literature on gentrification that has been published over the past several decades, little attention has been focused on the fate of displacees once they have migrated away from their neighborhoods of origin. This study covers new ground by tracking displacees to their new sites of habitation and applying ethnographic methodologies to collect displacement narratives spanning a decade--from forced relocation to resettlement and beyond. I argue that, notwithstanding the "trauma" of eviction, outmovers were able to tap into their own personal as well as their collective sense of place-identity in order to better negotiate the relocation process, proving to be far more resilient than might otherwise have been anticipated. Furthermore I suggest that the informants, all former residents of a cluster of courtyard enclaves in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, were empowered in their displacement journeys by the everyday practices of collaborative living that they experienced as participants in a highly articulated socio-spatial system that I have called "court-ordered living." Finally, this dissertation argues that the discourses surrounding gentrification-induced displacement be reflected upon from the vantage point of hindsight, providing new insights into the intersection of historic preservation, property rights, neoliberal governance, affordable housing, and what constitutes "a beautiful neighborhood" from the perspective of competing stakeholders across time and place.Item WATERFRONTS FOR WORK AND PLAY: MYTHSCAPES OF HERITAGE AND IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY RHODE ISLAND(2010) Williams, Kristen Arlene; Struna, Nancy A; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: WATERFRONTS FOR WORK AND PLAY: MYTHSCAPES OF HERITAGE AND IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY RHODE ISLAND Kristen A. Williams, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Dissertation directed by: Dr. Nancy L. Struna Department of American Studies My dissertation examines the relationship between heritage sites, urban culture, and civic life in present-day Rhode Island, evaluating how residents' identities and patterns of civic engagement are informed by site-specific tourist narratives of eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth-century labor histories. Considering the adaptive reuse of former places of maritime trade and industry as contemporary sites of leisure, I analyze the role that historic tourism plays in local and regional economic urban redevelopment. I argue that the mythscapes of exceptionalism mobilized at Rhode Island's heritage sites create usable pasts in the present for current residents and visitors alike, alternatively foregrounding and obscuring intersectional categories of difference according to contemporaneous political climates at the local, national and transnational levels. This study is divided into two parts, organized chronologically and geographically. While Part I examines the dominant tourist narratives associated with Newport County, located in the southeast of the state and including Aquidneck Island (also known as Rhode Island), Part II takes the historic tourism associated with mainland Providence Plantations as its case study and focuses exclusively on Providence County, covering the middle and northern ends of the state. In each of these sections, I explore, challenge, and re-contextualize the politics of narratives which reference the earliest Anglophone settlers of Rhode Island as religious refugees and members of what scholar Robin Cohen refers to as a "victim diaspora" against the rich co-constitutive histories of im/migrant groups that, either by force or choice, relocated to Rhode Island for work and thus constitute a "labour diaspora." The existence of these two or more populations living in close proximity to each other in areas of Newport and Providence, I argue, produced what Denis Byrne calls a "nervous landscape" fraught with cultural, economic and political tensions which exists even as narratives of the pasts associated with each group are mobilized in the contemporary urban environs of each city and its tourist attractions.Item Under the Arch of Friendship: Culture, Urban Redevelopment and Symbolic Architecture in D.C. Chinatown, 1970s-1990s(2009) Khoo, Evelyn; Gao, James Z; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis explores the history of the urban development and architectural changes in Washington, D.C. Chinatown in the late twentieth century. Urban development in D.C. Chinatown traces the way in which local politics, ethnic community elites and the larger international backdrop of geopolitics and the globalizing economy found expression in the visual streetscapes and architecture in the neighborhood perceived to be a predominantly ethnic site. This essay argues that the case of D.C. Chinatown represents a larger call for a spatial turn in Chinese American history, where more emphasis can be placed on the uses of symbolic architecture in determining Chinese American identity and settlement.Item Pattern Process: An Exploration of Non-Architectonic Seams(2008) Healey, Jonathan; Wortham-Galvin, BD; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The re-purposing of a two-hundred year-old river-side factory site involves a complex set of extant, historical, and hypothetical considerations, and requires a system of strategies and tactics beyond the conventional scope of historic preservation or formal architectural analysis. The discovery of cultural patterns, both physical and social, becomes the alibi for an even broader exploration of design methodology. By reviving the etymology of "pattern" as the co-joining of autonomous pieces to create form and volume, a conceptual study of pattern and seams seeks to develop an implicit methodology that first reveals non-architectonic structural relationships, then engages these structures as determinants in the re-design of the existing built environment. The proposed framework is tested against an architectural agenda that seams historic patterns of human activity and site conditions with speculative patterns of event, process, and technology for the creation of a place expressing contemporary ideology among the continuity of living history.Item Preserving Change, Changing How We Preserve(2008-05-23) Vosmek, Maureen Hogan; Wortham-Galvin, Brooke D.; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis investigates how infill development within a historic urban setting acts as part of the continuous spatial evolution of cities through time and views buildings as a living, changing artifact of human use imbedded in a complex, stratified and interconnected environment. As an addition to the Schuler School of Fine Art, located in the Station North Arts District of Baltimore, Maryland, this thesis weaves new construction through the negative spaces defined by existing historic structures. This overlapping of new and old creates an experiential quality that allows for a temporal reading of the site and the school. This project attempts to mend a broken fabric while reflecting evolving paradigms of preservation, style, social patterns and environmental concerns. Design emphasis is placed on the shared character of the contiguous buildings, and the exposed quality of joining elements between new and old.Item Adaptive Reuse in Martinsburg: The Interwoven School of Crafts(2008-06-17) McIntyre, Kristina; Kelly, Brian; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis explores critical regionalism and sustainable design through the adaptive reuse of the former Interwoven Stocking Company mill in Martinsburg, West Virginia. New programming establishes the manufacturing complex as the Interwoven School of Crafts, a learning institution dedicated to the production of functional, handcrafted arts and thereby also to the continuance of local culture. Regionalistic ideas are further explored through the development of a visitor center and gallery building that showcases the work of the artists. Nestled within the historic complex, this contemporary building is the interface between spaces, materials, and time periods. By building a contemporary structure the character of the existing buildings is enhanced by the contrast rather than trivialized by imitation or replication. By designing with sustainable principles and building craft in mind the newer components will contribute to both the character and the long lifespan of what is already on site.Item A Tradition of Struggle: Preserving Sites of Significance to African American History in Prince George's County, Maryland, 1969-2007(2007-04-30) Michael, Courtney Elizabeth; Sicilia, David; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis examines efforts by the citizens of Prince George's County, Maryland to protect and preserve local historic sites significant to African American history. Since the early 1980s, preservationists in Prince George's County have recognized the importance of -- and made specific efforts to find, document and preserve -- sites that tell the story of African American life in the county. Using three case studies, Abraham Hall, Rosenwald Schools and the Butler House, this thesis demonstrates how preserving African American historic sites became a priority in Prince George's County, due to both a shift in local demographics and to changing practices in the field of historic preservation nationwide.