School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation

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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.

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Designing Hostels: Spaces Promoting Positive Cultural Interaction
(2013) Bates, Benjamin Michael; Draper, Powell; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
The focus of this architectural thesis is to create a design process diagram that takes into account the cultural and spatial features affecting interactions and apply it to the design of a hostel. The thesis utilizes concepts from sociology, specifically, Georg Simmel's theories regarding objective and subjective culture as well as his five "fundamental qualities of space for communal life," and applies them to the field of architecture taking into account virtual space as a sixth fundamental quality of space. This process can shed light on how to design space within a hostel, enhancing positive cross-cultural interactions by focusing the user's attention on objective cultural expression rather than a subjective cultural one. Site, program, structure, form and building skin parameters were developed using matrices, cross referencing design options against one another and the specific cultural and spatial features selected for analysis.