The River is for Washing Carpets Safira Lakhani Contemporary peacebuilding, notably as it is practiced in Afghanistan, consistently fails to address local needs in favour of international priorities for global security. Despite the significant presence of foreign agencies and aid mechanisms in the country, peace in Afghanistan remains elusive. Any semblance of peace achieved is neither durable, nor sustainable, particularly because of international ignorance of on-the-ground environmental and social realities, with specific reference to natural resource management and gender dynamics. These failures are localised in Bamyan,...
In her thesis, Sonia Yuan proposes an ideal ‘post-post-Fordist’ society, a city envisioned as a dense, heterogeneous construct, whose post-post-Fordist urban intervention is presented as a bicycle factory in the city of Toronto. The proposal endeavours to lift us out of the industrial exploitation of the last century, while providing a relief from contemporary society’s over-saturation of digital technology, to return the machine to its rightful place as an intuitive extension of our bodies. Sonia will defend her thesis on Thursday May 12, 2016 at 4:30 pm in the Loft Gallery.
Continuing with Kitchener’s initiative to establish urban design at the human scale and introduce contemporary building ideas, Tahoora Alimohammadi’s thesis looks to expand work and living opportunities in the city center with the proposal of a new intermodal transit hub in the heart of that growing downtown core. This design proposal seeks to create an intimate relationship between public life, infrastructure and people.
The defense will take place on on Thursday November 26, 2015 at 1:30pm in ARC 2003, University of Waterloo School of Architecture
Sheida Shahi will defend her thesis entitled Adaptive Balconies on Monday January 19, 2015 6:30PM in ARC 2026. Her thesis proposes an open design system for tower renewal projects in Toronto using the balcony as a tool for shaping urban form.
Connor O’Grady will defend his thesis entitled “Liminal Matter: Diffuse, Adaptive Environments for a Future Dundas Square” on Friday January 16th, 2015 at BRIDGE Pop-Up located at 60 Main St. The design explores the capacity for an embedded, public, and adaptive architectural system to expose the liminal, “invisible” relations that affect the collective environment.
Amr El-Bahrawy will defend his thesis, “A House of No Importance: The rise and fall of Nasr City’s middle class extended family houses” on Thursday, January 15, 2015, at 11:00 am in ARC 2026. The thesis critically explores the relocation of middle-class, intergenerational households in urban apartment building typologies in the Cairene residential district of Nasr City to emerging suburban developments on Cairo’s periphery.
William Elsworthy will defend his thesis entitled Energy and Matter: The design of a nature centre, tunnel and neutrino observatory on Wednesday, January 7th at 2PM in the Architecture Loft.
On Tuesday October 28th at 2pm, Melissa Shea will present her thesis in the loft. “This is a story about a Goat, who is an Animated & a Talking Goat, unusually, for an Architect. There are also other Talking Animals, such as a Moose, a Butterfly by the name of Bill, a Beaver, and a Jackalope—the Jackalope is a bit scary, but perhaps they are all friends. In any case, there are also Buildings, or this would not be a Master’s Thesis in Architecture.”
Abstract by Petra Bogias By innovating the photobioreactor, the growth of algae can be deployed as a performative and ecological layer within contemporary building systems. Proposed is an algae textile: a building–integrated photobioreactor organized as a flexible membrane, whose form can be adjusted according to given programmatic and environmental conditions. This organization translates functions from industrial photobioreactors into forms that can operate at the lightweight scale of an enclosure or partition, demonstrating how algae might...
