Structuring beyond architecture

Abstract

This thesis explores the layering and negotiation of structural devices in urban settings. Its point of departure is a series of patterns of how structural design and urban design interact and overlap, from which are developed design strategies that encourage differentiation and the ability to accommodate change in the future. Therefore, the thesis traces an approach for growth rather than simply specifying a particular isolated solution to a single local set of conditions: a machine rather than a spare part. The overarching structural challenge which I have investigated as a vehicle for this approach is for foundation systems spanning over shallowly buried subway and highway tunnels at a site adjacent to the Fort Point Channel neighborhood in South Boston. This challenge, facing many cities around the world, provokes the problem of designing and creating the structure of support in these areas to enable more - rather than less - creative spatial possibilities above the ground. The subsequent proposal details a system of linear bundles - high-performance concrete beams rooted down to bedrock, along with utilities, walkways, plantings, open spaces, loading conditions, property rights, and implementation strategies bundled together -

(cont.) as well as the bridges, piers, and canopies which articulate the termination conditions at the bundles' ends. This thesis asserts that architecture as a discipline and as a creation can negotiate urban conditions and grade separations with structural gestures, shaping the spaces and volumes immediately above and below the constructed ground, and thus addressing both pedestrian and vehicular movement in urban environments. The project leaps between the scales of internal structure and the external urban realm, and situates architecture at this boundary. This exploration integrates relationships with historical precedents of Technological Modernism as well as connections to biological metaphors, to fiction and imagination, to music and harmony, and to broader principles and qualities for shaping and implementing structures in urban spaces. This thesis is the final component for the author's completion of the Master of Architecture degree as well as the interdepartmental Urban Design Certificate.