VTechWorks Repository :: Browsing by Author "Bryon, Hilary"

Browsing by Author "Bryon, Hilary"

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An airport on display
Lin, Yuqing (Virginia Tech, 2015-12-09)
Display and function are a pair of conflicting concepts. The thesis focuses on displaying a sequence of functional spaces which are commonly not exposed to the eyes of the public, in this case, a general aviation airport. The greatest challenge over the course of the study was how to create displayable spaces without overlooking basic functional programs and deepen both concepts in the process. The airport is designed to fulfill the dual attributes of display and function. It is an aircraft museum, displaying the behind-the-scenes system from arriving, to maintaining, to towing, to parking, and to departing. As well, it is a fully-functional airport, consisting of a sequence of functional spaces, including: runway, taxi area, maintenance hangar, towing corridor, parking spots, and auxiliary spaces. In the context of the thesis, "display" means to expose the elements - aircraft and air travel - as an exhibit to be viewed or to be noticed by the public through spatial organization and scales of engagement.
Among Earth and Sky: A Winery
Gaines, Ian Matthew (Virginia Tech, 2014-01-29)
This project began as a desire for large open rooms, unrestricted by programmatic requirements; a realm where architecture, its meaning, and its purpose could be explored unhindered. I chose a winery and located it among the rolling hills north of Charlottesville, Virginia. Inspired by the beauty of vineyards, this winery facilitates the natural process begun in the growing of a grape. Sunk into the hillside, the earth provides the stable temperature and humidity necessary for wine maturation. Accounting for the technical aspects of winemaking, this project likewise addresses the aesthetic, creating not only a functioning winery, nor simply a beautiful building, but a marriage between the two. The winery consists of a series of rooms that house a singular process of winemaking. Architecturally, the rooms are likewise individual in character: centrally planned spaces described by sacred geometry. These rooms are linked by a series of axial relationships. The descent and subsequent ascent lie on axis, rotated 90° from each other. The entrance and exit halls lie on a separate axis, shifted 45° from the former, marking the transition between the exterior natural world and the submerged built world. Visitors follow a more circuitous path. Weaving in and out, the foot's path intersects the main axes at crucial moments, but is otherwise diverted. The vertical axis also heightens spatial divisions and interrelations. Submerged in the earth the rooms each open to the sky, marking their depth within the dark, quiet earth while reconnecting them to the realm of the vineyards.
Aperture: An architecture to amplify aspects of competitive swimming
Torell, Erik Styrbjörn Odd (Virginia Tech, 2019-06-10)
Architecture can amplify aspects of life. The proposal in this thesis is to present the nature of competitive swimming through four specifically defined architectural moments. The vehicle for the thesis is a natatorium with four specifically designed architectural apertures that present the extraordinary motion of the swimmer, especially to the younger general public. The focus will be on the motion of swimming below and above the surface of the water. Below the water surface, the approaching swimmer and the moment of the turn will be framed. Above the water surface, two apertures penetrate the roof above the pool. One directs sightlines to moment of a race's start, while the other seeks to emphasize the linearity of swimming.
Architectura Laticis
Solórzano, Ramiro (Virginia Tech, 2011-06-28)
Public spaces can have the Architecture that supports the movement of people, a rhythmic movement from one space to another. This thesis is an exploration on how Architecture can transition in a natural, fluid way. It questions how one moves through space without well-defined boundaries that differentiate one space from another. It challenges how Architecture can move one lithely through space by the ambiguity of borders in between spaces. Previous designers have engaged ideas of movement, rhythm, and transition. Le Corbusier established the idea that Architecture is a successive phenomenon without necessarily having a genesis in which one can experience the whole Architecture without a designated starting point. Bernard Tschumi's set of follies at Parc de la Villette in Paris follow a set of syntactic rules with an infinite combination to reference the transition between one folly to another. Sergei M. Eisenstein describes Architecture as a montage in which a sequential rhythm is established by the placement of buildings. Likewise this thesis is a contribution to that discourse in the blending of edges between spaces. It is an exploration of a fluid ambiguity of boundaries, which support the rhythm of stride as one moves from one space to another.
Architectural Dissection and Intervention: Old Wiehle Brewery
Dean, Jamie Elizabeth (Virginia Tech, 2017-11-02)
This thesis is an investigation of architectural intervention; specifically a question: "How does one mediate the old through the intervention of the new?" By using methods of dissection, one is able to deconstruct the layers of a historic situation and identify key elements of the old in an effort to provoke a dialog with elements of the new. The historic artifact, in this case an abandoned distillery warehouse, held the essential material conditions of a stereotomic mass and a tectonic frame. Through the introduction of a new program, a brewery, a third architectural condition, the parasitic, was deployed to reveal a new synthesized whole.
Bridging
Angst, Martin Philipp (Virginia Tech, 2020-02-05)
Bridging is considered as a formal, spatial, referential, and tectonic articulation of connectedness between architecture and context. The question is probed through a mixed architectural program situated in the interstice of an urban downtown and residential neighborhood. The architecture originates from singular or hybridized combinations of these characteristics: whereas formal defines the compositional relationships through, for example, orientation, grids, scales, proportions, and contrast or balance among the parts; whereas spatial indicates a gradient of boundaries established through anchoring, intersecting, overlapping, projecting, interlocking, and parallel elements; whereas referential draws connections through an interpretation of distinct characteristics from the present, past, and future environmental context; and whereas tectonic consists of the underlying structure, frame or mass, and materiality without which the formal, spatial, and referential concepts cannot become physical.
Capturing the Ephemeral
Clifford, Kenith Jeramie (Virginia Tech, 2014-09-10)
This thesis is an investigation into the construction of ephemeral phenomena through material means and at multiple scales. Studies utilized abstract methods that are not immediately relatable to the scale of occupable architecture but at the same time convey inhabitability. These investigations informed the design of an art gallery for Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and the town of Blacksburg, Virginia.
Common Place: collective housing in the bluegrass
Sears, Caleb O'Connor (Virginia Tech, 2011-07-29)
This thesis proposes new housing for migrant farm workers outside of Harrodsburg, Kentucky. The housing complex deals with architecture's relationship to place and community while providing a dignified dwelling, imparting a sense of permanence and home to a constantly moving population. The complex deals with place through a connection to the regional built and natural context. By externally revealing programmatic relationships through massing and allowing individual housing units to assert themselves within the collective, the complex becomes an interconnected housing cluster that is neither house nor barn. It instead imparts the image of a small village or settlement, the essence of community.
Constructing Vision: László Moholy-Nagy's Partiturskizze zu einer mechanischen Exzentrik, Experiments in Higher Spatial Dimensions
La Coe, Jodi Lynn (Virginia Tech, 2019-05-01)
In 1936, while an expatriate in London, László Moholy-Nagy signed the Manifeste dimensioniste, crafted by Hungarian poet Charles Sirató, declaring his allegiance to the pursuit of creating artistic works in higher dimensions. In his artworks and writings, Moholy-Nagy was deeply invested in emerging technologies of the early twentieth century in the service of seeing the world differently, augmenting and training the sensory organs to visualize higher dimensions of space, essentially to see what does not appear, what is apparently invisible. Through his work with light and movement, which took many forms, painting, photography, film, kinetic sculpture, and theater, he worked through traditional and avant garde notions of space and time as related to psychophysical experience. Moholy-Nagy held that higher dimensions could be experienced through a re-education of human senses and began to lay out his claim for the education of the senses in order to see the world differently as early as 1922 in "Produktion–Reproduktion" (De Stijl). In Malerei, Fotografie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film, 1925), Moholy-Nagy asserted that through the visual objectivity produced photographs, especially in oblique photographs, "[w]e may say that we see the world with entirely different eyes." In this dissertation, I examine the influence of contemporary psychophysical, space-time theories on a stage/ performance design created by Moholy-Nagy, in particular, the two versions of his design for a synaesthetic theatrical performance entitled, Partiturskizze zu einer mechanischen Exzentrik (Score-Sketch for a Mechanical Eccentric): one a hybrid, mixed media drawing (c. 1923) and the other a revised version printed in Die Bühne im Bauhaus (The Stage of the Bauhaus, 1925). Following the structure of the hybrid drawing, each chapter is an interpretation of a single panel of the drawing, corresponding to the prelude and the five acts of the performance. This interpretation was made through a close reading of the drawing itself, examining the references made in the images and notations, comparing the two versions, and uncovering similar themes in his lectures, writings, and artistic works, and, in turn, pursuing references to physics, psychology, mathematics, and literature, whose profound influence was acknowledged by Moholy-Nagy in those texts. These influences include the writings of Albert Einstein, Hermann Minkowski, János Bolyai, Hermann von Helmholtz, Rudolf Carnap, Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Wundt, E. T. A. Hoffmann, James Joyce, and many others. Through this analysis, I reveal the ambitious intention at the heart of the Exzentrik, to immerse the audience in a synaesthetic experience that expands their psychophysical consciousness using electromagnetic vibrations in the form of visible and invisible light and sound, as well as shocking and comedic forms and movements, and that, thereby, opens the audience to the construction of a new vision that endows them with the capacity to envision higher dimensions of space.
A Critical Palimpsest: Reconstruing an Existing Spatial Condition
Fedor, Caitlin Elizabeth (Virginia Tech, 2010-06-28)
This thesis is an investigation of embracing the figural possibilities of palimpsest through layering new construction upon extant. The existing building, a neglected warehouse in Louisville, Kentucky, is challenged by a new program that is intended to subdivide the vast, horizontal space and reconstrue the two distinctly ordered systems to formulate new interdependent spatial relationships. Filtered critical moments and continuities are explored through the implication of collapse, the embrace of datum and ideatum, and the lateral play of scale and repetition. Through development of these new relationships, the building is intended to not be a product but a construct of process, allowing particular moments of composition to exist within a collage of space and time.
Density Reconsidered
Lyu, Jiayue (Virginia Tech, 2022-01-19)
The work seeks to reconsider aspects of high density in urban architecture, exemplified in a site in Hong Kong, where currently urban housing, temple, commercial, office and other structures coexist. While a very high density of urban housing is in place, it does not consider qualities of living such as natural light and view in the apartment layouts. In addition to qualities directly related to living, the thesis also seeks to engage a notion of identity and individuality which is often absent in high density projects. The stereotypical image of mediocre high-density environments is a relentless repetition of stacked units which accommodates only very basic human needs of cooking and sleeping but does not offer high quality urban spaces where people can expand their otherwise tight dwelling. The investigation seeks to recognize the particularities of the Hong Kong site, including a temple complex which offers itself as a unique and peaceful moment, contrary to the hustle and bustle of the city. The relationship between dwellings and temple is a point of departure which architecturally expresses a deep respect for culture and context of Hong Kong. A good architectural density in this sense is a composite of diverse function and spaces that offer opportunities of activities that together form a sense of place.
Duality
Barrios Sosa, Maria Ines (Virginia Tech, 2019-10-09)
The work seeks to understand the nature of architecture where House and Institution coexist. Specific architectural constructs support the archetype of house in order to provide an instant notion of Home. The constructs range from the visual to the experiential; where reality and imagination find common ground. Even though the House in this context is meant to be inhabited for a short period of time only, the architecture seeks to provide an immediate sense of home in the moment of transition for a mother and child, who are coming out of a domestic violence scenario. In this context, the relationship between House and Institution is regarded as symbiotic. The Institution suggests a public identity, providing places for therapy, consultation, and other types of assistance to the adults. For the children, the architecture includes places for the presence of books with an invitation to read. The architecture of House is based on individuality, a kind of receptacle for idea of Home. For the mothers, the space between this duality will offer places for gathering, sharing and learning; for the children, the architecture aims to be magical.
existence and continuity
Bryon, Hilary (Virginia Tech, 1996-08-01)
History is a narrative of interdependent events or a series of events clustering about some idea which weaves them together. History gathers individually occurring events along the datum of such an idea and absorbs it into a realm of simultaneity. Similarly, this thesis attempts to amplify the co-existence of overlaying fragments of construction. Interventions with extant artifacts are another layer compounded toward a continuing history of building. This investigation is a search for an architecture with a presence of permanence and historical continuity.
Folding: A House
Huntington, Kacey Joy (Virginia Tech, 2010-06-11)
Folding: A House is a study of the continuity of floor, wall and ceiling within the context of a house. With this method of continuity through folding, a strong directionality occurs within the spaces. The relationship among the different folds and between the folds and their enclosures is a syntactical relationship. Each fold slips in and past the previous fold. The forty-five degree rotation of the house on the forty-five degree sloped hill site allows for four fundamentally different relationships of house to ground and the surrounding views. The closed and open spaces inherently created within the folds directly relate to these differentiated views.
Form and Human Body
Wan, Mingchao (Virginia Tech, 2014-09-08)
Architectural form offers an expression and an observer receives an impression. This interaction exists at both intellectual (mind) and physical (body) levels. Through designing a sculpture pavilion in a forest, this thesis explores different means of empathetic expression in modern architectural form.
Hybrid Architecture within Najd Region, Saudi Arabia: Environmental, Cultural, Structural, and Functional Juxtapositions
Almatani, Bashair Saad (Virginia Tech, 2024-02-08)
The thesis investigates the concept of hybrid architecture as a juxtaposition of multiple architectural factors, including environmental, cultural, structural, and functional ones. The work examines the Najd region of Saudi Arabia and its historical and contemporary contexts concerning functional utility, cultural frameworks, tectonic architectural elements, and site-based environmental forces. The thesis proposes that architectural hybridity can enhance the human experience. The design project, a building combining a water purification facility with a cafe, exhibition hall, and other community functions, integrates traditional and contemporary cultural aesthetics by purposefully juxtaposing and relating: unlikely functions, temporally varied cultural forms, structural and ornamental tectonic elements, and contrasting environmental qualities.
Light and shadow transitions
Heydarian, Niloofar (Virginia Tech, 2018-09-26)
Transition is the movement between the past and the future. In architecture, transition is both temporal and spatial. It is the interstitial space where changes happen. A thoughtful architectural transition prepares for journey ahead by intensifying aspects of space and relating it to the before and after. In the analogous the trifold structure of time and tenses, transition could be designated as the present, situate between past and future. Transition is always assumed as a space that connects the two other spaces. The thesis claims that a building functions better with a thoughtful transition. It is based on an assumption that a well-considered transition is an architectural offering to better comprehend change.
The Light Within: A Graduate Architecture School in Roanoke, Virginia
Carter, Adrian D. (Virginia Tech, 2013-08-27)
In urban conditions architecture often loses a connection with the surrounding context and viewers through inappropriate scale, design orientation and the misuse of light during the day and night. In areas of density, perception is everything. This exploration seeks to express architecture as a language of light and transparency by emphasizing a long linear connection with the ground plane and surrounding city. This creates horizontal bands of space that emit and receive various forms of light. The goal of this thesis is to portray itself as a glowing beacon of attraction while simultaneously displaying its inner workings.
Light, dark, and architecture
Mali, Poorva (Virginia Tech, 2023-02-03)
The thesis explores the relationship of light, architecture, and humans focusing on both the mathematics of solar movement that informs the architecture and the experiential and spiritual response of human perception to it. The exploration uses the celestial realm as the inspiration and canvas that the design process was built on. The light tunnels, the design concept explored in detail, investigate the consequences of architectural form and space in combination with volumetric, reflected, dispersed, or absorbed light. The design process transforms an instrument derived from the sun dial to a living piece of architecture that responds to human perception to variably objectify and reveal spiritual conditions of the celestial sky.
Mediation between Architecture and Landscape
Li, Nong (Virginia Tech, 2022-08-22)
This thesis investigates how architecture engages with the natural landscape through iterative designs of exhibition space. Proposals of architecture adjacent to Smith Mountain Lake as well as along the Cascade Falls Trail in Virginia were considered. The design proposals led to a resolution that particular considerations are critical in relating architecture and nature, specifically a building's spatial organization and orientation, its materiality and tectonic assembly, and the bounding thresholds differentiating between inside and outside.

Browsing by Author "Bryon, Hilary"

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