NDSU Theses & Dissertations

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Research performed to achieve a formal degree from NDSU. Includes theses, dissertations, master's papers, and videos. The Libraries are currently undertaking a scanning project to include all bound student theses, dissertations, and masters papers.

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5
(North Dakota State University, 2019) Codden, Aaron
5 investigates how architecture should respond to tragedy and suggests that thoughtful, poetic architecture with deep seeded meaning is the answer. A history museum in Dublin, Ireland focusing on the five largest tragedies in Irish history serves as the vehicle for this investigation. 5 reclaims this landscape and gives a voice to those forgotten in the five largest tragedies in Irish history. The museum dives underground and focuses on ushering the user through narrow, concrete, and eerie exhibits that erupt into a crescendo with flowing water and pools open to the air that serve as a space to reflect and digest the heavy topics discussed in the exhibits. Finally, the towers shoot to the sky slowly revealing more perforations with warm, welcoming light with one tower facing the past of ancient castles and the other hopefully pointed at Dublin.
ABSIM Exhibition Design: Agent-Based Simulation in the Curating Process
(North Dakota State University, 2018) Laurin, Brady
The design of museum and gallery spaces are typically done by different designers with a mutual understanding of the scope of work for each. In the best possible scenario, these processes will take place congruently, with cooperation from both designers to realize the complete museum. In many cases, these processes take place in isolation from one another, with little to no collaboration between the building designer and the curator. Agent-Based Simulation, or ABSim, is a process often used to analyze the flow of pedestrians in a designed space. Most commonly used to optimize evacuation patterns and transit terminal layout, the same process of simulated occupancy can be used in the process of designing and curating a museum. By utilizing ABSim in the design phase, architects and curators can work together to identify and minimize problem areas, enhance high-traffic regions, and avoid dead-zones. This project relies on simulation analysis in the design process to better understand and control how hypothetical occupants will use and understand the building and its galleries in order to create a comprehensive museum design.
Acknowledging the Tides through the Renewable Energy of the Moon
(North Dakota State University, 2018) Wolf, Drew
A restructure of energy generation and architectures ability to transform power plants into a beacon of culture. This project seeks to reawaken a lost perspective of nature through the acknowledgment of the entwined relationship between our planet and the cosmic forces through the creation of a Tidal Lagoon in Seattle, Washington.
Act for Children: Formative Environments
(North Dakota State University, 2018) Jarrett, Kelsey
Can Architecture serve as an education aid in early childhood development? Can we as designers help children learn while provoking discovery and creative thinking? How can we as designers better prepare our nation's youngest generation for success? Our future rests on the success of our children. Due to social and economic trends, there is a tremendous need in our society for quality child care. The impact of the built environment within these facilities can drastically impact many aspects of development. If we as designers can successfully identify the needs and wants of our users, we can create an environment that fosters learning. My thesis seeks to explore redefining the typical day care center into an educational facility which prioritizes learning. I seek to achieve this by identifying key prepared environments that facilitate learning in early childhood development.
ADAPTATION: Leveraging Modern Narratives towards Preservation and Public Uses of Pueblo Bonito's World Heritage Ruins in New Mexico's Central Chaco Canyon
(North Dakota State University, 2019) Reed, Joseph
This study focuses on creating new narratives to cultural heritage sites by comparing concepts of ruins from cultural heritage sites and post-industrial landscapes. Both landscapes share that unifying feature of ruins and the historical and cultural significance that comes with them. Such methodology has been the subject of many recent papers on the complex challenge of reclaiming post-industrial landscapes beyond an environmental engineering approach. In landscape design literature there is an approach to focus on industrial ruins as settings for parks worldwide. We propose a similar attention to cultural heritage ruins as parts of a new genre of parks. To answer our research topic, we reviewed extensive literature about landscape narratives, landscape ruins, and post-industrial design approaches. We also analyzed how post-industrial landscapes evolved into ruins over time, the landscape design approach and challenges, and how their landscape revitalization schemes created a new narrative. This thesis will be applied to the Chaco Canyon world heritage site and national park. Specifically focused on the on the central valley ruins of the three-unit mixed-use complexes. These ruins are representative of Pueblo historical and cultural heritage and will be used as a case study to investigate how the creation of meanings and narratives can enhance the qualities of this emerging genre of parks containing cultural archaeological heritage ruins and how it can be applied to them.
Adaptive Architectural Value Engineering: A Study of Influencing Factors
(North Dakota State University, 2018) Meyer, Christopher
A study to define value, and define it as a critical variable in domestic residential design and construction, by the use of evaluation of adaptive symbolic models using designer controlled endogenous and external exogenous variables to define a field of optimal solutions. An application of existing and derived methods, and tools, on designer defined preferential models of domestic architecture.
Adventures in Mimicry: Enhancing Children's Motor Skills through Imitation Play and Interactive Habitats in the Kansas City Zoo
(North Dakota State University, 2018) Pruett, Rebecca
The creation of a collection of exhibits focused on well being, natural enrichment, and personal development for the inhabitants as well as all that visit them. To create spaces that encourage play and learning between species and give users an outlet for development outside a classroom.
Algorithmic Design and Architectural Machines
(North Dakota State University, 2018) Langr, Hannah
What is our relationship with technology? As designers, we sit on the precipice between the abstract and the alien; between meaningful imagination and reductive otherness. With the permeation of algorithmic software in the architectural profession, are we able to design algorithmically with meaning? How can digital means aid poetic architecture? This thesis opens a less examined side of algorithmic thinking within the dialogue between designers and the technology we use. Language, humor, and pataphors become building materials in this architectural translation of ‘Pataphysics, a rebel, absurdist science created by playwright Alfred Jarry. A dense prospection and oscillation through philosophy, history, art, and architecture all work to consider this design of a playful memory machine. Enter, the Urban Maker’s Studio and Artist Workshop. This story of machines, in both a fictional and a literal context, brings humans back into the fold through the linguistic dimension of algorithmic storytelling. It values the historical and cultural memory latent in ourselves over abstracted, generalized and reductive information. The project is situated in contention and alliance with the AT&T Long Lines Building, a foreboding idol of modern technology, in upper Tribeca New York.
Architectural Mood and Mental Space: A Cathartic Journey Off the North Shore of Lake Superior
(North Dakota State University, 2018) Englund, Ty
Most people think of architecture as a profession that is concerned with aesthetic beauty—designs that please the observer through visual perception of the harmony, symmetry, and good proportions crafted by the designer. But, architecture is more than just aesthetics. Well-designed buildings need to respond to the functional needs of the occupants, and ensure structural soundness for safety reasons. However, I believe Architecture is even more than that. True architecture can create feelings and emotions from within, and cause the users to self reflect on their own lives. Furthermore, I suggest that we, as architects, can provide a healing environment for everyone, especially those who are affected by mental health diseases, such as depression and anxiety. In the duration of my thesis, I will examine the historical approach to health, and how we have progressed throughout time. I will be comparing the most recent neuroscientific evidence with that of ancient thought to gain a better understanding of the mental essence of architecture, in hopes to show the potentiality to redescribe our fiction and reality through the movement through space. In comprising all my research, I intend to design a Mental Health Retreat, for those who suffer from mental illness, such as depression and anxiety, located off the North Shores of Lake Superior, more specifically, Wauswaugoning Bay, MN.
Architectural Sign Language
(North Dakota State University, 2020) Danielson, Anna
American Sign Language is not transparent, one cannot understand it until ones learn is. It takes many years of study and interaction with people who use it to be able to properly learn a language. As a student who studies architecture, I have found the same to be true about the communication of our built environment. This thesis project titled, “Architectural Sign Language” explores the ideas of communication through the built environment. The goal will be to integrate the notion of sign language and architecture into a building that non-verbally communicates to tell a story and can be appreciated by both the deaf and hearing communities.
Architecture and the Literary Imagination: T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land Reinterpreted as Reading and Pedagogical Space
(North Dakota State University, 2019) Lee, Whitney
"And I will show you something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you" (The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot). How can architecture, together with poetic language, challenge approaches to education and learning in an efficient world? How can the realm of architecture and its typical methods of representation and design be tested? This thesis uses poetic and historical fragments to create a new reality of connection between people, place, and history; one that questions what a world beyond immediate information could be like, and instead encourages one to read and learn through imagining. It sets to prove the importance of language in both education and all of life. Existing buildings are transformed into meaningful space. The first, a library dedicated to unpublished work relating to T.S. Eliot in Boston, MA, a place known for its literary tradition. The other a living translation of the poem; pieces of a wasteland in abandoned space of Detroit, MI. Spaces echo and overlap between site and history. One is placed between the pages of a book to celebrate both the individual and collective; an atmosphere created by The Waste Land. Language, drawing, and model unite to challenge even the education of architecture.
Architecture as Prosthesis: A Cultural Reimagination of Disability on Boston Harbor
(North Dakota State University, 2020) Randazzo, Zoe
How does architecture approach disability? Might this play a role in forming our cultural beliefs? Increasingly specialized attitudes of the modern era, critiqued by Hans-Georg Gadamer, move us to approach disability with afterthought accessibility formulas, often displacing these “other” bodies to the margins of cultural life rather than constructing them into it. As the prosthetic extension of our shared cultural body, how can architecture engage bodies of all abilities to reimagine the connections between external environment, self, and others? As Federica Goffi has suggested architecture to be an inventive medium for participating in history, this thesis enlivens cultural memory in order to advance cultural perception of bodies labeled as “other.” Boston’s Museum of Disability History and Prostheses assembles historical fragments of the city’s untold transformation story along with spolia of Boston’s crumbling almshouses into an exquisite corpse on Boston Harbor. Acting as an extension of the user’s body, the museum becomes a prosthesis for the user to reimagine one’s own body image through reinterpretation of the well-known condition of phantom pain. A cubistic encounter of restorative fragments reconstructs conceptions of disability in architecture and in culture, framing a reality for the user to imagine new ways of perceiving self and others through embodied experience.
The Architecture of Happiness
(North Dakota State University, 2018) Larson, Morgan
According to Architect John Lautner, the purpose of architecture is to “improve human life. Create timeless, free, joyous spaces for all activities in life” (Lautner, n.d.). His goal for this statement was to push architecture into a more timeless frame, architecture that had no beginning or end; however, I feel it can also be used to describe the importance of feeling within a space. Much of what we do as Architects is based around the wants and needs of people, this normally falls into the category of square-footage, bathroom space, circulation, how we can move a person from one space to another; basically, the program requirements of space, we tend to be less focused on atmosphere. But what if we consider interior architectural spaces in a different way, make them a journey of their own and put emphasis back on the atmosphere of the space—make the experience the main attraction and not just an added benefit. From considering the definition given to Experiential Space, I have found that a lot of people have varying opinions about what it means. One source says it’s how people interact with space to gain the knowledge of what an organizations brand is all about (Office, 2016). Another article describes Experiential architecture as a “achieving a strong sense of place with a particular atmosphere” (Morello & Piga, 2015). To me, Experiential architecture is a set of conditions within an interior space that build upon one another to create an emotional experience, this falls in line with the architectural theory of phenomenology (something we will discuss at length later in this thesis project); using lighting, material and space as tools to emphasize emotional phenomena in space, I will be designing a Nursing Home, a typology I feel could gain a lot from this study.
Architecture that Transforms History: Reframing the Birth Place of the Atomic Bomb for a More Critical Future
(North Dakota State University, 2020) Gefroh, Tyler
Can architecture serve as a critical reminder to our present and future societies of the horrific potential of mass destruction? Throughout history human beings have consistently engaged themselves in the act of destruction. Improvements continue to be made in our destructive methods, and when looking at where are at today, we can see that we exist in a dangerous state of potential mass destruction. If we want to salvage our existence and avoid becoming nothing more than a trace on this planet, we must remember our mishaps and destructive behavior from the past as a collective, continuous species, rather than individual countries or specific groups of people and have a critical perspective of history. Learning from our past has tremendous power to teach us a lot about who we are now and where we might be going in the future. My thesis seeks to explore bringing forth historical references and various destructive elements through metaphors in the architecture to serve as a critical reminder of the past, a sort of warning to the human race, as well as the potential for peace.
Arcology
(North Dakota State University, 2018) Peterson, Jack
Arcology is an approximately 30,000 square foot transit center located within the Ford Site redevelopment plan in St. Paul, MN. The core concept of the project lies in its incorporation of algae, a diverse group of water-based photosynthetic organisms, into the architectural framework. By exploring the vast potential of algae to provide energy, cleanse water, sequester CO2, and create a quilted mosaic of color, Arcology showcases a vision for the future of architecture that is both functionally, and quite literally, green. In this future, algae along with further research into biological sciences, help develop a symbiotic relationship between architecture and nature. This relationship will allow healthy infrastructure to continually provide for the needs of an ever-changing planet and an evolving society. As the community around Arcology develops per the city plan, and the needs of its people change, the building will work together with a growing ecosystem to meet these needs and evolve with its context. In this vision, the architecture functions self-sufficiently, remaining within the resource limit of the site, and creating a positive impact on both the human, and natural systems with which it interacts.
An Artifact of Industry: Preserving Minnesota’s Industrial Heritage, through the Rehabilitation of Concrete Grain Elevators and Silos
(North Dakota State University, 2018) Hegedus, Jenna Marie
This thesis project is to promote the value of Minneapolis, Minnesota’s cultural heritage through the rehabilitation of concrete grain elevators and silos. With the vacancy of many of these structures at a rise, the re-use and re-functioning of these industrial machines is necessary for the preservation of cultural heritage.
Bear Den Landing: Creating Resilient Environments & Tribal Communities through Ecological Planning & Public Participation on Fort Berthold Reservation
(North Dakota State University, 2019) Davis-Kollman, Morgan
Over half of the 135,000 miles of oil and gasoline pipelines in the U.S. were installed before 1969, with implementation of pipes occurring before maturation of steel or coating technology. Leaks and spills are becoming increasingly common within the realm of man-made environmental hazards. North Dakota is the second largest in oil production, suffering from 85 paramount oil spills in last 20 years. North Dakota tribal lands are faced with declining environmental issues as a majority of reservations located in areas of hazard, creating a state of crisis within their livable environment. A broken pipeline burst more than a million gallons of saltwater into Charbonneau Creek, a tributary of the Yellowstone River, causing massive die-off of ﬁsh, plants and the tainting of productive soil and drinkable water sources. Most spill damage directly effects Native Americans, who are most reliant on environmental health and stability. Oil spills are extremely unpredictable, with little available information of when, where and how they occur. Beyond this, there are no remediation or planning strategies to be executed when these spills transpire. While most literature focuses on reports of spills, this study will propose an analytical strategy to mitigate the environmental threat of oil spills to water resources through environmental planning. Geospatial and hydraulic modeling tools will be introduced using National Hydrography Dataset for watershed-based drainage delineations, basin characteristic visualization, and streamﬂow estimation. A variety of case studies will be examined and analyzed to inform environmental intervention. The result will present a landscape conservation and resiliency plan to include hazard identiﬁcation, vulnerability analysis and ecological planning for an endangered watershed area on Fort Berthold Reservation near Mandaree, ND. The goal is to provide new perspectives on possibilities of creating a more resilient and sustainable tribal community. The design of this thesis will focus on the study of the historically rich ecosystem of the river and detrimental effects on Lake Sakakawea and Three Afﬂiated Tribes way of life. Through environmental planning and reclamation, this project seeks to revive the relationship between biological and cultural diversity among natural environments.
Bismarck-Mandan Rail Bridge Park: Using Private-Public Infill to Create a Destination Waterfront Park in the City of Bismarck, North Dakota
(North Dakota State University, 2020) Schmidt, Austin M.
This study focuses on the preservation of the Bismarck-Mandan rail bridge and surrounding 200-acre site as a catalyst to transform the waterfront of North Dakota’s capital city into a 21st-Century urban park. Announced by the National Historic Trust for Historical Places, the iconic community structure has been listed as one of “America’s 11 most Most Endangered Historic Places” in 2019. With the backing of the Historic Trust, Preservation of North Dakota, community members, and the non-profit group, Friends of the Rail Bridge, the historic truss bridge has gained traction to be repurposed as a pedestrian bridge linking the parks and open spaces of the two cities. Much like the Brooklyn Bridge site, which the rail bridge predates, the city had turned its back on the river. Utilizing a comparative case study methodology to compare successful traits of transformative waterfronts, particularly in an urban context, this study resulted in a best-practices matrix to inform the urban park programming and design. This project expands on the role of a separate entity tasked with the re-purposing, operation, and maintenance of the bridge to include creating an adjacent park suitable enough to become a mixed-use destination and a city-shaping gateway to the West.
Breach: Building Integrated Flood Protection, Addressing the Inadequate Response to the Flood of 1997 by the City of Grand Forks
(North Dakota State University, 2018) Naastad, Tanner
In response to The Flood of 1997, the city of Grand Forks, ND constructed a flood wall along the river. It protected the citizens from the seasonal floods but it was an inadequate solution. It created a physical, visual, and emotional disconnect from the river front. The properties along the river front, some of the most valuable in the city, were predominantly rendered useless by the wall. Thus, peace of mind was achieved but at great cost. This thesis project will investigate alternative flood protection methods that could potentially provide a more thoughtful solution to flood protection than a flood-wall and dike.
Bridge: A Library as Interconnection for Culture and Function
(North Dakota State University, 2018) Vang, Shelley
My thesis is focused on creating an opportunity for the exchange and connection between individuals, cultures, communities, and knowledge we gain from one another. Located in the Fargo-Moorhead area, the two cities have a shared history but have expressed their individual identities in community engagement, built landscape, and conservation differently. Through my findings, there are strengths and deficiencies in both cities. By proposing a public library for Moorhead that connects to the Fargo public library. It bridges across the Red River from the cultural hub that is the Hjemkomst Center to the newly developed civic area in Fargo. It will address the programmatic needs of a 21st century library in a digital and physical age. It will also provide a connection to the river for Fargo. As the two cities work towards one another, the area will be strengthened.

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