MARCH, University of Cincinnati, 2020, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Architecture

Every place has a history, but not every place has a future. What happens to a place once its time has run out is usually always a mystery and this mystery grows when the reason a place loses itself is sparked from tragedy. In certain cases, these places struggle to hold on to what once was, or an attempt to rebuild happens. But in other cases, these “lost” places are overgrown and forgotten, leaving the areas to disappear along with all the memories and stories of those that lived there. Rather than follow the requirements of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, the Abandoned Mine Land (AML) program will be used to better solve the current underlying and possible future issues that the mining causes. By creating a palimpsest landscape using the future terrain created by surface mining along with aspects of historical pieces of the borough of Centralia, the new overall landscape will be able to play homage to the town, while helping clean up the surrounding areas and waterways, and contributing to Pennsylvania's growing tourism sectors.

Committee: Michael McInturf M.Arch. (Committee Chair); Elizabeth Riorden M.Arch. (Committee Member) Subjects: Architecture

MARCH, University of Cincinnati, 2016, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Architecture

Contemporary buildings have become a sort of spectacle, image products advertising ageless perfection, made for consumption and devoid of humanity. Contemporary works conceal rather than engage metaphysical aspects of human reality including time, process, memory, and imagination. By designing spaces that reveal themselves, their traces of time, making, use, wear and weathering, architecture can engage people in the metaphysical aspects of their reality. Abandoned buildings offer examples of time's inevitable impact on architecture as well as human life that can directly engage people in metaphysics. A critical restoration and adaptive reuse of Cincinnati's abandoned Republican Club building into an urban hardware store, material library, and material testing shop will showcase moments of weathering, decay, wear, and marks of making while teaching designers and builders about material properties and assembly. If successful, this thesis will establish methods for preserving and creating moments of metaphysical presence in architecture, allowing architecture to escape spectacle and return to the shared existential experience of humanity.

Committee: William Williams M.Arch. (Committee Chair); Jeffrey Tilman Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Architecture

MARCH, University of Cincinnati, 2012, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Architecture

Place is omnipresent, it is everywhere and it is inescapable. It provides significance and value to the spaces we occupy everyday. Without it we could not locate ourselves in space or time; our environment would be barren, empty, and devoid of meaning. Yet with the rise of globalization, place has often become indistinguishable. The functionality of progress and consumerism has birthed a McDonaldization of place that is no longer discernible as an independent location in space. Architecture as a practice has grown to see the world as its experimental playground. Works of “starchitects” are collected like pieces of fine art, projects are designed from overseas often with little regard for the context they are placed in, and mechanical systems are employed to normalize the environmental qualities of the region. Yet out of this dilution of place has born a resilient architecture of activism. Created in part due to a lack of large-scale infrastructure projects in the United States, this architecture seeks to move beyond physical construction, engaging practice as a social relationship. Often, we look to the past as a place saturated with meaning, character, and charm. This notion stems from our memories, photographs, and accounts; yet this history is not an objective truth. In large part it is a past of subconscious creation, a selective lens through which we remember only what is advantageous. In this case, our perceptual understanding of place is inconsistent with the objective reality; a fact that is trivial given that without perception, place is reduced to a numeric location. The true realization lies in the importance of human perception on the value of place. This essay seeks to understand that value by examining place through nine lenses. The nine lenses are knowing, perception, atmosphere, scale, materiality, geography, evolution, preservation, and inhabitation. These lenses will be further divided into three categories, which are the experiential, inherent, (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jeffrey Tilman PhD (Committee Chair); John Eliot Hancock MARCH (Committee Member) Subjects: Architecture

MARCH, University of Cincinnati, 2004, Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning: Architecture (Master of)

Industry, formerly defining the identity of Pittsburgh, has mostly moved away from the city. The resultant post-industrial landscape is littered with abandoned industrial buildings. These buildings facing disuse or demolition are the urban artifacts that once contributed to the sense of place. The loss of these artifacts has negative effects not only on the particular place but also on the broader urban environment. The reuse of these buildings is important to make them a valued piece of architecture once again. Place is immersed in layers of history. The destruction of the post-industrial landscape separates and tears those layers of history. While maintaining a connection to the industrial past is important, it is necessary not to overlook all the layers of pre- and post-industrial history. These are elements of the place. The conversion of unused industrial buildings can start to maintain the sense of place. The fuller sense of place may be realized in an architecture of palimpsest. Metaphorically, the term palimpsest refers to the ability of architecture to contain many partial “texts” thru time layered over each other. The richness of the architecture takes advantage of this and is derived from the layers that define place. The aspects used to create this architectural palimpsest are the validity of fragments, the existing architectural character, and the design of new interventions. Design exploration will take place through the Armstrong Cork Building in the Strip District of Pittsburgh. This striking hundred year-old cork factory has been abandoned for twenty-five years. The project derives its program not only from the needs of the area as well as from the layers of history.

Committee: David Saile (Advisor) Subjects: Architecture

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, English

This dissertation redefines lyric narrative—forms of narration that fuse the associative resonance of lyric with the linear progression of narrative—as both an aesthetic mode and a strategy for responding ethically to the political challenges of the period of late modernism. Underscoring the vital role of lyric narrative as a late-modernist technique, I focus on its use during the period 1925-1945 by British writer Virginia Woolf, American expatriate poet H.D., French filmmaker Germaine Dulac, and German critic Walter Benjamin. Locating themselves as outsiders free to move across generic and national boundaries, each insisted on the importance of a dialectical vision: that is, holding in a productive tension the timeless vision of the lyric mode and the dynamic energy of narrative progression. Further, I argue that a transdisciplinary, feminist impulse informed this experimentation, leading these authors to incorporate innovations in fiction, music, cinema, and psychoanalysis. Consequently, I combine a narratological and historicist approach to reveal parallel evolutions of lyric narrative across disciplines—fiction, criticism, and film. Through an interpretive lens that uses rhetorical theory to attend to the ethical dimensions of their aesthetics, I show how Woolf's, H.D.'s, Dulac's, and Benjamin's lyric narratives create unique relationships with their audiences. Unlike previous lyric narratives, these works invite audiences to inhabit multiple standpoints, critically examine their world, and collaborate in producing the work of art. Hence, contrary to readings of high modernist experimentation as disengaged l'art pour l'art, I show that avant-garde lyric narrative in the late 1920s—particularly the technique of fugue writing—served these authors as a means of disrupting conventional, heterosexual, patriarchal, and militarist social and political narratives. During the crises of the 1930s and the Second World War, Woolf, H.D., Dulac, and Benjamin turn to the lyr (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Sebastian Knowles (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English