Art Landforms A Study of How Designers are Using the Landscape

By examining the past and present forms of landscape designs, this report will establish a basis to understand one of the core elements of the Landscape Architecture profession. Using the land as a medium for expressing ones art and passions has been used for centuries. Fletcher Steele, Robert Smithson, Alan Sonfist, and George Hargreaves are all designers which have used land as a vital part for the creation of their designs and/or environmental art pieces. They all, in their own way, have been instrumental in how contemporary designers use and understanding of the land has changed and evolved over time. Through the analysis of visual elements of particular projects from each of these designers, this report will compare and contrast each of their approaches to design. It will also look at the philosophical underpinnings that these artists have about using the land and how they manifest in their designs. Although very different from traditional mediums, artists and landscape architects using the land are following the basic principles of design and visual elements that are part of any design

Green Process Design & Cost Benefit Analysis

The purpose of this project was to explore different aspects of sustainability, identify the major carbon footprint contributors of facility operations, implementing a process for green improvements, and illustrating the outcome with a cost benefit analysis. With the cooperation of a local WPI fraternity chapter house, Zeta Psi, and a minor budget of $500 we analyzed the operations of the fraternity house, implemented changes, and analyzed the results of our recommendations. After using techniques for green facility operation improvement, we were able to document an annual savings of$3,900 and reduced the carbon emissions from daily operation of the facility by 43,000 lbs of CO2, which is a36% reduction

Mobility mining for time-dependent urban network modeling

170 p.Mobility planning, monitoring and analysis in such a complex ecosystem as a city are very challenging.Our contributions are expected to be a small step forward towards a more integrated vision of mobilitymanagement. The main hypothesis behind this thesis is that the transportation offer and the mobilitydemand are greatly coupled, and thus, both need to be thoroughly and consistently represented in a digitalmanner so as to enable good quality data-driven advanced analysis. Data-driven analytics solutions relyon measurements. However, sensors do only provide a measure of movements that have already occurred(and associated magnitudes, such as vehicles per hour). For a movement to happen there are two mainrequirements: i) the demand (the need or interest) and ii) the offer (the feasibility and resources). Inaddition, for good measurement, the sensor needs to be located at an adequate location and be able tocollect data at the right moment. All this information needs to be digitalised accordingly in order to applyadvanced data analytic methods and take advantage of good digital transportation resource representation.Our main contributions, focused on mobility data mining over urban transportation networks, can besummarised in three groups. The first group consists of a comprehensive description of a digitalmultimodal transport infrastructure representation from global and local perspectives. The second groupis oriented towards matching diverse sensor data onto the transportation network representation,including a quantitative analysis of map-matching algorithms. The final group of contributions covers theprediction of short-term demand based on various measures of urban mobility

Mobility mining for time-dependent urban network modeling

170 p.Mobility planning, monitoring and analysis in such a complex ecosystem as a city are very challenging.Our contributions are expected to be a small step forward towards a more integrated vision of mobilitymanagement. The main hypothesis behind this thesis is that the transportation offer and the mobilitydemand are greatly coupled, and thus, both need to be thoroughly and consistently represented in a digitalmanner so as to enable good quality data-driven advanced analysis. Data-driven analytics solutions relyon measurements. However, sensors do only provide a measure of movements that have already occurred(and associated magnitudes, such as vehicles per hour). For a movement to happen there are two mainrequirements: i) the demand (the need or interest) and ii) the offer (the feasibility and resources). Inaddition, for good measurement, the sensor needs to be located at an adequate location and be able tocollect data at the right moment. All this information needs to be digitalised accordingly in order to applyadvanced data analytic methods and take advantage of good digital transportation resource representation.Our main contributions, focused on mobility data mining over urban transportation networks, can besummarised in three groups. The first group consists of a comprehensive description of a digitalmultimodal transport infrastructure representation from global and local perspectives. The second groupis oriented towards matching diverse sensor data onto the transportation network representation,including a quantitative analysis of map-matching algorithms. The final group of contributions covers theprediction of short-term demand based on various measures of urban mobility

Chapel Hill-Carrboro Freight Train Trail Feasibility Study

Communities across the United States are seizing the opportunity to leverage existing railroad corridors and transform them into valuable community assets. Retrofitting rail rights-of-way into shared use paths (SUPs) has become an increasingly common way of improving and expanding infrastructure for active transportation and physical recreation across the country. These efforts have been shown to provide numerous benefits to communities including improved human health and well-being, decreased vehicle miles traveled, and increased economic development. This report assesses the feasibility for a potential rail-trail on the currently active North Carolina Railroad (NCRR) right-of-way in Orange County, North Carolina, which is used to deliver coal to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s (UNC-CH) Cogeneration steam and power plant. This report will specifically analyze a 4.91-mile section of the corridor running north-south through the municipalities of Chapel Hill and Carrboro. It will assess the overall feasibility of the hypothetical project and present a conceptual framework for implementation. Additionally, this report will highlight strategies, opportunities, and challenges associated with rail-trail development generally, and more specifically related to the NCRR corridor. The study includes a thorough assessment of the existing conditions within the study area and, where appropriate, will attempt to integrate and synthesize existing and future area-wide planning efforts into the study.Master of City and Regional Plannin

From the Church of Disco to Waterfront Ruins: An Analysis of Gay Space

My senior thesis is an analysis of gay space from the late 1970s to 1980s New York, and I’m questioning how themes of private vs. public, accessibility, race, and economic status dictated where one searched for gay self-expression and community in the built environment. In order to understand how queer spaces functioned architecturally and socially, I’ve chosen to research two opposites: The Saint and the west side piers. The former was a private club in New York City from 1980-1988 and was considered to be the “Vatican of Disco” with a planetarium that could hold over a thousand men, two bars, and top of the line sound and lighting systems. As a result of its architectural and technological advancements, the Saint was able to blur reality and manufacture a new dimension of interaction where society\u27s rules didn’t exist at least for a select crowd of wealthy white men. On the other hand, the piers, the democratic ruins of the west side, were open to all: gay, straight, black, white, and they were frequented for sex, drugs, and artistic intervention. The piers weren’t about escaping reality, rather it was a space where one could explore gay identity in the crumbling outskirts of New York by anonymously cruising or sunbathing with friends on the concrete beach. Ultimately, by analyzing these two spaces, I plan to explore the various meanings and forms gay space takes, and consider how spaces like these have been both memorialized and forgotten over time

Approximately orchestrated routing and transportation analyzer: City-scale traffic simulation and control schemes

Along with other intelligent traffi c control schemes, autonomous vehicles present new opportunities for addressing traffi c congestion. Traffi c simulators enable researchers to explore these possibilities be- fore such vehicles are widespread. This thesis describes a new open source, agent-based simulator: the Approximately Orchestrated Routing and Transportation Analyzer, or AORTA. AORTA is designed to provide reasonably realistic simulation of any city in the world with zero con figuration, to run on cheap machines, and with an emphasis on easy use and simple code. Experiments described in this thesis can be set up on a new city in about five minutes. Two applications are built on AORTA by creating new intersection control policies and specifying new strategies for routing drivers. The first application, intersection auctions, allows humans to instruct their autonomous vehicle to bid on their behalf at intersections, granting them entry before other drivers who desire conflicting movements. The second, externality pricing, learns the travel time of a variety of di fferent routes and defi nes a localized notion of cost imposed on other drivers by following the route. This information is used to tax drivers who choose to improve their own trip by inconveniencing others. These two systems demonstrate AORTA's utility for simulating control of the traffi c of the near future.http://www.aorta-traffic.orgComputer Science

Design Concepts for Freeborn.

Class project of a Landscape Architecture class during winter 1991. Funding provided through the Minnesota Extension Service's Project Future and through funding support of the Center for Community Studies by the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs an

Measurement and Analysis of Walkability in Hong Kong

Though Hong Kong\u27s Victoria Harbour is world-renowned, the harbor front districts are far from walkable. The WPI team surveyed 16 waterfront districts, four in-depth, assessing their walkability using a tool created by the research team and conducted preference surveys to understand the perceptions of Hong Kong pedestrians. Because pedestrians value the shortest, safest, least-crowded, and easiest to navigate routes, this study found that confusing routes, unsafe or indirect connections, and a lack of amenities detract from the walkability in Hong Kong. This report provides new data concerning the walkability in harbor front districts and a tool to measure it, along with recommendations for potential improvements