Let's meet at the Civic Center!

The town halt as a type of architecture has become so prevalent that the term has been used to describe the activities that go on inside - namely, social gatherings of the public for purposes of discussion, question, and feedback to the governing body. The archetypes of the town hall, in the 12th century Italy, or 17th century New England, functioned not only as the municipal headquarters with offices and courts, but also in some cases included markets, church, warehouse, museum, pub, etc. Most importantly, it functioned as a meeting place for the public. However, as an architecture typology, the town hall does not scale as the municipality expands. The administrative parts of the town hall can grow or multiply proportionally with the population, but the public functions that were originally embedded in the architecture were either pushed out into the large plaza outside of the city hall, or disappeared entirely. This thesis project seeks to re-establish the ideologies of democracy manifested through the architectural typology of the town hall in New York City's Civic Center through creating small spaces for social discourse.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Wei, Shiyu, M. Arch Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Brandon Clifford.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/97370

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/97370