Puerto Rico is a place of strong sunlight, temperate winds and humid climate. It is also a place where the landscape and the natives are very colorful. Today's culture consists of a chaotic urban atmosphere which tends to obscure an extraordinary geography and the natural richness of its surroundings. As in any Western metropolitan area, urban life demands its toll. San Juan is plagued by noise, and heat intensifies between its buildings. Modern air-conditioning is by now a part of every work place and many residences, but beyond mechanical technology, architecture still can offer generously places of shade and shelter from the sun's rays. This project studies the essential characteristics of the landscape and climate of Puerto Rico, and aims to expose these architecturally. The rediscovery of these conditions is articulated by studying the compositional qualities of mass, surface and shadow. / Master of Architecture

Three houses are sited in the New River Valley of Southwestern Virginia in 1996. Each house is designed to provide the essential utilitarian resources necessary for habitation in modern Appalachia. The relative context within which to make each house has been found within the unique character of the individual sites. Each house exists within the current moment and place, so they therefore associate with a modern version of the Appalachian material palette: milled lumber, concrete and concrete block, raw and galvanized structural steel and roofing. The re-seeing of material is enabled through an understanding of the physical and metaphorical characteristics of chosen materials: chemical and physical properties, appearance, composition, regional presence, interaction with climate, structural capacity, manufacturing process, adaptability of form to standard construction and detail, etc. / Master of Architecture

The use of a two Stage Biological Phosphorus Removal (BPR) system to treat a high strength, low pH industrial wastewater was evaluated. A laboratory scale BPR system was continuously operated and fed the industrial wastewater. Effective utilization or removal of carbonaceous material as measured by Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) was attained, but BPR was not achieved. Other advantages of BPR and its anaerobic-aerobic sequencing were also monitored. While the loading on the aerobic zone was reduced 10 to 20% by the anaerobic zone, there was no noticeable improvement in secondary settling or effluent quality. Efforts to supplement the industrial wastewater influent with phosphorus, nitrogen, potassium and iron did not produce any significant improvements. Mixtures of the industrial wastewater, municipal wastewater, and supplements were also used as influent to the system. This indicated that the laboratory BPR system was capable of BPR when provided with an appropriate influent. Information characterizing the influent and system operation were collected. Loading and operating parameters were computed with these data. When compared with phosphorus removal data, little was revealed and the results varied. The information did indicate that pH was an important factor in achieving BPR. The industrial wastewater pH of 4.4 to 4.8 resulted in a pH of 5.5 in the anaerobic zone, and this prevented the establishment of BPR. / Master of Science

A laboratory investigation was conducted to identify the factors responsible for influencing the sedimentation of hydrocarbons in stormwater runoff during quiescent settling. Bulk runoff water samples were generated by simulation of a typical rainstorm. An area of pavement at a gasoline filling station was washed down with tapwater and the resultant runoff was collected and transported to the laboratory. Four large, clear Plexiglass cylinders were filled with well mixed bulk runoff and then allowed to quiescently settle. Interval composite samples were collected at specified times and at four depths from each of these columns. Samples were analyzed for total hydrocarbons (THC), total organic carbon (TOC), total suspended solids (TSS), and turbidity. Analytical results were statistically evaluated using multiple linear regression techniques. Relationships between the dependent variable (THC) and the independent variables (TOC, TSS, turbidity, and time) were determined. The entire experiment was repeated three times. Sedimentation of the majority of the hydrocarbons in the runoff occurred within 18 hours. Statistical results indicate that the behavior of THC during quiescent settling is highly dependent upon TSS concentration and time, and less dependent upon the concentration of TOC. Results of this investigation may provide guidance for improvements in the design of facilities for handling urban stormwater to minimize contamination of receiving waters and sediments due to the hydrocarbon load transported by runoff. / Master of Science

I have attempted two major tasks in this thesis. First, I argue that Deborah Mayo’s Error Statistical epistemology makes an excellent tool for historical research into experimental episodes. This is because it focuses the historian’s eye on the nitty gritty details of experimental arguments, particularly on the generation and manipulation of data. Moreover, her hierarchy of models provides an excellent organizing tool for disentangling complex experimental narratives. I illustrate the fruitfulness of this method by contrasting John Dorling’s and Ronald Laymon’s summaries of Cavendish’s Great Globe experiment with my own account. Second, and perhaps less successfully, I have used her concept of "arguing from error" along with her attendant hierarchy of models and severity criterion to make claims for the procedural objectivity of Cavendish’s experimental tests of an inverse square force law for describing electrical attraction and repulsion. Simultaneously, I confronted Harry Collins’ experimenters’ regresses and Pickering’s view of experimenters’ "tinkering" (in his mangle of practice) and show that neither is either a necessary part of experimental practice nor holds for Cavendish’s experiments. / Master of Science

The Eilat Research and Study Center, adjacent to the spring of Ein Netafim and roughly seven miles from the city of Eilat in southern Israel, will be a meeting-place for scientists and artists from around the world interested in issues pertaining to the desert. It will be a ‘monastery of the mind’. Semi-autonomous and distanced from an urban setting, this will be a place for intellectual refuge, a community of people with common goals, interests, and aspirations. The spring of Ein Netafim is situated at the beginning of a small canyon that descends to the shores of the Red Sea. The Center will be situated on the steep northern slope of this canyon, overlooking the wash. While always populated, the desert in these regions has rendered human habitation difficult. With the advent of new technology many adversities can be overcome, yet the challenge remains to create a built environment that can accommodate its residents while respecting the splendor and fierceness of its surroundings. The proposed architectural solution to this challenge is possible thanks to the predominant use of retaining walls that allow the creation of public and private spaces. The Center takes its form from the slope on which it resides, and continues a well-established tradition of monastic building in this area. Construction has been limited to a small number of components which accommodate themselves to the different requirements and scales throughout the project. And throughout the Center, care has been given to creating a variety of spaces that will answer different needs and encourage the interaction of its participants, all the while retaining architectural coherence and the sense of a unified whole. / Master of Architecture

The mobilization of the New Christian Right (NCR) has been a topic of scholarly interest and research since the early 1980s. This research attempts to explain this phenomenon by analyzing the mobilizing strategies and tactics of its most successful organization, the Moral Majority, toward its target constituency of Evangelical Christians. Resource mobilization theory explain grassroots mobilization by analyzing how social movement organizations (SMOs) use resources to mobilize people to political activity. Studies from this structural perspective credit the Moral Majority's mobilization of televangelists and political preacher in fundamentalist denominations who recruited from among their followers for the rise of the NCR. New social psychological research explains mobilizations by analyzing how people interact in ways that politicize their view of themselves and the world. Studies from this perspective attribute the political conservatism of Evangelicals to various measures of collective identity and politicized religious consciousness. This research constructs a theoretical model that synthesizes both perspectives and then tests this model with data from the 1983 Evangelical Voter Survey. Results of regression analyses offer limited support for the model. Most of the hypotheses that the model advances are confirmed, but unexpected direct effects of structural variables on dependent political variables suggest weaknesses in theory or measurement and suggest avenues for further research. / Master of Science

Master of Architecture

The design of the complex addresses Roman Catholic and pre-Christian legends, symbols, and signs. It transforms them based on our understandings of ourselves and our universe today. Saint Barbara is a Roman Catholic Church located on a suburban site in Chantilly, Virginia on the eastern coast of the United States of America. Chantilly was chosen because it has been victimized by a lack of comprehensive planning. The complex is composed of a bell tower, baptistry, Sunday school, sanctuary, outdoor funeral chapel, cemetery, and parking area. The church of Saint Barbara addresses the dichotomy of human existence as both spiritual and material being. / Master of Architecture

The design of this project - a religious retreat - although based on the form of a traditional monastery differs from it in its basic premise. The idea of monastic life is based on solitary contemplation and restricted social exchange, while a retreat places group interaction at its base. lt is a place where a community of persons shares time and thoughts, but also where each individual is given a space of his or her own to which to retreat when needing privacy. The retreat consists of three separate elements: a church, a dormitory complex and a "Unity House" that includes a library, and meeting and dining spaces. A massive travertine wall that divides public (profane) and private (sacred) spaces, is the main geometrical, focal and symbolic element to which the three buildings relate. In the design of this project the questions of what constitutes the necessary qualities of spaces in the structures designated for a religious purpose were explored. The design was approached with the understanding that for a project such as a religious retreat natural and man-made environments must be treated as one. Only then, design resources will allow for creation of harmonious, intimate and poetic spaces and give the retreat participants a chance to quiet themselves and experience the surroundings with all their senses. / Master of Architecture