In today’s world, architects are facing a problem of diminished control over the built environment. Across the industry, architects are forfeiting influence to developers, contractors, and lawyers due to increased concerns about innumerable risks. Architecture, for the most part, is dependent on other professions to create opportunities, and thus is not directly responsible for positive change. For architecture to accrue influence on how our built environment evolves into the future, it must understand and take a larger role within the real estate development process. The problem this thesis presents is that the position of architecture within this economics dominated power structure limits architects’ agency to affect a property’s use or influence its future use. The research delves into the standard development model, the real estate development process, design and construction, and operations of real estate practices in order to identify opportunities for architecture to engage in and enhance the process. This thesis proposes to understand a development process in Northampton, Massachusetts. It will illustrate that the opportunities and advantages of architect practicing as a developer to design and execute projects in the real world. Thus, for the research to be implemented through design, the chosen site includes several opportunities for a socially focused mixed-use development which responds well with the site and the surrounding context of Northampton.

The thesis is to design a house that captures the essence of solitude by using the principles of Hierarchy, Axis, Passages, and Spirals. / Master of Architecture

Master of Architecture

l seek to investigate space, material and harmonious order. A building should celebrate the continuity of space in three dimensions. Walls should not confine space, but expand perceptible limits. Architectural space should be active. A building should be an integration of material and order. Materials define the unit order from which the building develops. Materials should be handled naturally and correctly. Nothing in a building should be superficial. Ornament should grow from the natural pattern of construction and structure. To dwell in a house is the experience of passage in familiar surroundings. A house must emphasize not only place, but spatiality. Space outside should not be shut out, but become a part of the space within the house. The spaces of this house overlap and intersect inside and outside the walls. This continuity of space brings dynamic forces into the life of the individual. / Master of Architecture

This thesis is an attempt to express certain realities pertaining to Architecture: The realities of Man and his need for an aesthetic dwelling rich in sensory characteristics; the realities of the building's materials and their behavior; and the realities of the Earth with its changing forces. With an awareness and sensitivity to these existing realities, real Architecture can result as a celebration of all three. / Master of Architecture

Architecture is an act of making. A student of architecture must respond to the findings in the practice of architecture, the making. Theories are only signified through and after the making of a work of architecture. These theories develop from discussions among others and within oneself of ideas and objects in the artistic framework Finding the similarities and differences within objects and ideas begins the · dialogue. A reduction takes place. Ideas and objects are catalogued to ideas already structured in the architect’s mind from previous perceptions. This is not to say that the perceptions are brought down to similar experiences, but to ideas and things that have their own structure within the one world. Things and ideas no longer hold in our experiential context, they are reduced to perceptions that are not sensed in the initial apprehension of the phenomena; Perceptions that the architect understands through the making of objects. Something that was not revealed initially is unconcealed giving the architect a sense of being in the world. / Master of Architecture

thesis, architecture, study of architecture. learning, growing, seeing, building. vehicle - house. framework. what makes it architecture - reality? the house shelters day. dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. house is home, a place to learn, to teach, about world, life, connection, and separation. individuals within a community. the link of bonding into one of a community of individuals. to know the two paths must cross and eventually end in union. / Master of Architecture

The existential significance of buildings is considered with the aim of discovering an ahistorical paradigm for architecture based on the assumption of an ultimate or primary reality which is innate and unchanging. Particular attention is paid to the cosmogonic functioning of buildings through their role as places. Two aspects of the concept of place are considered: that of an inhabited realm which is set apart within undifferentiated space; and, that of an axis mundi about which a habitable world may become ordered. A vocabulary of architectural elements consisting of a chimney, plynth, wall, and roof is then used to pursue these ideas within a design project. / Master of Architecture

This thesis participates in the architectural construct of INSIDE and OUTSIDE. By means of a house with many rooms, the extremes of an inner, personal architecture contrast the extremes of an outer, public architecture. Each room is an inner architecture of closure and definition. While an outer architecture of openness and expanse surrounds them. One room is a bathroom of concentric cylinders. Another is a rectangular box with an upstairs bed, while another is a large cube with a smaller cube for a bed. Each room presents an inner architecture of almost crystalline purity. And each closes themself off from the others. Despite their particularity, these rooms gather, while black and white steel panels unite and define the outer architecture of house, barely. A ring of stairways angles across the steel matrix on its way to a rooftop patio, allowing the surrounding forest to creep in. The outer architecture of house begins to dissolve into the forest, leaving only the inner architecture of room in tact. Only the closed, inner architecture, so personal that we do not share, resists the diffusion. Only the inner architecture of identity maintains its integrity. Only an inner architecture can contrast the outer architecture. The lines drawn between an inner and outer architecture parallels those between public / private and individual / community. This thesis project draws the line between room and house, choosing to allow house to dissolve into the outer architecture of the surrounding forest while room assumes the role of an inner architecture. One conclusion of this thesis is that house deserves closure as well. Architecture is responsible for both the inner and outer extremes of the inhabited world. The inner architecture demands closure and definition. The outer architecture demands openness and expanse. / Master of Architecture

Master of Architecture