Master of Arts / Department of English / Daniel A. Hoyt / This project is the opening chapters of a novel in which two brothers, Txanton and Riddley, are split from each other in post-apocalyptic Kansas. The Commune of Eternal Light has been their family’s peaceful home for more than a hundred years but is crushed by a fascist army that considers killing the only way to survive in civilization’s aftermath. In this destruction, Txanton sees his father’s murder, while Riddley watches his mother’s death. After the separation, Txanton, along with several other boys from the Commune, becomes part of the very army that destroyed his family, and he is visited by the ghost of his great-great grandfather who begins telling his personal story along with the tale of the downfall of the world. Riddley, meanwhile, wanders a picaresque path in which he sees cannibals, zombies, witches, a cowboy, and other ghosts. Both boys struggle with the brutality of the wasteland they are thrust into and try to cope with the memories of their peaceful home and the deaths of their family and friends. Told in chapters that jump back-and-forth between the two brothers, the novel parallels their challenges in a close third-person narrative.

Master of Landscape Architecture / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / Mary C. Kingery-Page / People often move through public transit space only recognizing the functional qualities. In such an environment we become faceless bodies moving through the landscape. As our environments become increasingly functional, so do humans—we cycle anonymously between work and home with little spontaneous interaction occurring in between. The daily routine is executed in nonplace: “Where once there were places we now find nonplaces. In real places the human being is a person. He or she is an individual, unique and possessing a character. In nonplaces, individuality disappears. In nonplaces, character is irrelevant and one is only the customer or shopper, client or patients, a body to be seated, and address to be billed, a car to be parked” (Oldenburg 1989, 205). The Maplewood light rail station in St. Louis County, Missouri is an example of nonplace. Although functional, the landscape lacks character. In order to combat nonplace sociologist Ray Oldenburg suggests that we cultivate third places—liminal spheres between home and work that facilitate informal social interaction. A major component of third place is user accessibility. Therefore, the ability to physically and mentally access public transit space will be investigated as a design dilemma. Through the reframing of physical and mental accessibility the Maplewood MetroLink station will evolve into a third place capable of supporting informal social interaction. In order to understand the factors influencing social interaction in public transit space, five precedents were examined using the Project for Public Spaces definition of “place.” Characteristics found to promote social activity include linkages, flexibility, imageability and social infrastructure. The factors were further defined as ‘mental’ or ‘physical’ accessibility which were then used to analyze the Maplewood MetroLink station. After examining physical and mental accessibility at the Maplewood MetroLink station, a design solution was proposed. The design encourages users to pause and interact with each other and the landscape in a highly mobile environment.

Master of Landscape Architecture / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / Blake Belanger / Metropolitan Kansas City is a growing area, and the communities are considering new transportation options including a fixed guideway system. The addition of a fixed guideway system is often seen as controversial to people of the communities it affects, and many will not be in favor of it. Rail lines are great option for transportation because they are designed for the efficiency of getting people from place to place. However, they typically do not offer much of a visual experience to commuters. Making the transportation corridor more than just a transportation corridor through interactive, art installations will open people up to the idea of a fixed guideway system, provide trail users with destinations, and provide commuters with something interesting to look at creating a vibrant, visual experience. The RIC will become a place of destinations, recreation, vibrancy, sustainable features, and visual stimulants through the connection of the rail line, MetroGreen trails, installations, and the RIC communities. Locating literature related to the commuter rail, visual design, experience, aesthetics, and sustainability helped to determine how these elements fit into this project. Conducting precedent studies helped set guidelines for the design of installations. A process of using certain specifications in ArcGIS determined general suitability for installations resulting in twenty-eight identified sites. The development of a basic design framework through a set of matrices involving installation attributes and site conditions helped to determine site suitability for specific types of installations, which allowed me to develop a design specific to the site conditions taking the number of suitable sites down to twenty-one. Each site has a set of parameters specific to each installation. Some sites are fully designed and developed, while others are to be commissioned out to artists for design and development. This set of proposals presents a vision of the RIC as a place of destinations, recreation, vibrancy, sustainable features, and visual stimulants through the connection of the rail line, MetroGreen trails, installations, and the RIC communities. The transformation of the corridor through art installations enhances people’s experience of the corridor, promotes both the rail line and the MetroGreen trails, connects people to the corridor, and encourages sustainability.

Master of Landscape Architecture / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / Timothy Keane / Stormwater management within the urban context has evolved over time. This evolution has been categorized by five paradigm shifts (Novotny, Ahern, & Brown, 2010). The current paradigm of stormwater management utilizes hard conveyance and treatment infrastructure designed mainly to provide protection for people from typical 1-5 year frequency storms. Consequently, this infrastructure is sometimes unable to deal with larger sized, 50 to 100 year events which can have serious consequences. Manhattan, Kansas has suffered multiple flooding episodes of severe proportion in the past decade. The dilemma of flooding within the Wildcat Creek watershed is a direct example of the current paradigm of stormwater management. This once ecologically healthy corridor is fed by conveyance systems that do not address the hydrologic needs of the watershed; decreasing the possibility for infiltration and groundwater recharge. Vegetated stormwater management systems must be implemented to help increase infiltration and address flooding problems within the Wildcat Creek watershed. The aesthetic performance of designed landscapes has a tremendous effect on the appreciation and care given to them by the surrounding population (Gobster, Nassauer, Daniel, and Fry, 2007). Landscape architecture has the ability to aid in the visual appeal and ecological design of vegetated stormwater management systems (SMS) by utilizing existing frameworks that address aesthetic reaction of the outdoor environment (Kaplan, Kaplan, and Ryan, 1998). This document evaluates design alternatives of vegetated SMS in order to discern a set of variables that inform the relationship between each systems aesthetic and amenity performance and their ecosystem and hydrological performance. Identified variables are combined into a set of guidelines for achieving different levels, or patterns of aesthetic performance found within the Understanding and Exploration Framework et al. (Kaplan, Kaplan, and Ryan, 1998) and amenity performance listed by Echols and Pennypacker’s Amenity Goals et al. (2007) through vegetated SMS. These design guidelines illustrate how aesthetic theory can be applied through ecological systems in order to increase the coherence, legibility, complexity, and mystery (Kaplan & Kaplan, 1989) of existing sites. Creating spaces where ecological and socio-cultural activities can coexist addresses the local characteristics of aesthetics with the universal dilemma of stormwater management.

Doctor of Philosophy / Environmental Design and Planning Program / Robert J. Condia / The unique contribution of Vision and the Experience of Built Environments is its specific investigation into the visual processing system of the mind in relationship with the features of awareness and embodiment during the experience of architecture. Each facet of this investigation reflects the essential ingredients of sensation (the visual system), perception (our awareness), and emotions (our embodiment) respectively as a process for aesthetically experiencing our built environments. In regards to our visual system, it is well established in neuroscience that human vision divides into the central and peripheral fields of view. Central vision extends from the point of gaze (where we are looking) out to about 5° of visual angle (the width of one’s fist at arm’s length), while peripheral vision is the vast remainder of the visual field. These visual fields project to the parvo and magno ganglion cells which process distinctly different types of information from the world around us and project that information to the ventral and dorsal visual streams respectively. Building on the dorsal/ventral stream dichotomy, we can further distinguish between focal processing of central vision and ambient processing of peripheral vision. Thus, our visual processing of, and attention to, objects and scenes depends on how and where these stimuli fall on the retina. Built environments are no exception to these dependencies, specifically in terms of how focal object perception and ambient spatial perception create intellectual and phenomenal experiences respectively with architecture. These two forms of visual processing limit and guide our perception of the built world around us and subsequently our projected and extended embodied interactions with it as manifested in the act of aesthetic experience. By bringing peripheral vision and central vision together in a balanced perspective we will more fully understand that our aesthetic relationship with our built environment is greatly dependent on the dichotomous visual mechanisms of awareness and embodiment.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Geography / Kevin Blake / With their windswept ridges and wind-rent skies, prairies and plains have often been denigrated as nothing but nothing—empty, meaningless, valueless space. Mountains and forests, oceans and deserts have been praised and protected while vast expanses of undulating grasslands have been plowed under, grazed over, used, abused, maligned. Once the largest ecosystem on the North American continent, wild prairies now persist mainly in overlooked or unwanted fragments. In part, it’s a matter of psychology; some people see plains as visually unpleasing (too big, too boring) or physically alienating (too dry, too exposed). It’s also part economics; prairies seem more productive, more valuable as anything but tangles of grass and sage. But at heart, it’s a matter of sociocultural and individual biases; people seeking bucolic or sublime landscapes find “empty,” treeless skyscapes flat and dull, forgettable. Scientific, social, and especially aesthetic appreciation for plains requires a different perspective—a pause in place—an exploration of the horizon as well as an examination of the minutiae, few people have strived to understand and appreciate undifferentiated, untrammeled space. This research seeks to change that by example, using conscientious, systematic reflection on first-hand experience to explore questions fundamental to phenomenology and geography—how do people experience the world? How do we shape places and how do places shape us?—in the context of plains landscapes. Written and illustrated from the perspective of a newcomer, a scholar, a National Park Service ranger, a walker, a watcher, a person wholly and unabashedly in love with wild places, the creative non-fiction narratives, photoessays, and hand-drawn maps address themes of landscape aesthetics, sense of place, and place-identity by tracing the natural, cultural, and managerial histories of and personal relationships with Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, South Dakota’s Badlands National Park, Kansas’s Konza Prairie Long-Term Ecological Research Station, and Wyoming’s Fossil Butte National Monument. Prosaic and photographic meditations on wildness and wilderness, travel and tourism, preservation and conservation, days and seasons, expectations and acceptance, even dreams and reality intertwine to evoke and illuminate the inspiring aesthetic of spacious places—Zen of the plains.