This thesis seeks to produce space resistant to hegemonic ordering, as a means to reconcile co-existing histories and ideologies in Havana. The architectural proposal is a co-occupied retail field, hung above the datum of existing fabric. The field is both ground to the department store above and canopy to the market below. While the department store produces a space of endless, universal flows.

THE OPEN SUPERBLOCK looks towards the unused land within the existing superblock grid as an opportunity to introduce public space into the suburban fabric. By gathering and juxtaposing a variety of programs and activities into specific sites, the Open Superblock acts in contrast to its surrounding context. Unlike the current mono-functional superblock which is bound by the grid, the proposed intervention challenges the endless infrastructural gridiron, stitching together existing blocks, and overtime inverts the initial closed superblock into a dense, yet open development. In the end, this proposed intervention combines multifamily housing, programmatic density and planned open space in order to address the public realm within the suburban fabric.

This thesis examines the link between sound and perceptual space via the mechanism of the body, through an exploration of experimental music and the design of a conservatory expressly dedicated to its techniques. The use of poché space -- here defined as the space between major components of a specific program -- is critically considered, and ultimately turned on its head to provide the kind of spaces that support experimental music education and its processes. This new poché space is further linked to circulation, both of the students and faculty as well as the general public. Through the use of these circulation and experimental-space elements, combined in the poché, a new kind of porous field-object is inserted into the landscape of the city of Atlanta, specifically tuned in to its existing cultural spaces, that cultivates experimentation and participation to create entirely new forms of music.

This thesis proposes that the facade of a building, typically seen as a boundary, can become volumetric and inhabited with program. Shanghai's library, currently a sprawling, horizontal megaform, is reconfigured as a thin vertical envelope that attaches to the facade of an existing building. The inner, existing tower uses the efficiency of stacked floor plates for office and book storage, while the facade becomes a cultural interface with the city, bringing porosity and collectivity to the high-rise. The new nested tower typology invigorates Shanghai's crowded city center with an institution that lacks space on the ground plane, while providing a layer of climate control for the tower through a programmed, structural façade. Two latent byproducts of capitalism, skyscrapers and skin systems, are exploited to produce a typology for a high visibility, but low-footprint, institution for the city.

This thesis establishes indiscrete adjacency as an organization that can synthesize formerly discrete programs to produce integration and cross-fertilization across programmatic boundaries. Indiscrete space moves beyond cellular and continuous spatial models to produce fluctuating heirarchies of organization, program, circulation and form. The effect of these multiple heirarchies is a pervasive condition of simultaneously belonging to many spaces. The increasing number and complexity of activities, occupants, and group identities in an elementary school can no longer be organized by simple adjacency between discrete cells. Indiscrete adjacency is proposed as a model able to manage this complexity by producing spaces with allegiances to several programs at once.

This thesis examines contemporary Canadian art practices, which aim to challenge the notion of multiculturalism as a purported 'solution' to the cultural, racial and ethnic diversity that comprises the nation. Specifically focusing on the work of Canadian artists, Jin-me Yoon, Kinga Araya and Ken Lum, I explore the mythology surrounding Canada's liberal pluralist politics and problematize the notion of nationalism as operating through a process of exclusion by privileging a white Anglo-Canadian norm. This system of exclusion complicates further the process of (im)migration, therefore, I explore the psychological and 'unhomely' experience of displacement as expressed visually through artistic practice. Furthermore, as a means of addressing multiculturalism and (im)migration, I acknowledge the need for more global modes of thinking, in proposing reconceptualizations of the notions home and nation that favour mobility, hybridity, and change over stable, static and pure definitions that sustain exclusionary politics. / Ce mémoire cherche à examiner des pratiques en art contemporain canadien qui ont pour but de questionner le concept du multiculturalisme en temps que « solution » allégée à la diversité culturale, raciale et ethnique dont est composée l’état-nation canadienne. En étudiant surtout les œuvres des artistes canadiens Jin-me Yoon, Kinga Araya et Ken Lum, j’explore la mythologie qui soutient les politiques pluralistes libérales au Canada. Cette dissertation problématize également la notion du nationalisme comme processus d’exclusion qui privilégie une norme anglo-canadienne de race blanche, compliquant davantage l’(im)migration. J’examine ainsi l’expérience psychologique de la non-appartenance, exprimée visuellement à l’instar de la pratique artis! tique. Finalement, en adressant le multiculturalisme et l’(im)migration de cette approche, je reconnaît la nécessité de penser de façons plus globales. Ma proposition est donc de repenser les notions du « chez-soi » et de la nation en mettant de l’emphase sur les thèmes de la mobilité et l’hybridité et non pas sur des définitions statiques et politiquement exclusivistes. fr

<p> The focus of this study was to better understand the population known as cosplayers, people that dress up as characters from various media sources, including film, television, comics, and animation, who also attend social gatherings such as conventions (Gn, 2011). This study sought to exhaustively identify all motivations for people to cosplay. Two qualitative instruments were utilized, the first being an online questionnaire, and the second being a semi-structured interview script. Recruitment for participants took place online, with the subsequent data being coded and transcribed by the researcher. </p><p>

It is a given that the late works of Beethoven occupy a special place in our musical life; that they continue to speak so directly to audiences more than a century and a half after they were written says much for the universality of their appeal. Although the music of Beethoven's final decade is much appreciated today, some early listeners found the coexistence of apparently contradictory aspects in these works to be very difficult to understand. Analysis that would attempt to do justice to such complex music must take into account the interplay of both form and content, thus broaching the question of how music can communicate that content. Since music has no lexical capacity, it is helpful to consider analogies from other fields in an investigation of the problem. Myth, alchemy, Jungian psychology, and seventeenth-century religious poetry are, like Beethoven's music, engaged with the exploration and communication of meaningful human experience; to deal with such issues requires a means of expressing the inexpressible, and so at the core of ideas in each of these fields is the paradox. Paradox, an apparent self-contradiction that carries with it the implicit possibility of its resolution, is a self-referential phenomenon. That paradox is present in Beethoven's music has been recognized in a general way by a number of scholars, but a more detailed examination of this aspect of his compositions offers new insight into their construction and content. A precedent for Beethoven's use of musical paradox is found in the reflexive works of Haydn, although Beethoven's use of the technique developed into a tool capable of being applied to many more types of compositional situations, and with a much greater expressive range. An adaptation of William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity offers an introduction to the use of paradox in Beethoven's works, while two extended critical essays, on the string quartets opp. 132 and 130, develop a multidisciplinary critical framework in order to provide a more detailed examination of the utility of paradox in shaping the overall narrative design and expressive structure in these two compositions, and by implication, in many others of Beethoven's late works as well. / Graduate

The problem for this study was to investigate the relationship of Socioeconomic Status to Attitude Toward Music and Home Musical Interest in intermediate-grade children. By dividing Attitude Toward Music into Attitude Toward School Music and Attitude Toward Out-of-School Music, these specific problems were identified: (1) To investigate differences in Attitude Toward School Music of students from different socioeconomic levels at grades four, five and six.; (2) To investigate differences in Attitude Toward Out-of-School Music of students from different socioeconomic levels at grades four, five and six.; (3) To investigate differences in Home Musical Interest of students from different socioeconomic levels at grades four, five and six.

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