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<p> The art of tea or "teaism" is grounded in recognizing the polarity between the spiritual and material worlds with the goal of finding harmony and pause. The exploration of the metaphysical realities and principles of Japanese tea rituals can also be found in creating sacred space within the mundane to achieve harmony amidst the dissonance of the secular world. Creating a campus inter-faith center will both provide a place for students to embrace their spirituality or religion as well as facilitate understanding between religions in a world today in which it is necessary. A tea room based on the Japanese principles of the tea ceremony will provide a common ground where those with differing beliefs come together to take part in a ritual that promotes spirituality and moral values shared by many religions. Exploring Japanese tea history and the ritual will lay the groundwork for establishing a modern tea house based on those principles. Religious pluralism and what spaces religions currently use and their rituals will help to establish the programming for the interfaith center. Rituals are important aspects of both religions and the tea ceremony and are part of both the sacred and secular realm, public and private (or individual or group). Introspection and reflection through meditation and prayer are central to the design of the space in both areas of the tea room, such as the outer and inner waiting areas, as well as in the spaces dedicated to spirituality and religion for both individual and group worship. The juxtaposition and boundary between secular and sacred space will be explored. Nature, which is meditated upon in Japanese tea rituals and is also important to many religions, is also an important theme. The method of research includes historical writings on tea rituals and theoretical essays on philosophy of tea and religious influences. Studying sacred spaces such as synagogues, churches, mosques and temples and how people use those spaces will give insight into how users interact within those spaces. Case studies of both a multifaith center, interfaith chapel and modern tea house will all provide programmatic and design precedence for the final design.</p>

<p> For thesis, I will explore the resurgence of public markets in a variety of settings by analyzing branding strategies and design features that mold tradition to contemporary tastes. Our contemporary culture has a love affair with food. Not only are chefs celebrities but our society is more conscientious of food preparation and origins. This emerging interest started a revolution in public markets. Public markets are not a &ldquo;new&rdquo; idea. They have been in existence for centuries. Beyond providing food for the local community, they are responsible for providing improved economic factors and more social opportunities than supermarket shopping. The new markets are considered food entertainment establishments. Many of them have bars, restaurants, and cooking classes added for a sophisticated shopping experience. Thankfully, our society has a had a shift in the way we spend our money and time. Food offers a way for people to connect with themselves as well as each other. Being a more sophisticated audience, design has become a crucial element in establishing a successful business. Sleek construction and nods to historic origins give an authentic vibe to markets while integrating modern conveniences like refrigeration. Branding and Packing also play a role. Consumers have so many options that marketing and image attract customers and illustrate the artisanal properties of markets today. By analyzing the history of public markets both foreign and domestic, I will illustrate how they have come full circle in their usefulness, contributing to local economies and societal changes. </p><p> For my proposed project, I would like to illustrate how to bring the modern public market into a suburban setting. Using all the attributes such as farm-to-table sourcing, con- struction, branding, and design I would like to represent the public market in an area with less population and analyze how it would affect the surrounding environment. For guidance on the process, I will analyze the following design and architecture firms, Edens, Jensen Architects, and AvroKO. </p><p> My research up until this point has included but is not limited to the following: Books, social media, online references, and site visits. Thankfully, I have at least one historical public market in close proximity, Eastern Market on Capitol Hill. The new trendy version of a public market is Union Market, located in NoMa neighborhood. </p><p> Originally, public markets were conceived out of necessity. Farmers needed a centralized means of selling and distribution of products and materials. Consumers did not have cars and modern supermarkets had yet to be invented. Thus, public markets came into existence and did much more for the community than provide a means to purchase food. They became a means to support the community by providing economic and social enrichment. Patrons and vendors created a sense of community. Good design fosters functionality and success of a market. </p><p> In conclusion, public markets have a positive effect on local economy, providing healthy food alternatives, employment opportunities and a sense of community pride.</p>

Communication Through Artifact Creation was an opportunity to design an installation of artifacts in a new and provocative way. Using the inherent properties of the objects contained within the context of the installation as the performative event, the audience was able to shape their own narrative around these objects. Usually, as a scenic designer, I am shaping a space that performers are allowed into but the audience is not. There is a predefined narrative text that is the key element informing the designed artifacts that I make as a representation of the sculpted theatrical space in which a performance will take place. For this exhibit the artifacts designed by me and eleven other artists informed the structure that would house them, and the performative journey was open to the interpretation of the audience’s imagination. / text

This thesis describes an exploration of creative process and a set of methods used to find new ideas for theatrical design. The project began with questions about repetition and disruption. Can altering a typical process of designing a show help when designing the same show repeatedly, as an opera designer needs to be able to do? Can new ideas be generated not from streamlining one process but using a diverse pattern of research methods? How does using one design of the same opera as a lens for another affect the sum of both works and the understanding of the work? Several methods of work process are examined and explained. / text

Research has been carried out on three major difficulties in designing efficient and economic telescopes with 8m f/1 lightweight mirrors. These problems are polishing f/1 aspherics, thermal distortion of borosilicate glass mirror and mirror seeing. Viable solutions to all three have been developed. Solving the fundamental problems allows future very large telescopes to use such mirrors as the basic elements in the design which will reduce the cost. Accurate mirror figure together with good pointing stability given by the short focal length will enable the telescope to form images as sharp as that permitted by nature on the ground. A new technology of polishing f/1 aspherics with a computer controlled stressed lap will give very accurate figure because the lap is changed accurately to adapt the desired figure. Design parameters and performance specifications for a 0.6m aluminum stressed lap for polishing a spun cast 1.8m f/1 borosilicate glass honeycomb mirror have been developed. These can be readily scaled up for polishing 8m f/1 mirrors. Stressed lap polishing also requires accurate material removal over the entire mirror surface. An optimization algorithm using the theory of material wear has been developed to search for the polishing strokes suited for uniform or other desired removal rates. Direct casting of lightweight mirrors requires that the glass be borosilicate. The figure distortion caused by the expansion of borosilicate glass requires the mirror be isothermal to less than 0.1°C for image degradation not to exceed 0.1 arcsecond. The problem of thermal interference by air and the environment has been investigated. A method of injecting well controlled air into the cells that forces the mirror to be isothermal to within 0.1°C has been discovered. Mirror seeing caused by temperature difference between the mirror and ambient air can degrade the telescope performance, but can be reduced by careful thermal design. A simple theoretical thermal model is used to select the glass thickness of a honeycomb structure mirror. Under air ventilation thermal control, the mirror responds to changing air temperature in less than an hour, reducing mirror seeing also to 0.1 arcsecond for telescopes at good seeing sites.

A multiple wavelength, portable, solar spectroradiometer designed to measure atmospheric optical depth at several discrete wavelengths between 1 mum and 4 mum has been developed. The instrument employs a manually operated filter wheel to select wavelength bands with minimal gaseous absorption, and a thermoelectrically cooled PbSe photoconductor is used as the detector. Mechanically chopped solar radiation is converted by the photoconductor into a modulated electrical signal which is then processed by a miniaturized lock-in amplifier to produce a DC voltage proportional to solar irradiance. Example optical depth measurements are presented and discussed.

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Statistical models for the joint statistics of image pixels are of central importance in many image processing applications. However the high dimensionality stemming from large problem size and the long-range spatial interactions make statistical image modeling particularly challenging. Commonly this modeling is simplified by a change of basis, mostly using a wavelet transform. Indeed, the wavelet transform has widely been used as an approximate whitener of statistical time series. It has, however, long been recognized that the wavelet coefficients are neither Gaussian, in terms of the marginal statistics, nor white, in terms of the joint statistics. The question of wavelet joint models is complicated and admits for possibilities, with statistical structures within subbands, across orientations, and scales. Although a variety of joint models have been proposed and tested, few models appear to be directly based on empirical studies of wavelet coefficient cross-statistics. Rather, they are based on intuitive or heuristic notions of wavelet neighborhood structures. Without an examination of the underlying statistics, such heuristic approaches necessarily leave unanswered questions of neighborhood sufficiency and necessity. This thesis presents an empirical study of joint wavelet statistics for textures and other imagery including dependencies across scale, space, and orientation. There is a growing realization that modeling wavelet coefficients as independent, or at best correlated only across scales, may be a poor assumption. While recent developments in wavelet-domain Hidden Markov Models (notably HMT-3S) account for within-scale dependencies, we find that wavelet spatial statistics are strongly orientation dependent, structures which are surprisingly not considered by state-of-the-art wavelet modeling techniques. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the studied wavelet correlation models a novel non-linear correlated empirical Bayesian shrinkage algorithm based on the wavelet joint statistics is proposed. In comparison with popular nonlinear shrinkage algorithms, it improves the denoising results.