published_or_final_version / Architecture / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Thesis (M.Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1980. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Paula Jean Krugmeier. / M.Arch.

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This thesis explores how to design an addition to a modern building that makes the building users cognizant of the layers of history while simultaneously creating spaces that respond to the needs of the occupants today. The existing building, the Washington D.C. Central Library, designed by Mies van der Rohe, is conserved and rehabilitated maintaining the library function and new space is created for the Foundation for the Study of Social Media. The addition and the surgical rehabilitation of the existing are informed by the design concepts and details of Mies van der Rohe as well as the theories of Carlo Scarpa. The project evolves through a detail outward design approach in which material and spatial relationships at critical joints are first determined and then used to inform the design of the whole. / Master of Architecture

Two experiments were conducted that examined the effects of tangential information on readers' comprehension of explanatory texts. Participants were recruited from Introduction to Psychology courses. They were assigned to read one of three versions of a text (i.e., a base-text version, a base-text plus seductive details version or a base-text plus boring details version) about the process of lightning or the lifecycle of a white dwarf star. In Experiment 1, participants were told they had to write down everything they could remember from their passage when they finished reading. The base-text group recalled more of the core content than either of the other two groups. Lengthening a text by adding tangential information interfered with readers' ability to recall the information. More interestingly, the boring details group recalled more core content than the seductive details group. The degree of interestingness of the tangential information had an independent effect on readers' memory. Reading times were also recorded and analyzed. The seductive details group spent less time reading the core content of the passage than either the base-text and boring details groups, which did not differ. The presence of seductive details reduced the amount of attention readers allocated to processing the core content of the passage. In Experiment 2, readers were told that they had to verify whether or not certain sentences were presented in the passage they just finished reading. Reading times did not differ among the three groups. A post-hoc analysis of reading times across experiments revealed that participants in Experiment 1 spent more time processing the passages than those in Experiment 2. This suggests that changing the memory task from free-recall to a recognition-based task may have altered readers' online processing. In the sentence verification task, there was a tendency for participants who read a passage that included detail sentences to respond faster but less accurately. The presence of detail sentences lead readers to perform more poorly on identifying whether or not sentences were actually in the passage they read as compared to readers of the same passage without details.

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