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This project began as a critique of the current notions of "green" architecture. It grew into the creation of a system for integrating nature with structure, the organic with the constructed. A grand entry for the Highline Park on the lower Westside of Manhattan is used as a means for generating a domain which plants, specifically hanging ivy, could thrive. Simple elements such as columns, cables, stairs and ramps, can become a means for creating immersive living volumes, fostering instances where nature can conquer construction. / Master of Architecture

Due to our love of the waterfront, almost half of the United States population now lives in coastal areas, including shores of estuaries. Unfortunately, this increasing concentration of people upsets the balance of ecosystems. My thesis project, Designing for the Waterfront - An Estuarine Research Reserve on Jones Point is about setting an example, setting a precedent for building on the waterfront. I have attempted to design an environmentally responsive and sensitive research center that will not only monitor and study the Potomac estuary, but will also serve as an example of how one should build on the estuary. / Master of Architecture

Environmentally - appropriate architectural works are considered by certain critics as relatively oriented without any theoretical basis other than a technicist perspective. Furthermore, this technicist approach, which puts emphasis on the application of scientific rationality, is supposed as being challenged through an arcadian agenda, which claims the return to pre-industrial values through the revival of the vernacular. In the thesis, it is argued that contrary to the assumptions that the green architecture is highly relativistic depending on the ideological standpoints, it is founded upon a holistic philosophy established on the studies pursued by post-war ecological scientists who followed systems approach. It is claimed that the aforementioned duality between the technicist and the arcadian approaches finds its expression in the contemporary green architecture depending on the philosophical framework provided by the systems approach. Systems sciences deal with the ways in which elements of a certain whole come together to make up an organization. Its main principle is that a particular element can only be studied with regard to the totality of which it belongs. Ecologists who endow a systems perspective study on the assembly rules through which living and nonliving members of biological systems are organized into groups. In this thesis, it is put forward that the philosophical outlook and methodology that came along with the systems thinking offers a basis for green architecture. It is provided a historical-analytical survey of the emergence of the systems approach in the architectural discipline since the 60s. It is argued that the 60s appropriation of the systems approach in architecture is still influential in the contemporary green architecture / that today&amp / #8217 / s architects utilize the theories and methods put forward throughout this process of appropriation in their works, alongside the scientific terminology developed by the systems ecologists.

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This thesis is an evaluation and proposal for development for an alternative health care center in West Virginia. The Gesundheit Institute is based on the work of Dr. Hunter "Patch" Adams and his desire to create an alternative to the current model of health care. The Institute would not charge for services and will offer non-traditional as well as traditional methods of healing. By evaluating what is currently happening at the center and what the resources are, I propose to use an incremental approach to growth. The ideas would result in a series of smaller buildings developed over time as opposed to a single larger building. The thesis includes the design for the next major building, a community center/dining hall and a basic design for a series of sleeping quarters. It also includes the reworking of the master plan to better include issues integrating incremental growth and sustainable development. / Master of Architecture

Combining both roof and shelter into one creates several design opportunities for a small house for college students living in Blacksburg, VA. The roof will serve many purposes, including structure, rain water collection, and inhabitable space. The house has two volumes overlapped into a large cubic volume to create different spaces which can be reached through overlapping stairs leading to the different levels of the house. / Master of Architecture

Today, concerns for environmental quality affect nearly all walks of life. In response to demands for resource conservation, architecture has become more complicated because the design process now depends on a large number of different disciplines. Now more than ever, building owners and users have many requirements—informed by developments in knowledge, technology, and science. These stakeholders are asking architects to design for lower operational cost, good daylighting and views, and higher indoor environmental quality (IEQ). Integrating all of these issues in building design is a dynamic process, which looks holistically at all of the dimensions of architectural. Present barriers of integrating green and sustainable strategies in the design process are mostly associated with architect's education and the understanding of the fundamental knowledge of the dynamics between the building and the local environmental conditions. For example, Saudi Arabia faces many challenges related to creating more environmentally responsive buildings, and peoples' behavior may not be easily changed with regard to resource conservation. To achieve such changes, a new educational framework for architecture is needed. This study captures and structures knowledge that informed the examination and development of the new knowledge-based educational framework for green building design in Saudi Arabia. Through literature review, a series of case studies, and interviews with professors from United States architecture schools and interviews with graduates from Saudi Arabian architecture schools, the study revealed how knowledge related to green building can be structured and strategically implemented into architectural design education in Saudi Arabia. This framework presents green knowledge in a logical, sequential structure representing a learning path/knowledge map. The knowledge map was not intended to present a sequential structure over the course of several years, but is more general so that it can be applied across all architecture schools in Saudi Arabia. In other words, the knowledge map may be applied as-is within the current architectural educational knowledge in Saudi Arabia schools, or it can be used as a guideline and assistance tool for educators and school administrators. Overall, this framework presents a workable model for green design education in the context of the existing Saudi Arabia educational practices. Thus, the goal of the final knowledge framework is to transform the architectural educational system in Saudi Arabia. / Ph. D.

Building codes are socio-technical regulations that govern the manner in which the built world is designed, constructed, and maintained. Instituted in order to protect the health, safety, and welfare of humans in the built world, codes also serve as an index of always changing societal values. If codes do not co-evolve with social values, however, they often perpetuate standards that no longer reflect the priorities of mainstream society. As crises arise and as cultural practices change, regulatory institutions are charged with creating new or amend old codes to reflect these societal shifts. Emergent social values are often dismissed by the general public, misrepresented by their political representatives, or abstracted by the louder voices of the market and the state. In a few critical moments in modern history, however, society successfully adopted and institutionalized previously underrepresented values into urban form. Social movements provide a primary venue for such paradigmatic change. They do this through the production of new knowledge that aims to alter the cognitive praxis of its citizenry and to generate the momentum required to codify grassroots ideals into the built world. Exploring how this confluence of socio-technical innovation functions within the built world, this dissertation addresses the primary research question: What is the relationship between urban social movements, the values they espouse, the building codes they construct, and the liberative function of the spaces produced? In this dissertation, I investigate three established and one emerging social movement to discern the characteristics of democratic code formation that lead to civic urban form. These four case studies are analyzed in terms of their origins, the claims made, strategies employed, and outcomes achieved. Patterns are then extrapolated from this analysis to identify qualities of collective action that contribute to the codification of civic urban form. The research discussed herein was conducted in two phases to develop a historical base from which to evaluate contemporary efforts to codify civic urban form. The first phase of this exploratory investigation tells the story of three intrinsically valuable, but also comparable case studies of social change in the United States: the community development strategy pursued by the civil rights movement, the architectural accessibility platform advocated by the disability rights movement, and efforts to institutionalize new building practices through voluntary building assessment systems by the environmental movement. The second phase extrapolates patterns from the established cases to inform the investigation of proto-movements currently coalescing around issues of spatial justice. Both phases are then reflected upon in order to propose a theory of civic urban form that recognizes the dialectic between social movements, emergent social values, building codes, and the physical spaces they inform. The thesis statement underlying this dissertation is that urban social movements in the U.S. require a myriad of different activist organizations— radical and mainstream, professional and grassroots— to simultaneously employ diverse strategies through an integrated frame of collective action in order to institutionalize new types of civic urban form. Based on the theoretical framework developed to conceptualize the production of civic urban form, I go on to argue in the concluding chapters that urban social movements currently seeking various means to codify the tenets of sustainable development in the United States might benefit from couching their collective actions within an integrated action frame of spatial justice. / text