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This thesis is an academic exercise set out to understand the secrets of Architecture. It is a compilation of a series of gestures made on behalf of Architecture. These gestures confront the materiality of Architecture to reveal the imprints beyond what makes the material exist according to the law of its nature, the imprints that reveal the material as an imprint for the human desire, the human will, and the human wish, for the material as a tool of representation and interpretation, thus the human thoughts, the human purpose and the human work. Explained in terms of space or environment, in terms of form or function, Architecture is never quite fully and satisfactorily understood. These terms reveal their anxiety about the mundane and the prosaic in the material constituents of Architecture. They tend to inadvertently distance themselves from the material seeking to appeal to the conceptual. As much significance as the conceptual and the intangible contribute to the principles of Architecture, this thesis revels in the tactile, the vivid, in what is all together sense perceptible, the real, the present. As much as it regards the secrets that reside in the divine and in the spiritual, it is eager to find them embodied in its material reality. Truth, poetry, beauty, all things conceptual, that reside in abstract immaterial form beyond reach in the upper ethers, are afforded by Architecture to exist within a corpus. Without the material imagination, one is prone to participating in the exercise of Architecture, with undue weight given to its form, its shape, its geometry, to how readily it will serve a functional need, a need that seems to reduce life around it to that specific act, overlooking what will eventually reside alongside us in matter. Without the material imagination, one is prone to readily accepting what modern technology or modern alchemy can afford this exercise of Architecture thereby readily adapting techniques and systems without careful thought. Without the material imagination, one is prone to overlooking the prima materia1 and the primordial architectural gestures, and thereby unduly and unwisely willing the material to conform to the conceptual. Without the material imagination, one is prone to overlooking what is in the nature of a material and thereby missing what its inherent beauty informs us. Along with trying to understand the iconic elements of Architecture, this thesis is also an investigation in its materiality. It is an exercise in trying to understand what confronting the materiality of an artifice reveals. It is an attempt to define architecture by man's endeavour to understand the creature, to understand the material presence, to unravel the mysteries of the material constitution and organization. / Master of Architecture / I used this thesis to better understand architecture by focusing less on the shapes of built objects and more on their constitution. I tried to focus less on the form that we see and more on the body that is present among us. Instead of making a specific use for a building the impetus for building, I tried to consider the experience one has in inhabiting an environment. To conduct the above exercise, This thesis is structured with three main parts. The first part looks at the material environment and how it is organized before man intervenes. This part is what is referred to in this thesis as ‘Matron’. The second part looks at man’s intervention on the same environment from a time that precedes us, and is referred to in this thesis as ‘Ruin’. The third and last part is referred to as new mineral. This part contains the main body of work relying on the research material from the previous two, to produce a design for a monastic complex for 36 Benedictine monks.

This study seeks to investigate the impact of architectural icons on the cities that they are built in, especially those in Dubai to understand the perceptions and associations of ordinary people with these icons, thus analysing their impact on the quality of life in the city. This is an important study with the advent of ‘iconism’ in architecture that has a growing acceptance and demand, wherein the status of a piece of architecture is predetermined as an icon by the media and not necessarily by the people. There is no denying that the fastest means of appearing on the world map is through icons, which Dubai evidently achieved, and there are many supporters of this phenomenon as a means of progress and development, the bonus being instant fame and status. But the symbolism employed in these icons, specifically for this part of the world, many argue may not be relevant to the people or the region, thus leading to a loss of identity and sense of belonging that is a vital component in the overall sense of pride. This study thus evaluates architecture as a service industry that is not only to satisfy the personal egos of the architects or the clients. It has an important role to leave a mark on the end users and not only on the glossy architectural journals. The study presents views on what really leaves a mark on the people’s memory, addressing the scale, the grandness, the location, the size, the technology and the materials that may or may not contribute to the iconic status of an architectural project from the people’s perspective. Further the study investigates if an icon is one that could be a forced landmark or it is one that people associate with, relate to and one that gives them the sense of belonging and pride, binding them together. The expressive iconic forms with the metaphors emerging, may or may not add to the quality of a place, create places of spaces or it may result in more of form accommodating functions.Thus it is imperative to understand that though today Dubai with its multiple icons that are jewels in the crown of Dubai, reflecting awe and splendor, what does this architecture do for the people and thus in leaving an imprint on the peoples mind collectively. The study analyzes the dimensions that make certain kind of architecture stand out. Some of these dimensions are physical and others are difficult to measure, thus it addresses the tangible and intangible factors that result in the icon and the associated symbolism with it. The relevance and meaning of these symbols will have to stand the test of time to leave an ever-lasting impression on generations to come. The literature review was the first part of the study and the theoretical studies were divided into three pivot areas in this thesis: evolution of architecture as signs and symbols, international iconic architecture and its impact, architecture as identity through symbolism. The study also focusses on Dubai as an emerging iconic city concentrating on the needs of people and impact of these icons on people specifically, further highlighting the issues of legibility, context and identity in Dubai. The empirical study examines this argument about iconic architecture through questionnaires and interviews. A comparison is drawn between different segments of people in the community, one set of samples being those who are closely associated with these icons through the process of decision making or building, the others who have very minimal knowledge and association with these icons. The findings thus indicate both the well-established criteria for awarding an iconic status and also the intangible often ignored aspects in iconic image building. Thus, the study suggests a paradigm that could provide more human based elements in the iconic architecture and the selected symbols in representing these icons. Certain recommendations supporting the perception of people towards icons, their needs and local considerations are further made to make cities more liveable and joyful for the people they are intended for.

A symbolic image database system is a system in which a large amount of image data and their related information are represented by both symbolic images and physical images. Spatial relationships are important issues for similarity-based retrieval in many image database applications. How to perceive spatial relationships among the components in a symbolic image is an important criterion to find a match between the symbolic image of the scene object and the one being store as a modal in the symbolic image database. With the popularity of digital cameras and the related image processing software, a sequence of images are often rotated or flipped. That is, those images are transformed in the rotation orientation or the reflection direction. A robust spatial similarity framework should be able to recognize image variants such as translation, scaling, rotation, and arbitrary variants. Current retrieval by spatial similarity algorithms can be classified into symbolic projection methods, geometric methods, and graph-matching methods. Symbolic projection could preserve the useful spatial information of objects, such as width, height, and location. However, many iconic indexing strategies based on symbolic projection are sensitive to rotation or reflection. Therefore, these strategies may miss the qualified images, when the query is issued in the orientation different from the orientation of the database images. To solve this problem, researchers derived the rule of the change of spatial relationships in image transformation, and proposed a function to map the spatial relationship to its related transformed one. However, this mapping consists of several conditional statements, which is time-consuming. Thus, in this dissertation, first, we classify the mapping into three cases and carefully assign a 16-bit unique bit pattern to each spatial relationship. Based on the assignment, we can easily do the mapping through our proposed bit operation, intra-exchange, which is a CPU operation and needs only the complexity of O(1). Moreover, we propose an efficient iconic index strategy, called Unique Bit Pattern matrix strategy (UBP matrix strategy) to record the spatial information. In this way, when doing similarity retrieval, we do not need to reconstruct the original image from the UBP matrix in order to obtain the indexes of the rotated and flipped image. Conversely, we can directly derive the index of the rotated or flipped image from the index of the original one through bit operations and the matrix manipulation. Thus, our proposed strategy can do similarity retrieval without missing the qualified database images. In our performance study, first, we analyze the time complexity of the similarity retrieval process of our proposed strategy. Then, the efficiency of our proposed strategy according to the simulation results is presented. We show that our strategy outperforms those mapping strategies based on different number of objects in an image. According to the different number of objects in an image, the percentage of improvement is between 13.64% and 53.23%.

This dissertation explores the process of meaning transformation in digital participatory culture by examining the replication, mutation and circulation that iconic news images undergo in cyberspace through Internet memes. With triangulation of visual historical analysis, visual rhetorical analysis and iconographic tracking, the project argues that members of remix culture weaponize the digital derivatives of the famous images through manipulation to renegotiate history, dispense social justice in the absence of other recourse and engage in political activism. Such transformations, as this project shows, are likely to weaken the rhetorical powers of iconic images to define collective memory, a role they have played for decades. With the use of Internet memes, members of the public can now re-remember history outside the iconic accounts, producing their own interpretations of events that contribute to public discourse. Internet memes that exist alongside their iconic visual counterparts democratize the process of meaning making and remembering in remix culture, promoting polyvocality in favor of singular versions of the past. Such fragmentation of master narratives highlights the changing role of iconic pictures in the process of signification thanks to technology. Keywords: Iconic images, Internet memes, signification, digital participatory culture, collective memory.

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The considerable growth of digital images online in recent years has shifted users’ concern from whether or not an image is available to how to find a specific image in a sea of online imagery. Image Search Engines cannot satisfy every user, especially users that require specific images with more details. Furthermore, the variety and quantity of available images do not add value for users if they cannot find what they require in an appropriate timeframe. Therefore, an Image Retrieval is required that lets users define detailed search perimeters and find images that match their requirements.This thesis focuses on providing better communication and interaction between users and Image Search Engines. The work presented here aims to let users describe their requirements visually and make approximations of the images that they require by setting perimeters like color, scale and position. This approximation can help in retrieving more appropriate images which more closely match users’ needs. This thesis also proposes to involve users first in improving the Image Search Engine database by uploading their photographs and images, and second in helping other users that are not satisfied with search results, by sending an image as response to their request.To achieve this goal, the thesis applied two methodologies, Research through Design and User Centered Design. These methodologies allowed considering future possibilities and users’ requirements. The communication with users provided by low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes as sketches, that were used in workshops and helped in framing the concept and improving different aspects of it.

As the world becomes smaller through advances in telecommunications, the need for communication between speakers of different languages becomes greater. Concerns about cultural and economic hegemony argue against the use of any natural language, and machine translation is not yet perfected and available to speakers of all languages. With the technological developments of the last decade, such as powerful computers, graphical interfaces, and the World Wide Web, an excellent opportunity has been created for a computer-mediated visual interlingua to meet this need. An iconic language could be designed to take advantage of the technology. People would be able to communicate with an iconic language without the need to draw pictures themselves, since they could choose these pictures from the screen. This dissertation describes VIL, an iconic visual interlingua based on the notion of simplified speech. Similar to pidgins, languages arising from the prolonged contact between people speaking two or more languages, VIL utilizes features that are in the 'greatest common denominator' of features in different languages. This allows its complexity to be significantly reduced; for example, it has no inflection, no number, gender, or tense markers, and no articles. VIL has no linear order. This is possible because it was designed as a visual language, in contrast to written languages which are the result of a transfer to visual modality of spoken language, which evolved in the context of auditory modality where sequencing and ordering is critical. After reviewing previous research on universal languages that are artificial, non-artificial, and visual, VIL is described in detail, including its parts of speech, its grammar, and its organization for verbs, nouns, and adjectives. Throughout the discussion a set of principles is proposed, some of which are relevant to any universal language, others specific to visual or iconic languages. The development of a set of icons is also presented. Finally, the evaluations of the icons, language, and the system itself are described.

The icon represents a great part of the heritage of Christian arts in Egypt. In this thesis the early stages of iconic art are studied to find out the influential factors leading to the formation of the icon as it is now. The Coptic icon in particular is studied, both the icon itself and how it differs from the Byzantine icon. The religious factor is focussed on as an effective and modelling element in defining the icon, and the symbols are studied in order to go back to their historical roots. This study also aims at tracing the phenomenon of iconic art, by studying its characteristics and the works themselves and by clarifiying the iconic symbols as part of the cultural and creative activity. The important artworks in iconic art are analysed, and the effect of iconic art on human and social life is shown / Master of Arts (Hons)

The scholarly interest is the sway singular architectures can have on the collective aesthetic of a generic city: How to exploit this capacity and better orchestrate an impact? The obsession is with Singapore — a city Rem Koolhaas describes as “all foreground and no background,” without geometry, fabric or legible urban form that physically defines the city’s aesthetics. Singapore is necessarily a sum of its architectures, and is still waiting for a greater aesthetic to emerge from its heterogeneous collection. The initiative: to revitalize the former Malayan rail lands, a site spanning the full width of the country. The plan follows Singapore’s recent practice: building distinct, free-style architectures on shifting sands — only this time anchored by a formless, yet permanent and straightforward high-speed axis that induces continuity and reinforces the island’s status as a singular, cohesive entity. Only extreme differentiation, held in tension by the thinnest infrastructural line, can induce a forthright sense of direction in a capitalist city that must necessarily adopt multiple architectural solutions.