When performances engage with their set design, they become more powerful, more intricate. The atmosphere gets woven into every element on the stage. The performance arts have the ability to surpass the conventional as they begin to mold with other disciplines, immersing the audience into a multi-faceted experience. Many performances today are conceptualized, rehearsed, and performed on "blank canvasses" - from one small wooden room with a mirror to one large wooden room with hundreds of new faces staring back. Imagine architecture created in this manner: without site as a constraint, without site as an inspiration. Our surroundings are essential in the design process, and when that is taken away, our designs become placeless, lacking grounded conviction. By implementing a stage design that will become the site for the artist's work, one challenges the artist by providing them with a set of rules they can abide by or dispute. This will in turn make their work stronger as their concept gets applied in various mentions. Architecture has the potential to become that site for performance. Artists constantly find inspiration in daily life: Paul Taylor choreographs from the pedestrian movement of the busy urban corridors; John Cage composes music from the ambient noise of an airport. Inspiration is everywhere, and can be particularly compelling when discovered in daily life. Just as the pedestrian can be conceived as the performer, architecture can be conceived as the stage. Once this is realized, one begins to question the role of the theater. Is the theater just a container for the stage? If the stage design is constantly being reconfigured, what if the architecture of the theater began to respond to this? By inverting the norm and placing the stage on the envelope of the building, one begins to fully experience the architecture as the stage and, in turn, the world as the theater. / 0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

This project explores solutions to the projected challenges costal housing will face over the course of the next twenty years. Most specifically the main focus will be the challenge of global warming and rising sea levels. This project will attempt to create a model of coastal architecture that can act as a precedent and solution to the costal architecture of the future.

The aim of this dissertation is to provide Marabastad with a multi-sport centre with alternating levels of use and activity. Through kinetic architecture the structure adapts to Marabastad’s shifting nature. The centre serves schools within the Pretoria CBD, sport clubs and members of the public, constantly reshaping to cater for different needs. The centre is equipped with the necessary facilities to host practise sessions for teams taking part in the 2010 Soccer World Cup with ample space for fans and sport enthusiasts. This feeds off the established transport infrastructure that defines Marabastad. Inhabiting lost space within the urban fabric creates a site or destination for Marabastad dwellers to either partake in or watch the ongoing events, drawing the vibrant diversity of Boom Street towards the existing under utilised zone in the south, reinforcing the crumbling community structure. The building itself becomes a display case for sport, simultaneously creating awareness and intrigue. It can be described as a Centre for Illustrated Sports, a complex where Marabastad inhabitants can actively express their vibrant nature through physical activity. / Dissertation (MArch(Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Architecture / unrestricted

Crossfit is a unique method of physical exercise founded on a specific set of underlying scientific principles. The ultimate goal of Crossfit is to maximize work potential across broad time and modal domains. This project attempts to apply the concepts and principles of Crossfit to architecture to maximize living potential of built environments across broad time and modal domain by means of an architecture that is kinetic, interactive, responsive, and continually reconfigurable. The focus of the project is the design of an approximately 35,000 sf building titled The Motus Center for Kinetic Art Science. The building serves both as an actively used gymnasium and movement studio as well as an interactive museum and gallery of kinetic arts and sciences. The building site is located on Cross Street in Boston, Massachusetts between Hanover Street and Salem Street, in an area known as the Artery Strip.

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Dance, costume, and music are all reflective of a heritage that has been intact over three hundred years. The street activities during carnival season on the island of St. Kitts can be described as dynamic excitement between the onlookers, the Masqueraders, a local folklore group, and other carnival players. The interactive play amongst group members of the Masqueraders is one that tells a story of the colonization and perseverance of a nation influenced by Indian, European and African past. There is often, however a disconnection between an outsider, 'the audience', and the culture of the island. Only when the interactive play amongst the players is disseminated throughout the audience, inducing a response to embrace the culture does an outsider gains a better understanding of the culture. By expressing this interactive performance of the Masquerades through responsive architecture the stage can be set where the outsider can become submerged in a full cultural experience. In 2003 the Parsons School of Design succeeded in creating several interactive wall systems to monitor social behavior of passersby by creating movable walls that revealed seating ar- eas during high traffic periods. In the marketing world "interactive wall(s)" informs consumers, workers and potential clients of information on a particular product. Although successful within their own realms, these wall systems lack the ability to meet individual needs based on a particular cultural region. Analyzing the Masqueraders and conducting interviews will be of importance to this thesis research. Once information has been collected and compared responsive systems will be designed and tested. Frequent comparisons will be made with the investigations carried out by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Kinetic Design Group and Parsons School of Design. Responsive architecture can be used as modern day folklore, as in story telling, to conjure up the cultural spirit of a place, exhibit architectural aesthetics while offering an outsider an authentic and spectacular interactive experience. The results of this investigation will be geared towards improving human experiences on cultural levels.