Long ago the stories common to men were clearly present in their architecture. Sculpture, mosaics, paintings, stained-glass windows, all blatantly told the beginning, the morals, the epics, and future of humanity. Today these elements have all but disappeared along with the stories that they told. One story still common to humanity is the act of death, transcending culture, nationality, or creed. The pages to follow disclose an architecture for the emotional state of mourning. The seven spaces of this architecture exist in three dimensions: the narrative, the emotive, and sacred. / Master of Architecture

This thesis explores the idea of two autonomous spatial systems and their interaction: a syntactic grid and a pure formal volume. The juxtaposition of these two elements allows for insight into and exploration of their autonomous ordering potentialities, as well as the potential relationships or the presence of both systems. The syntactic grid articulates structure and strength for the architectural project , while the pure volume translates the programmatic function and their distinction from the grid. / Master of Architecture

The aim of this study is to understand the purpose, employment and place of specific materials in general, and &ldquo / light&rdquo / in particular, in architectural production. This thesis is a critical reconsideration of light as a building material, encompassing all the metaphorical connotations that the term suggests: light versus heavy / &ldquo / art form&rdquo / versus &ldquo / core form&rdquo / &ldquo / figuration&rdquo / versus &ldquo / tectonic&rdquo / ornamentation versus construction / craft production versus structural logic and abstraction versus materiality. All these binary oppositions combine to provide a conceptual framework for a contemporary interpretation of &ldquo / light architecture&rdquo / . Apart from its visual qualities, light plays an essential role in the production of architecture revealing the architectural form, function, mass, texture and context. When considered as an architectural material, light also has the ability to transpose the building into an &ldquo / art form&rdquo / as a monumental object, and to provide a dematerialized reality. When speaking of architectural materials, an analysis of the tectonic aspects of architecture is a prerequisite. It was Gottfried Semper&rsquo / s seminal work that first introduced the rich terminology of the material qualities in the products of architecture. The term &ldquo / textile&rdquo / , as an abstract procedure of Semper&rsquo / s theory, leads to a shift from primitive fabrics to contemporary modulation techniques and becomes a crucial element in the evaluation of such key words as &ldquo / dress&rdquo / , &ldquo / mask&rdquo / , &ldquo / skin&rdquo / , &ldquo / membrane&rdquo / and &ldquo / pure form&rdquo / . Following the theory of Semper, &ldquo / textile&rdquo / can be considered as a starting point for the conceptualization of these key words. Through specific examples associated with light, The Bosphorus Bridge, The Dogan Media Centre, The Kunsthaus Graz and the Image Mill, this study aims to analyze the historical and the traditional materials introduced by Semper together with the contemporary and the modern materials inserted by Bernard Cache and suggests the introduction of light as a modern and contemporary material that may be applied to the abstract procedures defined by Semper as &ldquo / textile&rdquo / , &ldquo / ceramics&rdquo / , &ldquo / tectonics&rdquo / and &ldquo / stereotomy&rdquo / . An in-depth reading of Semper and those that followed him: Kenneth Frampton, Harry Francis Malgrave, Karl B&ouml / tticher, Wolfgang Hermann, Bernard Cache and Carolina A. van Eck, will provide a conceptual framework for the evaluation of the material qualities of light design in architecture.