The thesis investigates a means of establishing a more meaningful connection between the individual and the city through providing opportunities to experience urban space in an atypical manner. The atypical is created by an architecture which elaborates edge conditions and displaces the individual's conventional circulation within those edge conditions. Alternate methods of circulation are studied through an elaboration of their salient features, the appearance of those features in historical examples and in examples found in Seattle, Washington. A project for a ferry terminal in Seattle, Washington is presented as an illustration of these concepts.

An improbable relationship exists between monumentality, which is called Apollonian--universal and timeless--and regionalism, which is Dionysian--local and time-specific. A city requires an architecture that is both, an architecture that monumentalizes what is unique about itself and its people. Wichita, Kansas, is a city that sits in the middle of the vast grid of the American Midwest. It also suffers from a sort of identity crisis typical of that region. What images for Wichita should be promoted, and how? An urban design scheme which establishes the Arkansas River as a monument for the city and which reinforces the genius loci of the area is proposed, along with a specific project for a hotel to provide a social forum in the center of the city and show how future building might relate to the scheme.

This thesis is intended to demonstrate a strategy for the creation of mixed income housing in the City of New York as an alternative not only to the upper income cooperative and condominium schemes of the 1980's which do not respond to current housing demands but also to the perennially unpopular, albeit necessary low income housing projects. In the interest of providing a low-impact solution which effectively mediates between speculative concerns and sensitivity to the identity and character of existing neighborhoods, inspiration was derived from unconventional sources. The low profile occupation tactics employed by squatters, artists and the homeless have been applied to the creation of a series of experimental shelter and circulation prototypes which ultimately inform the design of a mixed income housing project to be sited on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

This investigation begins and ends with conditions present in the city of Houston, which in many ways typify processes at work in other urban centers around the country and around the world. One senses, in the vast empty ring which surrounds downtown Houston, the infinity of the great plains, in the midst of a highly urbanized context. The complete lack of hierarchy or figure inherent in this landscape seems to be a fascinating architectural problem. How do we build in such an area, and how do we come to grips with this vast emptiness which surrounds it? The conditions of emptiness and dematerialization inherent in the territory led to an investigation of the aesthetics of silence. Silence can be defined in three ways: first of all as a literal refusal to tell us anything. Secondly, as a condition of presence or immanence, and finally, as a condition of exhaustion, at the end of the line. All three conditions appeared to be present in the territory bordering downtown Houston to the East. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)

Modernism has radically endangered the nature of mankind's relation to the planet upon which we depend for survival, and humanity now has the ability to destroy our environment. Modern culture is unsustainable, and to avoid disaster new patterns of existence must evolve. Architecture must be a part of this change. Many forms of architecture for a sustainable society have been posited. Some for a mass society of central control, others for a society returned to the agricultural village, and some for a society of self sufficient individuals. These fail because they are utopian. Sustainable architecture for America must address the reality of the suburbs. In order to reduce waste of land and energy, a denser fabric is needed. But this fabric must offer the amenities of the suburbs, therefore I propose a melding of the traditional row house and the suburban house types.

The individual's relationship to the public takes on architectural significance when one is designing for the city. Urban and architectural designs tend to generalize crowd movements and needs, squandering any sense of individuality. The designer must incorporate aspects of personal choice in order to create successful urban landscapes for the individual. Houston's city streets are designed in absence of the pedestrian; the street life suffers for it. The individual is granted a subterranean street, the tunnel system. Although it is strictly for pedestrians, this system of buried hallways lacks many pedestrian needs. A comprehensible measure of distance and a sense of orientation are missing from its environment. It is possible to create of this underground world something suited toward the individual and the more intimate crowd while maintaining contact with the crowd of speeding steel in the streets above.

Unrecognized by most Houstonians, the city is riddled with empty spaces. Abandoned sites are overlooked by denizens of a city that constantly erases its own past, reinventing itself completely anew. Ties to the past are few. These spaces of decay are re-occupied by traces of objects that used to exist there. These fragmented occupations are monitoring stations that provide a link between the individual and the unobserved city, between an unfounded future and a forgotten past. Bound in a matrix of global and local conditions, they map another kind of city, one that is transcendant and ephemeral simultaneously.

The means of operating at the urban scale in the contemporary metropolis requires a reassessment of forces too often considered beyond the grasp of the architect and too often ignored by the planner. In Houston, the difficulty of engaging the machinations of private development may constitute the greatest challenge to the project of urbanism. The redevelopment of Midtown Houston, a high-traffic corridor situated between Downtown and the Texas Medical Center, issues a prompt to create alternative tactics for reshaping the city. Midtown Parking (mtP) is a system of eleven hybridized parking garages that exploits the ever-present need for more parking as a means to intervene in the climate of private development, organize existing potentials, and influence the reshaping of the district. mtP offers a way of rethinking how urbanity might emerge from the confluence of an existing private development paradigm and a desire to make coherent and vital urban form.

Houston's lack of zoning, market driven constructs, and dependence on the automobile have produced a sprawling, decentralized city connected by networks of flow, where density and urbanism are exceptions, not the rule. In downtown Houston, after years of neglect, a recent boom in (re)development coupled with new transportation initiatives are radically reshaping Houston's historic core and its adjacent neighborhoods. As these new transportation corridors (specifically Metro's new light rail) are realized, their adjacent land use and development (both public and private) provide opportunistic conditions for new visions of urban form and metropolitan life in Houston. The Thesis investigates these emergent opportunities, addressing the changing city in its own terms, focusing on the convergence of these new and existing urban infrastructures to develop new strategies for urban density in Central Houston.

The suburbs are making us fat. Fat is driving the suburbs. In an age when most things are measured by their efficient movement, suburban design spirals inward to a terminating node where stored equipment augments an increasingly static lifestyle. This high degree of sedentariness has brought with it obesiotic trends that have increased the girth of homes and bodies sitting around Houston. We are living in an environment expressing the end of movement---an era where physical activity is being engineered out of our lifestyles. Fat City examines fattening expansion, immobile movement, and where it may lead. Cross sectioning through the metropolis, it analyzes where the chronic problem lies: within the microenvironment of the single-family home. It is a journey from community to singularity. Understood historically and contemporaneously, it will be shown how anti-urban, pathogenic, causal views created the desire for the single-family detached home. The results of the retreat from community have personal effects encompassing public consequence. Through the historical unraveling of urban growth and the contemporary contextualization of that expansion, the end of movement is revealed. Within this field of abundance, embryonic patterns have begun to emerge and become tangible. This is the age of post-movement and Fat City is the debut of those solidified trends.