A need in Houston exists---to encourage thickening of existing older neighborhoods. This thickness, the haphazard nature of events and performances found in everyday living, is fostered by building types that define our experiences within the city and build relations to one another. These qualities exist in discreet forms, sometimes dormant and out of focus, yet create openings for invention. Sites and cultures about Washington Avenue, found through close readings of site, contain latent potentials. However, with an influx of new townhomes and gated communities in the area failing to consider present conditions, these sites and cultures will soon disappear. This thesis projects that the architect's responsibility is to act through a light touch in unearthing the forces shaping latent sites and communicating unrealized potentials throughout the community. Deployed site vignettes become a tactical, bottom up overture---a poster campaign.

Recent manipulations and exploitations of the law have allowed the Indian tribes to operate and profit from casinos and gaming activities. The resulting juxtapositions question the relationships between Reservations, Cities, and States. These moments of reorganization expose new possibilities for the future relationships between these overlapping governments and the community they influence. The intention of the project is to establish a framework to organize the urban development of the border between the Sandia Pueblo and the City of Albuquerque in such a way that the form of future development along the strip will facilitate economic and physical interaction across and through this border zone, avoid the pueblo landscape and define the edge of the city. Future development of the strip would further negotiate the relationship between City and Pueblo. In part, this project outlines one alternative for the city to respond to the pueblo's strip. The city could choose to ignore, modify, or follow this proposal--the formal reaction of the city development would become part of the story.

Healing the circulatory wound is not a project embedded in architectures contemporary preoccupation with romantic relationships between highway and building through circulatory fluxes, speeds, and flows. Rather, this thesis is about developing a more socially responsible urban relationship between the highway and its immediate context by understanding the latent potentials to be found in the lost spaces under, along, and above the circulatory network of our cities. This new urban relationship is one of healing rather than treatment. It is a process of organizing the future metropolis and its physical, social, economic, and political environment in order to create civic amenities at points of existing trauma.

Fifty years after independence, Karachi, Pakistan's most important metropolis, continues to suffer from a widespread shortage of suitable housing and infrastructure. The recent growth of the newly empowered middle class has inflicted additional strains on this already overwhelmed megacity. While the rich are well-equipped to look after themselves, and the poor are best served with a 'sites and services' approach, the middle class has few accessible housing options. By looking at the development of Karachi, and its current urban form and infrastructure--in the context of patronage, planning and housing typology--this thesis reaches a better understanding of the issues, identifies appropriate housing solutions for the rising middle class, and proposes transformations of typology based on the target residents' social, cultural and economic needs.

This design project attempts to enlarge the role of urban codes to deal with issues relevant to the condition of the metropolis as a type of ecological niche. It is my view that urban codes are the most useful design mechanism for post-environmental relations between humans and the urban fields they reside within. These codes must be written not to designate that which cannot be done, but to provoke successful innovation by those following them. This is especially the case in a metropolis without zoning such as this. The project is a master planned community in an urban instead of ex-urban context as is typical, formed on a brownfields site, which is currently the oil services company Halliburton's mostly vacant headquarters just Northeast of downtown Houston. Coding of this site to be used by developers of the site must take into account parameters inherent in the site itself, in this case a polluted parking lot lying in a floodplain. To a certain extent these conditions pervade the landscape of Houston itself, and so this is in a sense a case study for a wider field of operation.

Suburban Living has infiltrated the city. Suburban proclivities towards isolation and dispersion undermine the social congestion that propagates urban social relations, slowly sucking the life out of the city. SUPERBLOCK exploits the current developer typology of the mixed-use high-density urban housing block to generate a newdomain for urban social interaction by operating as a massive social condenser. In order to successfully activate this social potential, SUPERBLOCK injects dynamic social concentrations into an open system of new urban life.

This thesis is an investigation of urban form, specifically urban form that allows for architectural interventions at a variety of scales, as well as an architecture that is at once, dense and porous. The idea derives from an interpretive reading of the city of Houston, as well as a predilection for modernist urban strategies that have these same concerns at their core. Aspects of scale and density are explored for their potential to register the subject into the city, establishing a reflexive relationship between the body and architecture. The self-service gas station is seen as a modern urban artifact that serves as a spatial model for testing these ideas. The thesis is explored through the design proposal for a small institution--a vocational school with housing, dining, and research facilities that occupy two vacant blocks in the southeast periphery of downtown Houston.

Architecture and the conceptions of urban and rural space have been drastically transformed by the continuous expansion of the man-made into the natural rural landscape. The collision of man-made and natural environments come together as a continuous overlay of conflicting systems. Complex fields are thus formed, creating systems of "in-between" landscapes that blur the boundaries between the natural and the man-made. The acknowledgment that inhabitants are continually within the city calls into question how society visualizes, constructs, and uses their surroundings. The "in-between" landscape has given way to the possibility of dismantling the common ideas of urban and rural in order to formulate a new type of hybrid landscape. The landscape proposed here, an Environmental Park, becomes a highly interactive field of natural and man-made systems that communicates new ways of thinking, making, and building within the natural, the man-made, and the "in-between."

The port of Nagoya offers a particularly promising site for new city planning, as it has remained largely untouched by the kind of less-than-successful new projects built in Tokyo and Osaka. However, current plans for a highly sophisticated enterprise zone complete with a new international airport, train terminals, office parks, housing blocks, and hypermarkets are characterized by the all-too-familiar imagery of the outdated Western city plan (as has already been implemented in Tokyo and Kobe). In fact, one could generalize that large-scale development outside every major city in the world has assumed a similar homogeneous, atomized quality; and yet a substantial amount of business is now conducted outside of traditional city centers by an increasingly itinerant work force. In response to these challenges, I have attempted to develop a small, interdependent prototype for a business substation within a proposed transportation terminal in Nagoya Port as a way to consolidate the various necessary programs into a conscionable unit. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

"Houston is the first major city without streets"$\sp1$ It is a city of parking space, and mostly surface parking at that. Economic incentives and automobility dictate the ground rules by which the contemporary city is created. It is cheaper and easier to have a surface parking lot. It is more advantageous for a developer to build farther and farther out from the city. Cars are relatively standard items. Architectural Graphic Standards will tell you the types of spaces they need. Parking designers have a codified system, Levels of Service (LOS), to dictate design. The automobile is perhaps the most convenient form of personal transit ever invented. Automobiles are becoming more accessible to more people. These same cars remain parked for 18-20 hours a day on average. Our city is created by these rules. In order to change the city--the ground rules must be adjusted. ftn$\sp1$Ingersoll Richard, "The death of the Street; The Automobile and Houston," Chapter 14 of Roadside America: The Automobile in Design and Culture, ed. Jan Jennings copyright 1990 Iowa State University Press Ames, Iowa.