There is a tendency in modern times for life to be divided into strictly separated categories-our music is divided into bins at the record store according to sometimes arbitrary genre distinctions, courses offered by one university department often cannot be counted towards a degree in another department, and students from middle school through college are outraged when they learn that "spelling counts" in a history paper. These distinctions, which are second nature to us even in childhood, were not as numerous or as strict in the medieval European understanding of life. Even when there were systems of division, such as the classification of scholarly subjects according to the Trivium and Quadrivium, the classifications were seen as interconnected and were meant to be studied together. I don't believe we can hope to truly understand any aspect of medieval culture if we examine these aspects in isolation according to our own categories. My hope is to come to a greater understanding of some part of medieval culture by examining in combination two aspects of this culture that are not normally combined in modern study-sacred architecture and sacred literature. I will explore correlations in the use of sacred geometry, number symbolism, light metaphysics, and optics in Gothic cathedral architecture and sacred literature of the same period. I will also explore the evolution of cathedral architecture from the Romanesque model to the Gothic model in terms of correlations with an evolving approach to popular theology as reflected in the literature of the period. More specifically, I will look at the use of sacred geometry and number symbolism as a central element of sacred architecture regardless of style and period and the increasing importance of light metaphysics and optics in Gothic architecture as a reflection of a changing approach to popular theology culminating in such thirteenth and fourteenth century writings as those of Robert Grosseteste, Chaucer, and Dante, particularly his Divine Comedy, which present to a popular audience a complex theology which would previously have been reserved for a clerical audience.

How can the unique legacy of the most ancient of civilizations be represented within a single building? How can one building spans the area between heaven and earth, the space described in the cosmology of our pharonic ancestors? Certainly, to design such a building is a unique challenge, and an unprecedented opportunity, on this most privileged of sites in the history of mankind, that a museum is to be constructed capable of linking the immemorial past with the distant future spanning both the horizons of the ancients and those as yet unseen. Through the investigation of phenomenology, geometry, simplicity, purity and light, listening to the voice of silence, emerging to the light from the darkness, and by understanding the strength of simplicity after passing through complexity, This thesis offers an endless stream of ideas that challenge the mind. The vision for the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) is to establish a place where people from different nations and cultures will be able to immerse themselves in the rich culture heritage from more than 5.000 years of Egyptian civilization. With the support of new technology, more effective and efficient dissemination of information can be achieved, enabling the New Museum to be a source of enjoyable, entertaining, educational and cultural experiences for all visitors. This project aims at structuring a complex of exhibits and facilities, which will accommodate all Pharaonic periods, it will be the largest museum in the world, and will provide access to information and future knowledge. It results from the careful articulation of the problem and a subsequent ordering of constraints within the context of the competition proposal. / Master of Architecture

This thesis deals with complex processes, relationships and phenomena which go beyond the assumed and accepted materialistic perception of the world in general and the process of architectural design specifically. It clarifies and actually redefine the sustainability from a point of higher universal principles forming our environment. At the beginning this thesis presents an extensive knowledge base of existing holistic design systems including Feng-shui, sacred geometry, geomancy or numerology. The purpose is to build and establish a solid foundation for understanding and further research as well as objectively interpreting lesser known topics as a whole. On the basis of intersecting information through the above mentioned topics we specify the hypothesis which proposes the pre-existence of one unifying design matrix of harmonic structures in architecture. The structure of its verification takes us from an analysis of the science of human perception to systems of self-similar contextual references of animated and inanimated forms. These systems of emergent form and flow are basically known as fractals, and could be expressed in both mathematical and geometrical languages. The thesis research then consists of analysing chosen examples of urban and architectural scale in sense of fractality, symbolism and geometrical matrices. We include and integrate the research of associated and relevant phenomena in pedagogical practice, and a case study of the application of fractals in development of a chosen town. From the results of this thesis we abstract five non-dogmatic guidelines or tenets for architectural design; which are supported by experimental verification on some of the author´s buildings. These tenets stand as pillars of implosive architecture. This kind of architecture in context of transcendental overlaps means a possibility of how to bring our anthropogenic environment closer to the natural and harmonic code of the Universe.