A model is a communication tool, making contact with the deeper self as well as with others. lt is a bridge between conception and perception, or intellect and intuition. It helps us to develop thoughts and evolve ideas. People are convening in New York City. It is called a melting pot. Everyone mingles there without losing his own characteristics. lt is a big house which contains gardens, paths, rooms and millions of people. On East 14th street, there is an open block which could be a small city containing a park, houses, offices and stores. This thesis demonstrates the development of a complex, or if you will, a small city, on the block, with the help of models. / Master of Architecture

As scientific understanding of the origin and order of coastal barrier islands continues to grow, designers are being forced to reevaluate their design strategies for the shore and near-shore areas. This project involves the design of an Environmental Research Laboratory on Back Bay, in the Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge. The problems and possibilities associated with building on the barrier islands have been analyzed. and design solutions applicable to this and other sites have been presented. In the final design, the structure has been located in the bay, shoreward of the barrier islands and elevated to permit sunlight and rainfall to pass as uninterrupted as possible to the areas below. The object of such design is to have a minimum effect on the landscape (or waterscape) below the building, while creating new green space above. All these characteristics are intended as positive results, able to transfer to other water or land sites. / Master of Architecture

Master of Architecture

This project examines the relationship between urban and rural conditions that exist in Alexandria, Virginia. The architect has drawn heavily from an editorial for <u>OPPOSITIONS</u> magazine entitled “The Third Typology”, by Anthony Vidler. “The Third Typology” is not utilized as a paradigm for architectural design, but rather as a validation of the ideologies employed. / Master of Architecture

Master of Architecture

As Bergson says, we do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it, we perceive only what we are interested in perceiving or rather what it is in or interest to perceive, by virtue of our economic interests, ideological beliefs, and psychological demands. We therefore normally perceive only cliches. But if our sensory-motor schemata jam or break, then a different type of image can appear, because it no longer has to be "justified." - Gilles Deleuze, "Cinema and Time," in The Deleuze Reader, ed., C. Bouncas (New York: Columbia University, 1993), p. 182. / Master of Architecture

A questioning of methods: If we are to accept existing American culture as an entity, should design not embody the spirit inherent in that culture? In Europe, architecture has been afforded the luxury of time. There, the concept of dwelling has encompassed the questions of man’s position as a rational being separated both from his surrounding environment and his divinity. A sense of alienation from such a universe forced him to search beyond his immediate environment. The role of architecture thus became a mediator, a departure point where man could dwell between heaven and earth. Sanctity, purity, proportion, centrality, and hierarchy all became building blocks for an architecture striving for a transcendental perfection. In the United States, however, architecture has been adjusted to accept its surrounding environment as a formal model. Space is defined either by the existing condition of the environment or by the will of man existing within his surroundings. Man, no longer alien or subservient, now does not need a mediator but instead a throne on which to share in the government within his surrounding environment. As a result, the American conception of space (i.e. the ‘tradition of the way we view our landscape’) has evolved into something different from that of our European counterparts. In a sense, America is the embodiment of the rational enlightenment in a new society. Its history lies not in the hearts and minds of its citizens, but on the other side of the ocean. Because of this unique occurrence where history loses its proximity, America has been able to develop into what Jean Beaudrillard describes as truly modern: a “utopia achieved”. It is a space where random meets rational and the limitless becomes a limit, a space which rejects European conceptions of centrality and hierarchy. If the foundations of Europe lie within the philosophy of Aristotle, than those of North America lie within the theories of Newton. Whereas Aristotle revealed the parameters of a perfect order, along with its ensuing hierarchy and centrality. In Dice Thrown, Benjamin Gianni investigates both early American farmsteads as well as the development of its cities (the rural and the urban) and compares them to European types. In the rural comparison, the European farm seems to be organized around a courtyard, creating an order of symmetry and proportion. The American farm structures, however, are arranged loosely in a cluster, their relationship being functional necessities and a common way of building (the doghouse is designed to look like the shed, which is designed to look like the main house). Moreover, Gianni draws similar contraindications in the urban comparison. In Europe, the city is autonomous, walled off from the outside and arranged in a hierarchy with the most important structures at the highest points in the center. Conversely, in American cities the countryside is brought into the city at its center in the form of parks to remind the people of their link with their natural origins. For traditional Europe then, purity and perfection lie in the symbolic harmony of formal relationships, where a center defines the elements around it and provides a place for man between nature and the heavens. For America, however, purity and perfection lie in the vast expanse of the natural surroundings. No longer a symbolic mediator between heaven and earth, architectural forms confront the world around it as it is. Without the guidance of formal relationships in culture, we have developed a conception of arrangement (or anAmerican type) which combines the classical adaptation of a rational imposition by a grid system with the limitless aspect of horizontal space. So important in the United States is the sanctity of individual freedoms. This suggests that the individual has the capacity through rational thought to intervene in nature and dictate his or her destiny. In early America, cities were built modeling the roman grid system. The urban plan was derived rationally as an egalitarian way of dividing space. Also inherent in theAmerican mind set, however, was the perception of boundless opportunity and individual freedom which promoted a dimensionless unregulated horizontal expansion of the built environment. The grid emerged as a way of organizing town centers. No sacred truths of the heavens and the earth were revealed, no ritual was carried out in a departure point for the transcendental; instead, a rational organization occurred as a means of confronting an environment as it existed in its own state, just as earlier settlements had developed a seemingly random order based on the boundless opportunities of providing landscape as a means of confronting nature in its own state. An interesting paradox emerged between two orders. One looked as if buildings and places were dropped from the sky, left to be dwelled within depending on how they tumbled and lied to rest on the landscape; a celestial game of jax played on an uneven surface. The other depended on a complete and unyielding imposition on the landscape where every thing, place or building was measured or monitored. As a result cities would emerge, each with their own rational imposition, with no relationship to each other. Today, a certain randomness permeates their rational existence. The result has been deformative. That is the realization of something completely different from original intention. It is a combination of an upward extrusion with the introduction of a diffusive horizontally which re-orders its existence. It is, in a sense, a changing of definition. Even New York, with its density and strictly imposed grid, has a kind of deformative diss-order which defines its place as a totally American (though unique in and of itself) phenomenon. Rem Koolhaas identifies the madness of piling up chaos on chaos in a rigid system which creates its “delirious effect” Even language, signs, and meaning have become deformative, setting in motion a wave of paradoxical relationships.Intention dissolves over time, history becomes representative or imitative, the immutable becomes alterable, and new definitions are formed to re-explain existence. The universal, the transcendental, they are the spiraling center which decomposes and recomposes, leaving sometimes only a shell from which to decipher meaning and existence. Umberto Eco, in his essay "Travels in Hyper-reality”, examines the relationship in American culture between the sign, the thing, and that which links them together, history. The sign is not a means for understanding the thing it symbolizes but rather is an object which "aims to be the thing, to abolish the distinction of the reference. This is the mechanism of replacement." In doing so, the sign becomes more real (or hyper-real) than the thing because it is identified by and more tangible to the existence of our culture. This explains our fascination with historical reenactments, dramatizations, wax museums, escalators, and Dysney main streets. All are hyper-realities which have taken over and become "more real” than the things they represent. They are “better” because they excite the senses and give material evidence of our place in history. In doing so the hyper-real in American culture has successfully performed an about face in the way we define things, creating the perfect irony: “the completely real becomes the completely fake”. If modernism lies within the tradition of the way we view ourselves and our landscape, if we live in Newton’s limitless universe of absolute space independent of perfect geometry, if we live devoid of origin with no primitive accumulation of time, if architectural space does not always necessitate the symbolic harmony of formal relationships but rather seeks to confront its natural surroundings, if the arrangement of space is deformative, lying somewhere in between rational intervention and the application of the limitless, and if irony is the result of our application of language and meaning, should these conditions not become tools for design in architecture? Does this not suggest that the modern conception of space has deformed itself into something completely different from that of our European counterparts? / Master of Architecture

This thesis looks at select aspects of culture in the architecture of a Gothic city, Prague, Czechoslovakia, a Renaissance villa, the Rotonda and a Baroque church, San Andrea del Quirinale. It also looks at the number of ways man is represented in the architecture of the Church and Piazza of San Pietro in Rome through scale, proportion and geometry. Thirdly, it shows the development of my own buildings and objects, inspired by my study of the past. / Master of Architecture

There has been considerable interest in constructing pen-based intelligent tutoring systems due to the natural interaction metaphor and low cognitive load afforded by pen-based interaction. We believe that pen-based intelligent tutoring systems can be further enhanced by integrating animation techniques. In this work, we explore methods for recognizing and animating sketched physics diagrams. Our methodologies enable an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) to understand the scenario and requirements posed by a given problem statement and to couple this knowledge with a computational model of the student's handwritten solution. These pieces of information are used to construct meaningful animations and feedback mechanisms that can highlight errors in student solutions. We have constructed a prototype ITS that can recognize mathematics and diagrams in a handwritten solution and infer implicit relationships among diagram elements, mathematics and annotations such as arrows and dotted lines. We use natural language processing to identify the domain of a given problem, and use this information to select one or more of four domain-specific physics simulators to animate the user's sketched diagram. We enable students to use their answers to guide animation behavior and also describe a novel algorithm for checking recognized student solutions. We provide examples of scenarios that can be modeled using our prototype system and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of our current prototype. Additionally, we present the findings of a user study that aimed to identify animation requirements for physics tutoring systems. We describe a taxonomy for categorizing different types of animations for physics problems and highlight how the taxonomy can be used to define requirements for 50 physics problems chosen from a university textbook. We also present a discussion of 56 handwritten solutions acquired from physics students and describe how suitable animations could be constructed for each of them.

Este trabalho apresenta um estudo sobre as representações de arquitetura, a partir da leitura e interpretação de um objeto histórico, o risco debuxado na parede do consistório da Capela do Carmo de Ouro Preto em 1789, e promove uma abordagem ainda não realizada, desde a sua descoberta em 1942, durante reforma realizada na capela pelo então SPHAN (Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional). O risco e os documentos da Ordem do Carmo revelam aspectos importantes para a compreensão da fábrica da arquitetura religiosa no período colonial brasileiro, quando o Brasil era parte do vasto reino de Portugal. Ao longo do texto confirma-se a existência de uma trama social e produtiva hierarquizada, em que o risco aparece como parte da fábrica da arquitetura religiosa, um recurso de reflexão coletiva no campo hoje reconhecido como das práticas projetuais. Mais especificamente, um procedimento de reforma do risco original feito para a obra de talha dos seis altares do corpo da capela, uma revisão de aspectos formais que só foram percebidos com os altares já asentados, ou instalados. Ao desenhar, ou debuxar, eram articulados conhecimentos técnicos e artísticos. As pessoas envolvidas em tal processo, mestres oficiais ou não, conheciam o peso da matéria e o sentido das ideias representadas a partir de recursos gráficos específicos, que comunicavam, antecipavam e constituíam elemento de coesão dessa estrutura social, consolidada na concepção e materialização de suas ideias, como pode ser visto na cidade de Ouro Preto. / This work presents a study on the architectural representations, from the reading and interpretation of a historical object, the risk drawn on the wall of the consistory of the Carmo Chapel of Ouro Preto in 1789, and promotes an approach not yet accomplished, since its Discovered in 1942, during a reform carried out in the chapel by the SPHAN (National Historical and Artistic Heritage Service). The risk and documents of the Order of Carmel reveal important aspects for the understanding of the religious architecture factory in the Brazilian colonial period, when Brazil was part of the vast kingdom of Portugal. Throughout the text, the existence of a hierarchical productive and social fabric is confirmed, in which the risk appears as part of the religious architecture factory, a resource of collective reflection in the field today recognized as of the project practices. More specifically, an original risk reform procedure done for the carving work of the six altars of the chapel body, a review of formal aspects that were only perceived with the altars already settled, or installed. When drawing, or debugging, technical and artistic knowledge was articulated. The people involved in this process, both official and non-formal masters, knew the weight of the material and the meaning of the ideas represented by specific graphic resources that communicated, anticipated and constituted an element of cohesion of this social structure, consolidated in the conception and materialization of its Ideas, as can be seen in the city of Ouro Preto.