'66°N' is the design for a large-scale ecotourism hotel that takes advantage of dynamic and shifting environmental conditions of Greenland to visually and physically register the changes in the fragile arctic environment. Located on the Western coast of Greenland near one of the largest potential sources of direct sea-level rise, the Ilulissat Ice-Fjord, the design explores the intersection of two global trends: the effects of global climate change and the increase in popularity of ecotourism in the arctic. The techniques of building in an extreme and remote environment to provide infrastructure for ecotourist activities result in a permanent structure that is subjected to the continuously shifting site conditions of water and landscape. The relationship between rigid and responsive forms is used as an architectural register to these conditions that change the patterns and use of the hotel over time.

A lack of non-commodified public space in Galveston was revealed through a series of analysis. The current state of a town that is undergoing a transformation from an agro-industrial economy to a tourist based economy is fertile ground for urban hypotheses. Responding to this need, a site was identified: a fringe area of downtown Galveston, left vacant because of the demise of the agro-industrial economy. Seeing potential for this site to perform as a public landscape for Galveston I use a process of abstraction to develop an architectural transformation strategy. The abstract nature of the proposed design is rooted in a very real comparison to the existing condition of the city tissue.

The effects of localization and urbanization economies, and firm specific factors on local industrial growth were tested for the electronic components industry (SIC 367) in Texas for the 6-year period, 1988 to 1994. The data source is the Texas Manufacturer's Register. Growth is observed on the plant level, the economic environment is the city a plant is located in. For plants that remain in the sample, firm specific variables are most important; younger smaller plants grow faster. Localization and urbanization economies are found to be out important. Localization effects vary in sign for effects of the four and three digit industry. Evidence that lower average firm size enhances local competition and growth could not be found. Urbanization effects are positive but a distinction between density and population effects was not possible.

In a privatized city, open land is wasted land. Houston suffers from a lack of public open space. What it does have is a glut of wasted space. I propose to restore Houston's blighted, abandoned, and underutilized sites to productive, public use as cultural parks. Bayous, railroads, pipelines, and electric lines string/stitch everything together. Brownfields and other abandoned industrial sites, along with parks, are points/mats along these lines. This is the network; the parks stitch and bulge, like a snake that swallowed an egg.

In architecture, a theoretical concept can be either applied to a project or derived from it. In my case, I choose to use the video-construction as the concept, which will be applied to an architectural proposition. Such a distinction cannot be made so clearly when, for example, an architectural intuition is supported by a certain aspect of film and painting theory, and in the process of the development of a project is transformed into a general concept for architecture. Without in anyway trying to fuse the intuitive process of the video-construction with the certainties of scientific thought the documentation attempts to point out the essential direction of an unfinished experimentation. This is an experimentation into the methodology of urban design involving the temporal aspect of the urban environment under the condition of the radical spatial and social changes. In the process of the semester long research, a working method is made gradually clear by constructing together the space, event, and movement, thus explore the strong links between memory and the city, its buildings and its people.

The metropolis is governed by a certain internal logic, an ' operating system' that we are often blind; initiated at the command line and materialized through mass mobility. The code for this operating system is realized through both very specific and more esoteric social rules and practices, conventions (local code restrictions, signs and semantics) which encode our motive environment, directing our movement, allowing or more often determining our personal inertia. This operating system has more to do with timing and the interactivity of planned coincidences than with built form. While speculative, this thesis preemptively explores a potential amendment to the jurisdictional constraints between architects and developers, planners and policymakers; seeking a collaborative and comprehensive approach to reconditioning the metropolis by up-cycling our highways for alternate occupation, multiplicity and intermodality. This thesis is both a speculation into one area of the metropolitan 'operating system'---it functions as a precursor to a larger manifesto, an initial attempt to decipher, decode and recode the metropolis. Mobilization of the multi-tasking machine.

One of the most visionary landscape projects ever realized, the Natchez Trace Parkway, a 449-mile linear unit of the National Park Service, roughly follows and memorializes the old Natchez Trace, an historic Indian trail and then colonial settlement and trading route running from Natchez, MS to Nashville, TN. Intimately coupled with the varying contours of the land, the parkway offers a driving experience phenomenologically subtle and complex in addition to its clear historic significance. Despite its importance, this unique piece of terrestrial infrastructure is under constant pressure to normalize it which would, of course, ruin it. In response, the project becomes a series of nine rest areas/'stopping-points' each composed of two, small prototype buildings (repeated nine times in nine different configurations). As quantifiable anchors, these stops combine as an attempt to hold a large and slippery landscape, to make it even more uncommon and easily appreciated and thus to aid in its resistance to those who would undermine it.

With the onset of nomadic threats and non-state terror networks in the twenty-first century, ideas of centrality and monumentality in American metropolitan architecture must be re-examined. The attacks of September 11th identified the destruction of architecture, specifically 'signature architecture,' as the primary ambition of these networked threats. So it is necessary then for a re-evaluation of the protective measures applied to architecture, edifice, and culturally symbolic built forms. Network theory argues the only way to successfully fight a networked organization is with another networked organization. Therefore, this thesis proposes the networking of civic institutions in modern metropolitan Houston. The freeway system provides the organizational distribution for these portals, and the monumental scale of the freeway interchange offers a surrogate edifice on which the institutions may be grafted. In this manner new mythologies of safety and security are embedded within the metropolitan landscape. While not necessarily providing complete and real security, perhaps an impossibility, these agencies of reassurance (protective measures) fortify and diversify the municipal field, reinforcing civic identity and purpose.

Open spaces, like urban parks in cities are impaired between the bureaucracy of the city government and the imperatives of commercialization. They are stagnant, unable to challenge the imagination. They melt into the background of a trancelike condition we live in. Design can jolt people out of this trance to act upon their environment, when liberated from providing prescriptive solutions to conflicts between pairs no longer categorizable as opposites: city + park, culture + nature, work + leisure, private + public. Gezi Park Kampanyasi is a design operation aiming to activate free spaces (or free active spaces) through a series of interventions. The interventions respond to existing formal temporal urban patterns interrupting and modifying their flows. These transient interruptions set off a chain reaction in the public realm out of which emerges an unpredictable urban space that is continuously changing.

The slow disaster of shoreline erosion has been met with various human attempts to control the relationship between Galveston Island and the Gulf of Mexico. In territorializing the island as private property, the main economic draw (the beach) is being sacrificed as the sandbar is increasingly expected to behave like a stable landmass. Private Property Rights and Public Beach Access clash as the difference between the land and the sea refuses to manifest itself as a line drawn through space. There is latent potential within the land itself to work with a beach access infrastructure that operates as a mesh. Such a system can transgress problematic territorial boundaries and mark out multiple processes of reterritorialization as they are occurring on the site. In this way, the forces at work in shaping the island can become culturally relevant in a constructive way, altering the human relationship with the land.