The spatial detritus lying at the dissolving urban edges of the American West are the ultimate free spaces. These stretches of temporarily forgotten lands are where people go to do things disallowed in civil space---let their dogs off their leashes, put their SUVs in four wheel drive, and test their rifle aim. These spaces have always been there, but as of late there has been a move to make them official---to bound and name them---to make them Open Space. The transformation of free space into Open Space involves little physical change. It is rather an operational reprogramming that hardens these loose spaces into defined entities and directs their "wildness" against encroaching development. The result is a spatial antibody applied in strategic doses to fortify an urbanity sick with space. This process of spatial immunization challenges typical modes of form making---urban, architectural, and otherwise.

This thesis is an investigation of U scRBAN M scERIDAN; the structure formed through relations rather than material and stimulation of it by inserting a park into everyday life. H scOUSTON D scOWNTOWN T scUNNEL S scYSTEM has been selected as a site because of its accessibility, controlled climate and slow speed. Although It is not a typical park, its characteristic rhizomatic labyrinth presents the system as a museum-like P scARK which is interwoven among the system of tunnels. The tree may be the same as one found in a typical park, however, this context changes the tree into an object in a cultural exhibition, working as a A scCUPUNCTURE needle to stimulate the relationship between people and the things in their everyday life. Although Urban Meridian has been forgotten, it continues to form the real life of the city. Understanding the city though this invisible structure can give us a clue to acupuncture and healing; because existence is always beyond the object itself.

This thesis searches for a new understanding of domestic space by dividing the house into two concepts---Liquid and Solid. As the Solid House has evolved reluctantly over the past century, the Liquid House has experienced revolution after revolution. Defined by market economies, construction standards, pop culture, etc., the Liquid House is an amorphous, constantly shifting figure that overshadows its Solid counterpart. The rise in prominence of the Liquid House is marked by astonishing statistics: The average single-family house has doubled in size in fifty years as lots have grown 25% smaller and households have decreased 15%. As per capita expenditures have tripled and credit card debt has more than doubled, average closet space has increased seven-fold. This thesis explores the ways in which the Liquid House, perpetuated by these statistics, has come to dominate, giving rise to contradictions and paradoxes that simultaneously define and confuse the very essence of domestic life.

The commute by automobile, as it happens in Houston Texas, is a spatial envelope. This envelope widens and narrows based on a set of variables: position, traffic, speed, and time of day, and it changes from day to day. The project is a study of and an intervention into this spatial envelope of the commute. The intervention takes the form of a gas station located on a feeder road adjacent to a freeway. Video is both a means of study of the commute, and a tool for the design of the station.

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is being used in conjunction with wireless communications and spatially referenced databases (GIS) to form a new telecommunications regime that is radically changing the way we move about and perceive the urban landscape. The increased speed and efficiency of this new regime favors decentralized, real-time decision making at the level of individual actor over centralized, top down planning. If centralized planning is no longer relevant in the decentralized city, how can urban planners, designers and architects engage the new urban frontier? By designing how information generated by the new regime is presented to users, those of us in the design professions can begin to tackle the problem in a decentralized manner, while maintaining our relevance in a world operating outside the bounds of centralized thinking.

The view of surface parking lots as "simple" surfaces has led to a stagnation of articulation and a collective acceptance of banality in parking lot design. The aggregation of these "simple" surfaces is beginning to have a negative effect upon the micro-ecology and infrastructural layout of the city and those systems with the potential to mitigate this effect are being supplanted by the singular nature of the surface. This thesis proposes a design schematic for the surface parking lot population that will promote a more symbiotic integration between the surface parking lot and other environmental systems within the city. Through a better understanding of the networked relations of these systems, we may be able to recode surface parking lots within the city as strategic design interventions, designed in response to and with the ability to react dynamically to specific changes in local and global environmental conditions.* *This dissertation is a compound document (contains both a paper copy and a CD as part of the dissertation).

Opportunities lay in areas not typically thought of in terms of design. Earth moving is not typically considered further than the initial site excavation. In Houston, earthwork is constant, often changing land incrimentally. The Port of Houston, ranking first in the United States in foreign waterborne commerce, and sixth in the world, requires the maintenance of its ship channel through regular dredging of sediments. Dredging is a reality of the Port of Houston and Disposal containment is its lifeline. Recently, three of the eight upland dredging disposal sites reached capacity and are now closed. Although the Port of Houston authority has proposed to raise the height of existing sites to increase capacity, this is only a short-term solution. Once a site reaches capacity, the land sits fallow indefinitely. The dredge material stays in the site perminently and would be difficult to develop or build on. They are also not publicly accessible, although it is quite apparent that they are used recreationally buy local residents. Treated as an engineering project, the two realities of waste site and recreation never meet. Redirection and design of existing earth moving and drainage techniques however, may allow for an operational switch from a permanent dredge storage system to a dry-bed removal system. Increasing disposal area capacity by moving material between sites would allow provisional and perhaps seasonal, public access to meet community demands such as a public park. The surrounding communities may benefit from living with dredge disposal area. A land use education area may serve as a showcase for a moving park that allows for the witnessing of fast geologic change as well as unlikely working relationships between the natural and the constructed.

In the aftermath of 1998's Hurricane Mitch, the republic of Honduras faces imposing obstacles in its reconstruction. The capital city of Tegucigalpa visibly bears the stress marks caused by collapse and flooding. The axial Choluteca River grown beyond the means to contain it, swept several city blocks, even whole neighborhoods, into its waters, forever changing the urban landscape. In response to this exacerbated ecological condition, a new hybrid urban intervention aims to suture the physical and psychological damage suffered by the twin cities of Tegucigalpa and Comayaguela through a new urban park/waste water treatment facility.

In Houston, Texas, a vibrant museum culture dedicated to the preservation of precious artworks and antiquities is oddly juxtaposed against a turbulant economy and an ethos propelled by short-term vision, rapid and unregulated change, and the uncertainty of enduring architectural landmarks. The museum of missing places is a new museum and cultural archive in Houston, Texas, attempting to exist as part of this unstable environment rather than in spite of it, and aspiring to be what this city's other renowned museums are not: an institution that can activate the public life of the city but also study it, and in turn propose a new set of cutatorial practices that might allow a museum to better integrate itself with its surrounding environment. Sharing the mission of existing museums in gathering, ordering, and exhibiting cultural information that is of broad public interest, the museum for missing places distinguishes itself by turning outward to the city; by initiating dialogues with a public-at-large in places where they've never existed before; and by employing a variety of experimental curatorial tactics to allow the boundaries between museum and its audience to disappear.

The rapid urbanization of Asia in recent years has radically transformed cities through the incessant barrage of the man-made into the natural. These immense changes are particularly evident in the nation of Singapore where for decades, modernization, urban renewal and industrialization have been the primary objectives of the governing authority. Lying in its wake however, are a series environmental consequences, the results of which are far-reaching and have only recently been addressed. The Singapore River has through the years suffered such a fate. Once teeming with aquatic life, the river now lays still, healing silently. And while the authorities have since then embarked on major cleaning programs, pollution till today, remains a problem and marine life an uncertainty. The thesis proposes the introduction of a suite of bridges, a sequence of filtering devices which through serving the purpose of connecting the banks of the river, incorporate secondary functions--cultural, educational or recreational, following the course of the river, addressing the varying conditions along the edges in the attempt to create a new engagement between water and the edge, nature and the city.