Traditional urban moderate income multifamily housing in the City of New York has failed to provide its inhabitants with an acceptable living environment. That environment being defined as an adequate condition of middle ground, or shared space, that space between the house and the street, both internal and external to the community at large, as well as space supportive of the individual in today's society. The objective of this thesis is threefold. The first, to evaluate the historical and existing precedents of middle ground in moderate income multi-family housing located within the City of New York, the second, to analyze the successes and failures of these housing typologies, and the third, to focus on the challenge of finding appropriate design principles for its making. In short, this thesis is on the history, design and making of an urban middle ground in moderate income multi-family housing.

To move through space is to change. Individuals and communities have always moved for change; within and over their own cultural borders. Yet, it is only by not moving, by breaking an ongoing migration, that certain critical advantage may come to a unified people. Such development, economic and cultural, springs from the constructive engagement between a people and their chosen site. Architecture, as an assembly of transitory constructions and spaces, is a primary instrument through which such interaction may occur.

This thesis explores social representations in architecture that have been objectified by various discourses on space and human activity. Using the sport-utility vehicle (SUV) as a multifaceted object in which these representations are seen, the possibility that a single material environment can embody conflicting social roles is proposed. A trope---the melee---is introduced as a model for the reception of material form and space that is grounded in bodily experience tempered by memory and projection. Three 'tries' engage the SUV in the melee, placing its apparent fixed meanings in crisis. Formal analysis in each 'try' reveals the vehicle's various typological allusions to Land Rovers, station wagons and crew cab pickup trucks. The imagined ancestries of the SUV---rooted in conquest, domesticity, and labor---conflict with one another and with its real uses, rendering architectural and urban space unfamiliar. In this melee , the embodied mind poses itself against the fixed social representations of spatial discourse.

The ground in Houston is characterized by its low permeability rate. This condition, combined with the standard manner of building construction, is pushing the drainage system to the limits, increasing the possibility of having, more often, urban flooding. The project proposes a complementary tower system that helps to control urban floods. These towers will act as "hybrid sponges", an extended mechanism of the bayou that is going to attract water with artificial elements complementing natural systems. On the other hand they are going to create new events within a community that will be the platform for new alternatives of development; like new houses that will allow families to exchange their houses that are into the flood plain, creating a new social-urban phenomenon that will start as a extended mechanism of the bayou, but immediate after it is going to be extend to the community for the provision of totally desirable alternatives.

Lying in the wake of accelerated technological advancement is a landscape of economic and environmental consequence. As older industrial facilities become obsolete, newer technologies look towards virgin land for growth. In turn, the industrial city, once the recipient of generous corporate taxation and stable work force, is saddled with social unrest, economic stagnation, and vast tracts of infrastructure-laden land. Such is the case with the vacated Bethlehem Steel plant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. At the root of this thesis is a conviction that regeneration of this site needs to be approached as a multidimensional phenomenon which touches upon the organic, the economic, and the chemical. As such, a kind of petri dish can emerge where physical entropy and the erosion of memory coexist with economic and ecologic growth. This thesis attempts to define a new beginning by bridging the cleft between growth and decay. The history of this site, its entropic future, and the beginnings of a new history are conflated into a single continuum.

This thesis explores the construction and [re]construction of society on global, national, local, and individual levels. Postapartheid South Africa is in the midst of a transformative nationalist culture project. The extremity of the South African situation facilitates analysis and representation of the problem of [re]construction. [Re]-construction is problematic because it reveals the underlying contradictions of the contemporary cultural condition. Space---both the space of the text and the space of human interaction---are crucial factors in the transformation of society. The analysis of South African [re]construction and [re]spatialization necessitates a new method, and a new thought process---one that re-conceptualizes and integrates discontinuous ideas and experiences. The result is a subversive and re-constitutive text that should be read by all those involved in the study and creation of the human environment.

The ground in Houston is a shifting landscape of heavy clay soils, flat topography, and intense rainfall. When this environment is overlaid with fixed, man-made infrastructures, the two systems interact to exacerbate natural phenomena such as subsidence, faulting, and urban flooding. In response to an investigation into the relationship between Houston's infrastructure, its ground, and its climate, this thesis proposes the development of mid-scale flood control basins. Retention basins in the Houston area exist at the two scalar extremes: very large, regional facilities, and small, scattered, individual ponds. Generally, these facilities are not only inaccessible when flooding occurs, but also divorced from their surroundings; they are not designed to be used even when dry. In contrast, the proposed basins are enmeshed with a range of programs and infrastructures, designed to simultaneously accommodate urban life and water, and work to create a fluctuating character and intensity of program and activity.

In order to address problems caused by widespread squatting, the government of Trinidad and Tobago has recently introduced legislation which grants a leasehold title to squatters on State lands, subject to certain conditions. The adoption of such regularization measures rests on the belief that granting squatters legal title to the land they occupy, and thus providing them with security of tenure, will create an incentive for squatters to invest in their dwellings and in their community, and will facilitate access to credit. / This thesis critically examines these assumptions, bringing to bear on this reflection the results of a survey conducted in two squatter settlements in Trinidad. In so doing. it explores the role of law in development and, further, it questions the capacity of law to guide and modify social behaviour.

The purpose of this thesis is: (1) to review the airport development and transportation policy of the United States (U.S.); (2) to provide an overview of the U.S. constitutional doctrines evolved under the Supremacy and Commerce Clauses, and their respective applications in the case law; (3) to review the regime of federal regulation of airport noise; (4) to examine the State Legislature's emphasis on "aeronautical progress" in the New Jersey State Aviation Act of 1938, as amended; (5) to examine the role of the State Aviation Act in zoning on and around airport land; and (6) to provide a detailed, thematic examination of relevant New Jersey and federal case law in this area.

This dissertation examines the response and design of reinforced concrete core-slab-frame structures subjected to monotonically increasing earthquake and gravity loads throughout the entire load range until failure, presenting findings from three separate studies by Manatakos and Mirza (1995) continuing the M. Eng. thesis research by Manatakos (1989). A typical building is selected consisting of a central core substructure composed of elevator, staircase and infilled slab cores, with coupling and lintel beams, and surrounding slabs joining to a frame substructure composed of slab-band girders, slabs and columns. / Stage 1 concentrates on the elastic response and Stage 3 examines the nonlinear response of the core-slab-frame structure considering the effects of cracking and crushing of concrete, strain-hardening of the reinforcement, and tension-stiffening. Analyses involve three-dimensional elastic and nonlinear finite element modeling techniques of the structure to investigate the contribution and influence of the various structural components. The structural response is examined for the deformations, the concentrated reinforcement strains and concrete stresses in the cores, the force and stress distributions in the structural members, and the failure mode. / Stage 2 focuses on the design and detailing of the core-slab-frame structure following seismic provisions of building code requirements for reinforced concrete structures where applicable as given in the CSA Standard CAN3-A23.3-MS4 (1984), the ACI Standard ACI 318M-83 (1983) and the New Zealand Standard NZS3101 (1982). Assumptions made in the conventional design procedures and any shortcomings encountered are examined. Suitable design procedures and reinforcement details are suggested where no provisions exist in the codes. / Findings demonstrate complex three-dimensional interaction among the cores, beams, slabs and frames in resisting the lateral and gravity loads, and show considerable strength, ductility and energy absorption capability of the structure. Critical areas for design include the joints and junctions near the vicinity of core wall-slab-beams ends and corners. Plastic hinging extends over the lower 2.5% to 33% height of the structure with the majority of inelastic action and damage concentrated in the bottom 10% to 15% height, predicting an ultimate load of 3.4 to 5.9 times the design earthquake load with top drifts of the structure between 750 mm to 1375 mm.