Houston is a non-traditional city. It is a unique combination of the artificial and the natural, and to a large degree, very temporary. Buildings in this city last as long as the economy can support them, as evidenced by the great scraping-away of many historic structures downtown during the 60s and 70s. Skyscrapers rest on artificial concrete bedrock floating in the sandy Houston soil. The urban fabric is neither dense nor wide open. Layers and networks--some visible, some invisible--structure the city. Within this temporary environment exist permanent enclaves, in the form of built developments like River Oaks and West University Place, and rituals like International Festival and Rodeo. Another such enclave has been proposed, involving the transformation of the temporarily-occupied Astrodomain into a new, permanent community. This unique, new community sustains itself: short-lived celebrations bring life to it, and residences and work-places allow the activity to remain.

This architectural design thesis contends that meaning is found not in historical typologies and static conceptions of architectural form but in the specifics of the proposed architecture's conditions--in its precise regional cultural territory and from the particular landscape of which it is a part (Houston). Such an approach is typically labeled Critical Regionalist as defined by architectural theorist Kenneth Frampton. This thesis proposes to extend Frampton's definition of Critical Regionalism by offering an architecture which is informed by the natural systems and processes, the geomorphology, and the phenomenology of the regional landscape. The project focuses on the bayou system, the Houston landscape's most significant and salient natural feature. The ideas derived from the bayous, along with the cultural, historical and formal content of the site are transformed into the architectural proposal from its overall massing; to its spatial configuration; and to the tactility of its smallest detail.

Blandness and paranoia in the architecture of the domestic realm has, to a great degree, been influenced by the current mode of information--the act of viewing this information, its pacing, and its rhythm. Reality is perceived in the information realm, while the experiential, physical "world of things" is unreal. We live in a commodified environment of projections from passively received information. The project is situated in the suburban condition of Daly City, California, and it is this model of society which is economic and information based that demands consideration. The articulation of the spaces in the Daly City dwelling project attempts to project an image of suburban patterns which have been reconfigured by forces of topography, perception and the physical body, information, and the automobile. What was once responsive to a narrow range of forces has become intertwined and "flowing" with a kind of momentum in the architectural elements which make the dwelling experience.

The thesis investigates a means of establishing a more meaningful connection between the individual and the city through providing opportunities to experience urban space in an atypical manner. The atypical is created by an architecture which elaborates edge conditions and displaces the individual's conventional circulation within those edge conditions. Alternate methods of circulation are studied through an elaboration of their salient features, the appearance of those features in historical examples and in examples found in Seattle, Washington. A project for a ferry terminal in Seattle, Washington is presented as an illustration of these concepts.

An improbable relationship exists between monumentality, which is called Apollonian--universal and timeless--and regionalism, which is Dionysian--local and time-specific. A city requires an architecture that is both, an architecture that monumentalizes what is unique about itself and its people. Wichita, Kansas, is a city that sits in the middle of the vast grid of the American Midwest. It also suffers from a sort of identity crisis typical of that region. What images for Wichita should be promoted, and how? An urban design scheme which establishes the Arkansas River as a monument for the city and which reinforces the genius loci of the area is proposed, along with a specific project for a hotel to provide a social forum in the center of the city and show how future building might relate to the scheme.

This thesis is intended to demonstrate a strategy for the creation of mixed income housing in the City of New York as an alternative not only to the upper income cooperative and condominium schemes of the 1980's which do not respond to current housing demands but also to the perennially unpopular, albeit necessary low income housing projects. In the interest of providing a low-impact solution which effectively mediates between speculative concerns and sensitivity to the identity and character of existing neighborhoods, inspiration was derived from unconventional sources. The low profile occupation tactics employed by squatters, artists and the homeless have been applied to the creation of a series of experimental shelter and circulation prototypes which ultimately inform the design of a mixed income housing project to be sited on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

This investigation begins and ends with conditions present in the city of Houston, which in many ways typify processes at work in other urban centers around the country and around the world. One senses, in the vast empty ring which surrounds downtown Houston, the infinity of the great plains, in the midst of a highly urbanized context. The complete lack of hierarchy or figure inherent in this landscape seems to be a fascinating architectural problem. How do we build in such an area, and how do we come to grips with this vast emptiness which surrounds it? The conditions of emptiness and dematerialization inherent in the territory led to an investigation of the aesthetics of silence. Silence can be defined in three ways: first of all as a literal refusal to tell us anything. Secondly, as a condition of presence or immanence, and finally, as a condition of exhaustion, at the end of the line. All three conditions appeared to be present in the territory bordering downtown Houston to the East. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)

Modernism has radically endangered the nature of mankind's relation to the planet upon which we depend for survival, and humanity now has the ability to destroy our environment. Modern culture is unsustainable, and to avoid disaster new patterns of existence must evolve. Architecture must be a part of this change. Many forms of architecture for a sustainable society have been posited. Some for a mass society of central control, others for a society returned to the agricultural village, and some for a society of self sufficient individuals. These fail because they are utopian. Sustainable architecture for America must address the reality of the suburbs. In order to reduce waste of land and energy, a denser fabric is needed. But this fabric must offer the amenities of the suburbs, therefore I propose a melding of the traditional row house and the suburban house types.

The individual's relationship to the public takes on architectural significance when one is designing for the city. Urban and architectural designs tend to generalize crowd movements and needs, squandering any sense of individuality. The designer must incorporate aspects of personal choice in order to create successful urban landscapes for the individual. Houston's city streets are designed in absence of the pedestrian; the street life suffers for it. The individual is granted a subterranean street, the tunnel system. Although it is strictly for pedestrians, this system of buried hallways lacks many pedestrian needs. A comprehensible measure of distance and a sense of orientation are missing from its environment. It is possible to create of this underground world something suited toward the individual and the more intimate crowd while maintaining contact with the crowd of speeding steel in the streets above.

Unrecognized by most Houstonians, the city is riddled with empty spaces. Abandoned sites are overlooked by denizens of a city that constantly erases its own past, reinventing itself completely anew. Ties to the past are few. These spaces of decay are re-occupied by traces of objects that used to exist there. These fragmented occupations are monitoring stations that provide a link between the individual and the unobserved city, between an unfounded future and a forgotten past. Bound in a matrix of global and local conditions, they map another kind of city, one that is transcendant and ephemeral simultaneously.