This thesis is an investigation of urban form, specifically urban form that allows for architectural interventions at a variety of scales, as well as an architecture that is at once, dense and porous. The idea derives from an interpretive reading of the city of Houston, as well as a predilection for modernist urban strategies that have these same concerns at their core. Aspects of scale and density are explored for their potential to register the subject into the city, establishing a reflexive relationship between the body and architecture. The self-service gas station is seen as a modern urban artifact that serves as a spatial model for testing these ideas. The thesis is explored through the design proposal for a small institution--a vocational school with housing, dining, and research facilities that occupy two vacant blocks in the southeast periphery of downtown Houston.

Architecture and the conceptions of urban and rural space have been drastically transformed by the continuous expansion of the man-made into the natural rural landscape. The collision of man-made and natural environments come together as a continuous overlay of conflicting systems. Complex fields are thus formed, creating systems of "in-between" landscapes that blur the boundaries between the natural and the man-made. The acknowledgment that inhabitants are continually within the city calls into question how society visualizes, constructs, and uses their surroundings. The "in-between" landscape has given way to the possibility of dismantling the common ideas of urban and rural in order to formulate a new type of hybrid landscape. The landscape proposed here, an Environmental Park, becomes a highly interactive field of natural and man-made systems that communicates new ways of thinking, making, and building within the natural, the man-made, and the "in-between."

The port of Nagoya offers a particularly promising site for new city planning, as it has remained largely untouched by the kind of less-than-successful new projects built in Tokyo and Osaka. However, current plans for a highly sophisticated enterprise zone complete with a new international airport, train terminals, office parks, housing blocks, and hypermarkets are characterized by the all-too-familiar imagery of the outdated Western city plan (as has already been implemented in Tokyo and Kobe). In fact, one could generalize that large-scale development outside every major city in the world has assumed a similar homogeneous, atomized quality; and yet a substantial amount of business is now conducted outside of traditional city centers by an increasingly itinerant work force. In response to these challenges, I have attempted to develop a small, interdependent prototype for a business substation within a proposed transportation terminal in Nagoya Port as a way to consolidate the various necessary programs into a conscionable unit. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

"Houston is the first major city without streets"$\sp1$ It is a city of parking space, and mostly surface parking at that. Economic incentives and automobility dictate the ground rules by which the contemporary city is created. It is cheaper and easier to have a surface parking lot. It is more advantageous for a developer to build farther and farther out from the city. Cars are relatively standard items. Architectural Graphic Standards will tell you the types of spaces they need. Parking designers have a codified system, Levels of Service (LOS), to dictate design. The automobile is perhaps the most convenient form of personal transit ever invented. Automobiles are becoming more accessible to more people. These same cars remain parked for 18-20 hours a day on average. Our city is created by these rules. In order to change the city--the ground rules must be adjusted. ftn$\sp1$Ingersoll Richard, "The death of the Street; The Automobile and Houston," Chapter 14 of Roadside America: The Automobile in Design and Culture, ed. Jan Jennings copyright 1990 Iowa State University Press Ames, Iowa.

This thesis seeks to offer strategies for the densification of various American cities developing its hypothesis through the use of biomimicry and the analysis of indigenous ecosystems. Solutions will be devised and tested based on methodologies of negotiation between man-made and natural systems and infrastructures. Metropolises to be studied will include New Orleans, Denver, Portland, New York and Phoenix. These cities were selected based on their locations within specific ecosystems (Wetlands, Prairie/Tundra, Evergreen, Broadleaf, Desert---respectively), their large populations, and expansive suburbs. Coherent research material on relevant issues will be presented (land use, population, pollution, transportation, etc.) and compared among the cities. Following, a comprehensive investigation of indigenous plants for each of these regions will be carried out, whereby strategies and hypothesis will be developed for interventions in each city/ecosystem variation. Physical planning strategies can be gleaned from these varying micro and macro ecosystems that have already existed, grown and adapted long before our cities were founded. Current localized systems of each city will be studied and alterations proposed to take advantage of unique indigenous conditions while allowing for farmland and natural area preservation, inclusion, and support of and within the system. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

This thesis will preserve and exploit the inimitable urban condition of the High Line by suggesting that its current alien presence in the city can be reclaimed and experienced while simultaneously maintaining the integrity of the historic structure. The High Line is an artifact; it represents a time in history when New York was bustling in a transportation fueled economy. History has constructed its current segregation and its 20 years of isolation from the city has allowed for ecology to self-seed a native prairie. Its integration back into the urban fabric via a series of public and private access nodes will serve to bracket between the artifact and the city as well as provide access to an elevated territory of much needed green space in Manhattan. Moving people sectionally through the city along these nodes is essential to the cultural and historical experience of the city. Its exploitation will in turn embed the artifact so deeply as a support system into the urban fabric that it will be able to sustain itself through the life cycles of the city.

A new strategy is needed in the housing industry. With a flux of unconventional residents moving back into the city an entire industry of "urban" housing has emerged. The products of this production housing are advertised as an alternative to suburban housing, but perhaps the only alternative it has is the vicinity to downtown. Construction techniques and design strategies deployed by the "urban" housing industry are no different than their counterparts working on Houston's periphery, producing a homogenized and compartmental housing as found in conventional suburban housing. Hybrid Housing is an alternative strategy for production housing. It uses industrialized techniques to produce a range of units that serve a variety of lifestyles. Assembled as a whole, these units react and grow into a complex body that nests private, public and communal territories within a mat of housing. By crossing social and physical relations, hybrid housing presents an alternative urban living.

EWB is a direct attempt to deal with numerous uncontrolled urban emergences in Beijing; instead of the current stratifying process, it offers strategies for intensifying the dynamic density through enabling the massive subversive forces. In turn, EWB exposes the city's future of unprecedented three-dimensional congestion---a hyper-dense city. EWB respond to the all-encompassing wildness with an approach that merges two opposing concepts of urbanity into one: the top-down plan that treats developments as lockdown enclaves; the unregulated activities that flood the urban ground. It propagates a new urban process by using the vast developments as a framework to proliferate street commerce---instead of being parasitical, unregulated activities can weave into the rigid structure of existing residential blocks and disturb it like a virus infection. Once they reach the critical masses, the city will reinvent itself as an uninterrupted hyper-dense urban landscape capable of accommodating all manners of street life.

from afar Gaia inspires us to see in her the design possibilities... ...the fractal becomes the unit for understanding the macros... ...within this macros the cities dwell... ...from the city we extract urban behaviors with similar intelligible natural patterns... ...within the parking systems, natural qualities are hidden... ...qualities that find their way through the concrete... through the lines... through the shadows... ...and in the end...nature finds it's way through the structure...

This thesis is an investigation of a rapid deployment housing system inspired by the El Paso/Juarez border shanty towns and their proximity to manufacturing plants in a global market transition zone. It is about developing co-operative relationships between architects, engineers, and fabricators, as well as developing new integrative methods of production, deployment and construction. The program typology is organized around a hybrid spine/duct that integrates structural, mechanical and circulatory functions into a single performative architectural device. Building systems are no longer conceptually exclusive and separately deployed, but synthesized into a fluid interior/exterior definition of space. This process instrumentalizes a hands-on/in-the-field form-finding strategy using a primary material (polystyrene foam packaging) as ductwork/spine that twists up to become wall and structural supports in key locations and twists flat to become roof, floor, ramps or bridges. This thesis is an interface connecting multiple disciplines while making available to home-seekers a form to adapt to their own culture and needs while also participating in a new form of urbanism.