This thesis addresses the urgent need to awaken our numbed senses by means of haptic architecture. As today's technologies continue to hyper-stimulate and under-differentiate, it is architecture's obligation to resist the resultant de-sensitizing of daily experiences. A return of a multi-sensory and corporeal element to architecture can reveal new possibilities for restoring sensory balance, and for connecting our bodies to our surroundings. Through the authority of all the senses, we may re-discover our human identity within the larger context of the world. <br /><br /> The proposed design is a spa health club in downtown Toronto. Throughout history, public baths have been important spaces in cities. Bathers are able to be social or solitary as they choose, while cleansing body and senses. Today, such spaces are lost in the race where thousands upon thousands of advertisements compete for one's imagination. Combining the ancient bath culture with the contemporary fitness culture, the design of the spa health club aims to heighten awareness by engaging the body and all of its senses. Central to the design is an urban public park offering transitory moments of tranquility and sensual pleasure. The spa, with its public park, offers a space that resumes the dialogue between body and space, creating haptic memories and, above all, raising human consciousness.

This thesis addresses the urgent need to awaken our numbed senses by means of haptic architecture. As today's technologies continue to hyper-stimulate and under-differentiate, it is architecture's obligation to resist the resultant de-sensitizing of daily experiences. A return of a multi-sensory and corporeal element to architecture can reveal new possibilities for restoring sensory balance, and for connecting our bodies to our surroundings. Through the authority of all the senses, we may re-discover our human identity within the larger context of the world. <br /><br /> The proposed design is a spa health club in downtown Toronto. Throughout history, public baths have been important spaces in cities. Bathers are able to be social or solitary as they choose, while cleansing body and senses. Today, such spaces are lost in the race where thousands upon thousands of advertisements compete for one's imagination. Combining the ancient bath culture with the contemporary fitness culture, the design of the spa health club aims to heighten awareness by engaging the body and all of its senses. Central to the design is an urban public park offering transitory moments of tranquility and sensual pleasure. The spa, with its public park, offers a space that resumes the dialogue between body and space, creating haptic memories and, above all, raising human consciousness.

No description available.

No description available.

A new method for the preparation of seven-membered carbocycles via cobalt-mediated [5+2] cycloaddition methodology is presented. We have demonstrated that Cp*Co(5-pentadienyl)+ systems undergo cycloaddition reactions with alkynes in a diastereocontrolled and high-yielding process. When acetylene is employed as the cycloaddition partner, unprecedented Cp*Co(2,3-cycloheptadienyl)+ complexes were isolated as the cycloaddition product under kinetic control. These allyl/olefin species were further transformed to the thermodynamic Cp*Co(5-cycloheptadienyl)+ complexes. Also described are two methods for the preparation of high-valent Co(III) 5-pentadienyl complexes, a compound class that has been under-reported in the literature. This work fills this void and provides a valuable view of the structural properties of 5-pentadienyl complexes as a function of the substitution pattern. The incorporation of tethered pronucleophiles onto the pentadienyl ligand allowed the preparation of fused bicyclic structures of relevance to natural product synthesis. Both conjugated and unconjugated cycloheptadiene species were prepared, made possible via the differing cycloheptadienyl complex hapticity. The oxidative decomplexation of the organic products is also described. Initial steps towards a divergent pronucleophile-bearing pentadienyl synthesis were also undertaken. The mechanism and structure/reactivity relationships for the [5+2] cycloaddition process were studied via density functional theory calculations. These investigations revealed the existence of several convergent reaction pathways on the potential energy surface, and provided a new rationale for the 2,35 isomerization, thereby explaining the low activation barrier for the isomerization of 2-butyne cycloadducts. Of interest is the elucidation of a radical-type pathway, calculated to be of high energy for the Cp* ligand system, yet energetically competitive in the Cp complex reaction manifold. Further, computations on the Cp system demonstrate a potentially viable pathway on the triplet energy surface, suggesting spin-forbidden transitions may play a role in the mechanism. These observations provide an explanation for the differing cycloaddition efficiencies in these two pentadienyl systems. Calculations also suggest that reaction chemoselectivity is determined during the rate-limiting alkyne complexation step; the energetics of this process being dominated by steric interactions between the pentadienyl substituents and the ancillary ligand.

No description available.

This thesis investigates cinema’s attempts to engage in a dialogue with the trace of the physical body. My concern is with the on-screen presentation of the body rather than its treatment as a representation of gender, sexuality, race, age, or class. I examine specifically The Elephant Man (Lynch, 1980), Crash (Cronenberg, 1996), Attenberg (Tsangari, 2010), Taxidermia (Pálfi, 2006), and Sokurov’s family trilogy (Mother and Son, 1997; Father and Son, 2003; and Alexandra, 2007). The recurring tropes in these seven films include references to the medical gaze (both objective and objectifying) and haptic visuality which privileges sensual, close engagement with the image of the material object. I consider the medical and the haptic as metaphors for depictions of the body in cinema. To develop my analysis, I draw on the works of Michel Foucault, Laura U. Marks and Vivian Sobchack amongst others. I conclude that the discussed films, preoccupied with images of corporeal forms, criticise cinema’s conventional treatment of the body as simply a vessel for a goal-driven character and portray bodies which appear to consciousness in their own right.

In humanity’s current condition, the advantages of organic material sources are supplanted by the qualities of synthetics that allow for rapid growth and altered capabilities, whilst man becomes further removed from his natural existence as a being that once possessed the aptitude to understand and work with these materials. Prior to our industrial, mechanised and materialist consumer culture, the direct interaction with the natural world provided humanity with more comprehensive and experiential ground for growth and learning. As we are connected to the world through our senses, space becomes the primary enabler of such a platform. Relying on the haptic qualities of materials and the body’s ability to experience and embody its immediate surroundings, architecture’s role in the integration between man, nature, and industry is explored. As a natural industry with a significant public interface, architecture acts as a mediator between man’s “constructed nature” and his “first nature” – referring to man’s estrangement from his environment. This dissertation investigates the adaptation of industrial buildings to accommodate public interaction whilst responding to the environmental impact that the production of building materials has on the environment. Alternatives to commonly used materials such as glass, steel and carbon fibres were researched, and so hemp, flax and bamboo became the primary elements used in the making of the architecture. / Dissertation MArch(Prof)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / Architecture / MArch(Prof) / Unrestricted

A GIRL, forced to marry her father after he sees her playing in his dead wife’s wedding gown, runs away wearing five dresses. Four dresses are of silk and they are beautiful. The last dress is of wood. It is in this dress that the girl escapes, throwing herself into the river to float away. A prince saves the girl but treats her badly, for she wears an ugly wood frock. Her suffering is eased at night when the girl takes off the wood dress and dances in her silk ones. The prince discovers the girl in the silk dresses and falls in love. They live happily ever after. This thesis is based on a fairy tale in which a girl’s life is changed by what she wears. In Fair Maiden Wood clothing is a means to identity. Costume is what identifies this girl as her father’s new bride, and it reveals to the shallow prince who his true love is. It is through clothing that we identify the fairy tale. But more significantly, it is through clothing that the girl experiences the outside world. The girl lives through her wood frock – it is the vessel by which she escapes the threat of incest, it is the prison that disguises her beauty from the prince; it is her armor, her cage, her temporary home. The wood frock becomes the girl’s first architecture, protecting and sheltering the girl in the most intimate manner, controlling her most immediate environment. But its role is not limited to enclosure; the wood dress also changes the girl’s experience of her surroundings, extending her bodily influence while also constraining it. The wood dress dictates how the girl moves, how much space she needs, how others see her, and how they treat her. It is an environment, elusively defined by the dialogue between her moving body and the surface of the wood shell surrounding her, which changes the girl’s quality of existence. In this in-between silhouette is a most potent, and poetic, form of architecture. In my thesis I continue the story of the girl in the wood frock through the design of three of her five gowns. The gowns reference the work of designers such as Cristobal Balenciaga or Issey Miyake whose clothes, by virtue of their construction and materiality, affect wearer and observer in startling and profound fashion. Their garments show a symbiotic relationship between body and shell, where the shell is not simply a passive enclosure but a responsive and independent extension of the body. My dresses are made with this symbiosis in mind, and I use their (painstaking) construction in order to propose that in clothing is the potential to create spatial environments that change fundamental perceptions by filtering and extending the wearer’s experience of the world and her effect on it. These dresses and the spaces they create are unique. They are not costumes of the everyday, used to suppress sensation in order to function; instead they are of the special day, when the girl seeks to be stimulated, enlightened, and also saved. They are dresses of heightened awareness, integrating both sense and action within their shifting boundaries, shaping a dynamic, albeit fleeting, architecture.

A GIRL, forced to marry her father after he sees her playing in his dead wife???s wedding gown, runs away wearing five dresses. Four dresses are of silk and they are beautiful. The last dress is of wood. It is in this dress that the girl escapes, throwing herself into the river to float away. A prince saves the girl but treats her badly, for she wears an ugly wood frock. Her suffering is eased at night when the girl takes off the wood dress and dances in her silk ones. The prince discovers the girl in the silk dresses and falls in love. They live happily ever after. This thesis is based on a fairy tale in which a girl???s life is changed by what she wears. In Fair Maiden Wood clothing is a means to identity. Costume is what identifies this girl as her father???s new bride, and it reveals to the shallow prince who his true love is. It is through clothing that we identify the fairy tale. But more significantly, it is through clothing that the girl experiences the outside world. The girl lives through her wood frock ??? it is the vessel by which she escapes the threat of incest, it is the prison that disguises her beauty from the prince; it is her armor, her cage, her temporary home. The wood frock becomes the girl???s first architecture, protecting and sheltering the girl in the most intimate manner, controlling her most immediate environment. But its role is not limited to enclosure; the wood dress also changes the girl???s experience of her surroundings, extending her bodily influence while also constraining it. The wood dress dictates how the girl moves, how much space she needs, how others see her, and how they treat her. It is an environment, elusively defined by the dialogue between her moving body and the surface of the wood shell surrounding her, which changes the girl???s quality of existence. In this in-between silhouette is a most potent, and poetic, form of architecture. In my thesis I continue the story of the girl in the wood frock through the design of three of her five gowns. The gowns reference the work of designers such as Cristobal Balenciaga or Issey Miyake whose clothes, by virtue of their construction and materiality, affect wearer and observer in startling and profound fashion. Their garments show a symbiotic relationship between body and shell, where the shell is not simply a passive enclosure but a responsive and independent extension of the body. My dresses are made with this symbiosis in mind, and I use their (painstaking) construction in order to propose that in clothing is the potential to create spatial environments that change fundamental perceptions by filtering and extending the wearer???s experience of the world and her effect on it. These dresses and the spaces they create are unique. They are not costumes of the everyday, used to suppress sensation in order to function; instead they are of the special day, when the girl seeks to be stimulated, enlightened, and also saved. They are dresses of heightened awareness, integrating both sense and action within their shifting boundaries, shaping a dynamic, albeit fleeting, architecture.