“Safety is an opportunity for people to open their minds” -Jin Baek, 2008 For my thesis I will design an education facility. That education facility will strive to meet with today's security needs and will provide a safe-feeling place for growth. In identifying the problem, I found two main causes for the described conditions in today's schools. They are improper adaptation and uniform building type. Improper adaptation has to do with surface applications, rather than integrating with the social fabric of the school's communal requirements. Unfortunate incidents have caused the solutions to heightened security around schools to be fortressing and disrupting to the human activities. Metal detectors, restricted areas and alarmed doors are some of the possibly necessary but often overlooked attributes of the school design, which in concentration create a trapping, prison-like feeling where they should suggest a place of voluntary education and inspiration for the future. I will utilize CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design) strategies, research codes, new building technologies, materials, systems, arrangements, precedent studies, and testing through simulation or experiment, in a form of installation. I can determine possible solutions and interventions using these resources. Uniform building type sets a counterproductive precedent. Today we must look at places were young people want to be, and splice the desired attributes of those places in to modern schools. In fact, uniform building type is one of the reasons for improper adaptation. Through interviewing school administrators, building officials, students, faculty, psychologists, builders and other construction professionals, I can identify the mandatory requirements. Implementing security and safety attributes as part of the concept, and knowing trends in technology can help secure educational facilities while still maintaining the qualities that are conducive to a learning environment. As stated by Holly Richmond in Contract magazine, February 2006 edition, "Students are the most crucial design element in today's schools," says Kerry Leonard, principal and senior planner at O'Donnell, Wicklund, Pigozzi and Peterson Architects in Chicago and chair of the advisory group for the AIA Committee on Architecture for Education. "Understanding how people learn and creating environments that respond to this knowledge is the best building block to start from."

Downtown Tampa, a struggling city core, will continue to struggle as it holds no true identity to its relationship with important surrounding context, as well as within itself. Evidence in the lack of inhabitable, urban spaces with the scale and comfort to support integral human activity on a day-to-day basis has resulted in the absence of a city center within downtown. One lost opportunity for downtown is its disconnection with the University of Tampa, one that could result in an activated edge condition. As UT appears vertically congruous with downtown, it has no relationship as it is separated from it by the river. The key to blurring the edge at this instance could be aided through an inhabitable, urban space activated by the neighboring student population, as well as individuals working within downtown. The site I have chosen is the existing Curtis Hixon Park and Kiley Gardens, directly across from the University, providing a wonderful opportunity to blur the disconnect. It is also situated amidst forces from all directions, including the central business district and residential areas within downtown's nucleus, thus creating an inter[positioned] quality within the site. One issue to deal with on the site is determining the manner in which the project meets the two main edges, downtown and the Hillsborough River. One source that will become a major infl uence on the concept will be that of Peter Eisenman's text "Blurred Zones: Investigations of the Interstitial." This text will allow me to understand another contemporary architect's ideas of that of the in-between. Thus, site conditions and modern culture will intertwine in the creation of an urban landscape situated within a struggling context to serve the public as a destination within downtown Tampa.