Our conception of Paradise is derived from the Old Persian word pairidaeza, referring directly to a hidden, walled garden. Such a mythical garden protects its occupant from the extrinsic gaze of those less fortunate. Taqiyah involves the precautionary dissimulation of faith in a hostile environment. For persecuted developing sects in medieval Persian Islam, taqiyah became an important cultural practice. Such persecution gave rise to a production of artifacts whose significant meanings were disguised within complex compositions. Understanding the nature of these compositions provides insight into the nature of perception and its role in architectural experience. These artifacts contain projective anamorphic devices that distort vision and obscure interpretation. They demonstrate taqiyah through visual estrangement and temporal defamiliarization. The isolation and architectural deployment of these dissimulative devices can create a dynamic interactive environment that initiates the occupant with a continually changing understanding of the architecture through time.

The metropolis is governed by a certain internal logic, an ' operating system' that we are often blind; initiated at the command line and materialized through mass mobility. The code for this operating system is realized through both very specific and more esoteric social rules and practices, conventions (local code restrictions, signs and semantics) which encode our motive environment, directing our movement, allowing or more often determining our personal inertia. This operating system has more to do with timing and the interactivity of planned coincidences than with built form. While speculative, this thesis preemptively explores a potential amendment to the jurisdictional constraints between architects and developers, planners and policymakers; seeking a collaborative and comprehensive approach to reconditioning the metropolis by up-cycling our highways for alternate occupation, multiplicity and intermodality. This thesis is both a speculation into one area of the metropolitan 'operating system'---it functions as a precursor to a larger manifesto, an initial attempt to decipher, decode and recode the metropolis. Mobilization of the multi-tasking machine.

Open spaces, like urban parks in cities are impaired between the bureaucracy of the city government and the imperatives of commercialization. They are stagnant, unable to challenge the imagination. They melt into the background of a trancelike condition we live in. Design can jolt people out of this trance to act upon their environment, when liberated from providing prescriptive solutions to conflicts between pairs no longer categorizable as opposites: city + park, culture + nature, work + leisure, private + public. Gezi Park Kampanyasi is a design operation aiming to activate free spaces (or free active spaces) through a series of interventions. The interventions respond to existing formal temporal urban patterns interrupting and modifying their flows. These transient interruptions set off a chain reaction in the public realm out of which emerges an unpredictable urban space that is continuously changing.

The slow disaster of shoreline erosion has been met with various human attempts to control the relationship between Galveston Island and the Gulf of Mexico. In territorializing the island as private property, the main economic draw (the beach) is being sacrificed as the sandbar is increasingly expected to behave like a stable landmass. Private Property Rights and Public Beach Access clash as the difference between the land and the sea refuses to manifest itself as a line drawn through space. There is latent potential within the land itself to work with a beach access infrastructure that operates as a mesh. Such a system can transgress problematic territorial boundaries and mark out multiple processes of reterritorialization as they are occurring on the site. In this way, the forces at work in shaping the island can become culturally relevant in a constructive way, altering the human relationship with the land.

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Kenora, Ontario is a city with a strong industrial identity, linked specifically to forestry. Historically sawmills were situated on waterfront properties for purposes of harnessing energy and transporting logs. As technology has evolved, the proximity to water is no longer integral and industry has become less centralized in the city. This practicum explores the implications of the loss of an industrial presence, and the impact of industrial disturbance in both the urban fabric as well as the surrounding region. A design proposal for a specific site, that has been home to a sawmill for over a century, reacts to the research through the design of a large scale public landscape intended to remediate the post industrial conditions and take advantage of the strong historical past.

There is an increasing awareness among landscape architects and other designers that although it is axiomatic that environmental concerns play a major role in design, it is also necessary to identify and address the issues of place that form a vital part of the well-being of the whole person. One major issue is that of genius loci. the spirit of place. The object of this project is to describe some of the elements that go to make up the spirit of place that is unique to Indiana. "The stage we're at in Indiana, I don't think we have a real 'Indiana' landscape that has sifted out, I think we're still stretching our wings and discovering what we have here." (Eric Ernstberger, Indiana Landscape Architect.)The project consists of four sections:1. Investigation into the history of and writings on contextualism and regionalism both in general and in relation to the Midwest of the USA in particular.2. A. Preference survey of Indiana residents taken from an opportunity sample of 180 residents in three areas of the State, administered by interview. B.Interviews with two practising Indiana Landscape Architects, expressing their thoughts on designing for Indiana.3. Visual catalog of artworks, photographs and excerpts from the writings of Christian Norburg-Schulz on Genius Loci and Rachel Peden on Indiana.4. Color slide presentation to class of students on the above. / Department of Landscape Architecture

The goal of this Creative Project was to write a model text on the principles and practices of specifications writing for landscape architecture students.The goals of the text were to provide: 1) an overview of the principles and practices of specifications writing as advocated by the Construction Specifications Institute; 2) examples of contract documents used by the landscape architect; and 3) a source of reference information specifically for landscape architects.The text consists of nine chapters. Each chapter begins with a set of goals, followed by the text content, and ends with a set of review questions. The text contains figures and appendices which provide examples and sources of information useful to specifications writers. / Department of Landscape Architecture