During the Victorian era, Galveston Island, Texas, was a cosmopolitan port-city, the second wealthiest city in the nation based on per capita income. In 1900, its good fortune was dramatically reversed when a hurricane struck the Island, killing more than 6,000 people and leveling much of the city. Although Galveston never regained its prominence as a shipping and financial center, it did gain notoriety of a different sort--as a haven for prostitution, rum-running, and gambling. Vestiges of this mottled past are visible today, as the rich and poor live cheek by jowl, their respective Victorian mansions and shotgun houses abutting each other at more than the occasional turn. A resort island for much of its existence, Galveston has an old and indigenous discourse of the self (Islanders) and the other (Mainlanders, tourists, and non-native residents). And like many tourist towns and settings, it also has an internal discourse about itself as the cultural other. This discourse is about the islandness that constitutes Galveston's "authentic" cultural otherness, as distinct from the touristic islandness, by which it commodifies and markets itself to outsiders. In the mid 1980s, the Island experienced an identity crisis grounded in the political economy of tourism and ushered in by a period of self-representation that parlayed a denatured historical past into cultural and economic capital. Galveston Island, in the late 20th century, was a city in the throes of historic preservation. As a form of cultural and historical production, preservation requires the privileging of certain periods and images of the past, and the suppression, if not outright erasure of others. The Galveston Historical Foundation, has been remarkably successful in this regard. For nearly a decade its hegemony remained virtually uncontested. But in the mid 80s, a series of political referendums designed to reintroduce gambling to the Island (this time by legal means), pitted the Victorian era-past against an explicitly resort-island past and exposed the symbolic connections between the patronage of preservation by the Island's dynastic families, and their opposition to gambling as a threat to the preservation of their ancestral milieu.

The Melting Shed presents the role of the architect as a traveler in the world today. This thesis documents a voyage taken to investigate the work of an artistic vanguard and focuses on the place where its art has been housed for the public. The journey is an exploration of the artistic and cultural life of two cities: Cuenca, Spain and Houston, Texas. The process involves research in both the old and the new worlds, while discoveries remind us of the rewards of searching in far away places. On the way, the architect considers establishing a forum for artistic expression in Houston. The project examines the city and illustrates how the site was selected as a place to shelter the arts. This thesis delivers a manifesto and suggests a design for the architect's proposal of a Facility for Urban Culture in Houston.

Traditional urban moderate income multifamily housing in the City of New York has failed to provide its inhabitants with an acceptable living environment. That environment being defined as an adequate condition of middle ground, or shared space, that space between the house and the street, both internal and external to the community at large, as well as space supportive of the individual in today's society. The objective of this thesis is threefold. The first, to evaluate the historical and existing precedents of middle ground in moderate income multi-family housing located within the City of New York, the second, to analyze the successes and failures of these housing typologies, and the third, to focus on the challenge of finding appropriate design principles for its making. In short, this thesis is on the history, design and making of an urban middle ground in moderate income multi-family housing.

To move through space is to change. Individuals and communities have always moved for change; within and over their own cultural borders. Yet, it is only by not moving, by breaking an ongoing migration, that certain critical advantage may come to a unified people. Such development, economic and cultural, springs from the constructive engagement between a people and their chosen site. Architecture, as an assembly of transitory constructions and spaces, is a primary instrument through which such interaction may occur.

This thesis explores social representations in architecture that have been objectified by various discourses on space and human activity. Using the sport-utility vehicle (SUV) as a multifaceted object in which these representations are seen, the possibility that a single material environment can embody conflicting social roles is proposed. A trope---the melee---is introduced as a model for the reception of material form and space that is grounded in bodily experience tempered by memory and projection. Three 'tries' engage the SUV in the melee, placing its apparent fixed meanings in crisis. Formal analysis in each 'try' reveals the vehicle's various typological allusions to Land Rovers, station wagons and crew cab pickup trucks. The imagined ancestries of the SUV---rooted in conquest, domesticity, and labor---conflict with one another and with its real uses, rendering architectural and urban space unfamiliar. In this melee , the embodied mind poses itself against the fixed social representations of spatial discourse.

The ground in Houston is characterized by its low permeability rate. This condition, combined with the standard manner of building construction, is pushing the drainage system to the limits, increasing the possibility of having, more often, urban flooding. The project proposes a complementary tower system that helps to control urban floods. These towers will act as "hybrid sponges", an extended mechanism of the bayou that is going to attract water with artificial elements complementing natural systems. On the other hand they are going to create new events within a community that will be the platform for new alternatives of development; like new houses that will allow families to exchange their houses that are into the flood plain, creating a new social-urban phenomenon that will start as a extended mechanism of the bayou, but immediate after it is going to be extend to the community for the provision of totally desirable alternatives.

Lying in the wake of accelerated technological advancement is a landscape of economic and environmental consequence. As older industrial facilities become obsolete, newer technologies look towards virgin land for growth. In turn, the industrial city, once the recipient of generous corporate taxation and stable work force, is saddled with social unrest, economic stagnation, and vast tracts of infrastructure-laden land. Such is the case with the vacated Bethlehem Steel plant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. At the root of this thesis is a conviction that regeneration of this site needs to be approached as a multidimensional phenomenon which touches upon the organic, the economic, and the chemical. As such, a kind of petri dish can emerge where physical entropy and the erosion of memory coexist with economic and ecologic growth. This thesis attempts to define a new beginning by bridging the cleft between growth and decay. The history of this site, its entropic future, and the beginnings of a new history are conflated into a single continuum.

This thesis explores the construction and [re]construction of society on global, national, local, and individual levels. Postapartheid South Africa is in the midst of a transformative nationalist culture project. The extremity of the South African situation facilitates analysis and representation of the problem of [re]construction. [Re]-construction is problematic because it reveals the underlying contradictions of the contemporary cultural condition. Space---both the space of the text and the space of human interaction---are crucial factors in the transformation of society. The analysis of South African [re]construction and [re]spatialization necessitates a new method, and a new thought process---one that re-conceptualizes and integrates discontinuous ideas and experiences. The result is a subversive and re-constitutive text that should be read by all those involved in the study and creation of the human environment.

The ground in Houston is a shifting landscape of heavy clay soils, flat topography, and intense rainfall. When this environment is overlaid with fixed, man-made infrastructures, the two systems interact to exacerbate natural phenomena such as subsidence, faulting, and urban flooding. In response to an investigation into the relationship between Houston's infrastructure, its ground, and its climate, this thesis proposes the development of mid-scale flood control basins. Retention basins in the Houston area exist at the two scalar extremes: very large, regional facilities, and small, scattered, individual ponds. Generally, these facilities are not only inaccessible when flooding occurs, but also divorced from their surroundings; they are not designed to be used even when dry. In contrast, the proposed basins are enmeshed with a range of programs and infrastructures, designed to simultaneously accommodate urban life and water, and work to create a fluctuating character and intensity of program and activity.

No description available.