In the next 25 years, la Democracia, a town of 4000 people in the Pacific coastal plains of Guatemala, Central America, will double in population if current population growth trends continue. In this thesis, the author investigates the current state of infrastructure; waste disposal, streets, education, health, and housing and proposes solutions for the town's future infrastructure needs.

Our relationship with the land is defined in the myth of American pastoralism. The founding and development of rural communities and towns throughout America has been strongly affected by the pastoral ideal. Complex pastoralism as defined by Leo Marx highlights the conflict between progress and this pastoral myth. This thesis is a proposal for the situating of a little league baseball/softball field along the commercial strip of a rural town in Texas. Using the exploration of complex pastoralism in this context, I am developing a strategy for the "architect" to operate in the context of rural America.

Houston is the rebellious younger sibling of the traditional city, a product of the tug-of-war between the amorphous historic past and the open field of future possibilities; this dichotomy contributes to the form of the experimental city which is direct challenge to the traditional city as applied urban model. In the traditional city urban meaning and architectural form are innately linked, in the experimental city it is not building which embodies the urban iconology, but instead the Between Spaces, the direct, although inadvertent, spatial results of Houston's construction processes. Thus, architecture and urban meaning are disassociated, and through this schism meaning is physically relocated outside of architecture in the Between Space of the experimental city. Through the analysis of two case studies, Transco Tower/Lamar Terrace, and Sam Houston Tollway/Memorial Bend, an alternative experiential and perceptual framework through which Houston's urban forms are assessed is determined.

The thesis originates out of a concern for communities regrouping after dispersal, questioning what vital components of architecture can make a meaningful contribution to communal identity. It explores the role architecture can play in revitalization efforts, gaining insights by participating with community groups and intensely examining the physical neighborhood. An effort is made to go beyond mere contextualism by exploring the differences and similarities between the terms "community" and "public", and their translation to architecture. Dialogue is relocated from popular architectural discourse to strategies that will allow a culture with a rich building tradition freedom of expression, while continuing to engage theoretical issues beyond cosmetics, such as spatial relationships. A seminal conclusion of the thesis is that an architecture of space which structure public activities gives at least as much meaning to communal identity as an architecture of images with which people identify.

In the introduction to his research on "The Contemporary City" Rem Koolhaas observes, "the unavoidable fragmentation of the existing city, has led to a displacement of the centre of gravity of urban dynamics from the city centre to the urban periphery."$\sp1$ City peripheries now display common characteristics: an apparently erratic juxtaposition of seemingly incompatible building functions and types. Here the unknown can be rethought; there is no model. Opportunities for experimentation present themselves in fields of tension between empty spaces and isolated bodies which are not subordinate to any anachronistic concept of order, but accept separateness and divergence.$\sp2$ The forces which shape the city of our times should be reinterpreted as the forces which generate the content and expression in our architecture. The objective is not to camouflage the unresolved situation; but to deal with the City as it is.

The creation of public space in the modern American city has been a persistent problem. This thesis is a revival of the problem of defining and creating public space. My choice of site is an abandoned urban parcel of land which housed the State of Ohio's Penitentiary for 150 years. The characteristics of the site which are of particular interest are its intrinsic definition of public realm, its existing order, and its proximity to the rapidly growing city of Columbus, Ohio. The use of this site, in combination with these features, will provide a novel approach for the making of public space.

Historically, architectural projects are based on a critically defined position within the culture of which they are a product. In the city of white noise there is no inherent direction or critically definable positions in the traditional sense, only limitless possibilities and options characterized by an inherent silence. It is the position of this thesis that it is the role of the architectural project to again inhabit the city on its own terms. Individual works of architecture must now begin to fill the void left by the demise of urban design. The city as field is approached in terms of matrix, frame, and module as an attempt to question the possibilities of the role of the architectural project within the city as it is currently found.

Houston's Fourth Ward has often been the object of redevelopment schemes which call for extensive change. The most recent such plan would save neighborhood houses, but would displace residents. To so easily separate buildings from their occupants requires an architecture concerned primarily with aesthetics. My thesis' premise is the desirability of maintaining the Fourth Ward's current population. Change must occur to stop this community from disintegrating due to poverty, drugs, and neglect. A community center located in and around an abandoned school, well known by residents, would act as a reinvigorated center for the neighborhood. Proposed new buildings mediate between this monumental school and shotgun homes around it. A sloped court connects neighborhood streets to the school's raised floor and serves as common entry to child care, elderly care, and commercial facilities.

Emerging morphology of American megalopoli includes a parallel arrival of megastructures and correlative empty spaces. Anthropomorphic relations to these phenomenon have been ignored in favor of economic efficacy and mass production. Although the scalar disjunction between space, form and figure is inherently a physically determinate one, it represents an existential conundrum concerning subjectivity as well; attempting to locate one's self among or between these megaobjects, one may also try to reconcile the externalized circumstances that created, and are right now becoming, these episodes of hyper-juxtaposition, i.e. late-capitalism. The philosophical armature of the sublime is equipped to contextualize this post- anthropomorphic architectural condition in terms of contemporary subjectivity and figural inscription. Conversely, the investigation reveals an effort to conjecture on an altered subject, in terms of what Jameson calls 'Hyperspace', the most recent mutation of space, having "succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually$\...$"$\sp1$ ftn$\sp1$Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), pg. 44.

Through a comparative analysis of selected modern and contemporary works, both religious and secular, a secular spiritualism is identified. The subversion of representation and suppression of a traditional sacred language, the revelation of the site and its phenomenal qualities, as well as the self-conscious manipulation of tectonics in terms of the relationship between light, material, and construction are the means for challenging the viability of this secular spiritualism at an urban scale. This thesis argues that such a spiritualism can be found in our secular world and proposes that the undefined residual spaces left by privatization become the neutral testing ground for a new urban prototype: the communal sanctuary.