Unrecognized by most Houstonians, the city is riddled with empty spaces. Abandoned sites are overlooked by denizens of a city that constantly erases its own past, reinventing itself completely anew. Ties to the past are few. These spaces of decay are re-occupied by traces of objects that used to exist there. These fragmented occupations are monitoring stations that provide a link between the individual and the unobserved city, between an unfounded future and a forgotten past. Bound in a matrix of global and local conditions, they map another kind of city, one that is transcendant and ephemeral simultaneously.

The means of operating at the urban scale in the contemporary metropolis requires a reassessment of forces too often considered beyond the grasp of the architect and too often ignored by the planner. In Houston, the difficulty of engaging the machinations of private development may constitute the greatest challenge to the project of urbanism. The redevelopment of Midtown Houston, a high-traffic corridor situated between Downtown and the Texas Medical Center, issues a prompt to create alternative tactics for reshaping the city. Midtown Parking (mtP) is a system of eleven hybridized parking garages that exploits the ever-present need for more parking as a means to intervene in the climate of private development, organize existing potentials, and influence the reshaping of the district. mtP offers a way of rethinking how urbanity might emerge from the confluence of an existing private development paradigm and a desire to make coherent and vital urban form.

Houston's lack of zoning, market driven constructs, and dependence on the automobile have produced a sprawling, decentralized city connected by networks of flow, where density and urbanism are exceptions, not the rule. In downtown Houston, after years of neglect, a recent boom in (re)development coupled with new transportation initiatives are radically reshaping Houston's historic core and its adjacent neighborhoods. As these new transportation corridors (specifically Metro's new light rail) are realized, their adjacent land use and development (both public and private) provide opportunistic conditions for new visions of urban form and metropolitan life in Houston. The Thesis investigates these emergent opportunities, addressing the changing city in its own terms, focusing on the convergence of these new and existing urban infrastructures to develop new strategies for urban density in Central Houston.

The suburbs are making us fat. Fat is driving the suburbs. In an age when most things are measured by their efficient movement, suburban design spirals inward to a terminating node where stored equipment augments an increasingly static lifestyle. This high degree of sedentariness has brought with it obesiotic trends that have increased the girth of homes and bodies sitting around Houston. We are living in an environment expressing the end of movement---an era where physical activity is being engineered out of our lifestyles. Fat City examines fattening expansion, immobile movement, and where it may lead. Cross sectioning through the metropolis, it analyzes where the chronic problem lies: within the microenvironment of the single-family home. It is a journey from community to singularity. Understood historically and contemporaneously, it will be shown how anti-urban, pathogenic, causal views created the desire for the single-family detached home. The results of the retreat from community have personal effects encompassing public consequence. Through the historical unraveling of urban growth and the contemporary contextualization of that expansion, the end of movement is revealed. Within this field of abundance, embryonic patterns have begun to emerge and become tangible. This is the age of post-movement and Fat City is the debut of those solidified trends.

"Field of Edges" investigates how design modulates social and material worlds. Operative systems, infrastructural (freeways, roads) and ecological (bayous, land mosaics), provide objects of study to investigate territoriality and colonization. These systems are examined at the regional scale, the scale that connects the local with the global. Planimetric and sectional strategies are developed to maintain continuity and functioning as differing systems must navigate one another and the larger context. The strategies also offer methods of systems mapping one another through the design of performative substrates such that edges between systems manifest territoriality as thresholds or gradients, and thus the social world of interacting and competing agencies is manifested in material assemblages. The project takes as its site the existing urban condition of Houston and attempts to re-integrate or re-optimize fragmented regional networks.

A need in Houston exists---to encourage thickening of existing older neighborhoods. This thickness, the haphazard nature of events and performances found in everyday living, is fostered by building types that define our experiences within the city and build relations to one another. These qualities exist in discreet forms, sometimes dormant and out of focus, yet create openings for invention. Sites and cultures about Washington Avenue, found through close readings of site, contain latent potentials. However, with an influx of new townhomes and gated communities in the area failing to consider present conditions, these sites and cultures will soon disappear. This thesis projects that the architect's responsibility is to act through a light touch in unearthing the forces shaping latent sites and communicating unrealized potentials throughout the community. Deployed site vignettes become a tactical, bottom up overture---a poster campaign.

Recent manipulations and exploitations of the law have allowed the Indian tribes to operate and profit from casinos and gaming activities. The resulting juxtapositions question the relationships between Reservations, Cities, and States. These moments of reorganization expose new possibilities for the future relationships between these overlapping governments and the community they influence. The intention of the project is to establish a framework to organize the urban development of the border between the Sandia Pueblo and the City of Albuquerque in such a way that the form of future development along the strip will facilitate economic and physical interaction across and through this border zone, avoid the pueblo landscape and define the edge of the city. Future development of the strip would further negotiate the relationship between City and Pueblo. In part, this project outlines one alternative for the city to respond to the pueblo's strip. The city could choose to ignore, modify, or follow this proposal--the formal reaction of the city development would become part of the story.

Healing the circulatory wound is not a project embedded in architectures contemporary preoccupation with romantic relationships between highway and building through circulatory fluxes, speeds, and flows. Rather, this thesis is about developing a more socially responsible urban relationship between the highway and its immediate context by understanding the latent potentials to be found in the lost spaces under, along, and above the circulatory network of our cities. This new urban relationship is one of healing rather than treatment. It is a process of organizing the future metropolis and its physical, social, economic, and political environment in order to create civic amenities at points of existing trauma.

Fifty years after independence, Karachi, Pakistan's most important metropolis, continues to suffer from a widespread shortage of suitable housing and infrastructure. The recent growth of the newly empowered middle class has inflicted additional strains on this already overwhelmed megacity. While the rich are well-equipped to look after themselves, and the poor are best served with a 'sites and services' approach, the middle class has few accessible housing options. By looking at the development of Karachi, and its current urban form and infrastructure--in the context of patronage, planning and housing typology--this thesis reaches a better understanding of the issues, identifies appropriate housing solutions for the rising middle class, and proposes transformations of typology based on the target residents' social, cultural and economic needs.

This design project attempts to enlarge the role of urban codes to deal with issues relevant to the condition of the metropolis as a type of ecological niche. It is my view that urban codes are the most useful design mechanism for post-environmental relations between humans and the urban fields they reside within. These codes must be written not to designate that which cannot be done, but to provoke successful innovation by those following them. This is especially the case in a metropolis without zoning such as this. The project is a master planned community in an urban instead of ex-urban context as is typical, formed on a brownfields site, which is currently the oil services company Halliburton's mostly vacant headquarters just Northeast of downtown Houston. Coding of this site to be used by developers of the site must take into account parameters inherent in the site itself, in this case a polluted parking lot lying in a floodplain. To a certain extent these conditions pervade the landscape of Houston itself, and so this is in a sense a case study for a wider field of operation.