This thesis explores the ways in which architecture can be used to enhance and support creativity in music by engaging with the urban environment. The investigation will take the form of designing a community scaled performing-arts incubator in downtown Toronto. The arts incubator program is familiar across North America, but often takes the form of either a pastoral retreat or an urban revitalization tool with a focus on community development. This thesis aims to combine both ideas and create an arts-focused facility within the urban environment. Elements of the creative process of music are translated to program-specific, arts-focused design elements that are then described by their relationship to each other and to the city. This thesis aims to create a series of spaces that will enhance the capability of urban musicians to practice their craft and in turn elevate the cultural identity of the place.

Stormwater management systems reduce the impact of surface runoff in urban environments. The Toronto Green Standard (TGS) has been developed to further mitigate effects of urban runoff by mandating runoff control implementation in new developments at the site level. The intended effect of these measures is to reduce the quantity and improve the quality of water. Recent concepts of sustainable stormwater suggest that amenity is an equally important aspect of such a system. This study evaluated Best Management Practices suggested by the TGS for their performance and amenity characteristics. Design professionals selected for prior experience with the TGS were consulted to determine industry perceptions of the requirements, and how the standards could be altered to improve amenity value. Several concerns were identified which appear to impede the successful implementation of sustainable stormwater management solutions, to which recommendations are proposed which may help balance performance and amenity requirements in the TGS.

Kingston is a city facing serious environmental challenges. In common with other Third World cities, these have usually been documented from the perspective of affluent and powerful urban residents. Very little research has explored the spatial and social distribution of environmental problems in the city, or has examined the ways that individual citizens from a variety of backgrounds understand the urban environment. These problems have often been packaged as discrete issues, when in fact they cannot be understood or alleviated without knowledge of their economic, political, and cultural aspects. Urban environmental problems require political solutions that address uneven power relations and ineffective structures of urban governance. In this thesis, I address these issues in Kingston through an application of the themes of nature, power and participation. A mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods were used to explore the ways in which urban residents from different age, gender and class backgrounds construct the city and its environmental problems. The knowledge of marginalised individuals and groups is placed in the foreground and is used to provide an alternative analysis of Kingston’s ecology. These understandings are then used to assess critically the structures of urban governance, and to suggest possible changes that could be made to these. The research confirms that there are significant environmental problems in Kingston, and that these have serious negative impacts on many urban residents. It shows that these problems are understood differently by the various social groups within the city, and that the burdens of environmental problems vary socio-spatially across the Kingston Metropolitan Area. Despite this, there is a general consensus that environmental improvement is desirable. However, for this to be achieved there need to be fundamental alterations in the social structures and political organisation of the city.

Among the many and varied episodes in the history of twentieth century architecture and urban planning, the British Townscape movement is usually associated with the rear guards of these fields; both conservative and nostalgic. If mentioned at all, historical accounts generally portray Townscape as a brief and sometimes necessary interlude to subsequent movements of greater consequence. This reception is due, in part, to contemporary movements such as the so-called ‘New Urbanism’, through which the more culturally conservative aspects of Townscape’s doctrine continue to persist, arguably masking and debasing an earlier and largely forgotten Townscape, originally intended to be modernist, visually striking and to challenge notions of tradition and taste in architectural and urban discourses. The following thesis proposes that Townscape’s contributions to the discourses and practices of the twentieth century are far more considerable than has been held to date. In its early phase, Townscape introduced several important conceptual innovations whose influence can still be felt within contemporary discourses, such as: ‘contextual’ or site specific design practice; comprehensive urban design, regardless of scale or disciplinarian frameworks; the insistence on the inclusion of historic buildings and urban fabric; and its promotion of a more scenographic, synthetic, compromised and pluralist approach, which resulted in informal, irregular and asymmetrical design solutions in architecture and urban planning. From today’s standpoint Townscape has historical interest, standing at the junction of some of the greater developments in architecture and urban planning, such as the transition from architectural modernism to post-modernism, and the rise of ‘urbanism’ and its positioning as the supreme question of architecture in the post-war period by architectural movements such as contextualism, neo-rationalism and post-modernism more generally. This thesis proposes that Townscape’s influence on these movements and their authors was far more substantial than is generally acknowledged. In architecture, personalities such as Colin Rowe, Leon and Rob Krier, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and Alison and Peter Smithson can be counted among those reacting to and to some degree influenced by the movement. In urban planning discourses, prominent reformists such as Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch and Christopher Tunnard also appear to have drawn on Townscape’s lessons in their criticism. In revisiting Townscape it is hoped that not only can a fairer and fuller picture of the movement emerge, but the scale and duration of the movement and the roles of its initiators and various supporters be duly appreciated. A thorough survey of the Architectural Review from 1930 to the 1980s shows some 1,400 articles relating to Townscape’s campaign, most of which have hitherto gone unnoticed in the scholarship on the period. These were contributed by around 200 authors, many of whom are rarely associated with the movement. This survey also reveals that most of the concepts and the rhetoric of Townscape was set much earlier than is usually thought, from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, that its intended scope was much more extensive than commonly held, and that it was planned, initiated and directed by Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-1983) and Hubert de Cronin Hastings (1902-1986). Both Pevsner and Hastings were occupied with Townscape throughout the 1940s and variously referred to the movement as ‘Visual Planning’ and ‘Exterior Furnishing’, which was more widely understood to relate to the picturesque revival carried out largely under Pevsner’s name in the Architectural Review. Throughout the 1940s Pevsner published extensively on the subject, while Hastings anonymously and pseudononymously directed discussion on the movement as executive editor of the Architectural Review, as well as from the less prominent position as proprietor of the influential Architectural Press. It is this body of work, its authors and its associated discourses that are the focus of the present enquiry. An analysis of these publications and their authors promises new insights into the early phase of the Townscape movement: its sources, originality, theory, objectives, and its influence and legacy in the practice and discourses of today. As an early reform movement of modernism, the view of Townscape put forward in this thesis challenges current historiographies, which tend to marginalize the movement’s position in the period. In its early phase Townscape was starkly modernist, but it contained much of the critique later taken up within the architectural urbanism of the 1960s and 1970s and can be seen as an important percussor to post-modernism. Additionally, Townscape’s particular approach to architecture and urban design reveals a greater value in contemporary discourses; one founded in its stylistic pluralism, its undogmatic interpretation of modernism, its insistence on historical and cultural continuity, its attention to the visual aspects and heterogeneity of the built environment, along with an aesthetic based on compromise, synthesis and inclusion.

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Dual occupancy, the development of two dwellings on a single allotment, was initially formulated by the Victorian Ministry of Housing in the late 1970s as a housing policy. In the 1980s it became a planning issue and was then developed as a key plank of metropolitan planning policy by the (then) Ministry for Planning and Environment, resulting in specific controls being introduced into metropolitan planning schemes in 1985. By 1987 it had become a major mechanism for the implementation of the government's urban consolidation policy. This thesis traces the evolution of dual occupancy policy and discusses its impact on urban consolidation of metropolitan Melbourne. It explores three major questions: - How did dual occupancy become part of metropolitan planning policy? - What impact did dual occupancy have on housing and building options from its inception (1985/86 to 1991/92)? - Did dual occupancy contribute to increased growth rates in the established municipalities of the metropolitan area? This thesis involved the application of a number of different research methodologies, including interviews, analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data and some literature reviews. Interviews were conducted with several key people who were involved in formulation of dual occupancy policy. This enabled the policy to be put into its proper metropolitan context. A central element of the thesis involved a detailed analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics census data for years 1985/86 through to 1991/92, including analysis of building approval statistics, population data, household size and household numbers for all municipalities within the designated metropolitan area of Melbourne. This allowed a number of trends to be established and observations to be made about the impact of dual occupancy developments on overall housing and population characteristics. The research represented in this thesis demonstrates that although dual occupancy was successful as a form of housing, it had little success as a contributor to urban consolidation. The data in this thesis shows that a large number of dual occupancies proportionate to other types of dwellings were built in the established and growth municipalities, but this form of development had a cost. Dual occupancy did not contribute to stabilising the population of established areas, nor did it contribute to reducing the rate of growth of developing (outer) municipalities.

This thesis studies topology optimization method employing the homogenization method, with a focus on different microstructures and their effects on the topology optimization solutions. In the thesis, different microstructure models were investigated. The strengths and weaknesses of each type of microstructures were discussed. Homogenization method was employed to formulate the homogenized properties of the material. The optimality criteria and schemes of updating the design variables in the topology optimization process were derived for the newly developed microstructures and existing microstructures for which the information is not available in the literature. New microstructure models of one-material and bi-material were established. Based on these studies, a computer software package called Homogenization with Different Microstructures (HDM) incorporating fifteen existing and the new microstructure models was developed. By using the software, a series of problems were studied and solutions given by different microstructure models were compared.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.