This thesis formally defines a diagrammatically transparent judicial system as a method of exploiting architecture's urban agency. Government and judicial institutions are typically architecturalized as either a semantic reading or a monolithic object. This thesis produces an architectural double agency merging the idea of a public object and public ...

In place of an indigenous culture, Houston has gathered an industry devoted to deploying generic, understandable, manmade environments in places they otherwise might not seem to belong. This project is a website that attempts to link the history of Houston to recent major transformations in the American landscape: the seeming homogenization of urban, ...

On Chicago's Metropolitan Rail system (Metra), the conventional commuter rail station remains configured much as it did when it served commuter suburbs of the late 19th century. The contemporary commuter station, however, now operates within a diffused suburban landscape. As the suburban fabric has loosened itself from the rail corridor, so have the ...

The contemporary city has evolved into an agglomeration of shopping malls, convenience stores, corporate offices, and single family houses that are linked by an intensive highway infrastructure and, as Andrew Kruse referred to it, "thinfrastructure" of fiber optic cables and satellites. This agglomeration, dubbed the "Generic City" by Koolhaas, is ...

Architecture can be defined as the manifold of space, movements, and events. This project, located in the City, utilizes movement as the primary ordering device for the production of space and the encounter of events. Movement, both determined and aleatory, can be understood to have spatial consequences which locate and materialize the architectural ...

This thesis expands upon the dialogue between speed and architecture, investigating how architecture reinterprets the linear city, originally defined by the continuous fabric of the freeway and more recently reconfigured by the high speed rail line. Using the linear city as a site of exploration and high speed rail as a ground to test new typologies ...

If the 19th century urban center was a city of manufacturing, and the early 20th century city was one of corporate capitalism, today's downtown can best be characterized as a site of culture and consumption, from the Guggenheim Bilbao to Times Square in Manhattan. Downtown Houston is at a disadvantage in this contemporary context, for it lacks any ...

Detroit continues to stand out as emblematic of failing urban economies, infrastructure, density, and form. But its spatially dominant urban relationships also provide the opportunity required to transform unsustainable, expanding megalopolises. Taking lead from the recently established Detroit Works Project, De-Center transforms existing urban ...