Santa Maria Antiqua: The Amalgamation of Identity in Early Medieval Rome

The intent of this investigation is to frame an identity for the church of Santa Maria Antiqua and the urban condition of Rome during the sixth through eighth centuries. Coupling topographical and semiotic information with larger geographic issues, this study interrogates the church and specific individuals associated with it as a way of more comprehensively understanding Santa Maria Antiqua as a visual medium of cultural change and political propaganda. Narrating the complex formation of personal and social identity at the site allows us to understand greater physical and social contexts and explore more thoroughly early Christian Rome

Pitstop Confessional

This conceptual project considers the region of the South to be a vibrant historical artifact with a valuable future tense. The Pitstop Confessional positions the cultural lineage of the saloon and roadside diner typologies within their contemporary highway context and critiques the morphology of the Southern dining experience from the one-room house to the asphalt edgescapes of suburbia. Waffle House is designed as a truer version of itself – a roadside sanctuary. An assertion is made through spatial gestures, allusions to religious rituals, and the written word that the Waffle House dining experience – however detached from the presuppositions society has about communal eating – is a spiritual activity that fulfills patrons’ desires for redemption and salvation under a pretense of affordable, transit-oriented happiness. The Fountain of Youth, the Hymnal, and the Call to Prayer are metaphors embedded in Waffle House. Drawing upon the speed and linearity of the automobile, the redemptive aspects of comfort food, and the dynamics between public and private experience at Waffle House, the Pitstop Confessional is a Southern sanctuary for highway pilgrims to find repose along their Westward journey. The project becomes a more real manifestation of what Waffle House means

Continuous Extremes: Architecture of Uncertainty in Poland, 1945—

In this thesis, architecture situates between extremes. The dichotomies of destruction and construction, mobility and fixity, performance and reality, inside and outside, and form and time frame architecture and the processes through which it is made. The context is Poland in the fallout of the year 1945, when Warsaw’s unique, nearly total destruction and the ascendance of a new communist regime raised the political stakes of architecture. The thesis focuses on a cast of characters in architecture and related artistic disciplines—individuals haunted by the traumas of their own pasts, negotiating a Polish state that created oppressive limitations through artistic mandates but also created opportunities by commissioning artists and architects, and participating as agents of a discipline that wielded incredible political power but was also revealed by the war to produce objects that were ephemeral and destroyable. The thesis then moves beyond the predominance of total destruction and totalitarianism, highlighting stories of improvisation, innovation, and self-becoming within a high-pressure political milieu. Just as the extreme conditions of Poland in 1945 preceded multiple spatial and conceptual approaches to form, the thesis itself takes the form of group biography, describing a fluid situation through glimpses of shared yet elusive realities in which architecture and architects try to intervene

Surrogate Infrastructures: Human Consciousness in the Information Age

This project is a study of collective memory in a place and time of intense change, intending to facilitate a conversation about the complexities of remembering and the challenges of humanizing the past in an increasingly fast-paced and consumption-driven world. As it critiques the architectural and anti-spatial precedents of newly suburban Poland, it imagines and exploits alternate narratives for a site that has been heretofore saturated by the singularity of its Holocaust past. Grappling with the absurdities of history and historiography in Kraków and across the globe, the program takes on a series of infrastructures, imbued with temporal potentials, to convey tourists into and out of their vicarious treks through the city and to proselytize an architecture of decision which urges engagement and understanding of the present

City of El Campo Downtown Revitalization Plan

The Revitalization Plan for Downtown El Campo is a planning document that provides guidance for the development of Downtown El Campo. This planning document includes an overview and analysis of the existing conditions in the City of El Campo and the El Campo Downtown Revitalization Area, a design proposal with vision, goals, and objectives for enhancing Downtown El Campo and a detailed implementation chapter for successful execution of the plan.This planning document presents the revitalization plan for downtown El Campo, Texas. This document was developed by Texas Target Communities (TTC) in partnership with the City of El Campo. The City of El Campo collaborated with Texas Target Communities in fall 2016 through the summer of 2017 to create a plan for revitalization of downtown El Campo. The purpose of the collaboration was to assess current community conditions, develop goals, objectives, and implementation strategies related to future development & growth strategies, through a public participatory process, in order to help guide the future growth of the City

City of El Campo Downtown Revitalization Plan

The Revitalization Plan for Downtown El Campo is a planning document that provides guidance for the development of Downtown El Campo. This planning document includes an overview and analysis of the existing conditions in the City of El Campo and the El Campo Downtown Revitalization Area, a design proposal with vision, goals, and objectives for enhancing Downtown El Campo and a detailed implementation chapter for successful execution of the plan.This planning document presents the revitalization plan for downtown El Campo, Texas. This document was developed by Texas Target Communities (TTC) in partnership with the City of El Campo. The City of El Campo collaborated with Texas Target Communities in fall 2016 through the summer of 2017 to create a plan for revitalization of downtown El Campo. The purpose of the collaboration was to assess current community conditions, develop goals, objectives, and implementation strategies related to future development & growth strategies, through a public participatory process, in order to help guide the future growth of the City

X Chromosome Factor Kdm6a Enhances Cognition Independent of Its Demethylase Function in the Aging XY Male Brain.

Males exhibit shorter life span and more cognitive deficits, in the absence of dementia, in aging human populations. In mammals, the X chromosome is enriched for neural genes and is a major source of biologic sex difference, in part, because males show decreased expression of select X factors (XY). While each sex (XX and XY) harbors one active X due to X chromosome inactivation in females, some genes, such as Kdm6a, transcriptionally escape silencing in females-resulting in lower transcript levels in males. Kdm6a is a known histone demethylase (H3K27me2/3) with multiple functional domains that is linked with synaptic plasticity and cognition. Whether elevating Kdm6a could benefit the aged male brain and whether this requires its demethylase function remains unknown. We used lentiviral-mediated overexpression of the X factor in the hippocampus of aging male mice and tested their cognition and behavior in the Morris water-maze. We found that acutely increasing Kdm6a-in a form without demethylase function-selectively improved learning and memory, in the aging XY brain, without altering total activity or anxiety-like measures. Further understanding the demethylase-independent downstream mechanisms of Kdm6a may lead to novel therapies for treating age-induced cognitive deficits in both sexes