Description: Informed by the methodology utilized in Peter Williams's Houses of God: Region, Religion, and Architecture in the United States (1997), the thesis examines Mark Lemmon's Gothic Revival design for the Highland Park Presbyterian Church (1941) with special attention to the denomination and social class of the congregation and the architectural style of the church. Beginning with the notion that Lemmon's church is more complex than an expression of the Southern cultural region defined by Williams, the thesis presents the opportunity to examine the church in the context of the unique cultural region of the city of Dallas. Church archival material supports the argument that the congregation deliberately sought to identify with both the forms and ideology of the late nineteenth-century Gothic Revival in the northeastern United States, a result of the influence of Dallas's cultural region.

Description: Chapter I describes the purpose of the project, which was to develop a body of work that exhibits all that I am at this point in time. The questions I presented to myself were the following: 1. A successful piece is defined by what parameters? 2. What visual qualities indicate my passion for clay and my enthusiasm for life? Chapter II lists and explains the five parameters of a successful piece, which are composition, firing, mark making, color contrast, and movement. Furthermore there is an explanation on how these parameters visually display my passion for clay and my enthusiasm for life. Chapter III is a summary concluding that by discovering my five parameters of a successful piece I now understand the elements that I am searching for in my work. My work will grow from this understanding as long as I have the same passion for clay and enthusiasm for life.

Description: The images that I sculpt deal with reflections of human traits. Wood lends itself to this endeavor, offering minimal resistance to manipulation. Keeping the origin and qualities of the material while manipulating it into another object is a statement within itself. Letting the wood do what it does naturally keeps the viewer in touch with the fact it is still just an object of nature. Wood does not make itself any less real because of the relationship of the sculpture to it as wood.

Description: This thesis uses the work and career of the textile designer Maria Kipp to stage a prolegomena concerning how to write about a female designer active during the middle of the twentieth century. How can design historians incorporate new methodologies in the writing of design history? This thesis explores the current literature of feminist design history for solutions to the potential problems of the traditional biography and applies these to the work and career of Kipp. It generates questions concerning the application of methodologies, specifically looking at a biographical methodology and new methodologies proposed by feminist design historians. Feminist writers encourage scholarship on unknown designers, while also they call for a different kind of writing and methodology. The goal of this thesis is to examine how these new histories are written and in what ways they might inspire the writing of Kipp into design history.

Description: The nature of clay's physical attributes and the application of these characteristics to an expression of gestural movement in utilitarian ceramics.