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Architecture
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What is Architecture?

Architecture sits at the intersection of art, engineering, history, and culture, making it a rich subject across disciplines including art history, design theory, urban studies, and the humanities. Students engage with it in courses ranging from survey classes on Western art history to specialized seminars on phenomenology, postmodernism, and vernacular building traditions. The field rewards academic inquiry because architecture is never purely aesthetic — every building encodes decisions about function, materials, society, and meaning. Core theoretical debates, such as whether form follows function remains a viable principle, push students to think critically about how designed structures reflect and shape human life.

The papers archived on this topic take a wide range of approaches. Historical surveys trace the development of styles from the Romanesque period and French Renaissance to Postmodernism. Theoretical analyses examine the work of specific architects — Tadao Ando's use of light, Michelangelo's relationship to Mannerism, and Steven Holl's phenomenological practice all appear as focal points. Comparative and cross-disciplinary essays explore how textiles, nature, and early Islamic decorative arts influenced architectural form and design. Thinkers such as Laugier, Banham, Greenough, and Fathy serve as reference points for arguments about architectural principles and ethics.

A strong architecture essay establishes a clear, arguable thesis rather than simply describing a building or period. The most persuasive papers ground claims in specific formal evidence — spatial organization, materials, structural logic, and historical context — rather than general impressions. The most common pitfall is treating architecture as background rather than as the primary subject: every observation should connect back to what a design decision reveals about built form, cultural values, or theoretical principle.

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Essay Doctorate
The First Emperor's terracotta army and Egyptian pharaonic tombs compared
¶ … Chinese First Emperor as with the Egyptian pharaohs, the tomb was a microcosm of the world that they knew in life, and filled with the objects that they would use in the afterlife.
Paper Doctorate
Postmodernism's role in interpreting contemporary political reality and culture
What is post-modernism? What is its relevance to the contemporary world we live in? Is it excessively pessimistic or realistic about political change and popular culture? There have been numerous attempts to try to identify and better define the world we live in, especially given the ever-changing conditions in our society. Nowadays, the term of globalization has come to impact not only the economic structures of global trade or interconnections at the level of hemispheres, but also it defines social interactions, political attitudes and in essence all elements that make up the global society.
Thesis Undergraduate
Bartolomé de Las Casas as an early human rights activist
This paper examines the life and work of Bartoleme de Las Casas, whom may be considered as an early human rights activist within the Church during the days of Spanish colonization of the New World. His writings are noted for their passionate defense of the Indian--but also for their exaggerated notion of Spanish violence.
Research Paper Doctorate
Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology: bridging nature and behavior
Traditionally, researchers in various fields of study have generally limited investigations to their area of expertise. Social scientists attend to prescribed areas such as memory, deviance, and microeconomics.
Essay Undergraduate
Risk management and mitigation strategies in software development life cycles
A Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a series of steps or processes that are undertaken to develop a software product. In general, the activities or processes include gathering the requirements, design,…
Paper Doctorate
Williams-Sonoma's fragmented multichannel strategy and integration challenges
During the timeframe of the case study, Williams-Sonoma is creating a multi-channel based business model that lacks the level of integration between online and brock-and-mortar stores to scale profitably. While the sales are increasing quickly for Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn and outlet stores, there is little evidence of online buying behavior driving in-store purchases. Worse yet, there is no indication that the high-end stores in their business are enjoying greater sales as a result of their e-comemrce sites. Without a concerted strategy to drive greater upsell and across channels, Williams-Sonoma will eventually end up being two or more companies. This is exactly why the industry they compete in is also following this growth trajectory; the attempts to focus on several segments at the same time is diluting focus on the selling cycle of customers. Retailers need to realize that the more effectively they manage the selling process both on- and offline as a single, unified strategy, the more profitable over the long-term they will be (King, Sen, Xia, 2004). The case indicates that there are fundamental shifts in how customers are choosing to shop online. The prevalence of social media is a case in point. As customers are increasingly relying on the most trusted sources of information, often their personal networks on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social networking sites, to drive their purchasing (Bernoff, J., & Li, 2008). Williams-Sonoma is not taking into account the communitization of their customer base, but rather assuming no interaction between online and offline customers. This is going to drive the company to operate as several different businesses over time. By better managing the entire purchasing process across both online and offline channels, Williams-Sonoma will gain a significant competitive advantage in the market. Today they are encouraging a bifurcated, fragmented view of their channels. By aligning online and offline strategies to a common objective or goal, the company will be able to better manage costs and predict revenue and profits more effectively. In devising and managing a multichannel strategy that involves online shopping and the potential for offline purchasing, retailers are discovering that the decision processes consumers use are changing quickly and significantly in favor of the Web as a product comparison tool (Reynolds, 2002). Williams-Sonoma will be able to unify their online and offline strategies through the more effective use of social media as well, creating a unique and highly differentiated customer experience in the process (Bernoff, J., & Li, 2008). In five years if these changes are made Williams-Sonoma will be able to challenge Amazon and other larger and more diverse competitors with a highly effective, unified e-commerce strategy that interlinks directly to their retail outlets. If they do nothing they will end up just as fragmented as the market they are competing in today, forced to eventually spin off specific retail divisions or store chains that no longer make sense for how far customers have changed in their decision-making and purchasing criteria. The bottom line is that how, where and who customers trust for information is changing much more rapidly than the Williams-Sonoma existing channel architecture and e-commerce strategies can allow for.
Research Paper Doctorate
John Brant's "Dual in the Sun" and 1980s American culture
There's a lot more to life than sports and athletic competition in the name of glory. But when a sports-focused individual is on a roll and has either achieved fame, money, and championship level victories - or is in…
Essay Doctorate
Judaism: branches, worship practices, and comparison with Christianity
Judaism (Introduction, Worship Site Review, Interview, Comparison/Contrast with Christianity)
Research Paper Doctorate
The marketing of Verona as a tourist destination online
How is the City of Verona being sold on the Internet and on the Web, and what makes the city attractive to the visitor, and what are the factors that would make him choose this city in favor of any others.
Research Paper Undergraduate
Renaissance and Baroque architecture: Michelangelo, Bernini, and Wren
Although the history of architecture dates back to very ancient times, beginning roughly in Mesopotamia, circa 4,000 B.C.E., it is during the period known as the Renaissance in which architecture truly began to…