the plural of thesis is theses
I accidentally stumbled upon a Blogger from 2010 where my six thesis classmates and our advisor discussed the meaning of a thesis. Eleven years later, I have no memory of this exchange or many of the ideas that consumed me at the time. It was the summer before we began our thesis - before our fifth year at Virginia Tech which we would spend on a single project, a single idea. Working on my thesis was the most formative experience of my design career and I still treasure the experience. I constantly use tools and concepts I developed during the process. My classmates were (and I’m sure still are) brilliant. Though the discussion may be niche, I enjoyed reliving the discourse that seems to have faded during the transition from academic to professional design work.
During this discussion, August 2010, I said “my thesis is looking at the moral responsibility of architecture to preserving memory (individual, community, national, and global)”.
My thesis statement in May 2011 was “Architecture is the bridge between the material and spiritual. A physical space can be made sacred, without any association with faith or religion, by architectural form that conveys the qualities of dreams, memories, and fantasy.”
The project was a memorial on campus for the victims of the shooting that happened on campus my freshman year on April 16th, 2007.
In case you’re interested, here is my thesis book: