Initial considerations for a thesis topic bring to mind interest in environmental design and historic preservation of buildings.  Both areas hold significant appeal.  A combined exploration of the two, immediately defending against presumed worries of a frankensteinian union, would potentially reveal a harmonious use of green technology to inspire and renew an existing building of historic value.  This is a broad starting point that threatens to remain overwhelming.  Further, selfish interest wants to create a project anew without contending with existing built form.

Inspiration.  This is the success of an architectural work.  Inspiration can vary among well being, redemption, scholarship and efficiency.  This thesis seems to demand more conceptual beginnings.  The question becomes, what to inspire?  And the answer reflects a personal need.

Fiction is a tool of detachment.  It is a consumer of the random, wandering thoughts of the everyday and a producer of the unreal - a refuge for those wandering thoughts and an opportunity for restful slumber.  As a preparatory exercise, formal interpretation of literary settings could be used to develop a project.  The use of creative writing in the form of short prose, poetry, or even a single phrase at a time, could find the user, the program, the site.  It would set the stage and invite the characters.  However, this was not intended to be an attempt at an anti-reality.

Instead, the intention is to offer a release, an outlet to detach.  This possibility draws in opportunities for resolve, meditation and abandon.  The term retreat lurks nearby.  Numerous precedents can be researched, but religious implications are to be avoided.  As with fiction, there should be no denominational bias. 

The theme is detachment.  A site, as yet, is not afforded.  The users are those fraught with sleepless nights and hoping for that real-life looking glass.