A Narrative Architecture of Multiple Realities Emily S Yen Master of Architecture Thesis
Rhode Island School of Design
A NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE OF MULTIPLE REALITIES
A Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Masters of Architecture Degree in the Department of Architecture of the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island. Emily Yen May 2015
Approved by the Graduate Examination Committee: ________________________________________________________ Silvia Acosta, Primary Thesis Advisor, Department of Architecture ________________________________________________________ Chelsea Limbird, Secondary Thesis Advisor, Department of Architecture ________________________________________________________ Enrique Martinez, Thesis Coordinator, Department of Architecture ________________________________________________________ Laura Briggs, Department Head, Department of Architecture
at the lip of Lava Rapid on Grand Canyon’s Colorado River
Abstract
Between the tangible and the intangible lies a narrative architecture in multiplicity. It occupies worlds of physical limitations, natural processes, dreams, uncertainties. Bound by gravity, context, programmatic necessities, and expectations, its release is revealed through an experienced fiction, an amalgamated reality. When the multiplicity becomes one, the story emerges. Within, a transit hub an intersection of different speeds, three-dimensionally layered infrastructure and experience in continuous space. Within, a moment of pause a breath between past, present, and future, infinity. In pursuit of simultaneous contradictions; in total awareness and disembodiment. Nothing is absolute, but not everything is relative.
sketching by casting
Contents
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Introduction
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About Fictions and Narratives
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With Natural Processes
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In-Between Absolutism and Relativity
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Exploratory Project : A Container Thirteen Ways a Container Between Making and Drawing
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Project Study : Transit Hub Ceramic Geologies Site Series Container Series Program Series Proposed Iterations Final Iteration: Column and Canopy
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Afterthoughts
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Research
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Acknowledgements
First, an ignitor Second, a vehicle Third, a recipient-collaborator Finally, a world.
Introduction
Creating anything, for me, has always been a product of my life history, vastly different interests, things I have seen, experienced, and remembered, at times contradicting intuitions, and spontaneous and momentous decisions. It is a compilation of everything that makes me who I am, ever-changing. Imprint Architecture’s imprint on me has always been one that is intertwined with memory, story, nostalgia, anticipation, spontaneity, and intuition. Appreciating a space is directly proportional to my physical experience of it; I have never felt so strongly about numerous unvisited famous buildings as about personally experienced modest homes and locales of my life. Places gain value upon use and inhabitation, upon layered experiences, upon overlapping memories made and forgotten. It is this connection and experience, this story that drives my passion for the built environment. We study many famous precedents to garner inspiration, but only through true analysis and inhabitation can we gain an in-depth understanding of spaces and relations. My analysis of the Notre Dame du Haut (Ronchamp, France) by Le Corbusier was the closest I ever got to taking in the fullness of the chapel and its exceptional distinction despite the physical barrier of never visiting. Only through studying all of its documents from concept to realization, drawing and re-drawing by hand all of its components small and large, building and re-building those components into three-dimensional digital form, exploding the whole, categorizing the parts, evolving the process beyond realization, devolving the physicalization back into initial conception, did I begin to achieve a semblance of being in that space – it is so reverential. AXON: Hand-drafted drawing of Notre Dame du Haut by Le Corbusier
This semester-long analysis was in itself a layered experience of the building. Memories and experiences were gained through the hand, pursued through iterative operations. In this thesis process, I ask of myself: how can I embed this methodology into design so that it can be physically and intimately experienced by myself and others? How do I represent and work in a nonsequential, iterative, analytical, physical, spontaneous, intuitive manner so as to enable a layered and complex experience?
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HOME: view from my childhood bedroom Anchorage, Alaska
“As you go through the building, the scenes will change, the mood will change, the fiction will change. If they are subtle enough, then you will not think of it as fiction or a story, you will just live it as reality.” - Tadao Ando Experience Experience is such a vague word. It carries with it universal, general meanings and has no comparable succinct synonym. The following passage begins to specify my intentions regarding the type of experience I aim to create. Visitors and inhabitants alike are engaged in a simultaneous presencing in the physicality and temperament of the world in which we live and the ephemerality and fantasy of the mind in which we observe. One feeds off the other; together, they facilitate an acknowledgement of this moment. Herein lies a story with no beginning or end.The architecture awaits fulfillment and reception, complete only when the observer enters. It begins with a collaboration with the natural world to set the stage. When finally an observer arrives, it is pregnant with potentials, understandings and misunderstandings, a story ready to unravel and write itself. Observers future and observers past become part of the setting; there is no beginning and there is no end – there is only a continuance of being. When awareness of the present collapses into the future and past, when reality and fiction blend seamlessly together, when the observer can be within, and weave his/her own story instigated by this intertwining multiplicity, “experience” gains intentional specificity.
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Process Architecture cannot be fully appreciated through two-dimensional pictures; the process by which architecture is created then must reflect the multidimensionality by which we understand our surroundings. By simultaneously toggling between sketch models and drawings, allowing one analog to inspire a move in the next, the design process itself acts as an organism that evolves naturally. There are certain details that are inherently born of three-dimensional, cast thinking and there is a clarity that emerges only through rigorous and precise two-dimensional drawing. Working back and forth between varying levels of control, I hope to generate a complexity both in the actual architecture and within its many methods of representation. Finality “And there is the magic of the real, of the physical, of substance, of the things around me that I see and touch, that I smell and hear.� - Peter Zumthor Peter Zumthor conducted an interesting experiment, described in his third edition of Thinking Architecture. He returned to an inspired written passage describing the euphoric feeling of being in a square and the pleasantness infiltrating all six senses. Wondering if that feeling was simply an outflow of his state of mind and circumstantial state of psychology, he tried to evoke the same feelings by dismissing the physical surroundings that triggered that euphoria. Quickly, that past experience began fading, and he realized one thing: without the atmosphere of the square, the tangible physicality of the things around him, those feelings could not arise. To test the intended fiction, I must bring at least a fraction of the design to a concrete, built realization. Only a collection of representations drawn and made, abstract and technical, can trigger the experience I seek. Yes, cracks, gaps, and canyons will be allowed in all the project for the imagination to make it more real. In order to create a sense of narrative fiction, I must utilize the real and bring the project to a level of finish. In order to persuade myself and others of the realness of the design, I must omit certain details so our minds can fill the gap. Finality comes when finish and unfinish, control and uncontrol, reality and imagination find balance in modest subtleties.
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About Fictions and Narratives The collapse of fictional space into architecture as bound by reality is integral to enabling that occupant’s imagination, to establishing an instinctual sense of place, engaging that occupant in a thinking, being, belonging experience, evoking a visceral feeling and memory that remains, like a rhizome, long after the moment disperses.
PRECEDENT: The Weather Project, Olafur Eliasson
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OBJECT: Thesis Seminar representation of an atmosphere gained by Jean Sibelius’ Concerto No. 1 in D Minor
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About Fictions and Narratives
“When the dreamer really experieneces the word immense, he sees himself liberated from his cares and thoughts, even from his dreams. He is no longer shut up in his weight, the prisoner of his own being.� - Gaston Bachelard
There is a magic and intensity that belongs to the literary fictional world. Stories have long since invigorated our imaginations, filled our minds with fantastical possibilities, disengaged our physical beings, and empowered our motivations.This abstract world of fictions and narratives has historically been triggered by words, written or spoken. Why, then, cannot moments of architecture act as those triggers? Moment by moment, space as perceived and space as existent can be engaged in constant dialogue. Static, materialized forms become dynamic glimmers dependent on the confrontation between space and time, bringing forth an indescribable atmosphere and feeling. An ephemeral whisper of logical incomprehension and emotional solidity, this fictional space enables a metamorphic experience, appearing and disappearing like a frolicking apparition.The narrative then helps guide through that fickle fiction, grounding the transient with things and forms that hold physical relationships with each other. Fictions and narratives work in tandem as an integral aspect of built architecture. They proffer a space that necessitates two people to create: the author and the receiver-collaborator. Without an audience, music is not performed. Without a reader, words are only abstractions on a page. Without the occupant, architecture does not exist. Through this process, the arrival of an architecture that stimulates, activates, enlightens, recounts, lives, all within the continuous matrix of time.
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PROBE: front
Thesis Probe
“The word opens up the world, the work gives the world presence.” - Christian Norberg-Schulz
Enter a somewhat opaque, too subjective world of translational fiction and narrative. I re-interpreted Sibelius’ three movements of his Concerto No. 1 in D Minor onto one continuous piece of laminated Douglas Fir. What began as twodimensional personal reflections on a favored piece of music evolved into a physical, three-dimensional manifestation. The continuous imagery wove into and out of the board, assisted by brad nails and white string. The threedimensionality of the piece wrote the narrative with which to approach the fiction, drawing the eye into, out of, around, above, and below the probe, taking in details and allowing for guided interpretations of subjectivity.
PROBE: bottom detail
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With Natural Processes Allowing transparency in design for cyclical change and its uncontrollability reminds us that we are not special, and we don’t need to be. We live in the context of a larger ecological system – our architecture should reflect this connection, not strive to hide it.
PRECEDENCE: Brion Cemetery, Carlo Scarpa
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REVEALS: Experimenting with reveal through natural elements [snow].
With Natural Processes
“Beauty is one way in which truth essentially occurs as unconcealedness.” - Martin Heidegger
“Progress smells of human-centeredness” - Kevin Kelly
Man and Woman has long practiced a dominance over certain natural processes – extending the human lifespan, engineering plants and animals to our taste and economy, mimicking aspects of biology to civilize and populate harsh environments unfriendly to conservative human needs. Our architecture responds to this need for dominance, and masks that which we have not yet mastered. There are two specific types of natural processes that have been the most heavily ignored and concealed: weather’s seasonal [ir]regularities and life’s inevitable cycle. By accepting our limitations and flexing beyond circumscribed physical and mental comfort levels, we can utilize these two processes to provoke fictional space. Reveal and celebrate our varied levels of control – let loose at times and we may be pleasantly surprised by the unexpected.
OBSERVATION: Ice opportunities along a building on S. Main Street, Providence, RI
Life’s inevitable cycle is a universal truth.Typically clinical and hidden, momentous and memorialized, fiction and fantasy abound. Peek beyond the cloak, see through the future dreams and expectations, past memories and eulogies. What is left is reality: birth and death. Celebrate its starkness, modesty, and truth. Seasonal [ir]regularities necessitate shelters, too much of which transcend pastoral nostalgia, too little of which fails to protect our basic needs. Allow two-sided conversations with weather conditions through inclusion, not seclusion, but not at the compromise of function. Toe the line, illicit adrenaline and wonder, presence of mind and awareness of body. Embed in the earth, revel in all its characteristics, and mask no more. 20
GROUND: Gathered snow and ground relations: texture, reveal, accumulation
PROTECTION: Continued ground and openings, in blizzard conditions
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DRAWING: currently unfinished compilation of original design and added processes
OPENINGS: snow’s drift inside enclosed walls, and its gathering in corners
EAVES: accumulation under lower eaves and in-between spaces
ROOF: unexpected accumulation
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In-Between Absolutism and Relativity Blur the lines between discrete, typically contradictory concepts and embed meaning in the transitional, intermediate space. Energy exists most at confluences. Like whitewater’s eddy lines, the fictional space lives where water is travelling in two directions, simultaneously.
PRECEDENCE: Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright
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GRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE: looking from one building, through an exterior path, into the next
In-Between Absolutism and Relativity
“The nature of intermediate space is its ambiguity and multivalency. It does not force opposing elements into compromise or harmony; it is the key to their living and dynamic symbiosis.” - Kisho Kurokawa
Nothing is Absolute But not Everything is Relative
ENGAWA: traditional Japanese definition, under the eaves, between inside and outside
Kurokawa’s philosophy of symbiosis creates a dynamic relationship between two elements while allowing them to be in opposition. This philosophy recognizes two separate spaces but employs a third, an intermediary, engawa space of ambiguous belonging that allows a juxtaposed transition between them. Broaden the Japanese engawa to question and juxtapose dualities. Foster the intermediate, the transitional. Many architectural relationships manifest themselves in divisive, absolute manners. Inside/outside, public/private, virtual reality/ physical environment, structure/envelope/program, etc. are some examples. Similar to the multiple realities physics theory expanded upon by Schrödinger, believe one space can hold multiple functions, boundaries, and atmospheres all at the same time. It is in this simultaneity of realities that fictions and narratives begin to emerge. 28
A House of Transitions
PERSPECTIVE: sharp light forms contrasting shadows
PLANS, SECTIONS, ELEVATIONS: in context, in anticipation
a house for three: a florist, her husband, her unborn child, her aging mother a house embedded in context narrating an ordinary extraordinary story of three lives overlapping and sliding juxtaposed, separated, integrated an architecture rooted in the earth reaching towards the heavens continuous but non-linear rhythmic structure and repetition accents, a heaviness, incidentals
unconceal the hidden away, revel in natural processes, celebrate the inevitable. 29
street elevation
collapsed section
ground plan
NOTHING IS ABSOLUTE, BUT NOT EVERYTHING IS RELATIVE
A HOUSE OF TRANSITIONS 0
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Exploratory Project: A Container This project begins with words and images – visualizations of an intended atmosphere – the fictional narrative. These images are made in tandem with material castings – the abstracted expression contrasted with material limitations and properties. Working this way, each piece of the puzzle affects another, and simultaneously become more defined at all scales, in all abstractions. Here, I discover a working process, beginning to answer questions of how: How to create an accessible fiction? How to integrate realities like material properties into a fictional creation? How to work in moments and details as well as the whole?
SKETCH CAST: finding inspiration through process
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Exploratory Project : A Container
“ At dawn I came to know my work it can be in a thousand different ways but only just one. Its place between perception and freedom. Its path to identify its motive, necessity. Its varied ending.� - Eduardo Chillida Neither here nor there, Everywhere and nowhere. Then, now and forever, The container awaits. Between the tangibles of reality and the intangibles of imagination lies a container in transition. Between material unpredictability and drawn intention lies a process that evolves towards informed ambiguity. The impetus behind this series of exploratory works is the making of an engawa space that collaborates with natural processes and weather elements to create a fictional narrative. Beginning with words and images to define that narrative, the project solidified through material translation, then integration back into drawings. Moving between drawing, casting, photography, and writing, I discover opportunities and varying levels of control. Ultimately, various levels and forms of engawa are tested in studio and in weather.
CASTINGS: moments of abstraction
A level of abstraction is necessary in this exploratory work. There is no site and there is no program. There is simply an investigation of architectural forms, their geometrical origins, material responses, and the play of rhythm and repetition versus mass, parts versus the whole.
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Thirteen Ways a Container Fairy Tales Competition 2015 Submission
SKETCHES: simultaneously sketching in space and words
“An ‘invisible space’ does not become visible unless it is consciously experienced and contemplated. The creation of space [thus should be], in a sense, entrusted to others [the users and observers].” - Takefumi Aida Working between writing and drawing simultaneously influences both and strenghtens both. The container sits, awaiting occupation, awaiting purpose, at the same time empty and full. The container is constantly changing, but it is never so different. This adaptation of Wallace Stevens’ poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” examines a sense of oneness in multiplicity, blending earth and sky, inside and outside, reality and anticipation. An embodiment of everything around it, inside it, expected of it, the container is.
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I Among twenty lands and oceans, The only living thing Was the container. II I was of three minds, Earth, Sky, Horizon In which the container is.
III The leaves whirled in the autumn winds. Over and through the container, a seasonal pantomime. IV A tree and a man Are one. A tree and a man and a container Are one. V I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of details Or the beauty of the whole, The container emerging Or just after.
VI Shapes held space Hinting at play. Minds shadows Danced them, to and fro. The mood Inhabited the container In intangible aura. VII O authors and makers, Why do you imagine Martian pods? Do you not see how the container Anticipates the dreams, hopes, and fantasies Of the people about you?
VIII I know perfect geometry And living, logical rhythms; But I know, too, That a fiction is involved In the container I know. IX When the container ebbs away, It marks the edge Of one of many circles.
X At the sight of containers Eternal homes for men, The end approaches And we cry sharply running. XI He slowed at the ground’s holes Ominous in their suggestion. Once, a fear pierced him, In that he mistook A glimpse of menace For the inevitable truth of containers.
XII The river is moving. Life continues and the container is. XIII It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The container waited At horizon’s end.
Between Making and Drawing
SKETCH: plan on river site
Beginning to concretize the elements drawn and written in Thirteen Ways a Container is a series of plaster casts that range from a more literal translation to the more abstract. Each iteration plays with different expressions of rhythm, structure, layers, and material integrity. Modeling in plaster lends simultaneous levels of spontaneity, discovery, and intentional control. The created forms and drawn geometries are made, and plaster, in various stages of fluidity, is poured in parts to achieve the desired complexity/simplicity. It is integral, in the effort to highlight and utilize natural processes in creating experiences, to understand how to work with them even on the smaller 1:1 scale. Plaster is one such material that allows this close relationship. Its ability to be controlled and unpredictability (bursting from the mold due to its weight, inexact fluidity, rate of curing) are what makes the translation from drawing to making to drawing so rich. All modeled iterations began with a drawing – a drawing that evolved as the model was poured in parts.
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CAST SERIES 1: a more literal interpretation and compilation of elements seen in Thirteen Ways a Container
CAST DETAILS: rhythm, slots, planes, transparency, age, process
CAST ENGAWA: interior / exterior / circulation / protection
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CAST SPACE: overlapping, shared intersecting spaces
CAST TEXTURE: utilizing plaster’s gravitational process to build texture
CAST IMAGINATION: form and intersion, projection and realization
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CAST SERIES 2 DRAWING: finished after the cast, incorporating incidental elements into intentional design
CAST SERIES 2: One level abstracted from the Cast Series 1, holding space and cantilever; allowing material properties to express themselves
material limitation to inspiration from incidental to intentional between drawing and making
CAST SERIES 3: one more level of abstraction from Cast Series 2 with more intention in recreating moments of material expression
Project Study : Transit Hub Through making, writing, and drawing, I am finding a process by which the project approaches solidity – in concept and in detail. What can never be lost, however, is a certain ambiguity, ability to read multiple realities in the same event. A transit hub sited in specific geologic and climactic conditions is the perfect opportunity with which to explore the intermediary between inside/outside, fiction/reality, multiplicity/oneness.
DRAWING: a part of the container series, defy
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Project Study : Transit Hub
SITE FORCES The created site holds conditions that exist on earth – conditions chosen for their universality and opportunities to further the thesis concept. The site contains cliff, a bank, a river. It undergoes all four seasons, receiving sun, wind, rain, and snow forces. CONTAINER COMPONENTS The container is caught between earth and air – the ultimate intermediary between the under and above ground. It works as a filter, moving elements and people alike through itself. Integral to its formation is the transitory, in-between space where intentional moments are emphasized in defiance and awareness of reality. PROGRAMMATIC PRINCIPLES The chosen program hosts three subway lines – it is at their intersections that the container exists. Its primary function is to circulate people into, between, and through all hours of the day, every day of the year. There is an integral moment of pause, of waiting, of heightened awareness, caught in the flurry of movement where the container comes alive at a standstill. DRAWING SERIES: site, container, and program explorations in abstraction
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Ceramic Geologies
CLAY: in response to air and time
From plaster to clay, I learn to control each material in intentional ways, but they teach and inspire me in return. Both contain material properties that rely on natural processes. With plaster, I worked with fluid dynamics, gravity, and mass. With clay, I collaborate with sand, water, gravity, and air. Both plaster and clay are time-sensitive materials that change, perhaps beyond what is anticipated. The use of these materials help me bring natural processes into my design process as well as my intended experiences. With clay, I allowed it to express its natural state as much as possible – holding a close relationship with gravity. Pressure from my hand and my tool contours its shape, and it begins to build up in geological fashion. The creation of openings from the stacking and layering method highlights gravity’s potency; the softer clay sags under its own weight. Only in waiting and patience can the openings be built layer by layer, all the while expressing and remembering that time through sag. Clay belies the way in which materials respond to earth’s gravity. It is a reflection both of site and container, and the connection between the two. 55
CLAY SERIES: layering and finding overlaps droops, nooks, and bulges
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Defining Site
CONNECTION - between sky, earth bound and grounded, still reaching up at light’s origin ACCEPTANCE - not domination, collaboration a necessary other to work with, not against, through, or around A preliminary definition of site is defined by acting geological forces from which I draw inspiration: layering, erosion, expansion, and compression. However, site is not divorced from container – its forces are also a part of the container’s formulation. The container’s relationship with site is one of connection and acceptance, embracing and embedding site’s forces as well as holding its own identity. The site contains a bank, a cliff, a river. Its geography is based on a real world place that is quite familiar to me. It undergoes all four seasons, receiving sun, wind, rain, and snow forces. The creation of site begins with those base components, facts, and statistics, and evolves through my own making in materials and analytical drawings. It is politically ambiguous; emphasis is placed on an abstraction of place, program, container, and the connection between all three. It is climactically and geologically specific; emphasis is placed on the allowance of natural forces into structure. 59
LAYER stack heap build press grow
ERODE carve cut flow dissolve dissipate
EXPAND stretch crack tension swell collapse
COMPRESS push bulge thrust fold mound
EMBED accept embrace surround absorb contain
DeďŹ ning Container
TRANSITION - meaning at confluences nothing is absolute, but not everything is relative FICTION - beyond the tangible ephemeral moments of a world unreal, triggered by the very real
The container itself is an engawa, a transitional space between inside and outside, program and site, movement and standstill. The question asked of this container is the relevancy of its own identity with relation to all the forces living within it. Its own identity and language comes from structural logic, engawa spaces, and a porosity between material expression and atmospheric defiance of the tangible. It both embraces and contradicts tectonics found in site. It maintains the integrity of spatial and structural demands made from program. It respects conventions of environmental protection, universal accessibility, and responsibilities to the public. There exist certain limitations the container needs to respect. Despite, and also in collaboration with, these limitations, the container will foster a fictional undercurrent. Non-sequential, multiple realities will exist within these parameters; upheld in all spaces and places made within this architecture. 65
HOLD Before, after, and during, the container holds, gathers, and releases.
FILTER Between, an intermediary of site and program. Itself an entity, also defined by surroundings. Into, out of, and through, elements and people. Absorb and project, influence and be influenced, the perfect two-way street.
OVERLAP Above and below, the layering of spaces. An engawa of transitions.
FLOW Around, surround, the flow, a circulation. Intentional intuition a freely guided movement.
DEFY Beyond, in defiance, the container hovers. A test of knowledge an experience unreal. Grounded in reality Released through intangibles. A locator in this/that time and place. Gathered and released, the container holds, Before, after, and during.
Defining Program
KINETICISM – still things move stand, yet the universe continues to revolve and orbit
Movement persists, into, out of, through, and within the container. People are constantly, consistently kinetic. The container stands still; still things move. This is a public transit hub – an interconnection of three subway lines. Open to the entire public, it sees people at all hours, every day. It is a part of their everyday lives – they get to know this place like their homes. Oftentimes habit can become robotic, a repetition of the same events that pauses time in its undifferentiated monotony. Outside, the earth continues to turn and the moon continues to revolve.Time hasn’t been paused, but skipped. A familiar collection of sounds, sights, and smells, change is noticed. To highlight change, create moments of distinction within a permanent, fixed structure. That which does not move can be kinetic. In the hurry, flurry, and persistent focus on the future, here is an opportunity to stop. Wait. Be aware of the now. 71
EMBED Below, the earth a stillness in the air. Darkness encompass infinity, eternity. Above, the sky its winds whispering. Lights and awareness, falling weather trespassing.
INTERSECT Between A and B, C and D, E and F, an intersection. A pause in transition, everything’s a change.
TIME Inside, outside, time continues. 24/7, 365, 4 seasons. Together we grow evolve and integrate. Fall and spring up, we are one.
WAIT Within, a gift this moment of waiting. Nowhere to go, nothing to do, for now, I wait.
AWARE Potentiality, anticipation, a full awareness of surroundings. Wandering eyes, keen ears, senses heightened. For now, I wait. ... ...
Proposed Iterations
After site, program, and container in words and images, combining a certain realism and narrative atmosphere in each take, the hardest and ultimate test is compiling those findings into an architectural proposal - maintaining the fiction while infusing technical, environmental, and programmatic realities. These compiled iterations propose to integrate the universal realities of earth’s environment: water, light, and air, with the universal realities of architecture’s constraints: structure, enclosure, material, and program in order to facilitate that specific experience that I have been exploring in various related components.
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DRAWN COMPILATION 01: searching through the site, program, and container series to compile everything into a first attempt at a cohesive architectural proposal
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CLAY + PLASTER: continuing to work in clay and plaster, building from drawn forms and site processes
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DRAWN COMPILATION 02: section and perspective compilation in tandem with exploratory site and massing models
CARDBOARD MODEL: layered and continuous space, with transparency , enclosure, and perforation studies in their light conditions and effects
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CARDBOARD MODEL : BANK ENTRANCE
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CARDBOARD MODEL : CLIFF ENTRANCE
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Final Iterations
DRAWN COMPILATION 03: existent in its parts simultaneously with its whole, the proposal is represented in the same way it was conceived - in a compilation of perspectives, whole plans, whole sections, and section details
COLUMN AND CANOPY The final iteration is a closer study of the structural canopy and column connections to a specific experience of blurring the then and now, inside and outside.A network of cast-in-place concrete beams are designed for an ideal depth and width, limiting the maximum span and conjuring layers of canopies both supporting the structural demands of the transit hub as well as a semblance of the light qualities available under a dense forest. The column as a gathering place - conceived as water collector and revealer, captures rain and courses it from roof to earth. Upon rainfall, depending on its heaviness, the rain emerges within allocated carvings. It might collect in deeper geometries, waiting to evaporate more slowly, or simply wash and deepen the concrete grounds’ coloring. 85
PLAN SERIES: structural canopy and light studies in layers
COLUMN-ROOF discreet perforations, upon slight slopes, catching rainfall
COLUMN-FLOOR-1 water meant to pool and continue to flow through the column, as controlled by tiny perforations and the natural rain force
COLUMN-STRUCTURE simple column to canopy connection - sitting atop and supporting below, connected by the hollow core through all
COLUMN-FLOOR-2 the final gathering of rain, flows from mid-level concourse to lowest concourse, connecting both physically and experientially
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CAST COLUMN MODEL cast in 1/2” = 1’-0” scale, the column detail studied method of making, material limitations, and necessary dimensions and geometries in relation to the proposed canopy
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RENDERED PERSPECTIVE: caught between canopies, modes of circulation - stairs, escalators, walking paths, and trains
CORE SECTION MODEL canopy above and canopy below, supported by spread columns inversed according to structural need and experience
CORE SECTION MODEL modeled light and structure study, this core section encapsulates a portion of each element: canopy, column, and windcatching tower, and builds relations between all three in terms of the tangible and intangible
CORE SECTION MODEL: final rainfall encatchment waterfall, connective slot to the container below, supported by columns revealing and pooling the rainwater
RENDERED PERSPECTIVE: at the bottom-most platform, experiencing the final rainfall into the embedded container below, a sliver of light dancing from the roof opening above
CORE SECTION MODEL: column in detail, with floor carvings and cascading slopes, as seen in three different light conditions
CORE SECTION MODEL: mid-level access from bank walking amongst the canopies and columns
CORE SECTION MODEL: bottom level canopy and cascading slopes within the steps
“No menace in darkness, The inevitable truth of containers” 93
Thirteen Ways a Container, Revised what began with a poem, now ends in a poem This revised adaptation of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” encapsulates this semester’s project ambitions, this year’s core beliefs, and an impetus for future work I Across twenty lands and oceans, The only moving thing Was the container.
VII O authors and makers, Why do you imagine Martian pods? Do you not see how the container Needs the gravity, structure, materiality To forge those dreams, hopes, and fantasies?
II Among three elevations, Cliff, Bank, River, The container is. III The leaves whirled in the autumn winds. Air caught in a tower, coursed through the container, a seasonal pantomime. IV A tree and a man Are one. A tree and a man and a container Are one. When geometry ebbs away, It marks the edge Of one of many circles.
VIII I know limitations And living, logical rhythms; But I know, too, That an untamed fiction is involved In this container. IX The traveler - collaborator arrives, Marking the edge Of one of many circles. X Within the container, Movement paces differently. In rhythms of train tracks and escalators and stairs and people We wait.
V I do not know which to prefer, The presence of details Or the aura of the whole, The water emerging Or just after.
XI He slowed at the tunnel’s hole Ominous in its suggestion, But into its mouth he raced. No menace in darkness, The inevitable truth of containers.
VI Shadows hold space Hinting at play. Light slices through the darkness Dancing to and fro. Canopies and columns, Inhabited the container In intangible exteriority.
XII The river is moving. Time continues and the container is. XIII It was evening all afternoon. It is coming And it is going to come. The container waited At horizon’s end.
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FINAL REVIEW SET-UP at Woods-Gerry Gallery, Rhode Island School of Design May 17th, 2015
Afterthoughts
Thesis began as a most lofty idea - we now embark upon a momentous periods of our professional lives - this was to be the most difficult, soulsearching, exciting, energetic, conceptual, theoretical, year, after which we become “masters.� This past year did not disappoint. What began as ideal and lofty quickly became physical and mental hardship, a struggle to define, redefine, and re-re-define our interests. I have enjoyed every second. Process and Reflection This past year has not been about proposing a finished project, though I had intended that level of completeness at the start. I have instead found a method of working by which to incorporate the many goals, ambitions, concepts, and demands that I believe all architecture needs. Between drawing, making, writing, photographing, and mostly limiting myself to an 11x17 format, I have found a way of thinking simultaneously in different scales, various levels of abstraction, and methods of representation. I have learned how to communicate, through a collection of the things I made, the desired atmosphere and experience I set out to project. In the end, I was able to convey those indescribable intangibles and atmosphere that were so difficult to define in the beginning. However, to really fulfill the intention of the thesis I set for myself, these intangibles and atmospheres need to be accompanied by tests and measurements. I have arrived at a point where I have enough to test, to model and bring into weather elements to observe, like I did six months ago with the smaller container project but have not yet done so. It is in this observation that the design comes alive, and evolves based on not only anticipated weather interactions, but unanticipated reactions. To speak of the poeticism of light, water, and air and the atmospheres created by them without measurement weakens my very belief that narrative, fictional architecture necessitates reality to exist in its strongest form. I believe, more than ever, in the integration of reality and fiction to create this atmosphere: a presence of mind simultaneous with disembodied dreaming.
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Findings I have learned the kinds of specific experiences that are important to me and how to represent and see them through architectural elements and universal realities - structure, enclosure, material, and program. I have presented in this book a first iteration of how those experiences and narratives might embody themselves in elements and components of a transit hub proposal, but that is only a first of many iterations. My last iteration of the project proposal is not the final iteration. Where I ended is in no way a culmination of the interests and beliefs I have explored and set forth in the past year. It is the beginning of something that I can now base better measurements and tests, more iterations and future projects. Most importantly, it is a way of seeing architectural elements like columns, structural slabs, and openings as more than the technical necessities they are. It is a way of seeing weather elements like rain, snow, and wind as more than something from which to mentally and physically insulate ourselves. This different way of seeing can and will percolate through all future projects, to some degree. and Beyond... Regardless of what the future holds, this year has been instrumental in learning more about myself and my abilities. I am thankful for the time spent selfishly pursuing exactly what I wanted to learn and make, on a course set for myself, being guided by advisors, critics, and classmates who had nothing but my best interests at heart. I believe that this thesis warrants further study and exploration - a culmination that is in fact a more comprehensive representation of the abstract. I am optimistic that the work done this year, formatted within the confines of this book, is just a part one of many more tomes to come. Here’s to future collaboration with more colleagues both within and outside of the discipline of architecture - in pursuit of a fiction as told by reality.
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I believe... in the revealing and celebration of natural processes in the acceptance and thoughtfulness of death and destruction in architecture and society in the embodiment of fiction through all scales of detail in the creation of “otherly� atmosphere in all projects in the importance of narrative in the integration of inside/outside in the establishment of awareness of present in the triggering of rememberence of past in the encouragement to ponder the future in the design of human experience over and through all in the willingness to play and experiment, happy accidents through intention in the value of simultaneous contradictions, where one thing is itself and many others; program is public, private, and in-between; enclosure holds interior and exterior conditions; material constrains and expands the imagination; design is selfish and generous, technical and fictional, nonsequential narrative and straightforward in the need to design for a multiplicity of demands both abstract and technical, small and large, in all projects, everywhere
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having survived the meat of Lava Rapid on Grand Canyon’s Colorado River, looking towards the runout
Research
Readings Aida, Takefumi – Buildings and Projects; Princeton Architectural Press, 1996 Auping, Michael – Seven Interviews with Tadao Ando; Modern Art Museum, 2002 Bachelard, Gaston – The Poetics of Space; Beacon Press, 1994 Balon, Hilary – New York’s Pennsylvania Stations; Norton, 2002 Benedikt, Michael – “For an Architecture of Reality”; Lumen Books, 1992 Butler, Cornelia, de Zegher, Catherine – On Line: Drawing through the Twentieth Century; MoMA NY, 2010 Coates, Nigel and AD Magazine – “Narrative Architecture”; Academy Press, 2012 Coleman, Alexander – Collected Poems: Jorge Luis Borges; Penguin Books, 2000 Darden, Douglas – Condemned Buildings; Chronicle Books, LLC, 1993 Heidegger, Martin – “The Origin of the Work of Art” from Basic Writings; Harper Classics, 2008 Hurley, Andrew – Collected Fictions: Jorge Luis Borges; Penguin Books, 1999 Interborough Transit Company – The New York subway : its construction and equipment; Fordham University Press, 1991 Kelly, Kevin – Out of Control; Basic Books, 1995 Kulper, Amy – “Ropes and Rules: Disciplining the Architectural Thesis”; RISD Lecture Handout, 2014 Kurokawa, Kisho – “Each One a Hero” from The Philosophy of Symbiosis; Kisho Kurokawa Architects, 2006 McCarter, Robert – Carlo Scarpa; Phaidon Press, 2013 Middleton, William D. – Grand Central, the World’s Greatest Railway Terminal; Golden West Books, 1977 Spiller, Neil and AD Magazine – “Drawing + Architecture”; Academy Press, 2013 Thoreau, Henry David – Walden, or Life in the Woods; Electronic Classics Series, 2013 Tsien, Billie and Moran, Michael – Work Life; Monacelli Press, 2000 Zumthor, Peter – Thinking Architecture; Birkhauser GmbH, Basel, 2010
Project Precedents 111 Lincoln Parking Garage, Herzog & de Meuron – Miami Beach, FL 2010 Awaji Yumebutai, Tadao Ando – Awaji Islands, Japan 2000 Brion Cemetery, Carlo Scarpa – Altivole, Italy 1968 Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright – Mill Run, PA 1964 Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Carlo Scarpa – Venice, Italy 1963 “Fosteritos” Metro System, Norman Foster & Partners – Bilbao, Spain 1995, 2004 Fulton Center Station, Arup & Grimshaw – NYC, NY 2014 Oxygen House, Douglas Darden – (unbuilt) Frenchman’s Bend, MS 1998 Twin Stations, sporaarchitects – Budapest, Hungary, 2014
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Acknowledgements
A sincere thank you to all the teachers, professors, and people in my life who instilled in me a confidence, stubbornness, and modesty. Professors, mentors, and advisors Karolina Kawiaka and Silvia Acosta have especially helped me discover and pursue this passion and guided me towards more maturity, complexity, and flexibility. Thanks to my mom, who has supported me in this long-lasting academic fervor and to my wonderful friends who have provided their ears, time, energy, and interest in both my loquacity and reticence to speak, show, and be a part of my work.
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2015