SENSESCAPE

Team: Aisha Cheema, Brenna Bierman, Andrew King, and Zachary Slonsky

Role: conceptual, formal, programmatic, and aesthetic development

Critics: Sandhya Kochar and Dow Kimbrell Spring 2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qCwfhsFXdc&feature=youtu.be

The Sensescape is a new typology that rejects the conditions of contention embedded within quotidian urbanity, and proposes new urbanisms as sense dérives. Alternative to the linear sequencing of space found in financially efficient architectural promenades, the sensescape produces a field of zones with fluxuating and competing hierarchies. Formal output is designed to produce phenomenological contrasts with adjacencies, and these transitory contrasts are controlled through specific articulations of the edge. The edge in this project becomes the tool for mediating tensions across disparate formal, material, and programmatic inputs. Liminal spaces contrive unique juxtapositions, eliciting sensations and in turn, fostering lucidity.

The typology choreographs an interactive dance between Bathhouses, Domes, Dutch Tile, Curtains, Leather, Piles, Plastic, Laundromats, Staircases, Gardens, Pools, Club Scenes, and more, producing an anarcho-ritualized space of leisure.

This holds revolutionary potential, a mere escape is translated into a subcultural institutionalization. Upon arrival, the individual’s labor-to-live headspace, a byproduct of the existing economic model, undergoes a radical transformation to a live-to-leisure embodiment, reinforcing the Sensescape’s experimental model of social play and humanistic exploration. The meta-aestheticization of the proposal characterizes a project that is self-aware in its idealization. We posit the Sensescape as a provocation; it's a call for an exodus.

A planar or linear intrusion penetrates a zone, producing a threshold.

Superimposition

Two zones operate simulataneously, overlapping program, material, and/or form.

A zone produces a linear or planar break, shifting to produce openings or straight lines.

Zones trade occupany with one another, trading tensions as one passes this edge.

II. LANDSCAPE OBLIQUE

The physical reality of the Sensescape is contingient on local spatial and scalar conditions. The Sensescape is more than anyone of these following realities; its primary identity is as a method for space making. In order to illustrate the characteristics elicited by this design method, four possible manifestations are explored.

II. Infinite Landscape -

How does the sensescape produce planimetric organizations? The landscape illustrates the overlaps and slippages that occur between systems in pluralistic space.

III. Low-Rise Building -

What are the sensescape's sectional attitudes? The Low-Rise explores how to blend the edge while producing vertical density

I. PavilionThe hardest letter to write is a short one. The pavilion shows the sensescape in its most reduced form. Domes close space, piles drive circulation and section, program drifts across borders.

IV. Infinite TowerImagine a vertical city with 300,000 residents. How do you accomodate civic programming vertically? This is an exercise in scale, and of sensescaping from within a metastructure.

I. PAVILION AXONOMETRIC

Formal Elements :

Pools -

Learning from the social rituals induced within Islamic Hammam and California's queer bath culture, we utilize the pool as a means of producing social situations, slowing time and altering body temperatures.

Curtains -

Like millions of little theatres, curtains backdrop zones and produce interiors. They encourage a boundary without rigidly enforcing it. Curtains are used to create fluid poches, dampen sound, and produce verticality.

Domes -

These occasionally monolithic outcrops work well to distinguish zones within crowded fields of content. They capture space, producing moments of interiority. Their mass cools the air and produces echoes.

Piles -

These bulbous forms control the circulation across the sensescape without producing organizing datums. They mediate sectional differences and scalar shifts, all the while producing local zones themselves.

Inhabitants pass through platforms of program as they circulate through the tower. Grand staircases may lead to a bath, curtains flow across gardens, the cavespace of a dome shelters a club, laundrymat steam blows plumes of heat atop a pool surface.

Poche is utilized for social rest space. The material thickness dampens the sound emanating from around these zones. Here, inhabitants can resign from the stimuli of the outside, exiting when ready to continue their journey up, or down.

Outward facing domes push space to the facade of the tower. Inward facing domes shelter occupants from the outside's gaze. The former houses performative progams, acting as a stage set. The latter promotes introspective rituals.

The Sensescape isn't so dramatic as to say any program associated with efficiency is irrelevant. Since the Tower City requires civic program, namely, spaces for the productive exhaustion of creative energy, we intregate an orthogonal system. These spaces are designed to be in service to the sensescape, not vis versa.