Crossing Thresholds: Blending Boundaries

Abstract

Urban boundaries exist in multiple forms. Interaction across these boundaries is typically unseen. Many forms of current architectural design reflect this isolated and individualistic feeling. Many contemporary buildings tend to be self-centered and seclude themselves from the rest of the urban environment in which they exist. One goal of the project is that the blending of boundaries will ultimately create a network of human interaction. Exploring the boundary and threshold conditions of building to ground, inside to outside, and adapting them to the surrounding context, will reveal new relationships that may connect people to the environment, community, and city. A primary interest is on the connection between natural landscape and architecture which attributes empty spaces to the conventional understanding. The project hopes to challenge this relationship to create new links in site design that embraces the user and surrounding context. These relationships will become activated by human intervention within a new system of boundary strategies. Thus, a new form of identity can be conceived that allows for a community that can be shared with others. Using thresholds to create an arrangement of spatial layers will add to this identity. Thresholds are where transformations begin and where an awareness of interaction takes place. This concept works in conjunction with blending boundary conditions. The goal of this project is to challenge our current way of designing to create a new system of unification that engages people and buildings in an urban environment. Blending urban boundaries and crossing multiple thresholds will form new relationships, but also respond to the need for individuality and identity.