Implacing the Body

Abstract

I want to start with the idea that any place is saturated with qualities and by placing architecture within any context is to re-interpret and re-script the experience of the environment. In my thesis I sought opportunities to re-engage architecture with its surroundings, thereby, allowing new kinds of experiences to emerge. These experiences, which are perceived by the body, are at the crux of this investigation. Therefore, this thesis investigates the seam between the body and architecture, and the architecture and the environment. Place is the bounds of our physical and mental world. It is composed of two edges, the near edge or the skin and the far edge or the horizon, the cityscape. How do we use our body to understand epistemological place? Can an act of search(ing), reveal(ing), and release(ing) begin to establish new connections to place? Can multiple architectural insertions enliven the experience of the city? By focusing on multiple ambivalent and residual spaces, this thesis will seek to re-script our understanding of the context within Detroit. The investigation will happen between the seam of the body and architecture. It will be a phenomenological approach into urban design. It will seek and explore a dialogue between the event and insertion. It will allow for events to occur that may amplify a sense of being-in-the world through the body and movement. The architecture may be a temporal place of shelter, protection, a place to interact either socially or mentally. It will be the opportunity for the possibility of collision of two bodies, a place to allow streams of movement from one place to the next and act as a mediation device. It will offer a chance of reflection or rest to occur and refocus on pockets of activity. It may funnel people through a brief exchange at a place before they move on. Seven site circumstances situate this investigation in the Midtown district. These site circumstances operate as insertions into the given landscape. The idea of the insertions is to initiate cycles of activity and re-activity between the existing context and the new inserted spaces. By importing a foreign element I seized the opportunity to foreground an embedded hidden quality and allow it to become visible through the relationship with the proposed site circumstance. The site circumstance by their nature, creates new thresholds between themselves and the city. Embedded within them is a given reciprocity that can diminish physical and conceptual separations between the cityscape and the architecture. By virtue of their scale and program they will act more as found objects than as destinations. The intent of the insertions is to re-weave the experience of the city.