MASTER'S OF ARCHITECTURE THESIS
Camiño As Home
Redefining home for the sojourner through the haptic
Camiño de Santiago / Santiago de Compostela, Spain
“The house is a mental device and filter as much as it is a protection for our fragile bodies. It houses our dreams and fantasies, memories and desires, fears and whishes in addition to facilitating the physical acts of dwelling. Dwelling is an exchange and fusion; as I settle in a space, the space settles in me and it turns into an ingredient of my sense of self"
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Pallasmaa, Juhanni. “Preface”. Nesting: Body, Dwelling, Mind
Among the number of dwellings that hold meaning in our lives, the home reconciles with our strongest memories and structures our deepest architectural experiences. It offers us retreat from the public realm in its immediacy within a place as well as within its intimacy and privacy. Within its context, the notion of the haptic lies innate, structuring personal identity and fostering direct user experiences. The fondest recollections related to the home are those that integrate whole-body, sensory experiences. As Peter Zumthor recalls his memories of home, he exemplifies the richness of hapticity, stating:
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“Now I feel like going on and talking about the door handles which came after the handle on my aunt’s garden gate, about the ground and the floors, about the soft asphalt warmed by the sun, about the paving stones covered with chestnut leaves in the autumn, and about all the doors which closed in such different ways, one replete and dignified, another with a thin, cheap clatter, other hard, implacable and intimidating...”
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Zumthor, Peter, Maureen Oberli-Turner, and Catherine Schelbert. 2006.
Thinking Architecture. Basel: Birkhäuser.
As most individuals are exposed to multiple opportunities to call more than one dwelling place their home, I am compelled to look beyond the physical and static notion of the house, challenging preconceived notions of its permanence through the lens of temporality. In establishing el Camiño de Santiago as the chosen site for my explorations, I investigate how the idea of home can begin to take on deeper ideas — those of temporality and those of the journey. This thesis seeks to explore how the haptic can be integrated in order to heighten the experience of the home that is the path, the camiño, for the pilgrims.
PROCESS
Experiential Analysis // The Journey and The Walk
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Understanding the camino’s temporality through the phenomenological experiences of walking establishes underlying themes of movement, dynamism, and rhythm. Through this cyclic activity that is the consummation of each day for the pilgrim, an active cadence and regularity is manifested as one progresses on the camino. Precedent analysis allows for opportunities to further investigate the objective qualities of the walk.
01 Marcel Duchamp
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912)
02 Etienne-Jules Marey
Man Walking (1890-1891)
03 Eadweard Mybridge
A Man Walking (1887)
Understanding Hapticity // Plaster Cast Models
To better understand the qualities of hapticity, I utilized plaster cast modeling as a methodology to investigate notions of texture, tactility, weight, and light. These investigations allowed for an understanding of the considerations to apply within the details of my design - how can the ground surface and quality of light, for example, beckon to draw the pilgrim into a space, heightening awareness and responding to the cyclic nature of his walk?
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Preliminary Site Analysis
Site investigations throughout my process take form primarily through work in model and drawings. Explorations involve analysis of existing conditions and geometries, topography and slope, and sectional relationships within the site. Gaining a holistic understanding of the site heavily influenced the preliminary formal organizations of my design intervention along the camino.
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Preliminary Site Analysis Models 1:100 scale
FINAL WORKS
The proposed intervention embodies the shelter that is the physical, temporary home, the albergue, for the pilgrims during their overnight stays along the path. It acknowledges the substantial needs of eating, sleeping, and contemplation in its spatial organization that presents the program immediately on being present at the core, the hearth. Growing from the existing village of San Marcos through long embedded gestures and gradually tying back to rejoin the camino, the structure literally becomes of the path, establishing itself as a true and literal part of the journey. Ultimately, it is in recognizing qualities of light, weight, rhythm, and material in relation to the walking dynamic innate to the pilgrim, that the haptic manifests itself to heighten the experience within the spaces.
01 / The pilgrim approaching the hearth
02 / The pilgrim seeking a meal
03 / The pilgrim seeking rest
04 / The pilgrim seeking contemplation
Final Site Plan 1:500 scale
Final Site Model 1:100 scale