Stereo-tectonic choreography:  A sculptural [re]surfacing of an enigmatic genius loci

Chames, Gabriel

Stereo-tectonic choreography: A sculptural [re]surfacing of an enigmatic genius loci

Thesis / Dissertation

2024

Abstract

This inquiry draws on architectural pieces - collages and models - that explore the tactile and spatial world conceptually. I have a broad interest in the mechanical world and the processes of assembling and disassembling. The making of the pieces and my fascination with the medium is manifested through this. Photography, physical modelling and drawing serve as a conceptual generative methods to explore architectural space, materiality and form. It is this curiosity developed through my hands and the material that has served as a tooling in uncovering and sourcing intuitive work - the binary rationale of which lies in a knowing of possible applications and configurations. These intrinsic connections to material, and its expansive capacity for an ordered logic are underpinnings of a thread that serves to clarify and give value to sculpture and form as generative design entities. Identifying a place and praxis where these processes coalesce - the ground, the stereotomic and the tectonic - offer measures for a siting, constructional and architectural syntax. In denoting the earth underfoot as the chromatic medium through which this inquiry embeds and travels , the nature of the groundline is tested as a dynamic entity - a mark that separates the built and the natural - but also one that receives, permits and mediates spatial relations between human , space, site, memory and atmosphere. Herein a sensorial and optic-haptic architecture is seeded, and the growth of its form traced and developed through phenomena of the physical and metaphysical. The basis for this experiential architecture, manifests out of the need to exalt the Strand Street Quarry site in which it is conceptualised. The program emerges as exhibitive, a response toward the barren and forgotten natural landscape , in a proposition that serves to uncover and permit the spirit of the current and former place in space. A museum for the City frames the architectural layer, and forms the agent surface through which a rich soicial and public engagement with the site can ensue.

Keywords

Architecture, Planning and Geomatics

Reference:

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Masters

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