active-synth

distilling encountered information, images and ideas through a simple sketch or single sentence

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Landscape Therapy, Studio Finale

After five years and innumerable hours spent scribbling ideas, iterating designs, offsetting coloured lines and photoshop masking, I have completed my final architecture undergraduate studio project. I am no longer slave to my studio desk. 

The term was spent exploring a fascination of walls and landscape; the interface, tensions and potentialities between them, all towards the conception of a spa. What may have started as a formal exercise evolved into a challenging of the current discourse of built form and the natural environment. What resulted was Landscape Therapy, a thesis testing the cultivation of symbiotic relationships between landscape and architecture and their evolution over time.

nature defined by wall. wall articulated by nature

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Facade comparison of two European cities, Paris and Bruxelles.

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CITY-STORY . Bruxelles

Bruxelles is a heterogeneous, entropic, often paradoxical city, resulting from habitual urban reconstruction driven by entrepreneurial and political motives. Large scale, drastic  projects throughout history have diverted, connected, overlaid and fragmented the urban landscape into the chaotic collage it is today. 

Timeline of Urban Projects in Bruxelles

1867/ The Senne River, once the founding place and source of economy for Brussels had by the early 19th century, become nothing more than a polluted open sewer. Several infrastructural projects over sixty years redirected and covered the Senne to the point where most Brusseleers have forgotten it's existence.

19th c/ Leopold II, 'The Builder King' demolished vast residential areas for the creation of straight, broad boulevards which connected the urban fabric with the outlying landscape. Sound familiar?

1952/ The North-South Junction, a massive endeavour of urban modernization, connected the national rail network and simultaneously divided the city of Brussels.

1959/ 'Europeanization' of the city after the establishment of the European Union generated oppositions physically and socially; foreigners and inhabitants, office towers and residential blocks, wealth and poverty.

1990s/ Haphazard urban development allowed uncontrolled demolition of historically and culturally significant buildings to make way for modern construction, a process aptly named Brusselization.

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BELGIAN FACADISM

Architectural 'style' de rigeur in Brussels.

Procure a building of historical or 'vintage' aesthetic appeal.

Demolish everything but the facade, leaving a mere skeleton of what once was.

Modernize, construct a new building behind the facade of an old one.

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CITY-SYNTH

Timeline of the building of Paris

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CITY-STORY . Paris

The massive urban construction of Baron Haussmann in the 1860’s generated the image of Paris which remains to this day in our global perception of the city. When Haussmann replaced winding, congested streets with broad, treelined boulevards, he eradicated Medieval Paris of disease, filth and poverty but afflicted the modern city with unrelenting sameness. 

Over a century later, the dwarfed skyline remains largely unchanged and perfect Parisian street of the 19th century remains untouched. For a city whose visual identity was defined and ultimately limited by a single, great act, what is it’s future? If we reconsider, manipulate, reconstruct the urban fabric of Paris, would it still be Paris?

Times ‘The Sky’s The Limit’

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city-synth

The question of a city's relationship to it's history has been a reoccurring subject of conversation in the past week. On a recent trip to Paris, we discussed the global perception, urban fabric and historical influences of one of the most visited cities in the world. Having lived in Paris previously, then in Rome and now finding myself in Brussels, I have been reflecting on the innate character of the urban fabric of each, not the monuments and architectural destinations but that quotidian 'stuff' which forms the city.

The plan now is to synthesize my thoughts on each, Paris, Rome and Brussels, in the form of a city-story sketch that answers two questions:

What is the urban fabric of the city?

What is that urban fabrics relationship to it's history?

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                                 stimulant > interpretation > idea

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ACTIVE(ation)  SYNTH(esis)

Activation-synthesis theory suggests that while sleeping, foreign stimulants are interpreted using personal memories which results in a dream. 

I would infer that while conscious we operate through a similar process. Foreign stimulants are interpreted using existent personal knowledge, generating a new thought, idea or perspective. Clearly I am not a neurobiologist, psychologist or dream theorist but I am adopting this as my methodology for this blog.

Intake a barrage of information.

Interpret them through personal perspective.

Generate a single cohesive thought in the form of a single sentence or sketch.

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For more information on Hobson and McCarly's theory, look here.

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What is the point?

Recently, I was told two things about myself. The first is that I am preoccupied with complexity. I was well aware of my obsession with intricate networks, convoluted problems and intertwined tensions. The second thing complemented the first. In order to make anything of this obsession, I need to synthesize my thoughts and ideas. 

I am a talker, immersed in a profession of talkers, the architectural profession to be precise. It is an environment where the eloquence of verbal bullshitting is taught in school and an architectural syntax is impounded into your head from the first time someone utters the word banal. But the question is, what is the point beneath all of the dialect?  How do you communicate what is actually important? How do you explain that metaphysical project concept you've been obsessing over to your grandmother?

That is the goal of this endeavour. To synthesize the information, ideas and everyday things which I encounter. By distilling, contemplating and curating complexity to define  the critical point, maybe even my grandmother will understand what I am talking about.  Active-synth.

Hi grandma.