There were a lot of errors in the concept of my previous posts, both in the narrative direction and the technical application. When it comes to dealing with concepts like this, it’s very important to root your main idea in the technical. Go wild with the concept, but then try to see if it’s accomplishable within reason given a technical solution.
About three weeks ago I had driven down a road I believed I was very familiar with in the opposite direction, a way I have never gone on this particular route. And this idea of perceptual unfamiliarity became the catalyst for a train of thought that would later develop into my main project for the semester.
Above and on the left is the route that I traditionally took when driving back and forth from home to school. Then when I moved closer to school I took the same route in the opposite direction and had the strangest sensation of the unfamiliar. I wondered how the idea of familiarity really applied to people within urban areas. This was a small scale experience but an interesting one that I think is worth pursuing.
I wanted to do some research on this topic of unfamiliarity and found a very strong correlation between our familiarity with our environment and what’s known as Sense of Space. Further research suggested that Sense of Space as a phenomena was a prerequisite for a more collective idea, Sense of Community.
This posed a question, if the routes we take and our experience of the familiar is a fundamental phenomena to the our sense of community how is design and architecture related to this?
Just for some further clarification, to make sure that this idea wasn’t completely foreign, I reached out online to see what other people thought. Asking them if they felt truly familiar with their environment, in this case an Urban Environment. The vast majority (of a relatively small sample size) states that there was a large part of their hometown or city that for the most case felt unexplored and uninviting.
