Beginnings of Site Analysis

In my trip to the Grand Central Terminal to document how people move and look at the main hall space, I began to think about how the architectural layout and spatial qualities begin to influence these behaviors. How people coming out of a narrow hall into the grand meeting space would almost slow down and visually take in a place before continuing to move at a  regular pace. How people walking down a slight slope tend to look up a little more than if it was a flat plane. These little moments begin to inform how they view the spaces they walk through and how these views inform the overall experience that is fragmented and biased to that particular trajectory.

I also documented the movement patterns within the terminal and where people would stop and wait for others and/or remain stationary to observe. The planar diagram below is a combination of people that moved through the terminal space and their trajectory within it. 

Fragmentation | Movement | View

This was an initial experimental photography used to analyze and explore the relationships between movement within a space and views dictated by the occupant in fragmentations. We visually experience a space through continual movement of our bodies and eyes, letting our minds as the translator of these fragments. In turn, these fragmentations of movement and views begin to inform our awareness of space. The analysis begin to inform what is looked at and how people move as the number of occupants increase. The systems of movement and views happen simutaneously. Analyzing the visual path with the movement path shown above, I wonder, how can architecture begin to refer our views/movements so that our awareness of experience can be enhanced and understood?

Methodology

Questioning:

How is architectural experience become awareness? By gathering fragmentations of complexities and systems within movement through a space, and using the mind and body as the translator of static imagery and other senses to translate this series of information into perception and experience. Since still imagery is limited by its boundary, in this case our senses, complete experience of architecture can never be realized.

Experimenting:

Photography is parallel to visual experience of architecture, a vantage point limited by its frame and exists only for its boundaries. Map the paths of how people move, view and experience within a space. Map out relationships defined by the occupant within that space to the architecture and explore how the architecture can become the lens to which the occupant experience.

Analyzing:

Manipulations in experimental photography can be used to scope out and reconstruct the experience of awareness as the vantage point, in both first and third person view. Distill images created to explore the relationships reversed, deriving drawings and preliminary physical modeling of these new relationships and structure between the observer and the observed. Asking what is beyond the boundaries? What are suitable sites and programs for such an intervention?

Implementing

1 + 3 + 9

Experiential awareness and architectural fragmentations: reframing systems to reference the subject to the object.

Disjointed experiences through movement and flux within architectural systems act as frames for definition and consciousness of architectural space. Bodies and minds stitch these fragments to conjure up the perception of architectural experience .What if architecture becomes the occupied frame where the built realm refers to the user, systems to its fragment and context to its accumulation.

Flux in experience relative to locations of architectural systems restraints a skewed view as the objects refer to the subjects. The objects are the viewers, users and occupants and subjects are the parts and layers within the architecture. Photography is parallel to visual experience of architecture, a vantage point limited by its frame and exists from its boundaries. Explorations with experiential/experimental photography will provide insights on how a shifting view on architecture can further awareness in architectural experience. Translating the information graphically and the physically requires iterations and testing. Methods of projection systems and reconfigurations of layers and information can allow for morphological moments. Relationships between program and its occupants can be redefined for experiential qualities instead of quantitative information. Organization of complexities and systems within a piece of architecture can refer to multiple occupants of different views to become a lens within the built environment. Interconnectivities between the new meanings of architectural systems and its occupant will define the awareness in experience.

Visual Response

Visual Response - Systematic Residue

Thoughts

Architecture is an incessant spectrum of ideas that defy or delineate the preceding or concurrent idea. Whether it is from modern(ism) to postmodern(ism), classical (style) to gothic (style), or eccentric curios(ity) to corporate predictabil(ity), Architecture has gone through flux to diverse ends of extremes throughout history. The existing architecture serves as a catalog of evolution of architectural ideas and intentions to learn from. How does one go about deciding what their architecture is? The struggle to choose only creates limits restrictions and boundaries to which is followed. Instead of selecting one over the other, Architecture should embrace contradictions and overlaps that allows for unlimited possibilities of physical, tectonic manifestations. Architecture ought to be socially, economically, and environmentally a sensible concept of intention.