This thesis participates in the architectural construct of INSIDE and OUTSIDE. By means of a house with many rooms, the extremes of an inner, personal architecture contrast the extremes of an outer, public architecture. Each room is an inner architecture of closure and definition. While an outer architecture of openness and expanse surrounds them. One room is a bathroom of concentric cylinders. Another is a rectangular box with an upstairs bed, while another is a large cube with a smaller cube for a bed. Each room presents an inner architecture of almost crystalline purity. And each closes themself off from the others. Despite their particularity, these rooms gather, while black and white steel panels unite and define the outer architecture of house, barely. A ring of stairways angles across the steel matrix on its way to a rooftop patio, allowing the surrounding forest to creep in. The outer architecture of house begins to dissolve into the forest, leaving only the inner architecture of room in tact. Only the closed, inner architecture, so personal that we do not share, resists the diffusion. Only the inner architecture of identity maintains its integrity. Only an inner architecture can contrast the outer architecture. The lines drawn between an inner and outer architecture parallels those between public / private and individual / community. This thesis project draws the line between room and house, choosing to allow house to dissolve into the outer architecture of the surrounding forest while room assumes the role of an inner architecture. One conclusion of this thesis is that house deserves closure as well. Architecture is responsible for both the inner and outer extremes of the inhabited world. The inner architecture demands closure and definition. The outer architecture demands openness and expanse. / Master of Architecture

Master of Architecture

Architecture is an expression of existence; it is the realization of a sense of place, a manifestation of a way-of-being in the world through built elements. "I want to see things. I want to see, therefore I draw. I can see an image only if I draw it." - Carlo Scarpa Carlo Scarpa expressed that he wanted to see, therefore he would draw, and draw incessantly. In that spirit, this thesis has been a search for what is authentic in my own work, based in a discovery through making. The way of making indicates a way of seeing a world; the drawings and the way of drawing directly impact my thoughts. The drawings tend to be fragmentary, indicative of an architecture of parts. The focus is on "the way to be" of the individual, and the way that individual is to the whole. These relationships inform a sense of order and direct the parts towards a greater whole. Those issues are explored in the making of a small house; it is one step toward a greater understanding. / Master of Architecture

This house is not in Ticino. It is somewhere between earth and sky, in the country, or in the city, passing the suburbs altogether at a speed of 45 mph. This house does not have a television set, hence the dweller never sees the architect portrayed in deodorant commercials, soap operas, nor shoe advertisements. / Master of Architecture

The house is a place to be quiet and alone; to be still and to rest. The task of the architect is to make the house that provides the possibility of this solitude. / Master of Architecture

As members of a collective whole, each of us, as a necessary event, must interact with others for our livelihood as well as the prosperity of society as a whole. However, just as we are part of a collective whole, we are also solitary individuals. As such, we need places which do not express community values, but rather, affirm our own identity and offer security and separation from the public realm. This thesis explores the historical precedents and generative principles for achieving refuge by varying the architectural character of spaces along a processional path to generate a subtle progression from the public to private domains. Following this, a design for a residence is presented which explores the potentials of the principles discovered. / Master of Architecture

An architecture of experience is one that asks the dweller to participate in the making of the place. The building does not tell a story, but instead presents fragments that become a foundation for the dweller's interpretation. The fragments complement that which is already existing in Nature and in the human consciousness in order to provide the framework for a richer architecture. The participant's experience is not unlike that of recalling a dream; the pieces manifest themselves one by one, each one clearly defined, but the whole is elusive. In the end it is the participant who completes the whole. / Master of Architecture

First House is geometry, material and light. Geometry gives order. Material gives reality. Light gives space. / Master of Architecture

School is a forum for continuous exploration, critique and innovation. This forum enables a student to develop a framework of operation. Five houses are presented, each with shared concerns. These concerns are subjective and based on a critical awareness of site, history and form. The houses are drawn in plan, section and elevation. The drawings are an attempt to convey the quality of the space. The drawings exist somewhere between the idea drawing and the construction drawing, but by no means are they a realization of the built space. The work thus confronts reality and yet hides from it. The plans will never pretend to replace the work itself. They cannot be read in themselves. They are not a synthesis of anything and are no relation, then to drawn architecture. What is shown can only act as guides, navigational charts that lead to the precise act that is the work. Then the architecture comes into being. Edward Bru / Master of Architecture

Over all that has been said here hovers the judgment of Hegel that art, "on the side of its highest vocation is a thing of the past." Under this judgment the limits of mythic thought are brought to light with respect to itself. For an incomplete mythic identification with modern cultural forms might indicate a passing of mythic thought into a critical capacity or ideal achievement. Such, I believe, is the world for Hegel. For Hegel, this capacity moves to understand itself in the world. In the realm of art, this is accomplished by a physical determination of rational thought as the Ideal comes to inquire scientifically what art is through the elucidation of itself in the Absolute Spirit by the forms of its logic: Being, Essence, and Concept. From the realm of art, the Ideal pushes on into areas less friendly to the senses: first religion and then philosophy or logic. It moves this way only to return, with feeling, back into the realm of art. Yet in this return art is not hallowed or made sacred as it once was with the ancient Greeks. Nor does it, in Heidegger’s sense, allow for the ontic happening of truth. Instead, art is the world of man in the Absolute Spirit brought into physical form. This passing of art into a new age remains an undecided question for Heidegger and Cassirer. Their differences with Hegel turn upon how the logic of idealism defines the question of the nature of Being. Heidegger and the later Cassirer look toward "phenomenological horizons" to provide their foundation. For our part, we are skeptical about a complete connection of mythic thought to the modern world. The modern intellect is critical and demythologizing. In Hegel’s words: "the mind renders thought its object" and by so doing comes to theorize first in order to understand itself and the world. What attracts this mind is what appeals to its criticality. But when our criticality has achieved the clarity of line and concept of which it is capable a different mode of thinking stirs around us for the mythos and "the ultimate positive basis of the spirit and of life itself." (PoSF.,p.4) Speaking about architecture from within the framework established by the authors here examined, we find our interpretation to lie in between the conceptual tectonic of das Eins and the existential analytic of the Dasein of myth. / Master of Architecture