My thesis tries to speculate a building in a scenario where there is a four-dimensional world behind the world we currently inhabit, inspired by the provocative 19th-century romance Flatland. After studying the characters of higher dimensionality, the thesis generalizes a way of perceiving the fourth dimension in three-dimensional building, which has two aspects of space and time. First, expanding the space allow us to perceive each 3D slice of a 4D space. Those slices should be "seen" at the same time if we have four-dimensional senses. This brings up the second aspect, folding time. We travel from one slice to another, spending time that would be no time if we truly experience four dimensionally.
The site is a small traffic island in Rosslyn, Virginia, across from Washington DC. Taking the space within the site as a slicer, and applying the method from studying the 4th dimension, we have got series of scenes (represented in box) in different sizes. These scenes are the 3-dimensional sections of the 4-dimensional world that are unseen to all of us, and are only to be "seen" by going into this building on the site. But the nature of going through the 4D in this 3 dimensional way is very personal. And the different sequences create different representations of what the building would be. Thus, I take a journey of our character J as an example to show what a similar building experience would be if we were going into it.
The number of 3D sections from 4D is infinite, thus our building is a particular combination of the scenes which are forming one's journey. In our world, visiting this building one enters by arriving at its end (top in this case), and going back down to exit. It is the same in the narrative of J's journey in this building's world. So, reality and imagination merge. Let's find out what it feels like. / Master of Architecture / Architecture is about designing buildings. But studying architecture, sometimes we want to know the things behind the appearance of the building. What happens "inside". Designing a building needs to deal with space. What is inside the space? By going straight in and out of the solidness, we enter the next dimension, the 4th dimension. This is inside and outside the appearance of the building we see every day.
Also trying to figure out the meaning of it, the thesis generalizes a way of perceiving the fourth dimension in three-dimensional building, which has two aspects of space and time. First, expanding the 3D space allows us to perceive each 3D slice of a 4D space. Those slices should be "seen" at the same time if we have four-dimensional senses. This brings up the second aspect, folding time. We travel from one slice to another, spending time that would be no time if we truly experience four dimensionally.
In the story of our helper J, we found a way, both a solution and a circulation, to visit this "building". Our sequence represents one of the appearances of what the building would be. In our world, visiting this building one enters by arriving at its end (top in this case), going back down and exit. It is the same in the narrative of J's journey in this building's world. So, reality and imagination merge. Let's find out what it feels like.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/102267 |
| Date | 04 February 2021 |
| Creators | Jiang, Huihai |
| Contributors | Architecture, Emmons, Paul F., Piedmont-Palladino, Susan C., La Coe, Jodi Lynn |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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