Missed connections are inherently everywhere: they exist within the passerby on the street and the one sitting next to us on our daily commute. Perplexingly, the most overlooked of all missed connections exist within the very buildings we inhabit on a daily basis. At this human scale, an inexplicit absence of the anthropogenic identity has become rooted by the hyper-perfection and immediate gratification of chasmic, value-engineered buildings; ones which ultimately fail to bridge the synapses of memory. As the experience that one feels when occupying a building begins to mediate among the realms of the temporary and the eternal; an inherent irony stems from the idea that maybe, the most immutable memory of a building may rise from the most impermanent of places.
Perceived through the lens of a decommissioned textile factory serving both a college town and a greater metropolitan corridor, this thesis recaptures vicissitudes of timely breadths; interjecting them back into the edifice. The proposal, an episodic vessel in triptych form intends to house:
A museum to preserve past textile identities.
A marketplace and restaurant to promote current anthropogenic stories.
A rail station to propose a transient future.
The mental photographs of a built environment, intrinsically developed on an evocative film are seldom a mass of ubiquity: they are the fixture, they are the detail; they are the past, they are the present; they are the immediate, lineal, and future place…
…they are the missed connections. / Master of Architecture / This thesis seeks to navigate the world of "missed connections" - moments throughout the built environment which are often overlooked, forgotten, taken for granted, or ignored as one becomes lost in the hustle and bustle of today's tribulations. As it encompasses a vast number of timelines; some past, some immediate, and others future, missed connections make their way into every day life. One example may be the way a door is hung; another, the way a beam meets a column; the way a material is utilized, or even, the way one passes through or inhabits a space. Beyond these constructed landscapes, missed connections arrive as those we meet on a morning commute; the person we share a drink with in a crowded bar, or even those encountered as a passerby on the streets of the modern city.
Through the lens of a decommissioned textile factory, this project attempts to interject missed connections back into the architecture through an observance of various construed appropriations. Historically, appropriation holds a negative connotation, yet the vessel of the built identity hopes to reclaim appropriation as it becomes unraveled through three primary intertwined programs. Dispersed throughout the "ruinscape," they are the museum, the restaurant and marketplace, and the transit hub.
As one takes moments to pause and consider the very way that buildings are assembled, hopefully an analysis and re-introduction of the missed connections into the building moves the profession of architecture towards a future where it can be appreciated by architects and non-architects alike beyond mere aesthetic values.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/104124 |
| Date | 08 July 2021 |
| Creators | Bocchino, Christian Joseph |
| Contributors | Architecture, Dunay, Robert J., Pritchett, Christopher Brian, Becker, Edward Gentry |
| 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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