Thesis: Echo Ma
Echo Ma
Echo Ma
Alpine Architecture: A Deleuzian Architectural Approach for the Descent Route of Mont Blanc
Reflecting upon the ongoing wars in 1917, Bruno Taut conceived a utopian city in the Alps through a sequence of drawings in his book titled Alpine Architektur, which seeks an alternative to the war ideology at that time by building connections to mysticism. Today, more than 100 years later within a completely different socio-politico and architectural climate, Taut’s vision still remains its relevance. This thesis investigation will borrow the legacy of the overt romanticism depicted by Taut, offering a runaway from the banal, the familiar, and the indifferent.
The design methodology of my thesis project is developed through investigating the notion of the Fold, a concept developed by the postmodern French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his work The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. The Deleuzian concept of the Fold, in contrast to a traditionally Cartesian worldview, suggests a distinct way of comprehending reality. According to Deleuze, roughly, the Fold comprehends reality as a series of complex and intricate structures that “fold” within and onto each other. The “fold” adds incremental layers of experience to reality that interact with one another through movement and change, instead of separating a logic-driven physical world from their abstract mental representations.
I argue that mountains exist, move, and transform in the same way that Baroque cathedrals “fold,” from their large movements between tectonic plates to the microscopic arrangement of crystals within metamorphic rocks. The mountain fold is structural, formal, gestural, compositional, and textural. It is as much a hardly perceivable tectonic shift, as it is finely detailed veins in a piece of marble. It is operating behind a system, or an operational function, as Deleuze might call it, that is constantly generating new marks of “folds” that can be detected in the massif, the glacier, the rocks, the river, or any other components of the mountain.
The question is, as Deleuze once asked, how to continue the fold? How to push the fold to infinity? In this thesis, the proposed Alpine Architecture folds the mountaineering journey into the architectural experience and then returns it back to the topographical fold of the mountain, integrating all parts of it as layers of a compound experience that acknowledges their interrelations. By engaging with the narrative of the mountaineering descent, the project intends to situate the formal and tectonic fold of the architecture within a “folding narrative.” Catering to the stories and mental experience of the architecture users—mountaineers and climbers—, the proposed buildings integrate the mountain and architectural experience into a new fold.
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Echo Ma -
Echo Ma
Echo Ma