"Caravanserai"
2020 presented a radical shift to how we conceive working, living, and playing. These monumental shifts bring a unique opportunity to revitalize declining cities and towns that are otherwise unable to benefit from globalized industry. With the potential of remote lifestyles, one can leverage digitally based industry to revitalize and rejuvenate forgotten towns.
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The role of a community is to create a place where, regardless of origin, there is space to amplify voices and to develop an individual’s full potential.
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The challenge is to make a lasting community that includes the permanent aging residents of the “borghi,” left behind by global economics, alongside younger digital nomads. Providing residents the ability to be productive anywhere they choose without necessarily having a slotted or forced place to work is essential. As a total design environment, building scale must prioritize the individual and their role in their community network. From there, we understand how to productively channel the individual over the family unit not just as random bodies who are circumstantially put near each other, but as equal people with equal voices making place together.
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ARC408 | Spring 2021 | Prof. Daniele Profeta
Project in collaboration with Leyla Ramelmeier
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Scales of occupancy are crucial to how one feels a sense of belonging or purpose within a space. The act of becoming- as a resident, citizen, or worker- comes from how one constructs their private and public selves. Understanding spaces thus comes from reading their permanent versus transient qualities' their familiar versus social qualities; their reproductive or productive capacity. The cross gradient between these dichotomies helps rationalize spaces based on their intrinsic qualities relating to the human body and how the individual defines themselves through these principal readings. The way that one belongs to a space thus derives from how one experiences the difference between these readings.
In-between spaces are formalized between the central figures of the project. These figures give the readings of transient and permanent spaces by establishing, stretching, and blurring the edge conditions between programs. At a building scale, the envelopes of the terra-cotta ‘pots’ prompt movement and pause according to their edge conditions. Locally, these edges further become the boundary of permanent spaces, helping to mitigate the potential of polarizing one’s life harshly between labor and living.
