1998 Master of Architecture
Transited Spaces

My travels taught me about the transitional state of being. I focused on learning the relevance of being partially outside the surrounding culture and struggling to understand the organizational patterns. The position that the transitional state of being occupied is one of extreme awareness. This state of being is introduced by a lack of understanding the local organizing techniques, which take the form of urban patterns and spatial layouts, as well as cultural and social positioning customs. It is only through personal experience that it was possible to obtain an understanding of the cultural boundaries. Such cultural boundaries can be described historically in print but have no spatial dimension until experienced firsthand. This state of continual experience was produced by not taking for granted the cultural boundaries of particular places at particular times and led me to wonder if it is possible to use architecture to create an experience that calls into question one’s position with regards to their cultural boundaries.

In studying position, along the way I realized that once a position is taken a multitude of others open up. It is also relevant that architectural position is much more than just height, length, width, and time, it is also about how culture interacts with the forms.

My travels taught me that if experience is site specific and cannot be achieved through an abstracted conceptualization of history then architecture must also be site specific. The most memorable aspects of my travels were the details, which were specific to a place and time. The site is much more than the physical boundaries, it is the boundaries created by perceptions of the site, not simply an abstracted view of geometries within a two-dimensional plane.

The following images are a sample image of what I experienced, images that lack in the smells, sounds, feelings, tastes, and people of the actual experiences. I now look forward to translating the experiences I encountered into an architecture that others may experience and interact with.

I have ended my travels with more questions and very few answers, which is a good thing, I think?

Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, and the United Kingdom

Czech Republic and Switzerland

France

Italy

Spain

United States