Urban ideograms

Abstract

This thesis offers the concept of Urban Ideograms. It is developed and crystallized through a strategic gathering and selection of specific textual and contextual information from various sources, such as the drawings of Henri Michaux, his poetry and literary commentaries, various architectural examples of park design, psychoanalytical texts that aim towards an understanding of traumatic experience, and a physical site that is the Boston Artery Strip. A central notion of this thesis is that of Ideogram, as understood in the work of Henri Michaux. The Ideogram is seen as a graphic condition that signifies and embodies the Interstitial, those qualities that are absent in the diagram as it is commonly understood and used in architectural practice, such as movement, animation, the poetry of incompletion, the accidental, and what is more important, the mental anticipation of the new, the strange, the future and the unknown. Thus, some of the questions that are investigated in this thesis are: What can the notion of Ideogram, as understood in Michaux's work, offer to the architectural process of form, spatial and programmatic investigation and conception? How can the notion of Ideogram serve as a conceptual tool of material translation and transference across the stages of the design process? How can the Ideogram constitute a generative design process? What does it mean to think ideogrammatically in architecture? Another central notion in my thesis is that of Trauma as it is understood in the writings of Sigmund Freud, Sandor Ferenczi, Maurice Blanchot, Cathy Caruth, and the balletic practice of William Forsythe and their commentaries.

(cont.) The notion of trauma is seen from the perspective of Traumatic Experience, and how this experience as a pathological condition gives rise to the cultural problems of the representation of the past, present and future, reference and perception, and performative potential of the body in general. How is the problem of reference related to the body in architecture and the body of architecture? One part of this thesis treats the physical site as a pretext and explores the concept of the urban folly. The other part treats the site as a context from where we notate, gather and select graphic information that provides a generative platform of design. The intention is to design or generate urban things that act as ideograms, interstitial zones and/or lineages between the disparate urban functions of the site.