Common ground : a Coast Guard station in Boston Harbor

Abstract

This thesis begins with the premise that the natural landscape is not a benign entity, but an active operator in the act of spatial perception and space-making. Founded on this premise, the thesis seeks to develop techniques and propositions for constructing space and infrastructure in the hostile, ever-changing environment of an island shoreline. To investigate the transformative and evolutionary processes of the alongshore environment, relies not only on a fundamental understanding of the natural processes which shape it, but a reconsidering of the mode through which we conceive our natural surroundings. Accepting the shoreline as a place of change, we then open ourselves to an exploration of the physical, natural environment beyond the picturesque.