Intermediacy : extracting vitality from intersecting borderlines

Abstract

Intermediacy is a condition of "coming between two things in time, place, character, etc." The areas of intersecting border areas, intermediate areas, display characteristics of the adjacent areas. Intermediate areas were the last lands available to be a place of transitions to connect adjacent areas. The lands, undeniably deserted, are mostly filled with ordinary functions necessary for modern lives, such as convenient infrastructure, big box retail stores, and corporate offices, which only return indifferent and ordinary experiences. Are the intermediate areas in the faith of being indifferent? What does it mean to be vital in those areas? This thesis seeks an approach to extracting the disregarded vitality of an intermediate area,and to introduce proposals that generate their own ways to vitalize an area. The study of an intermediate area, Alewife in Cambridge, Massachusetts, through range of scales and means, from diagrammatic mapping to observation of the site, gives understanding of what makes Alewife as it is now. The conceptual vocabularies assigned to conditions of the site shed the light on the potential vitalities as well as turn into conditions of design. The proposals for the intermediate areas have multiple purposes as a space, function, and role, in order to break through singularity and mono-functioning spaces which dominate the area. The proposals attempt to suggest how the resources of Alewife, both inherited on the area and from adjacent areas, could be maximized to activate the area. The stretched range of specificity, scale, intervening degree, and formality of the proposals allows the area to have multiple characteristics, which is a condition of being intermediate, "somewhere belonging to one place but with a foot in another.