Searching for shelter

Abstract

Architecture is born out of a need for the re-definition and intensification of t he existing physical landscape. An architects services respond and re-define culture and can never be legitimized by the want of form. Architecture is only significant when it is necessary and responds directly to our culture. It is within the nature of problem solving where architecture is given its form and meaning. This thesis is a search for the questions that are presented to us through our relationship with the landscape and with ourselves. The research method employed is an associative branching path where one topic of research branches into another. The responses to these questions are physical in nature and culminate in the re-definition and intensification of the landscape to provide the foundation for the building of a technical school and drug rehabilitation center for juveniles. The research is nonlinear and begins with a site. The site is the edge of a suburban neighborhood in Gainesville, Florida where a fallout shelter was built by a community of residents as a response to the threat of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.