Gathering the landscape : a community arts center on Lookout Mountain

Abstract

With a tape measure and a pad of newsprint, to document, understand and re-present a natural place was the first goal of this thesis. From this understanding a new built presence, a redefinition of the site, is sought, to gather its essential properties and bring them close. This thesis aims at achieving a continuity of experience between the built and the natural, at achieving new transformative readings of each, in which one order is juxtaposed against and ·thereby defines the other. Focusing on the exchange between these two worlds, explorations are made into levels of built and unbuilt, into where, how, and how much to transform what was there. Through this interplay of inside and outside, built and natural, permanent and transitory, the intention is to bring to people a new awareness and sense of belonging to the site, of the dynamics of natural forces, and of their specific location in the context of these larger orders. For ultimately, all architecture is an infill project relative to the earth. It is our connection to this outer world upon which our sense of belonging depends.