A community in the desert

Abstract

Changing paradigms in society's general understanding of reality have revealed general deficiencies in contemporary architecture, the primary evidence of the unique human relationship with reality. This thesis seeks to understand the nature of perceived architectural poverty and works toward a general approach for a more human, more timely, more appropriate architecture in synch with new, lost, ignored and rejected ideas. Architecture is qualified not as merely buildings, but as a system of relationships between objective and uniquely human subjective aspects of reality. Architecture is further refined to a definition as the relationships between the physical world, subjective experience, abstract knowledge and truth. The relationships inherent in this definition are used to analyze significant spheres of architectural context in order to determine which are most deterministic to architecture as the relationships defined. In order to test the application of the ideas put forth, a project is proposed as a testing grounds. ΔCity is a proposed community project sited in Nevada, 15 miles east of Reno, centered around a large new manufacturing, warehousing and distribution development: Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center. ΔCity is conceived as a systems-analysis-become-architecture based on the previous theoretical work. It is programed primarily in response to the determined need for new, repaired or improved relationships between the contextual spheres considered. The result is a 3-dimensional architectural system of relationships uniquely applied to the particular site and specific context spatially, ecologically and socioculturally through the "medium" of strategically programmed infrastructure.