Student Work
1∕10
Title
Ineffable Form
Project Description
In the foothills of the Himalayas, pressed against the Tibetan skies, the building is conceived of as ineffable form. Formally incomplete, it depends upon the hillside, the site, the lake, and the distant mountains to become whole. Slightly in and out of phase with its environment, it achieves a gentle dissonance through an uncanny resemblance of geology. It emerges as a designed landscape object. As an object of emergence, incomplete in formal character, programmatic interactions and envi-ronmental change cause it to become fundamentally different objects that last for a season and then change into something new. The building continually recedes into itself. A pattern of high and low, bright and dark, open and closed spaces continually draw the beholder through the building which is never resolved in itself. The whole is complete in a trifold of building, landscape and aesthetic beholder.
There may be no place in the world where the sublime is more pervasive than in the Himalayas. To build on the mountains is to absorbed within the sublime. The building exists within this condition, being conceived of as an object of geologic assemblage. Through the collapsing of discreet objects, it reveals a tension between the object-form and its qualities. The movement of the building’s tec-tonic shifts becomes static, suspending the architecture on the verge of emergence. The edifice ele-vates the beholders against the sky and invites them into the ground. It offers a navigation between the ethereal and the telluric, the ideal and the concrete. The building is beheld in glimpses of its ir-reducible being through perspectives which are never defining of its absolute essence. In this way, the beholder is never able to cognize the object in the full extent of its complexity and never able to understand it as a totality.
The intervention is conceived of as place of thought. An architecture which offers free association through a multiplicity of space and experience. Every space is meant to cultivate thoughtful con-templation for the decisions that must take place within its walls. This space for thinking consists of solitary paths to wander, personal and private spaces, social meeting rooms with dynamic views and grand spaces with somber gravity coexist and complement one another. Every surface is en-riched, from the material chosen, the light that it shapes, to the ornament that forms memory, as a humbling and inspiring invitation to project thoughts into the future.