| Summary: | As simple as the natural law, no physical objects will last forever - we are all in the process of perpetual senescence. While our eyes are sensitive towards the life cycle of human bodies, they are less attuned to the way buildings age. A building’s pristine original state, if that ever exists, only marks an infinitesimal, ephemeral point in the coordinates of time. Time is in fact the most significant part of the vitality of what we call - architecture.
This thesis uses “wrinkles” as a conceptual thread to study the correlation between a building’s life cycle and the life cycles of the humans who inhabit it. It seeks an alternative to break the binary of before/after, and to redefine the beginning and the end of architectural design. It is also an attempt to learn from the quotidian, the ordinary, and to gently question established forms of architectural authorship.
This thesis is rooted in an anonymous residential building in the center of Mexico City, one with 70 years of history being born, lived, earthquake-destructed, abandoned, repaired, rejuvenated, cared for, and so on. It dances between observation and imagination, and creates storytelling that unearths architecture as a living object, and unwraps its hidden layers of complexity.
Borrowing viewpoints from our allied disciplines, photography, filmmaking, and landscape architecture, this thesis uses the digital camera to access a series of spatial tools, such as photogrammetry, data processing softwares, plotting machine, and most importantly, our eyes. It is an attempt to build an alternative literacy, a set of representations for the fundamental elements architecture is entangled with - time and people. Solutionism is not the offering of this thesis, but rather, an outlook for re-discovering architecture as life-long projects.
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