2023 - Harvard GSD - Thesis Advisor: John May
In a civilization of supposed linear progress and rapid temporality, a human-nature dichotomy proliferates from our ways of living all the way to the building wall section. As our temporal rhythm of the solar movement became diagrammed to a circular clock face and our architectural conceptions became built with anonymous materials, we have constructed a way of living in
which the materials’ reactions to the environment became imperceptible. This silencing of the materials’ relationship to the environment and to the inhabitants of the building is an outcome of the well tempered environment, where interior spaces are insulated and severed from the exterior environmental conditions. This thesis proposes the antithesis to ocularcentric buildings and thermostatic lifestyles. Can perceiving
materials and its ability to mediate the exterior climate allow for a building that creates an understanding of the environment through our inhabitation? By being able to perceive and interact with materials, a relationship with the building can be formed where inhabitants will live with and care for the materials through diurnal, seasonal, generational, and material timescales.
