1/1: Thesis Clarified

The existence of the automobile allowed for urban landscapes to be carved, arranged, and segregated into episodic moments of experiential happening. The result of which has transposed the experiencing corporeal being from the tangible edge of the city, to a displaced position behind the framed enclosure of the automobile. Any moments of intimate interaction once occurring at the front of the city are now compressed into momentary visuals placed either at a distance or within close enough proximity to constantly slip from visual limits. Though the experience of perceiving architecture and urban landscape is brought into a unique viewpoint, such experiences within the moving body of a car never lingers long enough to create personal attachment or even notice from the onlooker. Thus the question is how and to what degree architecture may act upon the senses to awaken them from the confines of these edge conditions.

Framed within the car, the image of the city, place, and home becomes "flattened out, confined to a surface" by one's inability to make tangible interaction, which would permit depth to be reinserted back into one's experiential happening (Lefebvre, 313). With these gained perceptions, the development of urban landscape begins to address that which is perceived through the automobile, rather than through immediate bodily interaction of the pedestrian. Sense of place in turn becomes the product of the perceived, in which the depth of one's own sensorial experience is minimized into perceptible obscurity. As such environments facilitate our demand for prompt passage between destinations, edge conditions arise from them, bounding our bodies, governing movement, highlighting points of destination while simultaneously obscuring our journey in between travels. To counter the effects of detaching sensorial experiences, the thesis seeks to understand some specific role that architecture may undertake to counter the crisis of place.

What then must we ask of our architecture in order that these senses may be reawakened to the presence of place? Amongst these lines of movement that pinpoint beginnings and ends, but never bringing our attention to the middle, by which these bounding edges transform our city, home, and place into the background in which movement takes the stage. Accordingly, an interruption that juxtaposes the mechanical experience of driving with that which is within the compass of human experiences may lend to an engagement that breaches the edges of confined flux, in order that sense of place can be reframed within the mental scope of personal understanding. A moment of interruption will act to awaken the senses and reaffirm memory of place in order that the essence of place can be reestablished within its cultural and physical context.