Above | Below | Between

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2016-06Architecture transforms time and space at the intersection of the geologic and the human. Human existence in the natural environment constitutes such a small swath of both space and time that our very presence amounts to an insignificant interruption in the history of the universe. As such, the ways in which we connect with our environment are attempts to mediate this gap between the scale of the human and natural domains. In manipulating the space around us, we are testing hypotheses and understandings of the world around us. Architecture, in this manner, can be seen as a tool used to cross the boundary between ourselves and the external. Our built works are a method of translating between our inner consciousness and the exterior environment, between the infinitely small and vast. This thesis begins with the acknowledgement that the built environment exists as a mediation between man and nature. Every built object is a direct result of a continuing effort to connect and simultaneously exploit the land for own own use. When human constructs at all scales exceed their utilitarian lifetimes, they are often discarded. But instead, they can be seen as containing an embedded wealth of both scientific and cultural knowledge that documents intricacies of past times, places, and spaces. These obsolete artifacts of an industrial past and a post-industrial present are often sited in landscapes that shaped and were shaped by their presence. These latent structures remain a major unrealized asset in our society today, ripe for re-invention, re-interpretation, and rehabilitation. This project proposes that architecture can act as a sort of intermediary between man and the environment, bridging the interval between anthropic and cosmic time