ARCHEOLOGIST HOUSE
Academic Solo Project
Year: 2017
This project is designed for a archaeologist who spent his life traveling to the highest mountains and the deepest ocean, searching for the hidden treasures within. Climbing steep cliffs and diving cold oceans have become his everyday life. The domestic space of this archaeologist needed to create this nomadic experience. His domestic life involves privacy and adventure. It needed to be a space that can isolate him from the world around.
Punctum is the underlying concept behind the design of this project. In the book “Camera Lucida” by Roland Barthes, he says “The punctum has more or less potentially, a power of expansion to annihilate itself as a medium, to be no longer a sign but the thing itself.” The architecture should therefore be true to the user living within. At the early stages of design, several procedural textures were generated to study how the details on these textures can convey a sense of emotion. These textures are then applied to the architecture, creating spaces that trigger the users feeling.
The building is a biological structure formed inside of a gridded building frame. The building membrane absorbs rain and sunlight to feed the biological structure within. The growth of the structure is artificially controlled by the archaeologist. The building is sensitive to the habits of the archaeologist. Through the periods of living within the building, the structure reconstructs itself to suit with the daily life of the archaeologist. As a result, steep walls and caves are formed due to the archaeologist's desire to live in a natural mountain environment. Flat paths are formed at places where he frequently walks. Water rises from below to block the entrance to the cave where he hides his treasure. The building becomes a backdrop of the archaeologist’s activities.
