Experience in process [2] - constructing boundaries [locating a line of difference].
The project is a follow up to my thesis and tries to investigate its findings throughout the process of designing an ‘apartment building’ as part of a development project. This is where I, as a designer, become involved in a process of constructing boundaries, which produce space throughout a representation that is continuously reproduced along my process of design. In other words my concern in this building is through its process of making and representation in which the boundaries that I construct and the spaces I produce are now reduced into lines that I trace into the construction of my representation which ends up being finally my project.
In this way my project becomes an investigation of representing and making space, which is the apartment building, in a process of making which tends to manifest an individualized reading of this development building. It is a subjective reading that tries to absorb the existing commercial and residential categories of a development building into differences in experiencing and constructing space rather than differences in the labeling of space. At this point the lines I create become ‘lines of differences’ and individual tools that indicate differences in experiences, functions, and readings each depending on the position I take in relationship to the representation I am producing. It is more about how I experience such process of making, and thus read those lines of differences along a specific condition or framework and thus construct the line representing the other boundary. Therefore the way I overlap the different lines starts to define my role in the process of making space, where at this point space is deconstructed into its different layers of construction.
At this point it is essential to define my role as a designer only in the physical construction of the building or its ‘technical know how’. In other words my role is in the material and programmatic construction of the building which includes its structure, materials, finishes, surfaces, program… This is where I refer back to my thesis that talks about ‘experiential boundaries’ and the different meanings of spaces depending on the multiplicity of the users experiencing this space. At no point I can predict or anticipate the experience of the user space. Therefore my role is not in labeling space and anticipating a specific experience or functional use, but rather it is in the way I physically construct such space, in its materiality and differences to the other boundaries and spaces.
This is why the following project consists of a series of experimental investigations in representing and producing space. These investigations become part of a process of design whose direction is to produce a representation of a residential building that is always understood through its process of making and the experience of its representation rather than its labels of spaces. It is more about different techniques in constructing space and thus different spatial experiences and thus different meanings to space.
