Instruments of Gaia

Instruments of Gaia is a thesis which interviews the role of architecture as an interface between nature and human experience. The contained argument is a critique on architecture’s reliance on climatic mitigation; whereas relationships between site and user are nullified through concealed building systems. This thesis project as a counterpoint explores new ideas of architectural design and expression as a register for and active agent in the anthropocene where the magnification and understanding of place and site plays a key role in the development of the climatic imagination needed ever more, to grapple with human impact on the very ground we rest our foundations upon. Architectural expression as an intuitive, didactic mechanism and amplifier of this relationship is explored through the collapsing of multidisciplinary research, and expression of the fragility, and enormity of Gaia as a new secular mythos of the cosmos, and the embedding of these new myths, through weathering and geologic time scales, into an architectural project. The experiential memories formed within this expanded field of architecture constitute a new body of sensible knowledge. The art of architecture offers the medium with which to collapse these assemblages into poetic space and memory, and the beginning of a new dialogue with the Gaia of the Anthropocene.