PRINCETON UNIVERSITY MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE GRADUATION THESIS FALL 2003

THE WRITING OF THE C: MATRIX DISPLACEMENT AND INDUCED SEDIMENTATION IN DE LA PLATA RIVER BAY

 
     

THESIS: PABLO LORENZO-EIROA

 

THESIS ADVISERS: PETER EISENMAN AND EDWARD EIGEN,

DEAN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE: STANLEY ALLEN,  MARIO GANDELSONAS THESIS COORDINATOR 

"His Master of Architecture Thesis proposed an architectural machine that worked space, time and ecology, transforming environmental forces to generate artificial landscapes as feedback, developing a unique system of floating architecture foundations that become fixed by sedimentation, a different disciplinary approach to environmental issues related to spatial structure. He won the Butler Thesis Research Prize to analyze architecture and infrastructural effects on offshore and shore structures, for the Shearwater North Sea Central in the UK and the Holland Polders (2003)"

This thesis intends to work out a medium that deals with displacement and instability as tools activate a machine to produce difference in a pre-determinate matrix. 

The current real estate market suffers from the continuous instability of demand. The homogeneous, stable Spanish grid is not flexible enough to absorb these kinds of demands. This is the reason why some programs result displaced to vague areas, usually related to shore expansions, which are today already part of a kind of an induced ecology. In principle, the thesis proposes the displacement of Infrastructural devices into the river for the search of a new ground. The artificial effect of infrastructures affecting natural systems is boosted to slow down the flow of the water, inducing larger sedimentation to generate artificial landscapes. In this way the project recovers the latent lost memory of sand banks in the river. But in this exchange of information, the project insists to negotiate infrastructure perturbation and time-based accumulation of sediments to inform space. The project searches for an abstract diagram that works out space, time and ecology.

 

Machine Activation:

1-       Static Stability: City Matrix Displacement - predetermined artificial system superimposed to the environment (architectural virus incorporation)

2-       Dynamic Stability in Environment (input): Acting forces. Matrix Activation

3-       Dynamic Instability: Unstable Virus (Exchange and negotiation): Active Machine: Response on acting systems; information exchange, both accommodation to environmental forces and perturbation effects: resistance

4-       Ultimate Stability (Output): Latent interiority of the architectural virus becomes progressively less unstable enabling environment stability. Conventional flipping of foundations development: the fluid soil sediments providing progressive stability and structural foundation for the generated architecture.

This proposed machine is generated through the induced instability of the natural environment of the river.  However, this cause-effect relationship in order to generate its abstract diagram will activate architectural time-based effects in this exchange of information and energy. Therefore, architecture is a virus that becomes activated through the perturbation of the environmental stability, and at the same time, informs itself out of the accommodation of forces making profit of this energy exchange.