Terrain Vague: Between Presence and Absence, Landscape and Building. Cemetery and Public Park

Terrain Vague: Between Presence and Absence, Landscape and Building. Cemetery and Public Park

Saavedra Lux, S.V.

Nottrot, R. (mentor)
Van Dooren, E. (mentor)

Architecture

Architecture

Explore Lab

2012-01-31

We are living in a society of the ‘image saturated’ world, where perceptive and sensory qualities are more and more being diminished by the density, the material excess and the speed of modern life. Most designed environments are sterile and highly ordered. In contrast to these spaces stand the terrain vagues, spaces where the passage of time has created an order of a different kind, a fragmentary nature, where the boundaries between landscape and building have become less clear. These spaces offer environments where we can reactivate our sensory and perceptive powers and find a retreat to linger and reflect. They act as an oasis amidst the city, like a pause within the standardized environments that we inhabit everyday. However, the tendency is to transform these spaces into reconstructed spaces, doing predictable designs. Having thoroughly experienced the qualities of vague terrains in the Ruhr area in Germany, the aim of the project was to design a program keeping the intrinsic characteristics of the terrain vague with a minimal intrusion on the landscape. In order to avoid disturbing the character of the site, the shape of the building (both interior and exterior) is directly derived from the forms of the surrounding environment, letting it blend naturally with the landscape. Hence, the building emerges from the landscape, leaving only subtle traces on the territory. The atmosphere of the abandoned industrial territory is retained by keeping the wild vegetation that colonised the terrain during many years of dereliction. The resultant cemetery and public park is a silent space, arousing our inner senses, letting body and mind immerse into total isolation, evoking an architecture were we can pause to contemplate. An architecture which is silent, but changes constantly by the effects of light and shadow, surface and material. A space surpassing the separation between inside and outside and space and time.

Cemetery
Public Park
Terrain Vague
Landscape Building

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:65809eff-b941-4ee6-89cd-6d63380b80fb

2013-02-09

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2012 Saavedra Lux, S.V.