LIVING IN THE SOUNDSCAPE

Design V - Fall 2021

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The increased density of recycled walls and a more rigorous datum for form finding help give the walls a unique charactaristic. The walls function as retaining walls, simple structural aggregates, that mediate, control, and manipulate the landscape and its unending interrogation of the ocean. The ocean washing in tightens space for elevation gain, and when coupled with the need for cross axis circulation, the sand becomes an undulating surface that ripples across the beach like folded fabric. This land art system breaks the heavy barrier and edge of the walls, and democratizes the beach as a space for anyone. The landscape’s surface also subtly indicates a diverse range of views of the sea.The former aquarium becomes a site of rubble that provides a datum that develops the notion of fingers holding puppet strings suspending towards the ocean. These remaining walls intercept and disturb the perpendicularity of the walled system. Each wall of the system is purposely oranized to create a space that organizes non-linear circulation. By arranging the bubbles and the openings in the walls as pores to feed human circulation through organic paths. This creates a notion of an unseen organic fluidity in a geometrically orthagonal space. This happens even more subtly on the beach with the sand, with elevated openings mimicking a parallel repitition of the boardwalk. Program of the architectural system is designed to be occupied by shifting denisties of the public. In doing so, the spaces built should ultimately contain non-prescriptive programmatic elements; architecture as simple as a wall can hold everybody and nobody at simultaneously, without generating conditions of over-filled, and abandoned. This quality of the project enables the architecture to be used both properly and improperly for decades.

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