K3.x
Thesis project
Primary thesis advisor: Hani Rashid
Summer semester 2011
Rashid Studio / Die Angewandte.

   K3.x takes place in Lorient, France.

   It proposes a rehabilitation scheme of Keroman 3, a submarine base from second World War, and answers the desire to reconnect the city of Lorient with the bay. Its definition being shifted from being an entity located on the outskirts of the city's industrial zone, to becoming the dynamic center of a greater entity, the bay.

    It is composed of a museum of modern art which proposes exhibition spaces ranging from formal/representational to unformal/experimental, an art residency which updates the city’s cultural identity by programming the museum, a light house, an offshore racing center and its showroom, office spaces dedicated to nautic industry, cafes, restaurants, as well as a fish market.

   Orchestrating hybridity / Articulating specificities – K3.x explores the relation of part to whole, or how to implement subcontext within context.  And by extension, deals with the different types of border conditions of a fragment and its hosting context.

  Surrealist Architecture –  K3.x asks the question of wether it would be possible to consider an architecture which extracts features from its context, but which rather than counting on the cumulated symbolic values of these sampled fragments to constitute the overall identity and meaning (cf. post-modernism), would hijack some of the underlying qualities that they hold in spite of themselves and unfold them within a different dimension.
Meaning would then emerge from the intricate relations they establish together, and the role they play within this new setup. Their configuration, and set of relations to the hosting context would then call for a more suggestive and subconscious understanding of their correlations (cf surrealists).

   Through a three step process of context sampling on different layers (historical, programmatic, biological, material, , structural, formal), denaturization of sampled fragments, and orchestration of their interactions,  K3.x finds its new “raison d’ être” in a composite form that takes source in its contemporary context.

   Given the nature of the original building, most of its footprint is water.
The high tide condition on site is used as a mean to redefine actively, on a daily basis, the circulation schemes within the building, and the set of relation of its parts. In this regard, part of the building rests on floating foundations; water becoming the trigger element activating shifts in the nature of spatial, climatic and programmatic border conditions.

   The building is here seen as an environment, a living entity which behaves, adapts to and follows nature cycles as it transitions between its different states. The visitor adapts in turn to the scenario proposed at a specific moment in time, and benefits therefore from a unique experience of the building. The dynamic nature of this setup develops a degree of awareness of the visitor within space, and a organizes an organic, instinctive and sensual dialogue between the human being and its natural environment.