This thesis is developing an architecture of the landscape. The project is enfolded in nature in such a way that views, and light from the sun, moon, and stars empower and motivate the spaces.
It’s a kind of place-making, playing with light and views, finding strategies to bring in the conditions of the environment, creating intimate settings for the pilgrim and the landscape. Environmental events occur, spaces light up at certain times of day, at certain times of the year, a constellation comes into view. Something happens in there, for a moment, or for a time.
Selecting specific views from the landscape, specific points in the sky, singling these out and bringing them into the space allows for this intimate connection between the pilgrim, the landscape condition, and the architecture.
Zooming in and out of scale, from a confrontation with the texture of the rock, to a roof that pulls the galaxy right to you. This is how architecture can explain how everything, at all scales, is one thing and of one process. The desert is the place where this extreme shift of scale happens so fluidly.
I try to imagine processes that form the building rather than making the building as thing on its own. This project aims to create a complex set of experiences while struggling to retain formal simplicity. “Just enough and nothing more”. Simplicity on the side of complexity.