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Terrain Vague

Part 2 Project 2014
Pavlina Stergiadou
Liam Bonnar
Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture | UK
By regarding the landscape as a physical object, rather than a series of predominating concepts, we begin to deal with the actuality of the armature. Calibrating our architectures within the physically degrading coastal landscape of Almada, mirroring the commercial coastline of the Lisbon Reality, we identified the situation not as a problem but as an opportunity for architectural intervention, a Terrain Vague; “the idea of a script of land fit for creation, a dual concept of a plot of land defined by indeterminacy, which has both a spatial as well as a social connection, defined by what it is, but that being specifically defined by how the space is used.”

Atrophic Landscapes open in the dichotomy of what we perceive as city and nature and the thesis proposes the possibility of a mortal architecture in the Terrain Vague, which rises into ruin before it is built, rather than falls into ruin after it is built. Working with the narratives of rhythms and the body: as an abstract concept, a specific locale, and a subject of literary and architectural intervention; “Atrophic Landscapes” focuses on the architecture of Circadian and Synodic rhythms. In testing design within the Terrain Vague; we develop an architectural language and an attitude towards the existing, when we begin to calibrate our series of connected architectural fragments.

Our architectural fragments work between points: assimilating themselves into the rhythms and cycles present on the ruinous stretch of the Almada; yet also autonomously resisting them to create a distinct contrast between the public and private spaces within the propositions.

Elaborating on selected parts of the Index Conditions of Ruination - an atmospheric and material index of perceived situations within the Terrain Vague - led to the development of a programmatically processional architecture, which seeks to accentuate, mimic or conceal existing atmospheric conditions of our identified Terrain Vague: a Crematorium, a Chapel, a Necropolis, and a Processional Path are proposed to explore the task of architecture as a resonant amplifier, with auxiliary programmes of Workshops, Factories and Markets explicitly dealing with the Rhythms inherent in the Landscape.

Pavlina Stergiadou
Liam Bonnar

Tutor(s)



2014
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