The movement through [a threshold] suggests a change.
The static placement of a room to a room contains its movement in the threshold, the perceiver is the one who controls the movement. In house, a building, the rooms do not move, literally, but they do in terms of intention.
When I walk from bedroom to bathroom, I have an intention crossing that threshold and am looking for something to do or to happen. When I then [turn around] and go back through the same threshold, I am now intending a new thing.
There is a constant change in the movement through. What is moved through changes over time according to the inhabitant, the perceiver.
I want to suggest that, in studying the crossing of the threshold and in the looking back, I can then start to find the in between, the negative, the unseen, space of change of intention and start to make this a positive or tangible artifact to then manipulate to recreate past spaces in a new way in this understanding.
Upon looking at my previous projects, I have found that the thinking of threshold is not just a place of passing through but is also the place of intention.
I have tried to understand how the movement of the body through dictates the space. This is then tied to the program perhaps more directly or perhaps changes the program more directly. It is a constant back and forthing due to the looking at the body and its direction and then to where it is going and then back to the body to understand that it is actually coming from some place, and that changes the going to.
Could this then be the way to activate the static quality of the built room?
Of course, in writing this, there is an understanding of the “realistic qualities” of the constructed space, but I would like to propose an investigation that looks at thresholds and the passing through and looking back. By constructing the camera obscura to my body and the movements needed inside and the portability of the object, could this be the first construction of the project and the reference to the beginning of the drawing of architecture. By drawing inside the projections of the rooms I am in, I am receiving a perspective of the lens that is correlated to my dimensions and needs. [my limitation imposed on the project to have a control]
These drawings would be of the change in the space over the time of drawing [light, dark, movement of others passing through] and then I would turn around and do the same thing of the other side. In a sense, I am in the middle and I am the mirror of the reflections of the time in that place.
I would like to hope that this would give me some insight into how the in-between space, the space I am in, can start to take on a positivity of its own and [re]create the space, change it, [re]develop it in a way that I can then extract and redirect into projects that I have worked on thus far in school:
a greenhouse, a library, a hostel-studio/workspace, a house, an open space, a campus.
Perhaps these might be too many to attempt, but I would like to then choose a few that I can [re]visit and understand in a new way of looking back.
In a sense, for me, this is a way to understand the idea of architecture. What does it mean to cross a threshold. To enter a room. To exit a space. To look through and past into another place.
A couple precedents for me at this time are the slow house by diller+scofidio and the intention of the museum. How the shifting perspectives are the directive for the openings and closings of the space used. What is it to see the other space from the one you are in. To see the perspective change according to the movement of the perceiver(s) and that redirects the built space.