Alejandro Saldarriaga (MArch II)
Eroding Platonism
Platonic Naturalism seeks to render architecture, traditionally thought of as synthetic and imposed upon a site, as a harmonic natural atmosphere, blurring the line between the organic and the artificial.
The project is placed along a significant mountain range in the outskirts of the Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico. Since town has a long-standing tradition of pueblo pottery making, the project’s program speaks to the area’s cultural capital and holds a pottery center for the Santa Clara area. It serves as a space for a form of expression that seamlessly integrates the natural in the creation of the artificial.
The pottery center is held inside a platonic architectural volume – the cube. Through a generative process that emphasizes the natural over the fabricated, the project transforms a highly artificial geometry to merge it into the landscape of New Mexico.
The site’s unique topography is used as a negative of the interior space, which speaks to the language of the caves, rocky plateaus, and cliffs of its context. Understanding that natural landscapes are dynamic systems subject to raw decomposition processes, the project is subjected to a similar inevitable process. The building is allowed to erode vertically through a façade of increasingly porous layered rammed earth, rendering a building that is born from the mountain and, with time, deceases into the natural landscape.
The Immeasurable Enclosure Fall 2019
Eroding Platonism
Platonic Naturalism seeks to render architecture, traditionally thought of as synthetic and imposed upon a site, as a harmonic natural atmosphere, blurring the line between the organic and the artificial.
The project is placed along a significant mountain range in the outskirts of the Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico. Since town has a long-standing tradition of pueblo pottery making, the project’s program speaks to the area’s cultural capital and holds a pottery center for the Santa Clara area. It serves as a space for a form of expression that seamlessly integrates the natural in the creation of the artificial.
The pottery center is held inside a platonic architectural volume – the cube. Through a generative process that emphasizes the natural over the fabricated, the project transforms a highly artificial geometry to merge it into the landscape of New Mexico.
The site’s unique topography is used as a negative of the interior space, which speaks to the language of the caves, rocky plateaus, and cliffs of its context. Understanding that natural landscapes are dynamic systems subject to raw decomposition processes, the project is subjected to a similar inevitable process. The building is allowed to erode vertically through a façade of increasingly porous layered rammed earth, rendering a building that is born from the mountain and, with time, deceases into the natural landscape.
The Immeasurable Enclosure Fall 2019
