Figured Ground: Architecture, Art, & The Sublime

The impetus for this thesis investigation is born from a consideration for the implications of working with site. There is an inherent dialogue between a work of architecture and its site that expresses, and often embodies, the social, cultural, and historical conditions of the place. Architecture becomes not only a collaboration between physical form and space, but also the temporal mediator of the memories and anticipations of those who experience it. When we engage a site that is already a marked or inscribed terrain, we must be aware of how context affects the experience of both place and program. When this is done in such a manner that allows an understanding of architecture as a sort of cultural and historical recording, the architecture then becomes a palimpsest of place; an architectural layering of old and new, a vehicle for recollecting, rediscovering, and renewing. This then raises the question, how does one go about situating the new with regards to genius loci ?