It Takes a City to Raise a Child: Integrating the world of childhood into the urban landscape

Abstract

Within our modern society, human dominance over nature gradually changed our interaction with our environment. Architecture has become regarded as products or, more specifically objects; buildings created to be forms and primarily represent the cultural and social ideals of our time. Our highly conditioned and controlled indoor environment consequently created a disconnection between our bodies and our environment. Human beings are not autonomous but instead survive through relationships and we are sensitive to the dimensions of which our environment is composed. Rather than objects, architecture should serve as a medium between the inhabitants and their environment. The ground has the ability to interact with the contextual landscape while also allowing inhabitants to form a connection to the outside world. It is an element that will always exist below your feet and where the rest of the architecture will return to. Space is framed from horizontal planes instead of walls, allowing it to remain fluid and open. This thesis investigates the potential of horizontal planes, creating spaces more harmonised with the human dimension while also maintaining a relationship with contextual landscape. The platform is an architectural device directly extracted from the city landscape, but instead of stacked floors, it can exist as something between furniture and architecture. The more subtle level changes can merge and reciprocate with the city landscape to become something between architecture and landscape to create a new way of thinking about body and architecture.