Abstract:
What is a place that can connect isolated individuals in a bustling city? The third place. The “third place” is where people can spend their time and feel welcomed other than their home, the first place, or their work, the second place. The lack of a “third place” in the a city can often bring urbanites the feeling of disconnection and loneliness. The city’s high density creates a lot of sights. Sights from the street into a shop, from an office window into the opposite window building, from a mezzanine into an atrium. We design buildings and cities to achieve our demands. These built forms have become stages for us to watch, to connect with our surroundings. Architectural openings direct how people see things. As watching is often unintentional, it indicates that we are curious about our surroundings. The way we design these openings could be meaningful and enrich urbanites’ lives. A window is defined as, “an opening especially in the wall of a building for admission of light and air and capable of being open and shut.” Yet, we have extended our definition of window beyond its initial purpose as we access the other side of a window with our sight. This thesis is a perception based architectural experiment to design a public library as the “third place”. It pursues answers to the questions of: how can the mechanisms for watching be used to architecturally reconnect individuals in the city? How can windows be used comfortably and make cities less lonely by directing what urbanites watch? This thesis manipulates space like Edward Hopper’s paintings by orientating how people watch, controlling the proximity of what they watch, and articulating the thresholds through which they watch. Watching can be made comfortable in the city.