Open Collections

Ishimura, Genta

Since the development of modern technology and industry, the window as an architectural element has lost its agency as a mediator of public/private, interior/exterior, individual/collective and has become a simply a product of enclosure. Through the survey of existing regional windows, this thesis works on gaining a better understanding of Vancouver’s cultural milieu by providing a genealogical framework for the foundation of a generative process by critically examining the collective memory of this city. The proposal will situate itself in the near future, by re-imagining Vancouver’s relationship to the window, where a widespread building envelope failure begins to affect its most ubiquitous building form - the window wall tower. With accruing cost of repair paralyzing many into entropic disarray, a new narrative with the city emerges through the act of re-skinning the existing in order to reconsider its latent potentials. Strategically, negotiating the existing buildings into the rhetoric of sustainability provides new possibilities nested in the act of repairing. Proposed architecture finds itself working within the rules of the existing while addressing many of its failures that has spiralled the city into a state of crisis. In tapping into the city’s obsession with speculation, this new speculative process based on repair allows dwellers to engage with its environment in an open-ended manner. To place this projected future, the proposed site will return to the epicentre of where this all began, the Concord Pacific developments on the former Expo lands. Effects of multiplicity, strange familiarity, and urgent imagination compose the language to not only challenge the status quo but openly invites individuals to imagine together what this future might look like.

Vancouver (B.C.)

Text

University of British Columbia. ARCH 549

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0378546

Applied Science, Faculty of; Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA), School of

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/