Leaving Traces

This project began with the readings, All That Is Solid Melts into Air by Marshall Berman, and The Unfinished Project of Modernity by Jürgen Habermas. Berman and Habermas discuss the ideals of the modernist movement but determine it ultimately failed due to the sense of alienation felt by people. Upon travelling to Finland and experiencing the work of Alvar Aalto, I discovered that he developed a human connection, even as a modern architect, through the act of leaving traces. Through materiality and spacial configuration, Aalto allows people and time to leave traces on his work. 

This residence, in Palm Springs, California, explores the contradiction between durability and deterioration with the intention of leaving traces. While certain elements of the landscape and interior are meant to change with time, the structure of the home will remain. This creates relationships between the home, the landscape, and the people; allowing each to leave traces on the others. Through time these physical traces create a vulnerability within the home allowing people to more readily form connections with the architecture. These mental traces make the home more meaningful to the residents, and as future generations continue to live in the home, more and more traces will be left as time passes.

I began by mapping the traces that I left within my own home over the course of the day. Through multiple iterations and explorations, I developed the actions of wrapping, pushing, and folding as various ways of connecting these traces that I left. I then used these three actions to explore how they, in combination with programmatic, climatic, and topographic conditions, can begin to influence certain aspects of the home design.