Two Banks
Project
100,000 ft2
Washington, DC/Fort Worth
2017
This is a thesis on the possibility of poché: the mutable boundary that defines an interior as distinct from all else. Poché can also be understood as a site of cinematic action—poché as verb—in that it necessarily transforms an image in the delineation of interior and exterior. The two states are conditioned differently, having been mediated by the existence of poché.
This thesis recognizes two paradigms as polar conditions in the description of poché: the labyrinth and the pyramid. The former manifests as absolute surface – a scrolling, involuted interior to which one is always tangent. The latter is a condition of absolute thickness—where matter divides and volumes suspend.
In refutation of the 20th century’s pursuit of efficiency and insulation in architectural form, this project searches for other myths. It claims that an architecture can contain multiplicities in its reading, that the boundary of an architectural object is one that is highly contextual. As such, architecture might begin to approach a methodology of measurement based on relativity, rather than empiricism—an architecture where the thickness of a wall separates more space than conceivable.
