Path and place: a study of architecture, man, and nature

...But architecture has limits- and when we touch the invisible walls of the limits, then we know more about what is contained in them.

-Louis I. Kahn

Ideally, a thesis study in architecture should be made at a personal level of investigation so that a student may develop his or her own ideas and interests and, therefore determine a focus or direction towards an individual architectural position. It should be understood at the beginning, then, that this thesis asks a question that may never be answered. It is a part of a process in what is likely to become a lifelong search for the limits of architecture.

Architecture has always been the product of man’s attempt to shape his world. As such, architecture arose from a basic human need as a response to the challenge that nature poses to man. "...the first fact of architecture," wrote Vincent Scully, "is the topography of a place and the way human beings respond to it with their own constructed forms." Given these ideas, the focus of this thesis is the study of architecture as a potential medium through which man not only shapes his world, but interacts with it as well. This study has taken form through an investigation into the ideas of path and place as concepts which are fundamental to architecture, carrying with them implications of a relationship between man, architecture, and nature.