The Missed Connections: An Architecture of Identity

Abstract

Missed connections are inherently everywhere: they exist within the passerby on the street and the one sitting next to us on our daily commute. Perplexingly, the most overlooked of all missed connections exist within the very buildings we inhabit on a daily basis. At this human scale, an inexplicit absence of the anthropogenic identity has become rooted by the hyper-perfection and immediate gratification of chasmic, value-engineered buildings; ones which ultimately fail to bridge the synapses of memory. As the experience that one feels when occupying a building begins to mediate among the realms of the temporary and the eternal; an inherent irony stems from the idea that maybe, the most immutable memory of a building may rise from the most impermanent of places. Perceived through the lens of a decommissioned textile factory serving both a college town and a greater metropolitan corridor, this thesis recaptures vicissitudes of timely breadths; interjecting them back into the edifice. The proposal, an episodic vessel in triptych form intends to house: A museum to preserve past textile identities. A marketplace and restaurant to promote current anthropogenic stories. A rail station to propose a transient future. The mental photographs of a built environment, intrinsically developed on an evocative film are seldom a mass of ubiquity: they are the fixture, they are the detail; they are the past, they are the present; they are the immediate, lineal, and future place… …they are the missed connections.