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If on the line a magician
Cornell University, Fall 2024, Thesis
Independent Project
Advisors: Andrea Simitch and Ryan Whitby
“The poetics of the “open” work tends to encourage ‘acts of conscious freedom’ on the part of the performer and place him at the focal point of a network of limitless interrelations.” -Umberto Eco, The Open Work
This thesis envisions an architecture as an "open work" that resists singular truths, amplifying ambiguity, subjectivity, and contradiction. Seeking to destabilize the prescribed reality, it restructures cognition through sensory perception, formal imagery, and narrative transformations.
A series of improvisational encounters appear on the urban stage of the High Line, NYC. Flowing through the seams of the city’s schismatic structure, the line becomes a porous mediation between fragmented realities. Through the divinatory framework of Tarot, the theatres layer intuitive projections onto archetypes in surreal imagery - counter-imposing a structuralist device of narrative creation and integration.
Reality and stage blur in spontaneous play, woven between chance and agency. As narratives reveal, overlap, and alchemize in delirous fluidity, the city introjects an eternal story of infinite projections.
Veiled Suspension
“The real is impossible because it is always in its place—it carries on beneath its veils, repressed, rejected, unknown.” (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XI, 1973)
Site I at Chelsea Market, themed around distortion, heightens the tension between dualities through visual and gravitational destabilization. Two parallel paths emerge from tunnel vision and split on the High Line, unseen from one another, evoking the Two of Swords’ narrative of being blindfolded between opposing forces.
Creating dialogue between Chelsea Market, The Standard Hotel, the Google office building, and 14th Street Park, the intervention becomes a site for everyday encounters. Layered veils and glass surfaces manipulate light - reflecting, refracting, and obscuring - while porous glimpses flicker between two spatial volumes.
Suspended drawbridges in the void amplify unresolved tension as grounds shift between porous and solid, culminating in a diagonal path that punctures through veiled realities to reveal the river.
Vertical Metamorphosis
Site II, with the theme of transformation, amplifies the High Line’s shift from industry to nature and art, reinterpreting verticality through scent, sound, and mist to evoke ambiguity and creation.
In the art gallery district, immaterial pathways weave through interstitial spaces, linking tall school and gallery buildings as they hover over lush vegetation. A reimagined Tower archetype, derived from the existing chimney forms on site, becomes a vertical apparatus for scent mixing and sound reverberation.
Greenhouses spill onto rooftops, releasing mist and scent to form an ethereal cloudscape. Photography and fabric programs extend in a framing language, recording and reimagining dreams.
The pathways, towers, and greenhouses interact as a unified composition, shifting between sensory experience, observation, and introspection to evoke transformation.
Chance Projection
“Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.” -Jorge Luis Borges, Garden of Forking Paths
Site III, with the theme of revelation, celebrates overlapping cycles - sun, trains, and human circulation - by layering rhythms between hidden infrastructure and public realms.
At the Hudson train yard, soon to be concealed beneath a casino over residential spaces amidst community objection, the design reimagines the site as a cultural space predicating future developments within its ideology.
The ground plane peels into a dynamic roof, revealing the rhythmic motion of trains, the city’s invisible pulse. Reflective surfaces captures sunsets, while shallow rainwater retention pools vibrate with the train, their sounds reverberatuing through porous flooring.
Within the linear language of train tracks, pivot points introduce moments of redirection and fluid choice, echoing the circular form of the Wheel of Fortune - where cosmic cycles and randomness intersect with agency.
