Jillian Crandall
ARCH-4980.3 | Carla Leitao, Adjunct Professor
THE SENTIENT EVENT
Establishing a Reflexive Ecology
JILLIAN CRANDAL
For decades, the Olympic games have been used as leverage in cities to generate tourism and to fund infrastructural developments. In actuality, the event more often leaves a disproportionate amount of damage in its wake – environmentally, financially, and infrastructurally. The central problem of the Olympics is that while technology and culture continue to evolve, and while performative limits are transgressed each day, the fundamental nature of the event has remained stagnant. This calls for a rigorous reconceptualization of what the event should not only be but do, responding to a long history of the Event in architectural discourse.
This project adds to that history with the hypothetical Istanbul Summer Olympics 2028: version 2.0. Here, an assertive position is taken by regarding architecture as pure-program, defining new modes of inhabitation not necessarily bounded by walls but embedded within existing networks and infrastructure. This is ultimately an architecture predicated on moving bodies shaping space as a physical medium, and conversely space influencing the relationships between humans and their environment.
By imbuing the event with purpose and intelligence, a direct link is formed between the games and the city. The goal of the TRACfield TRIAD (an acronym for Transient Responsive Actuating Connector, and a spin on the traditional triathalon) is to create new intersections and traces in the city via the athlete as agent, to assesses and measure the interaction between the body and the city’s visible and invisible obstacles, to deploy, inform, respond, and remediate. These effects will last long after the games end, with careful planning long before they begin. This redefines the role of the architect as a collaborator with politicians, economists, environmentalists, researchers, academics, and sponsoring agencies. The prior stagnancy of the event is eradicated in favor of a new sentience, creating a multiplicity of perspectives for participants of local and non-local destinations in a radically new and dynamic way.