ARCH-4980.1 | Ted Ngai, Lecturer

TRANSIT HUB FOR THE GLOBALIZED INDIVIDUAL

ALEXANDRA DORN

The most radical architecture is that which exists in direct contact with the human body. Treatment of our truly immediate environments, our bodies, has evolved just as our treatment of our greater external environments. As we gain a greater understanding of where and what we live at smaller and smaller scales, our interventions become more refined and, as a result, at smaller scales and closer vicinity to the body. Now this idea of contact, scale, and vicinity are not necessarily in reference to attempting to make architecture something that can only exist physically connected to the body, but more of a nudge towards a closer feedback-loop between the building and the individual. As the most invasive undertaking of humans, the built environment needs to be more conscious of itself.

In this flattening world, the global individual is at the forefront of what is developing in this world. The globalizing world began with the search for the New World in the 15th century, and has progressed from a globalization of countries, then of companies, and now of the individual. With this, the individual, especially the student/young adult has been globalized both physically and virtually.

Focusing in on this globalization of the young adult and intersecting it with the drive to create an architecture that is in direct contact with the body leads to the development of the Transit Hub for the Globalized Individual in Keflavik, Iceland. The placement in Keflavik has drivers both in the environmental qualities of the place as well as it current status as a hub for cheap travel to Europe from North America. As a major crossing point for travel and in turn language, culture, knowledge, and behavior, this hub offers the diversity for the development of a truly adaptive place that tends to the globalized individual.

This transit hub will involve spaces designed virtually, and physically, responding to sensors on the body of the inhabitant. These will involve places for rest, learning, productivity, socializing, and entertainment. The main functions of the feedback sensor in the building will have to do with light, thermoregulation, and the disposition of a space.