Event, Ritual, and Space: A Festhalle for the City of Rapperswil
Rapperswil, Switzerland
Prof. Mark Morris + Iñaqui Carnicero
ARCH 5102, Undergraduate Thesis
Recipient of the Charles Goodwin Sands Memorial Bronze Medal
Spring 2013
"Holidays and Holy Days" seeks to understand the relationship between event, ritual, and urban form in a heavily layered historical site in the city of Rapperswil, a small urban agglomeration that strategically sits on a triangular peninsula along the narrowest stretch of Lake Zürich. The purpose of this project is twofold: to distill the multiple historical and cultural layers that remain latent on the site, and to use this strategy of unfolding to inform the design of a civic Festhalle, a cultural institution for the celebration of pilgrimage, as well as other local secular rituals.
In a city where patterns of social activity are associated with cycles of pilgrimage, jubilee, civic holidays, and sacred festivities (all of which have remained surprisingly untouched over the past century), the program of a Festhalle presents an opportunity to dissect a highly historical, heavily layered, and dramatically theatrical site- creating an institution that, at once, asserts the identity of the city, its rituals, and its people.
This thesis also contends that architecture is both 'time-ful' and 'time-less' : that by virtue of its inhabitation, its weathering, its decay, and its repurposing, buildings become instilled with a cultural patina of their own, and ultimately become physical repositories of latent memory. Through drawing and physical modeling, the project aims to suggest multiple scales of detail and tactility, as part of this argument that in its built form, architecture is an experiential artifice.
