Preliminary P2a Thoughts

In thinking about this project and the climactic and spiritual concerns at its core I realized that the best way to start here was by making a list of things I wanted to address/explore.  Some of these things are required in the assignment, some are obvious and a few are just things that I'm interested in.  Hopefully in this list and what follows, my concept of addressing both the spiritual and climactic requirements with a singular strategy will become clear.

Light:  In many ways light is the essence of spirituality and I'm sure the careful treatment of light will play a role in every one of our projects.  In mine I was thinking of the incorporation of light and water, in a way that uses daylight, filtered through water, as a diffuse lighting element throughout the space.  The video below is an example of my inspiration ofr this part... (please ignore the advertisment/profiteering nature of the video, I'm not trying to make any statements here...)



Time:  I wanted to address the temporal element of daylight, how its passage marks the passage of time.  I guess I could be making my space into a sundial or use light canons, but instead I'm thinking that I can combine this aspect with the light element by allowing the water/light fixtures to alternately heat and cool the space in response to time/sun exposure.

Climate:  I wanted to deal with the climactic situation by building underground.  I know that this seems contradictory to what Vince has said about the subterranean condition in Vegas, but I think a small scale intervention below ground isn't out of the question.  Earth sheltering, or at the very least earth construction, has traditionally been key to human life in the desert and it will be central in my project.  It will follow then that the tectonic/material aspects to my meditative space will be drawn from the immediate surroundings (rammed earth?) and reflect the forces of the subterranean condition.

Entrance procession:  This is one element that I am very interested in for this project, carrying on some concepts that interested me in third year.  I've been thinking about a ramped entrance procession that brings visitors slowly down and around the central meditative space while growing ever more narrow and quiet.  This would then open to the larger central space, but in the preceding moment each visitor would be alone, isolated even, in preparation for meditation in the main space.

All of those considerations combined with a bunch of smaller things seem to suggest the following intervention which I have roughly sketched below.  Take the sketch with a grain of salt, I imagine at this stage I can describe my intention better with words.

The idea here is that the only above ground elements are two semi-circular (although I'm not settled on this form yet) thermal mass "pads", separated by a rammed earth wall.  This wall will shade either one of the pads alternately, beginning the sunlight-temporal interaction that I'm interested in.  Each pad will warm or cool one of two channels of water, each forming a wall of the chamber below.  Those walls would be glass on the interior and likely concrete on the exterior (ground) side.  These water walls, circulating in a closed system, would both light the space (similar to the video embedded above) and become a heating or cooling element in the main room.  I'm hoping that there will be a noticeable thermal gradient formed between these walls that will slowly reverse as the day passes.  At night the thermal mass will continue to heat/insulate the space below and perhaps the lighting relationship will be reversed as artificial interior light begins to filter up through the water walls.  These walls will also divide the main space from the ramps surrounding it as part of the entrance procession.

Obviously this is only a rough idea at the moment and there are many elements I will explore over the next few days, like exactly what form and scale will be most appropriate,  the constructability of all of this and, of course, materials.

My initial material inspiration, chosen for the immediate locality of ramed earth and its excellent thermal (mass) properties. 

Good luck everyone.

J