Thesis: The Veil is Not a Veil

2014-2015. Providence R.I. RISD BFA/BArch Thesis

“The Veil is not a Veil” is an architectural thesis that seeks to transgress a threshold of understanding to construct common ground. Like a charm bracelet, the final performative and architectural work is an installation of relationships that are loosely composed with an imagined line. Through the architectural program of a bathhouse, the poetic narrative models a critical economy of relationships that key into a labyrinth. The procession through the bathhouse weaves different spatial bodies apart and together, emerging into a fluid architectural phenomenon.

The work is comprised of a variety of mediums, including:

• Casting sculptures

• Drawings, printing, and painting

• Digitally modeling & digitally fabricating 3D Stoll knits

• Welding scultpural installation

• Creating and presenting poetic prose

• Creating a final thesis book

The Veil is Not a Veil: The Bathhouse

Le Bivouac

Can life exist in the form of a poem?
Where we can inhabit the nuances of what is unknown.

For the tonal resonance BETWEEN what exists and what is perceived,
Can envelope us in a song that draws an inhabitation that we can conceive.

Constructing its existence lies in de-robing hidden forms,
Through an evolution of spatial pressures that reveal what was worn.

To slowly unravel the resonance that is created between the cognitive mind and its hand,
And allow the double entendre that exists at the route/(root) to construct an unseen geographical land.

Can architecture inhabit the artifice of a story that needs to be told,
Which may deafen ears if the whisper is too bold?

For the inhabitant must absorb and unlock the secrets of the opaque air,
within which you are willed to take care.

How does the body of work envelope us into a sensual narrative?
That melts us into the empathic chambers of an anatomically declarative?

Can the faces found in the echoes of this architectural voice,
Form a loyal accomplice that unlocked and could make your body rejoice?

Here is the point for the unknown inhabitant is completely subsumed,
Where a temporarily exposed recognition allows them to bloom.

Le Bassin

It is the cairn which marks where one must creep,
A sign that gestures through where one must peep.
To comprehend one must follow a narrow path.
Into the depths of the convoluted baths.

In embodying the sacred site of the chashitsu,
The entrance requires you to leave behind the things you carry with you.
It is the height and width of a nijiriguchi,
That filters out a new kind of esprit.

Your toes bath in the shallow wells of a basin,
Which set the tone for the slippery journey you will be taking.
For you have trespassed into a new ontological ground,
Where the discovery of new argonautics shall be propound.

Wet Rooms

The ritual lifted by the physicality of the act,
Reenacts a primal energy that carries the virtues into a medium that can compact.

The spatial body must pass beyond the folie,
And spray down the skin of a salty sweat that leaves the water murky.
To rinse and give rise to a formulated body,
Before it ascends into a confluence of anatomies.

Two wet rooms split the human figure,
While leaning in to share a common sliver.
Here is where you trace the gradient path,
That casts in place the other’s contrast.

Steam Room

Revived with a new found aesthetic voice,
A recognizable form is understood beyond the name of your choice.
In baring the journey of these strained conditions,
A reveal is discovered through an unknown set of associations.

These are channeled through the pressurization of our different architectural forms,
That ask you to endure conditions that have been previously recognized as the norm.
For the destination of not one but many horizons reveal the corruption of a single foundational path,
Constructing a personal narrative that is profound in the dampness of the baths.

The beauty therefore lies in the journey that we must each behold,
To discover and the stories that must told.
The perfection of that beauty can lie in what is emphatically dark,
Which asks us to engage in the pleasantries beyond which we traditionally choose to remark.

Suana

The air is hot, a burdening thrash,
A dry heat that beats away your body into ash.
The violent degrees progressively squeeze your body,
Concurrently compressing your chest, till it is left drained and completely lobbied.

Embedded within the hard grasp of the mountain’s gendarme,
The looming and insidious space, looks out onto an out door view with such charm.
The sauna sits within a falsified highpoint,
That looks out onto a seen with a vanishing reference point.

A little light that punctures through the walls of the heaving Sauna’s seed,
Looks out onto the valley where ravens dive into the whirling winds that heed.
They graze along the tree-line,
And pluck at the seeds of Alstroemeria that have managed to survive.

Les Grands Bains

Under the sky of a Dark Moon,
Masses and heated waters melt a body as it swoons.
The turmoil of polar temperatures are slowly subsumed,
Where and an attack on the flesh is no longer consumed.

There is a prominence in this new found state,
Where there is no need for external forces to mitigate.
Looking up at the sky space exists in a contiguous constellation of stars,
Through the dimensional relations of what lies afar.

And once you’ve read the view of a space drenched in heat,
You can ponder a plunder that burns so hot you cannot repeat.
No longer crippled but complacent of the journey you have past,
You retrieve your clothes for a new summit which calls for you to pass.

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made: Psalm 139:13-16

For you formed my inward parts;
For you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;,
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.

The Peeled Selves

The site is formed through each of these ideological constructions,
A phenomenological map, depicting a space within which each perspective functions.

For if each is a particular field of vision: formed from a visual lens that clearly depicts,
The visual geographies form what our constructions constrict.

And while the circle is what is traditionally given to us,
Its shape is associated with what our vision constructs.

The varying shadows therefore call upon us to ask,
What lies in these spaces which are commonly masked?

As we look beyond what our individual cultures formally obstruct,
We may reveal an underlying topology from which we can deduct.

Perspectival Matrix

“multiplicity and ambiguity advocates a construction of the multiplying number of differences; a new subject offering a new relation between subjects”.

Eclipse & Ellipse

Searching for the distinctive stratum of this stratigraphic correlation,
The relationship between theses diverging and converging forms are put into contemplation.

How have they evolved from the same origin?
What has made their current formal logic foreign?

And as each of these frames of thought chose a particular method to eclipse,
We could equate to the different geometric logics to the construction of an ellipse.

By tracing the evolutionary narrative from a shared provenance,
We can develop an understanding of the different forms of cognizance.

For the significance of this evolutionary line,
Lies in the dividing construction of a perception of time.

For within the global phenomenon of this religious nation,
We can reveal the complexity and potential contradiction inherent in any linear history of representation.

It is therefore the juxtaposition of distinct logics formed in perspective,
Through which we can draw an understanding of other that is objective.

The Veil

The veil by definition hides what we cannot see,
So how do we look for what allows it to be?

Today the fabric by capital US has been cast,
To define a frozen understanding of a religious mass.

Yet the material takes shape only from initial structures,
Which has been disregarded and thus maintained a binary rupture.

So the veil begins to tell a largely pale tale,
Of a subject we have not learned to bring into life’s scale.

In response we must resist the trend of etymology,
And look to understand it’s meaning within its intended geography.

For the subject has propensity for melancholy,
Which can entrap us in dangerous iconographies.

To see its performance as one of rich and nuanced religious practice,
That has embodied many cultural levels of social aspects.

How does its meaning coexist between the tangled present and past?
Where does its fixed definition make it incapable to last?

To learn to see past the veils from what we initially trust,
And move beyond the paralyzing consciousness of what is unjust.

So we can begin to elucidate the pessimist’s flaw,
And let our vision begin to slowly thaw.

Can its tectonics begin to describe these hanging social tensions?
To bring to light our common social misconceptions.

And break the tangle threaded line,
Of an independent material within our minds.

To see how dissonance has come to form around man,
All this through the understanding of the Islamic woman.

“We need the courage to create ourselves daily… as Christians, as Jews, as Muslims, as thinking, caring, laughing, loving human beings. I think that the courage to confront evil and turn it by dint of will into something applicable to the development of our evolution, individually and collectively, is exciting – honorable.” - Maya Angelou