Thresholds are where transformations begin, where exchanges between unlikely things occur, and where identities are declared. Because they are the result of dynamic relations, between architecture and landscape, public and private, work and recreation, inside and outside, they resist closure in terms of meaning and space. Thresholds hold the potential of an inclusive realm, where the introduction and maintainance of difference is possible. Unlike and ideea of inclusion as “melting pot”, where identities are blurred to create a compromised whole, threshold as an operation entails the preservation of differences, as well as the creation of something new from their coexistance.

The threshold operation will also provide a way of representing the identity of a place in spatial terms, rather than relying on façade or other image based means.

The project will try to define and construct a threshold whose significance as a passage is linked to its spatial and experiential semiautonomy from the place and elements it connects. Hierarchy, metonymy, reversal and deferral of passage, and scale, are some of the strategies that may contribute to a threshold’s autonomy.

There is a secondary set of allegorical thresholds that refer to themes of growth and regeneration. The project will also define multiple thresholds, between mountain and valley, constructed and natural, road and water course. The overlay of scales of body, building and landscape makes it possible both to represent and inhabit this expansive site with its seemingly endless length and uncontrolable perspectives. The project engages the regional scale of the mountain and valley landscape, bu also represents smaller dimensions of human activity. The labyrinthine route of the water reproduces the sense of negociating one’s way carefully through the rocks, bringing forward and confirming movements that have existed on the site for generations. The interwining of new paths and configurations with preexisting ones-both natural and artificial-constructs a landscape layered in time as well as space.

2009