Abstract | Keywords | Export | Availability | Bookmark

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

ETERNAL HOLIDAY investigates human tendencies in referring to landscape and uses architecture as a medium to further experiment upon this relationship. The South Funen archipelago in Denmark is considered as a site of this exploration. Not only does it allow a discussion on themes such as isolation and touristification, but it also begins to engage a wider and more general phenomenon that concerns the way we consume and commodify nature and enables an existential analysis of our relationship with time and experience. Recognizing the superficial glimpse with which tourism relates to places has been the starting point of the analysis, with architecture being a tool to interrogate conditions in which our glimpse changes. The reflection paper can be seen as a repetitive trip to the islands: through the use of shorts narrations, the reader constantly changes their role and perspective towards the archipelago. The narrations mirror the development of the dissertation, as they reveal the continuous evolution of my glimpse and the serial transmutation of the roles I have been playing; at times the architect, the tourist, the travel agent or the islander. Through this artifice, the islands are constantly re-discovered, allowing the reader to tackle an aspect that until then has been ignored. In this way the islands are re-defined and thus categorized, becoming at time a place to consume, a place to evade from, a place which can never be understood or known, or a place which is not needed. This formulates the structure of the dissertation - designed as a tab - where each chapter links the narration with a reflection topic. By experiencing in first person those islands and contemplating the evolution of my emotions, I was able in fact to recognize characteristics which are implicitly present or could condition the way we look at the landscape, such as boredom, constraint or imagination. Each of these concepts is uncovered and included in the analysis, and eventually tested in a drawing, another narration or in an architectural intervention, which can be seen as the ultimate experimental manifestation of the reflection topic underlined. Each chapter ends with a walk through the intervention, which embodies the discussed questions and triggers a different way to think of tourism and of the role of the architect. The intervention in fact does not only responds to the program and function which is previously outlined, but also ends up raising more questions, undermining basic pillars of the architectural praxis. Every trip and each chapter can be read as an occasion to discuss and question the tools we have, not only in the understanding of the landscape, but also of architecture. In the final chapter, architectural conceptions of time, function, meaning and experience are questioned and re-elaborated, laying the ground for the idea of eternal holiday.