Orchestrating Journey of Water

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Designing with Nature

1 Prologue Sense of Virtual

Changing a place where we live has a power to open up new questionings and understandings about interaction between the environment and ourselves. Breaking of the habitual conditionings and struggle of locating oneself in a new realm exposes the physiological and behavioral effects of the character of place on human.

The intuitive motivation for this research is rooted in my personal experience of moving to Ghent, Belgium for my master studies in 2019. My story starts with my arrival to the city of Ghent, eager for an internal transformation and adaptation to the new foreign environment. However, I felt a distance, a distance to the urban fabric, a blockage in the communication between me and the environment, which accumulated over time and ended up in an internal state of imprisonment. That was a new sensation for me whom I considered myself as explorative and adaptable.

After the initial denial state of these new sensations, I initiated to observe myself and my environment, in an attempt to understand the parameters of this condition. Through time, I came to a realization; during the times of internal change, in the times of uncertainty, we require a changing, moving, transforming; a dynamic environment which would correlate to our feelings, makes us reflect on it, allow a moment of joy or silence through diverse interactions. And the city of Ghent was the opposite, the aesthetics of the historic city was complete, un-changing; it was composed of beautiful picturesque sceneries that I cannot touch, alter or be a part of. Flatness of the geography, strict fragmentation of nature and functions, monotony of space and time was very different from my habitual environment. The socioeconomical dynamics such as commercial activities, tourism is built- in to the fabric of the cityscape; the constructed paradigm with its physical and non-physical systems seemed detached from its essence, I couldn’t feel and commune with the place. As I communicated with international students, I begin to realize it is not only me that feel disconnected, that the free dialogue with the surrounding reality is blocked. It seemed that the language of the environment has an extreme influence on our psychology. The singular and controlled nature of the experience I was having here reminded me word virtual 1 where I myself was not an active participator of reality anymore but a passive observer. The sensation of imprisonment raised in me as I was interiorizing my environment motivated by built-in survival mechanism of adaptation. I myself was trapped in a singular role and identity, resistant to flow and change. As I observe and talk with people, I realized core of the most of the psychological problems arises from this resistance of internal transmutations that correlates the frozen aesthetics of the exterior landscape and architecture.

Within the urban fabric, only the water was in motion; the waterways that has been running through the Ghent through many years, the water that marked the place for the first settlements, the water that emerged marshlands and created the culture of trade in the city of Ghent; water that has been breathing of freedom to the soul, spreading its life-giving force to its surrounding. In spite of its cultural, historical, ecological and psychological importance, it seems to be today the presence of water was not much celebrated.

In the light of this experience and personal observations, I wanted to use my master thesis as an opportunity to think about ways to alter this barren relationship with the urban fabric into a more fertile 2 and fluid 3 dialogues with the agency of design and architecture.

What would be the role of design and architecture to enhance, augment, alter, and transform this relationship? What is the language spoken in between, what binds us and departs us? Is the identity of self, identity of places are stable or transformational? How do they speak to one and other?

1“Virtual adjective: created by computer technology and appearing to exist but not existing in the physical world.” Cambridge dictionary. [online] Available at: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/virtual [Accesed June 08,2021]

2The word fertile is used to refer for both visible and invisible realms; ability to give life to an offspring such as a plant, or a thought, flourishing imagination. Cambridge Dictionary. [online] Available at: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/ dictionary/english/fertile [Accesed June 08,2021]

3“fluid adjective (likely to change ): If situations, ideas, or plans are fluid, they are not fixed and are likely to change, often repeatedly and unexpectedly.” Cambridge Dictionary. [online] Available at: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/ dictionary/english/virtual [Accesed June 08,2021]