A traveling fellowship in Architecture

1988 Competition Overview

As successive forms of culture and technology have encountered the world and reconstituted and recomposed it, as language substitutes for “experience”, as veneer substitutes for “solid”, as continuity of any kind is broken into parts and recomposed a digitized “bits”, architects have struggled with the memory of Authenticity. Their efforst to create authenticity distinguish their buildings from the common variety that freely adopts the potentials of contemporary practice. In the face of the pressures of this practice, architects in pursuit of authenticity are forced to absolve themselves by irony, produce illusions of solidity, or withdraw from the world in which most people live.

You will investigate the issue of authenticity at the Entrance. The portal, the transition between what is the public outdoor realm and the localized interior realm, is a point where architectural choices must be made. Is there an authentic continuity that links inside to outside, public to private? Or is the difference between inside and outside the authentic condition? Is entering more authentic than exiting? Which way does the door swing?