Places of curiosity

This paper is about a design task of three weeks in a first-year undergraduate architectural design studio. The main motivation was for students to encounter many possibilities and probabilities of place and to comprehend the close relationship of topography and architecture. A task was introduced to students with a text of three different depictions of the same place. Narration consisted of three intermingled layers of place, named respectively as: "End," "Passages," and "Core." It was a depiction of curiosities and astonishments of topography, triggered by this layered place. The place was derived from multiple places, as the text was a depiction of experiences from three different people. In this architectural design task, the experiences, feelings, and embodiment of place were more important than a building program. The task needed students to design both the topographical context and architectural concept within it. First, students played with micro and macro scales of things to create a possible topography, together with the Places of Curiosity. Then, they focused on the text and tried to decipher the experiences, in order to design the Places of Curiosity. Briefly, this paper aims to stimulate how a "sense of place" and an "embodiment of experience" can trigger probable architecture through narrative, releasing students from current curricula to design something out of curiosity and astonishment.