BY ALE CACACHO
EMBODIED COMPASS
Thesis Statement
This thesis will produce a new form of architectural subject by expanding the dimensions of architectural sensation-integrating multisensory engagement with visual design, adaptable spatial systems, and a deep connection to the natural environment. Through strategies such as connecting vision with sound, thermal perception, and dynamic natural elements like wind and light, the thesis reimagines architectural spaces as catalysts for sensory and emotional transformation. By incorporating biophilic principles and moments of sublime surprise, these designs aim to transcend traditional boundaries, redefining architecture as a medium for connection between individuals, their environment, and planetary systems. The architectural spaces envisioned will provoke reflection through sensory disorientation and balance disruption, encouraging users to rethink their spatial and ecological relationships.
These ideas will be demonstrated in the design of Embodied Compass located in San Francisco, California, a context that provides unique environmental challenges and opportunities for engaging with environmental hyperobjects such as sea-level rise and air pollution.
This adaptive multisensory architecture functions as a bridge between the human and the planetary, offering an embodied critique of visual bias while cultivating a heightened sensory and ethical engagement with our environments. By addressing Heidegger’s critique of enframing through design strategies that incorporate Juhani Pallasmaa’s sensory advocacy and Olafur Eliasson’s focus on subjective experiences marked by curiosity and wonder, it positions architecture as a medium for transforming human engagement with the world, shaping not just spaces but the ways we inhabit them.
Thesis Statement
Architecture is far from being an isolated and an autonomous medium, it is an apparatus precisely intertwined with the social, intellectual, and sensory dimensions of human experience, shaping and being shaped by historical and modern cultural demonstrations. The modern dominance of visual for architectural practices fosters a fragmented subjectivity marked by distraction, technological distortions, and socio-political alienation. Considering Martin Heidegger’s concept of enframing and the critique of technological mediation, this thesis argues that contemporary architecture’s overreliance on visual dominance transforms the natural and built environments into mere objects of categorization and control. By prioritizing vision, architecture aligns with technology’s reductive tendencies, rendering the world as something to be read or consumed rather than experienced. In so doing, it acts as an apparatus that reinforces the human perception of the world that is responsible for the Anthropocene.However, architecture, as a technology and apparatus, possesses the capacity to move beyond this limitation transforming human interaction with space from passive observation to active, embodied curiosity.
By integrating sensory modalities such as touch, sound, and scent with vision, architecture can challenge the enframing tendencies of technology, as described by Heidegger, and counter the socio-political biases and aesthetic limitations of visual dominance, highlighted by Walter Benjamin and Eileen Gray Nonheroic Modernism (1929), 239-245. This approach is not simply about augmenting sensory diversity but about cultivating a form of subjectivity rooted in embodied awareness, curiosity, and collective responsibility considering Dipesh Chakrabarty’s terms from "planetary subjectivity." The reconfiguration of architectural spaces to embrace adaptive multisensory elements also aligns with Giorgio Agamben’s call to reprogram apparatuses, redefining architecture not as a tool for perpetuating alienation but as a medium for fostering connection, reflection, and resilience. Juhani Pallasmaa’s advocacy for an architecture of the senses complements this vision, highlighting how built environments can cultivate embodied awareness and sensory integration. Likewise, Olafur Eliasson’s exploration of curiosity and wonder as forms of subjectivity inspires an architecture that re-engages users with the world’s inherent complexity.
By prioritizing vision, architecture aligns with technology’s reductive tendencies, rendering the world as something to be read or consumed rather than experienced.
Giorgio Agamben, expanding on Michel Foucault’s original
Proposal
NARRATIVE
This project reimagines the educational environment as a living, breathing organism that engages all the senses. Set against the dynamic tides of Yerba Buena Island, the floating school disperses its program across a constellation of islands, each crafted to awaken sensory awareness and embodied learning. It invites students to experience the natural world not just visually, but through touch, scent, sound, movement, and temperature, creating an educational journey anchored in embodied awareness. The floating campus is structured using lightweight steel space frames, forming flexible, organic geometries that adapt to the tides. The external skin, a combination of materials, breathes with its environment specifically shimmering under sunlight, vibrating with sound waves, and refracting light through cascading water or responsive liquid surfaces. Rather than static barriers, the facades become active participants in shaping space, experience, and learning.
The circulation bridges that weave the islands together are designed as thermal passages. Following principles inspired by Archimedes’ law and the studies of Ralph Knowles, these bridges subtly vary in temperature depending on their proximity to the water. As students walk across, they feel a coolness closer to the water's surface and warmth as they ascend. Movement is no longer just about transitioning from point A to B; it becomes a sensory experience that fosters mindfulness of the body’s relationship to space. The school’s programming is divided into specialized islands, each emphasizing a particular sense. Scent Islands feature herb gardens and aromatic curtains that release fragrances as the sun heats them or as the wind brushes through. Students engage with time and seasons through smell, learning to track the day’s progression not by clocks, but through the evolution of scents around them. Herbs grown by students are exchanged between classrooms, turning cultivation into a communal, multisensory practice.
Touch Islands celebrate materiality and texture. Floors, walls, and furniture are crafted from diverse tactile materials that encourage exploration. Corrugated surfaces, soft undulating walls, and embedded textures offer playful interactions, allowing students to learn through their hands and bodies, rather than simply through sight. These environments cultivate curiosity, physical confidence, and a heightened connection between self and space.
Sound Islands amplify the invisible forces of the environment. A dynamic glass facade embedded with resonating materials reveals the soundscape around the school specifically with vibrations from passing wind, movement of water, and even student-generated sounds are captured and made visible through ripples and shifting light patterns. This integration transforms sound from an ephemeral background into a tangible, participatory element of architecture.
Every island is in constant, gentle motion, floating and shifting with the tides. In this way, the school embodies a larger lesson that learning, like life and nature, is dynamic, interconnected, and never static. By designing a multisensory educational environment, the project challenges traditional ideas of architecture as a visual and static experience. It proposes instead that buildings can heighten awareness, deepen empathy, and nurture a generation that feels their place in the world with their whole bodies. It is an invitation to live, learn, and imagine through all the senses guided by the embodied compass within each of us.
