Research

This thesis investigates how different degrees of interiority shape ways of inhabiting. It does so by distilling the intelligence from three architectural case studies – the volcanic mountain range of Lihue Calel, Moriyama House by SANAA, and No Stop City by Archizoom – and a Mennonite colony in the Pampa Seca. In Lihue Calel, geological corrugations generate ecological niches that allow life to occur in an otherwise arid landscape. Moriyama House and No Stop City radicalise this idea through fragmented volumes and limitless grids that produce interstitial spaces and differentiated interiors. These cases frame the analysis of the Mennonite settlement as a form of “critical-paranoid” activity, in the sense described by Dalí and reinterpreted by Koolhaas: a way of fabricating a world that confirms a pre-established hypothesis. The project proposes a topographic and subdivision system that acknowledges the colony’s artificiality and its paradox – an extreme interiority that tends to expel its own members – and seeks to reconcile rural production with inevitable densification. Through iterative operations of diagonal cuts, lot subdivision and volumetric fragmentation, the thesis constructs a model capable of accommodating generational growth while preserving agricultural ground, turning the colony into a device to think the contemporary relationship between rurality, industry and collective life.