Hora di Bye-Bye - Major Design Project: The Embassy of Hora di Bye-Bye | Cabo Verde
How the design relates to the senses: The Embassy entitled ‘Hora did bye-bye’ means the ‘hour of departure’, a term used by Cape Verdeans. A fact or situation that is observed to exist or happen, especially when whose cause or explanation is in question. As viewers, we ask ourselves if this place exists, or if it exists in a space of imaginary experiences or memory. “The bias towards vision, the suppression of the other senses, and the consequent disappearance of sensory and sensual qualities from art and architecture has increasingly become a concern- in the way architecture is conceived, taught and critiques.” (Holl; 2005,9) Pallasmaa describes the mechanics of seeing, looking in particular detail at what he calls ‘the gaze.’ According to Pallasmaa, our experience of the world is mediated through a combination of all five senses, not just sight. The suppression of the other sensory realms has lead to an impoverishment of our environment, causing a feeling of detachment. My Major Design Project is comprised of six inter-connected spaces, linked through their relationship to the six senses:001 Hearing the Departed. This is a landscape of routes activated through sound and performance 002 Touching the Forgotten. An environment-scape that generates sound through texture 003 Smelling the Past. Points of sound, light and temperature that capture smell and taste 004 Seeing Memory. A space of illusion, using light and materiality to generate new memories 005 Hyper-Sensory. This land- seascape spatial investigation uses direction and disorientation to generate a hyper-sensory space 006 Tasting the Decibel A space in which sound and taste go hand-in-hand to experience a ‘cloud’ of salty densities. As architects, we design architecture to capture both our physical senses (sight, sound, touch, smell) and the incognizant sense of space. The basic interconnection of the physical senses of space has long been broken down into parts of study in basic architectural design. This compartmentalization and process actually conflicts with our inherent process to conceptualize and reconnect associations between the senses.
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