TETRAPOLIS - an exercise in building the complexities of proximity space

Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, Politehnica University of Timisoara, Timisoara, Romania

^a Corresponding author: diana.giurea@yahoo.com

Abstract

It is often said that the precarious state of Eastern European public space is a direct consequence of the poor communal and social bonds that the communist governance of space inadvertently put forth. Communal spaces belonged to all and to no one at the same time- were, and many times still are, devoid of anyone’s responsibility towards them. With this premise, we experimented with our first year architecture student’s intuitive ways for understanding these vicinities, their physical and symbolic proximities, through participatory tactics and certain poetic/architectural tools required in the phenomenological build-up of space. We thus devised the TETRAPOLIS game, through which, our students were able to work both autonomously as well as in teams, with the task of building a communal setting. Our paper discusses the methods used by this community building game and our findings regarding the student’s abilities to intuitively understand the complex nature of proximity.