AMBIGUOUS SPACE
By: Seantel Trombly
About the Author: Seantel Trombly is a Masters student at Wentworth Institute of Technology from Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to architecture she is an active poet often posting her work on her YouTube Channel, Writing Our Makeup, and proud feminist aiming to represent the unheard voices in a field with a heavily dominated male hierarchy. This past year she has pursued her thesis with a focus on inequality within space and how it may foster ones ability to “claim” authority” in it. She had always been drawn to the ways architecture represents different identities and cultures and how that may reflect inequality within them. She has dedicated this year to further develop the idea around ambiguous and androgynous space. Through studying methods of gendered and queer spaces, she has developed a unique lens to identify ways architecture can foster vulnerability and possibly create a unique form of interaction amongst strangers. Ambiguous space (in the context of the public realm) explores a design method that allows many users the ability to choose their own unique experience through space in order to foster a personal identification and resonance within it, one where they might normally feel levels of rejection or fear. With a project in the making Seantel aims to finish this year off strong, graduating in April to then find ways to bring these studies further into the field.
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The sketches represent different forms of personal space. Our relationship with the physical world is understood by our haptic senses, meaning the way we process the space around us is due how architecture influences color, scale, sound, thermal comfort, etc. The human experience in architecture is often one that is first felt and then seen. These sketches represent the suggested boundary (our “bubble”) in which we are always aware of and how that adjusts in relation to our physical boundary and others
