The Borges Cloisters

Abstract

The 20th-century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is best known for his fantastical stories of labyrinths and libraries, but his early poetry evokes the sacredness of ordinary urban spaces in his native Buenos Aires: patios, for instance, that are “the slope / down which the sky flows into the house.” The monastic cloister operates analogously. As the heart of the monastic polis, it synthesizes street, public square, and paradise garden, situating the daily rhythms of life “at the crossway of the stars.” It embodies a deep story of hope.

The cloister therefore offers an ideal typology for the urgent ecological task of urban rewilding: the practice of reawakening latent ecosystems in their sacred complexity. Less a means of exclusion than of inviting the soul to turn inward, the cloister can become a rich space for reconnecting cities with the land to which they belong. The unique perimeter walk, in particular, forms a contemplative and social space between inside and out, blurring “culture” and “nature.”

This thesis reimagines part of the Austin State Hospital’s languishing campus in Austin, Texas — the city where Borges writes he “discovered America” in 1963 and which he found reminiscent of Buenos Aires — as a communal urban village structured around cloisters of varied shape, size, and ecology: a monastic mat urbanism where architecture, city, and landscape entwine. The Borges Cloisters are spaces of discovery and refuge, of cultivation and symbiosis, of death and new life, inviting residents and guests into renewed relationship with the earth family.