Boston South Station: Re-imagining Mobility through the Mobile-Eye

Abstract

A top-down design process using projection lines on a flattened surface has been a dominant design technique for us, as we commonly witness in our daily lives of studios and practices or in written disciplines. However, in building scale as large as intermodal stations, such design technique fails to address the realities – in Pragmatist’s term - of architecture that people perceive building primarily through cinematographic itinerary rather than through plans or sections or any holistic set of building images, since the latter requires thought process to appreciate those images in mind. This thesis addresses the issues of intermodal stations designed top-down. Their design follows 19th and 20th-century logic of efficiency, systematically flawless but illegible to the general public, failing to solve a disorienting experience. Above all, delivering the intended architectural imagery of such stations is limited because the traditional reading can no longer be applied in such scale; aesthetics is a hidden work behind the vast space that a verification process, or familiarization through multiple travel, is required to appreciate the architecture. As a solution, a design principle is developed based on a Pragmatist reality as opposed to Kantian truth, on perception, and on mobile-eye theory. Through the new principle, this thesis seeks to re-design Boston South Station to make the wayfinding more intuitive and deliver better architectural realities beyond the limit of traditional design technic in intermodal stations.