Encountering the Enigma: A Transformation of the Fulton Fish Market

Abstract

With our increasingly advanced tools, we seem to be able to grasp the architectural object more exhaustively than ever in the most precise dimensions and countless components. However, this technical knowing does not give answers to what architecture is and all its excessiveness, and the infinite and immeasurable ways that we perceive and understand it. In fact, the seemingly stable architectural objects that we know are always assemblages of unnameable fragments of amorphous matter. This alienness of architecture is often repressed but can never be completely dispelled as we always work between completion and openness, the known and the unknown. In this open realm, our judgment is suspended; architecture unveils all its enigma and becomes again open to our interpretation. Can we work within this open realm of architecture, and conceive a building that engages our faculty of understanding upon encountering it, yet eludes it with its incessant enigmatic nature? In this spirit of a liberated interpretation of architecture, this project aims to unveil an enigmatic understanding of is objectivity and experience through a fictional transformation of the New Market Building of the Fulton Fish Market.