Notes on "Camping" : vacationing in Fairmount Park

The public perception of landscape is still primarily shaped by eighteenth-century English aesthetics, pastoral idealism disassociated with infrastructural reality. This idealism is on display in most cities, in the form of municipal parks which Koolhaas states can be read as both "an operation of preservation" and "a series of manipulations."' Further support of this assertion is the means by which municipal parks preserve an appearance of naturalness. Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, the site of this thesis, is continually constructed and managed by a staff of hundreds, assuring the right varieties of vegetation, constant fish stocks in a polluted river, purposeful insect infestations, etc. If this presentation of nature is wholly synthetic, can it be re-imagined as an architectural project? Modern architecture adopted the conditioned interior as a means of isolating the interior from exterior. Pushed to its logical end, could the conditioned interior become a new municipal park? The thesis proposes that the preservation programs of the park be recast as a new interior pleasure garden which makes visible Fairmount Park's necessarily synthetic construction.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Murphy, Ryan M

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• J. Meejin Yoon.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/47838

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/47838