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Virginia Tech

The Missed Connections: An Architecture of Identity

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Missed connections are inherently everywhere: they exist within the passerby on the street and the one sitting next to us on our daily commute. Perplexingly, the most overlooked of all missed connections exist within the very buildings we inhabit on a daily basis. At this human scale, an inexplicit absence of the anthropogenic identity has become rooted by the hyper-perfection and immediate gratification of chasmic, value-engineered buildings; ones which ultimately fail to bridge the synapses of memory. As the experience that one feels when occupying a building begins to mediate among the realms of the temporary and the eternal; an inherent irony stems from the idea that maybe, the most immutable memory of a building may rise from the most impermanent of places. Perceived through the lens of a decommissioned textile factory serving both a college town and a greater metropolitan corridor, this thesis recaptures vicissitudes of timely breadths; interjecting them back into the edifice. The proposal, an episodic vessel in triptych form intends to house: A museum to preserve past textile identities. A marketplace and restaurant to promote current anthropogenic stories. A rail station to propose a transient future. The mental photographs of a built environment, intrinsically developed on an evocative film are seldom a mass of ubiquity: they are the fixture, they are the detail; they are the past, they are the present; they are the immediate, lineal, and future place… …they are the missed connections.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master of Architecture
Level thesis:degree_level
masters
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Architecture
Department dc:contributor.department
Architecture
Grantor dc:publisher
Virginia Tech
Year dc:date.issued
2021

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Bocchino, Christian Joseph
Chair dc:contributor.committeechair
  • Dunay, Robert J.
Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember
  • Pritchett, Christopher Brian
  • Becker, Edward Gentry

Subjects

dc:subject × 4

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Dc Identifier Other
vt_gsexam:31711
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/104124

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Virginia Tech
Base URL
vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Bocchino, Christian Joseph. The Missed Connections: An Architecture of Identity. masters thesis, Virginia Tech, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/104124