This project consists in determining common features found in transition spaces when traveling (in airports, railway stations, navigation terminals and subways).Starting by a given domino, each characteristic is interpreted as an operation that ultimately transforms the domino into an archetype of transition spaces in a travel environment.The final operation, the installation, gives light to this archetype.

Transition spaces tend to be designed in such a way as to enhance our sense of anonimity of space. They are unacknowledged spaces travelers have to pass through in order to get somewhere. The have no character and tend to be globalized spaces.

Most transition spaces tend to be not relational, not concerned with identity. For identity, one intends the state of remaining the same under varying conditions, a sense of self by providing sameness and continuity.

At this point notion of scale is introduced. Scale provides the opportunity to enhance the idea of providing a sense of continuity and sameness through repetition and multiplication.The overall scale of the domino is 374m by 48m; that is 11 times in length and 2 times in width of the original domino. The dimensions refer to Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners International Terminal Station in Waterloo.

A traveller's experience is reduced to a mediation with text indicating that somewhere is a place with significance (be it personal or cultural) if one were to go through this passage.

Travellers don't fully experience a transitory place; they are not socially invilved with their surroundings. They just get into these spaces with the aim to pass through and get to their means of transportation. Individuals tend to be indifferent socially and spatially.

Our perception of space changes when inside a confined space; in the case of a terminal, we sense space in a partial and incoherent manner because we are caught up with the movement associated with the act of transitioning. In these spaces, passengers are in an environment of the moment where they are constatly relocated and redirected.

In transitory spaces there is a problem of emptiness. This void is often filled with commercial activities or monotonous seating areas. Program within these spaces is underestimated, there is potential to have more stimulating spaces from a sensorial point of view that focuses on spatial perception and movement for example.

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Domino 7

The Installation

People use transition spaces as passage corridors.The archetype is an anonymous space that focuses on getting the individual from point A (entry) to point B (exit). Of particular importance, movement through this space should be experienced through an awareness of your surroundings. The installation recreates a notion of lingering movement associated with travel environments. The space puts emphasis on the reading of the environment's scale in relation to the scale of our bodies. The installation further underlines the ephemeral quality of moving through a transitory space and challenges you to further push this experience and perceive more thn just an empty passage way.

A few words to direst you:

"Not finding one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. (...) But, to lose oneself in a city-as one loses oneself in a forest-that calls for quite a different schooling" (Walter Benjamin)

"to lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin's terms to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that is a concious choice, a chosen surrender.." (Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost)