Shahad Alshuaibi

Border

Architectural form has historically shaped the space of our daily lives by producing an interior—the enclosed or the included—set against the exterior or the excluded. Instead of accepting this division between interior and exterior, I sought to blur the line between the two. I explore the in between to find an architecture that produces two interiors rather than interior and exterior. This exploration started with my personal observations of the traditional fabric of Saudi cities in which the division between one space and another is not a line but a gradient. This gradient fosters a diverse and mutable range of social gatherings. To test the broader efficacy of this formal structure, I felt it was more radical to select a site and project far from the traditional cities I had studied. I chose to reimagine the Porta Nuova district in Milan, an urban landscape molded by late capitalism and populated by stand-alone signature buildings.  Here the in between emerged as an architecture that could reimagine the play of border of the urban edge. 

Porta Nuova Mapping

Diagraming the in between 01

Diagraming the in between 02