The project aims to use the Vaulting intelligence and Earth Casting technique to create the architectural experience of ‘Cleansing’ for the wellbeing of the mining community in Potosi, Bolivia. The city of Potosi as a model of the mining economy was established around the activities of miner’s daily routine. The whole lifestyle of Potosi still sitting on a highly dusty and dipolar way of living. During the era of diminishing ore in the silver mountain Cerro Rico, the modern lifestyle has reached a point of unsustainable balance. The scarcity of water and economic resource resulted in a shortage of sanitary facilities.Miners comfort the side effect of breathing in mining dirt by establishing in cave religion (El Tio) and Coca leaves chewing. The lacking buffer zone before they go straight back into family life intrigues more family conflict and crime. The Architecture will crawl over the steep slope in between the city boundary and mining entrance to become the new community center and attraction point for miners and their families. The Cleansing experience is designed for both physical and spiritual transformation.
The Cleansing Object aims to be a uniquely innovative bathing typology from logical from finding construct to the formation of Objects .
The cascading of pools is designed to be more fitted to the flow of topographical condition on the hill, and studied through the vector parameters for micro-clustering.
In the chapel. light is guided by ventilation horns on the roof, their desire and fair in cave fuse with the positive expectation to god and better life.
The design body starts with sketches of curational moments on section. And overlap by cultural translated architecture details.
a bathing communal space with horizontal walkway that provides after-bath social interaction.
Going up the hill, they have options to choose individual or family unit pools with different temperature and embedded leisure facilities.
The pools shall be cascaded in height to be multi-storied, which brings dynamic to the formation of enclosure.
Earth Casting technique is a way to retain the pool without paneling and accurate geometry calculation. It is constructed by excavating the landscape soil into a negative shape, and spray short-crete
A physical catenary was applied to observe how will the vault being deformed in horizontal and vertical direction.
