Unconscionable Maps

The next task for studio is to look at our given site in Igualada and find thresholds that exist. After finding these thresholds, these places where two elements collide, places of transition, we are to map the threshold.

How big does the scope of the transition have to be? Does the threshold exist outside of the cemetery or inside the cemetery?

I am thinking of the retaining wall as the place of transition. At a larger scope, the wall buffers the sub terrain from the terrain. The wall also acts as a mediator from one level of ground to the next. The wall contains levels. The stairs within the wall can be seen as levels that lead from one part of earth to another. There are also levels of niches. The wall acts as a transition between materials.

The façade of the wall acts as a threshold separating living person experiencing the outside world from the dead experiencing the earth. There is the same moment of separation that occurs within the wall where the staircase can be used by the living and the earth on either side of the staircase can be used by the dead.

If the wall can be seen as a line and the wall divides then the line is a way to divide? And what about what happens in between the retaining walls? The sandwich of one retaining wall and another creates this larger wall. So then does an occupation of the wall occur? The space between is usually reserved for things not people but here the occupation of the wall is by both the living and the dead.

At a more micro scope there is the point with in the facade where bright daylight and darkness of the niche meet in a piece designed by Miralles to mediate light. This piece becomes ambiguous too in the sense that it is semi enclosed but also semi open. This piece serves as gateway to the isolation of the crypt from outside world. Here the moment where compression of the niche and expansion into open space combine. But this open space is simply more of a spacious enclosure of void because the wall as a whole entity encloses that space too.

The question is how to map?

Could the three maps be an examination of the wall through different microscopic lenses? And each lens of examination makes up a part of the whole? Perhaps the smallest level examining the detail of the wall then another map is of the transition that occurs inside between niches and earth.

Or, another 3 maps can examine the wall relates to the context as far as acting change in materials, as a place where levels change and maybe as I don't know what else.