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The proposal seeks to explore the capacity of design to show the simultaneity of the natural, archaic, and contemporary in Tudela. A large void, a body with no organs has been made within the historic city center. A new datum of the ground and sky. Enclosure/Disclosure become interchangeable. The surfaces that embrace the spaces to be hidden from public view become the ground that supports the dissemination of the work within. Their seam, the architectural corner, indulges in its construction: the tangency and intersection of a surface. This phenomenon constricts and expands the various organs of a body once empty.

The institute is situated among five floors above ground. As a blackened vessel, the interior is organized around the eccentric illumination of its anatomy. The public meeting areas are nested as volumes within the vastness of research, office, and display spaces. The (absence of) a circulation spine that joins the floors together is a wall of light that contains the distinct, yet visually continuous programs of each level. It is not until the body reaches the light shelf above the city that the use of direct light and views situates the body within the exterior context. This is where one is to be alone, to contemplate. As an extension of the formal expression of the architecture, the ambiguity of a connectome institute serves as a new cultural and economic compendium of the historic city center.

Concept Diagram