The tourist experience is primarily a visual one. Part of what many tourists desire is to challenge their senses and experience new things in a way they have never experienced anything before. This includes using more than just their sense of sight. However, urban tourism doesn’t always foster the use of the other senses. The aim of this project is to address passive tourism through a direct intervention that forces occupants to touch their surroundings, be put off balance, and experience the architecture with a sense of uneasiness that challenges them to be hyper-aware of their surroundings. 

 

This Tourist Resentization Center operates as a tourist spectacle. Its erratic exterior form draws the tourists to it due to its irregular nature. Once the tourists begin to traverse the organic pathways of the structure, they encounter soft, squishy floors, branches blocking their way, spikes of sharp wood deterring them from some spaces, delicate bone structures that slow people down and cause them to move about and examine the environment with care, thin viscous like nerves create porous entries an exits that force occupants to take steps into the unknown in order to move forward. Floors give way to the weight of people, causing them to reach out and tactilely grab on to their surroundings for support. Heavy stone disintegrates into thin structures that support nothing, but allow people to move between them. Soft hair-like spaces provide walls and floors that hide its surroundings, blocking all that is seen yet allows people to move about unhindered until the material hardens and crashes through buildings of the plaza.

 

Each space within the structure challenges senses in different ways and encourages them to interact with their surroundings

and begin to see small details and understand the physical effects that each material can have on them. Through this intense challenge of the tourist’ senses created by an extreme material experience, it is hoped that after such an experience people will slow down and experience their surroundings through a different lens and notice small details that materials provide in their everyday world.