Sentinel

The modern human-built environment prioritizes productivity, speed, and efficiency. While economic growth, personal wealth, and technological advancement can all benefit from these conditions, human connection to place and the natural rhythms of the world are weakened. This thesis does not argue for a reduction in progress or criticize efficiency; rather, it contends that architecture must also operate in service of stillness. Stillness is an active spatial condition that counterbalances the speed and efficiency of contemporary life, mediating the relationship between human-built environments and the rhythms of the natural world. As a method of understanding stillness within architecture, phenomenological and material conditions of stillness are explored within theoretical texts and built examples, revealing a framework for future architectural design that supports an attunement to place, which is critical for human connection to the natural environment. This thesis will use the province of Saskatchewan, Canada as a testing ground for the established framework of design. The majority of the inhabited southern region of Saskatchewan is part of the Great Plains of North America, famous for its flat landscapes, absent of any dramatic shifts in terrain. The region embodies stillness as a lifestyle, living with the extremes of the seasonal climate rather than working against it. Through adaptive reuse, this project will reimagine the spatial opportunities of an abandoned grain elevator, the sentinel. The sentinels of Saskatchewan are monuments of time, recording the temporal qualities of the natural prairie landscape through natural decay of material surfaces. Former industrial machine, the sentinel stands vacant, awaiting re-habitation. The material qualities and quietude of the sentinel offer a testing ground for conditions of stillness in architecture.