Kayla Mantie

Room of Two Atmospheres: the Architecture of the Perpetual Threshold

As technology advances, society retracts further into our own inner-tech worlds, where we are segregated from the most important relationships. Architecture has mirrored this tenancy, reinforcing our disconnect not only from the exterior but also from our communities and sensory experiences. 

This thesis proposes the design of an assisted living facility in St. Norbert, Manitoba, for individuals navigating a significant threshold in their lives, the transition away from independence. Drawing on personal experiences with my grandparents, I recognise that at one of life's more vulnerable thresholds, our connection to exterior spaces often becomes what sustains us. This project asks if shifting the understanding of spatial relationships in a program such as assisted living can open a dialogue about a more robust understanding of architectural design in our daily lives? By examining this program, the project will challenge our perception of thresholds by exploring them across multiple scales of living.

The prevailing ideology in our Western-thinking culture views the relationship between the interior and the exterior as one of separation, where modern building practices keep the wild and uncontrollable environment away and safeguard the occupants within an environment that we feel like we have control over. This is discussed in House and Home by Jonathan Hill,

“However, the concept of home is also a response to the excluded, unknown and unpredictable. Home must appear solid and stable because social norms and personal identity are shifting and slippery. It is a metaphor for a threatened society and a threatened individual. The safety of the home is also the sign of its opposite, a certain nervousness, a fear of the tangible or intangible dangers outside and inside. The purpose of the home is to keep the inside inside and the outside outside.”
(Hill, “House and Home’, Pg. 8.)

We maintain increasingly rigid boundaries between perceived interior sanctuaries and the natural conditions of the world around us. However, this was not always the relationship between humans and the non-interior. As recently as two generations ago, my grandparents lived on farms in Lowe Farm, a small rural community in southern Manitoba near Morris. Isolated from urban centres and shaped by the economic realities following the Great Depression, they depended on continual engagement with the land for survival. This reciprocal relationship sustained them by providing food, water and shelter, while also fostering a deep sense of pride, responsibility, and accomplishment. 

In order to design architectural worlds where we are part of the systems we live in, rather than separate from them, we must examine what bridges the two conditions of the interior and the exterior. Traditionally, thresholds mark and divide space in architecture; this thesis expands their meaning as mediators between contexts and questions architecture’s role as a divider. Thresholds will be redefined from this point on as lived, sensory situations of transition, where relationships between people, the non-human world, and built environments come together. Through the lens of the perpetual threshold, which is a continuous condition rather than just a moment or fixed boundary, a condition that exists at multiscale, where interior and exterior conditions are experienced simultaneously. By using this lens and moving between scales, the perpetual threshold reveals that transition is not singular and instantaneous but lived and ongoing, shaping how spaces are inhabited and how social and environmental connections are sustained. 

Can engaging with the idea of threshold transform how we experience and understand the relationship between inside and outside? How might designing from a place of connection, rather than separation, challenge our existing spatial and programmatic ideologies?