The Evolution of Wonder Through History: Reopening the Realm in Seven Mythic Experiments of Technological Interconnection
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Abstract
As Henri Frankfort suggests, the sense of interconnection between
ancient people, nature, and the cosmos, was perceived as a living
“Thou”. As humanity has advanced this emphasis on interconnection
has faded from something perceived as alive toward a technologically
driven society today that treats Nature as an externalized “It.” The
Seven Ancient Wonders of the World were erected on the earlier mode
of interconnection wherein imagination was interwoven in the world.
Not only were many of the ancient Wonders resting places for mortals,
they were places that connected the ancient people with the cosmos,
their gods, and the nature of all things.
Such changes open an opportunity to explore the possibility of achieving
wonder in architecture today. Questioning how we might implement
technology in ways that reinvigorate a relationship to stories that
reawaken the imagination as part of reality beyond efficiency and functionality.
My thesis seeks to employ building as technology that opens a
realm of wonder that has been greatly untapped after the seventeenth
century.
Like the ancient myth of Osiris and Isis, this museum of myth and
wonder is scattered across seven sites around the world – each known
for their technological production.