The Borges Cloisters

Student Work; Honor Award

Gabriel Colombo

Austin, TX

The Borges Cloisters is a master’s thesis in architecture that explores the sacredness of urban spaces and land. The thesis reimagines part of the Austin State Hospital’s languishing campus in Austin, Texas, as a communal urban village structured around cloisters of varied shape, size, and ecology, embodying an urbanism where architecture, city, and landscape entwine.

Austin is the city where the 20th-century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote that he “discovered America” in 1963: a city that reminded him of his native Buenos Aires. Borges’s early poetry evokes the sacredness of ordinary urban spaces, imagining patios, for instance, as places where the “sky flows into the house.” The cloister, similarly, is the heart of the monastic polis, synthesizing street, public square, and paradise garden and situating daily life at the “crossway of the stars.”

The cloister offers an ideal typology for the urgent ecological task of urban rewilding: the practice of reawakening latent ecosystems in their sacred complexity. Less a means of exclusion than of inviting the soul to turn inward, the cloister can become a rich space for reconnecting cities with the land to which they belong.

Jury Comments

This student project is exquisite: the renderings are works of art. It is a contemporary design that enters into the realm of the medieval, revealing the student’s hand. It exudes thoughtfulness and care on the part of the designer.

Project Team Members

Gabriel M. Colombo