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—the city where the 20th-century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote that he “discovered America” in 1963. Austin reminded Borges of Buenos Aires, as a communal urban village structured around cloisters of varied shape, size, and ecology embodying an urbanism where architecture, city, and landscape entwine.
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 monastic cloister, similarly, is the heart of the 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. The unique perimeter walk, in particular, forms a contemplative and social space between inside and out, blurring culture and nature.
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
