EVANESCE – ALEXANDRA CHEM

Evanesce (2020)

Awarded 10th of 1104 entries of The Big Thing ‘Terminal’ Competition

Humanity is obsessed with mortality, and this obsession is taxing on the soul. Evanesce is designed to ease this burden, providing a moment of real peace, a large exhale as one separates from their physical existence. The typical terminal paradigm — vast waiting rooms lined with thousands of uncomfortable chairs, overpriced (and bad) food and monolithic hallways — have been reimagined as a space of transcendant mental, physical and emotional recharge.

The entrance design is circular with doors arrayed the full diameter, communicating to the entrant (both literally and spiritually) that there is only one way to go. Once inside, the curvature of the suspended bowl directs one under its shape, a space of compression before entering into the grand spiral stairway and main structure arcade. The 14 floor plates include different temperature baths, showers, resting platforms and grooming stations. When you have sufficiently washed your ‘humanness’ away you exit to your designated periphery platform and wait on an overhang for your cloud to take you away.

The design does not include the use of walls – only columns, undulating floor plates, arched doorways and arcades. These elements layered within the building allow light and clouds to traverse throughout. Further the staggering floor plates allow souls to experience multiple spaces at once and catch glimpses of their exterior.

The architecture creates a tension between symmetry and asymmetry and is created with unnaturally extruded doorways, deformed peaks of arcades and platforms which seem to suspend in space. Symbolically this “in-between space” transcends typical notions of purgatory as a neutral waiting area, and instead depicts the tension of the sensible and the surreal, of our creatureliness and our divinity.