| The journey is a powerful catalyst wherein characters pass from one physical or personal place to another. However, the adventure and excitement of the literary journey is often lost in the monotony of the daily commute and through preoccupation with the destination. Public transportation can be a passive affair, and the nature of transportation can render the travelers personally idle despite the physical movement. This reveals an opportunity to engage with the path and transform the commute into a journey through which people may directly traverse or wander aimlessly. This thesis proposes that a narrative intervention can elevate an ordinary transportation route into a stimulating and challenging journey by layering into the architecture different meanings and multifaceted interpretations of the story and storytelling process that can be interpreted differently by each individual. This will use narrative content as a generator for the design of sixteen transit shelters along the new Cincinnati Streetcar route and will tell the story of White Hawk and the Sky Sisters, a Shawnee ethnoastrological myth originating in the Ohio River Valley. Transportation and movement require a study of sequence, which can be distilled into two contrasting approaches, linear and flexible, that engage the site differently. The development of a rich field of potential interpretations uses conceptual tools, such as reference, which links specific narrative elements to associative ideas, imagery and a broader cultural and collective identity. Collage layers the references together to compose a structure with an inherent meaning linked directly to the narrative that, like storytelling, can be understood differently by everyone. Travelers project their own personal fears and desires onto the story, and through this personal lens the narrative can enrich the journey by offering a parallel fictional world, an adventure, to explore. |
