I Am He Who Aches the Earth: An Architectural Retelling of Genesis

Abstract

The story of Genesis serves as the creation myth for the major religions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. It has been interpreted and reinterpreted as a universal origin tale of religion and humanity. This thesis is an architectural retelling of the first eleven chapters of the Genesis creation myth that explores the journeys of divine and human characters as they undergo transformations that shape and are shaped by the built and natural environment. In the stories of God, Eve, Adam, Cain and Noah, human and divine behavior is intertwined with the creation and development of the built and natural environment. The Genesis narrative becomes reinterpreted to bind the characters’ beginnings to architecture and the environment so that we can come to understand how and why these events happened. Not only does it serve as a retelling of the origins of mankind, but also as a retelling of architecture. How does architecture become represented and restructured if the story of the First Man and Woman is retold with architectural context? This thesis attempts to study how an architectural framework can be applied to these stories that have come to serve as the foundations of human society. Architecture is practiced by these characters as a mediating tool to understand the world around them as their stories are used to establish a set of principles that contribute to the fundamental nature of architecture in its connection to humanity.