Chorrillos’ Edge
The final models bring the investigation back to material. Timber skins open and fragment around occupied levels, while darker frames make circulation and support legible. The landscape model places the individual interventions within the larger coastal terrain.
A continuous sequence of drawings follows the path along the edge. Each board is shown at the same scale, with the complete plan retained beneath the architectural views.
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Puerto de las Aguas Internas
The port extends the working life of the coast into shared public space. Boat-building, net-mending, fish preparation, and communal cooking sit alongside places for gathering at the water. A partial timber canopy creates a rhythm of shelter and openness.
Aviario del Cielo
A cliffside sanctuary gives priority to bird habitation. Nesting ledges and planted recesses are paired with light-touch paths and a suspended approach, allowing people to observe and listen without making human occupation the center of the space.
Retiro de Ayahuasca
Conceived as a ceremonial and contemplative space within a cliff cavity, the retreat moves from a screened entrance into a sheltered descent. Filtered daylight, enclosure, and the transition into shadow shape the architectural experience.
Santuario de Medicina Viva
A gathering space within a timber shell leads down to terraced gardens and smaller rooms for traditional healing practices. The proposal brings gardens, shared knowledge, and quiet occupation into a sequence open to sea air.
Biblioteca Ascendente
A terraced library turns ascent into a sequence of learning spaces. Coastal maps, architectural models, oral histories, and cultural records form a proposed community archive. Screened study rooms lead toward an upper amphitheater for teaching and storytelling.
Envelope, frame, topography, and material studies trace the movement from the act of repair toward architectural space. These models explore how layers and connections can hold new forms of occupation within the edge.
Repair is not simply the removal of damage. In the early material studies, decaying wood becomes a starting point for making: its gaps, fractures, and weakened surfaces suggest where to bind, support, bridge, or occupy.
This method carries into the coastal proposal. Four geological conditions—split, cavity, overhang, and underhang—become the basis for distinct architectural responses. Instead of a single continuous wall, the project develops a family of interventions shaped by the conditions they encounter.
Natural edges are not fixed boundaries. They shift through erosion, sedimentation, and the pressures of human occupation. This thesis asks what happens when architecture works with that instability instead of treating it only as a problem to control.
The investigation moves from community observation and comparative coastal studies to Chorrillos, Peru. Drawing, mapping, and material experiments become a method of architectural repair: making space for cultural life within a changing landscape.
How can architecture transform vulnerable, eroding landscapes into spaces of cultural resilience and ecological repair?
The research begins with community analysis: reading the urban edge through movement, occupation, and interruption. The Brighton Beach movie-camera study and urban mapping establish a way of observing relationships that a single static plan cannot fully describe.
An edge is understood here as a zone of contact—between land and water, infrastructure and everyday life, or public and private space—not simply a line separating them.
The geographic studies compare different ways of controlling water and land: reversing a river, diverting a sea’s tributaries, building levees, armoring a beach, or retreating from an eroding shoreline. The question is not only whether an intervention protects a site, but what it changes elsewhere.
Together, these cases frame the edge as a layered territory of ecological processes, unequal access, and accumulated decisions. They set up a methodology of repair, adaptability, and coexistence.
Engineered flow and the consequences of reshaping a water system.
Water diversion, a disappearing shoreline, and disrupted livelihoods.
The relationship between levees, sediment, protection, and land loss.
The tension between coastal infrastructure and a moving shoreline.
Coastal defenses, sediment movement, and unequal access to protection.
Elevated houses, retreat, and the limits of remaining at the water’s edge.
The investigation turns to Lima’s coastal edge, where highway infrastructure, urban growth, and steep terrain meet the Pacific. My family’s experience of the changing coast gives this research a personal foundation.
Chorrillos brings the social and geological questions together. The thesis examines hillside occupation, constrained access, and the relationship between the community and the shore. Its maps and sections read erosion alongside infrastructure, cultural activity, and everyday movement.
The proposal asks how future occupation might support this edge without treating the landscape as a passive surface.