As the timeless edict goes “humans are creatures of habit”. We cherish familiarity, it secures us to our context, transforming a house into a home, a face into a friend, and a space into a place. However, familiarising is an intimate, time-consuming process, compounded by the expanse of foreignness one strives to cross. Established navigates this hyper-personal task of producing familiarity in new environments through architecturally catalysed bond production. Perched precariously in Kirkenes, Norway, the project leveraged a tactile and iterative method of map making and information coding to produce a pseudo-architectural product designed to infer familiarity and expedite its production.

Grounded in the Saami Indigenous people’s tradition of mapping through storytelling, I compiled a field report based on narratives that reflect perceived, shared, imagined, and embellished reality, encapsulating transitional zones of the site. This formed a constellation of textual territories which I reinterpreted as linocuts, then paper lino prints, and finally fabric, wire, and wooden models.

With each step my individual physiological attributes imbued further temporal and personal information, while the process of cognitive reanalysis revealed objects, sites, patterns, and experiences of salience that relay and reflect the familiarity forming between myself and the site. The process itself became ouroboric, where my interpretations impacted artefact production, and the artefacts further impacted my interpretation, thereby evolving the project while deepening personal spatial familiarity.

The final architectural intervention mirrored this process of creating familiarity through an iterative process of analysis and interaction. A mouldable wire landscape grows out of a site unviewable from satellite. A ductile wire railing bends to the proportions of my hand, shaped by the tension in my muscles. With each step I request the structure catch me, as my weight reforms its morphing articulations. Another lean along the wire wall maps my movement within the anatomy of the structure. Its moldability, precarity and temporality change the place as much as much as it changes me. It remains to be explored if this structure becomes broadly applicable as a reusable architecture of familiarity, or if it would just familiarise its builder.