A project about the loss of Georgia's bathing culture in the shift from East to West. Resulting in a new typology for a underground bathhouse in the mountain region near Tbilisi; using stone and metal.

This thesis investigates the growing desire among urban dwellers to escape the pressures of modern city life and reconnect with an idealised rural existence. Sparked by my own urban-rural dilemma, I reflect on the mental burden of modernity, marked by burnouts, disconnection and high-speed digital life, and trace a revival of the Romantic longing for nature and community. Just as the industrial age gave rise to Romanticism, today’s climate crises, hyper-connectivity and social alienation catalyse a similar “back-to-nature” movement. Through a historical and theoretical lens, the text explores the rural ideal in both Romantic art and contemporary architectural projects, revealing tensions between idealisation and reality.

Rather than offering a simple escape, I argue that many contemporary rural visions (often packaged as luxury or greenwashed developments) merely reproduce the contradictions of urban modernity. Drawing on theorists like Hilde Heynen and Hannah Arendt, the essay questions whether peace of mind can be found solely by leaving the city or whether solutions can be found by reimagining the urban itself. In its final chapters, the essay advocates for a redefinition of the city as a place of shared experience and collective care, where public green spaces are not just aesthetic elements but active, social and political infrastructures. Ultimately, this thesis proposes that we do not escape modernity by abandoning it, but by transforming the conditions of everyday urban life.

This essay examines political-geographical liminality as a theoretical concept and its influence on the built environment. I will argue that liminality is strongly context-dependent and dynamic, highlighting how border regions often oscillate between ideological paradigms. The main research question of this essay will be: ‘How do liminality and oscillation between ideological paradigms influence the built environment?’ The essay will show that the effect of liminality takes form in a constant reshaping of a country's narrative. To fit the imagined identity, the built environment can become subject to alteration, as architecture and urban design can serve as physical manifestations of political agendas, cultural ideologies and historical memory. Shifts in geopolitical power and identity aspirations frequently leave their mark on cities, reshaping landscapes to align with dominant narratives and rejecting elements that contradict them. By exploring the connection between the large geopolitical scale and the smaller urban scale, the essay underscores how global and regional dynamics are inscribed into the local environment.

The concept of liminality, stemming from anthropological studies of rites of passage by Arnold van Gennep and later reinterpreted by Victor Turner captures the essence of ‘in-betweenness’ and will be explained more in-depth in the first chapter, Defining Liminality. The concept is characterised by ambiguity and has been interpreted in multiple ways, in the realm of political-geographical liminality, there is more consensus about what the concept entails and will, therefore, define the rest of this essay. The concept of liminality is very much spatially-bound and therefore chapter two, On the Periphery, will be about marginal spaces. Political-geographical liminality not only describes an in-between state but also underscores the tension between forces that shape identity, autonomy and spatial development, in chapter three, Trauma and the Built Environment, the attention will be drawn to the effect of liminality of a city’s built environment.