The Creation of a Monumental Environment: A simultaneous joining of two opposite conditions

Abstract

The Creation of a Monumental Environment will explore monumentality through the design and proportion of architectural environments. Monumentality is the sensation produced by the direct confrontation of an outwardly facing ‘wall’ of a certain scale and imposition on the body (FIG. 1), while environment is the embodied experience of being surrounded, enclosed, or immersed (FIG. 2). A monumental environment is the simultaneous experience of both these conditions, which generates a feeling of spatial balance at the same time as the dissolution of spatial boundaries. A Monumental Environment does not suggest a notion of great scale, but the power of proportional relationships between the building, body and surrounding context (FIG. 3). Vincent Scully writes of an architectural whole formed by the co-existing relationship between the Greek sacred architectural temples and the surrounding landscape. The body is turned from the architecture to the environment as the boundaries between both conditions collapse into each other. This is a formless experience embedding the body within a simultaneous understanding of these opposite conditions, is also considered as ‘sublime’. Investigations are also made into the work of the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel and artist Richard Serra which suggests that the notion of a monumental environment is possible, but it requires an insight into the body playing an active role generating the experience of an environment. Three questions are central to this thesis. How can a sense of monumentality and environment be joined together to form an architectural whole? How can the boundaries of monumentality and environment collapse and turn into each other to create a spatial quality that parallels the aesthetic concept of the ‘sublime’? And what role does architecture play in the experience of ‘walking’ a monumental environment? These questions are explored through a ‘gateway’ development located on the edge of the Auckland Domain. The intention of this thesis is to contemporise Scully’s insights into Classical Greek architecture and landscape, invoking an experience of awe through the sensitized relationships between the building, body and surrounding context. This is the creation of a monumental environment.