Abstract:
This thesis examines and challenges the condition of architectural experience in contemporary urban public space. With the onset of the digital age and establishment of a supremely consumerist - and inherently visual - culture, our society concedes a fundamentally superficial engagement with public space. We understand public space as a place of exchange and interaction; both between people and between people and ‘things’, and these exchanges define our perception of specific spaces and places. However, the modern move towards a container-like ‘skin and bones’ architecture coupled with our society’s production and adoption of increasingly sophisticated and entertaining forms of privatised stimuli all contribute to an insular milieu we occupy daily, leaving the body homeless and our public realm threatened. The design investigation tests the validation of material public place through a case study which presents the idea that in order to secure this validity, public initiatives need to now expand their focus beyond the provision of product or information and allow for the embodiment of social space. By way of an unorthodox retrofit of the University of Auckland General Library, the design project acts as a provocateur of occupants, engaging them in a journey of juxtaposition, tension and interplay. Scattered throughout the existing building these interventions exemplify the notions of contrast and exchange. Thereby subverting the aim of Modernism as they do not comprise one dominating form, but rather a series of metamorphosing ‘episodes’ nestled in the existing framework and achieving different specific qualities as defined by the body, both singularly and collectively. Through the employment of the ‘mechanism’ as an extension of the body and a borderline belligerent material palette; the interventions mean not to blend in. Instead, they act as a stimulant; rousing a dialogue between folly and container, the temporal and the static, between users, and between users and ‘things’. Through this device, the sequence of anomalous interventions punctuates a known condition, disrupting our habitual impulse to absorb the environment around us subconsciously. Exploiting the tension composed through this juxtaposition, the narrative of architectural experience seeks to draw attention to the “seamless sameness”1 of our built environment today, catalysing a critical consideration of the way we engage with public space.