Synthetic Pleasure: collective elements of everyday pleasures

Abstract

Architecture of Pleasure This thesis investigates the idea of Synthetic Pleasure through a method of observing the world as a highly curated version of the everyday. The project is a self-reflective investigation to test how architecture might engage the experience of everyday pleasure as a program. It centres on small things: feeling a breeze on a hot afternoon; happening across a couple dancing the tango in a park, a string of lights swaying above; observing an accidentally beautiful arrangement of objects, or rain on a window pane. Architecture as Collection The design project introduces an artificial island that carefully locates a collection of architectural propositions in Auckland’s Hobson Bay. The experience of the island, a place apart, is to accentuate the sense of a contained and curated escape from the everyday mundane. The island is a collection of buildings, landscapes, flora and sensations that are loosely assembled. Each of these moments is of equal weight. With no master-plan1 in this non-hierarchical space, you are free to meander as outside of time. Architecture of Formlessness Using only a series of serpentine2 lines, Synthetic Pleasure speculates an amoebic island form to compose an architectural space of delicacy. This space is absent of orthogonal and denoting vitality. It is a space in harmony with surrounding nature through lyrical architectural composition. Architectural Devices As part of the design making process various devices were developed in order to notate ideas. Taking pleasure in the everyday is a highly subjective undertaking. A personal Instagram account has been used as a starting point. Instagram, as the name suggests, offers a framework for rapidly capturing and sharing such small pleasures. Other framing and viewing devices were also invented such as a matrix of small moments and sensations. These were used to generate a programme that mediated the application of collages, drawings and model making techniques as a mode of assembly. Synthetic Pleasure speculates a space to recompose what are taken as clichés of the everyday and to re-evaluate these moments as pleasures of the everyday.