Abstract:
This thesis seeks to dilate and investigate the significance of sexuality in architectural design and theory. Motivated by the research and exploration of the complexities surrounding sexuality, the project highlights intimate and elusive spatial conditions found in the speculative spaces between the interstices of architecture’s boundaries. By addressing design in terms of theories of sexuality, this thesis engages deliberate misreadings of architecture as a product of a system of representations and sexuality as an inferior symptom of culturally reflected space. This involves rejecting traditional thoughts of built objects, material and structural constructs. Instead, by challenging and frustrating binaries and biased dichotomies, this thesis focuses on an architectural metaphor of reclaiming space in other terms. The space of sexuality is fluid, fugitive and formless, something that is individual and imaginary, and therefore operates outside of conventional frameworks.1 Situated in the archetypal site of the in-between spaces of earth, where land and rock meet water, where interstices are fragile and pulsing with energy, waiting to leak out. The site is the abstract rereading of Stanley Point as an illusory island, as seen from Auckland’s Queen’s Wharf. The island houses the imaginary catharsis of image and dream, the amalgamation of memory and desire. It is a series of spaces that interrogate containment in architecture through the veil, familiar signifiers, and a bleeding between nature and space in an open interiority. From ‘Mother’s Milk’ to the ‘Panorama of Potentiality,’ each proposition exploits ambiguous notions of space and landscape, presenting a meandering of displaced, quixotic, and idle spaces. Immersed in a synthesis of paradise and abyss, the beguiled refuge in a natural world away from culture’s scrutinising eyes. Combinations of a process of conceptual writing, drawing and making expose the divergence between representation and understanding, the image and the imaginary, and the difficulties in capturing the ephemerality of sexuality. An analog approach became an intrinsic catalyst for the unbuildable and theoretical representations of recognisable and surreal spaces of a collective imaginary. The project advocates for the salient role of sexuality as a theoretical concept in search of a space without boundaries, of the blurred limits between the real and ideal, and the burgeoning significance of female voices and sexual theories through a speculative architectural critique.