The Architecture of Maladaptation

Abstract

‘Can Architecture reflect an experience that is simultaneously real and unreal as a form of mental release and/or reflection?’ Mental wellbeing should be a key factor in the relationship between humans and their environment. However, a modernist emphasis on the homogenous, disciplined body – both individual and collective – forecloses on the possibility of a more dispersed and heterogeneous condition that embraces fantasy and escapism. Focusing on Foucault’s ‘heterotopias’, this thesis asks if the nature of ‘maladaptive daydreaming’ can be incorporated into a space for release and reflection? Such dissociative behaviour is an intensive condition where individuals spend significant time within vivid fantasies as disengagement from stress or pain. This design study explores how elements of desire and deep-rooted pleasure can be expressed within the experience of an architecture that draws on selected psychoses alongside cinema’s mise-en-scene. At the heart of the thesis lies an interest in the boundary condition between the moral and immoral within society and who occupies that borderline. This requires a critique of socialised normativity as a discipline, which results in suppression of the socially unacceptable due to fear of judgment. Rather than use architecture to cultivate or enact a cure, it is utilized as a means to avoid a cure; purely through an environment that allows for the expression of individuals and their desires. I, therefore, explore maladaptive architecture through a proposed labyrinthine space sited below Auckland’s Ponsonby Road, while creating a relationship with the existing Ponsonby above ground. The space becomes an environment of deviation through a network of multiple typologies; a smoking den, love hotel and a fight club for men and women. Inspired by the cinematic and its representational techniques, the setting becomes the bridge between the concepts of the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’, aided by the concept and properties of the mirror. Aspects of the architecture itself act as a slit or cut within the fabric of the context.