Abstract:
We spend a third of our lives asleep, vividly hallucinating visions of imaginary realities, to awaken and pretend it never happened. For designers, these hallucinations continue well into the daylight, the first infinitely mutable vision of a building inside one’s mind, a CGI coffee cup trapped inside a screen, the intangible value of a suburban home, a synthetic beach built atop a concrete headland, a geyser induced with a bar of soap, a town supported by an old film set, the artifacts of an idea long abandoned. In 1948 Bill Wilson declared, “New Zealand doesn’t exist... Somehow life escaped, slid out of the real world into the dream.” As if to insinuate dreaming is a worthless exercise. That the imaginary is simply a necessary precursor to the fabrication of real things. Even now, the role that fiction plays in our human-made profession is still an often overlooked and undervalued phenomenon. Alternatively, this thesis seeks to highlight and re-contextualize what we all see but do not acknowledge. This thesis is about interrogating the boundary between fiction and reality in a posttruth world defined by emotion, data, fake news and broken promises. This thesis is about how architects manipulate their reality to manufacture imaginary worlds. Through a methodology that encourages hybridity of storytelling, drawing, and fabrication, an anthology of critical fictional realities and 1:1 objects aim to challenge our traditional understanding of architectural practice and discourse, and muse on the various roles fiction plays in design and our cultural milieu. Consequently, this thesis speculates on a methodology in which architecture is ultimately perceived as a cyclical process of compounding fiction; An anthology of fictional objects.
