My Milieu

Abstract

This thesis is motivated through the author's personal desire to explore ‘the structure of something’, a broader definition of architecture. To explore how, for the author, everyday tangible objects created or evoked an overwhelming sense of joy or other intangible emotions. There was a craving to explore a more unconventional spatial statement within architecture, to delve into crafts and materiality within the freedom of the authors final university year. Conventionally, architecture is defined by form and space, built in context with a fixed scale and designed to be inhabited. This thesis proposes to expand this anticipated practice of architecture with techniques commonly used in the design of a garden, embracing theories of heterotopias and microcosms to create architecture that is fluctuating in scale, detached from context and constructing spatial order on its own. Such architecture also blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior, realistic and fictional. This thesis proposes to create six architectural propositions, named “Kagu”, to explore how domestic objects can become vessels of fluctuating architectural spaces. The Kagus will be fabricated engaging different crafting techniques, garden design techniques and materiality, which directly affects the spatial experiences they create. By using the author as a case study, crafts are pulled from family heritage and an emphasis on women's craft is explored poetically beside industrial materiality and logo centric tools. The thesis also proposes to insert a series of fictional spaces into the Kagus. The author will use themselves as a case-study, transforming six of the authors subjective emotions into fictional spaces that will be carried by the physical forms of the eight Kagu. These fictional spaces will be experienced when the occupants engage the Kagus. Together, the six Kagus form a spatial collective named “My milieu”. My Milieu being that of a response to the authors collective emotions. A space in which the author is literally in the middle of and surrounded by; but what the author or those whom the author may choose to employ, who have established and continue to modify these surroundings. The author’s milieu is not just objective, physical surroundings but includes the inscription of the relationships between Kagu and how an individual or a society conceives of the authors collection of six Kagu holding personal emotions.