Homo Ludens: Rejected Disciples and Rebelling Space

Abstract

Ever since The Production of Space by Henri Lefebvre, people start to notice and seek for the obscure relationship among space, everyday-life, capitalism, and modernity. This thesis is influenced by Lefebvre’s social-spatial theory and his critique of everyday life, taking them into the context of radical architecture, where architecture as a manifesto and instrument of critique, whilst seasoning with a sense of situationist. As an experimental project, the thesis seeks to explore the potential of architecture as a discipline in event-hosting. The design approach is an allegorical narrative derived from current circumstances. The story takes place in Hong Kong, one of the most globalized cities in the world. A fat soil of neocapitalism and a land full of desires. This thesis investigates the spectacular phenomenon of the Sunday gathering of foreign domestic workers on the streets of Central district. Furthermore, the thesis comprises a spatial critique of the shrinking public realm in Hong Kong and address the issue of citizens’ right to the city. The occupation of the streets with domestic workers’ ingenious tactics leads to appropriation and association of urban territories. A total man with a total act, as Lefebvre would put this.1 In the Critique of Everyday Life, he wrote: A total celebration, a Mass and a tragedy, intense and absolute, extraordinarily poetic and powerfully dramatic which would rejoice in the tragic destiny of Nature, finite and infinite, divine and human, joyful and harrowing! 2 The design cherishes the spirit of Dionysus underlying the Sunday gathering. A reassembled sanctuary for spatial and behavioral re-appropriation with festive and playful presence is composed. It harbours the rejected ones and constitutes a catalyst towards a total man. The outcome of the experiment wishes to extend the limits of occupants’ autonomy within architecture. The inhabitants as the main actors of the incremental spatial production, cocreating new events with their own out-of-the-script practices, appropriating devices within the structural framework designed by the architect.