Abstract:
Tea is the most consumed beverage in the world, aside from water.
It plays a vital role in human civilisation, demonstrating remarkable
social, economic, and political impacts throughout global history.
The way tea is made and consumed, the ways people interact with
tea and the aesthetics and atmosphere surrounding tea drinking,
define tea culture. The planting and making of tea is a sophisticated
process and an art in itself. It forms a complex cultural system that
integrates physical techniques into philosophical and spiritual
concepts, defining a unique way of telling the world about Chinese
people’s understanding of life.
The thesis researches how tea culture has been continuously
evolving, travelling and adapting itself to different cultures around
the world, and how it influences derived art and architecture.
The research starts with exploring how tea brings people together
and creates social or individual tea spaces, demonstrating how the
integration of culture and philosophy manifests itself in the sense of
art and architecture. It will then unfold tea’s dramatic history while
looking at some of the world’s most influential tea cultures, exploring
the process of making tea and its relationship with forming space.
In the research process, attention is consistently given to the scents
of tea and the environment of making, serving and tasting tea.
These actions create a sense of ritual, stimulating human perception
through a sensory journey of personal pilgrimage by activating
the architectonic of phenomenology and establishing coherent,
systematic space-making methodologies to form a tea building
complex. The atmospheric spirituality of this space shapes both an
ideal and an inner sanctuary to realise the existence of oneself.
The thesis aims to discover ‘tea architecture’ that responds to the
traditional and ever-evolving tea culture. It demonstrates how the
ideologies and philosophies of tea drinking can be represented and
reflected through architecture, and how architecture can be used
to revive the tea tradition. As an outcome of the research, an urban
tea space is proposed in Auckland CBD, providing a sanctuary for
urban dwellers to regain their inner peace, reflect their life and to
contemplate their existence.