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This thesis undertakes an architectural investigation of urban apartment dwelling in the context of the increasingly globalised conditions of the 21st century. Building out of my own living experiences in Central Auckland, the project speculates on the limits of individual autonomy and forms of psychical restraint as these play out in generic high-rise settings. Apartment dwelling, commonly amongst the most limited of dwelling types at the level of floor space, spatial complexity, access, and outlook, offers, particularly at the lower cost and rental ends of the market, a generic template into which the lived complexity of its dwellers must fit.
The reductive nature of these templates catalyses a parallel sameness in our cities. Life, sanitised, tightly tailored to gridded facades and concrete floor plates, and staked up to impossible heights builds in an insisting distance—distance from each other, distance from selves, distance from a certain agency to remake and mark differently the urban places we invest our lives in. Within these cities of reductive distance lie further realms of exclusion and scopic control—apartment interiors atomised and isolated, all the more so given their forced proximity. As such, this research explores such dwellings as condensers for, and carries of, the forces of globalisation - forces that work over, not just abodes, but the psychic and corporal routines comprising contemporary life.
This thesis asks what it would take to make such reductive templates liveable, and further, what liveable might mean in a hyper-commodified domain running from the most intimate to the most enormous of scales. The proposition explored here is that architecture, itself no less free of commodifying reference, might nevertheless play a countering role, one that turns the generic and the stereotypical against itself, opening up, in turn, a degree of imaginative free-play that may enrich occupation. Michel de Certeau has referred to such countering as tactical operations, a making-do with what exists to better redefine what can be made of existing.Working through a range of at least partially non-synchronous practices including film, photography, narrative writing, physical and digital modelling, and media conventions in architecture, the project speculates on the potential for counter-realities and paradoxes in urban life to be mobilised in the service of dwelling-modes in excess of mere surviving.
This process culminates in an architectural speculation of a generic apartment complex in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland—the one I find myself living in. Working through the tensions between an interior renovation and a building scale adaption, the apartments are transformed into a world of tactical opportunities fitted to a cast of fictionalised characters that together perform, in human and architectural senses, the radical social diversity and transformative potential that urban life offers. The resulting interactions between character and architecture consciously invokes a runaway condition in which the building itself takes on a life of its own, whereby challenging both the reductive spatial practices of the city, as well as the interactions of the body and psyche within our rapidly globalising conditions.
Ultimately, the thesis presents a vision for an expressive, tactical urban architecture, one that calls for a practice of emancipatory free play, seeing the existing generic architectures of the globalising city reclaimed by its residents through an imaginative engagement. |
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