The Third Stranger: Public Parasitology

Abstract

Exhaustion of religious and consequently scientific faith in the face of modernity confuses the individual among the collective, and certainty loses its presence, surrounded by uncertainties of the self’s beliefs. Order is the construction of the real where one feels at Home, which becomes the cause for Existential Homelessness upon encountering events that reveal a detachment from this order. Albert Camus’ theory of Absurdism presents this confrontation between the human desire for truth and the world’s inability to provide such resolution - as the Absurd. Strangers are absurd collections of incomplete information and subjects of uncertainty to each other. Indeterminacy presupposes all human relationships, reversing the 17th century Cartesian transition from doubt to certitude. Detachment is always there; always have been there - between you and them before any attachments were to be made. Public spaces in the contemporary city have become the site for interactions of detachment, where strangers conform to rituals of social parasitism in the absence of community solidarity. The thesis aims to investigate how the condition of detachment can be developed as a spatial device to reconfigure public spaces. Could an alternative communality take place between strangers in the public, rather than the status quo of relationships: the parasitic attachment of one to another? On Queen Street, SkyWorld Entertainment Centre was opened in 1999. After numerous conflicts between SkyWorld’s past tenants and the building’s new owner since 2011, the Covid-19 lockdowns have eventually ended the life of the entertainment hub’s once thriving atmosphere as a Third Place. Most of its interior is abandoned without any attempt to find a new directionality for its future. SkyWorld now parasites the most central fabric of Auckland CBD. The carcass of SkyWorld invites another parasite. The design proposal imagines a speculative spatial reconfiguration in the interiors of SkyWorld Entertainment Centre. The programme theatrically mimics the quotidian cycle, categorised in four rituals, each allocated to four typologies occupying the carcass of SkyWorld: Working, Eating, Playing, Sleeping. Strangers of the public are invited to a collective experience, towards a transition in symbiosis from parasitism to mutualism.