Manfredini, ManfredoChoi, Hyungjun2023-07-062023-07-062022https://hdl.handle.net/2292/64502How can simulation and hyperreality play a positive role in architecture practice? How can architecture affirmatively use the means of spectacle that have been developed by our advanced consumer society? These questions reflect the scope of this thesis by demanding the construction of strategies that deploy methods of double abstraction – that is the abstraction of the abstracted realm of spectacle – through a design exercise that envisions an emancipatory form of reality antagonist to our consumer society. They inform research that revolves around a core problem of our modern society: the sociospatial desynchronisation resulting from steadily accelerating abstractive spectacularisation. They foreground the effects of desynchronisation on our everyday life by focusing on the spatial and cultural practices of key places of our globalised capitalism, such as venues of major corporations of the fashion and hospitality industries. They point to speculative approaches moderating how hyperreality can be subverted to transform the pervasive mechanisms of spectacle into machines for acculturation in a better society. This thesis addresses today’s association of the self-propelling alienation of consumerism and the fragmentation of the public realm through the expansion of pseudo-public, but private enclosures. It explores the capacity of architecture to formulate discourses on the re-appropriation and re-commoning of central urban places that have been privatised for commercial exploitation. The rapid transformation of every social practice into actions of conspicuous and hedonic consumption has disintegrated and homogenised our society, subjugating it to the ruthless mechanisms of rampant capital reproduction. Overpowering hegemonic market forces coerced the individual to adopt standardised pseudo-behaviours that are scripted for specific commodified spheres, such as shopping malls and entertainment centres. These behaviours generate mirrors of social spaces dominated through brand’s false advertisements. Rather than seeking a solution to the constant acceleration of consumerism, this study aims to construct spaces of hope by using architectural narration. Instead of pretending to find an answer to these problems, it aims to rearticulate the critique of this crisis of our public realm by examining a specific paradigm that represents the way in which architecture is instrumental to a project of global commodification: Starbucks’ dramaturgical coffeehouse. This research takes a speculative approach, developing an allegorical reading of the spectacle that proposes a critical narration of reality as a liberated space of representation. Through the construction of discourses on the re-appropriation of the relationship between spatial representations and consumerism, the narration develops a coordinated set of fictional spaces that map and redistribute post-consumerist publics, affirmatively interpreting the logic of the spectacle. By engaging with the simulatory tactics and devices that merge real and virtual spheres in the selected place, this representation set unveils and reconfigures in the form of provocations the false appearances of spectacles. As a theatre of the real, an Autonomous Caffè of Fictive Superpositions shows re-appropriated experiential realms in which society celebrates new forms of resonant and anti-abstractive dynamic stabilisations.Items in ResearchSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/docs/uoa-docs/rights.htmhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/nz/Thesis2023-06-16Copyright: the authorhttp://purl.org/eprint/accessRights/OpenAccess