THESIS 2018-2019
THE ARCHITECTURE OF MALADAPTATION
EXPLORING THE VIRTUAL-REAL, CINEMATICS & THE MIRROR
“Can Architecture reflect an experience that is simultaneously real and unreal as a form of mental release and/or reflection?”
Mental wellbeing should be a key factor in the relationship between humans and their environment. However, a modernist emphasis on the homogenous, disciplined body – both individual and collective – forecloses on the possibility of a more dispersed and heterogeneous condition that embraces fantasy and escapism. Focusing on Foucault’s ‘heterotopias’, this thesis asks if the nature of ‘maladaptive daydreaming’ can be incorporated into a space for release and reflection? This design study explores how elements of desire and deep-rooted pleasure can be expressed within the experience of an architecture that draws on selected psychoses alongside cinema’s mise-en-scene. At the heart of the thesis lies an interest in the boundary condition between the moral and immoral within society and who occupies that borderline. This requires a critique of socialised normativity as a discipline, which results in suppression of the socially unacceptable due to fear of judgment. Rather than use architecture to cultivate or enact a cure, it is utilized as a means to avoid a cure; purely through an environment that allows for the expression of individuals and their desires.
The design response unfolds through a narrative and cinematic storyboard, which establish the durational experience of architecture as a series of moments. This ultimately communicates both the labyrinthine space with its abject interventions as well as the three maladaptive themed propositions; escapism, sexual arousal and violence. The juxtaposing nature of the maladaptive labyrinth with the clinic becomes a reflection of the dissociative. The spatial manifestation of a psychological condition can, therefore, unfold a more dissociative, sensory and therapeutic encounter with architecture. Such experiences emerge from a design methodology that adopts visual narrative as a cinematic mise-en-scene in order to explore environments that negotiate between the real and unreal.