SPACE: GRADUATE THESIS PART 3
As architects, should we not exploit the current cultural trend towards voyeuristic behavior? Can we not draw from the contemporary landscape to inform our constructed environment? Architecture cannot progress without evolving. We should learn from the basis of human desire to construct an architecture that draws from natural (conditioned) behavior to provoke deeper thought that questions self and truth. This project considers the opposition between the inside looking out and the outside looking in as an ephemeral understanding of the body in the context of relative time and place.
propaganda
People watch people. We mimic behavior. We covet celebrity: those with beauty, money, power and influence. What we mimic is a product of ego and envy. We are obsessed with viewing others, or rather viewing ourselves through others. Image culture seduces us to desire the ideal. What is ideal? Ideal is airbrushed, edited and posed. Ideal is a fiction—a commodity to be consumed. Imagery is a device for manipulation; thus our model for ideal is an artifact of manipulation. As a fabrication of product placement and edited sequences, modern life reveals itself as a skit, a production. a myth.
Pattern behavior refers to a chain of learned behaviors that are common amongst people
Collective behavior refers to the activities of crowds in panics, fads, cults and organized social movements
Those who own the means of production control the viewpoints circulated in our media. (Practices of Looking)
culture of the copy
Human desire is not an autonomous process, but a collective one. In short, we want what other people want. We look, we desire, we consume; we become a reflection of the myth presented to us. It is the interpretation of this myth that becomes the perceived truth.
Publicity seems to offer free choice: one brand competing with another. However, every publicity image confirms and enhances the other. Within publicity, choices are offered between similar products, thus publicity as a system only makes a single proposal. (Ways of Seeing)
Control is an illusion of choice between a set of similar decisions.
splice
There is no continuity to the production of a film, as it is captured as a series of discontinuous episodes, which are edited to produce the illusion of the montage. Architecture becomes a reflection, projection or product of bodies. The building exists as a dynamic layer of information blurring the boundary between spacial distinctions. (Sexuality & Space)
The reciprocal enjoyment through shared experiences between people produces architecture, while the building itself serves as a kind of scrim for projection and production. (Sexuality & Space)
endless loop of live and recorded surveillance, advertisements
In this building, there is no distinguishable time, place or singular body.
Architectural space is designed for and defined by the body. Where do we place disembodiment in architecture?
An organ without body can be “grafted on” to another body, another organism, be it living or not. A body without organs becomes liberated, libidinal, desiring. It would be transversed by ephemeral inscriptions, giving rise to artificially induced visual effects: flux, contacts, sensations, vibrations, momentary satisfaction, fleeting pleasures. (Flesh)
decisions are manipulated by sounds and symbols designed to illicit a set of prescribed behaviors and impulses. Time is an illusion created by artificial daylighting and increased oxygen. In this space, each voyeur is reduced to their baseline hedonism of consumption and desire. Place becomes an illusion by the erasure of physical space and absolute time.
A voyeuristic hotel is a department store of humanity.
Nature refers to behavior determined by biology or genetics.
Nurture refers to conditioned behavior dictated by upbringing, culture and experiences.
quote
phobia
We learn by observing others. Through observation, we understand happiness, sadness, contempt, disgust, surprise, anger and fear. What you feel, is the reality you live. Truth and reality is a perception of what is actual. Thus, reality does not truly exist; it is what an individual believes to be true that is their reality. Both nature and nurture create the individual experience in space.
frame of reference.
This is not a place to fear, but a place to explore fear.
humans test limits, push boundaries, harder faster bigger stronger
Internal forces skew our individual interpretation of space based on individual experiences, trauma, beliefs, etc. For example, if someone suffers from vertigo, they interpret space differently than others that don’t suffer from fear or a different phobia.
Understanding space through voyeurism. general. nature
individuality. nurture
fear space. coping
spacial mask. physical building backdrop for humanity as architecture of culture
memories. context
limbo
time and place are plastic, simultaneously existing in a metaspace opposed to real space.
within pliable time and place
As we move, the walls breathe.
PART 4 (coming soon)
Holmes, Alena Voyeuristic Hotel–Can Walls Breathe? University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; 2005. revised 2023.
Transparency is an effect of masking, The building masquerades as order. Order itself becomes a mask. The experiential procession of voyeuristic discovery becomes a kind of habitable space defined by the self versus the projection of self within visual periphery. Exposing voyeurism itself, contaminates yet activates space. It is architecture as space defined within the walls of voyeuristic bodies that this project is focused.
tropes
diametrically opposed spaces heaven hell good bad etc
scale
commercial architecture at the scale of the highway (Learning from Las Vegas)
The city is a complex interactive network which links often unintegrated social activities, processes and relations with a number of imaginary/real and projected/actual architecture, geography, civic and public relations. The question is not simply how to distinguish conducive from unconducive environments, but to examine how different cities, rather different sociocultural environments actively produce the bodies of their inhabitants physiologies, activities and behaviors. (Sexuality & Space)
dystopia
“You’re watching television. Suddenly you realize there’s a wasp crawling on your arm.” Becker states a question. “I’d kill it.” Rachel says without flinching.
Duality dichotomy juxtaposition stratefied
awareness
femme fatale – clones
machine awareness
“If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes.”
