Dysktiria

Abstract

How can architecture become a tool of awareness at the hand of a disruption within the standardization of the built environment by using a science fiction narrative?

Conventional architecture has made people unappreciative of how architecture can shape space, similar to how technology has made us numb to our own being-in-the-world, as Martin Heidegger would say. Architecture in general exists to make peoples’ lives as comfortable as possible and, as a consequence, inhabitants of the built environment no longer pay notice to the architecture that surrounds them. Unconsciously, people have been conditioned to live within a routine. People are inured to allotting their time organized to specific activities instead of having the ability to act by reacting to their needs. An example being when people eat at a designated lunch break during work hours or go to bed at ten in the evening, rather than eating when they are hungry and going to bed when they are tired. In order for people to be more sensitive about how architecture shapes their space there must be a type of unconventional disruption within the order of things.

Humanity has gotten to a point in evolution where we have built everything for our comfort and it has gotten slowly out of hand. While technology has improved our lives tremendously during the last century, we have grown lazier and weaker. This thesis intends to propose a type of high intensity architecture that has the possibility of provoking a sensation that could make people more sensitive to architectural possibilities. Architecture has gone through the same process with simpler and often boring architectural styles that fit our routines. As Aldous Huxley once said, “experience is not what happens to a man; it is what man does with what happens to him.” And in order to imagine the possibilities and be more conscious of the decisions we make towards the future, we need to free ourselves of conventional limits.