Is there a potential for a thick, integrated skin that adapts and interact with our bodies? The potential might allow for a contemporary interface between our subconscious, our body and our enclosure. Can architecture become more intimate for people whom view/inhabit it, and for the city in which it is located: something that is missing in the generic buildings of today. Everyday living allows an investigation into a dualism between my needs for simplicity and complexity, the infinite and the finite, the known and the unknown: are these mirrored by the ebb and flow of my anxiety and comfort? Is the bond between the user and his/or her everyday realm exhibited through personal fears and pleasures: through thresholds of our daily ritual? My interest lies within the discrepancy between our cognitive world and the real world: suggesting a stronger boundary that extends beyond or recedes within our physical boundaries.
The work of Frederick Kiesler’s discusses this potential for a contemporary relationship to our domain. Kiesler correalism investigates the body’s role in architecture: the dynamics of continual interaction between a person and his/her daily realm. Keisler’s believes that continuity, in relation to the human body, is vital to creating space that interacts more deeply with ourselves. Freud’s discourse on the uncanny is linked to this idea of discrepancy: a difference between our repressed experiences and our present ones. Freud’s work contributes to an understanding of the relationship between our fears and anxieties of the real world. Inflatable artist Hans Hemmert’s exploration of everyday living situations comment on the continuity of surface, where the traces of objects become more intuitive and the familiarity begins to vanish (Appendix A1). Interior surfaces have no visual pauses. These spaces he creates are hermetic. The unification of the contours of the environment suspends space, reducing our gravitational cues. Like sensory deprivation chambers, the boundary between the real and the unreal become ambiguous. The space formed imposes feelings of insecurity: producing an image of void or nothingness. “The familiar de-familiarized, the Freudian “Un-heimlich” in which the Sinister that which we were once entrusted with knowing and is later stamped out in a subconscious act of elimination.” (Anna Cestelli Guidi) The long-term objective of this research is to develop an understanding of designing architecture that responds better to the particulars of its context, operation, and its occupants: developing the relationship between our psyche and the individual elements that make up architecture as a whole.
SITE:
During a weeklong emersion of Montréal’s urban life, I discovered an ‘abandoned’ street that induced feelings of isolation. I felt as if indeterminate groups of people were gazing upon me, dead and alive. A fear of this unknown started to activate my curiosity for what lies behind these situational thresholds. My site is situated within the Mile-End industrial area, a neighborhood in existence since the 1870’s (Appendix A2, A3, A4, A5, A6, A7). The Mile-End area of the city is characteristically a multicultural artistic neighborhood, with large warehouses and factories that had been built adjacent to the Canadian Pacific Railway tracks at the turn of the century. During the 1950’s/ 1960’s the downtown located Garment district, was relocated just south of the center of the industrial area. Change had been contributed to the movement of immigrant garment workers to new residential suburbs along Mile-End. Navigation to the site is limited, by foot and/or vehicular, due to the isolation of the street within the Montreal street grid. My area of study incorporates the partially abandoned 1960’s concrete structures along Gaspe Street between St Viateur Street and Macguire Street. For decades, Gaspé Street was a hub of textile manufacturing. However, in the past years the number of companies involved in the garment trade has declined. Officially the garment district has since relocated a couple miles northwest to Chabanel Street. Currently the area is becoming inundated with artists, musicians, artist related businesses, with a mixture of residential and commercial use. The buildings within the site vary from 9 to 12 storeys of concrete columns and beam/slab construction, with loading and pedestrian access from Gaspe Street. My interest lies within the factories and the abandoned spaces between and below these solid structures (Appendix A8).
CONTEXT:
During the 60’s in the mile end district of Montreal, the old garment District encouraged the use of child labor in a sweatshop environment. My narrative continues 30 years later, when previous child workers have been brought back to the spaces of their demise. Through a failed attempt to collect monetary awards to victims of the child exposure to asbestos use in textile production, the now adult plaintiffs have decided, due to financial circumstances, to recover their losses through acquisition of factory property of the textile owner. Current asbestos levels are high within certain above grade levels, but they insist on claiming their rightful property underground. The narrative becomes a journey through a group of people’s lives as they navigate and inhabit unknown space, connected to repressed memories that form a network to their haunting past.
The textile-building site explores the potential for an outside source of influence onto people’s domain. Infrastructure speculation becomes a catalyst for integration and responsiveness within a bigger system (Appendix A9). The exploration of individuals as they deal with issues of threshold and boundary, creates a network within themselves and within another system of the city. Does a driving force of the city affect the behavior of the people in how they relate to their own domains. Is this force related to a city’s obsession for cleanliness, perhaps expressed through a sanitary infrastructure?
The compartmentalization of people’s lives, their space, affects how a ‘pressure’ may become a malleable and responsive element within that context.
PROGRAM STRATEGY:
I want to look at how our boundaries may lie beyond the physical ones we have built. Early exploration looked at the affect of everyday objects towards our behavior with a “skin”. The skin is a metaphor for the implied boundary created by the placement of objects and furniture due to our cognitive world (Appendix A10). I see the cognitive world as a dualism between what we perceive and what we don’t perceive. Sensory deprivation illustrated a contrast between one perception and another perception. I have actively searched for spaces that are more proximate to the body; there is a level of comfort with a space that is more finite in my perception. The creations of cells that inflate and deflate explore this perception difference: how does that affect the space in the street? There is also something valuable about the space between my boundary and my body, and the potential between that.
These skin moments, casts of repressed and present events, start to populate a study model. Characters navigate the other world of the sweatshop factory, confronted by thresholds and boundaries that are implicated by the site. The characters imagination and their behavior within and towards objects in a space affect the boundary they enclose themselves in. The world that starts to form becomes a direction or catalogue of relationships to a ‘skin’ (Appendix A11).
The intent is to explore the spatial and boundary implications of my experiences (through the characters) of fear and anxiety related to perceptional changes. How does a relationship to the ‘skin’ implicate a cognitive and real world?
