Integrating Sensory Experience in Parametric Architecture through a Phenomenal Lens - Master of Design

‘Parametricism’ has come to play a major role in contemporary architectural design and is now considered the dominant style for avant-garde practice. This thesis argues that despite parametricism’s unique capacity to articulate programmatic complexity, visual and intellectualized imperatives at the loss of experiential imperatives have limited parametricism as a medium through which architecture is produced, promoted, and evaluated. Architect Juhani Pallasmaa believes that this leads to the deprivation of vital human existential questions that enable us to relate to our built environment and that provide meaning to that environment. This thesis explores how parametric architecture can further develop by addressing the deficiencies that Pallasmaa has described, to further incorporate a sense of temporality, experiential depth and personal belonging.

Based on these critical examinations, the second half of the thesis includes design experiments which test the integration of sensory experiences within parametric design. Archives New Zealand has been selected as the vehicle for this design exploration because throughout history, archives have symbolically represented important spaces in cities to express the re-connection of our history and culture. Today, however archives are often perceived as little more than secular storage for objects and documents. The thesis tests how the interior design of a nation’s archives can be conceived through parametricism, while also incorporating symbolic and phenomenological imperatives.

This thesis concludes with five interior design experiments that are each derived from this experimental design process. The five interiors illustrate the mediation between parametric and phenomenal imperatives. These experiments conclude that through critical application of sensory imperatives, we may reconnect our human existence within the parametric world.

 

The Vortex of Conjunction - 400 Level

Interior Re-Design of St. James Theatre Ballet Building

Challenging Interior Architecture to Redefine Boundaries, Prescriptions and Presumptive Limitations of the Discipline, Using Methodologies Based in Professional Practice . INTERIOR DESIGN is often dismissed as being superficial and decorative when economically unrestrained or merely functional and basic when financially restricted. But INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE in its most profound sense demands that spatial design be imbued with meaning as well as be responsive to the human condition. INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE is capable of exploring issues of social and cultural relevance: informing, critiquing and challenging rapidly changing social, cultural, theoretical, political, environmental, and economic issues. Meaningful INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE demands that we establish a theoretical personal position, critically challenge human perception, and translate socially and culturally relevant themes relating to identity, ritual, time, space, memory, emotion, imagination and inspiration.

Making Room For The Public Intellectual - 400 Level

Using interior architecture to provoke an active relationship between the university and the city: make room for the public intellectual.

Watermark - 300 Level

Hospitality Spaces

Like all Interior Architecture, hotel design invites the Interior Architect to challenge human perception, to effectively engage and manifest four-dimensional perception-based objectives relating to time, space, memory, ritual, the five senses (see, feel, smell, hear, taste), emotion, imagination, human perception, identity, symbolism, narrative, cultural reference, etc.

Meaningful hotel interiors are capable of taking on these challenges, as well as engaging strong theoretical positions on hotel-related social/cultural issues such as migration and ‘otherness’; the home away from home; the residential vs. corporate; the international vs. domestic; the exotic vs. familiar; the modular vs. non-modular.