NORMAL ARCHITECTURE: PLAYING THE GAME OF ARCHITECTURE

Abstract

Architecture is a discipline of compromise. Despite having a great impact on architecture, the school or at least the one I am familiar with avoids talking about compromise, as if architecture is an uncompromising discipline, which is reminiscent of the attitude of Modern architects such as Le Corbusier. Our reality is far from Le Corbusier - with architects having less capital and agency, especially for a designer like myself who has limited privilege, being uncompromising is a sure way of not being able to practice architecture at all. The media is also symptomatic of this attitude, as they only portray the hygienic and logical processes through the lens of the architect, but rarely show the messiness and craziness that happens behind closed doors. I’m interested in this “normal” messy condition of architecture that is marginalised, as a springboard to challenge my own modernistic sensibilities in making. I view the hygienic and hermetic aesthetics of Modernism as a violence towards this process that is full of blood, sweat and tears, and something that absolutely veils the reality of architecture. Alternative aesthetics are tested in reaction to events in design, leading to an architecture that prioritises fragments over the whole, leaky over the sealed, and conflict over resolution. A game was designed in order to put myself in a simulation of reality, through inviting players to act as clients, structural engineers to role play as bad structural engineers, with the goal of designing a house. Three scenarios were created to test a variety of personalities and events, producing three houses. A large scale model, a square format drawing and photographs are the architectural outcomes of the thesis, which are tools to reinterrogate the relationship between the designed space and the events that have happened in the messiness of design.