Moving through stories: Creating and realizing expectations in architecture

Abstract

RESEARCH QUESTION How can the distinction between exterior and interior be leveraged to create a positive architectural dissonance and improve our emotional response to architecture?

ABSTRACT Buildings are made of exteriors and interiors, and the distinction between them is the substance of architecture. This project seeks to better understand how exercising control over exteriors and interiors can improve the way humans feel about the buildings we interact with. This document details the inspiration, background research, and design moves explored and implemented during these investigations, as well as the obstacles encountered during the design process.

The primary intellectual and emotional inspiration for the design output of this project is the fictional Library of Babel, first imagined by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941. Borges’s work is underpinned by research ranging from early modernist theory to modern-day writings about the architecture of experience. It is the combination of this inspiration and the totality of the research that informs the design of an oral history library in Heron Park, West Auckland.

This process generates an oral history library—built on a hexagonal grid mimicking Borges’s universe of galleries—with an exterior that hides the greater complexity of the interior, and an interior that leverages the expectations created by the exterior to generate architectural dissonance.

The final design outcome is an investigation into how a building can encourage and affect dissonance by controlling visitors’ movements through a building, and how increasing this dissonance can improve the engagement with—and the emotional response to architecture.

SITE: Heron Park, Auckland, New Zaeland