Intermission

Abstract

Nine spaces: A billboard, a stretch of scaffolding, a stretch of caulk, a street shrine, a car park, a water tank, a missing brick, a pedestrian bridge, a pocket watch.

Each: An intermission in the urban fabric. An in-between space, connective tissue between discrete moments. A pause, a break, an interlude, a respite. A timeout. A place outside of the trajectory of time’s linear progression. A portrait of such a space can only be captured in the oblique, in fragments that aren’t able to be strung together, not without interpolation, inference, imagination to fill in the blanks. representation A story—a fictional narrative that weaves through and across each space—also approaches it from the oblique, not centering it as an object-in-the-round, but inhabiting it as spatial, material, social framework. A walk—a journey woven across specified spaces—adds yet another layer of inferential representation, experienced in linear temporality yet suggestive of layered, non-linear spatial and temporal experiences.

Drawing from social theory and literary theory to inform a methodology for space-based narratives, this thesis takes the form of a collection of multi-media short stories titled Intermission. Pairing prose fiction with a guided walk, Intermission is a narrative exploration of the act of movement out-of-place, into the margin, the in-between, the timeout. By shifting the focus away from space as a designed and embodied structure, to space as a discursive construct, this thesis aims to bring to the fore systems, relationships, material and social networks, as well as standpoints (both human and non-human) that are integral to the existence and maintenance of the built environment, but that remain invisible in existing architectural narrative frameworks. The subject matter of these narrative exercises in text and lived experience are spaces, characters, and perspectives that step outside the fabric of everyday life. The experimental narratives woven around these subjects cast as the center the edges, namely those between spaces and experiences that are real and imagined, between remembering and forgetting, between documentary and fiction. In breaking with linearity, convention and expected mediums in architectural representation and speculation, the collective body of work produced through this thesis hopes to offer a fertile test bed for experimentation with discursive frameworks.