FOURTH YEAR 2021
STUDIO MAJOR PROJECT
HIGH DISTINCTION

SITE
The Downing Centre, Sydney

There is a constant imposition of regulations on the body within the contemporary city. We are subjected to a constant subconscious regulation of our bodies, assimilated to perform ‘suitably’ in any given environment. Regulating human performativity in response to spatial queues has become instinct. 
 
This proliferation of rules and sterilisation has made space dull, lacking spontaneity and playfulness. In order to cater for the masses, spaces have become familiar, containing just enough nuance that we don’t recognise them as homogenous. We have become programmed to desire this familiarity as a new hedonism, simultaneously becoming dangerously uncomfortable with the unfamiliar. Human performance has been subdued in response to the sterilisation of its environment.

CORPUS LIBERA seeks to emancipate the individual from the ‘common sense’ they are currently behaving under. It will expand on the notion of nuance, creating unfamiliar and unidentifiable spaces within which a de-regulation of the body may occur. An artificial construction of a body is born, challenging this social construct of the familiar ‘four walls of sensibility’ in which we are permitted to behave. This organismic structure actively breaks the restraints of its rigid confinement, growing and evolving as individuals move through the endless space. Through its pores sweat mist of liberation, in its orifices one finds intimacy and refuge. A heterotopia emerges, reminiscent of a ‘glitch’ in the city, whereby time becomes elastic and new modes of social interaction flourish within the unknown.
 
Abandoning traditional spatial logics, CORPUS LIBERA becomes a simulacrum of nature. Space is fluid and program-less, activated not for a pre-conceived purpose, but instead by the subjectivities who inhabit it and the means by which they decide to engage with it. A derive emerges; subverting definitive space within which the dominant hegemony thrives. Through an affordance of time, these unresolved spaces become hedonistic. The act of lingering becomes a powerful provocation to the contemporary rush and obsession with efficiency. CORPUS LIBERA begins to explore the unfamiliar as an impetus for the ultimate intersectional luxury.

What does space look like when it itself becomes unregulated? This is the space that is truly unfamiliar, because it is unexperienced - becoming a complete juxtaposition of the outside city where behaviour is so incessantly guided by space. Hedonism is no longer achieved through subjective materiality, instead intrinsic to scale and monumentality. The creation of a breathing terrain of fluid skins and intensified atmospheres begins to facilitate a limitless potential of performativity. The stripping back of space intensifies the bathhouse as the most intimate contact between the human body and architecture. Through this upheaval of predetermined trajectories and the facilitation of a completely foreign mode of interaction, a new, unregulated human performativity is born.

[rhinoceros3d]
[adobe photoshop]
[adobe illustrator]