Enlivened Architectures: Intensifying Encounters with Degraded Landscapes through Feminist Expressive Practices.

Enlivened Architectures: Intensifying Encounters with Degraded Landscapes through Feminist Expressive Practices explores the ability of Feminist Expressive Practices in the creation of an architecture that intensifies encounters with the complex and degraded Wairarapa Moana landscape. The creation of a situated architecture is tested through embodied and expressive design and includes experimentation with drawing with land, sculpting with land, and collaging with land. Alongside this, Somatic experiencing is posed as a critical tool for intensifying and re-orienting within degraded environments. The creative practice research finds techniques to encounter, draw in and express the entangled interrelationships of the Wairarapa Moana Lake Doman area. Creative practice is therefore taken up for its socio-spatial and material agencies to entangle with and honour land. Findings highlight the value of how architecture might go about situating with the land to strengthen opportunities for connectedness and hyper-localised cultural identification. The resulting architecture of the research also opens possibilities for the enhancement of community engagement and multiply the sense of belonging. Through embodied and expressive practice and the subsequent occasioned architecture, this research demonstrates how an architectural practice can attend to a landscape’s cultural, ecological and emotional dimensions. The thesis concludes that embodied and expressive practices contribute a vital sphere to architectural production insofar as they engage space and landscape as mediums to facilitate care, connection and healing in degraded, colonised ecologies. Enlivened architecture contributes to expanding the capacity of architectural practices to sensitively occupy a role in the healing and honouring of place beyond technoscientific approaches.