Inhabiting the Void: The Aotearoa Sublime
The sublime was a philosophical movement that transformed the visual arts, allowing people to be conscious of both the beautiful and the grotesque at the same time. Looking at research from Edmund Burke and Emmanuel Kant, the sublime is an intuitive feeling that encompasses fear, terror and awe, often embodied within impressive landscapes but also terrifying natural events, such as earthquakes, events that have shaped Aotearoa and inhabitants. Through contrasting emotions evoked by these, the sublime elicits a particular human sensory experience, intensifying the human to landscape relation. In this research, atmosphere is used as the tangible design tool to drive the sublime over three differing scales of design experiments, each conceived to explore the sublime and its impact on architecture in Aotearoa.
The research in this thesis looks into how we can harness the sublime to create sensory atmospheric architecture within the alpine landscapes of Aotearoa. To achieve this, I first explore understandings of the sublime related to seismic threat, something experienced strongly in New Zealand due to our unique location at the meeting point of vast tectonic plates. Through this, I am able to better understand what makes the sublime emotionally and spatially provocative, a unique combination of fascination and fear that can colour our understanding of space. This investigation into the seismic sublime sets the premise for the following two stages of design, which progressively gain in more architectural scale and complexity in pursuit of an intensified sublime.
The research is conducted through three scales of design experiment. In these, the reader is taken on a journey through the sublime, with each scale exploring the psychogeographic and atmospheric power of the sublime, through such devices as thresholds, dimension and contrast. Contrast is found to play a big part in achieving an intensification of the sublime and becomes a key strategy in the later stages of the design research. Through intense spatial contrasts, the architecture developed in this research becomes an essay in powerful atmospheric transitions, with space becoming a sublime journey through the incalculable greatness of landscape.
The first stage of design looks at the sublime through representation in a 1:1 physical installation, looking into how the power of the ‘seismic sublime’ influences our emotions. This allowed me to grasp the spatial effect of the sublime and how it might be reproduced as architecture that intensifies human experience. This work provides speculative strategies that bridge towards architecture, such as how the sublime qualities within physical models, at 1:1, might extend to architecture at greater scales.
The following two stages of this project explore the sublime alpine landscape of Mt Aspiring National Park. Being the least developed of all of Aotearoa’s national parks, Mt Aspiring’s unforgiving and untouched landscape means the sublime conditions allow an intensification of both landscape and its relation to architecture. This phase introduces architectural follies within the alpine landscape, developed as massive, mysterious sculptural monuments that can be discovered only through hiking in the mountains. These were designed as a theoretical journey through the sublime, acting as architectures of both thoroughfare and destination. From these I better understood the impact of scale and dimension, time, distance and power, and how to use those qualities to influence a stronger connection of architecture to the sublime landscapes of Aotearoa.
