SPATIAL SONANCE: exploring spatiality, temporality, and user relations through kinetic design

This research utilises a speculative architectural design methodology to explore how liminality, inherent to kinetic architecture, can shift perception, and how it can create a new kinetic architecture that enhances users’ relationship with time and built space. The research is through an intersection of design development, design-led research, and research on theory. The research pursues the question: How can kinetic architecture enhance the spatial and temporal nature of built space? This question is addressed through a speculative design research methodology in three discrete design stages that progressively increase in scale and complexity. This work endeavors to create architecture that adopts multi-sensory feedback responding to both active input and passive occupancy. The final proposition in the sequence of design explorations, a public scale concert hall, not only responds kinetically to auditory input to create a dynamic visual effect, but it also alters the quality and reverberance of audio as it moves. The occupancy of the auditorium space also affects how the sound was absorbed, making the user an integral and ongoing element of the spatial and temporal nature of the room. This research aims to contribute to potential future applications of kinetic design that alters an architectural space programmatically, volumetrically, and multisensorially. Through this, architectural design can move away from existing in a timeless stasis, and be more holistically integrated with the reality of time and presence.