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Shaelena Morley
Diploma 9

Architects seek to change the world.

Part ego, part naivety, we think we can construct utopia with the flick of the wrist, the click of the mouse. In an effort to construct this utopia in all its perfection, we inevitably seek to control experience. Our visions of utopia might claim freedom and flexibility, but any claim for freeom in architecture is a farce. Spatial devices are inherently iterations of restraint.

Architecture is ultimately a system of control. 

It is in the overlap of the architect's intentions and the occupant's experience, as understood through select moments, where this investigation takes place in order to find and exploit our system of control.

The Cite de Refuge opens in 1933 as a hyper controlled environment under the authoritarian hand of Corbusier and the Salvation Army. In 2010, after decades of disuse the Salvation Army reopens as a refuge in response to the economic climate. Diary found in the Inescapable Cite de Refuge With simple spatial manipulations our perception of the Salvation Army is altered leaving us with something completely different from what we think we know. By examining how perception can be controlled, we reveal the fallacy in the notion of a fixed context. Through shifts of perception, context is manipulated, reinvented, recontextualised. A design proposal only understood as a series of moments, the use of spatial distortion and results in an ever changing understanding or even misunderstanding of one’s surroundings.