Abstract

Developing a new spatial model for generating poetic intelligence in response to the already constructed and degrading landscape. The thesis has a simple inquiry: what innovative architectural spatial models can be developed within, or in response to, the townships and degraded land located along the Perth-Kalgoorlie water pipeline in Western Australia, to help instigate a new poetic intelligence when considering architectural making that has a direct relationship with the landscape that it exists within? The thesis begins and ends with a triad relationship between human perception, architectural idea making, and landscape: it begins with observation, engagement and recording and ends with a generative proposition. The thesis articulates how the complexities of a defined site can be recorded and modelled to bind disparate elements into being and therefore model more accurately the wholeness of perception that often drives architectural thinking. Commencing with the lens provided by the Perth-Kalgoorlie water pipeline, the thesis examines a domain in which architecture, landscape, and human action combine to activate our poetic intelligence. The thesis shows that we feel what we think we see, the visible power of man in nature and, the relentlessness of a middle distance that has been constructed around us. Through critical reflection a tremoring occurs, causing powerful new imaginings. The research attempts to visualise the new landscape and show that we help to degrade what we treasure. This moment or realisation can be framed as an aesthetic moment that causes us to think again. The research, formulated as a progressive, heightening of experience, leads the observer from Rambler's Gallery through commonplace territory pointing out observations along the way and then ultimately winds these commonplace observations together to construct a new presentation of the commonplace. The final exhibition announces a new spatial model for generating poetic intelligence in response to the already developed and degrading landscape. The exhibition creates a Speed_Space that posits and tests the essential theme of the research; it is an act of invention that creates new knowledge (the poetic intelligence). The common link between architecture and landscape in this thesis is that both are understood to have been significantly constructed by the human subject and, that this constructed landscape is a finite system and is all that we have. This thesis, through the evidence embodied in SPEED_SPACE offers a mechanism to demonstrate what gaining architectural experience is like; uncoiling into the world, observing, weakening, moving at the limit and then coiling up moments of experience, knowledge and perception to create a force of the imagination that generates new poetic intelligence as a result being in 'that' world. The new spatial model shows architectural experience, in response to the already constructed and degrading landscape, to be more like a self-made constellation acting as a force of imagination rather than a sequence of facts collected together