Transgressing the Inside / Outside Boundary: Towards Performative Design Tactics Engaging Dialogues Between Architectures & Publics

Abstract

In reaction to crises of legitimacy, built environment professionals evoke an inside/outside boundary between themselves and ‘the public.’ Transgressing the Inside/Outside Boundary addresses this disengagement of publics from architecture through design exploration, focusing on the tactic of dialogue. The thesis is underpinned by an understanding of publics as multivocal, competing and shifting, and tests the implications of this understanding for conceptions and possibilities of architectural space. The investigation suggests the inside/outside boundary is supported by the historic development of professionalism and blind trust, a politics of value in architecture, and by ‘architectural’ language. Current modes of dialogue and spaces with potential for engagement, including Architecture Centres, are found to perpetuate the status quo in terms of how spatial power relations are played out,lack of ‘situatedness’, and presenting a single, ‘correct’ way of valuing architecture. To explore possibilities for transgression, the thesis investigates three key voices: literary critic Bruce Robbins, critical architect Jonathan Hill, and post-critical pragmatist Sarah Whiting. Through cross-informing textual analysis and drawing, a dual understanding is developed. First, thematic conceptualisations of the inside/outside boundary, including eavesdropping, homeliness, antiobjects, framed perspectives, critical distances and temporality are found to have potential for architectural design applications. Second, performativity is developed as a responsive, situated architectural design research method for engaging dialogue through research, and for embedding potential of dialogue into built design propositions. Framed by Michel de Certeau’s writing on strategies and tactics, these understandings are applied to an investigatory design in Post Office Square, Wellington, New Zealand. The Doorway to the Built Environment is a non-prescriptive space for dialogues, exhibitions, productions, questions and investigations concerning the built environment to be generated. Five design tactics, performativities, embededdness, reaching, spacing and transitioning, are suggested as means of engaging publics in dialogues and rethinking status quo relations. As a whole, the thesis sheds light on the inter-connectedness of architectural productions, relations, legitimacies and valuations to broader socio-cultural climates. Architectural design is revealed as a potentially performative, tactical and multiple practice which is capable of, and richer for, public engagements. The thesis serves as a critical resource to prompt further debate about the challenges of positively increasing engagements between publics and architectures.