Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses

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End date: 2018 × Subject: community development ×

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    Participation in architecture: agonism in practice
    Beyerle, Ammon ( 2018)
    Literature about participation in architecture promised architecture the restoration of a moral dimension, arguing that participation would offer opportunities for empowerment and deliver broad benefits. To its disservice, the field of participation has been dominated by a rational ideology, and a focus on agreement and decision-making – incorporated in the term ‘consensus’. The dominant approach to participation has been at the expense of difference, passions, arguments, resistances and tensions present in the participatory process – incorporated here in the term ‘agonism’. Exacerbating this gap between consensus and agonism, a lack of real-world examples and analysis of everyday participation, has led to a quite limited practical language about participation or descriptions of the concrete process of participation in action, and arguably an avoidance to design and critique participatory processes in architecture and urban design. This Doctor of Philosophy attempts to do participation in architecture through a series of Creative Works in practice, by carefully considering approach, and, designing for difference and bottom-up empowerment of others with social, physical, emotional and psychological benefits specific to each project. The methodology exposed the realities of participation in architectural design practice with communities, highlighting social themes for exploration and multiple modes for practice. This research project demonstrates that agonism is an action-orientated way forward for participation, arguing that the tension between architecture and participation is actually productive. It concludes that difference rather than consensus is crucial to participation, suggesting for architectural and urban design practice that the philosophical role of an architect is to consciously create and maintain opportunities to keep alive the participatory process in the world, by critically designing participation.
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    Post-war Taiwan: knowing the other from the cultural politics of identity and architecture
    LIN, CHIA-HUI ( 2011)
    This research reveals the important role of space in history as the locus of identity construction in post-war Taiwan. Critical is the identification of a spatiotemporal realisation of cultural politics during the authoritarian Martial Law era (1949-1987) and the pragmatic formation of identity in the democratic present. Nationalism in Martial Law Taiwan is discussed as the preliminary concept of identity construction as are the multifarious representations of acculturation in which the history and spaces of post-war Taiwan have been inscribed, codified, reinterpreted and written. These have been frequently emphasised as a post-Martial Law identity. The intention here is to examine the dominant myth constructed under autocratic psychological suppression and to reveal the genuine implications of identity construction in spatial historiography and practices beyond the collective ideology and official discourse. This thesis consists of three core parts along with an introduction and a conclusion. The first part is a contextual sketch of the post-WWII built environment in Taiwan aided by a comparative analysis of Hong Kong and Singapore’s colonial past and the social ambivalence inscribed in their spatial constructions of identity. A strategic survey of Martial Law Taiwan’s ascendant discourse in architecture, which reflected in specific social political circumstances of the time, is followed as the comparison and analytical schema. The second part is a spatial observation of the revolutionary change in social atmosphere following the lifting of Martial Law in 1987 by looking at spatial re-representation in native literature and cinematic works. Through analysing literature and cinematic works, a dramatic transition from authoritarian spatial imagery to agency oriented dominance is identified. The final part deals specifically with post-Martial Law Taiwan’s remarkable social movement, Community Development, along with its spatial practices. Here, the theoretical discourse and representative case studies are analysed and discussed. The hypothesis, which corresponds to the problematic issues discovered in the research, is that the present spatial composition in Taiwan cannot be described as resting on either a simplified nationalist base or chaotic societal anxiety. Rather, there is a form of fuzziness between binary poles, namely autocracy and democracy, nation state and day-to-day life, top-down and bottom-up orientations, and orthodoxy and hybridisation. This fuzziness shapes present day identity construction in post-Martial Law Taiwan and in particular its architectural practices. Most importantly, it reflects the current mainstream value of what can be formed as “heteroglossia”. Framed in this way, this thesis therefore poses the fundamental question: “What is the identified representation of architecture beyond the context of post-war Taiwan’s culture and politics?”