Architecture as experience.

Krzysztof Wodiczko sighted the Architectural experience to that of ones first encounter with our father.




"In the process of our socialisation, the very first contact with a public building is no less important than the moment of social confrontation with the father, through which our sexual role and place in society is constructed. Early socialisation through patriarchal sexual discipline is extended by the later socialisation through the institutional architecturalisation of our bodies.


Thus the spirit of the father never dies, continuously living as it does in the building which was, is and will be embodying, structuring, mastering, representing and reproducing his 'eternal' and 'universal' presence as a patriarchal wisdom-body of power".



pg 1067, Art in Theory 1900-2000.



In the case of the metaphysical architechturalisation of the course Time-Based Media at Wimbledon College of Art, the spaces, the rooms, the ceilings, the walls and their restrictions have guided my experience on a tour of the history of the avant-garde. My relationship with this space has been a temptuous one, not unlike my experience with my own father. As i sleepwalk around each room, in a lucid dream, encountering many different reflections of myself in the mirrors, in the bright droplets of orange juice spilt on the floor of my experience, the cautious curfew and space in time within which i am to live out my self expectations, i find solace.

It is in the mirrors in the bathrooms, i find myself transformed into a product of my imagination. A clichéd cliché; the tiled, placid walls of uncertainty homing down on me. The corners of reality, forcing the flesh of my body into the edges of the rooms, like a giant trapped in a proletariat shack, filling each crack and crevice, traversing each room like a tourist, engaging with each piece of equipment as if engaged in some pagan act on a sofa. Ones display of emotion proved by the choice of pyjamas, the material of mine a light white cotton t-shirt, worn so thin that it is sure to come apart at any moment.

When a metaphysical building can be found in a room, within a physical building, the spaces of time and sound are often blurred, when one day could be a month within the minds habitat, choices are made whim fully, on ones' reactions to the said environment. A shadow or ambiguous shape on a wall can merge thoughts to become something other that what was original thought, like the tracking of a dream.



To be cradled by the overarching presence of an institution one can feel extremely venerable and contented at the same time, as if one is dragged back to the early days of youth, when mistakes were expected and encouraged in order to teach and to patronise, for the good of the family, and for the good of a child’s understanding of its place within society. We must also be pruned and gardened into useful members of a certain set of values lived out by the rest of the social sphere within the architectural space.