Wilza Mendes

"“Through inBetween”"

Section MS3, Ariel Caine

Keywords: installation, model-making, environment, consumption, body

The experience of walking through Olafur Eliason’s “Din Blinde Passager” artwork, whilst listening to Max Richter’s piece “A Blessing” resulted in a fascination towards the way in which the immaterial can possibly dictate, control or aid how people move through spaces. The exploration of the element of manipulation of unconscious behaviour in relation to the introduction of objects and phenomena, both analogue and digital is at the essence of the project’s intention.

The understanding of the impact of these material and immaterial objects can be divided in two scales; that of the architecture as a whole and that of the individual spaces, objects, movements within the building. Thereby, the overall intend of looking into the two scales will be done in order to draw a contrast between the notion of what I view as “negative and positive manipulation”. Understanding different senses, such as sound and vision, equilibrium and orientation and how they can be mediated and manipulated in the experiences that one has in relation to space is my point of interest. Therefore I opted to study different ways in which shopping centres, have constantly, almost microscopically been observing people’s traffic and finding different ways to control, manoeuvre, manipulate that traffic. It becomes an interesting typology to study as it uses more architectural moves and more centred around people behaviour, rather than airports or embassies as they are more reliant on signage rather than light, for instance. The project represents an abstract, more positive reading of an architectural technique used in shopping centres, The "decompression" zone.

The technique consists of a 3m to 5m buffer zone to adjust to the changes in lighting, temperature and scenery in order to shift into the environment inside the shopping centre, away from the outside world. The installation would sit between the RCA Architecture studios and the Interior Architecture studios as the different in the light and noise conditions becomes a nice challenge. “Through inBetween” consists of a corridor of a mass of mirrored panels, that when interacting with direct light and force or wind, creates a space of both shadow and light. The visual effect, based on the duration of the individual and the proposal’s interaction, It would create a sense of disorientation and decontextualization. The corridor would have the effect of removing you from your exit point, and physiologically affect how one goes into the entry point.