Crossing the Cartography of Exile explores ideas of territoriality, hybrid identity and transculturation. The thesis and exhibition is the result of two years of Practice-Led Research, which is the performative research methodology, carried in the La Chapelle Woodshop of the 100 Laurier Avenue East Building of the Department of Visual Arts. The building was the former Juniorat du Sacré-Coeur of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate built in 1893-94. The Woodshop is the former chapel of the seminary therefore has references to a place of prayer and worship and for my praxis became a place to re-enact the ancient trade of Joseph the Carpenter. The La Chapelle Shipyard inside the woodshop as mnemonic site became a performative site-specific platform specialized in creating small-scale sculptures with recycled and repourposed shipping pallets and a place in which to connect memory with the ancient trade of a shipwright or shipbuilder. Small-scale sculpture then became a symbolic marker for the intimacy of a personal and free territory made of repurposed shipping pallets. Therefore, by working with recycled changeable materials I fashioned a poetic visual language to enchant the wound of exile.

This thesis evolves perception as a hypothesis to reframe architectural praxis negotiated through agent-situation interaction. The research questions the geometric principles of architectural ordination to originate the ‘felt_space infrastructure’, a relational system of measurement concerned with the role of perception in mediating sensory space and the cognised environment. The methodological model for this research fuses perception and environmental stimuli, into a consistent generative process that penetrates the inner essence of space, to reveal the visceral parameter. These concepts are applied to develop a ‘coefficient of affordance’ typology, ‘hypervigilant’ tool set, and ‘cognitive_tope’ design methodology. Thus, by extending the architectural platform to consider perception as a design parameter, the thesis interprets the ‘inference schema’ as an instructional model to coordinate the acquisition of spatial reality through tensional and counter-tensional feedback dynamics. Three site-responsive case studies are used to advance the thesis. The first case study is descriptive and develops a typology of situated cognition to extend the ‘granularity’ of perceptual sensitisation (i.e. a fine-grained means of perceiving space). The second project is relational and questions how mapping can coordinate perceptual, cognitive and associative attention, as a ‘multi-webbed vector field’ comprised of attractors and deformations within a viewer-centred gravitational space. The third case study is causal, and demonstrates how a transactional-biased schema can generate, amplify and attenuate perceptual misalignment, thus triggering a visceral niche. The significance of the research is that it progresses generative perception as an additional variable for spatial practice, and promotes transactional methodologies to gain enhanced modes of spatial acuity to extend the repertoire of architectural practice.