This practice-led research examines ideas surrounding the interpretation of place; the representation and experience of place are explored in my practice and throughout the thesis. The practice and thesis develop an interdependent relationship where one informs the other and each provides a critical platform whereby existing beliefs are brought into question and new ideas emerge. During the research period the practice is tested against different circumstances in a variety of situations and novel responses are generated. The thesis critically analyses approaches to interpreting place through a number of formats and a variety of sources. Both practice and theory are examined through peer-reviewed conference papers, artist-in-residence programmes and publications allowing new ideas to be explored and scrutinized by the academy. A working method that recognizes the importance and usefulness of serendipity and sagacity is established, bringing together my practice and the theoretical scope of the research. My primary focus is to understand and develop critical responses to the experience and representation of place within the realm of contemporary art practice. The work of W.G. Sebald and the secondary literature surrounding his work plays a significant role in providing ways of dealing with the entanglement of knowledge. Period Drama is both the name of an artwork and the name I have given to a conference paper. Both explore the convoluted and complex methods involved in realizing a site-specific work that challenges fiercely-held beliefs about place. My intention throughout the research has been to examine a variety of approaches that explore the representation and experience of place within contemporary art practice. Prominent within this examination has been the highlighting of the need to belong to a particular place and the sense of displacement generated when this need to belong is challenged or the nature of this connection is questioned.

On the brink of a sixth mass extinction, I renegotiate, through crafting, some basic assumptions on which our economy-culture is built, those of separation and dominance. The project Till Källan / Water Talks is based on a method where I ask various places what they would want me to do on site. It is a process of reconnecting to place and the non-human, a radical rethinking of relationship between human and the other. I investigate the possibilities of craft to be a conductor of that relationship.The paper tracks various lines of thought around my practice, like trickles gathering more water into my pond. It starts in a quantum physics philosophical base for how the world is in a state of becoming through intra-action, on to why water is the perfect medium to affect the world through a puddle. I look at how my practice has an affinity with animism as philosophy and indigenous ways of relating to place and materials. I explore various facets of performativity, in world-making, craft-making, in the resulting objects and in the restoring of relationship through ritual. The enquiry that runs through the paper is what craft is when the object was made for a place rather than for the “art-world” or other economic systems. Going back and forth between a western and a non-western mindset, between practice and theory and between the poetic and prosaic, makes for a synthesizing of sources, leading up to the concept of Rewilding Craft, and a number of crafted objects and images that speak of the relationship.

Flyovers, or grade separated bridges or roads, are a type of urban infrastructure that has been used to facilitate high-speed vehicular movement. This once-popular strategy of the west, despite being considered as a failure for sustainable urban growth, has been adopted in Bangladesh to combat traffic congestion in Dhaka that has a crippling effect on daily life of the citizens. As was anticipated by many urban planners and architects, these expensive structures did little to reduce traffic congestion, but created additional problems of noise and air pollution as well as reduced pedestrian mobility. More importantly, these flyovers created wasted void spaces underneath that are uncomfortable, devoid of human scale and act as physical and visual barriers that cause tears on the urban fabric. The objective of this thesis is to explore how architecture can unlock the potential of the unused spaces under the flyovers in Dhaka, by turning these linear leftover spaces into dignified public places that improves the daily lived experiences of the urban dwellers, by minimizing the disruptions caused by the flyover and by realizing the potential inherent in the robust structure of the flyover. This thesis examines a democratized way of building, where the role of architecture is to facilitate organic and heterogeneous growth, addition and modification to the flyover in order to bring the human scale back to the massive flyover structure through a reconciliation of top-down and bottom-up approaches. The architectural interventions respond to the site conditions, potentials and demands. The architectural outcome is based on the concepts of creating a threshold, architecture as armature and parasitic structures. / Master of Architecture / Flyovers, or grade separated bridges or roads, are a type of urban infrastructure that has been used to facilitate high-speed vehicular movement. This once-popular strategy of the west, despite being considered as a failure for sustainable urban growth, has been adopted in Bangladesh to combat traffic congestion in Dhaka that has a crippling effect on daily life of the citizens. As was anticipated by many urban planners and architects, these expensive structures did little to reduce traffic congestion, but created additional problems of noise and air pollution as well as reduced pedestrian mobility. More importantly, these flyovers created wasted empty spaces underneath that are uncomfortable and act as physical and visual barriers that cause tears on the urban fabric. The objective of this thesis is to explore how architecture can unlock the potential of the unused spaces under the flyovers in Dhaka, by turning these linear leftover spaces into dignified public places that improves the daily lived experiences of the urban dwellers, by minimizing the disruptions caused by the flyover and by realizing the potential inherent in the robust structure of the flyover. This thesis examines a democratized way of building, where the role of architecture is to facilitate organic and de-centralized growth, addition and modification to the flyover in order to bring the human scale back to the massive flyover structure through a reconciliation of top-down and bottom-up approaches. The architectural interventions respond to the site conditions, potentials and demands. The architectural outcome is based on the concepts of creating a threshold, architecture as armature and parasitic structures.

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.