OLIVER BURTON.
INCIDENTS OF AN ARCHITECTURE STUDENT.
 

Mechanical Translation

September 2014.
 

The brief for ARC 650 outlines a proposal that requires the student to demonstrate an ability co creatively research through design and develop and exploration of an architectural issue through a body of work. Concerning my own research I intended to explore and analyse the methodologies and techniques used by artists and writers of the Surrealism movement and coherently form a body of work related to architectural studies. I wanted to begin to understand the surrealist beliefs regarding the unconscious and use the subsequent research as an opportunity to translate them into a realised form through models, drawings, videos and photography. 

The interest towards these surrealist beliefs is rooted in my preliminary hypothesis and questioning of why, as humans, do we create things the way we do. Why are certain objects and outcomes more visually pleasing than others, and whether or not there are sets of predetermined boundaries that dictate out visual preferences.

Perhaps the most essential driver for this project is surrealist’s fundamental belief that the subconscious strain of thought is more important than the conscious.  This particular strain of thought free and liberated of contextual bearings and human input begins to create a spatial and visual language translating the raw thought of the human into tangible creation.

Largely the idea and focuses of the project concern themselves with the concept of deconstruction, this pattern runs parallel through the multitude of subjects within the topic creating a dialect with, gestalt psychology, the buildings or Richard Meier, the art of assembly and automatic drawing. Utilising a broader spectrum of mediums than is stereotypically applied to an architectural project the research by design is able to adopt a more conceptual base from which to evolve and as such the final outcome blurs the definitions between art, psychology and architecture.