Retrograde

• Main Author: Lee, Mary Bernadette Shujie
• Other Authors: Joan Marie Kelly
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Visual arts and music
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/60055
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Surrounded by architectural constructions of extension and expansion, it is almost impossible to find a sense of 'Home' in this concrete jungle. My sense of displacement increases exponentially with the demolition of familiar spaces. Instead of moving onward and forward, I find myself regressing - inward and backward - in an almost desperate bid to cling to familiarity. But in the process of doing so, I also embark on a journey of actualization and increased awareness of myself and how I interrogate with the space around me. This project is a visual manifestation of a phenomenological approach to understanding the relationship between my body, space and architecture. Architecture is the physical setting and platform upon which my physical being is informed, influenced and disciplined within a space. This trichotomy between Architecture and my body has resulted in a tapestry of mental and emotional conclusions. Art is a vehicle that takes this information and uses them to express. Eventually, there will be six bodies of works to represent six phenomelogical approaches to six difference spaces. These exterior spatial representations reveal interior bodily emotional and mental processes, as if to bring to the foreground, the architecture of myself as a person and an artist. This project is a personal expansion from a project I had done a year ago. Last year, the project explored Singapore architecture with particular focus on the striking resemblance between buildings of the past and the present, and into the future with emphasis on it’s aesthetic characteristics and functionality as we continually strive to carve our national identity and keep up with modernity while maintaining a strong foothold on the global map. This building aesthetics is a reflection of Time. Time is an inflexible discipline. It shapes every procedure and every decision throughout time. It determines the metaphysical stress of the physical town by adding a fantastical, futuristic, and spatial dimension to the urban infrastructure of the city. Science Fiction was also a genre I referred to as a definitive influence over architectural aesthetics. One of the pertinent issues I explored was the Utopic-artifice these buildings created in light of development. In a precipitously changing world, many of us live in cities that we have seen expand and transform over the past decade due to global population explosion, mass migration and environmental degradation. Architecture reflects current global concerns and workings of architecture, which have spawned new forms and expressions in response to contemporary realities and cultural obsessions. It means that space to build in the real world is shrinking. What’s more, with more of us equipped with the digitally enhanced tools of dreaming with an urgent and growing need to find architectural solutions to contemporary problems, the city we know now increases vertically into the skies. They are designs of great scale, structures of monumental landscapes and reflections of a utopia cityscape. It is of little wonder that these structures proliferating everywhere reflect fragments of utopia that the city scrambles to assemble in the quickest possible time. The rush to create the ‘perfect simulacrum’ is ongoing and progressive to become and maintain being one of the top cities in the world, which is ironically dystopic. Is this future; a labryinth of private worlds and megastructures of vertical visions merely a carnivalesque foil to the ‘chaotic order’ that lies beneath the facade of utopia?