Architecture as a technology of framing experience : camera obscura, camp, and the confessional
Author(s)
Advisor
Basa, İnciDate
2009Publisher
Bilkent University
Language
English
Type
ThesisItem Usage Stats
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Abstract
Throughout architectural history, the problematic of experience is mostly addressed
within the confines of either deterministic or phenomenological models. Bound as they
are, however, to the transcendental coordinates of a founding structure and a selfcontained
subject figure, neither one of these models seems to provide us with the
necessary tools of engaging with the transgressive aspects of experience in general or
architectural experience in particular. Beginning with the problem of how architecture
can be said to effect the experience of its subjects, the dissertation aims at gaining an
insight into the constructive capacity and functioning of architecture as a technology of
framing, whereby the subject's relation to environment, to other subjects, and to oneself
can be addressed. In order to do this, the author first traces the constituent elements of a
so-called “science of experience,” an experiontology, throughout the historiographic
work of Michel Foucault. Developing a composite framework as such, which facilitates a
historico-critical analysis of the work of architecture in relation to the formation and
transformation of experiential structures, the author thus identifies the logic of
experience as a process of desubjectification at work in and through the triplicate
domains of epistemology, politics, and ethics. Once the terms of this logic are tested and
further enhanced through the analyses of three environmental formations – namely, the
camera obscura, the camp, and the confessional – what is arrived at is a veritable
relationship between architecture and experience in the neighborhood of the categories
of error, resistance, and interiority of the self. The result is a recognition of architecture
as an art of organization of bodily encounters, in accordance with which the
architectural frame becomes the condition of possibility for the production and
reproduction of novel corporealities.