ANNA TWEEDDALE

Lost Garden Found

Tutor: Xavier Costa. The thesis problematizes the response of architectural discourse to a commonly perceived crisis of the body and the city prompted by modernity, and in particular, virtual technologies. Not easily articulated from the outset, the thesis explores and unfolds an intuition that resistance to the often-unquestioned consequences of our drive to modernity, specifically as relates to architectural discourse and production, may best be investigated through specific attention to the languages and systems of meaning excluded by restricted systems. The thesis approaches this through exploring the particular exclusions of architecture through concepts of excess, pleasure, materiality and multiplicity.

This thesis embraces an entwined process of research, creation and documentation as a mean to simultaneously elaborate and distil a position. The result of this process is a complex document that encompasses many layers: an audio-visual garden installation, a graphic novel, a narrative performance and transcript, and series of essays that act as an index of concepts. The format of the thesis reflects the fluid nature of the process and the thesis’ refusal to allow its distillation to one form only. The Lost Garden Found is itself an attempt to resist the common tendency to reduce architectural discourse to instrumentality.