KIRAN D'SOUZA

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Part 1: Play

All humans crave entertainment. Children fulfill that need through playful everyday investigation, while adults must try to get it through more formalized things, such as organized sports, theme parks, stories, socializing, creative pursuits, etc. Frequently, these activities have migrated to the digital sphere, to the detriment of adults’ physical senses.

Digital entertainment is largely passive, as it is limited to audial and visual stimulation. On the rare occasion it does require physical reactivity, the motions are incredibly limited and repetitive—swipe, tap, tilt. Engaging the senses in the tactile world is completely different type of entertainment, and largely absent from the average adult’s life.

Part 2: Exploration

Young children play for the sake of entertainment, but in doing so, they begin to understand the world around them. Every object is new (or at least, not yet familiar) and so every interaction with said object is undertaken with the spirit of exploration. Everything, at first, is about testing limits—can I sit on it, can I stand on it, can I push it, can I stack it? Will it break, will it bend? Is it heavy, is it light, can it be thrown? Does it move?

To a child, everything is new, and must be explored until the practical question of what does it do borne from such newness bleeds into the abstract, imaginative play questions of what could it do?

An adult, when presented with an object, will compare it to previous objects to determine what it is and how it works. Through repetition of running against those physical limits and force of habit, an adult assumes those limits will always be consistent. Unless presented with something that obtrusively breaks those assumptions (for example, a bowling ball or balloon painted and texturized to resemble a basketball), adults rarely need to engage in the sort of unselfconscious, exploratory curiosity that toddlers do.

Part 3: Wonder

Architecture, in the form of buildings, is treated as a shell—something that is meant to be interacted with physically but fade from mental awareness. Buildings are a physical demarcation of where certain activities begin and end; they are protective, but invisible. They provide shelter, a boundary between “inside” and “outside,” and delineate the difference between liminal spaces and the site of action. The average building does not invoke wonder, because the average building is not awe-inspiring, astounding, or surprising.

Fine art, on the other hand is treated as the opposite: objects that are meant to occupy the viewer’s mental processes, while rarely engaging more tactile senses. Art is meant to facilitate intellectual thought, ideas or discussion; to make a point; or to share a narrative.

Installation art bridges that gap, to varying levels of success. Despite being “objects,” in a sense, many installations—especially pavilions and similar structures—succeed at creating the same boundary-marking “envelope” that architecture does. However, these envelopes do not protect against the elements, and are frequently attached—or installed—inside a “real” building. Thus, installations have one of three relationships with their “container” buildings:

Discrete: building is a container for installation - most common; building is a shell which houses a separate installation

Dialogue: building is attached to installation. Both building and installation respond to each other; you cannot remove the installation without destroying it and/or damaging the building, and the building influences aspects of the installation's design

Unified: building is installation - there is no installation without the building

These categories are not mutually exclusive; rather, they are three significant points on a spectrum.
Ultimately, this thesis seeks to investigate how adults’ sense of wonder can be inspired through structures that engage curiosity (the desire to explore) and appeal to the human need for entertainment (the desire to play).