Conceptually situated within the thinking of Arakawa and Gins, the writing of Lewis Carroll, the architecture of Peter Zumthor, and the music of Eric Satie; this project explores tactics of defamiliarisation and detournement within an architecture which stresses the existential and phenomenological dimensions of human being. The project poses several key questions related to the human experience of architecture. In particular, it is concerned with the degree to which architectural settings can alter perceptual frames, schemata and practices applying to the everyday narrative of human experience. How might the defamiliarisation and suspension of normal coordinates through design, contribute to an altered sense of habitus?

The project plays with inversion, appropriating the Situationist strategy of detournement to recontextualise experience and radically shift its meaning. It constructs circumstances of intensity which enable critical questioning of the everyday, leading to clarification and expression of human desires and drives.

Harbour Bathe aims to provide a setting for a cleansing of the thoughts we unconsciously hold, as it explores how a poetic architecture might also shift frames of perception and reposition an automated habitus. Through an architecturally staged bathing experience that culminates is an absolute sense of floating; one’s bodily extends are blurred and one’s perception of gravity is defamiliarised. Were an architecture to undermine premises so fundamental as
gravity, all that our habitus presupposes could be brought into question and our unhefted bodies reawakened.