Strange generation: Doing the phenomenological within a disrupted urban thing. Exploring the interface between a phenomenological design process and an immersive urban experience, in post-earthquake Christchurch

Abstract

The advent of the Canterbury earthquakes left a rupture through the urban environment. Something in this space was ‘held open’ demanding a reconsideration of the relationship between designer and landscape. There was no ‘usual’ way to go about design in this place. There was little productive space here for a simple binary interaction between designer and designed. However the characteristics of the official redesign of the central city fell precisely into this coarse reallocation of space into monocultural zones that eschewed the attentiveness to its own ontology that the place demanded. The sensibilities of phenomenologically-based design offered an apt framework for developing an alternative design transaction in this context. In formulating a phenomenological design process based on the later work of Merleau-Ponty (1968), the goal was to place primacy upon intensely grounded experiences within that process. During the early part of the experimentation, we explored immersive strategies (Dee and Fine 2005: 73), and tried to experientially enmesh ourselves with the landscape as well as take account of the autonomy of the things within it. This notion of de-familiarisation and the tendency of the everyday to give rise to automatic perception was identified and described by Viktor Shklovsky (2006). Strange-making finds a parallel in Merleay-Ponty’s description of the phenomenological reduction (2002: xv). In particular Shklovsky identified the ability of poetic language to interrupt our automatic perception. We chose to engage with linguistic cut-ups as a means of creating defamiliarised briefs that were constituted by poetic language. The briefs that emerged were rich with juxtaposition and unusual convergences. We applied this to Christchurch’s Eastern Frame, working in perspective, placing and arranging the designs through a series of storyboards. As we placed the strange interventions, the design once again became altered through the metonymic shift from the page into the landscape. This continual reformulation propagated the unfamiliar and the strange, creating a landscape that continues to invoke perceptual engagement. In the context of the absurd qualities of the landscape in post-earthquake Christchurch (Bowring 2013: 22-23), the rhythm of this unusual design practice felt apt, if uneasy. Strange-making and acknowledging the centrality of the body to experience and encountering otherness in the landscape became useful tools in making sense of, and moving within an altered landscape. Instead of trying to impose a structure of normalcy on a post-disaster urban environment, the strange is more adaptive and generous towards the unusual and unexpected. This process of designing always felt slightly disjointed from the ‘normal’, the everyday. We were at one and the same time immersed in and syncopated from the flow around us, still operating within the rhythm of the city, but situated on the off-beat. The transactional moments between ourselves and the landscape were not synchronised, and were not discrete. The research suggests that phenomenological methods, such as this, offer alternative approaches to design practice in the urban.