The Grange Hotel: Everyday Leisure in the Grange Neighbourhood
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Date
2015-05-07
Authors
Kwak, Dongkyu Dan
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Waterloo
Abstract
The modern metropolis offers a wide variety of experiences to enrich our everyday
life. Beyond meeting our daily needs, such a rich and diverse city is a complex
system of urban phenomena that also satisfies our need for creating meaningful
experience. Rapid urbanization and the confusion of meaning it creates in our
existence, as well as the ensuing proliferation of corporate urban spectacles replacing
deeper civic meanings of rooted urban traditions, depreciate the quality
of lived experience and the modest entertainment in our contemporary life in the
city.
The thesis is about capturing and exposing the singular moments of urban leisure
experience in Toronto’s Grange neighbourhood from the binary perspectives of
both the local (as a resident) and the stranger (as a visitor). The research undertakes
the dérive, a Situationist strategy, for examining the definition of local authenticity
and the subjective perception of urban spaces. By juxtaposing the perceptions of
the local and the stranger, as noted above, the thesis attempts to obscure the border
between normative urban reality and imaginative fantasy. This mediation seeks to
reveal the subliminal layer of absurdity already intrinsic within the existing urban
context, that is, a layer suitable for procuring surreal situations in our everyday
leisure.
The Grange Hotel is a symbolic alibi for an architectural fiction by serving as a
conceptual context of a mediation between the local and the stranger. Common
places dispersed across the Grange neighbourhood are détourned from their original
urban expectations, being redefined as an indeterminate narrative of surreal
moments and absurd situations. By inducing the notion of meta-architecture
similar to that found in the texts of surrealists, the significant moments of urban
experience can be retranslated into new psychological plots for scripting another
dimension of the absurd reality within those common places. The thesis proposes
to provoke a different mode of how we perceive and experience the typical urban
spaces in the Grange neighbourhood.
Description
Keywords
urban design, hotel, Situationists, everyday life, leisure, meta-architecture, architectural fiction, experience, perception, surrealism, Deconstruction