Escapia: Escapism through forced perspective and reflections in interstitial spaces

Abstract

Escaping has always been a core phenomenon for humans. At first, we escaped from physical threats by using physical means, which then shifted into escaping the non-physical, for example the mental, with distractions such as activities and fictional worlds, becoming what we call escapism (Heilman, 1975). While the term escapism comes with a lot of negative associations, Yi-Fu Tuan suggests in his book “Escapism” (1998), that human culture, in its fundamental sense, is a mechanism of escape. This argument is supported by Greg Shazer in “Late escapism and contemporary neoliberalism”(2022) stating that while escapism can be seen as a diversion of the social world, that it is in fact what constitutes it. This masters’ thesis investigates how a sense of escapism can be created through the means of architecture, specifically illusions by asking “How can the use of reflections and forced perspective be used in a threshold/interstitial context to achieve a contrast in architectural space and personal mindset?”. Through the investigation of escapism connected to places, the concept of “middle landscapes” (Tuan, 1998), was found as examples of places that evoke the sense of escapism through utilizing the aspect of what you want to escape from together with the contrast of it, for example the artificial city and nature. It was also found that illusions are a technique to evoke escapism from the real everyday life into the unreal. By using forced perspective and reflections from mirrors, the perception of space can be bent. While it is important to have a believable illusion to achieve immersion in gaming world (Polfeldt, 2024), the deliberate break of an illusion could in physical spaces be of value. A method was developed for the design proposal where the process focuses on identifying what to escape from in an interstitial space and the contrast to that scenario, later translating that into an architectural space by the use of illusions. The thesis results in two interventions using reflective mirrors and forced perspective to shift the perspective of the transitional space in a transport hub in Gothenburg Sweden, hoping to achieve spontaneous escapism in that space.