A frugal beauty

Abstract

This thesis explores perception and relationships of beauty, sustainable effects on nature, resources and urban landscape. Beauty and frugality, an exploration of finding positions of beauty in the simpel. It explores relationing, the act of establishing relations between things. As negotiations of indeterminate interactions, within the relative, the beauty in the brief and ephemeral interactions, time and change and continuous re-positioning. Relations of humans, non-humans, living, non-living, time and change, mattering, becoming, interactions and coalitions. A becoming-with or making-with of coalitions of individual differences into composts and conglomeration, a part/whole muddle. Facing human accountability for how humans are taking part in the world, by that, an exploration in how the inner and outer relational mechanisms of human bodies, consciousness and surroundings guides perception and orientation within the world and architectural space, with and between body and environment, humans and non-humans, living and non-living. An acceptance in allowing otherness, non-humans to take hold a mutual framework where other forces of nature can perform and be part of the becoming landscape. It’s a speculation into design of applying applications of (re) wilderness and apparatuses in these inbetween zones. Apparatuses, as partial (pre-)configuration(s) to situate relationships or relationing. A speculative design into means of making perceptible differences, not as a division exercise, but making differences that matter, as of mattering and becoming, making coalitions and networks. The thesis is within a situation(ing) around the edge of Masthuggskajen, Gothenburg, Sweden, within the discourse of in-between urban developments, in-between zones of Terrain Vague and within the discourse of allowing both humans and non-humans to find a space within gaps of the urban landscape. Taking account of the journey and becoming, to wander within these zones. A discussion and references within fields of Terrain vague, of East-asian philosophies, post-human philosophies of critical naturalism, and discussions of perception from Cinema and art.