Seen through cold eyes, contemporary life essentially boils down to a series of operations to satisfy the absolute cycle of production and consumption… for spectacles. In this framework of everyday routine, leisure is a questionable subject. What do we live for in this delirious city?
Other than park and bar, such typical designations programmed for “functions” of urban leisure, is it possible for our own immediate reality and the physical realm of everyday life to be another place, where we can escape and estrange ourselves from the cycle? Far away! We take a flight to exotic foreign cities, Paris, Venice, or even Bangkok at the limit of our credit card – to truly be a stranger in a strange world. The absurd narrative those cities offer quench our thirst for a personal fantasy… of surreal experiences and spontaneous episodes.
The focus turns to the reality of our lives right here. The mission is to diagnose “perception” of our local domain of everyday life, and through the places and the streets we regularly drift through, to discover and reach that theatrical place of subliminal leisure experience.
Halfway between reality and fantasy, that’s where the Grange Hotel is found. The Hotel unfolds an architectural fiction about wandering through another dimension of the absurd reality within the Grange neighbourhood.
The Grange Hotel: Everyday leisure in the Grange neighbourhood
Abstract by Dan Kwak
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 acts as 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 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, the thesis attempts to obscure the border between normative urban reality and imaginative fantasy. It suggests entry into the subliminal layer of absurdity already intrinsic within the existing urban context, that is, a layer suitable for procuring surreal experience and insight in our everyday leisure.
The Grange Hotel is a symbolic alibi in this thesis for serving as the liminal context 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 field of accidents and radical episodes. 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 the hotel’s narrative. The thesis proposes to provoke a different mode of how we perceive and experience the typical urban spaces in the Grange neighbourhood.
The examining committee is as follows:
Supervisor: Val Rynnimeri, University of Waterloo
Committee Members: Ryszard Sliwka, University of Waterloo
Mona El Khafif, University of Waterloo
External Reader: Michael Hannay, The MBTW Group
The thesis defence will take place on Friday May 1st, 2015 3:00 PM ARC Loft
A copy of the thesis is available for perusal in ARC 2106A.
