Subway Space in Our Everyday Lives

Abstract

This research booklet can be read along the film: In Transit: An Exploration into Subway Space, as an experimental study into the everyday experience of architecture. The film, story and essays are an attempt to better understand the relationship between architecture and human life and to question the way the subject of architecture can be studied. The triadic work is a layered study that combines actual footage of subway systems and stations, which is edited into a narrative. This narrative is structured and accompanied by a written account of a fictional figure, who starts as an outsider and slowly progresses into an everyday commuter of subway space. Lastly, each chapter is accompanied by an academic essay about the nature of the architectural phenomena and the observed phenomena through exploring a number of theories about perception, atmosphere, materials, semiotics, habits, space, time, rhythms, the everyday, and public space.

Overall, this work is an attempt to study architecture by actually participating, to experience lived space while also observing and writing about the abstract processes that produce it. In the words of Anne Buttimer and Henri Lefebvre, it is an attempt to be both an insider and an outsider, and to situate oneself in the seam, between
practice and theory, ordinary and special. In doing so this study linger on the edges of the architectural discipline that touches upon subjects such as philosophy, sociology, biology, anthropology, geology, urbanism, storytelling and filmmaking.

The design is an attempt to put use these lessons into practice and to design a transformation with simple interventions.