The Hospital of Thinkable Boundaries

Abstract

The Hospital of Thinkable Boundaries: Methods for Noetic Design; addresses how the modern city and knowledge-context deals with mental illness and healing. Rather than studying medical spaces this research stems from personal evidence of embetterment through the noetic experience, where productive and vital experience is materialized by the ingestion of psychedelic/synaesthetic compounds. By studying and experiencing non-western/shamanic healing practices where these mind altering plant medicines are culturally integrated, the research on the noetic concerns topics of perception, cognition, body, collectivity and ecology. The design methods derived is what is called situated design, where the personal, material and the situated becomes the main directionality for design; a layered architectural method that concerns the following: (i) the dialogue between the material and the immaterial context, (ii) the notion of liminality, and how to respond to binary opposition through approaching the threshold as process, this also inquires approaching architecture as process, as an event ontology, materializing this sense of continuity, ritual, agency and intentionality (iii) the body as mediator, where the main method is about getting insight into the immediate context and relation through bodily experience. The design proposal The Hospital of Thinkable Boundaries is a system of healing interventions on the site in Skanstull, Stockholm, a liminal place in the city and an abandoned train track where modern vernacular interventions of awareness and healing relates to the material symbol of the industrial locomotive. The proposal includes seven interventions relating to the shamanic ritual of healing where the ceremony is the main spatial and perceptual experience, but it also includes the production of the psychedelic compounds, as well as functions that relates to the cleansing and preparation of the body before entering the ceremony. These additional spaces becomes a means of extending and rethinking the shamanic ritual in an urban modern context, intending to bridge between knowledge-contexts and cultures.