Description:

Homo-Cellular investigates the contemporary predominance of digital screens and digital media spaces and the role of playful architecture in this. It proposes a set of experimental urban playgrounds that uses our dependence on digital screens and counteracts and resists this. Play, playfulness, and the playground are important since the project establishes a relation between physical play in physical spaces that encourages proprioceptive awareness of the body versus the disembodied virtualised entertainments within virtual spaces provided by digital screens.

Our modern society is surrounded by arrays of multiple and simultaneous images. We are placed in a new space, the information space. Our everyday life has increasingly shifted towards digitisation. Digital spaces like social media platforms have emerged as veritable new habitats, seamlessly blending with our physical world. They expedite communication via virtual avatars and transform how we interact, receive, and give information. As a result, devices such as phones and computers become mainstream in work, social settings, and private lives. The world within digital screens has become more important to us than the spaces we inhabit physically. Some might argue that digital overdependence numbs and erodes something of our physical selves in favour of a virtual existence online, and this is indeed what my project is interested in.

The final proposal includes four pavilions integrated into the urban fabric connected by a tram. The site is on the Auckland waterfront and stretches between the anchor points of the Wynyard Quarter and Britomart sites. These spaces are not intended as public transport solutions but rather make use of Wynyard Quarter’s existing tram tracks to create a set of experimental urban playgrounds intended to amplify proprioceptive awareness of the body. They provide space for the public to engage in autonomous activity while simultaneously serving to make us palpably aware of our dependence on the digital screen-driven world.

This project is not necessarily a neat architectural solution to the problem of the proliferation of digital screens and our obsession with them. Rather, I intend to create a diverse space that critiques modern digital culture yet manifests ambivalence towards it.