Grafted scales - gardens of the other

Date
2010
Authors
Lim, Kevin Kyujung
Supervisor
O'connor, Maria
Jackson, Mark
Item type
Thesis
Degree name
Master of Art and Design
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Publisher
Auckland University of Technology
Abstract

This exegesis aims to critically assay the Master’s research project Grafted Scales: Gardens of the Other. The design outcome for this project proposes a garden that promotes communication and heals a rift between two communities in their incommensurability and difference. The project has a focus on two judicially defined communities located in Wiri, a suburb of Manukau. The prisoners of The Auckland Region Women’s Corrections Facility (ARWCF) and residents in the environs or milieu of ARWCF are targeted in their entangled being-in-common, in order to disrupt their varied boundaries and assumptions. The project seeks ways of bringing to visibility their belonged communities as a being-in-common without identity and with lessened conflict, while an openness of relations to the Other finds support.

Gardens of the Other is focused on interrogating qualifications of meaning and the meanings of qualities. Grafted Scales may be considered in terms of a fundamental or primordial relation that opens to visibility quantity and quality in their differing. Scale, the scalar as such, as ratio that binds incommensurate measures opens this play: the necessary conforming of design practices to scalar conventions but also the balancing acts we associate allegorically with justice itself and then the infections that contaminate the surfaces of plant growth. All three encounters with scale are in play with the otherness of the garden.

The project seeks to disrupt the meaning of quality as qualification of meaning. It does so with recourse to an application of Derridean deconstruction opening the question of spatial and temporal qualification of design and the processes of meaning making to the undecidable as such as that which opens the question of decision and decisiveness. The rift between communities is neither overcome nor does it remain. The design project opens spatial design to the fundamental ambiguity of partitioning that joins in its separating and that makes the neighbour a fundamental condition of otherness.

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Keywords
Garden , Prison , Deconstructivism , Scale , Otherness , Spatial design
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