Order for Experience: Reinterpreting Classical Principles Through Human-Centred Design

Abstract

This thesis investigates how classical architectural principles can be reinterpreted and operationalised through a human-centred design framework to enhance sensory and emotional experience in contemporary architecture. Rather than treating classicism as a stylistic language to be revived or rejected, the research positions classical order as a set of durable organisational tools concerned with legibility, hierarchy, proportion, and experiential clarity, and tests whether these can operate ethically within present-day constraints.

Methodologically, the project adopts an interpretivist, design-based research approach in which iterative design propositions and reflective critique function as the primary evidence base. A deliberately reductive framework of “soft rules” is developed by synthesising key classical canons with selected human-centred criteria related to wellbeing, perception, agency, and sensory comfort, then applied as both a generative and evaluative device across staged design testing.

Early scope-testing through site research and massing studies for a new-build theatre in Albany demonstrated that formal order and geometric clarity can generate coherent diagrams but are insufficient to produce architectural meaning when detached from context, prompting a methodological refinement toward a more constraint-rich setting. The framework is subsequently tested through a restoration and extension proposal for Auckland’s heritage-listed St James Theatre, where heritage protection, limited daylight, tight urban conditions, and competing programme demands force classical principles to operate as negotiative tools rather than idealised rules.

The findings suggest that classical ordering systems retain contemporary value when treated as an open grammar: they support cognitive legibility, wayfinding, and civic presence, while human-centred criteria sharpen accountability to lived experience. However, the work also reveals trade-offs, particularly in resolving interior multisensory and biophilic outcomes under severe environmental and programmatic constraints. The thesis contributes a provisional, design-tested framework that clarifies how classical principles can be translated into contemporary, ethically grounded design judgement without collapsing into representational historicism.