Corpo-real and its' students are particularly focused on the connection between theoretical thinking, reflecting and the practical research. The fruitful meeting between these research methods in recent Finals projects shows that it leads to new findings and perspectives for the professional field.
ChiaYu Chiu
Grief container: The sense of 莊嚴神聖
As designers, we carry a responsibility to enhance the functionality, efficiency, and accessibility of spaces. However, we often neglect the mental and emotional needs that these spaces should fulfil. This realization has driven my studies at ArtEZ over the past two years. Here, I am given the complete freedom to explore my personal interests. I enjoy manipulating materials and creating atmospheres that facilitate meaningful dialogues and reveal the spatial truths between bodies and social realities. This project is dedicated to those who have lost loved ones and experienced grief. Initially inspired by the architectural concept of the sublime, I began by examining a columbarium in Taiwan to understand how its design evokes feelings of sacredness, honour, solemnity, and inviolability. These insights have then formed the foundation. Designing a space that serves as a container for grief is my goal_a place where people can express their lament and sorrow. This space is intended for participants to share, resonate, and ultimately, find closure. I hope such an environment helps us achieve inner peace and mindfulness.
Jessy-Lee Esselink
The Soul of The Space
"How do we capture the soul of the space and encapsulate it?" As human beings, we form deep bonds with the spaces we inhabit, creating attachments and connections through our experiences and memories. These attachments and experiences imbue the space with a unique essence, which I refer to as its soul. The interplay be-tween human experience and space forms the foundation for this soul to exist, intertwining our personal histories with the physical environments around us. For my final research, I aim to find a way to encapsulate this "soul" of a space. But how can we achieve this? Just like the human body, a space needs to be nurtured and cared for to maintain its soul. I have designed a ritual and created a capsule or altar that serves as a tool to bond with the space, capture its soul, and allow us to mourn and honor it. This ritual in-volves engaging with the space in a meaningful way by nurturing it, reflecting on our experiences and memories associated with it, and then using the capsule to symbolically gather these elements. The capsule or altar becomes a vessel for the soul of the space, enabling us to carry a piece of it with us as we transition to a new one. This process provides a way to say a final good-bye, acknowledging the importance of the space in our lives and the impact it has had on us. By doing so, we honour the space and our experiences within it, ensuring that its soul remains with us when we move and inhabit other spaces.
Parisa Ghasemsani
Acting Space: Transforming Audience into Actor in Space
This topic comes from my interest and background in both architecture and theatre. Theatre artists are always trying to make their performances more engaging through a variety of ways. Nowadays, some directors incorporate audience participation as part of their work. This research started from the idea of “involving the audience in the theatre.” The goal was to make participants in an architectural space feel like actors by experiencing different concepts and acting within the space. It all began with the idea of “Changing position,” and the research continued with other concepts like “Being framed,” “Sound player,” and “Being seen.” I combined these main concepts into one design. This design considers shape, colour, and architectural and theatrical elements such as light and shadow to create an eye-catching and interactive space. To conclude, in this space, by changing positions, being behind frames, influencing the sound of the place, and being seen, even those without any theatre experience can feel like actors and be spotlighted.
Lynn Henderikx
Lynn Henderikx
Nature can have a lot of positive effects on our health and well-being. Despite that, we spend most of our time in indoor environments, where nature is not always present. Starting from feeling good while being in nature, I became interested in how to implement that feeling of being in nature in interior architecture. During this research, I am looking for new answers in implementing natural elements in interior architecture by looking at aspects of nature. Perspective, light and shadows, sound, materials and forms come together within this research. The aim is to optimize spaces like waiting rooms in hospitals, so it is not only a space to wait between arriving on location and the appointment, but that it also contributes to the time people are present in these environments.
Mi Jang
We have a landscape, Landscape has us
For me, it is intriguing whether immersive spatial sensibilities have been created in the spaces. The sensibilities I want to bring into the space mainly come from nature. This project began with admiration and curiosity for the natural landscape surrounding our society. We have an intimate landscape in our minds. The senses felt when looking at the vast landscape contain mesmerizing atmospheres and emotions that go beyond just other senses. A Landscape Architect said, ‘Landscape was original dwellings’. Evolutionary psychologically, the accumulated evolutionary data lived in natural environments unconsciously and intrinsically remains a core part of who we are today. Living in different landscapes and climates far from my birth ground made me realizes what was my original dwellings. The organically connected mountains, towering in their respective and distinctive shapes. A magnificently view of the mountain ranges by overlapping this mountain and that mountain. The intimate landscape has been our initial home. I, family, neighbours, and even ancestors who lived in, we may be sharing that landscape as each other’s home. The landscape unfolds, our space intertwined. It merges with us, our presence aligned. That’s how we have the landscape, the landscape has us.
Caroline Mazaro
PROPRIOCEPTIVE PLAY
Exploring the Intersection of Creativity and Functionality
In his book "Homo Ludens," the renowned Dutch historian Johan Huizinga delves into the role of play in shaping culture and human civilization. Inspired by his words, my research journey led me to reflect on my own childhood experiences, where an absence of playfulness reflected my later fascination with the transformative potential of children's toys as developmental tools.
In my practice, I explore proprioceptive play, which represents play at work. Can children's toys be dynamic instruments for collaborative design? As a crucial part of my master’s final research, I created a mobile space for a collaborative workshop developed to provide participants with a toolkit for play and creation, a catalyst for reimagining the spaces where we truly want to learn and grow.
At its core, play emerges as a transcendent force—an imaginative conduit that channels the unspoken essence of existence. Play and learning are at the core of the work I will be exploring as a spatial designer, creating spaces for children to discover themselves and flourish.
When we approach design with a spirit of playfulness and games, we unlock new dimensions of our creative thinking. In these moments, when we feel a sense of agency and belonging, the world transforms into a more hopeful place.
My research on play has helped deepen my appreciation for design strategies that prioritize collaboration, social consciousness, and human connection. I've uncovered the power of unconventional materials in generating innovative concepts. Embracing play as context, I've gleaned insights into the value of infusing real-world activities with the engaging dynamics inherent in games.
Rachit Puri
Soundspace
I have always been captivated by the realm of sound. Some of the most profound moments in my life have been intertwined with sound and music. As a semi-professional musician and audio production hobbyist, music has always existed as a distinct passion from my work in architecture. In this project, I sought to blend these two worlds. By merging my deep fascination for sound with the architectural knowledge I have gathered over the years, I aspired to create a space that offers a unique spatial-sonic experience. In my project, I delved into understanding the emotional resonance of sounds, human sound perception and sound-space relations, examining how these elements influence our experience of a space. This inquiry led to a fundamental question: Can sound create space? The result is an immersive and interactive space that uses sound as a fundamental tool for creation. This approach opens up new possibilities for imagining and experiencing space, redefining what it can be.
Julian Puszcz
Owning without Owning
To make a space a home, we need to individualise it. As so often in life, the more money we have, the easier it is: With enough financial resources, we can tailor our own property exactly to our liking. But how can we make this work, if we rent an apartment, where the possibilities of making changes are minimal? How can we make a space our own without owning it? My research approaches this topic from our personal items, as they reflect our identity as a person, and serve as vessels to project this identity into a space. The outcome is a spatial system consisting of five containers, aiming to portray the personal items as the protagonists in the room while allowing users to arrange the system according to their specific functional requirements.
Maya Serghi
On the meaning of space. Architecture from the perspective of Literature.
How do we read spaces? By using representations and adapting architectural elements to fit literary thinking, my aim is to explore Space through the lens of Literature, reshaping its meaning to uncover similarities in how we understand both of these mind expressions. My research addresses questions about the nature of space and representation. It investigates how literary techniques can transform archetypal architectural elements- and whether these alternative renderings can provide a meaningful spatial experience. To which extent is the representation not valid as spatial experience? Ultimately, Literature serves as a medium to define Architecture, linking archetypal elements such as windows, columns, and gates with literary devices like analogy, allegory, and metaphor. My installation brings together these three reinterpreted elements, forming a novel space where the meaning is dictated by the algorithm of another discipline.
Launa Visser
Escaping in Architecture
My project finds its roots in my love for stories, fantasy and imagination. As I grew older, this love became a way to escape my daily life's challenges. I found solace in the digital space of games, where I could immerse myself in their magical realms. My research focuses on the concept of ‘escapism’, the psychological urge to seek escape from reality. As a spatial designer, I see great potential in our practice. Architecture, rooted in the physical reality, can create mindful escapes by impacting our senses, evoking powerful emotions, and creating immersive atmospheres. With the knowledge I have acquired, I aim to make a positive impact on the tangible world around us. My goal is to re-imagine a chemotherapy treatment room, infusing it with elements that stimulate this feeling of escape, bringing solace to those confronting the darkness of disease.
Siyao Yu
Embodying post privacy
Throughout my architectural practice, the question of 'what is home' has always intrigued me. Growing up with the internet, I found community, identity, and belonging online—elements that define the non-physical aspects of ‘home’ for me. Interor architecture is often referred to as the practise of creating a border between inside and outside, private and public. Today, our digital usage blurs this boundary, as they accompany us into private and public spaces alike. Although we understand post-privacy intellectually, we haven't internalized it instinctively. Our bodies haven’t adapted, leaving us unsure of how to react to this reality. My research aims to bridge this gap by developing works that inform and train our instincts about post-privacy. Additionally, I proposed concepts for future homes in this new reality. My goal is to enhance our understanding of post-privacy and guide us towards ethical and informed decisions.
Yujia Zhang
The spatial dynamics of pain
Space serves as a site for the practice of the body; the body is not merely an object within space but also the subject of space. Throughout my entire practice, the body has consistently been a central component. Pain, and the vulnerability of the body, when applied to the relationship between the body and space, through processes of 'reflection' or 'evocation,' makes it possible for my own body to establish a more intimate relationship with space.