I’ve been trying to decide what to write my dissertation on for ages now. After my first meeting with my group I felt a bit lost and wasn’t sure what interested me enough that I could write thousands of words on it!
Today I went Dover Street Market by Green Park and I loved the interior of it. It is a basically a designer department store and its layout was unique, interesting and got me thinking…. I want to look into how space is designed to make people perform and attract them in. How is a space designed so people explore it and why is it designed the way it is? When I walked around Dover Street, it felt like a stage set with each department being different from the next and as though you were going from one scene to another as they all told there own story and style.
This is just a starting block but it is something i want to look into more. I thought I could start by looking at non-places by Marc Auge again who we looked at for our seminar and The poetics of space by Gaston Bachelard. I also want to go to the walking in mind exhibition at the hayward gallery and hopefully this will help me develop my disseratation topics and ideas further!
1 response so far ↓
1 ephraim // Jun 15, 2009 at 10:31 am
Hi Rachel,
Thanks for your post.
Dover Street Market in relation to the notion of non-places seems very interesting.
Marc Auge describes place as intrinsically related to a physical and socio historical context. A place is therefore implicitly contextual.
The non-place, as an opposite of place, is (following Marc Auge’s description) effectively non-relational. Airports, supermarkets, shopping centers, etc present themselves as transit-spaces deploying connections between places (or as self referential) yet providing an ‘abundance’ of space segregated from a physical and socio historical context.
You could possibly research this notion of connectivity and the ‘(non)relational’ aspects of non-places vis a vis a physical and socio historical context further on the basis of Michel Foucault’s writing; Of Other Spaces (1967), Heterotopias.
More info on: http://insideopen.net/page/2/
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