Thesis Defence: Dan Kwak

The modern metropolis offers a wide variety of experiences to enrich our everyday life. Beyond meeting our daily needs, such a rich and diverse city acts as a complex system of urban phenomena that also satisfies our need for creating meaningful experience. Rapid urbanization and the confusion of meaning it creates in our existence, as well as the ensuing proliferation of corporate urban spectacles replacing deeper civic meanings of rooted urban traditions, depreciate the quality of lived experience and the modest entertainment in our contemporary life in the city.

The thesis is about capturing the singular moments of urban leisure experience in Toronto’s Grange neighbourhood from the binary perspectives of both the local (as a resident) and the stranger (as a visitor). The research undertakes the dérive, a Situationist strategy, for examining the definition of local authenticity and the subjective perception of urban spaces. By juxtaposing the perceptions of the local and the stranger, as noted above, the thesis attempts to obscure the border between normative urban reality and imaginative fantasy. It suggests entry into the subliminal layer of absurdity already intrinsic within the existing urban context, that is, a layer suitable for procuring surreal experience and insight in our everyday leisure.

The Grange Hotel is a symbolic alibi in this thesis for serving as the liminal context between the local and the stranger. Common places dispersed across the Grange neighbourhood are détourned from their original urban expectations, being redefined as an indeterminate field of accidents and radical episodes. By inducing the notion of meta-architecture similar to that found in the texts of surrealists, the significant moments of urban experience can be retranslated into new psychological plots for the hotel’s narrative. The thesis proposes to provoke a different mode of how we perceive and experience the typical urban spaces in the Grange neighbourhood.