Welcome to Wonderland: a Narrative Architecture

Architecture is a story, with its own set of truths, deceptions, and distinctions. Inspired by the fantastical qualities within Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, this thesis rejects prescriptive standards—standards that have become tropes through todays drawing expectations and conventions leading to the hyper-real—to create an understanding of architectural space that does not conform to that understanding of expression, and returns to a more intuitive and personal expression. Overlaying the allegory of “Wonderland”, the thesis is superimposed upon the observed “realities” of the city. This thesis aims to create a discourse achieved through the specific act of sketching as an operation of a temporal, and necessarily incomplete drawing. The act that binds the mind of observation to the hand-sketch, itself becomes an analogue of mediated story-telling, within a known context, allowing for thoughtful projections—and opening a space of the imagination—while avoiding predictions or prescriptions of its occupation. The sketch lends itself to its author, becoming a medium that is unapologetic and remains in a state of incompleteness. This allows the validity of the drawing to be read as a ‘precise sketch’.