A downloadable game

Cosmopoiesis

| World-making


Cosmopoiesis is a short, experimental game concerned with the architectural design process, and uses architectural hand-drawings and GameMaker: Studio to speculate on new means of digital spatial representation and design in both architecture and video-games.

The project will not use GameMaker to design a game necessarily, but to help me with the design process and to expand my thinking in the representation of space.

As Marco Frascari posits, architectural drawing allows architects to engage in Cosmopoiesis, or world-making. Drawings allow architects to explore thought experiments (Gedankenexperiment) through graphic analogies, and it's critical that the exploration of architectural theory be derived from the phenomenology of the lines traced on site and paper.

Drawings can be explored through a digital avatar that can navigate and teleport between different drawings. The figure can transform the spatial reading of a drawing by being able to rotate, change scale and physically move and interact with the drawings. The drawing is transformed into a reactive landscape that animates and transforms in response to the avatar's movement, and have drawings that overlay in a powerfully intriguing aesthetic.

From the rise of the computer and increasing computerization of the architectural discipline, digital tools and analogue tools have proven not to be enemies standing at different camps, but instead interesting companions to one another and this proposal proves that one can enhance the other.


Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Architecture (Professional) degree, The University of Auckland, 2016.