AUSTRALIAN NETWORK FOR ART + TECHNOLOGY (ANAT)
Design Thesis Major Project
Suzannah Waldron, RMIT Bachelor of Architecture, 2006
Supervisor: Brent Allpress, RMIT Architecture Research Director
The AUSTRALIAN NETWORK FOR ART + TECHNOLOGY (ANAT) is an organisation which supports, advocates and promotes the synthesis of art and culture, science and technology. This proposition incorporates an annexe for ANAT within the existing educational precinct of RMIT.
The fields of science and art have traditionally developed binary systems of evaluation which divorce scientific and aesthetic values along the lines of the quantitative and the qualitative, reminiscent of an architectural distinction between the visual and the tactile.
Vision was once dependent on touch. The seperation of the senses is part of a larger history of visual dominance and an impetus for the motivation within the project to connect the visual and tactile.
Instrumental to this tactile strategy is a series of tactics which explore the interconnection of quantitative measures of the visual and qualitative inferences of the textural. These combine to become productively distractive – each simultaneously draws in different directions and mutually influences the other.
A dense existing urban fabric and changes of level force an engagement with oblique and peripheral orientations related to the perceptual mechanism of tactile urban distraction.