OVERCOMING A VISUAL BIASES IN ARCHITECTURE: To Explore Architecture as a medium devoid of vision

Abstract

On a primary physical level, the main purpose of architecture is to provide shelter. On a secondary psychological level, architecture has a more deep rooted meaning and purpose. It has the ability and power to stimulate and engage experience of its inhabitants. It can impart memories in people's mind through its built spaces. Architecture fundamentally a multi-sensory art is at the threshold of becoming visually dominant and stagnant. The mere use of sense of vision flattens the surrounding and loses the plasticity of surrounding space. As a result instead of absorbing and accepting our built environment we just look at it and observe it as a photographic single dimensional image. This thesis aims to examine the different ways in which the blind and visually handicapped navigate through and experience the built environment. Understanding of these interactions is used to develop an architecture that enhances the specific characteristics, which help the blind and visually handicapped and also heighten the senses of normal sighted. Better sensory spaces can be designed if the response and reaction is changed from just pictorial, visually pleasing to how it can be formed by reverberating sounds, vibrations of different materials and textures. Tactile and acoustic have strong existence in our built space but we often redirect these responses and reactions.