Becoming: A meta-discourse on the intoxication of architectural education.

BECOMING is an interactive Virtual Reality project that critiques modes of architectural practice. The project uses architecture to tell a story of my final year in training at University, using VR to unpack and examine the modes of architectural procedures both critically and psychologically. Derived from Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, the project becomes a metanarrative which questions the intensity of commitment in the architectural profession.

Daniel Duffield

BECOMING is a critical exploration of modes of architectural practice and education in the architecture school. The free reign given to the design student affords opportunities to pursue what they are truly interested in, becoming increasingly obsessed with their work. Seeing the process as intoxicating through passion, control and competition the project acknowledges ‘cult-like’ qualities of the architectural profession and the mediation of these cultic conditions through processes, tools and practices embedded in the education of the architect.
BECOMING unfolds these psychic conditions through the analogous environment of virtual reality, where the tutor is asked to become the student, inverting power relations. The project critiques the very system it is embedded in, and questions the modes of practice of architects and architectures.
Derived from Jonathan Swift, the project becomes a meta-narrative, using scale to tease out experiences of the student within a virtual world. These parallels start to question architecture beyond education, into practice where the intensity of commitment continues. Through an assembly of the different spaces of architectural education, this project has sought to generate an architecture of intoxicating intensities and emotive experience, testing and exploring the potential of virtual reality as both design driver and critical design practice.