Becoming-interior : toward a nondual philosophy of design for dwelling-in-the-world : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Design at Massey University

Abstract

Martin Heidegger suggests that dwelling is an act of inhabitation, which engenders a becoming-interior of the world. The site of this dwelling is not confined to architecture, but occurs in the space between earth and sky: the world. This work seeks to investigate the implications of this claim on the role of interior design. It proposes that, in order to formulate an approach to design that aims to facilitate a Heideggerian dwelling, the binary oppositions of inside and outside, nature and culture, self and world, must be re-examined. The connections between architectural minimalism and Eastern aesthetics that are hinted at in contemporary New Zealand lifestyle magazines such as urbis provide a gateway to an investigation of dwelling-design that moves beyond the conflicts of a world divided by Cartesian dualism. The space between East and West operates as the field of inquiry within which this work locates a comparative study of nondual philosophies pertaining to dwelling as an interrelation of self and world. Nondual concepts found in the writings of Elizabeth Grosz, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, are subjected to a reading that suggests links with such Eastern philosophical concepts as ma (the space of the in-between), yin and yang as an analogy of correlativity and becoming-other, and dao and de (field and focus) as a conceptual model for the interrelation of the natural world and the self. Through the generation of a nondual core philosophy, the work suggests that the "nothingness" of minimalism may be reconceptualised as a betweenness, with the potential to act as an intermediary space between the inhabitant and nature. The nature of this mediation as the stimulation of resonance is explored in relation to the depiction of the natural world in art, and subsequently applied to the architectural threshold. Architecture is posited as an instrument of facilitation - the means by which the potential for dwelling may be manifested in a becoming-interior of the world.