8 minute read
Architectural Alterity: An Uncanny Manifesto of De-Familiarization
By way of introduction, my name is Eilís Finnegan (she/her) and I am a recent 2020 graduate of Auburn University with a dual Bachelor of Architecture, Bachelor of Interior Architecture degrees - I am also a person with Narcolepsy w/ Cataplexy.
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Narcolepsy is a chronic neurological disorder of the sleep/wake cycle that usually develops during childhood or young adulthood. Symptoms of narcolepsy include excessive daytime sleepiness, fragmented nighttime sleep, cataplexy (sudden muscle weakness triggered by emotions like laughter, surprise, annoyance, or exhilaration), sleep paralysis (temporary inability to talk or move when falling asleep or waking up) and hypnagogic hallucinations (vivid hallucinations that may be terrifying while falling asleep or waking up). One in 2,000 people have narcolepsy worldwide. Project Sleep (https://project-sleep.com/), a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness about sleep health and sleep disorders, educates and empowers individuals using events, campaigns, and programs to bring people together and talk about sleep as a pillar of health. This past year, Project Sleep initiated World Narcolepsy Day (Sept. 22, 2019), a day dedicated to raising awareness of narcolepsy on a global scale. Established by 24 patient advocacy organizations across six continents, World Narcolepsy Day
unites the international narcolepsy community to inspire action, increase public knowledge, and elevate the voices of the 3 million people living with narcolepsy worldwide.
This year, I am a committee member for World Narcolepsy Day with Project Sleep, in addition to being a Rising Voices of Narcolepsy trained public speaker. My goal and task with the committee is to advocate to Universities and Colleges around America in an effort to raise awareness for students diagnosed with Narcolepsy, and to help educate students studying the sciences about the complexity and nature of the rare sleep disease. As someone who received a lot of support from my faculty throughout architecture school, which is infamous for being a grueling, and “sleep” unhealthy experience, I want to help make sure that students who aren’t so lucky have someone in their corner. I feel so lucky to have been invited into this committee this year and am so proud of the efforts of all who have been involved. Especially because this year’s World Narcolepsy Day will exist entirely online, everyone has been working so hard to make sure that everyone feels excited, engaged, and encouraged by the events that we have planned. As for me, I will be speaking virtually at several major institutions around the country, specifically to rising medical school students and others studying the sciences.
In 2017, during my second year of architecture school, I was diagnosed with Narcolepsy w/ Cataplexy. Although I had been experiencing symptoms for as long as I can remember, even as a child, they worsened significantly after starting my collegiate academic career. After experiencing my first cataplexy attack, of which I experience full body paralysis caused by intense laughter, I really realized that something was the matter. Because all of my peers were also struggling with sleep and wakefulness, it took this more significant instance to make me realize I needed to get some answers. Thus, I went home to Chicago from school on a weekend and spoke with a sleep specialist who was then able to diagnose me after taking an MSLT, Multiple Sleep Latency Test.
For many, diagnosis is not shocking, due to the great disparity in time between symptom onset and diagnosis. It ends up being more of a “what now” moment, where you really begin to examine what this means for you, your family, and your loved ones. For me, I initially struggled trying to understand how I would be able to carry on in school when this duality takes over half of my life – it became clear that my efforts to separate them would be futile, and it would be so much better if I found a way to marry the two. It did not begin in such an “aha” clear moment, but more as a coping mechanism. I would sketch and draw from my dreams in class in order to help me stay awake, and I eventually began to share them on social media. Shortly after, Julie Flygare, CEO and Founder of
Project Sleep, became interested in my work and she invited me to draw some graphics for a Giving Tuesday Campaign. From there, my confidence grew in sharing my work, and I ended up putting my dream sketches, now DREAM*S, into my portfolio. The crossover between DREAM*S and my architectural work only grew. This past year, the 5th year of architecture school, I decided to pursue the ultimate intersection of the two through my thesis. …
Architectural Alterity: An Uncanny Manifesto of De-Familiarization, Displacement, and Dreams acts as a call to feel again, and to feel powerfully. The vast array of emotions one feels while dreaming - elation, confusion, pleasure, discomfort, sadness, and even ecstasy - ought to be delivered by our conscious, waking environment as well. The uncanny is a representation of a mental state interrupted by a disturbed and distorted projection of the real and the unreal, the space between waking and dreaming. The emergent elision between reality and fiction creates an uneasy sense that ought to have remained concealed.
Thus, the thesis explores how the Architecture out here, the spaces that exist within our consciousness, can be more like the Architecture we see in there, the conditions and experiences built out of our uncanny subconscious.
Displacement is defined as the removal of someone or something by someone or something else which takes their place. Through the lens of this research, this means that something familiar, being replaced by a warped version of itself, becomes a displaced thing - an uncanny mirror. Many seek out these displaced entities, that which makes us uncomfortable. It is plausible to suggest that people today are actively interested in and pursue the undesirable. It is imperative that people return to a desire to feel, and to feel powerfully. Experiential integrity and value are lost on those who seek to avoid feeling - those who seek to be comfortably numb. An architecture that destroys this notion is one that places the user on their toes.
As proposed, if architecture was plagued by a neurological disease, one situated in the interstitial space between waking and dreaming, its risk management and mitigation would not be in mathematical and financial viability, but rather in
containing and designing for these uncanny, hallucinogenic, metaphysical encounters – that which breaks from the familiar and warps it. An architecture sited within the context of the human sleep cycle, through a lens of a sleep disease, Narcolepsy, would act as a simulation for an “other” version of “ordinary” if designing for the uncanny, the uneasy, was standard and necessary in regards to maximizing experience.
There is a call for a new kind of architecture - one that is able to accept ‘otherness’ and craft the unwanted, the unimaginable, the marginal. These projects in particular have the ability to foster memory makes them increasingly culturally sustainable and ideal for creating a sense of place. Thus, this thesis explores a simulated architecture that exists within the interstitial space of sleep - a site that is a state of consciousness. The cyclical nature of the site, the sleep cycle, lends itself to this idea of a journey, one that requires places of pause or moments of remembrance. These points of impact are represented as they are in the conscious reality, as rest stops and welcome centers. These nominally standard programs are set up within the first stages to then be broken down and warped in the later stages, the ones approaching a full slip of consciousness. The emergent architecture is one that insights uneasiness in the form of ‘unrest’ stops and also illuminates the uncanny existence that a rare portion of the population has the ability to experience.
Attached to this thesis is a critique of everyday life. Through an uncanny lens, the critique of the everyday results in a rethinking and warping the everyday pattern architecturally. Spaces with high user frequency and standard, streamlined use create the perfect storm for interrupting the norm. If this architectural discourse is to move forward, it is essential to explore structures that support these kind of visceral reactions - one’s that many seem to avoid now in an effort to remain ignorant and even blissful in the absence of a more challenging human condition. However, many experience these symptoms silently. Therefore, if there was an architecture to portray this condition publicly, the conversation would be far less taboo or even obscure. The uncanny would remain, but the fetishization of its sensations would adopt a new popularity. A desire brought out of the shadows. A desire that cannot remain so hidden when the rabbit hole become inverted.
I hope to continue my research into neuroaesthetics and the uncanny into my professional career. I think, even as just a process in design, exploring the duality, and giving validity to that which we see in our subconscious, can help make the spaces of our reality more dynamic, and hopefully, equitable – more human. I am so grateful to SheTheyMagazine for featuring my story and allowing me to continue my advocacy for Narcolepsy. Project Sleep and the World Narcolepsy Day Committee are looking forward to this upcoming World Narcolepsy Day on September 22! If you’re interested in learning more, feel free to check out the Project Sleep website to find a calendar of all of the upcoming events for the day.
