Can You See the Space?
Name
Dai-xdd44-march-arch-2026-thesis.pdf
Size
34.63 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
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f7a83bbaab8fe861813ac36a7ad0fbf1
Author(s)
Dai, Chenyue "xdd"
Advisor(s)
Farahi, Behnaz
Date Issued
February 2026
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
This thesis presents an interactive artistic experience conceived as a performative intervention for the final architectural review. Rather than a conventional presentation, the project transforms the review site into a collective perceptual experiment, where audiences encounter an augmented version of the presentation space and its surroundings through carefully orchestrated spatial and visual interventions. The work investigates the fundamental question of how spatial perception is constructed, challenging the assumption that we passively receive architectural space. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodied experience and James Gibson’s theory of direct visual perception, alongside contemporary frameworks of predictive perception, the project reveals the invisible cognitive and sensory mechanisms that shape spatial awareness. Through multiple layered interventions, the experience exposes the hidden architecture of perception itself: the unconscious rules, expectations, and bodily engagements that determine how we understand and navigate space. By situating audiences within an augmented environment that disrupts conventional spatial reading, the project makes visible what typically remains imperceptible: the active, constructed nature of architectural experience. Each intervention operates as both spatial manipulation and pedagogical device, prompting participants to recognize their own perceptual processes. The final review becomes not merely a presentation of research but an embodied demonstration of its core argument: that architecture exists not in built form alone, but in the dynamic interplay between space, body, and consciousness.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture
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In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
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