ART, ARCHITECTURE AND LANDSCAPE AS MULTISENSORY AGENTS IN DEFINING AND ACTIVATING PLACES

Abstract

The essential reality human experience of his environment is multisensory. But the contemporary lifestyle and its ever exceeding sophistication creates an imbalance in the sensory contributions of multiple senses. The visual has a high degree of dominance over the other senses as its experience can be channelled more effectively along with tha audial. The major accelerator of this trend is the immersive new media that catches the fancy of the experiencer due to its essentially dormant physical response requirement. This makes human experiential reality flattened to a continuous stream of image and sound.The reversal of such a phenomenon is a tough effort and against the tide of a market centred development and consumerist world view. But one possibility is to create far more engaging social experiences and places that can host this. Placemaking is an activity humanity always performed involuntarily. But the time has come to do conscious and explicit strategies to make a cohesive and healthy society back from the solitary and shallow social network socialising of the digital virtual and delusionary to the real temporal and the living. This thesis explores the above themes and takes the context of a specified area in Indian Institute of Roorkee to propose reactivation of existing and creation of new places that benefit the community by means of a design proposal