MADA
  • Urban Domestic
Belinda Au
Bachelor of Interior Architecture
belinda.w.au@gmail.com

As cities transform to become spaces where people live, spatial phobias and stress are on the rise as sociable spaces that have been taken for granted become conspicuous by their absence. This project explores how people with agoraphobia, in both psychology and architecture, respond to signs and spatial devices and how this can be used to facilitate their reluctant movement through public areas.

It aims to do this by proposing a transitioning series of spaces that move from introverted to open and can be applied as pavilions within different urban environments; in this instance, Bourke Street Mall. Drawing from the idea of the uncanny, in which the familiar becomes alien and surreal through the process of repression, these spaces would eerily bring scenes of the domestic into the public sphere to soften the estrangement felt from agoraphobic spaces.