Brigette Pacholok

Advisor: Carlos Rueda

A collage titled "The Other Within: Architecture and Intersubjectivity" blends text and images, featuring human figures, architectural ruins, and abstract forms, conveying a sense of historical reflection and philosophical inquiry.
A photo collage blends historic and modern buildings in an urban landscape. Sepia tones create a nostalgic yet timeless atmosphere.
The Exchange District as a heterotopia of time and history.
Abstract collage with overlapping aerial maps and cityscape photos. A person stands in an urban street, conveying a sense of complexity and urban life.
Broad site conditions.
Vintage-style sepia photo of a street corner with brick buildings, trees, and parked cars. The scene appears calm and timeless.
Site location.
A vintage sewing machine sits near a window with lace curtains. Beside it, typed text poses questions about clothing origins, creating a reflective tone.
The Other; In Absentia. This installation, along with its companion poem, aims to illuminate the interconnections, separations, hierarchies, and processes of subjugation that go into clothing our bodies. Similarly, the proposed design intends to reveal similar processes that are used to house our bodies.
A creative necklace made of white buttons, watch faces, and safety pins is displayed on a beige mannequin bust, evoking a vintage, eclectic feel.
All Buttoned Up and Ready to Work. This piece, composed entirely of found material, is a commentary on the suffocating nature of colonial conceptualizations of time, linearity, productivity, propriety, and class.
Black and white collage of urban street scene with buildings, fire escapes, and market stalls. Blurred figures suggest motion and bustling activity. Text overlays provide a layered, abstract feel.
The design will engage the existing Alleyways Market and integrate a new arts festival into this space.
A dimly lit room with concrete floors and walls. A person stands near a transparent cubic wall. Shadows and hazy figures suggest a surreal atmosphere.
An Initial Modest Attempt to Invert Spatial Experience. Situating studio spaces directly within the gallery, and separating them only with transparent partitions, allows people to see behind the veil of artistic translation.

The Other Within: Architecture and Intersubjectivity

Architecture is intertwined with our very being. The spaces we inhabit become an indivisible part of us, just as we become part of them.1  The entirety of the external world, here defined as the other, is inextricably bound with our internal existence; trying to separate the two is an unachievable feat, an abstraction.2 Yet, many of our contemporary spaces still lead us toward false isolation and hierarchy. Through architecture, we are often distanced from our interrelations with one another, our land, our senses, and therefore, ourselves. When we find ourselves enmeshed within these spaces, we feel a sense of dissonance because they do not align with us, but still, they permeate us. The carceral, the corporate, the colonial, the industrial: these grotesque extensions are born from us, but do they reflect us?

This thesis examines how isolated and hierarchical conceptions of the self have shaped the socio-spatial conditions we currently inhabit. It situates itself within Winnipeg’s Exchange District, an area embedded with creativity and beauty, yet simultaneously marked by histories of colonial expansion, industrialization, and displacement. This context offers a grounded site to investigate how architecture can either reinforce or resist its own systems of division. Within this setting, the project engages intersubjectivity as a spatial condition, understanding architectural inhabitants not as isolated entities, but as interrelated beings who fundamentally shape place. To strengthen this condition, the space permeates itself with various means of artistic translations, using them to dissolve boundaries of thought and emotional experience. In essence, the project proposes a creative collective woven into the existing artistic fabric of the Exchange District. Composed of studios, galleries, and intimate performance spaces, the design prioritizes softened thresholds, blurred boundaries, and sensory entanglement as an architectural means of shaping intersubjective experience and collective presence.

Footnotes:
1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Humanities Press, 1974),171.  
2. J. E. Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 34.  

Bibliography
Malpas, J. E. Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London; New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Humanities Press, 1974.