Preface

In 2002 I enrolled at the University of Waterloo, and moved to Cambridge, Ontario. While urban life is the norm for a large majority, it took me some getting used to. Not only are the daylight hours and weather different in Ontario, the hard streetscape is also a stark change to the Midwest’s rural plains. Finding myself so distanced from nature, I grew stressed. Far from my home and family, I was not used to the city.

My home, a grain farm on the Alberta prairies, is nearly twelve kilometres away from the nearest town, Kitscoty, whose population is less than seven hundred, and about two and a half kilometres away from the nearest neighbour. I continue to work on the farm every year during harvest, helping to bring in the crops. There is a sense of pride and connection to the land that arises from the farming lifestyle. Farmers know to plant their crops when the leaves of a poplar tree reach the size of a dime, and that if dew is not present on an autumn morning that it will rain in three days. This sensitive connection to the changing nuances of the land stems from our roots in nature, which is unfortunately long-forgotten by most people within today’s society. Farmers are often required to be creative and innovative because of the variety of challenges that come when working with a medium that is as ever-changing, and unpredictable as nature.

I had begun this thesis with an intention to study Albertan vernacular architecture through an investigation of the farmstead. However, during the course of my research I gradually lost interest in the topic. Although I grew up working on the farm, I discovered that I was not inspired by my investigations into the politics and economics of farming. Frustrated, I found myself, little by little, spending less time on my research, and replacing it with something that I once regarded merely as a fanciful pastime: heavy metal music.

The world of heavy metal sucked me in -- it consumed me. I became completely engrossed in its menacing allure. Every spare moment became a quest to discover new bands, YouTube™ skilled guitarists, take electric-guitar lessons, read fantasy novels, and unearth new artists specializing in fantasy art. I plunged into the behemoth monsoon of the raging lyrics blasted from bands such as Slayer, Pantera, Cannibal Corpse, and Megadeth.

Heavy metal became something that brought me pleasure and happiness, relief and fantasy. As part of a preliminary design exploration, I proposed a conceptual home for a heavy metal musician. In this make-believe world, this musician’s music and life were at the center of it. The design reflected the musician’s total absorption into his world, the world into which he escaped.

It was at this point I realized, “This is what heavy metal is for me!” It is an escape. In an instant, I recognised that in order to release the sense of hopelessness I felt while working on my initial thesis of the farmstead, I had begun to search for an escape through my music. This escape energized me, gave me happiness again, and renewed my creative energy.

Escape is an omnipresent need within every individual and is found throughout our culture. Heavy metal may have been my escape; however, it is certainly not for everyone. Oddly enough, I had never really listened to much music while growing up. As a child, it was the outdoors, in all its abundance, that was my primary escape. When not working on chores or schoolwork, my siblings and I would venture outside, creating our own forts, discovering new places, and forming new spaces, often travelling great distances. Like every child, play and daydreaming were our forms of escape, and being in nature seemed to provide an infinite supply of inspirations and opportunities.

When I lived in Cambridge there seemed to be nowhere I could go in order to escape. It was finally the intense complexity of heavy metal, and its explosive lyrics that blasted me out of misery.

Music is not architecture; however, it is able to provide the environment we need in order to escape. Music has the ability to create three responses. First, it often creates a physical response. We tap our foot, dance, and even sing in reaction to music. Second, it has the ability to produce pictures in our mind; it tells a story through lyrics, and even abstractly, through the progression of a musical composition. Lastly, it produces an atmosphere which allows us to escape, and often a large portion of the music is even missed due to this escape. However, we also have to like the music for this to occur. Based on our experience and preferences, it must contain the proper amount of complexity in order to produce pleasure.² Understanding that not everyone has the same experiences and preferences as I do, and that each of us is individual, it is clear that not everyone uses heavy metal music to produce the atmosphere needed to escape. I wondered how to produce an architectural design which would appeal to as many people as possible in order to engender escape. As I thought back to my experiences on the farm, I knew the answer: nature. Nature is common, and we have an inherent human attraction to it.³

This thesis examines the capacity of architecture to create places that extend an atmosphere of escape to others.