The master's thesis with the title Apparition effects: Conservation approaches to ruins from architectural perspective, is broadly concerned with exploring the changing human relationship to space throughout history, with a view to understanding more clearly the process that has led to today's disrupted balance between primary and secondary nature. This process is traced, in the first phase, through a review of some of the ideas in metaphysics, philosophy and science that have been used by humanity to define its relationship to space. In the second phase, the process of human alienation from primary nature is analysed through an examination of the transformation of space itself, where space is understood as social space. The work of the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, entitled The Production of Space, is a central thread here.
In the light of the current controversy about the consumer-oriented society and its destructive impact on the environment, the aim of this master thesis is to point to some existing situations in space that, through their effects on the subject, could perhaps be the starting point for the design of a new way of life (and thus social space) that would aim to establish a new, more positive relationship between human beings and the primary nature. The term »apparition effects«, used in the master's thesis, refers to precisely such situations that arise the imagination of the subject, and is used by Lefebvre (2013, p. 224) to describe the effect of a landscape on the subject who observes it. Such power over the subject is also wielded by architectural ruins.
In what way such effects of architectural ruins and primary nature (as a unified ecosystem) could influence the formation of both a new architectural and conservation approach to ruins and a new social space, we aim to outline in the master's thesis with the example of the ruins of the former Haasberg manor on Planinsko Polje. In defining this new approach, the master's thesis also draws on some contemporary ideas of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, in addition to the insights gained previously about the human relationship to space throughout history. Reading such works influenced, in particular, the reflections on possible new architectural elements that would no longer necessarily be dedicated solely to humans and on the role of architectural and conservation appraches to ruins in the future.
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