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Walking as a Creative Process to Design 

Wan Azhar Sulaiman, Syed Sobri Zubir and Rashidah Ab. Rahman 

Department of Architecture 

Faculty of Architecture, Planning and Surveying 

Universiti Teknologi MARA 

Selangor, Malaysia 

Contact details: 

Wan Azhar Sulaiman 


Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying 


40450 Shah Alam, Selangor, Malaysia 

E-mail : wa_sulaiman@yahoo.com 

Syed Sobri Zubir 





E-mail: sszubir@yahoo.com 

Rashidah Ab. Rahman 





E-mail: rashidah212@yahoo.com or rashidah212@salam.uitm.edu.my 

Abstract 

There is a saying that suggests that ‘one needs to walk in order to create’ and has been proven 

that writers, poets and designers are inspired from this daily routine. The city for walking has 

been transformed into an automobile escapade. Probably the globalize free-information from 

the WWW, or the age ‘post-knowledge’ have somewhat contributed to the creation of 

individuals cooped up in their personal environment. This paper tries to re-establish ‘walking’ 

as a valid tool for creativity simultaneously reviving its usefulness in architectural design. The 

first part of the paper will briefly explain the theory of walking as a catalyst for creativity in 

contestation to the ideas of the ‘Situationist International’. Their interpretation of derive is 

centered within the confinement of social intervention that emphasizes walking as an active 

tool for intervention. The second part of the paper will try to shade some light on walking by 

explaining some ideas derived from Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author as the 

theoretical basis to distinguish the authority between design and architecture. This seminal 

text encourages a less didactic subject-object approach and emphasizes the built form as a 

direct interpretation in which design and walking can be related. The third part of the paper 

discusses the idea of mapping expounded by Bernard Tschumi as a communicative tool in the 

design process. And finally, our proposal of the Fake Plastik will try to accumulate all of the 

above ideas into a design proposal in London, mainly and as to validate the purpose of this 

paper. 

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Biographies 

Wan Azhar Sulaiman is a lecturer in the Department of Architecture and a designer with the 

publication unit. He graduated from Universiti Teknologi MARA (B.Arch), the Bartlett 

(M.Arch) under the tutelage of Dennis Crompton and Peter Cook. He is also the founder of 

CODA – an architectural consultancy office 

Syed Sobri Zubir is Associate Professor of Architecture and a practicing urban designer. He 

holds degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (B. Sc. Arch.) and Pratt Institute 

(B.Arch & M. Sc. Urban Design). He is a founder of the faculty’s urban design research 

laboratory and the publication unit. 

Rashidah Ab. Rahman is Associate Professor of Architecture and Design Coordinator in the 

Department of Architecture. She holds degrees from the University of Southwestern 

Louisiana (B.Arch.) and the Bartlett (M.Sc) under the tutelage of Iain Borden and Adrian 

Forty. 

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Walking as a Creative Process to Design 

Wan Azhar Sulaiman, Syed Sobri Zubir and Rashidah Ab. Rahman 


Faculty of Architecture, Planning and Surveying 


Selangor, Malaysia 

Introduction 

Walking is an act of placing one foot in front of the other, then placing the other foot in front 

of the previous foot while continuously repeating the whole procedure. It is a skill learned 

with great effort in the first months of life, only to become an unconscious, natural, automatic 

action. It is through walking that man began to construct from the man-made and natural 

landscape his own personal surroundings – creating psychologically transient meaning that is 

absorbed as he walks along the nomadic pathway. In order to apprehend this, then the idea of 

walking should not only be viewed as an act of moving through physical-geographic terrain. 

It should be viewed as a journey of re-interpretation and modification of spaces according to 

ones arbitrary imagination. Walking should also be understood as a form of urban 

intervention that inherently contains the symbolic meanings of the primal creative act; 

roaming as architecture of the landscape, where the term landscape indicates the action of 

symbolic as well as physical transformation of anthropic space (Careri, 2001). 

However, in most recent interventions on the city, especially in the capital city of Malaysia, 

the idea of walking is left out of priority. The city of Kuala Lumpur, once famous for its 

indigenous verandahways as covered walkways, is now referred to as a pedestrian hostile city 

(Bindloss & Brash, 2008). This is one of the many examples that prove that the city for 

walking has been transformed into an automobile escapade. The problem occurs when most 

architects claimed that architecture is merely a physical phenomenon with specific tasks in 

the techniques of building, but not the occupied building (Hill, 1998). Any form of design 

within a real context automatically raises issues of territoriality, politics and other factors that 

intervene the composition and structure of a society. Based on this argument, a commonly 

shared societal problem is that local built environment is becoming more and more like ‘white 

elephants’ that ignore the users and are devoid of meaningful cultural context. One would 

agree that recent developments are based on the projection of a capitalistic worldview that 

denies people as a component in generating design objects. One should view that city spaces 

still have a nature that demands comprehension – to be filled with meanings rather than 

designed and filled with things (Careri: 2001). 

Mark Cousin’s lecture on Vitruvius summarizes that the discipline of architecture is a 

collection of prior knowledge accumulated from various field except architecture (Hill: 1998). 

He acknowledges that architecture is a field immeasurable. Therefore architecture is 

indeterminate. The question here is how does one define ‘design’ in architecture? The literal 

meaning of ‘design’ is ‘to work out or create the form or structure of something’. Therefore 

design is an act, while ‘architectural design’ should be an indeterminate act. Hence, it is the 

crux of this paper to discuss walking as a catalyst for imagination and creativity; focusing on 

how the immeasurable and the indeterminate encompass humanistic value of the physical and 

the desirable. 

To delineate this, the paper is divided into three parts. The first part of the paper will briefly 

explain the theory of walking as a catalyst for creativity in contestation to the ideas of the 

‘Situationist International’. The second part of the paper will try to shed some light on 

walking by explaining some ideas derived from Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author as 

the theoretical basis to distinguish the authority between design and architecture. The third 

part of the paper discusses the idea of mapping expounded by Bernard Tschumi as a 

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communicative tool in the design process. To conclude this paper, our research entitled Fake 

Plastik will try to accumulate all of the above ideas into a design proposal in London. This 

proposal will bring forth the essence of a Nomadic Architecture – an idea of ephemeral 

architecture for the walking city – that not only exists as an urban intervention but also 

becomes an active component that is symbiotic in its presence to co-exist with the city. The 

purpose for this proposal is mainly to encourage alternative means to re-establish walking as a 

tool for creativity in architectural design education. 

Background Studies 

The idea that walking is a term synonymous to intellectual activity that promotes creativity is 

actually a tradition that was first introduced almost 2400 years ago by Aristotle. The reasons 

behind his walks were as much to do with clearing his thoughts while lecturing, as well as to 

divert the attention of his obviously intense subject towards the surrounding environment at a 

constant move (Harper, 1987). He lectures as he walks in circles through the Lyceum while 

pausing as to reminisce the subject’s specificity in relation to reality. Explaining a subject in 

parallel with man’s perception could provoke an easier understanding of the nature of things. 

Since then, the teacher and student participation as they walk and talk was described as 

‘peripatetic’. The word peripatetic is derived from the Greek peripatein meaning ‘to walk 

about’. Later during that period, the Peripatetic School was established to continue teachings 

of Aristotle. 

1 Situationist International 

It was in 1957 that an artistic political group known as the Situationist International promoted 

the idea of walking as a serious tool associated with creativity. Guy Debord, the founding 

member of the group devised a mental mapping technique to reinterpret the city that he refers 

to as ‘psychogeography’ – the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the 

geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of 

individuals (Sadler, 1998). The group was formed in the northern part of Italy and have been 

established, sometimes with different names in walking cities around the world. Their 

activities are mostly centralized in Paris partly due to the location of Guy Debord’s office and 

partly because Paris is strategically known to be the most susceptive city for art. The group 

studied the effects of geographical setting of the city not by perceiving the viewable built 

forms or the pedestrian structure of Paris, but by observing the city inhabitant’s emotional 

behaviour from direct intervention of their daily social structure. Guy Debord’s strategy of 

dérive (drift) confronts the habitual and functional experience of the city by the construction 

of participatory situations through walking. 

Dérive reinvents the notion of a ‘stalker’. The participant or the ‘game player’ will stalk a 

person walking the streets of Paris and then changes the target to another person that the 

earlier person came in contact with. This is done continuously. Although the act irritates most 

of the subject, it was through this game that walking became a social intervention. And with 

this the Situationist suggested that traditional maps could be re-appropriated and transformed 

to produce psychogeographical maps that document the hidden psychological structure of 

urban space (Wigley, 1998). This non-scientific method of aimless drifting records the 

emotions given by a person in a particular place and the trail of the observed as a means of 

establishing zones with atmospheric intense ambience (Debord & Jorn, 1959). 

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Figure 1: One of the psychogeographical map by Guy Debord & Asger Jorn entitled The 

Naked City 1957. Photo: Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague 

To quote Guy Debord “the play of the wanderer might become one of manipulated walk 

through real time and space rather than as narrator or interpreter of place. The wanderer 

would position himself as their recreated being or perhaps become a signpost re-framing the 

geography of the city in rejection of the closure of historic interpretation” (Sadler, 1998). This 

suggests the ‘game player’ as an active physical component of city intervention 

simultaneously interpreting the event throughout the game. Thus, the Situationist values the 

indeterminacy between the public-personal, observer-the observed and walk-event domain as 

he wrote “architecture must advance by talking emotionally moving situations, rather than 

emotionally moving forms, as the material it works with. And the experiments with the 

material will lead to unknown forms” (Knabb, 1981). 

The idea behind psychogeographical map has advocated continuing theories and idea 

proposition that beheads the theme of indeterminacy and the essence of walking that 

promotes creativity. This can be exemplified by a design proposal by Leslie Johnson entitled 

Peripatetic. The proposal that was initially a daily routine ‘walking to work’ in London 

instigated into a psycho-physical exploration of her encounter with names, streets and found 

objects, which is indirectly related to her personal memories. She mapped her journey 

through decomposed photomontages (figure 2) accompanied by twenty-seven boxes (figure 

3) – designed as cut sections of her tapestry of passionate memories of whom she might be 

associated throughout her walking journey. Twenty-seven signifies the alphabetical order of 

The London Geographers A – Z Street Atlas in which she carries along as her crossreferencing 

linear depiction of a fragmented experiential journey. 

Figure 2: B-C Psychogeographical Map by Leslie Johnson 

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Figure 3: Cut sections of memories kept in twenty-seven boxes by Leslie Johnson 

2 The Death of the Author 

In this seminal work, much of the understanding between walking-designing is indebted to 

Roland Barthes’ text from The Death of the Author published in 1968. This French literature 

was considered to be not a style of writing but a correct and proper way to write. Jonathan 

Hill regards The Death of the Author as such when he states that; “Barthes does not propose 

the death of writing but the death of the author who proposes uniform, natural system of 

meaning based upon mimesis, the belief that an image, word or object is the carrier for fixed 

message determined by the author. Barthes states that the text often contradicts the intentions 

of the author; the importance of the author is over-rated because the journey from author to 

the text to reader is never seamless, direct or one-way. The reader may be passive, and 

respectful of the text, or reactive, to some degree allowing personal concerns to affect what is 

read, but Barthes focuses on the creative reader constructing a new text in the act of reading” 

(Hill, 1998). 

Barthes’ own writing suggests a rather different writer who, while recognizing the profusion 

of ambiguities and interpretations that inhabit the indeterminacy between writing and reading, 

is not without passions and ideas. Barthes’ writing suggests a new reader as the new writer 

having a role in the creation of the text. Hence, the book becomes the theoretical basis to 

distinguish the authority between design and architecture. This literature encourages a less 

didactic subject-object approach and emphasizes the built form as a direct interpretation in 

which design and walking can be related. 

The book also establishes the role of the designer, the participants of the walk and the city as 

the stage for reinterpretation. This would suggest a new value and understanding of the built 

environment. The city should not be read as a factual text. The translation of The Death of the 

Author acknowledges that the city is a complex bodily experience of built forms and 

passages. Therefore, the creative reader constructs a new text similar to the Situationists’ act 

of dérive that constructs a new city intervention. The Death of the Author implies a new 

architect who, firstly acknowledges that architecture is made by design and use and, secondly, 

considers the creativity of use to be the central issue of design. Through appropriation, or in 

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this discussion re-interpretation, the creative reader makes a new text and the creative user 

makes a new city. 

An architectural thesis proposal by a student, Wolfgang Fiel, entitled Freud’s Garden 

exemplifies the notion from the book Death of the Author. This work derived its theme from 

the author’s walk through residential areas of London trying to find clues and references of 

his origin, which is Vienna. Along his meandering he coincidentally found Sigmund Freud’s 

Museum. In 1938 the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, being Viennese, was a refuge of war, 

where he moved with his family and his clinic to the chic residential area of Swiss Cottage 

during the World War. From the research findings, he found out that Freud would keep a 

routine detail of his daily schedule in which it states the actual time of his trimming beard, 

entertaining patients and taking the frequent breaks for cigar (Davies, 1998). It comes as a 

coincidence whence Freud did take frequent strolls along his house for his breaks and after 

dinner as an act of replenishing his exhaustion from the appointments. 

Fiel begins to understand his walk by superimposing the surrounding area of Freud’s original 

residence in Vienna into his new refuge surrounding of Swiss Cottage (figure 4). This 

approach has a similarity with the psychogeographic map entitled The Naked City by Guy 

Debord and Asger Jorn (figure 1). Fiel began to dismantle the iconic pieces that would pose 

clear indifference between these two places such as lamppost and other obvious street sign 

(figure 5). Here he initiated a strict interpretation of psychoanalyzing the psychoanalyst with 

numerous drawings of the space limited by his daily schedule (figure 6). The process 

becomes a re-evaluation of Swiss Cottage as an urban structure for imagination, a desire that 

recalls upon the banal and everyday, the personal and intimate rather than public (Johnson, 

Padouvas and Sulaiman, 2002). He designated this within an installation box, which he refers 

to as Sites of Spatial Flux (figure 7). 

Figure 4: Dissecting symbols and signage of Swiss Cottage. Photo: Miyuki Takeuchi 

Figure 5: Iconic pieces of Swiss Cottage dismantled. Photo: Miyuki Takeuchi 

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Figure 6: Drawing of specific space Sigmund Freud’s daily routine 

Figure 7: Sites of Spatial Flux. Photo: Miyuki Takeuchi 

Projected image of Swiss Cottage is superimposed against miniature street signs, symbolic 

city forms coupled, fog and wind-channelling machine that is connected with a computerized 

switch control board are installed inside the installation box as an interactive apparatus to 

examine the indifference between Vienna and London’s Swiss Cottage. Each time a 

participant interacts with the box, new movement and spatial configuration is regenerated 

thus creating a unique non-repeatable condition. Just like the notion of the Death of the 

Author, the user designs his unique and personalized experience, which is perceived only by 

his creative reinterpretation. Freud’s Garden also understood that the importance of creating 

architectural space is not by means of imposing sets of ideas but by understanding the notions 

of chance and coincidence that conditions it. Hence, walking is a tool that is capable of 

reading and writing of spaces intrinsic to it while constantly modifying city spaces upon each 

new journey a wanderer takes. This is the essence of Nomadic Architecture. 

3 Manhattan Transcript 

The Manhattan Transcript by Bernard Tschumi is an important work that investigates 

architectural diagrammatic methods from reinterpreting the experiential space of the journey 

of a ‘wanderer’. The transcript, which was executed between 1976 and 1981 for consecutive 

solo exhibitions, embodied in four episodes the principles for mediation of architectural 

sedition. The transcript is largely influenced from his experience of the May 1968 uprising in 

Paris and the approaches of the Guy Debord of the Situationist’s notion of dérive and 

détournment (deflection). Composed in a tripartite mode of notation (figure 8), the transcript 

offer readings of architecture in which event, space and movement are ultimately independent 

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yet stand in a new relation to one another. The transcripts should not be read as a seamless 

encounter between the ‘wanderer’ and Manhattan, New York, though the transcript is not a 

renunciation of both. They co-exist but rarely meet - only through unprecedented and 

coincidental event. Tschumi’s common assumption is that the actions and spaces can be either 

independently or interdependently related to circumstances: ‘One does not trigger the other: 

they exist independently. Only when they intersect do they affect one another’ (Tschumi: 

1990). 

Figure 8: The Tripartite mode of notation representing event, space and movement extracted 

from The Manhattan Transcript, Episode 1: The Park 

In his later writings on ‘Event and Space’ he insisted that “…if architects could selfconsciously 

use such devices as repetition, distortion or juxtaposition in the formal 

elaboration of walls, couldn’t they do the same thing in terms of activities that occurred 

within those very walls? Pole vaulting in the chapel, bicycling in the laundromat, sky-diving 

in the elevator shaft? Raising these questions proved increasingly simulating: conventional 

organization of spaces could be matched to the most surrealistically absurd sets of activities. 

Or vice-versa: the most intricate and pervasive organization of spaces could accommodate the 

everyday life of an average suburban family…” This statement advocates his architectural 

non-coherent overlapping of spatial programming. He continues by saying that “Architecture 

ceases to be a backdrop for action, becoming the action itself. All this suggests that ‘shock’ 

must be manufactured by the architect if architecture is to communicate” (Tschumi, 1990). 

The manifesto is adapted into Tschumi’s 1989 scheme for the France Library competition. 

The major aspect of the proposed scheme was to provide a large public running track and 

sports facilities on the roof of the complex, intersecting with upper floors of the library’s 

central programme so that neither the sports program nor the intellectual program could exist 

without an impact on the other. On the other hand, Tschumi’s intention is to induce readers’ 

creativity – to which Wilfried Hou Jo Bek argues that the conditions of creative thinking 

might share the connection between walking and doping. He further explains that running 

intoxicates one’s own endorphins. It is an act of ‘getting high to create’ (Bek, 1997). This is 

perhaps the reason why Tschumi refers to the caption that ‘an active body creates an active 

mind’ (Tschumi, 1994). 

In Episode 2: The Street (Border Crossing) (figure 7) extracted from the transcript embarks a 

dérive through Forty-Second Street of Manhattan, which was then drawn on a ten metres 

continuous tracing paper. The montages, which he marks as ‘Border’, permeate the 

continuation of his walk. The interpretation on this episode would be to confirm when 

Tschumi writes: The ultimate pleasure of architecture is that impossible moment when an 

architectural act, brought into excess, reveals both the traces of reason and the immediate 

experience of space….The architecture of pleasure lies where concept and experience of 

space abruptly coincide”(Tschumi, 1990). Tschumi suggested that chance and coincidental 

accidents could be diagrammatically strategized through designing the passages and places 

for walking. 

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Figure 9: The Manhattan Transcript, Episode 2: The Street (Border Crossing) 

Over the course of creating the transcript, Tschumi digests his research of the transcript by 

documenting through severe limitations of uninflected citation, diagram, and hard-line 

architectural notation. “By eschewing technique, by resisting every urge to originality, by 

confining such volatile material within the straightjacket of conventional graphics, Tschumi 

causes the Transcript with a wholly original force. For over a decade, The Manhattan 

Transcript would stand as the study nonpareil of transformative architectural graphics” 

(Kipnis, 2001). This work is revisited and applied into his winning scheme for the Parc de La 

Villette project in Paris in which his central idea to strategically design walking spaces is 

intended for creative use. 

Design Proposal: Fake Plastik 

a) The Setting 

The city London is chosen as the location to conduct our research due to its known nature as 

the ultimate city for walking. We wandered aimlessly during the early stage of the research in 

order to search for issues through walking rather than being conditioned by a prescriptive 

theme. The London Geographers A – Z Street Atlas, or widely recognized as A-Z, acts as a 

guide to our indefinite journey not only because the book possesses the most comprehensive 

mapping of London but also because of its popularity that people seek it for guidance more 

than they seek the bible. However, A-Z describes about a specific location with names, 

coordinates, simple pronounced graphic and symbols with limited colour palettes (figure 10), 

begin to influence the journey in several ways – mainly from perceiving the initial meaning 

imposed by the description through connectivity, homogeneous diagrammatic network and 

constant accurateness at a superficial level. During these long and aimless drifting that our 

interest shifted from map reading to reinterpreting ‘writings on the wall’ in search for a 

counter-guide from the former as to avoid ascertain fixation during walking. 

Figure 10: Simple pronounced graphical lines and symbols with limited colour palettes are 

the graphical connotation to the book The London Geographers A – Z Street Atlas 

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The nature of ‘writing on the wall’ or graffiti is considered a crime – defacing the property 

without the property owner’s consent is considered vandalism – but within the flat-engraved 

art from markers, spray-paints and scratches, unfolds underlying meaning of free 

advertisement, territoriality, symbolic explicit representation and expression of subversive 

agenda as an alternative channel of communication (figure 11). The varying attributes of 

graffiti are commonly located in; isolated areas – public toilets, service alleys, underneath 

bridges and footpaths; intellectual areas – schools, institutes and universities around the city; 

but mostly concentrated in the East End of the city. East End, a term pejorative, is a location 

that is not defined by universally accepted formal boundaries, describes the eastern part of the 

medieval walled City of London and north of the River Thames. Where the West side of 

London is considered as the prime area and the entertainment, cultural and business district of 

the city, the East End of London is still undergoing slow change, where some of its parts 

continue to contain some of the worst poverty in Britain (Hammet, 2003). The directional 

points of the East-west obviously demarcate the social status in London urban fabric that has 

been regulated by land value and the imbalanced intensity of social development. 

b) Strategy 

Figure 11: Photomontage to deciphering the Graffiti’s tag 

From this stage onwards, the research permeates itself into a framework of social critique 

against cast segregation and media manipulation of the capitalist regime. Locations in London 

portray sentiments with a degree of class ambience and the study areas manifest this irony. 

And by chance, our walk we lead us along the walkway of the Regent’s Canal. The canal is a 

defunct transportation route is still in used mainly by boat-residences and city-squatters that 

live underneath bridges or boat motels. They find that this amphibious lifestyle is the only 

solution to sustain themselves against the rising cost of properties prices in London. We 

started a West-East walk beginning from the Paddington Basin to Limehouse Basin that was 

abruptly cut-off in the middle due to a no walking zone of Islington Tunnel. Our journey 

continues at the other end of the tunnel only to experience the gradual change of cityscapes of 

an industrial yard, abandoned viaducts and the end of the route that leads to the gate of the 

River Thames. We responded to this by devising a strategy from Tschumi’s ‘shock inducer’ 

as means to agitate attention from the public. Beheaded with this, we started a campaign to 

throw plastics onto the canal as a to notion instigate a subversive intervention that is loaded 

with hidden agenda, which is entitled ‘Fake Plastik’. 

c) The Scheme 

Much to the public’s expectation, the idea is actually an advertising strategy to attract the 

public while manipulating the media as to promote walking along the canal’s deserted 

walkways and re-activate the identity of the place. Our task is to create a rotating vessel made 

from hundreds of plastic mushrooms that rotates while deflating inside the water and inflating 

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itself as it submerged as to create a temporary pontoon that connects both sides of the canal’s 

wall (figure 12). The contraption, which we refer to it as ‘Plastik-marine’ moves at a superslow 

pace from the west to the east of the canal powered only by the kinetic force gained 

from the water currents to rotate the mechanical ‘Caterpillars’ (figure 13a). The ‘Plastikmarine’ 

acts as a catalyst for the media speculation to inform the masses of its credibility to 

project manifolds of issues ranging from the exciting colourful new installation bridge – 

influenced from the fixation of A-Z (figure 13b) – to an environmental threat as a catalyst for 

creativity (figure 14). 

Figure 12: The ‘Plastik-marine’ forming a temporary floating pontoon bridge between two 

walls of the canal 

Figure 13a & 13b: The kinetic powered and swaying Caterpillar that controls the movement 

of the vessel and the limited colour palettes of the inflatable plastic mushrooms 

Figure 14: Media speculating events during the journey of the ‘Plastik-marine 

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Figure 15: Views from underneath the canal of the ‘Plastik-marine’ 

Undermining the whole visual agenda that surrounds the intervention, the ‘Plastik-marine’ is 

equipped with toxic spores that are released every second of the rotation to give a mildhallucinating 

effect to participants, bystanders and amphibious residents along the canal. The 

idea is not only meant to agitate a heightened sense of feeling to space but also to amplify the 

human senses for creativity that respond to this state. 

Figure 16: Earlier signs of the participants experiencing the toxic spores 

As the ‘Plastik-marine’ enter the Islington Tunnel, all communication and broadcast of the 

vessel if cut-off due to the nature of the small, narrow and elongated sewer-like tunnel 

resulting in the lost of the ‘spore-addicts’, the media coverage and the public support of the 

west. Only the amphibious residents of the canal managed to continue the journey while 

becoming a permanent addict to the vessel. 

d) Trans-mutating Scheme 

Coming out to the East End of London, our design intervention unfolds into another scheme 

that involves the methods of not-illegal occupancy with the participation of amphibious 

residences of the canal. According to the England and Wales act of the ‘squatters right’, 

anyone who occupies registered land without permission from the owner and treats it as his 

own for ten years is entitled to apply to be registered as owner (Law Commission & HM 

Land Registry, 2001). However, the property can only be owned if the owner does not request 

evacuation within a fixed period of time. There are also loopholes in the ‘Squatter’s Rights’ 

particularly when the mentioned areas only stipulate its horizontal dimensions and spaces that 

can be measured or occupied, instead of the in-between small spaces of a building wall. 

Herein underlies the beguiling agenda of acquiring and owning partial components that 

constitute a building. The application of the ‘Squatter’s Right’ within these immeasurable 

13

area might be the strategy to own the structural components of the building. Our task is to 

design cutting tools to cut through concrete and bricklayer walls, which is angled to an 

indefinite precision so that only the person under the influenced by the toxic spores 

understands it artistic capability (figure 17). 

Figure 17: The cutting tool and the cut out walls to be occupied. 

The essence of the proposal grew out from the idea of walking that by exposing the 

inhabitants to the hallucinated ambience of the context would lead to a re-appreciation of the 

place and hence making them more creative (figure 18). Therefore ‘Fake Plastik’ becomes the 

agent for their pyschogeographical detachment of the place. As a political agenda, the scheme 

can regenerate to fit the ever-changing patterns of ideas to fit the context in space-time. As 

such it could be mutated to create architecture without architects declaring the death of the 

profession. The scheme could also be viewed as a parody that tries to criticize the authorities 

as a typified Masonic entity. 

Figure 16: Strategies to occupy spaces inside thick masonary walls of the abandoned viaduct 

Conclusion 

The themes for our design research proposal regards the framework of Situationist 

International, the book Death and the Author and the Manhattan Transcript as a means for a 

new set of theory to emerge; a modus operandi to establish the framework to the research. 

The proposal of ‘Fake Plastik’ reveals that the act of walking may inspire many varied 

attempts that recognize the intervention between ‘designers and the city’. And even though 

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the proposal seems to portray a devious scheme with its own sets of political agenda, through 

the designer’s reinterpretation from a walking journey along a canal, theoretical design issues 

regarding problems to bridge social gaps could be generated. It can also pose to society the 

danger of absolute-media domination. It can also examine the validity of man-made laws that 

are susceptible to innovation as well as create disastrous impact on society. In conclusion, 

only through walking can one fully appreciate the premise of this paper and realize the hidden 

dimension of ‘walking’ and that creativity could be generated along the way. And only 

through walking can one understand that no city in the planet is identical and that the idea of 

the genius loci might not have been compromised in order to impose non-contextual 

proposition of architecture that exist on its own. 

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