Urban Celebration

This Thesis looks at the transformative nature of Carnival in Trinidad on the city of Port-of-Spain. Carnival in Trinidad embodies a unique cultural confluence that is born from the conjoined European, African, Indian and modern West Indian narratives that shape the Caribbean consciousness. The transformation that occurs during Carnival is of a civic, personal and perhaps even spiritual nature. This thesis will explore in depth the urban artifices of Carnival, looking at the anatomy of the festival itself, that is, the history, characters, places and moving parts that comprise its celebration in the city. Through this exploration of masquerade and urbanism, I hope to create a realistic understanding of the syncretic nature of this festival and its emancipating role in West Indian society.

Carnival in Trinidad evolved as a vehicle of emancipation for the ex-slaves of the society. Its celebration is a centrifugal force within the society; drawing on the many parallel histories of the island and bursting onto the streets in the ecstatic celebration of a unified myth and reality. The problems of identity, spatial ownership and belonging that are inherent to the post colonial mind, on the days of Carnival are temporarily non-existent. This thesis therefore aims to create the beginning of an new urban understanding of Trinidad that is rooted in Caribbean history and Caribbean behaviour, rather than in borrowed attitudes and fractured codes.

Link to site: http://urbancelebration.blogspot.com/

The One Minute Theatre: Allan Wes Wilson

The following is an abstract of my intentions...What began as an ipod on the roof of St. Peter's has thusly evolved.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the correlative qualities between architecture and theatre. For millennia, drama has been used as a dominant vehicle for the investigation of those ethereal qualities which comprise daily life; operating as a framework for the deeper understanding of incredibly dynamic social, political and temporal relationships. To parallel an analogy by the English poet Ted Hughes; the classical dramas of the Greek poets have been conceived as quantitative elements which illustrate- which make accessible- the most intangible of human conceptions. However, episodes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century have evolved the dramatic arts into to something more critical. As such they may actually provide the richest interface for the registration and projection of colliding ideologies, capitalist motivations and cultural histories. What this thesis supposes is that drama has the capacity to express a more fundamental understanding of the affects of contemporary architectures. The proposition is made for an architectural device which may chronicle the dynamic tensions embedded in a neighbourhood in crisis.