Friction, delight + the public realm Challenging the role of architect as author

"Friction, Delight and the Public Realm: Challenging the Role of Architect as Author" is a process-based MDP focused on enhancing and catalyzing a city's social and cultural environment, particularly its downtown core, through an architectural intervention. The public realm, a complex social networking of individual and collective experiences, sustains the energy and quality it gives to a city through nodes of activity and cultural vibrancy. These thresholds that structure the public realm rely on the participatory role of people, and the city's urban spaces and built form should encourage engagement and act as an infrastructure for human life to take place.;Rather than focusing on the formal consumption of architecture, spaces should recede in order for people to inhabit them. Here, utilization becomes central to the design in order to allow people to take space into their possession - where the non- prescribed stimulates emergent program and the complexities within the prescribed create vibrant thresholds. The significance of this concept is that the architect refrains from excessive authorship in order for a user to impact that space and become an author themselves, creating a sense of place and a unique culture through habitation. People's ability to construct or respond to creative expression, or friction, within an infrastructural and open-ended environment is essential to not only producing a sense of pleasure through that engagement but also developing a valuable and culturally vibrant city.;The process of mapping revealed an opportunity for an intervention through the exploration of vibrancies and latencies within the cultural and social context of downtown Regina. The resulting intervention emerged from the mapping as well as through spatial, formal and programmatic goals to create insfrastructural space. "Friction, Delight and the Public Realm" explores the role of the architect as an author, seeking to create a balance between the prescribed and non-prescribed, authored and unauthored, to enhance the vibrancy of the public realm through an architectural intervention that encourages user engagement.;KEY WORDS: appropriation, authorship, delight, friction, infrastructural, interstitial, non-prescribed, prescribed, public realm, utilization.