“…if your first reaction is to imagine what it looks like, you have probably missed the point…”

Kester Rattenbury, 2003

The 3rd Degree is an architectural thesis design endeavour stemming from the past 10months of research and design adventures, culminating in a project based around creating, accessing and revealing hidden codes within an architectural framework through the bodies engagement with a material internet. The program is a secret secular brethren society based on three levels of ascent that meets in private four times a year in a space modeled after Solomon’s Temple. The material internet is a slime-mould based living technology hidden within the guise of gilded gold. The material internet is a clandestine system accessible only to highest rank, the third degree members within the society. The body engages the system through the building, utilizing the hand, eye and leg as components that sense the space through sensations of touch, light and movement, where objects such as door handles and desks, through use and activity, reveal the architectural framework of the building as a tool that projects a model of the societies ideal world within the guilded gold coating on the inside encompassed by a larger framework that suggests this projection to the outside world.