Wednesday 16 October 2024

The Darkness of Interiors/ The Absence of Openings.

Outpost 081024

Connections remaining sensuously in play.

The Darkness of Interiors/ The Absence of Openings.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/










On the formation of the Japanese house.

In making for ourselves a place to live we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house. The quality that we call beauty must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows.

In Praise of Shadows, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki. 1933


The Trace Drawing

Interstitial Mappings/Spaces/Interiors/Parts/Intimacies.


Obviously, it is not being suggested that we should somehow be able to think something timber back into its tree, nevertheless, the reciprocal associations enjoyed by obtaining the one from the other depend upon certain conditions of connection remaining sensuously in play.

Peter Beardsell.


Making with circumstance/attention to place.

Giving buildings decisive readings that inform our readings of place.


A 'decisiveness' arrived at through attention and circumstance.


Living in a world reconstructed by information, deformed by restrictive economies.


Ontologically/Making Relations, having something to do with its being, not with exactly how it appears or its data – measure. Flat ontology is an idea that things exist in the same kind of way, no matter what they are. 


Things are much more mashed together than we like to think, and also much more distinct.


The biosphere is made of its parts, but it is distinct from its parts, and these parts are not reducible 'upwards' into wholes – the 'biosphere'.

There is one Biosphere, and its whole is less than the sum of its parts. Because the whole is one, and the parts are many and things exist in the same kind of way (flat ontology). Parts are distinct and non reducible if they exist in the same kind of way, no matter what they are.

Timothy Morton. 



You Are The Weather.

Roni Horn.


Weather isn't just a symptom or climate.



Anselm Kiefer.

The High Priestess. 1989


VIII : Book 88


In this book as a whole nature and architecture alike convey only the absence of life.

Armin Zweite.


Grey Works/Charcoal.

Lead/Ceramic/Inscriptions.



Weird Things


Things are entangled with interpretations of things, yet different from them.


Tim Morton, the thinker of that thought.


Reflecting on the bamboo screens and log columns of Osaka and Kamiichi, I realise that those details could be read as some kind of mask for a bucolic future. However, the choice of detail is derived from the capability of the material's presence to determine the quality of space- what the late David Pye refers to in his book Nature and the  Art of Workmanship as 'the weather in the space'. Japan has confirmed my view that architecture is inclusive – a collusion between different technologies and constructions that make the relevant accommodation for society.

Peter Salter. 



A Hut Life.

A life-lived as it is evolving.

Of Japanese/Chinese reclusive poets.


Interstitial Spaces.

The interior structure braces the external timber shell against snow loads. Between the braces are interior rooms for looking out. Moving between these rooms is like walking in the space 'between' which is sometimes 'clogged' by structure.

Kamiichi Pavilion, Peter Salter. 1995 


The hut and its hut life is a material process of living a relation, not (restricted or contextualized) as form or its container. The hut retains that which is frequently 'explained away' by relating things to a decade, a country, a state of human economic relations.


Roof top turrets, bits of former utility. A city of huts, of hut dwellers, of found places, of inspiration for new memories even as they invoke old ones. Visiting one another's sites, they climb creaky stairs and slip onto rooftops, balconies, or parapets. There they touch something deep in the needs and memory of people. Something that refuses to be dismissed, yet is fully alive only in the hut.

Anne Cline.


Kamiichi Mountain Pavilion.

4+1 Peter Salter : Building Projects.


The Buildings Reactions to the Weather/Ground/River and View.


Steadily the snow buries the building, but the exterior shell, which takes compression like a boat and behaves almost as if the building were in water, inversely anticipates the snow-load. This annual load exerts wear and tear, and will repeatedly leave its marks and defacements by way of distortion and pressure. But the building is designed to encode and record these batterings.

Conditions of Connection, Peter Beardsell.


The building is located in a clearing on the edge of a meltwater river. The intent is to provide a place to rest and enjoy the view. The building is first seen from a bridge through a clearing in the trees. Visitors approach it by a path along the river's edge.


Once within the building, their movement is directed towards a special room which is oriented towards the borrowed landscape, with a view of the two mountain peaks at the head of the valley.


A large gutter on the south side brings this water into the building, as if to guide the visitor. This same gutter also becomes the entrance canopy to the building, offering shade from the summer sun. The building aims to be cool in summer, full of shadows, with views out to the bright reflected light.


The building is naturally lit, with no electricity, and fresh water is provided by a hand-pump. All timber used in the construction has been taken from renewable or second-hand sources. The building is closed down in winter and becomes a part of the snow covered landscape.



Before the onset of winter, the townspeople of Kamiichi come to clean and prepare the building for the expected snow. It is then left to the small hibernating mammals and roosting birds. In the spring the shutters are opened and the snow barriers removed.


The copper water tank collects water from the gutter on the south elevation. Three overflows celebrate the abundance of meltwaters in the spring.


Section of first proposal. It was intended that the building should collect snow along its slatted roof structure, allowing the melted snow to drip down through the interior of the building.


Paper cut-outs were used to reassess the mass of the building proposition.


The building is snow-bound for seven months of the year, with snow reaching 12m. It is shaped hydro-dynamically to resist the snow, with two timber latticed compression shells. Within these shell structures a new landscape is created, as a resting place for climbers and a winter hibernation space for animals.


Students in Peter Salter's Diploma Unit are often asked to work at scales of 1:500 and 1:5, and nothing in-between. The defining properties of a strategy (not a programme) describable at 1:500 should carry a definitional force capable of determining detail at 1:5. Intermediate scales are disallowed to let a strategy's connective energies make their way, unimpeded, into detail. One applying pressure on the other, both tightens and expands the possibilities of connection and exchange.


Afterword/Making with beautiful circumstances.


Rules For Detail/A Search For Legibility Through Detail.

Peter Salter.


Rules are made to govern the definition of space through the accuracy of constructional detail. In the reading of such detail the spatial emphasis of the room can be understood to be mute or otherwise, giving it a kind of legibility. This ordering and quality of space help determine the accommodation and relevance of the architecture in circumstances where the programmatic brief is unavailable, underdeveloped or redundant. Legibility implies a variation in the reading and definition of the proposition. This is explored through a number of recurring strategies:


To make ever finer territories in order to relieve the burden of scale upon the architectural piece.


To look for possible scale differences – architecture as furniture – as a way of offering emphasis within a sequence of rooms.


To work with an additive architectural programme rather than a conglomerate form.


To introduce the metaphor of the boat as a raft that assembles parts of programme common to the wider building form.


Each strategy offers tactics for proceeding and the possibility of detail. Each implies a layering, a kind of stratification of idea and details; the control of the spatial hierarchy and the design of the door furniture can be layered together.


The strategy offers rules for construction when intuition runs out, and a way of testing form. The layering suggests an in-situ construction – a serialising of programme that offers a crafted building.



Ceramics

Anglian Potters.

Cambridge Exhibition.

https://www.anglianpotters.org.uk/members/russell-moreton/

Monday 14 October 2024

Studio Workings : Outpost/Drawing/Architectural Body.

Outpost 041024


Sensing Peripheries/Gestures and Acts. 

Trace Drawing

Body Outline/Material Flows.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/




A sudden quantum like jump between a thing and its parts, between its different scales, its ontological gap. In a way a whole is really another specific, not a generalization about a specific thing, this means that there is a 'weird gap' between the whole and the parts, an ontological gap.

Timothy Morton.


Architecture in the Space of Flows, 2012.

Andrew Ballantyne, Chris Smith explain that everything can be understood as functioning in terms of flows – flow of various kinds and scales make up architecture and connect it with the world. Here, a volatile mode of thought begins to proliferate architecture as a whole, rather than developing the thought in relation to the body or space in isolation.


The Extracorporeal Space.

Architecture in Abjection.


A visceral assault, an affect that passes through the subject. 

An architecture that gets distilled down to experience and the chemical exchanges between body and space that begins to function within a similar realm to abject(ion).



The basic unit of study is body coupled with architectural surround. 

Arakawa and Gins.


You shouldn't force the memories. Just try to untangle them slowly.


I would suddenly have the feeling that a story was coming back to me and I would reach out instinctively to seize it. But there was nothing for me to hold. When I could no longer stand to stare at the blank page, I would type a, i, u, e, o, and then, imagining that I would now be able to write something, I would erase them again. But of course nothing came to me, and I would return to a, i, u, e, o. And the process would repeat itself. In the end, all that was left was a torn page, from the many times I'd erased what I'd written.


The Burning Library.


It may take a long time for every word to disappear, we held our breath as though fearful of disturbing this beautiful scene. 


The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa.



Ceramic Objects/Monumental vessels that explore contemporary society's relationship to death and ritual.


Abstractive figurative forms invite the viewer to meditate on the intimate relationship between the clay vessel and the human body.


Stair's exhibition explores humanity's reliance on art as a means to transcend the unknown.


Themes of Containment/Embodiment.

Julian Stair : Art, Death and the Afterlife.

Sainsbury Centre, 2023.


Developing explorations in which material culture and artistic practice can engender 'a new , expressive language to both mediate loss and celebrate life, Julian Stair'.



Francesca Woodman.

Gagosian, 2024.


Putri Tan: In those pictures the objects bisect the space and also consume it. Counter to that , as you said, is the body. I'm never wholly convinced of the idea that she is part of the architecture when she's holding on to a column or contorting her body to fit into the environment or to disappear into it.


Corey Keller: There's both a brutality and a monumentality about the bodies she depicts, you don't quite know whether they're trapped or liberated. I think what's interesting about the work is it's never quiet only about the space and it's never quite only about the body, but it's about the psychological spark (tension) that ignites when those things intersect.


Architectural Body

Arakawa and Gins.


The architectural body is a body that can and cannot be found. Boundaries for an architectural body can only be suggested, never determined.


A bioscleave is an event-fabric within which all exists only tentatively, within which all is perpetually shifting, and within which architectural bodies form and collapse, here distinctions between body and space, subject and object are diluted. This results in a certain indeterminacy of boundaries, as body and surround are collapsed into one, and as they are constantly shifting in relation to one another.


I found it terribly difficult to come to terms with the old man's death. I had lost many people who were important to me in the past, but somehow my parting with them had been different from what I experienced now.


But the laws of the island are not softened by death. Memories do not change the law. No matter how precious the person I may be losing, the disappearances that surround me will remain unchanged.. But this time I had the impression that something was different. In addition to the sadness, I was overcome by a mysterious and menacing anxiety, as though the old man's death had suddenly transformed the very ground under my feet into a soft, unreliable mass.


The materials of the world that surrounded R and me were simply too different-as though I were trying to glue a pebble I'd found in the garden to an origami figure. And the old man, who always reassured me at such moments, who promised we could find a different type of glue, was no longer here.

The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa.

Art and Architecture : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Jane Rendell

Art and Architecture. 2006


If a site is a location that can be defined in physical and material terms, a situation can be both spatial and temporal, the location of something in space and a set of circumstances bounded in time – the conditions of a particular instant, a moment, an event. The associated verb to situate describes the action of positioning something in a particular place, while the adjective situated defines something’s site or situation. Situatedness, then, is a way of engaging with the qualities of these processes of situating or being situated.

 ‘Critical spatial practice’ came to my mind back in 2003 as a helpful way of describe projects located between art and architecture, that both critiqued the sites into which they intervened as well as the disciplinary procedures through which they operated. In Art and Architecture (2006), I argued that such projects operated at a triple crossroads: between theory and practice, between public and private, and between art and architecture, and I was keen to stress three particular qualities of those works: the critical, the spatial and the interdisciplinary. 

Other practitioners and theorists have since worked with the term, evolving it in different directions. For example, there was the reading group and blogspot initiated by Nicholas Brown in the early 2000s, which came out of discussions around Brown’s own artistic walking practice. In 2011, Nikolaus Hirsch and Marcus Miessen started a book series with Sternberg Press called Critical Spatial Practice which focused on architectural discourse and practice, and in the first publication they asked the question: ‘What is Critical Spatial Practice?’.

But as this website shows a whole multitude of practitioners and theorists have been developing work in an ‘expanded field’ such as this, quite different perhaps from the one Rosalind Krauss identified in 1979. This is work that overlaps, diverges, converges, runs in parallel, and in circles, and in many cases came before and goes beyond; from transparadiso’s ‘direct urbanism’ to Steve Loo’s ‘sites of perdurance’, these practices incorporate ‘event scores’, ‘insertions’ even ‘banalities’ and pay close attention to relation, position, performance and situation, as well duration.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/










Making/Matter/Material : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Claywork/Correspondences : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Drawing Participation : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Indexical Awareness : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Mechanisms of Mutuality : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Viewing Assemblage : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

A Process of Consciousness : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.









https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

Sunday 13 October 2024

Drawing : From Blindness to Evidence/Figures, Doors and Passages.

Outpost 131024


Taking Sides.

On The Phenomena of Vision : From Blindness to Evidence.

The debt at the origin of all drawing.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/




Derrida in 'Memoirs of the Blind' opens our eyes to this strange filiation, to this sort of conversation or duel between different generations of 'Taking Sides'. It not only teaches us much about blindness, vision, and drawing – about philosophy and art – but leaves us another way to understand the legacy of drawing and vision, the legacy of representation, the legacy of legacy itself.


I have grown to believe that a really intelligent man makes an indifferent painter, for painting requires a certain blindness – a partial refusal to be aware of all the options.

Mrs Talmann, spoken words from The Draughtsman's Contract




It thus will have seen to it to interrupt the legacy of a monocular vision in order to lead us by the hand towards this other legacy that is passed down in darkness. Opening eyes, then, yes – but only in order to cancel them, and to recall that the draughtsman's contract always concerns a pleasure and a condition that are not only out of sight, but out of this world.


Jacques Derrida.

Memoirs of the Blind.

The Self Portrait and Other Ruins.

Witnessing/Testimony/Legacies/Inheritances.


Like a dream, then, of whispering clouds, one can almost hear this obscure communication between past, present, and future, between Derrida and Greenaway, between them and us, between all those 'taking sides' on the other side of vision – in the night.


These are Derrida's themes in 'Memoirs of the Blind'


Blindness, dispropriation and the interruption of a lineage or filiation: the cancellation of what makes representation possible, the difference between the body proper and the supplement, the living body and the scarecrow, and the ruination and death of all foresight, all representation, and all legacies. 


A singular genealogy, a singular illustration of oneself among all these illustrious blind men who keep each other in memory, who greet and recognize one another in the night,

Derrida.


An exhibition ( of selected works) that reflects Derrida's inquiry on vision through the metaphor of blind men and visionaries.


Drawing/Filiations, the relations of one thing to another from which  it is derived or descended.




The Draughtsman's Contract.

Peter Greenaway.


A film about the differences between drawing, painting and sculpture, about allegory and ruin, about masks and funeral monuments, about strategies and debts, optics and blinds, about living statues and sounds represented in drawing. But above all it is about witnessing and testimony, about legacies and inheritances. The very themes of 'Memoirs of the Blind'.

Pascale-Anne Brault, Michael Naas.


Sensing Spaces : Working Assemblage/An extended phenotype of creativity.

Painting/Assemblage/Ceramics.

Ceramic Vessels on Site Specific Ground.

On the sensorial nature of creative inquiry


Indexical markings into the aesthetic realm between objects.

Making With Clay.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/









Relationscape between organism-person-environment.

Architectural Body.

Arakawa/Gins/Manning

Inquiry is essentially the way of learning : Fragile Architectures of Hapticity and Time.

In an era in which architecture is once more learning its potential as a form of inquiry, rather than as a service — as a producer of knowledge, and not merely of ‘projects’.

Brett Steele, Atlas-Tectonics in Barkow Leibininger, Bricoleur Bricolage. AA 2013

 Inquiry is essentially the way of learning.

On Learning ‘The Cultivation of a Good Mind’ J. Krishnamurti, Brockwood 1963


THE WAVERLEY INQUIRY

Interior Design MA, UCA Farnham 2013-2015.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/









ROOMS AS EXPERIENTIAL OUTPOSTS 

Translations from Drawing to Building.

Robin Evans.

Interiors crafted as a palimpsest of augmented realities. 

Robin Evans, Figures, Doors and Passages.

The architect is Not a Carpenter:

On Design and Building, a talk by Tim Ingold Fieldwork on Foot: Perceiving, Routing, Socializing

Jo Lee, Tim Ingold.

The Perception of the Environment,

Essays on Livelihood, dwelling and Skill, Tim Ingold.


The Aesthetics of Decay

Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the absence of Reason, Dylan Trigg. The Projection Room (the darkened room, camera obscura)

Ruin In Architecture and Cinema, Kiefer, Pallasmaa

Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky

The Artist/'Monk, Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky 1966)

Six Memos for the New Millennium, Italo Calvino Architecture as a stage for the effects of an immersive cinema. Palimpsest

Edward De Waal, Antony Gormley, Studio Spaces designed by Architects. Tony Fretton on Retreats, Creative Centres and Exhibition Spaces. Herzog and De Meuron, Working Models, Surfaces, Images and Materials.

Subversive Libraries, researching between the walls of culture and politics.

A HUT WITHIN THE INFLUENCE AND NATURE OF ARCHITECTURE

The tendency of technological culture to standardize environmental condition 

and make the environment entirely predictable is causing a serious sensory impoverishment. Our buildings have lost their opacity and depth, sensory invitation and discovery, mystery and shadow.

Juhani Pallasmaa. Hapticity and Time. Notes on Fragile Architecture. 2000







The Scriptorium Description of Work

The ruined site of the abbey at Waverley, near Farnham has been appropriated as a site and as a place within which to position and develop architectural and sociological inquires. The design processes of interiors have been employed as a tool to both critique and to create how we might further develop the contents of architecture. This Spatiality and its diffractions of differences and similarities, narratives and subjective experiences are what my interior spaces attempt to initiate.

Design as a interactive structure, an interlocutory interior in the making of space and spatial relations.

Interior design presented as an interactive and immersive spatial inquiry

The Scriptorium brings together a varied and discursive set of objects, texts and i interior architectures. This work seeks to understand how the virtual changes physical architecture and how this affects the space between people and buildings. The “performativity of research” is presented through specifically designed apparatuses and partitions. These designed components, made objects together with annotated texts and drawings conspire to create a complex design led inquiry a “Place Study” staged in a niche-like space. This interior presents itself as both distinct and relational to the other projects in the MA Interiors Show. The interior presents the many manifestations of creative research, structures and even symposia that have been developed through engaging with the site. The visualization of the research and the relational architectures rendered through montage and collage explores digital and analogue technologies. This hybridisation and the use of pinhole photography and film footage further explore interests in the field of performance as an immaterial architecture drawn in the presence of place.

The realisation of my interiors project consists of two separate but relational elements that are presented into a built environment. The small ‘Scriptorium’ conceived as a space as a refuge, an intimate minimal construction that features a doorway and an interior that contains a place for objects, perhaps books, as well as a small sitting area. This construction, an open cell perhaps is evocative to a state of contemplation between the fabric of the everyday. The rather hybrid design appropriates a merging of minimalism, modernism and the plastic architecture of a ruined Cistercian Abbey. The construction comes into close contact with its occupant, it is a restricted spatial apparatus that attempts to promote through its awkwardness distinctive experiences. In particular the apparatus of the Scriptorium and its materiality is attempting to promote a sensory intensification that is further underpinned by the cognitive processes of reading and perhaps other social dialogues. The sensory intensification of a hut like space promotes a haptic sensibility, allowing the nearness and intimacies of both the built space and the imaginative, virtual realm to become entangled. Ultimately the Scriptorium is trying to build on unique human subjectivities that are manifested through a kinaesthetic repertoire or script that helps to enact further spatial experiences. It might be useful to think of this constructed space as itself still under construction, a site that acts as its own vessel within the multiplicities of human perception itself. The influence of the Cistercian Order, the site of Waverly Abbey and its pastoral landscape, have all contributed to a sense of the design process, The Scriptorium like the ruins themselves is open to the elements. Waverley Abbey remains as a sensory site between the remains of architecture and its society and the effects of our own global culture in the information age.

In troubled times they all sought to experience life away from social definitions of success or failure. From there, these primitive huts marked personal, original inquires into the ever-mysterious nature of human existence.

Anne Cline. A Hut of One’s Own

Life Outside The Circle Of Architecture.

The Scriptorium began through a research of both architectural themed texts and documentation of the site, and creative practice involving photography (digital, analogue and film) art practices of collage and drawing. The many visits promoted my own subjectivities to the site and these were also frequently subjected to change by the intervention of others in unexpected ways, these social intrusions by other revealed the very boundaries that the historic site engenders, some playful other malicious. These extremities within the social order of the visitors became problematic in designing for the site itself. An earlier proposal to host a Symposium centred on the Arts and The Humanities, that would use the Abbey and its surrounding ground appeared to be a project of vast diversities and logistics better suited to a cultural project through arts management and funding. As the project developed certain creative methodologies around particularities of the site itself began to appear, the notion of palimpsest being one of them. This promoted the idea of a reading room, as an ephemeral interior space that gathers up the experiential values of ‘ruins’ and re-enacts them as a site to explore the architectures of images. It became apparent that ‘palimpsest’ could be both a visual surface of erasures, earlier markings partially over written by newer ones ‘annotations’ and it could be a scaffold of developing ideas clearly visible merging as adaptations into the very usage of the site.

These re-imaginations through the notion of palimpsest seemed filmic and as such they would able to display a vast amount of diversities and subject matter, a library of recourses that would require users or an audience or both. The referencing of the reading room to the library, and the symposium to the cinema or theatre allowed me to realise that I was dealing with a number of spatial arrangements that needed to develop together, but which could be employed separately. The theatre of research became the vehicle in which to see if this collaboration might be possible.

The use of the image and text in my architectural collages allowed me to visualize associations, to create the possibilities of interior spaces that might be manifested into the built environment. The use of the collage in Architecture is widely acknowledged, architects from the likes of Mies van der Rohe, Daniel Libeskind and Rem Koolhaas. The ability of the collage process to juxtaposition fragments, images and texts from irreconcilable origins into an experience, that is visual, tactile and time-based makes it an interesting tool into the realms of architectural design. Collage begins to visualise not only the structure of spaces but also there content and circulation. The theatre of research is interested in how to promote collage and its use as a cognitive and perceptive tool in architecture.

Collage and montage are quintessentially techniques in modern and contemporary art and filmmaking. Collage combines pictorial motifs and fragments from disconnected origins into a new synthetic entity, which casts new roles and meanings to the parts. It suggests new narratives, dialogues, juxtapositions and temporal durations. Its elements lead double-lives; the collaged ingredients are suspended between their originary essences and the new roles assigned to them by the poetic ensemble.

Juhani Pallasmaa. The World is a Collage

Jennifer A. H. Shields. Collage and Architecture

Both the Scriptorium and The Theatre Of Research exist only in the form of the exhibition presentation. What they singularly of together propose can only be imagined through their manifested form as static objects placed within a built structure that loosely references architectural concerns and materials. They appear diminished and assigned to the voyeuristic gaze of the visitor that is equally curios and dismissive. These objects and the interior spaces they promoted seem stilled and stalled, as much they appear beyond reach as if the authenticity of their materials and construction have some how been subsumed by their stature and scale. The issues and qualities of which they are attempting to speak of seem reduced by the hegemony of vision, there is little hapicity and time to encounter, only it seems by investing narratives can we begin to re-enact the spatial encounter.

How might the performativity of research be staged, and into what contexts might it be appropriated?

As Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht notes, we live in a culture of meaning, not in a culture of presence. We constantly produce effects of meaning and multiply them with mass media. This applies not only to the humanities but also to a large degree to our wholly normal everyday lives. And in this respect, our experience of presence is getting drastically lost.

Art works may never completely be explained by theory or meaning. The sensual, material makeup of the work in its presence is not the cinders, slag, and ashes, the undigested remains of theory, but remains of an intensified moment

Peter Lodermeyer.Time, Symposium Amsterdam 2007.

Personal Structures, Time, Space, Existence.

The question I ask is do these objects and their interior spaces cause me to think beyond mere representation and recognition, or rather do they create enough of an encounter to force me to engage with them, even if I or the viewer are un-certain as to their meaning or possible outcome. Deleuze comments that something forces us to think. This something is not an object of recognition, but a fundamental encounter. Something that challenges us. Have these miniature architectures of objects become relational, do we start to use them in perhaps a heuristic manner, a hands-on approach to learning or inquiring, something that we can discover for ourselves. This heuristic finding-out could be made informative through collective collaborations and exhibition through the theatre of research. Is design stripping us of our qualitative spaces as the digital tooling removes the makers trace.

The model object has served as a thinking place in the development of the idea of the Scriptorium. The materials used and their proportions echo interests in Minimalist Sculpture, the intervals between things in the work of Donald Judd and the architectural languages of memory and tectonics of the craftsman turned architect Peter Zumthor. This open sided hut seems cut away almost anatomical as if we were looking into the internal workings of an environment and resident. The structure would have to be made relational to its surroundings if it were to be placed in the landscape. Adaptations to weather the structure, to make it serviceable for use. The Scriptorium has analogues to the notion of a fire-place and its chimney stack. It is a the heart of a building the place of warmth, of dialogues and under the influence through fire of the imagination. The incompleteness that surrounds the scriptorium creatively asks for further design proposals that are even more site specific. The Solar Pavilion built by the Smithsons utilised the old fire place and chimney from the demolished cottage. Around this central element they developed the beginnings of their Modernist (Brutalism) pavilion, an architecture clad with glass, wood and zinc and contained by a walled garden and situated in the pastoral landscape of Wiltshire. Furthering the themes of being in the landscape the Scriptorium could become an observatory, as place from both to look out from and also to look in. The mobility or need to be re-assembled from site to site could promote innovative design solutions as well as interesting detailing or use of materials and surfaces that would facilitate interactions between visitors.

The notion of the Scriptorium becoming clad by an exterior skin, an ephemeral membrane which would then render the differences between the interior and the exterior into the realms of an almost immaterial architectural experience; in as much as the usual distinction between the unpredictable forces of nature outside and the predictable domestic spaces inside. This prompt further investigation into an  architecture that blurs the boundaries of both architecture and nature, this could be further explored through the notion of quixotic gestures, art and performance that can capture the experience and the experiential engagement with the natural elements. The Scriptorium becomes the centred structure of remnant that is surrounded by an architecture that can create imprecise boundaries through inconsistent materials. This spatial arrangement will create its own qualitative responses, dialogues and subsequent movements. Architecture in this context becomes purely a sensorial response.

The body as the vector for active mediation with the world of the spirit. The body is the instrument of a qualitative evaluation, the measure of intensity, which alone is capable of giving space extension and modifying it Space is no objective parameter; it must be ‘excavated’ related to the mobile living parametrics of the body.

Frederic Migayrou. Architectures of the Intensive Body. Yves Klein. Guggenheim. 2005

Mark Prizeman. Intensity. Ephemeral, Portable Architecture.

Time, space and existence are amongst the greatest of themes-so great that we could never be so presumptuous to think we could do them justice, and too close that we could ever escape them, whether with our thoughts or actions, in life or in art.

Peter Lodermeyer. Personal Structures Time. Space. Existence. 2009

My design project has attempted to produce spaces and their interiors together with the apparatus of the Scriptorium that qualitatively seek to inquiry into the world we inhabit. The Theatre of Research attempts to establish some sense of a community that can do field work that invigorates the perception of the environment. My own interests are centred through experientially and mindfully exploring voids, cavities, and spaces between things, together with use of clay, glass and other vernacular materials. As an interior designer/artist I have become experiential to the agency of spaces. The theatre of research becomes a meeting place for furthering my programme initially proposed as a symposium at Waverley Abbey.

Through experiencing familiar images, smells, sounds, and textures, but also through making certain familiar movements and gestures, we achieve a certain symbolic stability. Disrupt that familiar world, and our psychic equilibrium is disturbed. From this we can surmise that home, and the operations performed at home, are linked intimately with human identity. Architecture, it would seem, plays a vital role in the forging of personal identities.








Neil Leach. Camouflage

Analysing the desire to blend-in with our surroundings


Beyond the limits of academic levels of discourse and learning 

Building/Working with Theoretical Objects in Architecture

The Scriptorium would need to collect up and question considerable more qualitative data. Some sort of portable shelter, lightweight and offering some protection from the elements; would have allowed longer periods of stay and the possibility of experiencing different times of day. The activity of walking to the site, of having to incorporate it into a journey would help to create a stronger sense of place and routine. I am interested in the ‘thingness’ of this place, its influence and how its influence might be transposed into a methodology of reading, theorising and making. I am reminded of the Peter Brook who deliberately demolished his avant-garde theatre building Bouffes du Nord in Paris so as he could create a more emotionally responsive space for theatre. It is this under the influence of the Abbey, which I wish to explore as a creative catalyst, a tool that picks up on its differences as qualitative readings. The ruin by its very nature has re-defined its own architecture from one of form into that of experience, this sense of liminality or immateriality that constitutes itself as the architectural experience.




A good space cannot be neutral, for an impersonal sterility gives no food to the imagination. The Bouffes has the magic and poetry of a ruin, and anyone who allowed themselves to be invaded by the atmosphere of a ruin knows strongly how the imagination is let loose.

Peter Brook. The Open Circle

Andrew Todd. Peter Brook’s Theatre Environments. 2003






Friday 11 October 2024

Walmer Yard by Peter Salter talk by John Comparelli

Arakawa and Gins : Architectural Review.

 https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/reputations/arakawa-1936-2010-and-gins-1941-2014

Arakawa (1936-2010) and Gins (1941-2014)

Using architecture as their medium, Arakawa and Gins encouraged people to reassess perceptions, liberate their senses and challenge mortality

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Illustration by Saki Matsumoto

In 2010, artists-turned-architects ShÅ«saku Arakawa and Madeline Gins founded the Reversible Destiny Foundation at their loft and studio on Houston Street in New York, a network for collaborations primarily intended to further their project pursuing immortality through speculative architecture and theoretical inquiries. Created under their provocative mandate ‘we have decided not to die’, these visionary sites of ‘reversible destiny’, implemented in the 1990s and early 2000s, aimed to increase mental and bodily awareness. Their buildings were designed to train the occupant to ‘not die’ through built features including uneven and undulating floors, unusual shifts in scale, and vibrant colour combinations, intended to make the occupant confront their body and senses. 

Arakawa and Gins’ modus was to create environments that demand attention, challenging the senses through constant visual and physical stimulation, compelling us to re-evaluate our world and ourselves. In problematising our bodily states, they suggest, we cannot subsist in stasis or succumb to death. As Gins said, ‘We don’t have to be passive. We can reverse the usual downhill course of things’.

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Screen Valves, 1985-87

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Drawing for a Ubiquitous Site X, 1990

Developed over a five-decade-long creative partnership, Arakawa and Gins’ collective projects encompassed architecture, film, painting, philosophy, poetry and scientific research. Their oeuvre is an odyssey in metamorphosis and mutability – themes the pair would continue to explore throughout their career. Central to their artistic experiments was an underlying questioning of the potential of human perception and experience, and how understanding ourselves as bodies in space can be shaped and reshaped, thought and rethought.

The couple (in both work and life) belonged to the downtown New York art milieu of the 1960s. Arakawa, born in Nagoya, Japan in 1936, attended the Musashino Art University in Tokyo where he began his affiliation with the Neo-Dadaist Organizers, the avant-garde group who borrowed from the materials of everyday life to exploit notions of wit and deadpan humour, and elicit participatory performances that made viewers self-aware of the very act of looking. Gins was born in New York in 1941 and, shortly after graduating from Barnard College in 1962 with a Physics and Eastern Philosophy degree, turned to experimental fiction and poetry. Arakawa moved to New York in the autumn of 1961 and quickly befriended Marcel Duchamp along with other notable figures including John Cage, and was exhibiting works at the Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles by 1965. He met Gins in 1962 while taking classes at the former Brooklyn Museum Art School (BMAS), at a time when many seriously questioned socio-cultural and political life in the US. This, paired with the fact that Arakawa was born in the recent aftermath of the Second World War, alludes to their collaborative efforts to construct a more optimistic version of the world, one that bridged the discourse of conceptual art with the rhetoric of Dadaism and philosophical investigations into phenomenology, linguistics and cognition.

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© 1994-2018 Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins

Biography

Key works

Screen Valves, 1985-87 Ubiquitous Site * Nagi’s Ryoanji * Architectural Body, 1994
Critical Resemblance House, Yoro Park, 1995
Elliptical Field, Yoro Park, 1995
We Have Decided Not to Die, 1997
Reversible Destiny Lofts, Mitaka, 2005
Bioscleave House, East Hampton, 2008
Biotopological Scale-Juggling Escalator, New York, 2013

Quote

‘Most people, in choosing a new home, look for comfort ... Nonsense. People, particularly old people, shouldn’t relax and sit back to help them decline’

Through their independent practices – Arakawa as a conceptual artist turned painter and Gins as an experimental writer – both explored signification through the use of words and symbols, and sought to push possibilities in art and language. Arakawa’s early paintings challenge the capacity of cognition and many already reference architectural elements, such as highly schematic imagery, that suggest blueprints and diagrams, including the windows depicted in his Alphabet Skin (1965-66). In her books, poems and scripts, including her first two publications WORD RAIN (or a Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says) from 1969 and What the President Will Say and Do!! in 1984, Gins employed linguistic stunts and playful typographic treatments to explore philosophical issues within an activated space between reader and author. 

A concern for sensorial and perceptual stimulation is evident in their first truly collaborative project, begun in 1963. The Mechanism of Meaning is a collection of 83 mixed-media, human-sized puzzle-panels, proposing a series of visual, language, and thought exercises, many of them requiring physical interaction to test the automatic ways in which people perceive their surroundings. Intended to shape our cognitive apparatus, The Mechanism of Meaning anticipates later works by Arakawa and Gins that became increasingly spatial, going from the page to three dimensions, and eventually to the realm of architecture. In 1969, Arakawa and Gins contributed to guerrilla literary and art project Street Works IV, creating artworks on the pavements of Manhattan; Arakawa planned to ‘remove the Empire State Building and place it in front of the Architectural League’. 

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Reversible Destiny Lofts, Mitaka, Tokyo

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Reversible Destiny Lofts, Mitaka, Tokyo

Forgoing traditional notions of comfort and convenience, their work intended to confront the physical body with corporeal and mental challenges in an attempt to multiply the ways the body interacts with architecture. Their first consideration of architectural space at full-scale was in 1983 with Container for Mind-Blank-Body, an unrealised proposal for the Venetian island Madonna del Monte. The project lives on as extraordinary exploratory drawings, which illustrate the sequence of different sensorial units one would pass through, featuring undulating topography, walls to be walked through, and trench-like passageways to confront the body’s limitations.

‘Arakawa and Gins put architecture in the service of the mutable body, aiding in the structuring of the self’ 

Many of these elements can be found at Yoro Park in Gifu, Japan; this 18,000m2 urban experiment from 1995 is an elliptical public space known for its tilted terrain and conceptual sculptures. In Critical Resemblance House, one of the park’s buildings, a maze of walls bisect everyday items such as a bath, chair or toilet, questioning how we define objects and their respective functions. The potential for the reassignment of meanings and experiences is also central to Ubiquitous Site * Nagi’s Ryoanji * Architectural Body, one of three large-scale permanent installations at Arata Isozaki’s Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art in Okayama. Realised in 1994, the capsule-shaped installation is also Arakawa and Gins’ first permanent architectural work; two replicas of the Ryoanji Garden in Kyoto affixed to the walls mirror one another while a see-saw appears on the floor and ceiling in different scales, toying with our perceptions and causing a sense of dislocation. Two residential projects, Reversible Destiny Lofts, Mitaka in Tokyo from 2005 and Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa) in East Hampton, NY, three years later, incorporate multi-coloured spaces – the lofts are rendered in 14 paint colours while Bioscleave has 52. With textured, bumpy floors to stimulate the senses, these two projects allow inhabitants to ‘discover the full potential of the body’. 

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Elliptical Field at Yoro Park, Japan, 1995

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Critical Resemblance House at Yoro Park, Japan, 1995

These are the only full-scale architecture projects realised in their lifetime, yet they constitute the ideas and methodologies Arakawa and Gins explored throughout their careers, and speak to their ultimate commitment to architecture. As with the duo’s early independent investigations, their radical architectural ethos attempted to systematically undo physical and mental habits in an effort to unsettle automatisms and what they perceived as a complacency with normative behaviours. They saw their architectural projects as strategies for heightened awareness and life-extending experiments, where commonplace sensorial experiences are deliberately denied, and replaced with ‘procedures’ for new ways of thinking and moving in space: a practice conceived to re-educate, or even coerce, the body. Space, time and the self are seen as a dynamic progression of experiences, rather than as one static, concluding experience. 

To transform the mind and body through space, they expanded on diverse discourses, straddling conceptual art, experimental poetry, philosophical inquiry, linguistics, cognition, disability studies, medical research and phenomenology, bringing these pluralistic interests into their architectural projects. Gins once referred to the architectural manifestation of their work as ‘an interactive laboratory for everyday life’. 

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Bioscleave House, East Hampton, 2008

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Bioscleave House, East Hampton, 2008

Their approach to architecture, like all subjects they pursued, might be best understood as a way to pose questions more than offering precise answers. As Duchamp put painting back ‘in the service of the mind’, Arakawa and Gins put architecture in the service of the mutable body. Central to this ideology is the notion that architecture can aid in the structuring of the self. In what could be described as the artists’ architectural treatise, the human form is inseparable from site, as body, person and world are interlaced. Both Arakawa and Gins were independently inspired by American blind-deaf writer Helen Keller. Gins’ genre-bending, multi-person biography, Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994) commingles the lives of the historical figure, the artist Arakawa, as well as the author, Gins, to collapse time, place and identities, and question what constitutes an able body.

In their attempt to radically reshape the conditions of perception, they devised their own set of terms to describe their goals, including ‘architectural body’, articulated in their 2002 manifesto-book of the same name. In it, they describe the reciprocity between body and architecture, and how, through architecture, meaning is created and defined through a process of self-invention.

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Ubiquitous Site * Nagi’s Ryoanji * Architectural Body, 1994

Later speculative projects were envisioned on an urban scale, including the development of apartment complexes, public housing and plans for entire cities, which live on today as schematic studies, models and digital renderings. Arakawa and Gins brought to these projects similar elements from their past works, including labyrinthine terrains, colourful and volumetric architectures (cubes, spheres, pyramids) and a continued experimentation with programme and space. Of the 2003 unrealised Isle of Reversible Destiny, Fukuoka, Gins wrote: ‘A very natural-appearing engineered terrain, an extremely re-articulated terrain makes it possible for the body and the city to operate conjointly – as much kinaesthetically, proprioceptively, and tactilely as visually.’ Though these projects were never realised, their questioning of what constitutes a body, through an approach to creating designs for the reconstruction of experience, brings their work into proximity with fields such as artificial life research. 

Since their deaths (Arakawa in 2010 and Gins in 2014), many have argued the various interpretations of their work. Some have suggested it was metaphorical provocation. Some believe it was to be taken at face value. Others still offer the idea that the work was about the act of processing, rather than an argument about whether or not they truly believed architecture could reverse death. For Arakawa and Gins, the best way to understand the world (and thus ourselves), is to overturn it as it is. If anything, such an ambitious and experimental undertaking remains their greatest legacy.