Architectural Body/Architecture In Abjection : Bodies/Spaces and their Relations.

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Studio Works/Architectural Surround.

Art practice explores relations between organism-person-environment.

Architecture In Abjection.

Bodies, Spaces and their Relations.

Zuzana Kovar. 2018

This book marks a turning point in architectural theory by using philosophy to examine the field anew. Breaking from the traditional dualism (space-body) within architecture – which presents the body as subject and space as object – it examines how such rigid boundaries can be softened. Zuzana Kovar thus engages with complementary and complex ideas from architecture, philosophy, feminist theory and other subjects, demonstrating how both bodies and bodily functions relate deeply to architecture. 

Architecture: A dualistic paradigm.

On the breath of approaches to subjectivity.

Eisenman,Tschumi, Derrida.

Deconstructivism challenged the notion of wholes, order, rationality and stability of space/object. Hence it questioned much of modernism, which was seen as purist, and attempted to map out an in-between. In the late 1980s, Eisenman wrote that 'traditional oppositions between structure and decoration, abstraction and figuration, figure and ground, form and function  could be dissolved.

Architecture could begin an exploration of the 'between' within these categories. Explorations of the in-between can be seen in play in Eisenman's Wexner Centre (1989) in Columbus, a building split in two by a 'scaffold structure', which is not temporary but permanent. As such, the centre apparently 'falls somewhere between process and product, past and present, shelter and non-shelter, structure and form, structure and ornament, building and non-building, exterior and interior. In an almost identical sense, Tschumi has written much the same in his Manhatten Transcripts (1994). 

What emerged from Derrida and his deconstructive form of criticism was a particular way of thinking about and practising architecture beyond dualism. Yet, despite this apparent shift from a dualist mode of thought to one that engaged with the in-between, and despite the complexity and promise of thought revealed in the respective theories of Eisenman and Tschumi, if one interrogates the built works, what is revealed is that the subject remains very much intact, and so too does the dualism of subject-object.

Deconstructive architectural theory and its built works have been funnelled into a formalism, which is preoccupied with deconstructing platonic solids and the notion of the object/space as a whole and discrete entity.

For Kovar, what is necessary, is to reconfigure the dualism of subject-object/body-space, to deconstruct the hierarchy and distinction between the two and to map out an in-between between these, rather than within space itself. It is the distinction between body and space that forms the crux of dualistic thought within the architectural discipline, which unless probed, will  allow this mode of thought to prevail.

Tschumi's theory of 'event' introduces a relational conception of the body within architectural discipline. In so doing he mobilises the subject and further shifts the focus from a body to the movements of that body. For Kovar, this setting of the body in motion (although again we are dealing with just one side of the equation) is a lot more productive in the context of questioning dualistic paradigms than formally deconstructing space. Thinking in terms of event allows for not only a volatile conception of the body, but a volatile conception of architecture, given that for Tschumi architecture is constituted by spaces and events.

Developing architectural thought beyond relations to a body or space in isolation.

Event/Assemblages/Bodies/Space-Flows.

Using the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattati and the notions of event, movements, defined in terms of vectors and field relations, time (or the idea that all things change) and scale (an awareness and importance of the similarities in relations across any number of scales)

Architectural Body.

Architectural Surround

Bioscleave.

Arakawa and Gins map out a relational understanding of bodies and spaces, and hence a relational understanding of architecture.

Thinkers, theories conducted in spaces inhabited through experimental projects that illuminate theory at its core.

Sanford Kwinter, Arakawa + Gins, Brian Massumi, Gilles Deleuze.

Being Ecological.

Part of our growing ecological awareness is a feeling of disgust that we are literally covered in and penetrated by nonhuman beings, not just by accident but in an irreducible way. A way that is crucial to our very existence. Maybe this feeling of disgust will diminish if we become used to our immersion in the biosphere. Just like our neurotic feelings diminish as we become friendlier with our thoughts.

Timothy Morton.

Studio Workings : Outpost/Drawing/Architectural Body~Bioscleave

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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.

Studio Works/Architectural Surrounds : Drawing into the indeterminacy of boundaries.

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Research Collage 2015

Disjunction and Event/Architecture In/Between.

The task of the architect is to modulate, orchestrate, or simplify the potential reciprocity, indifference, or conflict that spaces can generate. Most problems in architecture are disjunctive, namely they are multiple, heterogeneous, divergent and even contradictory, involving site, program, budget, schedule, and interest groups, among other factors. All of these contradicting and disjunctive forces eventually contaminate one another. Bernard Tschumi, Notes on Architecture 2010 (unpublished).

Making/Adaptations/Using The Made.

Drawing into the indeterminacy of boundaries.

Organism-Person-Environment

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

Studio Drawings.

On Feeling More Matter than Form.

There is always more of everything than a thing can contain.

Immediate Architectural Experiences.

Bodies, Spaces and Their Relations.

Creating an independent yet meaningful reality, that are direct aesthetic experiences of the real.

Kenzo Tange.

Regaining our experience in a world of mass media  culture, regaining a world that is directly lived.

Ann Cline.

Architectural Body/Sited Awareness.

Arakawa and Gins  end up pointing to the inseparability and affect of body and surround, for them this inseparability is what gives rise to the architectural body. They write that a person should never be considered apart from her surroundings, that their hypothesis of the Architectural Body/Sited Awareness, announces the indivisibility of seemingly separate fields of bioscleave: a person and an architectural surround, and that the two together give procedural architecture its basic unit of study the architectural body.

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. 

The architectural body is a body that can and cannot be found. 

Boundaries for an architectural body can only be suggested, never determined.

Architecture in Abjection.

Zuzana Kovar.

Relevance/Relation as a way of organizing things through both contingency (philosophy) and metonymy (linguistics).

Relevance has by its nature, wiggle room because things have wiggle room. Because things never quite coincide with how they appear for or how they are used by or interpreted by other things (and possibly even themselves).

What we want to do and how we feel and what we are wanting and feeling about are all mashed together into an ecological awareness.

The Context of Relevance is Structurally Incomplete.

Whenever you want to do something, you always encounter a whole thicket of things that are relevant to what you're wanting to do. This thicket of things creates an explosion of contextualization, and you can't – won't be able to stop it.

Timothy Morton.

An interconnection without an edge or centre called General Economy.

Bataille.

Architecture and Material Practice

Katie Lloyd Thomas.

Susannah Hagan argues for a return to a cyclic model where matter is only ever reformed and make (or adapt) architecture accordingly – but without necessarily returning to old forms of building. In a responsible future, architects may have to relinquish their role as form givers, and 'grow' materials rather than give them shape.

Social imperatives and new technologies may well, finally, be the undoing of the grip that hylomorphism has held on architectural and material practices for so long.

Caryatids/Project Spaces.

Architectural Surrounds.

Studio Floor Drawing/Painting.

Mattering/Of and For the Body of Others.

Material Worlds : Frottage, charcoal, wax, Indian Ink, crayon on water.

Material and buildings are always implicated, in and of the world. In discussing her work with a group of African women who are beginning the process of making their own homes, Doina Petrescu asks how their principle of 'putting together and sharing' might be realized in an architectural project. 

The specificities of place, culture, gender and local forms of negotiation make an 'architecture' that is more fluid than solid, and more matter than form, and demonstrate the radical alterity of building in another context.

Architecture in Abjection.

Organism-Person-Environment

Human bodies and spaces flow  through one another – a chemical indiscernibility that is invisible.

Two of the most fundamental things that come out of the work of Rahm and Arakawa and Gins for architecture, in mapping out a more open-ended and volatile understanding of bodies and spaces, are the reduction of these to matter and a thinking in terms of relations or events rather than static and discrete entities. These link directly into the area of process and intelligent material philosophy that is at the forefront of this thinking, and that is employed here, namely through the work of Deleuze and Guattari, in order to approach abject(ion) productively. 

What the introduction of abject(ion) and a reading of it through the filter of Deleuze and Guattari allows for and contributes on top of its own way of reworking dualities is a bringing together of the material and processual approaches already in play within the work of Rahm and Arakawa and Gins, respectively. It is with this in mind that we move to the Kristevan concept.

The Hot Death. 2006.

Philippe Rahm.

Rahm's work has a very particular quality. There is almost no building, which is usually the measure or ground of architecture. There is nothing left but the ritual, experience, coder and effect of architecture itself.

Physiological/Meteorological Architecture operates across fields of art, architecture and science. Rahm through his spaces, manipulates temperature, oxygen and hormone levels. Importantly, as his works straddle this range of fields, it frees up the architecture, allowing it to be distilled down to its effects and to experience.

An architecture that gets distilled down to experience and the chemical exchanges between body and space. It begins to function within a similar realm to abject(ion). It becomes about a visceral assault, an affect that passes through the subject.

This extracorporeal space, especially in contemporary man, consists of filling to the point of overflow where the subject is ensnared, a condition  of the state of stress and an endemic breach of adaptation.

The Hot Death is a choreography piece that investigates the indiscernibility of the body and space at a chemical level. A levelling between body and space occurs, where the temperature of the space slowly comes to equal that of the living body, stabilising the two and eliminating their differences: a  play on death.

The bodies are on stage at the start of the order of individuality, each with its own movements, independently of others, as a multitude of energy. Then gradually, the temperature, humidity of the room rises to match that of the human body. The movements are slower, heavier, gravity wins put up any ground, motionless, without more space between, more movement possible.

Body and space are at the fundamental level of a base materialism, merely matter, and that because of this, 'can wind quintets carry and spread the flu virus?' such exchanges are possible.

Raum's work moves away from an architecture that is constituted by body and space to an architecture that is the active exchange between body and space. It is in this understanding – that bodily and spatial boundaries are not clearly demarcated as architecture still generally assumes them to be, and that they regularly are transgressed and diluted – that constitutes a move beyond dualistic modes of thought.

Clay+Ceramics : Correspondences and soundings on deep surfaces.

Nomadic Structures~Compositions : 

Drawing Resonances~Surfaced Sounds

Works in action that are paused at specific sites of speculation.

Wayfaring~Making : Bodies Of Experience through Spatiality, Temporality, and Subjectivity.

https://axisweb.org/artist/russellmoreton

Art works in gathering and playing a 'series of exchanges or choreographed economies composed of actions, things, people, events and places' with critical spatial practices.

Jane Rendell.

Tim Ingold.

Ceramic Shelters : Transitional Zones between Thinking and Making.

Russell Moreton : A visual fine artist working with clay is exploring themes around 'Making' involving the imprint of the artist, and metaphysical immersive nature of contemporary art practices and architecture. He is Interested in developing speculative making spaces where craft, theory, art and architecture can come together.

Moreton's site-based practices using clay as his principle material  further develops his  inquiry into a site based speculative learning, and with it creative propositions for knowledge production through his ceramic objects. He finds in ceramics an analogy with architecture, in particular a resonance of a spatial structure in which the the drama of the building has now ceased. 

His practice investigates the interconnectedness of making interior spaces. These works in clay are processual in nature, developed by a need to demarcate and fold material into spatial forms and volumes. The act and gesture of drawing further adds ephemeral marks of process amongst the materiality of the built spaces. Clay slips and other incised marks on both sides of the clay are all interwoven into his spatial forms.

Assemble forms are then divided into several spatial interiors, in which the use of piercings are used  through the surface to set up a circulation for light to enter into the interiors. Further firings and more ceramic coatings are applied to further investigate the involuntary relationships that have emerged. These objects are unknowable as they are extracted from the kiln, and as such they act as forms that can take on a theoretical nature, gathering his discursive researches and readings into a performative ceramic body.

For Moreton ceramics help to facilitate the essential auditory experience of silence, as experience by architecture as tranquillity. He is drawn by the solitudes of libraries and the sounds of construction, of pounding on materials, of making and constructing space. Architecture also presents this drama of construction silenced into matter, space and time. His  finished fired constructions could  become a museum for a waiting, patient silence. The silence of architecture, like that of clay is a responsive, remembering and meditative gathering, a correspondence of matter(s). 

Tim Ingold : Textility of Making/Hungate Clay Drawings/Speculative Constructions/Interior Design Theory

The House is all about the poetry of shelter and siege from the elements and cosmos.

Gaston Bachelard.

In And Out Of Material. 2007.

Tony Cragg.

All our senses scan the space in front of us; the future, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, lies before us.

Clay, is always a working idea, a matter/material process between things, a form of thinking in process.

Clay-Drawings in volumes, void spaces and surfaces.

Presenting a building as a process rather than an object; a process which continues from the initial conception phase throughout its existence via construction and occupation

Tim Ingold.

Textility of Making, 2020.

https://issuu.com/oliwkaka/docs/publ_ver_15_publish_fin

Building Materials/Brick Form/Buttressed/Tower/Scaffolding

Corten Metal Box Constructions.

Components brought into a spatial form/navigation/exploration of built spaces.

Building as drawing, showing changes taken, marked, erasures, superimpositions, indexical and scored surfaces.

Materials marked, moved and redeployed elsewhere.

Poche/Pierced Walls/Architectural Details

Lead tray/Water/Ceramic/Wooden Wedges.

Making Template/Drawing/Pierced Components

Hidden Spaces/Enclosed/Confined Volumes/Voids

Experiential/Spatial Alterations to the drawn plan as the building commences. 

St Peter Hungate

Norwich.

A History of the Church.

Geoffrey Goreham, Rachel M. R. Young.

1965.

This sketch by John Kirkpatrick, who died in 1728, is the earliest extant picture of the church.

John Bonde also left 6d, to the anchorite of St. Peter Hungate. This  was a man vowed to live a religious life in solitude. An anchorite's cell was often built against the church wall with a connecting window, so that he could hear Mass and yet remain secluded.

The pyx and the metal box or chrismatory (mentioned in 1368) which held the consecrated oils were also locked lest the holy wafer and oils should be stolen and used in witchcraft.

Monochrome by James Sillett, 1828.

Space-Enfolding-Breath.

Monica Wyatt.

Towards a New Interior.

An Anthology of Interior Design Theory

Lois Weinthal, 2011.

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience

Localities of experience and research : Making Entangled

Making Entangled : An eclectic synthesis of knowledge fields

Potters Wheel/Studio Space/Reconstrution/Licie Rie/V & A London.

Mary Quant, V&A London.

Confronting Spatial Intelligence-tracing the use of spatial intelligence. 

What are we learning about in the concrete particularity of this space?

Leon van Schaik : Spatial Intelligence

‘Architecture is the product of our spatial intelligence, of its workings in establishing the mental spaces of every individual, and of the spatial values shared by groups.’

The Retreat, Upper Lawn Pavilion. 1959

This country retreat presents itself as a glass box but is grounded by its relationship to the pre-existing masonry of a walled garden. 

Leon van Schaik comments that the little glass house retreat built by Peter and Alison Smithson around a walled garden evokes for him memories(mental spaces) of being a schoolboy working in a conservatory in a walled garden at Cliveden, such that the notion of a retreat is this ideal of being built into the walls of an existing walled garden.

You rise up into its glazed upper storey with views over the rolling hills beyond and perch atop the wall on the edge of a threshold space carved out of the woods, or remove yourself from view sink down to the ground and sit with your back to the wall.

Kenneth Frampton subscribes to a general theory of architecture independent of any local articulation beyond adaptations to meet the needs of local climatic conditions.

Dalibor Vesely, an architectural theorist who spent his teaching life demonstrating that in the modern era the unity of time, place and culture that is essential to architectural reality has been fractured. Leon van Schaik comments as a consequence in architecture today our spatial knowledge is either buried deep within our unconscious, or it is surfaced in a highly simplified (adolescent) form.

Architecture as ‘a purveyor of esoteric spatial luxuries to domestic elites’ (Schaik, 2008:84)

It follows that this fractured reality is deeply problematical to architecture, to the increasing number of architectural practices that have no ready connection to the daily expectations of citizens, resulting in a brutal instrumental policing of space (and our mental spaces) via the architecture that underpins the politics of our corporate or governmental interests.

Mediators for spatial experiences.

Interior design presented as an interactive and immersive spatial inquiry

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 my practice. The Abbey, its buildings, and its grounds have provided a valuable source of the material evidence for thinking about hapticity and time in a pastoral setting.

The Scriptorium presents the “performativity of research” through specifically designed apparatuses and partitions. These designed components, made objects, together with annotated texts and drawings conspire to create a complex interior design, 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 that have been developed through engaging with the site.

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.

Libraries with research conduits for immersive and interactive cognitive mappings, allowing a praxis to enter the practicability of the everyday, a crafted philosophical inquiry, building new livelihoods.

Colour Texture Surface Enclosures Voids

Sample Materials: Relationships through Localities/Mood Boards/Technical and Physical Details.

Erasure in drawing and architectural planning (space voids) as a methodology to superimpose multiplicities.

Erasing : Kirosan Observatory, Anti-Object, Kengo Kuma. 

Multiplicities and Memory, Peter Zumthor.

Learning Spaces as a performative spatial practice through a process of tuning and minimizing. Noh stage in the forest, Kego Kuma.

PLANNING DOCUMENT use GRAPHIC DESIGN, theories and applications to visualize, design and map out the nature/interior spaces and experiences of this proposal.

Natural Connections: Retreat and Awareness through Architecture (Architectural Experience).

Experiencing The Phenomenology of Place at Waverley Abbey

INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE through a sensitive adaptation of place studies, and using materials and built spaces to form the container/scaffold/stage for an activity not its contents. Working spaces that can be given a multiplicity of tasks that can accommodate the humanities and the life sciences.

Architecture and landscape, together with the localised weather, and the sheltering buildings all contribute to finding the mental spaces for the retreat.

APPARATUSES DURATIONS EFFECTS

THINGS-MAKING-PEOPLE-IN THE WORLD

Heightening the experiential experiences of place. Ramps, stairs and passages as devices (movable) to examine and to create immediate architectural interventions. Notion of the observatory (part built/part still under development) (monuments as instruments, Japor). The camera obscura’s darken room becomes a stage and a cinema; a drawing black boarded room for making creative reciprocal social practices.

MAKING SPACES PARTIAL to the material flows and currents of sensory awareness in which IMAGES and OBJECTS reciprocally take shape/meaning.

The Body in Space: merging/mediating/climbing over architecture and its territory in the landscape.

Keywords,

Place Studies : Spatiality : Phenomenology of Place : Spatial Intelligence :

Relational Aesthetics:

Retreat, Sensing Spaces, Experiential, Pastoral, Architectural Fabric, Ruined Buildings, Historical Community/Order, Neo Romantic, Camera Obscura, Mortality, Consumption, Palimpsest, Remote Sensing, Architectural Interventions, Material, Massing, Body, Objects and Things, Craft, The Physical Body (Historical/Postmodern), Contemporary Art Practices, Tim Ingold

‘Making’ and the inter relationships of Archaeology, Anthropology, Art and Architecture.

Assets of Site

Listed Historical Site, Tranquil (of road site in parkland), Otherness (ruination and romance), Water, Archaeology (building), anthropology (significant settlement Cistercian Abbey)

CREATING FORMS AND MESSAGES

The Way Things Are Connected (or the stickiness of dependence between things and humans)

Kengo Kuma. Anti-Object

Not Networks, but rather Entanglements or Meshworks/Mesh (implying infinite connections and infinitesimal differences) or Mess (resists neat compartmentalization and order). 

Mark Dion. Archaeology

The Work, its Shelter, the Collection and its Process and Furniture (Agency)

The Wunderkammer as a structural feature (De Waal, V&A )

The Mapping/Charting Table (conduit, meeting/passing place)

Tim Ingold. Making

Ian Hodder. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things.

Peter Greenaway. The Physical Self.

The Self in a Spatial/Social/Corporeal Situation The Tactility/Closeness of Learning (Craft)

DESIGN CREATIVELY/COLLABORATIVELY AND STRATEGICALLY THINKING IN THE RUINS

THINKING IN THE FICTION OF RUINS

THE ABBEY AS A REMNANT OF ITS WORLD, IN WHICH WE HAVE COME TO LATE,

TO A WORLD THAT HAS SEEN TOO MUCH.

POLITICS OF PLACE, English Heritage/Listed Building, has been used as a filming locating in contemporary cinema ranging in genres from the historical to the dystopian. Recently use of the site as a film location allowed the building of a temporary tower structure situated in close proximity to the existing ruinous fabric of the site.

POETICS OF SPACE/Bachelard AETHETICS OF DECAY/Trigg

THE WAR OF DREAMS/Marc Auge 

The Theatre of Operations.

Ruins, as a notion and a phenomena are slowly disappearing from our western cities, out of a lack of time (faute de temps) Marc Auge further comments that we are condemned to produce waste, not remnants of the past.

LOCATION, Streetfinder O/S. GPS Locality and access options/experiences.

World placing with solar and astronomical positioning. Scale and proximity

HISTORY, site, occupations, ruination, dereliction, reclamation into a garden feature. SITE SPECIFIC to GLOBAL CONCERNS

LOCALITIES and HISTORIES

HUMAN EXPERIENCE, Qualitative and Quantitative

DWELLING, LEARNING, RUINS, AND MEMORY> WHAT REMAINS? 

MAPPING/REMOTE SENSING using the palimpsest of this landscape/of its human occupation, of its demise to re-instate and re-imagine the cultural and anthropological shifts that have affected humanity.

RE-INSTATING a gathering with intellectual concerns in the humanities.

SPEAKERS/REASEARCH POSTERS/EXHIBITIONS and ART WORKS/SCREENINGS.

Oren Lieberman, Immediate Architectural Interventions/Intraventions. 

Mark Dion, Thames Dig, tents, taxonomies, teeth and texts.

Kate Whiteford, Land Drawings, installations and excavations

Colin Renfrew , Remote Sensing, aerial photography of sites (WW2) being used to re­ image specific archaeological notions of place.

Tim Ingold, MAKING, on the entanglements of Archaeology, Anthropology, Art and Architecture.

METHODOLOGIES

Temporary structures, blue screens, stage flats, projection, surfaces and skins, envelopes and membranes, optics and materials, programmes and debate, exhibition and research, global networking and virtual presentations, workshops around the phenomenology of place and its interrelationships with critical spatial practice. Presentations and Symposium, Curriculum and Practices, Site Specific Work and Performance.

Public Intimacy in Social Spaces. Architecture and The Contemporary Arts.

Learning through Making, (The Parallel of Life and Art) Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture.

Visitor’s Centre, with interpretive exhibition (Stonehenge/Denton Corker Marshall) or an immersive intervention (Winchester Cathedral,Anima-Animus/Elferova and Wilson). A place where the interior space evokes a sense of place/a becoming (Existential, Historical, Social, Cultural) see ‘The Physical Self exhibition curated by Peter Greenaway. The Fate of Place/Human Sociology.

A contemplative space or spiritual/secular retreat featuring a series of interventions (Follies/Pavilions/Huts/Heidegger/Tschumi) that focuses the gaze on a particular view or detail, framing a distant reference (landmark or natural phenomenon, research into Lutyen’s ‘Thunder House’ for Gertrude Jekyll).

Museum of Wisdom. Kengo Kuma. 

Noh Stage In The Forest. Kengo Kuma. 

Hortus Conclusus. Peter Zumthor.

The Solar Pavilion. Alison and Peter Smithson.

The Secular Retreat, Living Architecture. Peter Zumthor. 

Heidegger’s Hut, Bachelard’s Poetics, Ingold’s making.

Spatial Apparatuses, Buildings and Social Devices/Agendas 

Events as Interventions producing Intraventions from Sociology, Architecture and the Humanities/Contemporary Arts.

USING the existing site to host concerns and education through a light footprint of temporary structures and intermediary arts based events.

THEMATIC SPACES in literature and the arts locate themselves within the ruins; become new creative points of departure, new narratives that add to the spatiality of the events experience.

CRITICAL SPATIAL PRACTICES (Architecture/Fine Art and Performance) as a methodology for engaging with the transformative processes now emerging is of vital scholarly concern for design practices and professionals.

Inclusions of observation and practice.

Experiential experiences from a place by the river, under the canopy of dappled sunlight; a secluded proximity of the monks dormitory through the pleasing decay that is aging beautifully.

Variegated and mutable veiling of transparencies through sunlight and a gentle breeze.

Shadow (voids) and Forms (layered movements) Permeable membrane (time passes through here)

The River (Jackie Leven/Kenneth Patchen, The Skaters) a corporeal presence on loss, memory/absence, subjectivity and flow.

Kengo Kuma. Complete Works, Kenneth Frampton.

‘Our aim is to create architecture that confronts and fuses with the earth’

‘Architecture should not be cut off from the ground like a building designed and transported to the site’

Kema’s ‘anti-objective’ architecture is anti-perspectival in that it is categorically anti­ thetical to the subject/object split of the occidental tradition.

‘The asymmetrical projection of the Water/Glass volume, derived from the diagonal platform of the Noh stage, makes it explicit that there is no single ideal point from which this waterborne scene may be experienced.’ (Frampton, 2012:12)

Katsura Aesthetic.

Non Corporeal Architecture ( 2001 A Space Odyssey, the final room with its dematerialised phantom character of absence and voyeurism)

Japanesse Vernacular, Void/Ma space, Translucency, Sequence of Spaces,

Siddig El’Nigoumi’s pots hold an interior space that cannot itself be transposed only broken ; they are in effect testimonial silences to his humility and his agency working with clay. In my mental space on these inner spaces of Nigoumi’s ceramics I can reach a correspondence, a pitch with its distinctive mutual timbre that is still active. The existential trait left in the innerness of these vessels is irreducible to my own subjectivity.

Site drawings, archaeology of found objects, anthropological observations, time based media, architectural plans.

Interior Spaces/Making and the adaptation of existing.

Photographic drawings, collage, montage, interventions through designed walls/pathways/interactions.

“Hut” Sensing Spaces/Building.

Materials, aesthetics, volumes, dwelling, social, light and dark, place.

Localities of experience and research.

Negative Capability Exhibition (art works in response to archaeological sites),Winchester University.

Making Spaces/Proximities : Navigating theory and redundancy.

Outpost 120224

Studio Spaces.

A Scriptorium, a space within the wall.

St Jerome at his study.

Making Spaces/Proximities : Navigating theory and redundancy.

INTIMUS

Interior Design Theory Reader.

Julieanna Preston.

Mark Taylor.

Declaring a field of inquiry that lies beyond disciplinary boundaries of design and architecture, all of the texts included in this reader establish generative and active exploration of interior design as a practice informed by the intellectual scholarship surrounding its cultural production and creative practice. They are not foundational in that they do not recognise or declare an originary state or propose any fundamental canon. Collected in order to catalyse creative associations within this operational field, the texts in this volume are presented via an organisational strategy that refuses both chronologic and thematic structure.

Essentially they present a connectivity to do with inhabitation and spatial presence as outlined in the examples above that is at once distant, by discipline, and intimate, by content.

Proximities/On interior theory related to the specifics of inhabitation and bodily presence.

What is being teased out hear is a multifaceted dialogue between that which is theoretical in nature, abstract, knowledge-based and immaterial and that which is grounded, physical, phenomenal and concrete. Not wishing to pull these apart, but rather to encourage convergence, this book identifies a territory of emerging points that collectively register connections of understanding with reference to a field tentatively named as the theoretical domain of interior design.

This conception forms a working method for searching and organising texts, and for mapping their locations as a relational matrix. Described in other theoretical discourse as rhizomatic, networked or diagrammatic, matrices foster the formation of connections among notions as opposed to defining or creating singular isolated entities.

However, one image in particular harboured virtual potentials pertinent to our inquiry.

Within the pages of Emily Post's book 'The Personality of a House' is a photographic plate attributed to New York architect William Laurence Bottomley. This seemingly unassuming image gently frames the prevailing issues, topics and texts in this volume. 

The doors reveal a space between the opaque panelling, a space within the wall occupied by a small vanity or dressing-table. Another mirror backs the niche which doubles the light, and the ruffles and tassels of swagged curtains are softly gathered at the boundary of this closet and cloister. The room seems to be dressed in parity to the self-reflective body that inhabits it. And yet, it is a private space,  a space for one, a space for an individual.

The mirrors reflect very little of the greater surroundings, but the scale of the panelling and the floor-to-ceiling height help to extrapolate that this secret space occurs as an informality among the far more social and self conscious home atmosphere.

How might this 'Perfect Example of Dressing-Table hidden behind panelling when not in use' be physically, socially and theoretically constructed? How are the intricate details of curved timber work on the doors and stool indicative of current and historical values of ornament, surface, gender and politics? While the doors mask the presence of the dressing-table, the mirrored interior expands infinitely. What appears as a small enclosure is a mode of liberation. What one might assume to be self-indulgent or decadent decoration may be found to be a sign of self-expression.

While the architectural room is wrapped with abstract notions of time and space, this small alcove inhabits its periphery as a pocket where body is central, maybe even fluid, and space is temporal, perhaps even subjective. 

The archive of discursive fields of inquiry.

Navigating theory and redundancy.

On a theoretical praxis, a matrix for gathering material from the archive.

The matrix is intended to be used as a surveying instrument and ordering device with the purpose to catalyse cross- and inter-disciplinary insights.

A matrix or diagram mediates between the virtual potentials generated by the data ( the field of essays/excerpts) and the actual book. The matrix is to some extent graphic shorthand used to declare latent structures of organisation. The diagram is also generative, and can be used to order possible readings.

Seeking theory informative to interior design/spatial practices by trusting that through the act of searching various sources/databases/resources a range of associations and connections would verify an emergent practice. Such associations are fuelled by the abstract and diagrammatic quality of an organising tactical matrix in its flexibility to seek casual and coincidental links among related and sometimes assumed disparate disciplines. By looking for correspondences between seemingly unrelated research and practice, and by moving laterally between existing systems and categories, not in a haphazard manner but through productive leaps generated by rules that had consequential and significant outcomes. This process enabled the gathering of material from several disciplines when the linear historical model seemed inapplicable, and thematic structures too constraining.

Coupled with its ability to engage the complexity of the real, the matrix assists in making sense of the found texts and their potential reformations. Conceptually, such order is not made towards the specificity or hegemony of a discipline, but rather to turn outwards and mobilize forces of action and imagination between matter and information.

Pragmatically, the matrix positions each text relative to a disciplinary body of knowledge (social, political,philosophical, technological, gender and psychological) and then relative to prominent interior design/spatial practice issues (material, colour, light, space, decoration and furnishing). Within this methodology an interpretive role is played in ordering these texts and the multiple locations in which each text could be placed.

Producing an interdisciplinary database search using terms typically associated with interior design as a decorative craft, an architectural speciality, a spatial art or a physical articulation of social interaction located essays framed by a wide range of types of theory, genres of writing and sources of textual discourse.

Many of the researched essays did not declare that they are concerned with 'interior theory', but instead they either operated critically on spaces, places and inhabitation of the built environment's interiors, or offered observations and abstractions of use and inhabitation that engender a criticality in this collection of texts. To include this material raises questions of what constitutes theory, and how theory relates to the critical study of the interior.

Thresholds of experiential concern.

Architectural Body/Transactive Memory.

The reclamation of theory, other spaces, further sites for production and inquiry. 

In their book 'Intersections : Architectural Histories and Critical Theories', Iain Borden and Jane Rendell outline nine epistemological tendencies on which theory is constituted within critical discourse. Rather than champion a narrow definition or description, their categories are expansive and inclusive, and when considered relative to the scope of our inquiry assist in substantiating numerous items that would normally fall outside the limits of architectural or design theory, most notably some that take the form of turn-of-the-century advice literature or historical analysis of a place or activity.

Of particular interest are those texts that are observational in nature or assert new paradigms of dwelling in light of technology. In most cases, selection of such texts proved a matter of locating the speculative mode of inquiry within the written work, registering the inferences and extending them as conduits to other contemporary works or notions. In other cases, it became an exercise in dwelling in the period, revelling in the details specific to when the text was written and recognising that theory and critical history have been defined and couched differently across time.

For if theory is conditioned by inquiries and speculation about what occurs between events, situations, objects and actions, then the method of inquiry or the analytical device employed is of primary concern.  

Art Works/Spatial Relations.

Beyond the formal values/qualities of drawing.

Figuration and the spatial inter-personal concerns of/found in drawing.

Extending the body in drawing.

Jenny Saville.

Cecily Brown.

Manuel Neri.

David Smith.

Atmospheres/Light.

The Flame of a Candle.

Charcoal, Alternative Photography.

Gaston Bachelard. 

CLAY.

Mythical city of Orion. 

Speculative retreats/Tarkovsky/Krishnamurti/Hannsjorg Voth.

Making for life on the hospitality of the body.

The architectural body and the body in care.

INTERIOR SURFACES.

Photographic Exhibition/Retrospective.

Desiring into the pathology of the image.

Breaking into corporeal and subjective spaces.

Erasures/temporalities within the materiality of photographic sensations and their memories.