Speculative Projective Reading/Making : Life outside the circle of architecture

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 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.

Spatial Practice could be a program and a site for a critical approach to social engagement and interdisciplinary collaboration.

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 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.

Praxis could be the energy produced between combining research and creative embodiment as speculative strategies/assemblages.

The Reading Room
Materials and Objects in Social Space
Spatial Practices in The Politics of Things


'Ordinary things contain the deepest mysteries'

The Social Condenser in Operation.
Five figures and a stature distributed evenly in its isotropic space; a picture of the socialized as opposed to the sociable.

Robin Evans,
Figures, Doors and Passages

Project Proposal Waverley Abbey Site 2014.

Exploratory project centred around the proposal to return the site with its Cistercian origins and its surviving ruins into a self sustaining pastoral and educational retreat.

Secular Retreat, Peter Zumthor

 

Krishnamurti Centre

Brockwood Park School, Holistic, Sustainable, Education.

This site requires a new working order much the same in stature as before its dissolution. This holistically based institute would operate as both a learning centre with research facilities and practical workshops that would facilitate in the development and maintenance of the site and its structures.

It is envisaged that new enclosures will articulate the project space as a whole and help to regenerate this once prolific pastoral community. The choice of materials and building practices is being reviewed and extended to allow the hybridising of the vernacular with the technological advancements of new building processes and materials. The new structures built into the existing site will mutually accommodate any existing feature or surface.

The scaffolding systems of construction will inform the envelope of the internal frames and built components will be incorporated as single spatial entities within the headroom of the structure. The seductive densities of materials and substances will theatrically inform space and surfaces.

Rooms can become thematic, theorised even through their content of substances, materiality, space and ambient light.

It is a design feature that these new adaptations for dwelling spaces should in some way index and register the spaces that have been erased by a process of over writing in the sense of a double occupancy, a place reopened back to a site. New surfaces become facsimiles of existing forms (use of clay impressions as floors) from which to create within the building a series of subtle palimpsests.

Spaces become fused with the monumentality of the existing historical remnants. Corridors navigate both the passage of individuals and the interventions that set-up possibilities for spaces between walls and floors.

The adaptation of this ruinous mass of historical architectural forms becomes enmeshed through sensitive and site responsive adaptations; living architectures that can playfully through a vocational necessity that (a being close at hand) crafts evocative, poignant and precise interior spaces.

Photographic Collage with text fragments and disparate images

Originally published 14 February 2017, revisited 2021