If the everyday can be considered an ecology where passions circulate in a perpetual state of intensification and entropic decline, the empirical self (and not just David Hume's version of it) is essentially in a state of flux. This posits the human as an organism constantly adjusting to its passionate environment, with a self that is constantly appearing and disappearing, crystallising and dissolving.
Ben Highmore
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Camouflage : Neil Leach
Camouflage offers a mechanism of locating the self against the otherwise homogenising placelessness of contemporary existence. It thereby promotes a sense of attachment and connection to place.
Camouflage may therefore provide a sense of belonging in a society where the hegemony of traditional structures of belonging - the family, church and so on - has begun to break down. This aesthetic sense of belonging can be compared to other modes of belonging, such as religious devotion or romantic attachment.
In highlighting the creative capacity of human beings to adapt to their environment, this book offers a more optimistic account of human existence, which valorizes the present as the site of productive endeavor.
Here we might cite the work of more positive thinkers, such as Fredric Jameson who looks to the realm of representation for a mechanism of reinserting the individual within society. Jameson has developed a notion of ‘cognitive mapping', which serves to overcome the lack of spatial co-ordinates within a society of late capitalism. He sees the potential of such mapping within the aesthetic domain. What we need today, Jameson seems to be saying, is a viable form of aesthetic expression that reinserts the individual into society. The aesthetic domain can therefore be seen to be somewhat Janus-faced. It is both the source of many of our problems, in a culture in which everything is co-opted into images and commodities, and potentially the way out.
Aesthetic production should maintain the capacity to operate as a mediation between the self and the environment, but only aesthetic production whose design has been carefully controlled can achieve this. The difference between productive and unproductive modes of expression is therefore a question of design. In this respect we can recognise the important social role of design in providing a form of connectivity for ‘cognitively mapping an individual within the environment.
Design becomes a crucial consideration for the effective operation of camouflage.
Design plays a crucial social role in offering a form of connectivity, a mode of symbolisation, that allows people to relate to their environment. Exquisitely designed works such as S, M, L, XL can therefore be interpreted not simply as highly aesthetic publications that could be accused of a process of ‘glossification’ — of turning the world into a designer representation of itself.
Rather they can be seen to be operating in the very space of contemporary culture, a space that is highly visual.
The concept of ‘Camouflage’ can therefore also respond to some of the questions that Koolhaas himself raises. In his essay on the Generic City, for example, Koolhaas offers a critique of the placelessness of the contemporary cityscape, where each city is virtually indistinguishable from the next. The theory of camouflage, however, would seem to suggest that design itself can overcome this condition by providing a mechanism for relating the individual to the environment.
Design here must be contrasted to junk. If the junk city has become the placeless generic city, the exquisitely designed city can become the city of a new form of spatial mapping. This theory of camouflage is therefore presented not only as a retroactive manifesto through which to appreciate Koolhaas’s work, but also as a contribution to the debates which he initiates.
The concept of ‘Camouflage’ will allow us, at least, to move beyond the often simplistic denigration of the aesthetic realm within recent critiques of postmodern culture, and to grasp the complexities involved in our negotiation with the world afforded through that realm. Above all, it will allow us to recognise the important strategic significance of aesthetics in contemporary culture in general and in Rem Koolhaas’s work in particular.
The Architectural Plan
An Anthropology of Architecture
Embodiment and Architectural Form
Process-Relational Philosophy
Building The Drawing
The drawing as analogue allows more subtle relations, of technique, material and process, to develop between drawing and building.
Immaterial Architecture
The Illegal Architect
Jonathan Hill
Oak Tree
Oil
Paper
Plaster
Rust
Sgratfito
Silence
Sound
Steel
Television
Weather
Frosted Light
Index of immaterial architectures
TRANSPARENCY : LITERAL AND PHENOMENAL
Colin Rowe, Robert Slutzky
Interactions of the Abstract Body
Josiah McElheny
Object Lesson
Interactive Abstract Body (Square)
The Spatial Body (After Fontana)
Tracing Eisenman
Stan Allen
Indexical Characters
FABRIC=MASS+ FORM
Alan Chandler
The interest in fabric formwork is in its deployment in a building process, which is faster than conventional formwork. Fabric formwork is inherently more sustainable due to the minimising of both concrete and shuttering, and more radically, allows the constructor to intervene in the process of casting even as the cast is taking place.
ANTI OBJECT
Kengo Kuma
We are composed of matter and live in the midst of matter. Our objective should not be to renounce matter, but to search for a form of matter other than objects.
What that form is called- ARCHITECTURE, GARDENS< TECHNOLOGY is not important.
ReThinking Matereriality
The engagement of mind with the material world
Elizabeth DeMarrais, Chris Gosden, Colin Renfrew
The Affordances of Things
Towards a Theory of Material Engagement
Aesthetics, Intelligence and Emotions
Relationality of Mind and Matter
Material Agency
Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach
Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris
At The Potter's Wheel : An Argument for Material Agency
We should replace our view of cognition as residing inside the potter's head, with that of cognition enacted at the potter's wheel.
The Neglected Networks of Material Agency : Artefacts, Pictures and Texts
Material Agency as Cognitive Scaffolding
The Cognitive Life of Things
Material Engagement and the Extended Mind
Lambros Malafouris, Colin Renfrew
Minds, Things and Materiality
Michael Wheeler
Communities of Things and Objects : A Spatial Perspective
Carl Knappett
Imagining the Cognitive Life of Things
Edwin Hutchins
Things and Their Embodied Environments
Architectures for Perception
Structuring Perception through Material Artifacts
Charles Goodwin
Leach Pottery, Studio and Museum
A Potter's Book
Bernard Leach
Adventures of the Fire, Vessels Through Time
Ceramic Pavilion
People make space, and space contains people
Ceramic space and life
Gordon Baldwin
Objects For A Landscape
David Whiting
Vessels-Spaces that cannot be drawn, rather they need to be experienced.
Imagining a Vessel in a Rock on a Beach, 2006,(charcoal on paper)
The Architecture of The Ceramic Vessel
The use of the vessel in the investigation of our world.
The exploration through the dichotomy of the analysis between exterior and interior, of one pot to another and from the message they convey.
MATERIAL MATTERS
ARCHITECTURE
AND MATERIAL PRACTICE
Katie Lloyd Thomas
PLENUMS : RETHINKING MATTER, GEOMETRY AND SUBJECTIVITY
Peg Rawes
ARCHITECTURE
IN THE AGE OF DIVIDED REPRESENTATION
The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production
Dalibor Vesely
The Nature of Communicative Space
Creativity in the Shadow of Modern Technology
The Rehabilitation of Fragment
Towards a Poetics of Architecture
The Projective Cast
Architecture and its Three Geometries
Robin Evans
Architects do not produce geometry, they consume it
Analysing ARCHITECTURE
Simon Unwin
Geometries of Being
Architecture as Making Frames
Space and Structure
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