Sunday 28 March 2021

Working Towards a Secular Retreat in the Landscape

 Working Towards a Secular Retreat in the Landscape.

The task of architecture is to maintain the differentiation and hierarchical and qualitative articulation of existential space. Instead of participating in the process of further speeding up the experience of the world, architecture has to slow down experience, halt time, and defend the natural slowness and diversity of experience, architecture must defend us against excessive exposure, noise and communication. Finally, the task of architecture is to maintain and defend silence.

Juhani Pallasmaa : The Thinking Hand.

Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture. 2009

This exploratory project centers around the heritage site of Waverley Abbey. This site has ruins from its ecclesiastical architecture that could be utilized in the sensory aspects of an architectural experience. The site offers up the possibility of constructing and choreographing enclosures and interiors by directly working with its unique sensitivities of place, mass, light, materials and surfaces. This project sets up real potentials to explore the possibility of crafting interior spaces that can host a rich layering of place perceptions. Currently my research has explored a number of themes and formal structures that might engender these concerns through my professional engagements with contemporary art practices and experience in the construction industry.

Peter Zumthor, Hortus Conclusus, Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2011 Adam Sharr, Heidegger for Architects 2007

Leon van Schaik, Spatial Intelligence 2008

Henry Plummer, The Architecture of Natural Light 2009

Architecture is not made with the brain. The labour of Alison and Peter Smithson.

Architectural Association 2005.

Smithson’s on modernity, not as a goal but as an established reality that needs to be interpreted.

Articulation of the volumes based on rigorous rules that derive from the ordering capacity of the necessities of daily life.

Holistic Practices.

The way person and work fit together so seamlessly.

Embedding building within a specific contemporary cultural context. (Krucker,2005:85)

Transitions between spaces.








‘Building relationships to relate to what already exists.’ Herzog and de Meuron The Parallel of Art and Life

Aesthetics about Perception Poetics about Production

‘The approach leads from the static object of the mere picture to the dynamic process of imagining. ’(Schregenberger,2005:82)

‘As found is a small affair, it is about being careful.’ (attentive awareness (anthropological) to people and place) Peter Smithson 2001

‘The ‘as found’ attitude is anti-utopian; its form is specific, raw and immediate. It calls the will to question. It is a technique of reaction and a concern for that which exists.’ (Schregenberger,2005:81)

Complex Ordinariness Bruno Krucker

Urban Structuring.

Importance of urban planning, specific responses to the surroundings generated different shapes. Testing out spatial bound volumes and aligning them with the site or urban fabric/passages of use and existing features.

The Everyday.






Life between buildings.

The necessities of daily life (the repetition of basic sequences) giving shape and layout to the architecture.

Heavy Prefabrication. Whole wall sections used to a homogeneous expression that emphasises their tactile qualities.

To systematise transitions of both components and internal spatial orderings. The sizes of elements are determined by the inner spatial ordering in an almost organic, non-schematic way.’

We developed elements that embrace the entire thickness of the wall.’ (Krucker,2005:85)

The search for directness while avoiding too much design, but still ensuring that our buildings look right in their surroundings.

Cultural Background.

Fitting in with the ordinariness of the environment, an ordinariness that only reveals its strength over time.

Embedding building within a specific contemporary cultural context. (Krucker,2005:85)

The anonymous settings of settlements and agglomerations create documents/cinematic presences of familiarity within these architectural contexts. It is important to go beyond any superficial fascination with the ‘periphery’.

Structural Thinking. Anti Object: Kengo Kuma.

Identity out of structure/layers of latticed structure.

Character-forming ability of structures, through the transitions of interior to exterior spaces. ‘Our approach was to act decisively at an urban and a spatial level and to create precise alignments that would strengthen existing elements. Within the structure, it becomes possible to give specific places an individual identity and to create an awareness of the relation between repetition and difference. Seen in this way , the facades are less a surface around a volume, and more the outer edges of the structure itselfi importantly the structuring becomes independent of the programme, which can change over time). ’   (Krucker,2005:87)

The power of a building originates from its structuring (a character of a building that is not wholly subservient to its programme).

Neutrality and Character.

‘This kind of structural thinking supports the search for a more anonymous everyday architecture that can nevertheless develop a character of its own.

The prefabricated parts generate complex volumetric forms that remain only partly visible after assembly. The effect is similar to that of Japanese timber construction, in which the simplicity and clarity of appearance belie the complexity of the joining techniques involved.’ (Krucker,2005:89)

‘The Smithson’s embraced an architecture that was not purely driven by formal intensions but by questions regarding content. This is an architecture that results from an attitude of openness towards the world (of worlds) and an acute awareness of the impact of the architect’s actions. Such an architecture insists on addressing the nature of real conditions and how they fit into the fabric of a larger context.’ (Krucker,2005:90)

Lessons Learnt from Alison and Peter Smithson Jonathan Sergison and Stephen Bates.

‘I remember finding the work awkward, even ugly in its removal from architectural conventions.’

Research Contexts/Materials

The Shift/Italian Thoughts, both became pivotal in the understanding of the intensions behind their work.

What does it mean to be an English architect? The lessons presented as six themes.

Strategy and Detail, as a design concept and method.

A manual for negotiating our way through the development of a project. 

‘All our projects begin with an interpretation of the specifics of the programme and a response to the place we are adding to, either as a series of sketches or a model exploring a building form. A dialogue then begins about the ‘feeling’ of the project, its material presence and its language of construction; this provides a framework in which to take decisions and a structure that can be referred to.’(Sergison,2005:92) Trying it out, testing its placement in place, its on-site feelings. 

A detailing of open brick perpends (a breathing building envelope) that is overlaid on all three elevations, giving a quiet expression to the building’s tectonics.

Conglomerate Ordering, as an overall interconnected building solution. 

‘A bold simple form adjusted by the forces of the site, thereby containing an equivalence, an overall tonality through the concrete frame as a structural solution and the block infill and their aluminium dressings. The building form and plan arrangement were adjusted according to the particularities of the site and to rhyme with the geometries of the neighbouring industrial buildings.’ (Sergison,2005:94)

Ways, (a spine providing a variety of spatial experiences coupled with the means by which circulation is distributed) sometimes Ways are employed in a manner that is latent and discreet; in other instances they are the most public part of a project. 

‘The concept of Ways as a means of organizing circulation and supporting activity.’ (Sergison,2005:94)

A simple organizing circulation element that can be read, at one level, as a street or lane running the length of the plan, linking the apartments. This space is given a strong material intensity, entirely timber-clad on floor, walls and soffit. At selected moments views of the city are framed or the sky is revealed.

Janus Face, origins in Italian Thoughts, teaches us to understand how mediation is possible between inside and outside, or between one side of a building and another; as all faces are equally engaged with what lies before them.

By focusing attention on the enclosing envelope and how the building should engage with the conditions around it.

The opposing forces of a site and its relationships to the different faces of the building can become multifaceted, through scale, the choice of material or even the layering of its construction; a discreet link is sought which connects rather than confronts.









‘The Solar Pavilion, is both a lookout over the distant landscape on the north facade, sitting on top of the existing cottage wall, and a garden pavilion mediating between two types of controlled landscape. It aims to provide a minimal enclosure that allows as immediate a relationship between interior and exterior as possible.’

(Sergison,2005:97)

Ground Notations, the need to find an existing physical structure, see ‘Shifting the Track’ (Smithson.)

‘The Smithsons’ search for a strong existing element that could be added to and adjusted, if necessary, ensures that a project is grounded in its place. Successful ground notations operate at varying scales, ranging from large pieces of infrastructure (roadways, etc) to natural, seasonal landscape infrastructure (trees and meadows). Once absorbed into an existing situation, new ground notations begin to refocus a place and act as the basis for subsequent actions’ (Sergison,2005:97)

Drawing on an existing topographic ground notation (earth-bunds) matrices of bundways that help irrigate the marshlands and define land ownership. 

‘New topographical features containing the infrastructure necessary for development, with roads on top and supply conduits inside them. Public buildings were located on top of swollen bunds, for visibility and orientation, while the spaces in between bunds became serviced fields for new settlement.’ (Sergison,2005:98)

Could it be that where a human settlement seems structure less, without purpose, we invent and build ‘ground-notations’ to offer an analogous power to that offered by strong natural landforms?

‘As Found, is a small affair: it is about being careful, the as found (is) where the art is in the picking up, turning over and putting with.’ (Smithson.)

‘The essence of ‘as found’ as a concept lies in accepting the value of the everyday. Any aspect of the built environment can be interpreted and employed as a trigger for architectural propositions. To consider ways in which the ‘ordinary’ can be harnessed through reinterpretation.’ (Sergison,2005:98)

Saturday 27 March 2021

Making Spaces : Between Speculative Movements of Reading Architecture

DRAWING INTO THE READING ROOM






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

FLEDGLING ARCHITECTURE IN THE MAKING ISOTROPIC SPACE

SOCIALIZED SOCIABLE

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 as being part built/part still under development through drawing, (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.



Working Towards a Secular Retreat in the Landscape.

The task of architecture is to maintain the differentiation and hierarchical and qualitative articulation of existential space. Instead of participating in the process of further speeding up the experience of the world, architecture has to slow down experience, halt time, and defend the natural slowness and diversity of experience, architecture must defend us against excessive exposure, noise and communication. Finally, the task of architecture is to maintain and defend silence.

Juhani Pallasmaa : The Thinking Hand.

Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture. 2009

This exploratory project centers around the heritage site of Waverley Abbey. This site has ruins from its ecclesiastical architecture that could be utilized in the sensory aspects of an architectural experience. The site offers up the possibility of constructing and choreographing enclosures and interiors by directly working with its unique sensitivities of place, mass, light, materials and surfaces. This project sets up real potentials to explore the possibility of crafting interior spaces that can host a rich layering of place perceptions. Currently my research has explored a number of themes and formal structures that might engender these concerns through my professional engagements with contemporary art practices and experience in the construction industry.

Peter Zumthor, Hortus Conclusus, Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2011 Adam Sharr, Heidegger for Architects 2007

Leon van Schaik, Spatial Intelligence 2008

Henry Plummer, The Architecture of Natural Light 2009


The sewer is the conscience of the city. Here, no more false appearances, no possible plastering, the filth takes of its shirt, absolute nakedness, rout of illusions and of mirages, nothing more but what it is, wearing the sinister face of what is ending. Reality and disappearance.

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.

Philosophy is the microscope of thought. Everything desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it. In the effacement of things which disappear, in the lessening of those which vanish, it recognizes everything. It reconstructs the purple from the rag and the woman from the tatter. With the cloaca it reproduces the city; with the mire it reproduces its customs.

Peter Zumthor, interested in the authentic core of things, in emotions and imagining things and not theories. From the emotional/existential experience of things, Zumthor further embodies sensations of remembrance and memory into the fabric of his architecture.

For a moment there fell on Jude a true illumination: that here in the stone yard was a centre of effort as worthy as that dignified by the name of scholarly study within the noblest of colleges.

Thomas Hardy, Jude The Obscure.

An architecture that responds to the evanescence of natural light, in praise of shadows.






The Cemetery and The Allotment, differences and similarities. What is important is what is contained, not the container.

Space for an architect does not exist, so we design the limits that give the impression of space.

Eduardo Souto de Moura. RA Sensing Spaces 2014

There is a sense of pleasure in moving from darkness to light or vice versa because as human beings were cyclical. How light reflects and how light is contained is the stuff of architecture.

Grafton Architects. RA Sensing Spaces 2014


Space is already structured (Deleuze), it is place that is the relational human praxis of space.

The Dehumanised Nature of Human Consciousness, Silke Panse. Screening Nature : Cinema beyond the human. 2013

Metaphor (as a spatial experience/sensation?) is itself a philosophical concept. Multiplicity and Memory : Talking about Architecture with Peter Zumthor. Six Memos for The New Millennium, Italo Calvino.

Interiors as book, poem, essay, philosophical treatise.

To define these spaces one needs decisive characteristics woven into the fabric of the building in its everyday function. These characteristics or spatial zones will define exact physical limits to be read or navigated as an experiential experience. These zones mark the outside limits or boundaries of layered experiences.

GLAS; Derrida, (a philosopher interested with the “between”) Gias in French means the death knell tolling of a bell. 



The methodology of reading.

Playful interrogations of the borders between philosophy and literary writing. “This anti-book stages a kind of linguistic battle between philosophy and literature.”

Destabilising tactics through different typographical styles, formats and languages.

Derrida’s text turns philosophers, thieves, fathers and families into unstable figures; their identities are no longer assured, and neither are the usual hierarchies.

On The Lefthand Side.

Philosophy as expressed by Hegel, who believed that the bourgeoisie family was an embodiment of absolute knowledge and its subsequent passing down through strictly controlled channels.

On The Righthand side.

Subversive literature in the shape of the writings of Jean Genet, whose writings celebrate the very opposite of family values.

The experience of the text is its reading (like that of a collage) is that neither column can be read without its internal boundaries or edges being constantly opened up to the other column.

In each column, Derrida cites and grafts (what might these terms generate in architectural space) from Hegel’s personal letters and documents or from his philosophical texts, and from Genet’s journal of the thief and his prose poetry.

GLAS; Has in fact a multiplicity (multiplicity and memory in architecture, Peter Zumthor) of author’s and their authority is always placed in doubt; in fact GLAS has an excess of boundaries that seek to divide it up inside itself. 


Its fragments offer multiple beginnings and endings. Hegel’s Columns. (Heidegger)

Hegel’s “Absolute Knowledge” spirals through dialogues of thesis and antithesis into a higher synthesis that is in tum interrogated by conflict and resolution (dwelling) until it comes to rest as an “ultimate harmony” presided over by “absolute reason”.

Genet’s Columns. (Winterson)

Metaphors and puns seductively unfolding their colourful eddies, ruffles and dark labyrinths.

Derrida by placing both on the same page and in close proximity forces the reader to experience the literary effects, the unintentional connotations and insinuations and metaphors that blossom up in explosions of meaning; from within the most rigorously unruffled philosophical prose.

Architecture on reality and living (dwelling)

Architecture can go too far in completing and controlling social space and influencing the politics of the everyday. Spatial practices are needed as a plastic and permeable social architecture that loosens and adapts the everyday from the imposition of both state and history. From these first speculative oppositions, architectural practice can be informed with the differences between the logic of design and the reality of place.

Heidegger. Jung. Archetypes. Pottery

Architecture

Old Buildings/New Designs: Architectural Transformations. Charles Bloszies. Knocktopher Friary is a quiet place of contemplation. The new residential cloister

unifies the friary and the church. The composition of the architecture is a knitting together of two original forms with a ribbon of concrete, glass and wood. The new buildings are crafted from a minimalist vocabulary where the palette of materials was kept to a minimum. One of the interesting design features is that the new elevations never touch the old facades with a solid-to-solid intersection; the new is either set back from the old (Ashley Castle) or the joint is glazed. The existing church floor is used as both a datum for maintaining the new floor level in the new construction, and as a vein of closely controlled changes of materials and finishes. The resultant architecture is played between subtle material exchanges of concrete meeting wood, concrete meeting glass, and concrete meeting concrete with slightly different surface qualities. What results is a clear differentiation between the old and the new, both are remarkably quiet architecturally reflecting the concerns of the site as a Carmelite monastery in the southeast of Ireland.

Working Thoughts.

Scarpa, extensive use of concrete with different aggregates and finishes.

Ashley Castle, restoration of ruin into a domestic dwelling, sensitive use of materials and methods of joining or revealing the historical fabric (allowing the ruinous to remain visible) of the building.

The Dovecote Studio, a building made of CORTEN steel built within the interior of a ruined Victorian dovecote (see further notes).

Building Practices

The Everyday : The Jug.

The Dwelling Place : The Bridge Mediators for spatial 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 minimising (Minimising, NO stage in the forest, Kego Kuma).

Reading Rooms between the Body and the Book Not just a project but also a field of study.

Peter Greenaway, Architecture and Allegory. Peter Greenaway, The Physical Self.

Mark Dion, Archaeology (The Project as Archaeology/Thames Dig). Herzog and De Meuron, Natural History.

Appropriation and Modification/Interlocking Spaces.

Speculative Architecture : On the Aesthetics of Herzog and De Meuron. The speculative solution, which turns not the real world but logic itself on its head.


Without opposition nothing is revealed, No image appears in a clear mirror If one side is not darkend.

Jacob Bohme, De tribus principiis 1619.

Everything is interrelated and suffers when it acts, so too the purest human thought

Holderlin, 1798.

Text definitions/Spatial frames and small interventions.

Surfaces and Spaces. Colour and Material dialogues/engagements.




Monday 8 March 2021

The aesthetics of the intermingling of function and form in everyday things

 

Frames, Handles and Landscapes

Simmel 1965


A tools beauty springs from the many unintended and absolute causalities, instead of being a materialization of an aesthetic idea

The Thinking Hand

Pallasmaa


Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things

Gibson


A psychology of causality is at work as we use everyday things

Donald Norman 2002


Perception of Environment/Relational Situations

Tim Ingold





A Species of Spaces

The Social Turn

Museum Site and Display

Political Philosophy

We have all the choice in the world in terms of products, but very little choice in terms of the kind of

economy within which those things are made, accessed and used

Whose Economy

Reframing the Debate

After Neoliberalism

Doreen Massey

Other 'material interventions' and the revaluation of making through strategies of repair and

maintenance

Making Ecological Politics

A world teeming with impulsive movements, deviations and many other lively (capacious) materialities

Influences that pervade, enable, and disrupt us

Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett

Makers work in a world that does not stand still

Iteration allows for continual correction (material conversation) in response to an ongoing perceptual

monitoring of the task as it unfolds, mixing the potential for blending or combining matter that already

exists into new combinations

Tim Ingold 2010

Each thing framed dwells in the world differently

The frame and framing, through its configuration, must never offer a gap or a bridge through which as it were, the world could get in, or from which the picture could get out

The picture frame reminds us that the work of art, while it hangs in our room, does not disturb our day-to-day sentient and perceptual ecologies

It is like an island in the world that waits until one approaches it and which one can as well pass by and overlook

On The Picture Frame, Simmel


Art becomes art by virtue of literal and institutional framing

Aesthetic contemplation blurs reals and emotional space in a way that produces tangible affects in the world


The thinking hand that mediates a haptic bridge in which creating and holding, becoming and grasping are all practical everyday activities extending the thinking body


Objects that stand in two worlds at once and becoming drawn into the movement of practical life through the virtue of being held in the hand


The intermingling of persons and objects in pictorial space and the aesthetics of the intermingling of function and form in everyday things


The pictorial space is one in which persons and images intermingle and passions can be aroused

Gell