Architecture that forces us to confront our own spatial intelligence by moving us so much that we recall the eidetic origination of our own mental space.(Schaik,2008:80)
"Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived. These need only to be tonalized on the mode of our inner space."
Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space.
The phenomenology of space - the matter of how we experience it.
Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space (space and reverie), The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Poetics as an evolving and discursive system of dialogues that acknowledges environmental changes, of other spatial narratives and histories, and things that are not just about place and space.
Thinkers and Vessel Makers
Studio Practice : Social Sensing/Innerness Studio Practice
UK based Visual Artist using drawing and experimental photography to explore issues around embodiment and existential space. Interested in creating spatial charged architectural interventions using glass and ceramics as conductive materials to articulate introspective spaces, surfaces and structures between buildings.
Theory and Analysis
Craft and Design/Interior Design Building, Dwelling, Thinking Scripting Rooms/Spaces and Events
The pot promotes an architecture of the soul, of an intimate yet social interior illuminated through the imagination.
Building human presence, to dwell shaped by 'the vocational' (physical and human topography)
Everyday Aesthetics
The Arts : As a Form of Experimental Psychology
The Play Of Affect/Space and Politics
Apparatuses and Architectures
Rethinking Materiality/At The Potters Wheel How Things Shape The Mind
Colin Renfrew
Making
Tim Ingold
The Essential Vessel Natasha Daintry
I think that part of our problem is that it is not easy to talk about sensing, doing and being? They're not concepts as such neat little fixed shiny packages of ideas, but more existential states which shift and move as you inhibit them more amorphous, like clay.
One can speak of this duality of inside and outside but the real experience is more kinetic, more fluid and interchangeable.
Heidegger, Coper. Baldwin, De Waal, Zumthor
The Potter/The Pot
Where Brain. Body and Culture Conflate Lambros Malafouris
‘Speculations about the first shelters, the relationship between our home and the universe, about spaces that we first use as surrogate houses as we form our spatial histories and our mental space. It is about the contemplative effects of the miniature, about the paradoxical way in which the scale of many of our most cherished monuments can switch in our minds from large to minute- the quality of intimate immensity. It is also about propositions around the complex relationships between inside and outside and the surface between, about the phenomenology of roundness’ (Schaik,2008:86-87)
‘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.’
Kengo Kuma.
On Anti-Object: An extended essay that is not so much history or theory as a volume of self-assessment that gives an opportunity for the author to contextualise his own body of work through considered self-reflection.
My purpose in writing this book is to criticise architecture that is self-centred and coercive.
Kengo Kuma.
‘Like McTieman or the theorist Paul Virilio, Kuma sees new digital and information technologies as leading us to an aesthetics of disappearance, rather than image or form.(Steele,2008:3)
Beginning as one always does in the middle, in mediis rebus, one experiences a sense of disorientation, a sort of cartographic anxiety or spatial perplexity that appears to be part of our fundamental being-in-the-world. It is an experience not unlike that of Dante, in the opening lines of his Commedia:
Introduction: Spatiality. Robert T. Tally Jr. The New Critical Idiom, Routledge 2013
Midway along the journey of our life, I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
for I had wandered off from the straight path. (Dante 1984:67)
As a number of critics and theorists have noted, this bewilderment has increased with the modem and especially postmodern condition.
This latest mutation in space-postmodern hyperspace-has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world.
(Fredric Jameson 1991:44)
‘My ultimate aim is to erase architecture’ (Kuma,2008:3)
How then, can architecture be made to disappear?
‘To be precise, an object is a form of material existence distinct from its immediate environment. I do not deny that all buildings, as points of singularity created by humankind in the environment, are to some extent objects. However, buildings that are deliberately made distinct from their environment are very different from those that attempt to mitigate this isolation, and the difference is perceptible to everyone who experiences them.’ (Kuma,2008:Preface)
‘A monument is a form that preserves time through the compression of space, a form in which visual perception is the parameter. A monument is a compression of time and space’ (Kuma,2008:92) Anti Object.
Procedural Architectures : Collected Texts and Diagrams/Images
Organism-Person-Environment
Start by thinking of architecture as a tentative constructing toward a holding in place. Architecture's holding in place occurs within and as part of a prevailing atmospheric condition that others routinely call biosphere but which we, feeling the need to stress its dynamic nature, have renamed bioscleave. Architectural Body
Madeline Gins and Arakawa Working Notes/Holding in Place
Wayfinding/Movements through accumulated research Running scripts, enactments, instances, involvements Collaborative texts, complexity, emergent, discursive
From The Bookcase to The Field Table : Landing Sites of Inquiry
Camouflage
Neil Leach
For Benjamin, the twentieth century is an age of alienation. Human beings are no longer 'cocooned' within their dwelling spaces. Architectural spaces are no longer reflections of the human spirit. Something has been lost.
Mimesis, 19.
New Concepts of Architecture Existence, Space and Architecture Christian Norberg-Schulz
A child 'concretizes' its existential space. A Philosophy of Emptiness
Gay Watson Artistic Emptiness
Everything flows, nothing remains. Heraclitus
Rethinking Architecture Neil Leach
Figure 1, Sketch by Jacques Derrida for Choral Work project. 343 Foucault, Figure 2 Bentham's Panopticon (1791). 360
Page laid in, The Atrocity Exhibition by J. G. Ballard, new revised edition, annotations, commentary, illustrations and photos.
Tracing Eisenman
Plenum, juxtaposed to form/haptic values/body absences Robert Mangold
Between moments of 'meaning' lie spaces or blanks of immediate experience. Such blanks are actuality. Usually the blank, the actuality, goes unnoticed because it works so efficiently to differentiate one meaningful event from another. Kubler discussed this in The Shape of Time.
Interactions of the Abstract Body Josiah McElheny
Object Lesson/Heuristic Device
The term 'heuristic' is understood here to denote a method of addressing and solving problems that draws not on logic but on experience, learning and testing. In this regard stories and fictional narratives can be heuristic devices in acting as ideal models that are not to be emulated but which help to situate characters, actions and objects.
Space Between People Degrees of virtualization Mario Gerosa
Adaptive Architectural Design Device-Apparatus
Place Function Adaptation
The second phase of project activity acknowledges that the proposal involves two sites; the landscape of settlement and the artifice of the factory. The design is intended to be a reflection of the conditions of each, so there was a need to work directly with the manufacturing process, at full scale, as early as possible. This would provide an immediate counterpoint to the earlier representations and a necessary part of exploring the manufacturing medium in the context of architectural design.
Building The Drawing
The Illegal Architect Immaterial Architecture
Mark Cousins suggests that the discipline of architecture is weak because it involves not just objects but relations between subjects and objects. And if the discipline of architecture is weak, then so, too, is the practice of architects. Architecture must be immaterial and spatially porous, as well as solid and stable where necessary, and so should be the practice of architects.
Jonathan Hill
Index of immaterial architectures Herzog and De Meuron
Natural History
Exhibiting Herzog and De Meuron
We are not out to fill the exhibition space in the usual manner and to adorn it with records of our architectonic work. Exhibitions of that kind just bore us, since their didactic value would be conveying false information regarding our architecture. People imagine that they can follow the process, from the sketch to the final, photographed work, but in reality nothing has really been understood, all that has happened is that records of an architectural reality have been added together.
My studio is a piece of architecture that is silent. The things of which it is made say all and at the same time nothing. Its strength lies in its demanding silence. A stern silence in order to permit works to occur. I imagine that a painting by Newman could be hung there.
The arrival of Beuys in a world that was gradually falling asleep amidst minimalism generated a kind of confusion that was truly excellent for opening up the mind. Comfort vanished, driven away by subversive complexity.
Speculative architecture
On the aesthetics of Herzog and De Meuron
Without opposition nothing is revealed ,no image appears in a clear mirror if one side is not darkened
Jacob Bohme, De tribus principii (1619) Reflections on a photographic medium
Memorial to the Unknown Photographer Thomas Ruffs Newspaper Photos Valeria Liebermann
Working Collages Karl Blossfeldt
Anti Object
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.
Kengo Kuma
NOTE BOOKS, June 2014-January 2015 SEQUENCE OF RESEARCH
Re-Casting THE ABBEY as an INTERIOR SPACE within its own ENVIRONMENT THE EVENT CREATES A NEW BOUNDARY AROUND THE SITE
The research found in my exploratory project has been further developed into the intellectual content of the event itself. To facilitate my organisation of the abbey site I am proposing to initiate detailed design based modifications to the circulation of the site. The project will be made functional from the proposal of an exhibition on-site that would act as a precursory event to gauge interest, support and possible funding partners, whilst also testing out some of the logistics that are specific to this site . Further to the theme and direction of the exhibition I propose to construct components that will make up the interior building spaces of the pavilion/stoa. Whilst investigating the actual experiential sense of place, I am proposing a small number of sensitive intervention/art works that will allow me to become more in tune with the possibility' of inviting leading contemporary' artists.
Clare Tomely, Ceramic Interventions, buried and excavated objects.
Mark Dion, Objects and Taxonomies from the River Wey
Helena Elflova, Anima and Animus, live re-presentation of the Winchester Cathedral performance.
How much of this research is really relevant to both the structure and assessment of a design orientated course/qualification and the proposal of a project brief designed to produce material to test its own suitability. In the light of these findings it would seem more beneficial to work directly with the subjectivities of aesthetics and materials that can be built into “interiors”. My working life has been centred around the craft disciplines of ceramics and glass, with a supplementary career in the construction of timber frame buildings and latterly in art education. My specialist design skills and knowledge’s rest within these experiences.
Forming and Questioning Outcomes and Outposts around Interior Design.
I create an exploratory body dedicated to things and to the world, of such sensitivity that it invests me to the most profound recesses of myself and draws me immediately to the quality of space, from space to object to the horizon of all things, which is to say a world that is already there.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Designing/Scripting interiors that are by their very nature contingent and unknowable till built.
Drawing as a thinking process towards the dissemination of the brief.
Creating something that when finished precedes the confinement of its origins.
Clarifying the relation between space and place which contains inherent difficulties in as much as they are necessarily connected (inasmuch as place carries a spatial element within it even while space is also a certain abstraction from out of place), but there has been a pervasive tendency for place to be understood in terms of purely spatial. Jeff Malpas
SPACE- ROOM TO MOVE
or as a verb To Make EMPTY, EVACUATE, EMPTY OUT.
The Production of Space/Human Agency/Place
PLACE-VILLAGE, TOWN, or OTHER SETTLED LOCALITY.
PLACE-HOME
PLACE-A VERY SPECIFIC FORM OF BOUNDEDNESS/GATHERING
As a gathering of elements that are themselves mutually defined only through the way in which they are gathered together within the place they also constitute.
DESIGN-TO PUT IN PLACE
Place referred to merely in the sense of position or location - usually the location or position of some already identified and determined entity .
Slippages, Anomalies and liminal spaces. Our relationships with space and place.
THE MEMORY OF PLACE
A PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE UNCANNY
Dylan Trigg’s The Memory of Place charts the memorial landscape into the body and its experience of the world. Trigg analyses monuments in the representation of public memory', “transitional” concepts such as airports and highway rest stops; and the “ruins” of both memory and place in sites such as Auschwitz. The Memory of Place argues that the eerie disquiet of the uncanny is at the core of the remembering body, and thus of ourselves.
STOA, a complex topology.
The Stoics took their name from the place where they met. In the stoa they talked as they walked along the long shaded alcoves. The stoa offered shelter from the sun and rain without becoming an enclosed room. It was an in-between and transitional space, neither outside nor inside. Conversations could commence through casual interruptions in a site of gossip, rumour and information
We imagine the stoa as a spatial metaphor for the emergence of critical consciousness within the transnational public sphere. It is a space for criticality without the formal requirement of political deliberation and for sociality without the duty of domestication.
The stoa is the pivot point at which private and public spheres interact and from which the cosmopolitan sense of being and belonging from the vantage point of the stoa, then the telematic linking of two screens in the public squares of Australia and Korea can be viewed in a new light.
The linking of these screens creates a new transnational public space, a space for the creation of a new discourse on the topology of the cosmopolitan imagination in contemporary art practice.
Thinking the place of art within this context is more than jumping from either the local to the global, the private/'oikos to the public/bouletrion, or even the singular to the universal. It is more like the limmal zone of the stoa.
Public Screens and Participatory Public Space. Nikos Papastergiadis, Scott McQuire
Flesh and Stone,
The Body and the City in Western Civilization. Richard Sennett. 1994
Basically a long shed, the stoa contained both cold and hot, sheltered and exposed dimensions; the back side of the shoa was walled in, the front side consisted of of a colonnade which gave access onto the open space of the agora. Though free-standing the stoas were not conceived as independent structures, but rather as edging for the open space of the agora.
Sennett: Flesh and Stone, page 50.
Bringing Things to Life
Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials Tim Ingold
EWO= The Environment Without Objects
THINKING AT WAVERLEY, as a site of multiplicity and memory. Walking is Thinking, Richard Long
Heidegger-To participate with the thing in its thinging
Our most fundamental architectural experiences, as Juhani Pallasmaa explains, are verbal rather than nominal in form. They consist not of encounters with objects - the facade, door-frame, window and fireplace - but of acts of approaching and entering, looking in or out, and soaking up the warmth of the hearth (Pallasmaa 1996. 45).
As inhabitants, we experience the house not so much as an object but as a thing. (Ingold 2008: 8)
Curriculum making as the enactment of dwelling in places
One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity, Miwon Kwon. 1997
