Outpost 220422

Immateriality and Transparency

The Poetics of Glass.

Architecture is fundamentally a haptic art-form and the atmosphere of alienation in today's architecture seems to arise from its exclusive visuality. We experience our being as an embodied haptic experience not as a retinal picture.

The multiple essences of the material, its simultaneous brittleness and malleability, hardness and fragility, immateriality and solidity, heaviness and weightlessness.

A work of art or architecture is not a symbol that represents or indirectly portrays something outside itself; it is an existential image or object that places itself directly in our experience.

In the basic alchemy of architecture there are only two fundamental categories of matter: opaque matter and transparent matter. One creates separation, privacy and shadow, the other provides connectedness, view and light.

The ultimate success of architecture will always be measured by its experiential qualities and its 

psychic impact.

We animate our buildings unconsciously; we encounter buildings the way we encounter creatures of the living world.

From Form to Matter.

Whereas Modernism was primarily concerned with form, structure and space, the past three decades of artistic work have introduced a deepened interest in matter and time; the depth, opacity, weight, patina and ageing of materials have emerged in all forms of art. 

This development has been equally clear in painting, sculpture and architecture. The Arte Povera Movement, the physical works of Richard Serra and Eduardo Chillida, as well as the material poetry and expressions of Jannis Kounellis and Anselm Kiefer all exemplify this new interest in materiality.

This shift results from a change in our attitudes towards place and time, signalling a new desire for  rootedness and perhaps, paradoxically of an acceptance of our own mortality. We need to feel enrooted in our world and to experience our belonging to a specific place and time. Enrootedness, rather than the ideal of abstract and placeless generality, makes the the thought of death tolerable.

Temporary Darkroom

Loading/Unloading Pinhole Camera.

Robert Macfarlane

Landmarks

To a three – or four-year-old, “landscape” is not backdrop or wallpaper, it is a medium, teeming with opportunity and volatile in its textures. Time if fluid and loopy, not made of increment or interval. Time can flow slow enough that a mess of green moss on the leg of a tree can be explored for an age, and fast enough that to run over leaves is to take off and fly.

What we bloodlessly call “place” is to young children a wild compound of dream, spell and substance: place is somewhere they are always in, never on.

Anna Shepherd's belief in bodily thinking gives The Living Mountain a contemporary relevance. We are increasingly separated from contact with nature. We have come to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world – its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits – as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb.

The Living Mountain/Phenomenology of Perception.

For Merleau-Ponty, post-Cartesian philosophy had cleaved out a false divide between the body and the mind. Throughout his career he argued for the foundational role that sensory perception plays in our understanding of the world as well as in our reception of it. He argued that knowledge is “felt”: that our bodies think and know in ways that precede cognition. Consciousness, the human body and the phenomenal world are therefore inextricably intertwined. The body “incarnates” our subjectivity and we are thus, Merleau-Ponty proposed, “embedded” in the “flesh” of the world. He described this embodied experience as “knowledge in the hands”; our body “grips” the world for us and is “ our general medium for having a world”. And the material world itself is therefore not the unchanging object presented by the natural sciences, but instead endlessly relational.

We are co-natural with the world and it with us – but we only ever see it partially.