Outpost 050823
Dwelling/Reading with Intensity.
Hungate Medieval Art.
11 Princes Street.
Norwich.
NUA Degree Show, Interior Design/Architecture. 2023.
Boardman House.
Redwell Street.
Norwich.
Dwelling with Intensity.
In our houses we have nooks and corners in which we like to curl up comfortably. To curl up belongs to the phenomenology of the verb to inhabit, and only those who have learned to do so can inhabit with intensity. There is a strong identity between naked skin and the sensation of home. The experience of home, like that of a large cradle, is essentially an experience of intimate warmth. Our houses, and their homecomings from snow-covered landscapes turn the pleasure of the skin into a singular sensation.
Gaston Bachelard.
Architecture in the flesh of the lived world not as a construction of an idealised vision.
An Architecture of Visual Images.
The ocular bias has never been more apparent in the art of architecture than in the past 30 years, as a type of architecture, aimed at a striking and memorable visual image, has predominated.
Instead of an existentially grounded plastic and spatial experience, architecture has adopted the psychological strategy of advertising and instant persuasion; buildings have turned into image products detached from existential depth and sincerity.
The current deluge of images has consequences on the architecture of our time, producing a retinal art for the eye. Instead of being a situational bodily encounter, architecture has become an art of the printed image fixed by the hurried eye of the camera.
As buildings lose their plasticity, and their connection with language and wisdom of the body, they become isolated in the cool and distant realm of vision. With the loss of tactility, measures and details crafted for the human body, and particularly for the hand, architectural structures have become repulsively flat, sharp-edged, immaterial and unreal. The detachment of construction from the realities of matter and craft turns architecture into stage sets for the eye, into a scenography devoid of the authenticity of matter and construction.
The contemporary city is the city of the eye, one of distance and exteriority.
The haptic city is the city of interiority and nearness.
The Significance of the Shadow.
In our time, light has turned into a mere quantitative matter and the window has lost its significance as a mediator between two worlds, between enclosed and open, interiority and exteriority, private and public, shadow and light. Having lost its ontological meaning, the window has turned into a mere absence of the wall.
Take the use of enormous plate windows, they deprive our buildings of intimacy, the effect of shadow and atmosphere. Architects all over the world have been mistaken in the proportions which they have assigned to large plate windows or spaces opening to the outside. We have lost our sense of intimate life, and have become forced to live public lives, essentially away from home.
Luis Barragan.
An architecture that addresses our sense of movement and touch.
Acoustic Intimacy.
Sight isolates, whereas sound incorporates; vision is directional, whereas sound is omni-directional. The sense of sight implies exteriority, but sound creates an experience of interiority. The wide, open spaces of contemporary streets do not return sound, and in the interiors of today's buildings echoes are absorbed and censored. The programmed recorded music of shopping malls and public spaces eliminates the possibility of grasping the acoustic volume of space.
Sight is the sense of the solitary observer, whereas hearing creates a sense of connection and solidarity. Every city has its echo which depends on the pattern and scale of its streets and the prevailing architectural styles and materials.
On Skin-Architecture-Corpus-Corporeality-Matter-Sensuality
Architecture and its materials of patina and petrified silences.
The hollow smells of abandoned houses stimulated by the emptiness observed by the eye.
In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke gives a dramatic description of images of past life in an already demolished house, conveyed by traces imprinted on the wall of its neighbouring house. The retinal images of contemporary architecture certainly appear sterile and lifeless when compared with the emotional and associative power of the poet's olfactory imagery.
Architecture presents the drama of construction silenced into matter-space-light.
The most persistent memory of any space is often its smell.
Every dwelling has its individual smell of home and every city has its spectrum of tastes and odours.
The experience of home is essentially one of intimate warmth.
The Visible and the Invisible.
The Intertwining – The Chiasm.
The skin reads the texture, weight, density and temperature of matter. The surface of an old object, polished to perfection by the tool of the craftsman and the assiduous hands of its users, seduces the stroking of the hand.
Spaces of Intimate Warmth.
The fireplace and its immaterial alcove, sensed by the skin, a warm cave carved into the room itself that is an intimate and personal space of warmth. Antonio Gaudi, Casa Batilo, Barcelona, 1904.
The bath with its heightened experiences of intimacy, home and protection are sensations of the naked skin. Pierre Bonnard, The Nude in the Bath, 1937.
The door handle is the handshake of the building. The tactile sense connects us with time and tradition, through impressions of touch we shake the hands of countless generations. It is pleasurable to press a door handle shining from the thousands of hands that have entered the door before us, the clean shimmer of ageless wear has turned into an image of welcome and hospitality.
My body is made of the same flesh as the world, this flesh of my body is shared by the world and the flesh of the world or my own is a texture that returns to itself and conforms to itself.
Merleau-Ponty's sense of sight is an embodied vision that is an incarnate part of the flesh of the world. Our body is both an object among objects and that which sees and touches them. Merleau-Ponty saw an osmotic relation between the self and the world - they interpenetrate and mutually define each other – and he emphasised the simultaneity and interaction of the senses. My perception is not a sum of visual, tactile and audible givens; I perceive in a total way with my whole being: I grasp a unique structure of a thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Juhani Pallasmaa.
Being and Circumstance.
Notes Towards A Conditional Art.
Robert Irwin.
Here in the phenomenal realm we can no longer say that one is more real than the other. Consequently, this 'mark X' no longer rises out of ground as before, but remains an integral part of, and interacts with, its circumstances. To quote Merleau-Ponty on this point, 'Our visual field is not neatly cut out of our objective world, and is not a fragment with sharp edges like a landscape framed by a window. We see as far as our hold on things extends. Far beyond the zone of clear vision and even behind us.'
The Condition of Postmodernity
The experiences of space and time have become fused into each other by speed (David Harvey uses the notion of 'time-space compression), and as a consequence we are witnessing a distinct reversal of the two dimensions – a temporalisation of space and a spatialisation of time. The only sense that is fast enough to keep pace with the astounding increase of speed in the technological world is sight. But the world of the eye is causing us to live increasingly in a perpetual present, flattened by speed and simultaneity.
Silence-Time-Solitude.
A powerful architectural experience silences all external noise; it focuses our attention on our very existence, and as with all art, it makes us aware of our fundamental solitude.
Architecture emancipates us from the embrace of the present and allows us to experience the slow, healing flow of time. Buildings and cities are instruments and museums of time. They enable us to see and understand the passing of history, and to participate in time cycles that surpass individual life.
The essential auditory experience created by architecture is tranquillity. Architecture presents the drama of construction silenced into matter, space and time. Ultimately architecture is the art of petrified silence. The finished construction becomes a museum for a waiting, patient silence. The silence of architecture is a responsive, remembering silence.
Power Of Gentleness
Meditations on the Risk of Living.
Anne Dufourmantelle.
The Eyes Of The Skin
Architecture and the Senses.
Juhani Pallasmaa.
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