Marking a Place : Land Art/Architecture/Propositional Drawings

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Reticular Events/Tentative Surfaces.

Structures/Journeys/Maps/Diagrams

Buildings that include/contain areas for inhabitation, living, working, sleeping.

Marking a place in the seemingly infinite expanse of the desert. 

For Richard Serra, such a building serves as a barometer by means of which the landscape can be interpreted and known.

Architectural Fables/Unbuilt Projects, posited as ideal communities, projects living on as architectural fables long after constructed buildings have crumbled. 

Emilio Ambasz, speaks of architecture as a myth making act, my work is a search for primal things, being born, being in love, and dying. It has to do with existence on an emotional, passionate, and essential level.

Steven Holl, speaks of architecture and site as having an experimental connection, a metaphysical link, a poetic link.

Hannsjorg Voth has developed a feeling for the formal and spatial relationship between the artifact and the ideal pristine landscape, he is interested in finding traces of this 'ideal' original landscape or as he likes to call it, zero landscape, on the sea and in the desert. 

Sky Stairway, resembling the great archaic calendar structures (Jaipur) with its steps, which seem to lead into an endless distance, symbolise the link between the finiteness of earthly things and the infinity of the cosmos. Yet the symbol is transient, the clay was trodden in the traditional manner will not be able to withstand the erosive force of the Moroccan Desert indefinitely. A special place that will only live on in the tales of the nomads.   

Between Landscape Architecture and Land Art.

Udo Weilacher.

Himmelstreppe-Sky Stairway is a seemingly archaic clay structure in the Moroccan Plain of Marha. 

Voth has developed a form of dialogue with nature, landscape and civilization which clearly stands apart from works of Land Art, on account of its semantic complexity and close links with European cultural history.

Signs of Remembrance.

Hannsjorg Voth.

Voth's creativity has always been characterized by the desire to investigate the elemental relationships in nature and their their fundamental connections with humans. The artist's almost meditative treatment of the four elements, provides revealing insights into the potential force of artistic interventions in the complex relationship between landscape and natural environment. 

Christo has made a decisive contribution to making art in public space popular, my 'bindings' for The Field Marks 1975 had a great deal to do with bandaging a wound in the landscape, whereas Christo wraps in order to reveal. My work has also very clearly got something to do with escaping from people. Today people no longer seem to be capable of approaching nature and creative work with respect. The trend today is to drive to the ends of the earth and then to destroy everything there. It is difficult for me to come to terms with schizophrenic mixture of escape and dependence.

Hannsjorg Voth. 1999.

Casa De Retiro Espiritual

Spiritual Retreat.

Emilio Ambasz

Peter Buchanan.

Casa De Retiro Espiritual, makes explicit that the entire complex is conceived as a spiritual retreat and though offering magnificent views of the lake and estate, it is essentially introverted in character.

Isolated on its estate, it withdraws below the ground. At a simple remove are the bedrooms for deep dreams, and the bathrooms oozing oriental sensuality, and still further removed is the elevated balcony. Like those found throughout the Islamic world and following a traditional Andalusian pattern, this balcony is enclosed in a lattice of turned wooden spindles giving privacy and shade while admitting the breeze. 

Of the many ways of engaging with an architectural work, there are two especially pertinent to this spiritual retreat. A house devised both as a receptacle for the changing play of light and mood as well as a carefully choreographed sequence of experiences.

To move physically through the house, exploring and experiencing its spaces in sequence is the more active mode. While the other is observing patiently how slowly subtle changes of light, colour, temperature, movement and sound register and rotate through the days and seasons.

By means of these devices the viewer is gradually induced to open up to a contemplative mood and awareness of cyclical time in which even the simplest of daily rituals are now invested with a semi sacred intensity.

Emilio Ambasz

Steven Holl

Stuart Wrede

While Ambasz's work on the whole addresses the primal psychological urges in us that have been basic to humans since time in immemorial, Holl's architecture tends to address the more elusive, complex and brittle psychological states of modern urban humans.

Both architects' work reflects the schizophrenic nature of late 1960s attitudes towards engagement and withdrawal. Each has designed 'Mythic Retreats' placed below the earth's surface. Ambasz, partly sunk in the midst of open wheat fields outside Cordoda, Spain. Holl, floating underwater of the coast of St Tropez, France.

The Poetics of the Pragmatic

Emilio Ambasz

Anchoring

Steven Holl

Michael Heizer.

Nader Khalili.

Becoming Propositional/The Human Neuron.: Each Proposition/Activates Contrast/The Dialectic of Duration.

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The Dialectic Of Duration, Gaston Bachelard. 1950

Bachelard argues for a discontinuous time, made of instants out of which we construct new durations and deconstruct old ossified ones. A time experienced as durations that addresses the nature of time in its irreducibly fractured and interrupted state, and within which Bachelard urges us to launch projects and lead lives of creative rhythms. 

Becoming Propositional.

Developing in the Incipiency of Relations/Ecologies between Things/Phenomena.

One has to realize what restraint it needs to express oneself with such brevity. Every glance can be expanded into a poem, every sigh into a novel. But to express a novel in a single gesture, joy in a single breath: such concentration can only be found where self-pity is lacking in equal measure. These pieces can only be understood by those who believe that sound can say things which can only be expressed through sound.

Arnold Schoenberg, from the introduction to the Six Bagatellies for string quartet, Opus 9, by Anton Webern, a Viennese friend and contemporary of Egon Schiele's.

Rachel's, Music for Egon Schiele. 1996.  

Individuations Dance/Relationscapes

There is no time to return to the line, the line must draw the movement, the gesture itself must become line. One pass with the paint and that's all, move the canvas. The result a vastness of localized movement, a movement across that is at once microscopic and macroscopic.

Erin Manning.

The Swimming Pool Drawings

Michael Grimshaw, Winchester School of Art.

We land into the focus of an awareness that becomes us.

Whitehead. 1929.

The architecting of spacetimes of experience co emergent with bodies in the making.

Choreographic Propositions/Mobile Architectures, Erin Manning.

The choreographic proposition  serves not to delineate positions or forms from one another in a normative practice of movement notation, but to create a diagram that captures in a fleeting moment the qualities of movement expressibility, such that their force of form can be felt.

Deleuze defines the diagram via Francis Bacon as the operative set of asignifying and non-representative lines and zones, line-strokes and colour patches, whose function is to be suggestive. He  speaks of the diagram capable of unlocking areas of sensation, suggesting that the diagram is chaos, catastrophe, but also a germ of order or rhythm.  

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

In Closing.

OURSELVES

Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world. And it's breathtaking.

I believe that our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed  the turtle, for example, to continue to exist more or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of years; for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have been in existence. We belong to a short lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What's more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes which we have triggered are unlikely to spare us.

For the Earth they may turn out to be a small irrelevant blip, but I do not think we will outlast them unscathed – especially since public and political opinion prefers to ignore the dangers which we are running, hiding our heads in the sand. We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. I fear that soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilization.

Carlo Rovelli. 2016.

It could be said that the most fantastic material is the human neuron. It dominates most materials around it, it is a prime agent of change and determines many forms on the planet.

For Cragg, ninety-nine percent of those forms are solely utilitarian, driven by survival and economics. The result is an impoverished material world. Utilitarianism censors the possibilities of form, this not only applies to designed objects and architecture the world over, it also applies to forms of education and society in general.

Our super-thinking material the human neuron with that prime position in the hierarchy of material, has a responsibility for all other material within its grasp whether mineral, plant or animal. 

Tony Cragg, Sculptures and Drawings. 2011.

Each Proposition

Activates Contrast.

Architectures based on a full recognition of the embodied human condition and of the multitude of instinctual reactions hidden in the human unconscious. A piece of furniture sets up a proposition for a event, the encounter with itself and the body of the user.

Alvar Aalto's buildings are not based on a single dominant concept or gestalt; rather they are sensory agglomerations. They sometimes even appear clumsy and unresolved as drawings, but they are conceived to be appreciated in their actual physical and spatial encounter, 'in the flesh' of the lived world, not as constructions of idealised vision.

Juhani Pallasmaa, Alvar Aalto.

Choreography As Propositional/Relations/Generative Practice.

Choreography starts from any point, it cleaves an occasion activating its relational potential. It makes time, beginning its process anew, always from the middle of the event. Choreography is thus a proposition to the event. Choreography asks/inquires into the event, how its ecology might best generate and organize the force of movement-moving.

William Forsythe, Erin Manning.

Choreography, a self generating act proposed into a movement/potential motion/event of a milieu/gathering.

Making/generating/organizing as a proposition/task/technique to the material.

Developing in the incipiency of a choreography creative ecologies of the force of movement/making/movement. 

Tony Cragg/In and Out of Material.

Carlo Rovelli/Seven Brief Lessons On Physics.

Intertwining Thinking and Making.

Architecture and the Senses.

Juhani Pallasmaa/The Eyes Of The Skin.

Bayfield Hall.

Making and deploying theoretical objects/installations/workshops.

Exploratory Clay/Ceramic based inquiry.

Creative entanglements in a world of/with materials/others.

CLAY.

Ceramic Components/Composite Sculptures.

Templates/Painted Cardboard. 

Extruded/Sledged/Moulded. 

Julian Stair/Art, Death and the Afterlife.

Sainsbury Centre.

As proposition to the event, choreography does so not by abstracting itself from the event but always as part of the event, it can never be separated out from its coming-into-itself-as-event. 

Choreography/unfolding-as-event is the fielding of a multiplying ecology in a co;constitutive environment, it develops in the incipiency of the in-between, spurred on by tendencies that waver between  the rekindling of habit and the tweaking of a contrast that beckons the new. 

For an event to tune itself choreographically many techniques are necessary. Techniques can be generated as tasks, or they can be self generated. 

Chorepgraphy as a generative practice must ask, how the tasks become propositional, how the coalescing ecology becomes more than the enabling constraints that set it into motion.

Erin Manning.

On The Body of Drawing/Demarcations

Localized/Relational/Choreographic.

Transparency/Translucency/Erasure 

  

What Remains/Of The Other Sister

Dead on Arrival.

The life drawing separated from its corporeal event is now just a representation marooned in its media.

The Life Room, a space where an individuals mental reality meets cultural narratives.

Anthropological Entanglements/Emergent Landscapes : Strange Tools/The Rings of Saturn

 

Walking into Emergent Landscapes : Covehithe Beach

The OLD WAYS, a JOURNEY ON FOOT, Robert Macfarlane

“ Walking was a means of personal myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings:

Edward Thomas not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them.”

“To Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led out-wards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inward to the self. These traverses- between the conceptual, the spectral and the personal-occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events. He imagined himself in topographical terms.”

DSC_0585 Covehithe : Walking/Thinking/Physical Entanglements in the Landscape

Natural History : Dried Carnations

Blueprints : Anthropological Forms

Botanical traces with leper graves

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

Contexts:

Art therapy , Exhibition , Open studio , Practice-based research,

Artforms:

Film & video , Painting , Photography , Printmaking,

Laboratory of Architecture : Spatial Practices MA, UCA Canterbury.

Methodologies : Speculative/Diffractive Modes of Inquiry and Making

Derrida (Glas, University of Nabraska Press, 1986):

‘The art of this text is the air it causes to circulate between its screens. The chainings are invisible, everything seems improvised or juxtaposed. This text induces by agglutinating rather than demonstrating, by coupling and decoupling, gluing and ungluing, rather than exhibiting the continuous, and analogical, instructive, suffocating necessity of a discursive rhetoric.’

Marcus Doel (‘Meanwhile - Cats, Glunks, werewolves and other poststructuralists’ in Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, eds., Thinking Space, Routledge, London, 2000):

‘... .to approach the text as a map, a tool kit, a record: there are entrances and exits everywhere; fold it however you want; follow whatever trajectory you fancy. It’s still philosophy. A book, a work, an event: they all vary in and of themselves.. ..hence the setting off of the variable ‘and’ in place of the constant to-ing and fro-ing of the sedentary ‘is’ and ‘is not’; identity-difference; self-other; being-nothingness. Every ‘one’, every ‘each’ every ‘a’ is packed with innumerable others that are bursting to get out for a breath of fresh air, a taste of the outside, a stroll in the open.’

Luce Irigaray, The Irigaray Reader, Margaret Whitford, ed. (Blackwell, Oxford, 

1991):

‘Everything then should be thought of as volume(s), helix(es), diagonal(s), spiral(s), curl(s), tum(s), revolution(s), pirouette(s)....An increasingly dizzying speculation which pierces, drills, bores a volume still assumed to be solid. And therefore violated in its shell, fractured, trepanned, burst, sounded even unto its centre. Or belly. Caught up in faster and faster whirlings, swirlings, until matter shatters and falls into (its) dust.... Fluid must remain that secret, sacred remainder of the one’.

Jean Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 

1993):

‘The adversary and accomplice of writing.... is language... One writes against language but necessarily with it. To say what one already knows how to say is not writing. One wants to say what it does not know how to say.. .one violates it, one seduces it, one introduces into it an unknown.’

The Laboratory , Canterbury 2009,  Russell Moreton on Flickr.

Cyanotype image from pinhole camera with sound intervention/device within the apparatus of the camera, performative material gathered from the Canterbury School of Architecture.

UCA Spatial Practices MA under Oren Lieberman.

MA Fine Art / Spatial Practices Introduction to Theory

Dr Judith Rugg 

Consider the following:

‘A metaphor speaks indirectly - it implies. To be theoretical, one has to explicate - to open the folds.’ Yve Lomax, Writing the Image (2000).

‘Time is multi-dimensional, an uneven bundle of swerves (not linear). The idea of the self as a self-conscious presence in the now, must be abandoned.’ Jacques Derrida, On Grammatology (1976).

‘To go off writing, I must escape from the broad daylight which takes me by the eyes, which takes my eyes and fills them with broad raw visions. I do not want to see what is shown. I want to see what is secret. What is hidden amongst the visible. I want to se the skein of the light.’ Helene Cixous, ‘Writing Blind. Conversation with the donkey’ in Stigmata (1998).

‘Cultures do not relate to the “reality” of the world but to the world as narrative and illusion. These are subtle and vital for human existence. We live in the Golden Age of the alienation and the dissolution between real and fake, true and false in the triumph of consumer capitalism.’ Jean Baudrillard, Radical Uncertainty

'Seeing red is a matter of reading. And reading is properly symbolic. ’ Trinh T Minh- ha, All Owning Spectatorship.

‘Gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent to that it is performed. Certain kinds of acts are usually interpreted as expressive of gender core or identity... which either confirm or contest that expectation in some way.’ Judith Butler, Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.

‘A space exists when one takes into account vectors of direction, velocities and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of moving elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it... that orient it, situate it. In short, space is a practiced place.’ Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.

‘When it has totally disappeared, we will logically be under the total hallucination of power - a haunting memory that is already in evidence everywhere, expressing at once the compulsion to get rid of it... and the panicked nostalgia over its loss. The melancholy of societies without power: that has already stirred up fascism, that overdose of a strong referential in a society that can’t terminate its mourning.’ Baudrillard, ‘The Procession of Simulacra’ in Simulacra and Simulation.

‘...a Chinese encyclopedia in which is it written that “animals are divided into: a) belonging to the Emperor; b) embalmed; c) tame; d) sucking pigs; e) sirens; f) fabulous; g) stray dogs; h) frenzied; i) innumerable; j) drawn with a fine camel hair brush.” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Introduction) 1991.

‘The walls will never be really cast down. Hence, the melancholia of all landscapes. We owe them a debt. They immediately demand the deflagration of the mind, and then obtain it immediately. Without it, they would be places not landscapes. And yet the mind never burns enough.’ Lyotard, ‘Scapeland’ in The Lyotard Reader, A. Benjamin, ed.

‘Now more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture, just as monstrous and mutant algae invade the lagoon of Venice, so our television screens are populated - saturated, by ‘degenerate’ images and statements. In the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City; he ‘redevelops’, driving out poor families...’ Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (1989).

‘To think about the geography of the female subject of feminism is not to be able to name a specific kind of spatiality which she would produce; rather, it is to be vigilant about the consequences of different kinds of spatiality; and to keep dreaming of a space and a subject which we cannot yet imagine.’ Gillian Rose, ‘Making space for the female subject of feminism.’ In Steve Pile and M. Keith, eds, Mapping the Subject (1995)

In this age of motor cars and aeroplanes, only slight atavistic terrors still lurk beneath the blackened halls, and that comedy of farewell and reunion played out against the background of Pullman cars transforms the platform into a provincial stage.’ Walter Benjamin (see Graeme Gilloch, Myths and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City, 1996).

‘It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think in the first place. In that case, it either “expresses” some deeper irrepressible historical impulse (in however distorted a fashion), or effectively “represses” and diverts it, depending on the side of ambiguity you happen to favour.’ Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).

Tim Ingold
MAKING 2013
Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture.

Practical Geometry

The Architect and The Carpenter

The Cathedral and The Laboratory

Templates and Geometry

The Return to Alchemy

Collage Workings : UCA Interior Design MA, UCA Farnham

Between Science and Poetry/Bachelard.

 

Between the abstract and the figural.

Cyanotype Process/Drawing Boundaries/Bodyscapes.

https://visualartpractices.wordpress.com/

https://russellmoreton.tumblr.com/

Drawing Technicity : Lines/Choreographies for Potential Eventness.

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New Occasions of Experience.

Housing The Body.

Dressing The Environment.

Forcefields/Associated Milieu.

Individuations Dance.

Lefebvre acknowledges that geographical space created through the body, through routes which were inscribed by means of simple linear markings. These first markings, paths and tracks drawn into the landscape would become the pores through which without colliding would produce the establishment of places, localities made special for one reason or another. There is no stage at which  human beings do not demarcate, beacon or sign their space, leaving traces that are both symbolic and practical.

The Production of Space, Lefebvre. 1991.

 

Durational play, crafting of the as yet unthought, where the microperceptual and the micropolitical meet to create new movements in the making.

We land/dance into the focus of an awareness that becomes us.

Objectiles thrown into the world and invitations to move-with.

Propositions are ontogenetic, they emerge as the germ of the occasion and persist on the nexus of experience to take hold once more through new occasions of experience.

The proposition I am seeing on the table is a hammer, the eventness of the proposition now persists in my hand, what moves a body, returns as a movement of thought.

Objects exist in the between of a proposition and its eventness, in so doing they are inciting co-constellations of movement-moving.

Technicity and its choreographies for potential eventness.

In this strange time-loop, what is lived is less the encounter with space pre-formed or objects pre-existent than a direct experience of relation.

William Forsythe/Erin Manning.

Making Divides Fluid.

Fielding Differences With Curiosity.

Kairos, the movement and its moment.

Being Alive, Tim Ingold.

Much of our thinking happens across various kinds of divides.

Choreographic Thinking.

Choreography has the capacity to craft an associated milieu of relations that extends far beyond the stage.

Experiencing environment as gradually taking form, using choreographic objects to help shift the everydayness of time, towards the durational time of play. The choreographic proposition begins with the folding of space more than the form-taking of bodies.

A Lure For Feeling.

Like his choreographies Forsythe's choreographic objects are created with very precise conditions for the movement experimentation. They insist on the precision of parameters for movement (technique) without divesting the movement of its potential for eventness (technicity). They are carefully crafted towards generating certain kinds of participation and yet unforeseeable in their effects.

Erin Manning.

An Attitude to History.

At Castelvecchio, Carlo Scarpa embarked on a much more far-reaching idea of not only cleaning the building but attempting to clarify and expose the layers of history by selective excavation and creative demolition. He attempted to cut and then disentangle one epoch's construction from another so that the building itself becomes a giant exhibit revealing its growth and change in nature.

Scarpa was primarily interested not in any concepts of restoration but an idea to do with historical clarity, making history visible by the co-existence of overlaying fragments of construction.

Ceramic Testing/Prototyping/Making

Hungate Glass Assemblages.

Drawing/Diagrams/Choreographies into the Architectural Body.

Relationscapes/Propositions/Organism/Person/Environment.

Arakawa, Gins, Manning, Forsythe, Irwin.

Shotesham SPAB.

Bayfield Hall Sculpture Trail.

Propositions into the Figural.

The Social/Private Body on Display.

The Physical Self, Peter Greenaway. 1992. 

As we draw the human figure we both reveal and hide ourselves and it.

The Life Room is a peculiar place and Life Drawing is a bizarre activity.

How you draw is contingent on why you are drawing.

What you bring to the Life Room defines you.

Before embarking on a program of Life Drawing, you need to ask yourself how and why you are doing it. Your answers to these two questions should qualify each other.

We do not dispute that Life Drawing is an important aspect of an art education. But if it is to be significant, it must extend into the rest of life and begin to touch upon things that matter to you, otherwise it is an empty activity, the development of a skill with no purpose.

Peter Stanyer, Terry Rosenberg. 1996.

What is the occasion and purpose of the drawing?

We need to be aware of what it is we need to reveal.

Is the nude as a form of art still valid?

The curious and uneasiness of the psychology of nakedness.

The practical and theoretical issues of the confrontation with the the unclothed human form.

Problems/Praxis of Method : Novalis/Bachelard/Arte Povera.

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Body Movement.

Robert J. Yudell.

The interplay between the world of our bodies and the world of our dwelling places is always in flux. We make places that are an expression of our haptic experiences even as those experiences are generated by the places we have already created. Whether we are conscious or innocent of this process, our bodies and our movements are in constant dialogue with our buildings.

Problems of Method.

Novalis/Bachelard.

No vision invites him to do so, it is the very substance he has touched with his hands and lips which summons him. It summons him materially by virtue of what seems to be a magical participation. The dreamer undresses and enters the pool, only at this moment do the images appear. They emerge from matter, they arise as if from a seed out of a primitive sensual reality. A rapture which cannot yet project itself on the feminine substantiality of water. Water becomes woman against his breast.

Gaston Bachelard would like to develop a philosophy that has no point of departure, and a philosophy that is not a point of departure. Bachelard in his books, attempts to systematize formal material and dynamic imagination.

Space contains compressed time.

On Poetic Imagination and Reverie.

The Autobiography of Lost Possibilities.

Gaston Bachelard.

A dispersed philosophy that must constantly operate on its very edge, at the very limit where its systematizing impulse is challenged by the actual creations in other domains of human activity. Bachelard becomes a 'hinge' between totalizing metaphysical systems and polyphilosophy.

Bachelard does not develop a fully fledged philosophy of values, rather his books offer lessons for working, reading, breathing and dreaming well, all of which constitute an art of living poetically. Throughout his work he developed the paradox, that the primitiveness of poetic consciousness is not immediately given, it can only be a conquest. Images reveal nothing to the lazy dreamer.

Colette Gaudin. 

Guiseppe Penone.

Souffle 6. 1978.

A large earthenware jar on which the artist has stamped the imprint of his own body. This process shows a sensorial conception of art, a concentration on the organic and the original, reasserting the permanent nature of myths and an animist conception. A vitality of matter, material and object.

The National Museum of Modern Art.

Georges Pompidou Centre.

Arte Povera as an artistic praxis, highly critical and anti-cultural. An art that explores a 'strange area' that is interested in elemental human situations. It was the art critic Germano Celano who in reference to the research done by the polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski, outlined in his book 'Towards a Poor Theatre' proposed the notion of Arte Povera in 1967.

Epicurean Asceticism.

The Phenomenological Approach.

Problems of Method.

Reading as a dimension of consciousness.

For Anna Teresa Tymieniecka, the essence of life is not a feeling of being, of existence, but a feeling of participation in a flowing onward necessarily expressed in terms of time, and secondarily expressed in terms of space.

Poetry as a synthesis of human existence.

Bachelard's auditive metaphor 'reverberation' for the poetic image brings together through sound, both time and space. In its reverberation, the poetic image will have made a sonority, a situatedness of being.

Science and Poetry.

Concepts and images develop along two divergent lines of spiritual life. The image cannot give matter to the concept, the concept by giving stability to the image would stifle its existence.

Nascent Material/Media.

Drawings rendering an insistent corporeality.

Drawings loosing their haptic senses of mark-feeling and becoming increasingly camouflaged into an image based on representation of an objectified art form/context. 

Life Drawings subdued by visual representation.

Is the initial situation/situatedness/awkwardness of drawing process becoming overwritten.

Drawings feeling the body marking its presence in the space /stage of drawing.

Collage : Solar Pavilion/A Philosophy of Solitude/John Cowper Powys : The Hut as a projection of self/Ann Cline

As my dwelling took shape, it began to shape my life as well. And when I sat inside reading the recluse poets, the terse simplicity of their record framed my own perception, one I likened to a camera recording a world of pure experience.

Ann Cline

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.

‘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)

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.

John Cowper Powys hopes to create a new level of discourse that will appeal to the common person, that person who desperately needs a philosophy of life, a means of comprehending the world around him or her, while at the same time being a person who is receptive and curious.

‘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)

The hut addresses the core of ritual as a part of nature versus the supposed freedom of modernist thought and the architectural contrivances it pursues. The hut represents the convergence of ritual and naturalness, at the same time addressing cultural issues and practices.

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’.

John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) created an attractive and congenial meditation in his best non-fiction book: A Philosophy of Solitude.

Writing in the early 1930's in his adopted United States, where he was living and working as a free-lance lecturer, a popularizer of intellectual themes barnstorming the country, Powys' book is prompted by his experiences, his insights, and his disappointments. He sees the United States as a slave of modem technology — of megalopolis, pandemonium, noise, of "the Gargantuan monstrosities and Dantesque horrors of our great modem cities."

The situation, he declares, is too far gone for the inspiration of American writers like Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, with their facile optimism and their confidence in the virtues of an American character now lost in the twentieth century.

The only thing that can really help us is a much more definite and drastic philosophy ... a real, hard, formidable, unrhetorical introspection ..."

And this is the philosophy of solitude that Powys sets out of construct.

To Powys, solitude is the necessary social, psychological, and intellectual state of the individual. It is social in pulling away from the life and tumult of the crowd (Powys lived for decades in New York City, finally moving to a small town in upper-state New York before returning to Wales a few short years after this book's publication).

It is psychological in the sense of identifying and pursuing a frame of mind for the personal pursuit of solitude. And it is intellectual in offering a philosophy calling upon a variety of classic thinkers and using the tools of plain everyman logic.

Powys sees this simplicity of mind and desire as a key to self-control and understanding. His elementalism is based on the solitude that is evoked by this self-knowledge, which allows a person to make and define a life for themselves based not upon the tempo and rhythms of the crowd and technology but on the unspoken wisdom that wells up from solitude itself.

The hut has a sense of immediacy that no room-filled house can achieve. The hut focuses its dweller on immediacy and meaningfulness. I had found the commodity of my dwelling through the poetry of its use.

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 itself (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).

The book is an extended essay, not a history, but it does call for a close sense of identity with the subject and with those who have come before. The author dives into the subject of primitive huts, skimming the surface with Po-i and Shu-ch'i, the recluse archetype brothers of Chinese antiquity, with modems like Gaston Blanchard and Thomas Merton, classics like Lao-tzu and Heraclitus, plus the great Japanese hut-dwellers Kamo no Chomei and Hoshida Kenko. The hut, she notes, has always been a projection of the self. When Heraclitus was chided on why he lived in such a small and humble abode, he responded, "Even here, the gods reside."

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 structureless, without purpose, we invent and build ‘ground-notations’ to offer an analogous power to that offered by strong natural landforms?

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 

With an agility larger structures can never match, huts bring together the physical environment with such disparate aspects of culture as necessity, fantasy, faith, and "life-style." The hut, then, may be humankind's supreme experiment.

‘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 organising circulation and supporting activity.’ (Sergison’2005:94)

A simple organising 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.

Outpost 021222 Thinking Forms/Haptic Collisions

 Outpost 021222

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

Lo-Fi

Alternative Construction.

Contemporary Natural Building Methods.

Lynne Elizabeth, Cassandra Adams.

Earthbag.

Experimental earthbag structures at Cal-Earth.

Nader Khalili.

The beauty of the earthbag technology lies not just in its low cost, but in its freedom of form.

The use of soil-filled sacks (earthbags) for construction has received growing interest as a natural alternative building technique. Earthbags are textile or plastic casings packed with soil, and sometimes sand or gravel, used to construct foundations, walls, and domes. The technique is essentially a flexible form variation of rammed earth construction.

Earthbag construction is one of the most inexpensive building methods on the planet. It uses locally available site soil and common sacks. The technique requires few skills, is significantly faster than earth building methods such as adobe or cob, and unlike equipement-intensive modern rammed earth, requires few tools other than a shovel.

Working Cyanotypes/Vectors/Clusters of Movements.

Spatial Verbs/Durations.

Drawing on a light mediated surface.

Abstracted notations on the verge of visibility.

Traces on the canvas.

The Inclusion of Absences.

Mapping surfaces, from transparency to occlusion.

Abstract Circulation Diagrams.

Diffractive Intermediaries in Architecture.

Alternative Photographic Processes.

Subjectivity in forsaken spaces.

Resistivity/Photographic Decay : Inclusions in the order of time.

Theory, Placemaking, Trigg

Francesca Woodman, Deborah Turbeville.

Photographic Collages.

Place Studies.

Locating practice/inquiry.

In the darkroom with the flesh of the film.

Building on the impossibility of the specific. 

Everyday correlations, living with making place.

The recording apparatuses spatial practice.

Learning with phenomena, presentia the light in its moment. 

Spatial cyanotype drawings and exposures. 

Daylight weather observed and recorded.

Red Gas Kiln, external dimensions, 1.2m x 1.2m x 1.0m, plus stand 0.5m.

Joseph Beuys, clay accumulator and table, Tate Modern.

Joseph Albers.

Karen Barad.

Intra-Activity, Performativity, Bodies.

Colour Intermediaries, induce spatial relations between objects and processes, they create, set in motion diffractive phenomena.

The Mind's Eye.

Bridget Riley.

SPAB, Working Parties.

What Remains.

To preserve something from the continuum of time.

Materials bounded by contact and context.

Plastic Architecture/Lime and Flintwork.

Linking built surfaces to the aesthetic experience of place.

Asperity, in materials science, is defined as unevenness of surface, roughness, ruggedness, that can create frictional interactions between the relationships of materials. 

Site is a temporal undoing of place.

Architecture taken back into the domain of  building. 

Scaffolds for learning, access, practices and preservation. 

On Reading.

Cell-Court-Domain.

Apokatustasis.

Jim Jarmusch

Jozef Van Wissem

John Cowper Powys.

A Philosophy Of Solitude.

Reading Powys one finds no belief, no system of dogmas or doctrines, just an insight gathered from experience.

He  is a walking philosopher, who develops his thoughts on the character of solitude, the walker formulates his words out of an inner heuristic development. A preparation in order to be able to relate to other people. 

A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

Rebecca Solnit.

The wonderlust of learning for profound and complex inquiry.

The creative, hopeful philosophy of emotions that colour, illuminate our worlds.

Experimental Artist/Into Beautiful Privacy : The Blurring of Art and Life

Essays on The Blurring of Art and Life, Allan Kaprow

Kaprow_Allan_Essays_on_the_Blurring_of_Art_and_Life_with_Impurity_Experimental_Art_The_Meaning_of_Life_missing.pdf


Architectural Inquiry :  Medieval Windows

Architectural Inquiry : Archaeological Remains

Immaterial Architecture : Waverley Pavilion

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/


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