Outpost 081024
Connections remaining sensuously in play.
The Darkness of Interiors/ The Absence of Openings.
On the formation of the Japanese house.
In making for ourselves a place to live we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house. The quality that we call beauty must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows.
In Praise of Shadows, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki. 1933
The Trace Drawing
Interstitial Mappings/Spaces/Interiors/Parts/Intimacies.
Obviously, it is not being suggested that we should somehow be able to think something timber back into its tree, nevertheless, the reciprocal associations enjoyed by obtaining the one from the other depend upon certain conditions of connection remaining sensuously in play.
Peter Beardsell.
Making with circumstance/attention to place.
Giving buildings decisive readings that inform our readings of place.
A 'decisiveness' arrived at through attention and circumstance.
Living in a world reconstructed by information, deformed by restrictive economies.
Ontologically/Making Relations, having something to do with its being, not with exactly how it appears or its data – measure. Flat ontology is an idea that things exist in the same kind of way, no matter what they are.
Things are much more mashed together than we like to think, and also much more distinct.
The biosphere is made of its parts, but it is distinct from its parts, and these parts are not reducible 'upwards' into wholes – the 'biosphere'.
There is one Biosphere, and its whole is less than the sum of its parts. Because the whole is one, and the parts are many and things exist in the same kind of way (flat ontology). Parts are distinct and non reducible if they exist in the same kind of way, no matter what they are.
Timothy Morton.
You Are The Weather.
Roni Horn.
Weather isn't just a symptom or climate.
Anselm Kiefer.
The High Priestess. 1989
VIII : Book 88
In this book as a whole nature and architecture alike convey only the absence of life.
Armin Zweite.
Grey Works/Charcoal.
Lead/Ceramic/Inscriptions.
Weird Things
Things are entangled with interpretations of things, yet different from them.
Tim Morton, the thinker of that thought.
Reflecting on the bamboo screens and log columns of Osaka and Kamiichi, I realise that those details could be read as some kind of mask for a bucolic future. However, the choice of detail is derived from the capability of the material's presence to determine the quality of space- what the late David Pye refers to in his book Nature and the Art of Workmanship as 'the weather in the space'. Japan has confirmed my view that architecture is inclusive – a collusion between different technologies and constructions that make the relevant accommodation for society.
Peter Salter.
A Hut Life.
A life-lived as it is evolving.
Of Japanese/Chinese reclusive poets.
Interstitial Spaces.
The interior structure braces the external timber shell against snow loads. Between the braces are interior rooms for looking out. Moving between these rooms is like walking in the space 'between' which is sometimes 'clogged' by structure.
Kamiichi Pavilion, Peter Salter. 1995
The hut and its hut life is a material process of living a relation, not (restricted or contextualized) as form or its container. The hut retains that which is frequently 'explained away' by relating things to a decade, a country, a state of human economic relations.
Roof top turrets, bits of former utility. A city of huts, of hut dwellers, of found places, of inspiration for new memories even as they invoke old ones. Visiting one another's sites, they climb creaky stairs and slip onto rooftops, balconies, or parapets. There they touch something deep in the needs and memory of people. Something that refuses to be dismissed, yet is fully alive only in the hut.
Anne Cline.
Kamiichi Mountain Pavilion.
4+1 Peter Salter : Building Projects.
The Buildings Reactions to the Weather/Ground/River and View.
Steadily the snow buries the building, but the exterior shell, which takes compression like a boat and behaves almost as if the building were in water, inversely anticipates the snow-load. This annual load exerts wear and tear, and will repeatedly leave its marks and defacements by way of distortion and pressure. But the building is designed to encode and record these batterings.
Conditions of Connection, Peter Beardsell.
The building is located in a clearing on the edge of a meltwater river. The intent is to provide a place to rest and enjoy the view. The building is first seen from a bridge through a clearing in the trees. Visitors approach it by a path along the river's edge.
Once within the building, their movement is directed towards a special room which is oriented towards the borrowed landscape, with a view of the two mountain peaks at the head of the valley.
A large gutter on the south side brings this water into the building, as if to guide the visitor. This same gutter also becomes the entrance canopy to the building, offering shade from the summer sun. The building aims to be cool in summer, full of shadows, with views out to the bright reflected light.
The building is naturally lit, with no electricity, and fresh water is provided by a hand-pump. All timber used in the construction has been taken from renewable or second-hand sources. The building is closed down in winter and becomes a part of the snow covered landscape.
Before the onset of winter, the townspeople of Kamiichi come to clean and prepare the building for the expected snow. It is then left to the small hibernating mammals and roosting birds. In the spring the shutters are opened and the snow barriers removed.
The copper water tank collects water from the gutter on the south elevation. Three overflows celebrate the abundance of meltwaters in the spring.
Section of first proposal. It was intended that the building should collect snow along its slatted roof structure, allowing the melted snow to drip down through the interior of the building.
Paper cut-outs were used to reassess the mass of the building proposition.
The building is snow-bound for seven months of the year, with snow reaching 12m. It is shaped hydro-dynamically to resist the snow, with two timber latticed compression shells. Within these shell structures a new landscape is created, as a resting place for climbers and a winter hibernation space for animals.
Students in Peter Salter's Diploma Unit are often asked to work at scales of 1:500 and 1:5, and nothing in-between. The defining properties of a strategy (not a programme) describable at 1:500 should carry a definitional force capable of determining detail at 1:5. Intermediate scales are disallowed to let a strategy's connective energies make their way, unimpeded, into detail. One applying pressure on the other, both tightens and expands the possibilities of connection and exchange.
Afterword/Making with beautiful circumstances.
Rules For Detail/A Search For Legibility Through Detail.
Peter Salter.
Rules are made to govern the definition of space through the accuracy of constructional detail. In the reading of such detail the spatial emphasis of the room can be understood to be mute or otherwise, giving it a kind of legibility. This ordering and quality of space help determine the accommodation and relevance of the architecture in circumstances where the programmatic brief is unavailable, underdeveloped or redundant. Legibility implies a variation in the reading and definition of the proposition. This is explored through a number of recurring strategies:
To make ever finer territories in order to relieve the burden of scale upon the architectural piece.
To look for possible scale differences – architecture as furniture – as a way of offering emphasis within a sequence of rooms.
To work with an additive architectural programme rather than a conglomerate form.
To introduce the metaphor of the boat as a raft that assembles parts of programme common to the wider building form.
Each strategy offers tactics for proceeding and the possibility of detail. Each implies a layering, a kind of stratification of idea and details; the control of the spatial hierarchy and the design of the door furniture can be layered together.
The strategy offers rules for construction when intuition runs out, and a way of testing form. The layering suggests an in-situ construction – a serialising of programme that offers a crafted building.
Ceramics
Anglian Potters.
Cambridge Exhibition.
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