Carlo Scarpa/Layers, Anne-Catrin Schultz : Architectuul, Judith Arthur, Stefan Buzas.

Carlo Scarpa: Layers/Stratifications

by Anne-Catrin Schultz

In recent decades, Carlo Scarpa's relevance has been steadily on the rise. At a time when architects have to use existing city and building structures as a point of departure for their work, his oeuvre remains a source of inspiration. Buildings such as the Castelvecchio in Verona show us that architecture is capable of communicating its own history, has meaning, and develops a contemporary dynamic of its own. Scarpa's layered architecture makes visible the process of becoming and the time-related sedimentation of material and meanings. It is especially at points of transition and interface that layering becomes a narrative element that elucidates the tectonic qualities of the building. Overlaying includes leaving a record of how an object came into being -- either by means of the sediments of its history or through the intervention of the architect. In this book Anne-Catrin Schultz presents her research about the phenomenon of layering in Carlo Scarpa's architecture. Layering describes the physical composition of layers defining space as well as the parallel presence of cultural referrals and formal associations imbedded in the physical layers. Scarpa's work is an embodiment of multidimensional layering and, at the same time, a focal point for architectural movements of his time that have stratification as their theme. In most buildings, the principle of layering may be regarded as something that is part of the nature of building. Functional conditions call for planes, elements, or "layers" to provide the supporting structure, and others to protect from rain, cold or the heat of the sun. However, architectonic layering goes beyond merely fulfilling technical requirements -- the principle of layering may be used as a formative method that allows elements of different origins to be combined into a non-hierarchical whole. Layering exists in a realm of complexity and implies a capacity of being interpreted that goes beyond itself and creates references to the world at large. The first part of the book examines Scarpa's fields of influence and intellectual roots and puts them in perspective with former theories and their interpretation of architecture as layered, for example Gottfried Semper's theory of clothing. The second part displays an analysis of three major projects, Castelvecchio and Banca Popolare in Verona and the Querini Foundation in Venice.

https://architectuul.com/architect/carlo-scarpa

Carlo Scarpa (June 2nd, 1906 - November 28th, 1978) was an Italian architect and designer heavily influenced by the history of Venetian culture, materials and landscape. in 1926 obtained his diploma of Professor in Architectural Drawing at the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Venice. He then began his career at the Royal Superior Institute of Architecture of Venice (successively Architectural Institute of Venice University) as assistant to Prof. G. Cirilli. He possessed an exceptional understanding of raw materials, and from 1933 to 1947, was artistic director of Venini - one of the most prominent producers of Venetian glass before he began the pursuit of his career as an architect. During the years 1954-64 he gave annual lessons to Fulbright scholarship holders in Rome. In 1956 he won the National Olivetti Award for Architecture and in 1962 the IN-ARCH National Award for Architecture for the Castelvecchio Museum of Verona. In 1972 he became the Director of the Architectural Institute of Venice University.

Museo Canoviano, Possagno.

Judith Arthur, Stefan Buzas

To commemorate the bicentenary of his birth, the Venetian authorities decided to have an extension added to the overcrowded basilica, and they commissioned the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa for this delicate task. Scarpa composed a small, but highly articulated building that is in a strong contrast to the Neo-Classical, monumental basilica. The subtly designed sequence of spaces is unique even among Scarpa's so many extraordinary museum interiors as the architect was here in the rare position to compose the spaces as well as the placings of the exhibits. The placing of the sources of natural light which infuses the plaster surfaces with the softness of real life is in itself a rare achievement.

Relation to time

Scarpa's architecture manages to respect the old and historic while simultaneously introducing new and modern design details. In this respect his work is deeply sensitive to the changes of time, all taking shape in a careful selection and combination of materials.

In mounting his 'attack' on the outward signs of architectural habit, Scarpa ending up by designing works meant to elude time, favouring the vivid colours of the past above the dull grey of the future. He achieved the maturity of this approach after a lengthy apprenticeship, working slowly and cautiously. His true youth, for this reason, was irremediably belated.

Scarpa's projects constitute so many experiments. In them, architectural thinking combines with the acquisition of increasingly refined techniques and distills the secrets of form into design. It is this mixture that is responsible for the fragmentary nature of his achievements, which cannot be fully identified with any of his works, with the exception of the monumental Brion-Vega Cemetery for the Brion family in the cemetery of San Vito d'Altivole (from 1969 on). Scarpa's designs are, in fact, mostly provisional arrangements and the involuntary memory that emerges in his drawings points continually back to the past. The incompleteness that is the typical mode of his research reveals his concept of the work in relation to time. It thus becomes possible to see the architectural fragment as the favoured embodiment of Scarpa's work and the coherent expression of his rejection of habit.

Scarpa's design

Right from the start, when Scarpa preferred to "study" with the master glass workers of Murano rather than bow to the restrictions of academic culture, one finds him using drawing and execution as part of the development of experience. The work he achieved up to the start of the '50s reveals the role of visual memory in Scarpa's work. Another comment on Proust could also be revealing here: "For the author who remembers, the main part is not played by what he has seen," affirms Walter Benjamin, "but by the work of remembering, by the Penelope's web of his memory." The results of this tension provide the framework of Scarpa's fragments, which even before being formal events are acts of momentary fixation of experience.

We can imagine the art of seeing which Scarpa came to possess by the end of his apprenticeship, as the result of the intellectual vagabondage that characterized his education. He whiled away the time in gazing, portraying himself through drawing the objectivity of that which he observed. His peculiar formal culture derived from the eye, and by observation he mastered technique. For instance, when he was designing his glass objects in the '30s, he was also observing contemporary figurative works.

This attitude is confirmed by other characteristic features of Scarpa's culture and so by further articulations of his achievement in design. For instance, when he devoted himself to the study of the various techniques of construction - whether in glassware or museum design, in the use of materials or those involved in essential building skills - what seems to have first seized his attention was the creative limitations implicit in them. Hence, in his effort to break through a norm by introducing distortions and even flat contradictions into technical details and constructional solutions, one finds tangible evidence of his rejection of habits and the empty values of utility whose premise they are.

This rejection underlies the special kind of culture of materials Scarpa refined on over the years. His tormented love for the hidden qualities of matter in his buildings developed parallel with attacks on the limitations technical banalization places on use. His desire to question these constraints appears clearly all through his oeuvre, revealing its full coherency in a wide range of achievements. It is articulated in successive phases, in the definition of which the art of seeing develops its own continuous critical commentary on reality. Comment expressed in the language of architectural forms is, indeed, one of the fundamental aims of Scarpa's designs.

Visual comments, going beyond the works exhibited-this is what we find, for instance, in Scarpa's most successful designs of exhibitions. They range from the temporary installations for the exhibitions of Klee (Venice, 1948), Mondrian (Rome, 1956), the room devoted to Antonello da Messina in the exhibition of 15th century Sicilian art (Messina, 1953), down to the museum layouts for the Accademia and the Correr Museum in Venice (1952-56), the Possagno Plastercast Gallery (1956-57), and the Castelvecchio in Verona (1958-64). Scarpa's museums declare even more explicitly than his exhibition mountings the effort he put into shaping materials, light, spatial arrangements and colours as a visual commentary structured around the work of art.

Scarpa's compositions consist of rifts and contrasts - his misgivings over the norm necessarily lead to difference. And difference is the hallmark of a Scarpian fragment. In the detail, deviation takes shape: the viewer's attention focuses on it. The fragment compels a nearer view, it brings the object closer up. This focal reduction appears in the drawings Scarpa scattered over sheets of paper, circling, dismantling and so analyzing the problem he intended to resolve. The horror vacui we find in his papers is the result of a rigid analytical discipline, the only appropriate way to penetrate the subtle form of the fragment.

The Scarpian detail eludes the completeness of any ordering or systematic arrangement. It requires elasticity in composition and excludes general stylistic rules. With regard to the latter question, we need only note Sergio Bettini's observation: Scarpa's "events" speak far more clearly of an absence than of any return to some kind of order. This increases the distance between his works and most of the achievements of modern design.

The withering of standards based on classical rules of composition has given rise to much nostalgia in con-temporary architecture. The uncertainties springing from this seem to be settled when use and function, technology and consumption, reproduction and mass methods, come to be seen as the basic principles for a new system and crystallize into an order of values.

Scarpa displays a substantive indifference towards the 'new" scale of values. The roots of his work pass through the emergent strata of the tradition without being affected by them. He was little involved in the mythologies that determined this tradition. For in-stance, with technology he came to set up what was actually an ironical relationship, when he felt its limits most deeply. Scarpa preferred to play the card of artifice, of the detail, of difference, of the fragment. He saw the norm as an arrest of learning, a manifestation of the laziness of the eye.

Natural elements

Natural elements seen by Scarpa as materials of composition. It should also be noticed that the use of water in Scarpa's gardens is coupled with labyrinthine forms and rare stone materials. The slender watercourse that wends its way through the garden of the Querini- Stampalia Foundation, for instance, spills over a block of white marble chased with a geometrical pattern.. The combination of water and stone seems to revive one of the most important symbolical associations in Buddhist gardens, where these elements are linked in evoking the mystery of life.

Concept of "decoration"

The concept of "decoration" can be associated with a very different order of significance from those commonly ascribed to it by modern formal vocabulary. What has happened is that the tradition's valid principle that nothing is useful unless it is honest ("measured") has been gradually replaced by the conviction thatnothing is honest unless it is useful. This inversion has produced a misunderstanding of the value of ornament. To modern culture and design, decoration and ornament appear as not necessary components of matter revealed, delivered from the indeterminacy of unmeasured quantity. Since "matter" is merely the "material" of a product, the value of ornament is determined by technology, which sees its presence as a system tending to conceal its own intrinsic qualities. The significance of ornament emerges when matter is no longer considered merely as a means, hence a product. The reduction of material to a means is the end result of the "out-reaching hand" of modern technology, in its relation to things and action.

Brion-Vega Cemetery

With the creation of the Brion-Vega Cemetery, Scarpa's struggle against the habits of time completely sheds its makeshift character. The entire project was conceived as an endless work, intended to interpret only the time of maturation of the alchemy, the experiments, the expedients by which the language of its own composition is nurtured. It was no accident that Scarpa desired to be buried here, in this cemetery, near to his own works: only the death of its artificer could have put an end to the building of this autobiographical narrative, treated as a place of enchantments, celebrating in unrepeatable fashion the primacy of the instant, which is the quest of Scarpian composition.

Influence

Scarpa's work was influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright as well as Josef Hoffmann. He executes a "minimalist" aesthetic within historic buildings which allows the existing context to exist within the new work without being disturbed. The extraordinary care in the execution of handrails, floor patterns, benches, door pulls, and the like set Carlo Scarpa's work apart from others of his generation. Scarpa was concerned, with the manipulation of materials in relation to the human body. Scarpa's architecture is expressed through precision detail, a delicate combination of modernism, historicism and craftsmanship.

His work greatly influenced that of other Italian interior designers, most notably Franco Albini. While most of his built work is located in the Veneto region of Italy, he made designs for landscapes, gardens, and buildings in other regions of Italy as well as Canada, the United States, Saudi Arabia, France and Switzerland. One of his last projects, left incomplete at the time of his death, was recently altered (October 2006) by his son Tobia: the Villa Palazzetto in Monselice. This project is one of Scarpa's most ambitious landscape and garden projects.

During his life Scarpa developed a fascination with Japanese art and culture. Although Venice always remained the centre of his activities, starting from the 1950s he undertook several journeys to the Far East. He died in Sendai in the north of Japan on his last journey there in 1978.

Castelvecchio Museum (Italian: Museo Civico di Castelvecchio) is a museum in Verona, northern Italy, located in the eponymous medieval castle. Restoration by the architect Carlo Scarpa, between 1959 and 1973, has enhanced the appearance of the building and exhibits. Scarpa's unique architectural style is visible in the details for doorways, staircases, furnishings, and even fixtures designed to hold a specific piece of artwork. It is in the Castelvecchio Museum that Carlo Scarpa's delicate handling of ancient buildings comes to its highest achievement. Here floor patterns and materials interact to form a tactile play of pliant versus hard surfaces The new is held apart from the old by revealjoints and spatial slots that function as miniature conceptual "moats," and each work of art is lovingly held up to view by a stand or a bracket that is almost human in its anthropomorphic configuration. Carlo Scarpa resisted the postmodern and neorationalist influences of the 1970s, preferring to elaborate a decorative system derived from the materials of modern architecture used in a craft tradition. Carlo Scarpa was in constant touch with his artisans, and his drawings were revised almost daily to reflect a preindustrial attention to old methods of construction. The museum displays a collection of sculpture, statues, paintings, ancient weapons, ceramics, goldworks, miniatures and some old bells.

The Revoltella Museum is a modern art gallery founded in Trieste in 1872 by Baron Pasquale Revoltella. In 1963 Carlo Scarpa received the order for the restructuring of the Museo Revoltella. The museum consists of three buildings from the second half of the 19th century: the Palazzo Revoltella by architect Hitzig, the Palazzo Brunner and the small Palazzo Basevi. In 1967 the construction work began, difficulties with the construction company began and in 1970 the contract with it was dissolved. The work is discontinued, in 1971 Scarpa resigns the order. It was only in 1980 that the construction was continued under the direction of Franco Vattolo and later Paolo Bartoli and completed in 1991.

In this project, Carlo Scarpa did not modify his design, correct it, as in the case of his other work in a permanent confrontation during the construction work, but his first concept was partly implemented or finalized by other architects. This consists in a rigorous dealings with the old and the new: while the Revoltella was virtually completely preserved and is also managed in the museum as an ambience of the Baron Revoltella and Pinakothek of the 19th century, The Brunner was subjected to comprehensive measures. Into the emptied shell, a skeleton of reinforced concrete was drawn in, which, emphatically accentuated, became an ornament and made the interior (insulated with stone walls) insulated into the exterior. For the vertical orientation, Scarpa uses the Palazzo Revoltella as the theme of the inner courtyard and creates a substantial analogy and at the same time a formal difference with the light-filled entrance situation from the roof. This area and the auditorium on the ground floor are those parts of the museum which were most clearly implemented in the sense of Scarpa's planning.

The Brion Vega Cemetery is in San Vito d'Altivole near Treviso, Italy. Carlo Scarpa began designing the addition to an existing municipal cemetery in 1968. Although he continued to consider changes to the project, it was completed before his accidental death in 1978.

The enclosure is a private burial ground for the Brion family, commissioned by Giuseppe Brion, the founder of the Brionvega company. Scarpa is buried adjacent to the Brion sanctuary. Several discrete elements comprise the Brion family burial site: A sloped concrete enclosing wall, two distinct entrances, a small chapel, two covered burial areas (the arcosolium for Giuseppe and Onorina Brion, and one for other family members), a dense grove of cypresses, a prato (lawn), and a private meditation/viewing pavilion, separated from the main prato by a separate and locked entrance, and a heavily vegetated reflecting pool. The "viewing device" of the pavilion of meditation suggests a vesica piscis, a repeated leitmotif in Scarpa's architecture.

The architect said about this project: "I would like to explain the Tomb Brion. I consider this work, if you permit me, to be rather good and which will get better over time. I have tried to put some poetic imagination into it, though not in order to create poetic architecture but to make a certain kind of architecture that could emanate a sense of formal poetry. The place for the dead is a garden. I wanted to show some ways in which you could approach death in a social and civic way; and further what meaning there was in death, in the ephemerality of life other than these shoe-boxes."

The Banca Popolare di Verona is designed by Carlo Scarpa in collaboration with Arrigo Rudi, who has completed the master's work after his death. The building is located in the historic heart of Verona, and overlooks the Nogara Square.

Banca Popolare di Verona was completed after Scarpa’s death under the supervision of Arrigo Rudi. The Banca's highly articulated facade, a provocative variant on classical models, aroused international controversy.

The head office of the Banca Popolare demonstrated a major development in the was new buildings might intervene in a historic centre. This discourse had been opened up by Scarpa's work for Olivetti and followed by several projects.

Interior design and technical details

A particular quality of the interior of the Banca Popolare lies in the surface finishes that Scarpa employs. Polished and coloured 'stucco lucido' is applied to many surfaces and is particularly associated with elements of vertical circulation - stair and lift enclosures. This is not merely a decorative device since the specular reflections from this conjunction of form and material act to convey light deep into the heart of the building.

The modern office building, almost inevitably, has comprehensive systems of heating, cooling and ventilation. Banca Popolare is no exception, but Scarpa's originality of mind allows him to avoid the conventional solutions to the physical incorporation of the systems into the fabric of the building. A number of vertical risers carry services up the building from the basement plant room and a large horizontal duct runs at roof level connecting these to the rooftop plant room. The relationship of the structural and environmental systems of the building is given expression in the design of the ceilings at all levels. Unlike the vertical layering of the continuous suspended ceiling found in most modern office buildings, Scarpa establishes a clear horizontal differentiation between exposed concrete structure and plastered surfaces beneath service voids. This organizes and disciplines the position of artificial light fittings and air-conditioning grilles.

Facade

The Banca's highly articulated facade, a provocative variant on classical models, aroused international controversy.

Anarchive Workings~Layered Making/Indexical Relationscapes : Interventions into models/stratifications of research

Interior Design MA~Anarchive

An anarchive is a creative process and philosophy that resists traditional, static archiving. Instead of just storing past traces, it acts as a "feed-forward mechanism" that uses archival material to continuously spark new art, sensations, and becoming.

Spatial Apparatuses, Building/Social Devices and Agendas/Rooms

Indexical Relationscapes.

Events as Interventions producing Intraventions from Sociology, Architecture and the Humanities/Contemporary Arts.

Relationscapes

Erin Manning

Movement/Art/Philosophy

 

For Brian.

The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

Waverley Project : Areas of Project Research. 

The Reading Room (a library of subjective taxonomies on the alchemy of building)

The Listening Room (a soundscape interior in time with its environment)

The Sheltering Corridor (a modernist Stoa as a place for encounters/dialogues)

The Pot Room (a installation of thrown objects creating the interior partitions)

The Empty Studio (a adaptation of architecture through the ritual of creativity)

The Perception of The Environment, Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. 

Tim Ingold.

Archaeology, Anthropology, Art and Architecture.

Anti-Object.

‘A building intervenes between subject and space.’ Kengo Kuma

Caruso St John : The Phenomenology of Construction  

Things.

‘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. Things need to be ordinary and heroic at the same time.’ Alison and Peter Smithson

Public Intimacy in Social Spaces.

Architecture and The Contemporary Arts.

Learning through Making, (The Parallel of Life and Art) Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture.

Visitor’s Centre, with interpretive exhibition (Stonehenge/Denton Corker Marshall) or an immersive intervention (Winchester Cathedral,Anima-Animus/Elferova and Wilson).

A place where the interior space evokes a sense of place/a becoming (Existential, Historical, Social, Cultural) see ‘The Physical Self’ exhibition curated by Peter Greenaway. The Fate of Place/Human Sociology.

A contemplative space or spiritual/secular retreat featuring a series of interventions (Follies/Pavilions/Huts/Heidegger/Tschumi) that focuses the gaze on a particular view or detail, framing a distant reference (landmark or natural phenomenon, research into Lutyen’s ‘Thunder House’ for Gertrude Jekyll).

Museum of Wisdom. Kengo Kuma.

Noh Stage In The Forest. Kengo Kuma.

Hortus Conclusus. Peter Zumthor.

The Solar Pavilion. Alison and Peter Smithson.

The Secular Retreat, Living Architecture. Peter Zumthor.

Heidegger/Hut,

Bachelard/Poetics,

Ingold/Making.

Construct (Definition) DSC_0029
Ann Cline
A Hut of One's Own
Life Outside The Circle of Architecture.

Herzog  and De Meuron
NATURAL HISTORY

Walking and Mapping

Speculative Environments/Ecolects

Spatial Collage/Assemblage : Yellow/Lead/Photography

Fragments and layers from, Winchester Cathedral, Tidbury Ring Geodesic Dome, Star Atlas.  

Brian Clarke. Beauties (from the two Cultures) 1981.

Brian Clarke. The Office of The Dead 2008. 

It was the region, not the nation, which was the motor force of human development; the almost sensual reciprocity between men and women and their surroundings, was the seat of comprehensible liberty and the mainspring of cultural evolution.

Cities of Tomorrow, Peter Hall.1988

Anarchism, A very short introduction, Colin Ward.2004

Foucault, Sexuality and the 'Confessing Animal' 

https://sondermag.wordpress.com/2016/09/02/foucault-sexuality-the-confessing-animal-josh-mcloughlin/

My photographs are part of my way of thinking about and imagining spaces and light, of pondering and approaching an idea. In this case, the photographs generate a way of looking at a structure that exists only in order to provoke a sensorial and intellectual experience.

Cristina Iglesias : METONYMY 2013

https://literarydevices.net/metonymy/

https://www.simplypsychology.org/Zone-of-Proximal-Development.html

fig496 Proximity
10 Days at The Laundry : Winchester UK

Architectural Transposition : Anti-Object
Kengo Kuma's, Transparent and temporary shelter at Waverley Abbey

Possible Worlds
The Sensual Reciprocity of This Enchanted Isle

UCA MA Interior Design 2015

Making Spaces/Proximities : Navigating theory and redundancy.

Outpost 120224

Studio Spaces.

A Scriptorium, a space within the wall.

St Jerome at his study.

Making Spaces/Proximities : Navigating theory and redundancy.

INTIMUS

Interior Design Theory Reader.

Julieanna Preston.

Mark Taylor.

Declaring a field of inquiry that lies beyond disciplinary boundaries of design and architecture, all of the texts included in this reader establish generative and active exploration of interior design as a practice informed by the intellectual scholarship surrounding its cultural production and creative practice. They are not foundational in that they do not recognise or declare an originary state or propose any fundamental canon. Collected in order to catalyse creative associations within this operational field, the texts in this volume are presented via an organisational strategy that refuses both chronologic and thematic structure.

Essentially they present a connectivity to do with inhabitation and spatial presence as outlined in the examples above that is at once distant, by discipline, and intimate, by content.

Proximities/On interior theory related to the specifics of inhabitation and bodily presence.

What is being teased out hear is a multifaceted dialogue between that which is theoretical in nature, abstract, knowledge-based and immaterial and that which is grounded, physical, phenomenal and concrete. Not wishing to pull these apart, but rather to encourage convergence, this book identifies a territory of emerging points that collectively register connections of understanding with reference to a field tentatively named as the theoretical domain of interior design.

This conception forms a working method for searching and organising texts, and for mapping their locations as a relational matrix. Described in other theoretical discourse as rhizomatic, networked or diagrammatic, matrices foster the formation of connections among notions as opposed to defining or creating singular isolated entities.

However, one image in particular harboured virtual potentials pertinent to our inquiry.

Within the pages of Emily Post's book 'The Personality of a House' is a photographic plate attributed to New York architect William Laurence Bottomley. This seemingly unassuming image gently frames the prevailing issues, topics and texts in this volume. 

The doors reveal a space between the opaque panelling, a space within the wall occupied by a small vanity or dressing-table. Another mirror backs the niche which doubles the light, and the ruffles and tassels of swagged curtains are softly gathered at the boundary of this closet and cloister. The room seems to be dressed in parity to the self-reflective body that inhabits it. And yet, it is a private space,  a space for one, a space for an individual.

The mirrors reflect very little of the greater surroundings, but the scale of the panelling and the floor-to-ceiling height help to extrapolate that this secret space occurs as an informality among the far more social and self conscious home atmosphere.

How might this 'Perfect Example of Dressing-Table hidden behind panelling when not in use' be physically, socially and theoretically constructed? How are the intricate details of curved timber work on the doors and stool indicative of current and historical values of ornament, surface, gender and politics? While the doors mask the presence of the dressing-table, the mirrored interior expands infinitely. What appears as a small enclosure is a mode of liberation. What one might assume to be self-indulgent or decadent decoration may be found to be a sign of self-expression.

While the architectural room is wrapped with abstract notions of time and space, this small alcove inhabits its periphery as a pocket where body is central, maybe even fluid, and space is temporal, perhaps even subjective. 

The archive of discursive fields of inquiry.

Navigating theory and redundancy.

On a theoretical praxis, a matrix for gathering material from the archive.

The matrix is intended to be used as a surveying instrument and ordering device with the purpose to catalyse cross- and inter-disciplinary insights.

A matrix or diagram mediates between the virtual potentials generated by the data ( the field of essays/excerpts) and the actual book. The matrix is to some extent graphic shorthand used to declare latent structures of organisation. The diagram is also generative, and can be used to order possible readings.

Seeking theory informative to interior design/spatial practices by trusting that through the act of searching various sources/databases/resources a range of associations and connections would verify an emergent practice. Such associations are fuelled by the abstract and diagrammatic quality of an organising tactical matrix in its flexibility to seek casual and coincidental links among related and sometimes assumed disparate disciplines. By looking for correspondences between seemingly unrelated research and practice, and by moving laterally between existing systems and categories, not in a haphazard manner but through productive leaps generated by rules that had consequential and significant outcomes. This process enabled the gathering of material from several disciplines when the linear historical model seemed inapplicable, and thematic structures too constraining.

Coupled with its ability to engage the complexity of the real, the matrix assists in making sense of the found texts and their potential reformations. Conceptually, such order is not made towards the specificity or hegemony of a discipline, but rather to turn outwards and mobilize forces of action and imagination between matter and information.

Pragmatically, the matrix positions each text relative to a disciplinary body of knowledge (social, political,philosophical, technological, gender and psychological) and then relative to prominent interior design/spatial practice issues (material, colour, light, space, decoration and furnishing). Within this methodology an interpretive role is played in ordering these texts and the multiple locations in which each text could be placed.

Producing an interdisciplinary database search using terms typically associated with interior design as a decorative craft, an architectural speciality, a spatial art or a physical articulation of social interaction located essays framed by a wide range of types of theory, genres of writing and sources of textual discourse.

Many of the researched essays did not declare that they are concerned with 'interior theory', but instead they either operated critically on spaces, places and inhabitation of the built environment's interiors, or offered observations and abstractions of use and inhabitation that engender a criticality in this collection of texts. To include this material raises questions of what constitutes theory, and how theory relates to the critical study of the interior.

Thresholds of experiential concern.

Architectural Body/Transactive Memory.

The reclamation of theory, other spaces, further sites for production and inquiry. 

In their book 'Intersections : Architectural Histories and Critical Theories', Iain Borden and Jane Rendell outline nine epistemological tendencies on which theory is constituted within critical discourse. Rather than champion a narrow definition or description, their categories are expansive and inclusive, and when considered relative to the scope of our inquiry assist in substantiating numerous items that would normally fall outside the limits of architectural or design theory, most notably some that take the form of turn-of-the-century advice literature or historical analysis of a place or activity.

Of particular interest are those texts that are observational in nature or assert new paradigms of dwelling in light of technology. In most cases, selection of such texts proved a matter of locating the speculative mode of inquiry within the written work, registering the inferences and extending them as conduits to other contemporary works or notions. In other cases, it became an exercise in dwelling in the period, revelling in the details specific to when the text was written and recognising that theory and critical history have been defined and couched differently across time.

For if theory is conditioned by inquiries and speculation about what occurs between events, situations, objects and actions, then the method of inquiry or the analytical device employed is of primary concern.  

Art Works/Spatial Relations.

Beyond the formal values/qualities of drawing.

Figuration and the spatial inter-personal concerns of/found in drawing.

Extending the body in drawing.

Jenny Saville.

Cecily Brown.

Manuel Neri.

David Smith.

Atmospheres/Light.

The Flame of a Candle.

Charcoal, Alternative Photography.

Gaston Bachelard. 

CLAY.

Mythical city of Orion. 

Speculative retreats/Tarkovsky/Krishnamurti/Hannsjorg Voth.

Making for life on the hospitality of the body.

The architectural body and the body in care.

INTERIOR SURFACES.

Photographic Exhibition/Retrospective.

Desiring into the pathology of the image.

Breaking into corporeal and subjective spaces.

Erasures/temporalities within the materiality of photographic sensations and their memories.

Innerness~Interior : Hans Coper and the Egyptian Vessel/Wallace Stevens 'Anecdote of the Jar'.

Innerness and Interior : Surface Pleasures

In the future will we be able to extract the Platonic values that Hans Coper writes about with regard to the Egyptian vessel?

Theory and Analysis. Russell Moreton

Crafts Study Centre, UCA Farnham. 2015

This essay is an attempt to get to understand my current concerns centred around the interior spaces of things and places. This sense of the interior is itself held in place by the notion of some kind of vessel or material whether it is a pot or an architectural structure. It is this vessel and its materiality together with its form and its formlessness that I want to explore more closely.

In architecture an interior can become a ‘sensing space’ with its own particular characteristics it becomes a host space, an extension of our own existential space; it can promote memories, sensations and can act as a reflective refuge from our post modern lives. Do these vessels and spaces re-enact the particulars of traditions and livelihoods, of other lives; are they in fact built expressions on the basic needs of a civilisation whether they be pots or architecture?

Do we in some way attempt to reconcile and balance opposites, the outside with the inside; and as a result the practicality of a space depends on a larger degree to issues regarding its actual emptiness? I am interested in both the interior of a vessel, and the interior sensations of being in a space. The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard is also interested in this dialectic between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.

In her essay The Essential Vessel, Natasha Daintry (Daintry, 2007:9) cites The Tao Te Ching ‘we turn clay to make a vessel, but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.’ It follows then that this might be where the vessel starts to embody ‘something and nothing and becomes an effortless three dimensional manifestation of both form and formlessness.’ (Daintry,2007, :8) It is interesting to note that the potter is dealing simultaneously with both form and its attendant space as he hollows out the clay to create what might be termed an ‘essay to abstraction, a clothing of emptiness.’(Daintry,2007:8) This defined air is the ‘most transcendently human of all made things; volume, inner space, an interior, the carved out air that connects the morning teacup with the domes and spandrels of San Maco. There’s nothing there but clay and air, then there’s defined air.’(Gopnik, 2014:6) Adam Gopnik essay on the pots of Edmund de Waal speaks of an ‘innerness’ and De Waal speaks of ‘a breath held inward’. My own experience of De Waals work in the Architects House at Roche Court, Salisbury, is that of a multitude of similar porcelain pots that were all uniquely able to hold just a single thought or a memory. The installed pots and their simple wooden support became a permeable wall for remembered silences.

This sentiment and its sensitivity to describing visible aspects of the world that are conjoining the concrete with emptiness becomes a poetic on the permeability of spaces and their vessels. The philosopher, Lucretius who was interested in infinitesimal entities comments in his poetic work ‘On the Nature of Things’ records how ‘knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world.’(Daintry, 2007:8) This lightness and its associative attendances can be found in ‘Hans Coper’s only extant piece of writing.’(DeWaal, 2004:34)

A pre-dynastic Egyptian pot, roughly egg-shaped, the size of my hand made thousands of years ago, possibly by a slave, it has survived in more than one sense. A humble, passive, somehow absurd object – yet potent, mysterious, sensuous. It conveys no comment, no self expression, but it seems to contain and reflect its maker and the human world it inhabits, to contribute its minute quantum of energy – and homage. Hans Coper, 1969.

Does Hans Coper’s text reflect through this archaic pot the human sense of innerness that this vessel still dwells with? ‘Theories of relativity and uncertainty have shown that all matter, even the airy oxygenated void inside a vessel is energy, and that it is composed of the same building blocks generated from exploded stars.’ (Daintry, 2007:8) Hans Coper’s Egyptian pot certainly as he observes, is still contributing its minute quantum of energy from thousands of years ago; an innerness put into being by the human hand. The sensing, doing and being that is caught, even marooned in this vessel talks of existential states, rituals, of things that shift and move as you inhabit the interlockingness of skin, volume and displacement.

There is a material memory at work here, an artefact from another epoch, another mindset, but our corporality and the physical traces left in the clay concur its humanity. Pottery is given a priority in its ability to reveal cultures of the past.

‘The special historical value of pottery is due to its stillness underground. Almost uniquely, it does not corrode or disintegrate when exposed to earth and water, and so it forms the most important part of the physical record of the past. Like an invisible architecture, inverted and buried out of sight, they are our most reliable evidence of human endeavour.’ (Adamson, 2009:36)

Gaston Bachelard writes in his Poetics of Space that ‘We absorb a mixture of being and nothingness.’ He is interested in the dialectic of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. He asks is outside vast and fluid and inside concrete and small? He surmises that perhaps there is some membrane or intermediate surface that could separate the two states or rather a duality of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. But these are concepts and abstractions, ‘the real experience is more kinetic, more fluid and interchangeable.’ (Daintry,2007:11) Can it be that as Bachelard argues that the mind and its imagination actually blurs the duality of inside and outside. He comments ’everything, even size, is a human value, even the miniature can accumulate size.’ In this way he explains further ‘being does not see itself, it does not stand out, it is not bordered by nothingness: one is never sure of finding it, or of finding a solid when one approaches a centre of being. We absorb a mixture of being and nothingness.’(Bachelard,1994:53)

Bachelard seems to be in accord with the poetics of Lucretius as described by Italo Calvino in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium as ‘the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us is that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies.’(Calvino,1996: 61) There is a lightness and an exactitude in this ‘interior space’ that exists between its states of form and its formlessness. The vessel seems to have the ability to inhabit, mediate and transpose spaces between the ‘rich liminal territory of uncertainty and abstraction.’ (Daintry,2007:12)

The transformative power of the vessel on changing spaces and our perceptions through its existential condition is illustrated in the poem “Anecdote of the Jar by Wallace Stevens” cited by Edmund De Waal. The jar or rather its vessel qualities becomes a spatial metaphor as it ‘practices’ the landscape around it by taking dominion as it were over the unmade. Perhaps Wallace Stevens’s ‘Jar’ promotes an architecture for the soul, an intimate yet social interior illuminated through the imagination?

Natasha Daintry asks are we now using objects to lead us back to ourselves, objects that before were used as a way of feeling our way into the world? (Daintry,2007:13) She remarks on the strong resonance that clay in particular has to human civilisation and as a material that can socially inform us.

I am interested in exploring further these notions of material and spaces, of form and formlessness through the social contexts and professional practices of Hans Coper and Edmund de Waal. I am particularly interested in the making process ‘throwing’ as it promotes the situation of attending to the physicality of things which has the effect of locating you in the world and connecting you to your own physicality. Daintry comments ‘it represents a way of existence of felt experience, of being known, and knowing the world through the corporeal.’ (Daintry,2007:13)

Pottery Making, Inner Spaces, Installation Art and the Post modern.

‘When potters throw a certain curve in a vessel wall, they are in affect in dialogue with every kindred pot that they have seen or held. Like an archaeologist’s excavated shard, the experiential dimension of making can act as a bridge across temporal distances.’ (Adamson, 2009:44) The pot can be seen as a cultural trace that can bring a sense of immediacy from across the centuries.

Hans Coper’s assembled ceramics are constructed from a number of thrown components, throwing a process that he remarks on by saying ‘I become part of the process, I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument, which may be resonant to my experience of existence now.’(Birks,1983:63) Tony Birks comments that all his works were containers and that they were all thrown and that some of their energy is the direct response of being solely conceived on the wheel. This ceramic practice of throwing gave him his sense of livelihood, dwelling and skill.

Coper’s pots celebrate the studio potters pioneering spirit of innovation and discovery through the daily practice and discipline of a craft. He produced composite forms of his own invention that underpinned his modernist aesthetic. His ceramics have evolved through a series of archetypes, families and groupings, from which he could propose subtle amendments and adaptations.

Hans Coper’s pots are objects that seem to spatialize their surroundings with their complex inner spaces. They seem to set up in their interiors, narratives and intimacies that radiate outwards to the surface of the vessel and then beyond into the scale of the world.

The Pots themselves have an almost mechanical surface treatment. This is caused by abrading the glazed engobe layer. This seems to give their interior space a reverence for the handmade and sensibilities of the once plastic clay.

Hans Coper’s candlesticks made for Coventry Cathedral could be seen as epochal points of reflection and reconciliation with humanity.

His pots take up dominion as thinking, sensorial vessels, artefacts that enter into our existential social realm.

Hans Coper was part of an ethical avant-garde. He produced modernist artefacts that sat on his studio shelves; his pots had no need of biography, plinth or cabinet. They exist solely through the agency and inquiry of their makers’ situation; they reference the modernist traits of their time, yet they are touched by an archaic timelessness, an entropy that they and we can never escape. These pots now question the new social consciousness that has itself left art in the world of the Post modern, which is itself addictive, conditioned and fetishized. Hans Coper’s pots remain humble in their humility despite market forces; but can they really gives us some sense of ‘a vision that affords perspective on our existence and the hidden aspirations of man?’ (Kuspit,1994:5)

Suzi Gablik in The Re-enchantment of Art confirms that our way of thinking about art (has become conditioned) to the point where we have become incredibly addicted to certain kinds of experience at the expense of others, such as community, or ritual. Not only does the particular way of life for which we have been programmed lack any cosmic, or transpersonal dimension, but its underlying principles (have become) manic production and consumption, maximum energy flow, mind-less waste and greed. (Gablik, 1991:2)

In sharp contrast to the abraded and textured reworkings found on Hans Coper’s pots, Edmund de Waal’s contemporary installations furnished with his own hand thrown porcelain pots; shimmer and shine with a suffused surface of reflections producing a delicate aesthetic that promotes his ‘dialogue about the use, preciousness, survival, presentation and display of ceramics.’(Graves, 2008:8)

His large scale installations show large groups of ceramic vessels, these are often in historic architectural settings. He is both an artist and an historian of ceramics. His installation Signs and Wonders contains up to 425 pieces of wheel thrown porcelain. Through working with specific settings De Waal has produced installations that by their very impermanence offer ‘new and unexpected dialogues’ through staged interventions that are ‘framing pots within architectural features or the intimate spaces of furniture.’ (Graves, 2009:10) This site specific installation is located high up in and under the main oculus window at the Victoria and Albert museum in London. The installation will be visible to viewers as they look upwards into the space of the monumental central dome.

Signs and Wonders could be about seeing and sensing pots from a distance, De Waal is seeking to reflect the sentiments found in Wallace Stevens poem that makes the pot itself appear as a still centre from which we can step back from and observe as it helps us to gather in our surroundings.

‘De Waal has placed his pots in circulation, but not in the sense that they can be held and passed around. They are even, to some degree withheld.’ (Adamson, 2009:34) De Waal’s porcelain vessels (shape shifters) are in effect objects from memory brought into a shifting nature of influences from the Chinese porcelains, the 1800 Century European porcelains and the collections of the Modern era from Vienna, Bauhaus and the Constructivists. ‘The way in which the pots are displayed has become an integral part of the work. And increasingly there is a sense that it is about putting on a show, albeit one that might be for a private audience.’ (Graves, 2009:8)

This work is not about tactility, immediacy or possession, perhaps De Waal has succeeded in producing a collection that is also ‘a talisman of subjectivity’ of one man’s personal vision of ceramics.

His work and the interior spaces associated with it are in some way becoming endemic of his and our post modern world. Is there some sense that De Waal’s throwing, his vessel making has itself just become a function, an endless repetition. Is there a fear that the presentation and the framing of De Waal’s vessels actually ends up with him filling in the spaces he has strived to construct?

Although the body has been existential throughout the throwing process and is clearly represented in Edmund de Waals work. It might now appear that these new thrown pots destined for another staged presentation, are being crafted with this aim in mind.

Rebecca Solnit explores Susan Bordo’s claim that ‘if the body is a metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception and knowledge, then the post modern body is no body at all.’ Solnit comments on this post modern body that it is more of a passive object, appearing most often laid out upon an examining table or in bed. ‘A medical and sexual phenomenon, it is site of sensations, processes, and desires rather than a source of action and production, this body has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be embodied. Which is not to disparage sex and the erotic as fascinating and profound, only to propose that they are so emphasised because other aspects of being embodied have atrophied for many people.’(Solnit, 2002)

We return back to the urgent need to make and experience things that in someway that lead us back to ourselves. The creative architectural work of Peter Zumthor is something that I am engaging with. He has developed architectural design practices that consider each project in terms of a comprehensive and encompassing sensory experience. He looks beyond the mere physical form and its fabric. He attempts to address issues of the body and how it may interact within a built environment. The use of memory as a spatial narrative to accompany the atmosphere of his spaces is realised through evocative material surfaces and densities. I feel that there is a synergy here between the opening up of the interior of a pot and the opening up of a space to dwell in.

In sensing a pots interior from its surface, we are as it were in some intimate tacit correspondence with its spatial sensing centre. We become known to it through its maker’s creative gesture of innerness. This anthropological inner space linking us to the potter is both sensual and distant; its vacancy allows us dwell in the maker’s absence. We become part of the vessel, we enter its philosophy of solitude.

Shadow Theatre/Sculpting In Time : Visceral Compositions~Gatherings

A Resultant Complication of  Agencement.

Shadow Theatre for a  Performative Interior.

Enfolded Structures : On a sympathy of correspondence.

Sensing Places : Towards an Alchemy of Thinking.

This site based exploratory apparatus, part self assembly, and part crafted brings together components, materials and filtered light. Built around the involvement of making in the landscape, this event based intervention creates a fictional space articulated through the alchemy of built spaces that merge the poetic with the tectonic.

Photographic Documents : Domain-Court-Cell : Research Collages

Spatialities and Interior Spaces~Apparatuses for Diffractive Thinking.

Science~Inside The Church : Spatial Documentation~Defractive Readings.

VISITORS : Collage/Waverley Project/Exploratory Practice 2015.

Cyanotype Process

Modern/Primitive

Collage/Fragment from Dom Hans van der Laan

Cell/Court/Domain

Visitors

Godfrey Reggio 

Research collage with photographic document, MA Interiors, UCA Farnham.

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience

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

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience