Studio Works/Architectural Surrounds : Drawing into the indeterminacy of boundaries.

Outpost 250924

Research Collage 2015

Disjunction and Event/Architecture In/Between.

The task of the architect is to modulate, orchestrate, or simplify the potential reciprocity, indifference, or conflict that spaces can generate. Most problems in architecture are disjunctive, namely they are multiple, heterogeneous, divergent and even contradictory, involving site, program, budget, schedule, and interest groups, among other factors. All of these contradicting and disjunctive forces eventually contaminate one another. Bernard Tschumi, Notes on Architecture 2010 (unpublished).

Making/Adaptations/Using The Made.

Drawing into the indeterminacy of boundaries.

Organism-Person-Environment

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

Studio Drawings.

On Feeling More Matter than Form.

There is always more of everything than a thing can contain.

Immediate Architectural Experiences.

Bodies, Spaces and Their Relations.

Creating an independent yet meaningful reality, that are direct aesthetic experiences of the real.

Kenzo Tange.

Regaining our experience in a world of mass media  culture, regaining a world that is directly lived.

Ann Cline.

Architectural Body/Sited Awareness.

Arakawa and Gins  end up pointing to the inseparability and affect of body and surround, for them this inseparability is what gives rise to the architectural body. They write that a person should never be considered apart from her surroundings, that their hypothesis of the Architectural Body/Sited Awareness, announces the indivisibility of seemingly separate fields of bioscleave: a person and an architectural surround, and that the two together give procedural architecture its basic unit of study the architectural body.

This results in a certain indeterminacy of boundaries, as body and surround are collapsed into one, and as they are constantly shifting in relation to one another. 

The architectural body is a body that can and cannot be found. 

Boundaries for an architectural body can only be suggested, never determined.

Architecture in Abjection.

Zuzana Kovar.

Relevance/Relation as a way of organizing things through both contingency (philosophy) and metonymy (linguistics).

Relevance has by its nature, wiggle room because things have wiggle room. Because things never quite coincide with how they appear for or how they are used by or interpreted by other things (and possibly even themselves).

What we want to do and how we feel and what we are wanting and feeling about are all mashed together into an ecological awareness.

The Context of Relevance is Structurally Incomplete.

Whenever you want to do something, you always encounter a whole thicket of things that are relevant to what you're wanting to do. This thicket of things creates an explosion of contextualization, and you can't – won't be able to stop it.

Timothy Morton.

An interconnection without an edge or centre called General Economy.

Bataille.

Architecture and Material Practice

Katie Lloyd Thomas.

Susannah Hagan argues for a return to a cyclic model where matter is only ever reformed and make (or adapt) architecture accordingly – but without necessarily returning to old forms of building. In a responsible future, architects may have to relinquish their role as form givers, and 'grow' materials rather than give them shape.

Social imperatives and new technologies may well, finally, be the undoing of the grip that hylomorphism has held on architectural and material practices for so long.

Caryatids/Project Spaces.

Architectural Surrounds.

Studio Floor Drawing/Painting.

Mattering/Of and For the Body of Others.

Material Worlds : Frottage, charcoal, wax, Indian Ink, crayon on water.

Material and buildings are always implicated, in and of the world. In discussing her work with a group of African women who are beginning the process of making their own homes, Doina Petrescu asks how their principle of 'putting together and sharing' might be realized in an architectural project. 

The specificities of place, culture, gender and local forms of negotiation make an 'architecture' that is more fluid than solid, and more matter than form, and demonstrate the radical alterity of building in another context.

Architecture in Abjection.

Organism-Person-Environment

Human bodies and spaces flow  through one another – a chemical indiscernibility that is invisible.

Two of the most fundamental things that come out of the work of Rahm and Arakawa and Gins for architecture, in mapping out a more open-ended and volatile understanding of bodies and spaces, are the reduction of these to matter and a thinking in terms of relations or events rather than static and discrete entities. These link directly into the area of process and intelligent material philosophy that is at the forefront of this thinking, and that is employed here, namely through the work of Deleuze and Guattari, in order to approach abject(ion) productively. 

What the introduction of abject(ion) and a reading of it through the filter of Deleuze and Guattari allows for and contributes on top of its own way of reworking dualities is a bringing together of the material and processual approaches already in play within the work of Rahm and Arakawa and Gins, respectively. It is with this in mind that we move to the Kristevan concept.

The Hot Death. 2006.

Philippe Rahm.

Rahm's work has a very particular quality. There is almost no building, which is usually the measure or ground of architecture. There is nothing left but the ritual, experience, coder and effect of architecture itself.

Physiological/Meteorological Architecture operates across fields of art, architecture and science. Rahm through his spaces, manipulates temperature, oxygen and hormone levels. Importantly, as his works straddle this range of fields, it frees up the architecture, allowing it to be distilled down to its effects and to experience.

An architecture that gets distilled down to experience and the chemical exchanges between body and space. It begins to function within a similar realm to abject(ion). It becomes about a visceral assault, an affect that passes through the subject.

This extracorporeal space, especially in contemporary man, consists of filling to the point of overflow where the subject is ensnared, a condition  of the state of stress and an endemic breach of adaptation.

The Hot Death is a choreography piece that investigates the indiscernibility of the body and space at a chemical level. A levelling between body and space occurs, where the temperature of the space slowly comes to equal that of the living body, stabilising the two and eliminating their differences: a  play on death.

The bodies are on stage at the start of the order of individuality, each with its own movements, independently of others, as a multitude of energy. Then gradually, the temperature, humidity of the room rises to match that of the human body. The movements are slower, heavier, gravity wins put up any ground, motionless, without more space between, more movement possible.

Body and space are at the fundamental level of a base materialism, merely matter, and that because of this, 'can wind quintets carry and spread the flu virus?' such exchanges are possible.

Raum's work moves away from an architecture that is constituted by body and space to an architecture that is the active exchange between body and space. It is in this understanding – that bodily and spatial boundaries are not clearly demarcated as architecture still generally assumes them to be, and that they regularly are transgressed and diluted – that constitutes a move beyond dualistic modes of thought.

Everyday Living Places~Fielding Mobility : The Intensity of Inhabitation/Grey Tones Chromatic or Achromatic.

Outpost 181024

Siting Awareness : Studio event in the midst of its potentiality.

https://axisweb.org/artist/russellmoreton

Philosophical Solitudes~Sensual Objects

Here the full meaning of the philosopher's solitude becomes apparent. For he cannot integrate into any milieu; he is not suited to any of them. Doubtless it is in democratic and liberal milieus that he finds the best living conditions, or rather the best conditions for survival.

Gilles Deleuze.

Life Of Spinoza.

Ann Cline.

A Hut of One's Own/Life outside the circle of Architecture.

How to cook a wolf.

Essay as Cookbook.

The pleasure of Sue's little house and her inspired oblivion to the ugliness of poverty, appeals not because of its strangeness, but because of its calm. The pleasure of her little house as with the 'bagatelles' around Paris lay in the intensity of its inhabitation.

At first when you entered it, the house seemed almost empty, but soon you realised that it was stuffed with a thousand relics. You ate by one candle, everything from one large Spode soup plate. I have never eaten such strange things as there in her dark smelly room, with the waves roaring at the foot of the cliff. The salads and stews she made from these little shy weeds (gathered from the cliffs and nearby field) were indeed peculiar, but she blended and cooked them so skilfully that they never lost their fresh salt crispness. She put them together with thought and gratitude, and never seemed to realize that her cuisine was one of intense romantic strangeness, to everyone but herself, moreover it was good.

M. F. K. Fisher.

Inherent Light.

The light that seems to glow from within a colour.

To attend to colour, then is in part, to attend to the limits of language. It is to try to imagine, often through the medium of language, what a world without language might be like.

David Batchelor.

Retinal Studies

Colour, David Hornung. 2005

Knowing Obscures Seeing.

Vision is influenced by our preconceptions about reality. In viewing a scene, we establish unconscious hierarchies that reflect our functional relationship to objects and our momentary priorities.

The camera, like the human eye, sees only shapes and colours. It documents the world impartially through a lens that is similar to the eye. The functional relationship we have with objects creates visual expectations that interfere with our ability to see 'like a camera.'

In retinal painting, one concentrates upon colour and shape while resisting the urge to name individual objects. When vision is directed in this manner, one actually experiences a different way of seeing. The result is a picture in which the subjects seem to be constructed purely out of colour shapes.

The Impressionists developed a way of painting that, at its most extreme, sought to replace drawing as the basis of pictorial composition with the objective transcription of colour shapes as observed in reality. Claude Monet (1840-1926) in particular attempted to build his pictures strictly out of his response to visual sensations. He proposed that the painter should record only the patterns and colours that  fall on the retina and ignore the 'identity' of the subject. This constituted a new kind of realism that reflected the physical nature of vision.

Bridge Tones.

Tones, tints, or shades that combine qualities of two distinctly different colours and act to soften those differences when placed near them in a composition.

Chromatic Darks.

Very dark chromatic greys that have discernible temperature.

Chromatic Greys.

Subtle colours that result from considerably lowering the saturation level of prismatic colours. Chromatic greys weakly exhibit the distinguishing quality of the hue family to which they belong. 

Median Transparency.

An illusion of transparency where the value of the colour at the overlap is halfway between that of the two parent colours. The hue of the overlapping area blends the hues of the two overlying colours equally.

Luminosity.

The amount of light reflected from the surface of a colour. Value is a measure of luminosity.

High Key.

What an image is said to be when the colours in it are predominantly light in value.

Middle Key.

What an image is said to be when the colours in it are predominantly medium in value.

Achromatic Greys.

Greys that are created by mixing black and white. Achromatic greys have no evident coloration when seen against a white background. Black and white are also achromatic.

Greyscale.

A graduated representation of the value continuum broken down into a finite number of steps, usually ten, eleven, or twelve achromatic greys.

Non proportional Colour Inventory.

A graphic rendering of specific colours observed in an object.

Proportional Colour Inventory.

A graphic representation of the exact colours and their proportions in a observed object.

Retinal Painting.

A term coined by Harriet Schorr in reference to painting from observation in a manner emphasizing the faithful transcription of coloured shapes as they appear on the retina of the eye. An outgrowth of Impressionism, this method favours accurate colour rendering over drawing to describe form. 

Shade.

The result of mixing a colour with black.

Tint.

The result of mixing a colour with white.

Tone.

Made by mixing grey (either chromatic or achromatic) with a colour. Tone can also have a more general meaning. The term is sometimes applied to all colours achieved by admixture including tints and shades.

Colour Unity.

The Altered Palette.

Unifying Strategies for Colour Mixing.

Any primary triad will have inherent limitations, but these are what give a palette its character.

Comparisons between the compositional study and the finished inventory clarify just how the inherent light in a design or painting is a projection of the palette from which it originates.

The colour overtones associated with specific pigments will limit possible saturation range. These limitations can be thought of as an expression of the character of illumination inherent in a colour. Just as a fluorescent light produces a characteristic quality of light that unifies what it illuminates,  any primary triad exerts a characteristic quality of inherent light through intermixing. 

An almost fool proof way to achieve family resemblance among a group of colours is to generate them from a limited source. Intermixing any primary triad (plus white) can produce a wide range of tones that share a common light quality.

A triadic dot study, teaches a mode of examination that, in a few steps summarizes the tonal range of a selected palette. The follow-up applies the colours of the study to a composition and puts the palette into action.

Earth Tone Primary Triad.

A primary triad of chromatic greys (so called because of their resemblance to pigments found in nature, e.g., ochres and umbers).

Low Key.

What an image is said to be when the colours in it are predominantly dark in value. 

Ceramic Oxides/Body Stains.

Chromatic greys from earth tones producing weak muted colours.

Huts/Follies/Pavilions : Experimental Lives/Reworking Subjectivity.

Outpost 241024

It seems that the significance of an aesthetic event is in its future.

Timothy Morton, Realist Magic : Objects, Ontology, Causality.

Reworking Subjectivity.

Actualizing Traces.

Vectors/Inscriptions and Field Conditions.

Theory and Things.

The Intuitive Practices of the Untutored Maker.

Experimental Lives.

On Simple Huts.

On Exercising Experience.

Huts, as Folly or Pavilion, serving a deeper impulse of curiosity, pleasure, experimentation, discipline. While the primitive hut belongs equally to 'what architecture is' and to 'what architecture is not' ironically its greatest significance may derive from the many non architectural ideas it engages.

Anne Cline.

Giving way to the nature of materials, new sensitivity, new subjectivity.

Ceramic objects of open intervals, intersections, inner places, and places in-between. 

These primal images give us back houses in which the human beings certainty of being is concentrated, and we have the impression that in images that are as stabilizing as these are, we could start a new life. A life that would be our own that would belong to us, in our very depths.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.

Ann Cline.

It would seem then that the search for the primitive hut begins in play. A deconstructing process in which children seem to examine what is given them, intent upon taking it apart. While Rykwert's primitive is founded in the expression of origins, collectively imagined and believed. Bachelard's primitive is founded in the expressions of youth, not as vulgar nostalgia (as he emphatically warns) but in images as we should have imagined them during the 'original impulse' of youth.

In other times of cultural transition, the primitive hut, as invention or as a construct of experience, has brought humans to the edge of their normative existence and from there allowed perspective and experimentation.

The more 'primitive' the hut the more its creators recognized the arbitrariness of their own culture.

Within the inhabited hut, cultural issues and practices readily converge 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 lifestyle. The hut, then, may be humankind's supreme experiment.

Divertissements and spectacles cover over the most basic human aspiration, to know what it is to have a human life.

Earth-House-Hold.

Gary Snyder. 1969

AM1.

Architecture, Art, Design, Fashion, History, Photography.

The Production of Space.

The Poetics of Space.

A Species of Spaces.

Space is not 'a priori' but rather a matter of relations between objects (things/phenomena).

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Spatial Practices/Making Agency.

Circulation Diagram/Body/Space/Living/Activities/Production.

Movements/Interactions/Spaces/Volumes.

Tentative/Procedural Architecture (existential experiencing of built spaces).

Arakawa and Gins.

Body/Bodies as vector of movements/interactions/overlapping/navigating through interlocking/disparate spatial volumes.

Making and Meaning.

Andrew Higgott.

Peter Salter: Building Projects.

Architectural Association School.

Work created in design units such as that of Mike Gold, starting with the human figure as generator, or of Peter Wilson, prioritized sensibility over articulated theory, the evocative over the concrete: but the approach came to be evident in many student projects beyond these units. Much of this work was concerned with creating new forms of an architecture of meaning, and generating this meaning through a variety of intuitive devices.

As Peter Salter's own work developed, his interest in structural ingenuity gave way to a new sensitivity and subjectivity. A sensitivity to site and to the nature of materials, subjectivity in terms of making the personal and particular response. Seeing precedent in the practice of the Smithsons and other recent architects, but also in the practice of the untutored maker of things.

Grounding his work in the realization of the transformation of materials from natural form to the making of space: actualizing traces of context and echoes of history in its making. Rather than the more obvious and simple course of collaging fragments of pre-existing forms, it understands such devices and has an intuitive resonance of them. 

Architecture in Abjection.

What Greg Lynn in the 1990s is laying out here, following Deleuze and Guattari, is a relational understanding of the world, as opposed to an understanding based on things. For Deleuze and Guattari, relations occur not only between things but within the things themselves, such that the world is a vibrating field of potential, never in a moment of stasis or being but always changing. It is therefore very much about the in-between, and it is this in-between, this field of relations, that is a multiplicity.

Although Lynn's reference to and adoption of philosophical concepts has no doubt been productive not only for his own practice but for the architectural discipline as a whole, the simplification of that philosophy serves to overlook many further-reaching implications, such as the reworking of subjectivity.

Simplification of borrowed thought is thus one key criticism in this respect. The other, which applies not only to Lynn but also to architects engaging with the concept of emergence, rests in the application of that thought as an organisational and form-generating strategy.

Influenced by the emergent behaviours within networks, swarms, flocks and so on, the key thing to point out with the uptake of a processional or relational mode of thought within architecture is the shift in emphasis from the end product – the building – to the process through which the  building is conceived – the design process. The important aspect is how a form is generated, and how its parts interact and are organised, rather than the form itself.

Flows of various kinds and scales, make up architecture and connect it with the world.

Event (Deleuze/Guattari) as defined by Movement in terms of vectors and field relations, of Time or the idea that all things change, and Scale an awareness and importance of the similarities in relations across any number of scales become pertinent.

Arakawa and Gins explore a house with a client that at appears at first to be a pile of material. But that upon occupation, it expands into a habitable series of rooms whose volume shifts in relation to the movement of bodies within them.

Drawing on Life : Bento's Sketchbook/A Hut of One's Own : John Berger/Ann Cline/Bento de Spinoza

In the backyard of where she was living, Cline once decided to build a hut inspired by Kakuzo Okakura's The Book of Tea.

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.

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

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.

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.

This may seem a bold conclusion given the modesty of the hut throughout history, and the modest ambitions of its makers, but this is Cline's point, that the experiment in solitude and simplicity is bolder than any social or culturally-sanctioned experiments or projects, simply because the latter are contrived and unnatural, even anti­ natural.

https://www.hermitary.com/bookreviews/cline.html

Then the days of working at home on it. The image in my head was often clearer than the one on the paper. I redrew and redrew. The paper became grey  with  alterations and  cancelations.  The drawing didn’t get better, but gradually she, about to stand up, was more insistently there.

The effort of my  corrections and  the endurance of the paper have begun  to resemble the resilience of Maria’s own body. The surface of the drawing - its skin, not its image — make me think of how there are moments when a dancer can make your hairs stand on end.

We who  draw do  so  not only  to  make something  observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.

The bodies of dancers with their kind of devotion are dual. And this is visible whatever they are doing. A kind of Uncertainty Principle determines them; instead of being alternately particle and wave, their bodies are alternately giver and gift.

They know their own bodies in such a penetrating way that they can be within them, or before them and beyond them. And this alternates,  sometimes changing  every  few seconds,  some­ times every few minutes.

The duality  of each  body  is what allows them,  when  they perform,  to  merge into  a single entity.  They  lean  against,  lift, carry, roll over, separate from, co-join, buttress each other so that two or three bodies become a single dwelling, like a living cell is a dwelling for its molecules and messengers, or a forest for its animals.

The same duality  explains why  they  are as much  intrigued by falling as by leaping, and why the ground challenges them as much as the air.

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

Rendering Visible : Heuristic Mappings/Assemblages and the Production of Open Subjectivities

Visual material must capture non visible forces. Render visible, not render of reproduce the visible

Deleuze and Guattari

Interior : Gridshell

A Hut of One's Own, Ann Cline

For Irigaray, wonder corresponds to time, to space-time before and after that which can delimit. 

Wonder constitutes an opening prior to and following that which surrounds/enlaces.

The Intuition of The Infine

The intuition of a subject that at each point in the present remains unfinished and open to a becoming of the other that is neither simply passive nor simply active.

The Poetics of Space : The house, from cellar to garret. The significance of the hut.

"He will revive the primitivity and the specificity of the fears. In our civilization, which has the same light everywhere, and puts electricity in its cellars, we no longer go to  the cellar carrying a candle. But the unconscious cannot be civilized. It takes a candle when it goes to the cellar."

Gaston Bachelard.

Texts,Annotations, Foundations, Pathways, Corridors, Bookmarks, Walking, Thinking, Ramble, Cross Country, Disciplines,

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_0205 Archipelagic

Research Collage, Waverley Project/Reading Rooms

Blueprints : Anthropological Forms
Botanical traces with leper graves

Walberswick : DSC_0181a/Digital Pinhole. 2016

Being/Becoming : Aesthetics and Subjectivity
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie.
Nick Cave, The Lyre of Orpheus.
Hildur Gudnadottir, Saman.

Prints From Secrets and Ambiguity
Is there still an aesthetic illusion? And if not, a path to an “aesthetic” illusion, the radical illusion of secret, seduction and magic? Is there still, on the edges of hypervisibility, of virtuality, room for an image?
— Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, 2005

Jana Sterbak
Remote Control 1989

A heuristic technique (/hjᵿˈrɪstᵻk/; Ancient Greek: εὑρίσκω, "find" or "discover"), often called simply a heuristic, is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals.

Sensate
Non Spaces : Fire escape Winchester School of Art

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

The Darkness of Interiors/ The Absence of Openings.

Outpost 081024

Connections remaining sensuously in play.

The Darkness of Interiors/ The Absence of Openings.

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

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.

https://www.anglianpotters.org.uk/members/russell-moreton/