040521
Anti Object
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.
Kengo Kuma
Procedural Architecture
Start by thinking of architecture as a tentative constructing toward a holding in place. Architecture's holding in place occurs within and as part of a prevailing atmospheric condition that others routinely call biosphere but which we, feeling the need to stress its dynamic nature, have renamed bioscleave.
Architectural Body
Madeline Gins and Arakawa
LIVING : FRONTIERS OF ARCHITECTURE
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
Wang Qingsong : Dormitory, China, 2005
Key Words : Observatory, Camera Obscura, Living, Seeing, Intensity
BEHAVIOROLOGY ( the study of the combination of natural dispositions, social environment and personal experience)
Deals with the special atmosphere and character of the suburb. In film, literature and art the suburb often has an undertone of something mysterious, eerie, of events that are kept hidden.
The dual desire to see and to be seen leads to instability. An object may be made transparent, but it remains an object. And transparent, it is more thoroughly under observation and more thoroughly dominated. Conditions in the suburbs are in a sense even more wretched than those in the panopticon.
Kengo Kuma/Observatory/Anti-Object
Uchronia, Burning Man Festival, Nevada. 2006
Rouen Concert Hall and Exhibition Complex
Architectural Envelope/Heterogeneous Composite
Movement Vectors/Layers : Interior Concrete Skin/Visible Arches of the Steel Skeleton
Painting Space : Yellow ochre on white gesso over kraft paper
An Anthropology of Landscape
Christopher Tilley
Kate Cameron-Daum
Spirituality in Contemporary Art
The Idea Of The Numinous
Jingu Yoon
New Global Ecologies
Baratunde Thurston
INTENSITY : Portable Architecture as Parable. Mark Prizeman
The act of moving through mobile societies makes this transient architecture understandable.
A nomad uses what is to hand and able to be replaced or adapted.
The success of a tent depends on the exploration of an idea in the workshop by wandering through the dream and not being restricted by the finite parameters of a drawn representation of the future object.
Like explorers planning to venture into the unknown, an ability to imagine the consequences of what one takes and what one leaves behind is imperative.
ERASING :
Kirosan Observatory, Kengo Kuma
Observatories demonstrate the self-centred nature of human perception. They are generally objects, that is the core of the problem. I wondered if this observatory could be made transparent, that is, effectively erased, so minimising the damage to the environment.
In terms of erasing an object, the settin is more important than the choice of material. In this case, the setting was a summit that had already been levelled and turned into a perfect pedestal. Anything that is set on a pedestal becomes an object, regardless of what it is made of or how discreetly it is placed.
Most works of contemporary art are tiresome because they rely on this particular property of the pedestal.
Observatory/Artists Outdoor Studio with astronomical 'Hortus Conclusus' /pavilion/segment built from the walled garden.
IMMATERIAL :
Layer upon layer of reality and image, the material and the immaterial, were thus overlapped.
The Camera Obscura and Telescope, Dumfries. 1836
It is not quite clear what the real astronomical purpose of camera obscurae was, not only the Royal Observatory at Edinburgh but also the Royal Observatory at Greenwich still posses theirs, though dismantled and stored in cupboards for a century or more.
Paramatta Observatory, New South Wales, 1822
Sepia stained cyanotypes of architectural building plans
Plaster tabletop viewing screen, concave, chalk/matt surface
Lead weights on natural ropes used to control the apparatus
What I am most interested in now is inverting the structure of a culture that is centred around the city. The twentieth century was an age of industry, and an age in which everything from material goods, information and culture flowed from the cities to local towns and villages. Following the same vector, architecture, too, flowed out from the centre to the periphery.
Kengo Kuma
APPARATUS :
The Observatory is a facility for stealing looks at visitors
Electronic technology is used in these devices to expose the imperfection of vision and reverse its privileged status. Under ordinary circumstances, the seeing object is under the illusion that he/she dominates what they see. However, seeing also opens up the possibility of being seen. Anyone who dominates another through vision is always vulnerable to a brutal reversal.
High and Low, 1963. Akira Kurosawa
I therefore tried designing a transparent object. My real aim was not to create an object, but to choreograph a sequence of movements by the subject, that is, to create a device controlling his/her vision. Anti-Object, Kengo Kuma.
Your Chance Encounter, 2010. Olafur Eliasson
Messr Barr and Stroud, Optical Engineers, Glasgow, used to produce obscuras for industry, they were much cheaper to purchase and maintain in a large industrial establishment than closed-circuit television.
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