Scaffolds/Tentative Architectures : Drawing Architectural Surrounds

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Space And Subjectivity.

Collage with glass and documentation from Francesca Woodman.

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

Making/Building made indeterminate through a retention/questioning of a framework and the insertion of an event that introduces a slippage/deviation of that of a framed outcome.

Bernard Tschumi. (equation as a provisional framework)

Tentative/Processual Architectures. 

Arakawa and Gins.

Lucy Orta.

Shortcomings of Phenomenological Thought.

One places oneself at the centre, designates oneself, measures oneself and uses oneself as a measure. One is in short a 'subject' and space is a projection of oneself or its counterpart, that it is defined therefore not in its own right, but in relation to the subject. Space, my space is not the context of which I constitute the 'textuality' instead it is first of all my body and then it is my body's counterpart or other, its mirror-image or shadow. It is the shifting intersection between that which touches, penetrates, threatens or benefits my body on the one hand and all other bodies on the other. This maintains the boundaries between body and space, subject and object.

Henri Lefebvre.

Phenomenology always stops at boundaries, at the boundary of the body, which is precisely where abject(ion) continues beyond. It is because phenomenology concerns the lived body rather than bodies in a plural and more general sense that it is a discussion of wholes rather than transitions and exchanges unable to accommodate volatile processes.

Inhabitations : Cultures Of Melting Snow.

The In-Between.

There is no room for the in-between, no way to describe exchanges between entities and the effect of those exchanges. All is static and no cannot as Francois Jullien wrote of Plato, think of the snow in the process of melting. One can only think of either snow or water, but never the process of change.

Abject(ion) Architectures of Process, with brings to the fore interrelated areas of Relational Architecture and Emergent Phenomena.

Architecture in Abjective(Abject (ion) States of Subjectivity.

Frameworks/Scaffolding.

Affective Matter/Mattering.

Kovar turns to Abjection a concept developed by Julia Kristeva, abjection-abject(ion) is both process and product, and can hold a discussion of the transgression of borders. It concerns anything that crosses the symbolic, anything that is expelled literally or figuratively, and that is necessary to keep at bay in order for subjectivity to prevail, issuing from abject(ion) is therefore a threat to our subjectivity, a threat to the boundary between Subject-Object/Body-Space.

Expanding on the processual and material nature of abject(ion), such an undertaking begins with Event and is rounded off with discussions of Affect and Matter.

Zuzana Kovar.

A Disclaimer.

Following Deleuze this book is interested in what 'Abject(ion)' does, rather than what it is.

Drawing (at times) on aspects of the same theory, Kristeva is interested in the disruption of psychological boundaries and Deleuze who deals with both psychological and physical boundaries. Through Deleuze we are able to engage with abject(ion) more holistically.

This book is not concerned with making 'abject' architecture, that is making buildings with abject matter. But is rather concerned with developing ways of thinking about bodies, spaces, and the relations within and between these through the lens of abject(ion).

Architecture in abject(ion) promotes an interest revealed by a sensibility that favours theory and textual practice over images and objects, and goes towards explaining why illustrations of examples referred to throughtout are withheld.

Project 3.1

Body aject(ion) space: A collection of contracts.

The Contracts is the collective name given to a series of projects that explore the notion of abject(ion) as event. Critically, The Contracts are not only explorations (as accommodated by Tschumi), bur also spatial events (as accommodated by Deleuze), and hence the architecture that is defined by the interplay of these events. Given the centrality to this book of the simultaneous abject(ion) of human bodies and spatial bodies, and the indiscernibility in which this results, The  Contracts have come to span a period of three years, hence establishing themselves as the most developed body of work included here.

Architecture in Abjection.

Bodies-Spaces-and Their Relations.

Zuzana Kovar.

A Species of Spaces.

Reclaimations, between a desk and a skip.

Russell Coates.

Archive Mappings/Concerns : Lines/Linkages/Nodes/Points/Intersections.

Architectural Constructs/Events into Material/Making.

Abject (ion) : Affective Resonances/Matter : Clay+Ceramic.

Vessels/Voids/Making from folded spaces.

The simple issues of attending to the material.

Re-Casting Matter, not 'materials'.

Becoming mindful of 'materials' and their 'hylomorphic tendencies'.

Clay retains transitions and exchanges, collects up discrete entities/symbols/inscriptions, places them into volatile spaces/processes of change .

Questioning Subjectivity : Fluidity of matter/material out of place.

The Cinema of Catherine Breillat.

The Process of Abject(ion).

In critical theory, abjection is the state of being cast off and separated from norms and rules, especially on the scale of society and morality. The term has been explored in post-structuralism as that which inherently disturbs conventional identity and cultural concepts. Julia Kristeva explored an influential and formative overview of the concept in her 1980 work Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, where she describes subjective horror (abjection) as the feeling when an individual experiences or is confronted by the sheer experience of what Kristeva calls one's typically repressed "corporeal reality", or an intrusion of the Real in the Symbolic Order.

The process of a body excreting from within itself. A transition between inside and outside, a disruption of physical and psychological boundaries of the still prevalent understanding of body as subject and space as object.

A moment of indiscernibility, the result of which is the product of repulsion, the abject and where body, space and abject become an ambiguity, ranging in intensity from subtle gestures to confronting actions immersed in the viscosity of our leaky bodies.

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

Architectural Body/Architecture In Abjection : Bodies/Spaces and their Relations.

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Studio Works/Architectural Surround.

Art practice explores relations between organism-person-environment.

Architecture In Abjection.

Bodies, Spaces and their Relations.

Zuzana Kovar. 2018

This book marks a turning point in architectural theory by using philosophy to examine the field anew. Breaking from the traditional dualism (space-body) within architecture – which presents the body as subject and space as object – it examines how such rigid boundaries can be softened. Zuzana Kovar thus engages with complementary and complex ideas from architecture, philosophy, feminist theory and other subjects, demonstrating how both bodies and bodily functions relate deeply to architecture. 

Architecture: A dualistic paradigm.

On the breath of approaches to subjectivity.

Eisenman,Tschumi, Derrida.

Deconstructivism challenged the notion of wholes, order, rationality and stability of space/object. Hence it questioned much of modernism, which was seen as purist, and attempted to map out an in-between. In the late 1980s, Eisenman wrote that 'traditional oppositions between structure and decoration, abstraction and figuration, figure and ground, form and function  could be dissolved.

Architecture could begin an exploration of the 'between' within these categories. Explorations of the in-between can be seen in play in Eisenman's Wexner Centre (1989) in Columbus, a building split in two by a 'scaffold structure', which is not temporary but permanent. As such, the centre apparently 'falls somewhere between process and product, past and present, shelter and non-shelter, structure and form, structure and ornament, building and non-building, exterior and interior. In an almost identical sense, Tschumi has written much the same in his Manhatten Transcripts (1994). 

What emerged from Derrida and his deconstructive form of criticism was a particular way of thinking about and practising architecture beyond dualism. Yet, despite this apparent shift from a dualist mode of thought to one that engaged with the in-between, and despite the complexity and promise of thought revealed in the respective theories of Eisenman and Tschumi, if one interrogates the built works, what is revealed is that the subject remains very much intact, and so too does the dualism of subject-object.

Deconstructive architectural theory and its built works have been funnelled into a formalism, which is preoccupied with deconstructing platonic solids and the notion of the object/space as a whole and discrete entity.

For Kovar, what is necessary, is to reconfigure the dualism of subject-object/body-space, to deconstruct the hierarchy and distinction between the two and to map out an in-between between these, rather than within space itself. It is the distinction between body and space that forms the crux of dualistic thought within the architectural discipline, which unless probed, will  allow this mode of thought to prevail.

Tschumi's theory of 'event' introduces a relational conception of the body within architectural discipline. In so doing he mobilises the subject and further shifts the focus from a body to the movements of that body. For Kovar, this setting of the body in motion (although again we are dealing with just one side of the equation) is a lot more productive in the context of questioning dualistic paradigms than formally deconstructing space. Thinking in terms of event allows for not only a volatile conception of the body, but a volatile conception of architecture, given that for Tschumi architecture is constituted by spaces and events.

Developing architectural thought beyond relations to a body or space in isolation.

Event/Assemblages/Bodies/Space-Flows.

Using the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattati and the notions of event, movements, defined in terms of vectors and field relations, time (or the idea that all things change) and scale (an awareness and importance of the similarities in relations across any number of scales)

Architectural Body.

Architectural Surround

Bioscleave.

Arakawa and Gins map out a relational understanding of bodies and spaces, and hence a relational understanding of architecture.

Thinkers, theories conducted in spaces inhabited through experimental projects that illuminate theory at its core.

Sanford Kwinter, Arakawa + Gins, Brian Massumi, Gilles Deleuze.

Being Ecological.

Part of our growing ecological awareness is a feeling of disgust that we are literally covered in and penetrated by nonhuman beings, not just by accident but in an irreducible way. A way that is crucial to our very existence. Maybe this feeling of disgust will diminish if we become used to our immersion in the biosphere. Just like our neurotic feelings diminish as we become friendlier with our thoughts.

Timothy Morton.

Sensing Spaces : Working Assemblage~An extended phenotype of creativity.

13/10/24

Painting/Assemblage/Ceramics.

Ceramic Vessels on Site Specific Ground.

On the sensorial nature of creative inquiry

Indexical markings into the aesthetic realm between objects.

Making With Clay.

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

Relationscape between organism-person-environment.

Architectural Body.

Arakawa/Gins/Manning

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

A Body Of Relations : Knowledge Production/Creative-Embodied-Practices

GILDENGATE HOUSE

*STUDIOS UPDATE*

Due to redevelopment of the area, OUTPOST Studios will be closing in February 2025. Founded in 2010, we are thankful for 15 years in this fantastic space! Home to 90+ artists at any one time, hundreds of artists have benefited from studio space over this timeframe.

OUTPOST STUDIO 181121

Organism-Person-Environment/Architectural Body, Arakawa and Gins.

Haptic slippages between subject and object, between what is alive and what is animate.

Drawing/Anamorphic Perceptions, apprehended and felt, more than seen.

https://axisweb.org/artist/russellmoreton

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

Glass/Skin/Permeable/Translucent, Diaphanous and Wondrous.

The Sensation of Flesh/Skin, Surface and Subjectivity.

Material Thinking and the Agency of Matter.

Barbara Bolt. 2007.

Things and Bodies/Shifting Signs

The haptic image/indexical/involuntary markings and the present instant, a body at the limit of its moment when it is most definitely intensely alive and in the present.

Beyond the body's blurred contours and indexical markers, to see through, to see sense challenged.

Time is persistently liminal, a suspended, extended present.

Mattering/Mutability, Accident, Flux

Experience/Existence/Presence 

Life Drawing/Staging Oneself/Others

Body in Space/Resilience, Endures

An ecological view of cognition, knowledge of the world comes from engagement with things.

Rather than studying the world as an object, we  correspond with it in its own movement of growth or becoming. This correspondence sets up a relation with the world which opens up our perception to what is going on so that we can respond to it.

Tim Ingold. 2013.

Making as a process of thinking.

Making involves the socialised, skilled artist body labouring with materials, responding constantly to tactile, visual and emotional feedback from the emerging form. 

I am exploring emergent objects as landscapes, inhabiting them and of making sense through them.

Barbara Bolt. 2007.

Creative 'practice' and the embodiment of the 'social'.

The Life Class/The Artist's Studio.

Knowledge is emergent as the artist engages with the environments and processes of practice.

Adopting a conception of cognition as ecological assumes thinking and perceiving occur as an organism moves through its environment.

The artwork and the work of art produce a knowledge that is performed in the moving interactions of body, material, and social actors in space and time of which the artwork is a trace.

Tim Ingold. 2000.

Event Spaces, as an experience of distributed artistic subjectivity and shared art-of-inquiry. 

A Body Of Relations

Reconfiguring The Life Class

Yuen Fong Ling. 2016.

Intermediaries and happenings between my body and other bodies and their technologies, where their performativity is revealed offering new perspectives on the roles within the life class.

In my fixed physical position as the life model, the notion of the 'pose' reflects a union of the conscious and unconscious, instilled by the act of being looked at, and the ways to record this through optical devices and machines.

Modelling Subjectivities

Life Drawing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Art Education.

Margaret Mayhew. 2010.

Drawing is important because it delineates between elements in the physical, visual, psychological and cultural field, it also delineates between bodies and spaces, art and fashion, and present uncertainty verses timeless tradition.

The act of drawing itself involves considerable self control on behalf of the drawers, not only in mastering hand-eye coordination, but in concentrating on the present moment, the present action and in the immense discipline of looking at a naked body, culturally marked as sexually available, and not displaying sexual interest.

Margaret Mayhew. 2010.

The body is never isolated in its activity but always already engaged with the world. 

Merleau Ponty. 1999.

Through the configuration of the body as potentially transparent, against which the human being can only push with her hands at the limits physical and psychic geographies that are between inside and outside. 

Photography and the permeability of time evoking a physical experience of observing and examining other worlds.

Aesthetics of intimacy, photography and bodies of desire, the gaze of the passionate camera.

The intimacy and equivalences created through the photographic experience.

Her inert body both inside and outside the vitrine.

Potentially something dangerous about the  experiments with her body, with and into its layering and embodiment within speculative spacetime dimensions.

Here the viewer has the sensation of seeing through a double protective layer of glass and skin.

Art Practice/Building Distant Realities/Wonder

Like glass and within the glass, with the skin that separates the body from outer/other space as well as inner geographies and selves.

Written on the body, maps and navigations of interior spaces. Winterson/Woodman.

Her poetic image of a space that presses psychically on her from the outside.

The earthbound, partial female body, transgressions of the everyday limitations on the body.

The psychic geography manifested within frames of spatiality that becomes an inner space that flips outwards and defies limits.

Through and beyond the drawn/sculpted and painted body.

Site for psychic inner explorations, a corporeality for others rooted in the body's present moment of experience.

Diffracting Drawing and Painting.

Mattering as a reconfiguration of its own making, understanding and encountering.

Atmospheres : Architectural Environments, Surrounding Objects. 

Peter Zumthor. 2010.

Manuel Neri, Studio, Benicia, 1980

Francesca Woodman, Untitled contact sheet, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976

The Diagram of the Painting/Fielding the Feeling of Force taking Form

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The plurality alive in art, always risks being overtaken, colonized, immobilized and arrested by the forces of encounter it invites. Yet paraphrasing Nietzsche, Deleuze writes, a force would not survive if it did not first of all borrow the features of the forces with which it struggles. What a will wants is to affirm its difference. Through the will to power, force takes form.

Active force always risks capture by reactive force and the risk of translation, of rendering work within a stabilizing narrative of identity or representation.

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

The diagram of the painting/drawing is its feeling of force taking form that is itself in movement.

Relationscapes, Erin Manning.

Propositions of Force/Appetition.

The Work's Diagram.

The force of the work is an emergent way of looking, more than an actual taking form.

Raveningham Diagrams for Sensing the Landscape. 2023.

Opening the present to its potential for experiential complexity.

Opening to the indeterminacy of experience.

Creating work that remains open to an infinity of potential evocations.

Making works that resonate with an ontogenitic plurality of sense(s). 

The same object, the same phenomenon changes sense depending on what force which appropriates it. Deleuze.  

We become sited in the fielding of the quasi chaos of microperceptions, an experience that leaves us out of breath, our muscles tense with the twitching of kinaesthetic empathy. We move with the intensive magnitude of the micromovements moving.

Erin Manning.

Landing sites choose us, creating an associated milieu that worlds the body-environment. 

Some are perceptual, some are dimensionalizing, some are imaging. 

Organism-Person-Environment

A decision is like a hook onto the environment to gain traction on it.

Fielding how we think-feel.

Nothing happens without kinaesthetic instigation and corporeal proddings.

A landing not so much into a place, as a dancing into attendance.

Architectural Body, Arakawa/Gins. 2002.

A choreographed encounter is never, wholly what it seems, you can't really choreograph movement because we are constantly in a process of fielding our surroundings, which also fields us. How we think-feel is a space-time of experience alters where and how we can experience it. This fielding is how Arakawa and Gins define a landing site.

Erin Manning. 

The decision of the landing site is its focusing into experience.

For Whitehead a decision is a becoming actual of a virtual potential, and decision is what gives the event form and by consequence creates an individuation. The decision is the separating off, the honing in that makes a particular tonality take form.

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

Actuality is the decision amid potentiality. 

A decision creates the potential for consciousness, not the other way around.

Whitehead. 1929/Erin Manning-Interlude.

For Arakawa and Gins, landing sites corner experience in the making.

A landing site is an activity that is as expressive as it is organizational.

Apparatuses/Diagrams

Holding their form, their bodies pause, the camera waits for them.

In the work's final form, the force of its potential can still be felt, this is the works diagram.

The camera focuses these sites into an in-gathering that captures them as transitory thought-feelings. We feel the shift from dances in the making to haptic experiments in the viewing.

The camera works with the tensile activity of the dancers minimal gestures, moving now to one side as though filming four bodies in one, suspending our attention in tandem with the suspended bodies.

Sculpting in Time.

Films heavy with the languor of relationships forming between bodies, ground, and partitioned space.

For Tarkovsky, the presence of the camera is felt as though it were another body, forcefully moving us to watch, constraining us to see not only a location or a dance, but the tensile rhythm of groundedness itself. The camera bis not there only for the recording, it feels the weight of the waiting, physically as we watch. These shifting affective tonalities are landing sites. They are what Arakawa and Gins call a depositing of sited awareness.

Erin Manning.

Fielding Assemblage : Trace/Diagram/Canvas/Paper/Studio Wall

Textual/Conceptual Forces/Siting Awareness.

Cultivation Field Research Collage

Geological era 1800.

The deep intervention into nature by humans as biological and geological agents.

The Anthropocene denotes a new framework of thinking and action.

A space where the individuals mental reality meets 'cultural narratives'

Social Conditioning/Underpinning Education.

Spatial Register between Consciousness and Social Existence.

Windows/Boundaries between the personal and the commonly shared. 

Confessional Animal/Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Corpus/The Individual Presence/Jean-Luc Nancy

Camera Obscura of Ideology/Sarah Kofman

Ceramic Diagram of Interlocking/Partitioned Spaces.

From Models to Drawings.

Spatial Tonalities/Affective Environments 

Filtered Light.

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.

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.

Studio Workings : Outpost/Drawing/Architectural Body.

Outpost 041024

Sensing Peripheries/Gestures and Acts. 

Trace Drawing

Body Outline/Material Flows.

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

A sudden quantum like jump between a thing and its parts, between its different scales, its ontological gap. In a way a whole is really another specific, not a generalization about a specific thing, this means that there is a 'weird gap' between the whole and the parts, an ontological gap.

Timothy Morton.

Architecture in the Space of Flows, 2012.

Andrew Ballantyne, Chris Smith explain that everything can be understood as functioning in terms of flows – flow of various kinds and scales make up architecture and connect it with the world. Here, a volatile mode of thought begins to proliferate architecture as a whole, rather than developing the thought in relation to the body or space in isolation.

The Extracorporeal Space.

Architecture in Abjection.

A visceral assault, an affect that passes through the subject. 

An architecture that gets distilled down to experience and the chemical exchanges between body and space that begins to function within a similar realm to abject(ion).

The basic unit of study is body coupled with architectural surround. 

Arakawa and Gins.

You shouldn't force the memories. Just try to untangle them slowly.

I would suddenly have the feeling that a story was coming back to me and I would reach out instinctively to seize it. But there was nothing for me to hold. When I could no longer stand to stare at the blank page, I would type a, i, u, e, o, and then, imagining that I would now be able to write something, I would erase them again. But of course nothing came to me, and I would return to a, i, u, e, o. And the process would repeat itself. In the end, all that was left was a torn page, from the many times I'd erased what I'd written.

The Burning Library.

It may take a long time for every word to disappear, we held our breath as though fearful of disturbing this beautiful scene. 

The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa.

Ceramic Objects/Monumental vessels that explore contemporary society's relationship to death and ritual.

Abstractive figurative forms invite the viewer to meditate on the intimate relationship between the clay vessel and the human body.

Stair's exhibition explores humanity's reliance on art as a means to transcend the unknown.

Themes of Containment/Embodiment.

Julian Stair : Art, Death and the Afterlife.

Sainsbury Centre, 2023.

Developing explorations in which material culture and artistic practice can engender 'a new , expressive language to both mediate loss and celebrate life, Julian Stair'.

Francesca Woodman.

Gagosian, 2024.

Putri Tan: In those pictures the objects bisect the space and also consume it. Counter to that , as you said, is the body. I'm never wholly convinced of the idea that she is part of the architecture when she's holding on to a column or contorting her body to fit into the environment or to disappear into it.

Corey Keller: There's both a brutality and a monumentality about the bodies she depicts, you don't quite know whether they're trapped or liberated. I think what's interesting about the work is it's never quiet only about the space and it's never quite only about the body, but it's about the psychological spark (tension) that ignites when those things intersect.

Architectural Body

Arakawa and Gins.

The architectural body is a body that can and cannot be found. Boundaries for an architectural body can only be suggested, never determined.

A bioscleave is an event-fabric within which all exists only tentatively, within which all is perpetually shifting, and within which architectural bodies form and collapse, here distinctions between body and space, subject and object are diluted. 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.

I found it terribly difficult to come to terms with the old man's death. I had lost many people who were important to me in the past, but somehow my parting with them had been different from what I experienced now.

But the laws of the island are not softened by death. Memories do not change the law. No matter how precious the person I may be losing, the disappearances that surround me will remain unchanged.. But this time I had the impression that something was different. In addition to the sadness, I was overcome by a mysterious and menacing anxiety, as though the old man's death had suddenly transformed the very ground under my feet into a soft, unreliable mass.

The materials of the world that surrounded R and me were simply too different-as though I were trying to glue a pebble I'd found in the garden to an origami figure. And the old man, who always reassured me at such moments, who promised we could find a different type of glue, was no longer here.

The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa.