Showing posts with label Architecture in Abjection. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Architecture in Abjection. Show all posts

Friday, 3 July 2026

Overspilling Forms : Unnoticed Displacements/Tensions and Correlations~The Silent Transformations

 The Fluidity Of Life.

(or how one is already the other)

The notion of silent transformations encountered in the corner of a page. How will these unnoticed displacements, the silent transformations one day be considered.


Francois Jullien

The Silent Transformations


Things Superimposed~Dispositive~Spill

Overspilling Forms~Sympathy~Abject(ion)









Architecture In Abjection
Bodies, Spaces And Their Relations.
Zuzana Kovar

Gaston Bachelard.
John Piper.
Lucio Fontana.


https://seagullbooks.org/products/the-silent-transformations

To grow up is to grow old. With time, great love can turn into indifference. And even the most earnest revolution can imperceptibly become its own system of privilege and corruption—just as global warming has slowly modified the climate by degrees. These are examples of the kind of quiet, unseen changes that François Jullien examines in The Silent Transformations, in which he compares Western and Eastern—specifically Chinese—ways of thinking about time and processes of change.


Jullien argues that our failure to notice the effects of cumulative changes over time is due to Western thought’s foundations in classical Greek philosophies of being, which encourage thinking in terms of determined forms and neglect the indeterminable nature of the transition taking place. In contrast, Chinese thought, having a greater sense of the fluidity of life, offers a more flexible way of understanding everyday transformations and provides insightful perspectives from which to consider our relation to history and nature. In particular, a Chinese approach, argues Jullien, allows us to discover that there may be occasions when it is more efficacious to yield to situations than to confront them head-on.


In The Silent Transformations, Jullien resituates Western philosophy by examining it in the light of traditions of thought that have developed from fundamentally different concepts and contexts. Jullien here opens a space for a new way of thinking, and this refreshing book will stimulate the interest of scholars in both Western and Eastern philosophy.

Wednesday, 3 June 2026

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

Outpost 140924

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.


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.


Monday, 18 May 2026

Bodying/Scaffolds/Tentative Architectures : Modes of Existence creating Architectural Surrounds

Outpost 291024

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.


Sunday, 29 March 2026

Restless Objects~Fictioning : Sheltering Spaces~Studio Practice : A space between, movable and nomadic.

Making matter(s) of correspondences with the continuous weather-world.

Studio Practices : Speculative spaces between organism~person~environment

Studio Works : Between body and architecture



Clay Based Making.

Clay+Ceramics.

Folded Readings~Heuristic Spatial Forms from Fired Clay.

Ceramics from clay constructions of indisciplined spaces where experiential markings and imaginative readings between theory and practice develop new material discourses.

Possible Outcomes~Clay Based Ceramic Propositions

Architectures~Making Spaces in Abjection.

Bodies, Spatial Bodies and their Relations.







A place between is spatial. It is a mapping of the topographies between here, there and elsewhere. It is also social, an articulation of the place of dialogue, of the ongoing discussion between one and another. A place between is temporal, it pays attention to time, to the ways in which we locate the then from the now, the now from the yet to come. 

Jane Rendell.


The Experience of Existence.

Fired clay meditations on a materiality, a willingness to survive and endure.

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

Clay~Making : The Analogous Atmosphere of  Experience.








Asking how making is a thinking in its own right, what else that thinking can do?

Erin Manning.


AI Overview

This artwork is a sculptural assemblage by Russell Moreton, featuring ceramic vessels and forms. 

The work explores themes of reverberation, innerness, and volume through a processual approach to clay. 

Moreton's practice investigates the interconnection of making interior spaces, demarcating and folding material into spatial forms. 

These pieces are described as 'extreme atmospheres' or 'fired clay labyrinths,' utilizing textural surfaces and industrial-like perforations


This image features mixed-media ceramic artworks by artist Russell Moreton.

These sculptures are part of an exploratory research project titled "Clay/With Fire," focusing on architectural themes.

The artist explores the concept of "making" through the interconnectedness of interior spaces, using clay as the primary medium.

The pieces are processual in nature, meaning they evolve from the direct experience of working with the material.

The works incorporate the artist's imprint, exploring the metaphysical and immersive nature of creation.


These images feature exploratory, architectural-themed ceramic sculptures by artist Russell Moreton. 

Artist: Russell Moreton.

Medium: Clay.

Theme: Architectural structures and spatial practices.

Focus: The imprint of the artist and the material itself.


 













Interdisciplinarity~Spatial Collaboration.

Spaces between Forms for Speculative Creative Outcomes.
Making Spatial Stories : Over time and through space.


Restless Objects~Fictioning : Sheltering Spaces, Movable and Nomadic : Slab Built Ceramics

The objects in the image are architectural-themed ceramic sculptures created by the artist Russell Moreton. 
These works are part of the artist's exploratory research into materials, often incorporating themes of "making," spatial perception, and site-specific installation. His practice frequently involves building with slabs of clay to create forms that engage with their architectural settings.