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

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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.

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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.

The Ceaseless Flux of Disappearances/The Examination of Sight.

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Drawing in Charcoal : Sensing through Movement.

#The Examination of Sight.

The act of drawing refuses the the process of disappearances, and instead proposes the simultaneity of a multitude of moments.

#Light.

The Ceaseless Flux/Causality Of Disappearance.

#Seeing.

On Disappearances Opposed By Assemblage.

The Drawing Challenges Disappearance/Oblivion.

Catching The Light : The Entwined History of Light and Mind, Arthur Zajonc.

Drawn To That Moment.

A drawing is more than a memento, more than a device for bringing back memories of the time past.

From each glance, a drawing assembles a little evidence, but it consists of the evidence of many glances which can be seen together. On one hand there is no sight in nature as unchanging as that of a drawing or painting, on the other hand what is unchanging in a drawing consists of so many assembled moments that they constitute a totality rather than a fragment.

For Cezanne, one minute in the life of the world is going by, paint it as it is.

For John Berger, how does a drawing or painting encompass time? 

What does it hold in its stillness?

Thus if appearances, at any given moment are a construction emerging from the debris of all that has previously appeared, might it be understandable that this very construction may give birth to the idea that everything will one day be recognizable and the flux of disappearance cease.

Because the faculty of sight is continuous, because visual categories, red-yellow-dark-thick-thin remain constant, and because so many things appear to remain in place, one forgets that the visual is always a result of an unrepeatable-momentary-encounter.

Any image, like the image read from the retina records an appearance which will disappear.

The faculty of sight developed as an active response to continually changing contingencies, and the more complex the view of appearances it could construct from events. 

For the faculty of sight to become developed, the mind uses recognition as an essential part of the construction of appearances, and recognition depends upon the phenomenon of reappearance sometimes occurring in the ceaseless flux of disappearance.

An event in itself has no appearances.

To draw is to look, to examine the spectrum of appearance.

Drawings reveal the process of their own creation, and  their own looking.

On Drawing/John Berger.

Drawing into awareness.

Things/Feelings that are both hermetic and infinite.

Drawing 'situates' impressions between relations and responses.

Between seeing and feeling.

Butades/Haptic trace, inscription.

Derrida/Blindness inherent in drawing.

The drawing is as much about a haptic experience as it is an optical one, the actual contact between paper and brush informs me that a mark will materialize, a mark marking the abstract and the concrete, a hybrid image of reality.

Perceptual Psychology.

My desire is to set up a situation to which I can take you and let you see.

My art deals with light itself, not as a bearer of revelation, but as revelation itself.

Immersive architectural environments to carry the inner world into the outer spaces, so that our sense of lived-in-territory is increased.

James Turrell/Deer Shelter Skyspace.

In the trajectory of the intermezzo.

The Working Diagram.

Relays between points/paths.

Nomadology, Deleuze/Guattari.

Speculative Learning Environment : The Library/Hidden Curriculum #2

Hidden Curriculum #2, a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

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Speculative Learning Environment : Russell Moreton.

Re- Imagining Education, Brockwood Park School. 

a thousand plateaus

Deleuze, Guattari

Assemblage

Becoming

Body Without Organs

Nomad

Rhizome

Smooth Space

State

War Machine

Breathing/Drawing : Inhalation and an exhalation of being.

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Situated Practice Live.

Critical Spatial Practices.

The conditions of a particular instant, a moment, an event.

Making/Living in the matrices of situatedness.

Seated nude, 1958 Oil 116x89cm.

Alberto Giacometti devoted much of his career to the struggle between matter and meaning, engaging in an extended exploration of how to reduce the figures's mass as far as possible while imbuing it with essential force. Up until his death in 1966, Giacometti pushed the limits of representation, setting into motion ever-unfolding phenomenological investigations that remain at the core of art making today.

How can matter-bronze, plaster, charcoal, paint-embody truth? And how, if at all, can art preserve the essence of the living?

Nothing disappears completely.

In space, what came earlier continues to underpin what follows. Pre-existing space underpins not only durable spatial arrangements, but also representational spaces and their attendant imagery and mythic narratives.

Production of Space.

Henri Lefebvre. 1991

Spatiality-Space and the Object.

Of or relating to space, existing or occurring in space, having extension in space.

The Multiplicities and heterogeneous nature of space and spatiality.

Abstract and concrete, produced and producing, imagined and materialized, structured and lived, relational, relative and absolute.

Concetto Spaziale, Lucio Fontana.

The protean nature of space and its ability to bring the unconscious into the open. 

Merleau-Ponty.

Lived Body and Space.

Situatedness and Place, multdisciplinary perspectives on spatio-temporal contingency in human life.

Hunefeldt/Schlitte. 2018

Sites, Situations and other kinds of Situatedness.

Fields of Care.

Interactions between bodies and our habitats.

What is outside eventually comes inside.

The irreducible fact of the human condition is that we are open. The bodies we house are open bodies, dependent on interchange and communion with surrounding life. Surfaces are two-sided like the skin, we cannot touch without being touched in return, and because we are open , we need boundaries strong and flexible enough to also close. Complementarily and interdependence belong to this openness. 

Architecture is a Verb.

Sarah Robinson. 2022

The associated verb to situate describes the action of positioning something in a particular place, while the adjective situated defines something's site or situation.

The way we inhabit our everyday spaces, reveals the extent to which our bodies extend into and integrate with the features of our surrounding.

The Architectural Body.

Organism/Person/Environment.

Arakawa and Gins.

Making, is a question of surrendering to the wood, then following it where it leads, instead of imposing a form upon a matter. Matter so shaped informs the processes of its shaping.

Deleuze and Guattari.

Making is not a matter of imposition or a hylomorphic process. But of intervening in the fields of force and flows of material. What this understanding entails is that rather than interpreting the creative process 'backwards' from a finished object to an idea in the mind of an agent, one must rather 'read it forwards' in an ongoing generative movement, that is once itinerant, improvisatory and rhythmic.

Sarah Robinson, Tim Ingold. 

The mutual shaping of body and place is captured in the Greek word Choros. The root of choreography referred not only to dance, but also to the dancing place, and the group that dances.

Chora, closer to the meaning that Suzanne Langer articulates is the space of forces, a generative place that depends on participation, a territory that appears through continual remaking and reweaving. 

Topos, like its modern usage in topography suggests, was space that can be mapped.

Notion of a Place-Ballet.

The 'Spanish Steps' are not only crystallisations of movement, but generators of movement. We can navigate our living spaces in the dark, because we have already integrated the locations of our furnishings into our repertoire of movement. We create a zone of familiarity, with its integrated gestures, behaviours and actions that sustains a particular task or aim.

The reciprocity between one's body-routine and the environment supports these integrated movements, resulting in a fusion of interpersonal and communal exchange and effective attachment.

Places/Public Spaces become meaningful because they support our personal body-routines in an inter personal setting. 

David Seaman.

Place-Ballet, propositional movements of dancers around objects and the exhibition space.

10 Days in The Laundry, Winchester. 2009 

Bodies/Interchange/Communion with Surrounding Life.

Breathing, a balancing act of sustaining openness.

There really is an inhalation and an exhalation of being.

We not only breathe in and out, we breathe in a certain rhythm, our heart beats in rhythm, our perceptual experience oscillates in rhythms. Our experience of colour once again lays bare the facts of this unending rhythm.

We speak of 'inspiration' and the word should be taken literally. There really is an inspiration and expiration of being.

My flat is, for me, not a set of closely associated images. It remains a familiar domain round about me only as I still have 'in my legs' the main distances and directions involved, and as long as from my body intentional threads run out towards it.

Phenomenology of Perception.

Merleau-Ponty.

If a site is a location that can be defined in physical and material terms, a situation can be both spatial and temporal, the location of something in space and a set of circumstances bounded in time.

Practitioners and theorists whose work overlaps, diverges, converges, runs in parallel and in circles, and in many cases came before and goes beyond. 

Practices that incorporate, event scores, insertions, even banalities, and pay close attention to relation, position, performance and situation as well as duration. 

Projects located between Art and Architecture, that both critiqued the sites into which they intervened as well as the disciplinary procedures through which they operate. Such projects operate at a triple crossroads, between theory and practice, between art and architecture, between public and private, Jane Rendell is keen to stress three particular qualities of these works, the critical, the spatial, and the interdisciplinary.

Situatedness then is a way of engaging with the qualities of these processes of situating or/and being situated.

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Architectural Body/Procedural Architecture

Organism/Person/Environment

Earth, House, Hold, Dwelling Places.

Unlike the sense of sight or hearing, only the sense of touch can discern space and time at once.

The skin as the harbourer of a subjects sense of touch.

Skin/Subjectivity becomes as flesh a connective tissue which both unites and divides.

The skin can judge time less well than the ear, and space less well than the eye, but it is skin alone that combines the spatial and temporal dimensions.

Maternal Skin/Subject Formation, Anzieu.

A Field in England : On the nature of Photography.

Between Art and Information.

Brought to Light : Photography and the Invisible.

The Visible/Invisibility between the potential of  things.

The Photograph and The Lacanian Mirror.

In which identity is constantly shored up and broken down, but also as a persistent space invested with the paradoxical qualities of intimacy and alienation, of proximity and utter detachment all through which an offer of an encounter is held out in invitation.

Inter-Subjective Encounters, a space in which the subjectivities of the artist and the spectator might meet and mingle.

The skin is the surface through which self and other are mediated.

The mutuality of touch itself is echoed by the skins structure, it both touches and is touched and this duality is reflected in the way the skins surface is exposed to the outside world, whilst also protecting and containing the unseen interiority of the body.

Harriet Katherine Riches, 2004.

Light and Spaces of Intersubjectivity.

Tactile Light.

The photograph holds out the promise of an encounter through its carnal medium.

For Riches, the self-representational photograph becomes a kind of veil or mask, a displaced surface whose skin-like relationship to the subject is always suspended, and perpetually deferred. It frames a space of contact and a fantasy of union with the original subject, the photograph's skin-like quality also enables it to be imagined as an inter-subjective space of exchange.

Light creates the spatiality/transitions that passes beyond subject/object relationships.

Skin/Surface/Subjectivity : Movements in thinking through Spatial Agency

Skin becomes a site of symbolic acts of aggression/gesture.

Surfaces of suggested pain/experience through which subjectivity is created.

Conduits of colour specificities and counterpoints

Relationscapes : Movements, created through colour temperature and spatial contact.

The phenomena of things being brought into perception/focus.

Through a body every colour creates movement and has its own/creates its own perspective/its mapping/layering/extension of spatial temporal material.

Analogies/Difference : Spaces created through mimesis, wavelengths intermingling with the spatial.

Glass/Lead/Filtered Light.

Glass Slide/Subjectivities brought into the light

Colour Subjectivities, the appearance/experience of mattering material.