SPACE SITE INTERVENTION Through Performative Archaeological Methods.
A space has been created, allowing for a different construction of what may be significant in these circumstances, relative to objects found in association with each other. (Robert Williams, Disjecta Reliquiae The Tate Thames Dig)
Associations and coincidences that become meaningful (or are unearthed) within the context of the activity.
Erika Suderburg. On Installation and Site Specificity
The Waverley Project 2014, UCA Farnham, Interior Design MA.
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THE WAVERLEY PROJECT, methodologies in the making.
This research and its design proposal are centred on the arts and the humanities and their ongoing function in our contemporary society. The emphasis of this inquiry is located by the spatial practices of architecture, fine art and performance. My project is a field event and symposium that would be able to host intellectual dialogues, lectures (TED) workshops, performative events and exhibitions. I am particularly interested the relational production of social spaces and the aesthetics of builtspaces, both historical and ephemeral. The proposed use of Waverley Abbey near Famham as a possible site and retreat for this venture is valid as it links a possible interdisciplinary territory of anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Tim Ingold (Making) Colin Renfrew (Figuring it Out) and others have for many years been researching and mapping this new spatiality.
What remains of Waverley Abbey and its sense of place are critical to the holistic and contemporary underpinning of this experiential event. Founded in 1128 it was the first Cistercian Abbey to be built in England. It is recorded that Cistercian life was initially based on manual labour and self-sufficiency, this was further supplemented by other activities like agriculture and brewing that enabled the abbey to support itself. Later over the centuries education and academia began to dominate the concerns of the abbey. The abbey was suppressed with its dissolution in 1536, although records show its activities were already at this time substantially diminished. The ruins and their site then enter into the imaginary realm through classic literature in the novel Waverley by Scott. Further on a pictorial reference from an engraving shows the ruins now incorporated as a fashionable landscape feature within the newly built Waverley Abbey House.
On a contemporary note Waverley Abbey has featured in a number of films ranging in genres from period costume dramas through to fantasy, together with post apocalyptic visions of dystopia. A recent film shoot required the construction of a sixty-foot tower made from internal scaffolding with a skin that recreated the adjacent ruinous fabric of this historic site.
Encountering the site is currently only manageable by foot; this short walk in the surrounding landscape sets up the sense of place and prepares our own subjectivities to its reception. It is in this expectation, this thinking in the landscape that the pastoral and educational aspects of the site become apparent. Currently access is only available through one directed pathway; a multiplicity of other access points and even other structures (bridges, earthworks and thickets) could begin to open up the spatial palimpsest already located at Waverley. What remains of the architectural fabric with its diminished interiors still grants a hospitality and refuge for both the body and the imagination. This activity opens up the experiential space of encountering ourselves through the enjoyment/entanglements of layered social space.
Waverley Abbey is a public monument in the custodian care of English Heritage. It can only be accessed by walking about a quarter of a mile from the limited parking spaces.
Waverley Site
Hortus Conclusus Sensing Spaces
Peter Zumthor, Hortus Conclusus 2011.
Directors’ Foreword: Julia Peyton-Jones, Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Zumthor’s architectural design practices consider each project in terms of a comprehensive and encompassing sensory experience. Looking at more than the physical fabric and form of the building, he often draws inspiration from memories of childhood experience. His projects aim to reference all aspects of sensory perception, addressing the relationship between the human body and the ways it may interact within the built environment. Many of Zumthor’s projects have been specifically noted for their thoughtful and evocative play on scale, colour, material and light in harmony with the buildings function and surroundings. (Peyton-Jones 2011: 9)
Using spatial practices as an inquiry into issues of “site” through architecture, art and performance.
What are the possible phenomenological assets of the site?
What remains of the interior spaces of the architecture and how much of the ruin has been submerged into the parkland setting?
How might these be explored and subsequently re-presented into the public realm?
A SITE BASED Symposium on ‘Making’ as experienced through the palimpsest of place.
Featuring the ‘Reading Room’ an ephemeral interior space, which gathers-up the experiential values of ‘Ruins’ and re-enacts them as a site to explore the architectures of images.
Library of Contents/Taxonomies Knots of Reference/Lines
Humanity, An Emotional History:
The Poetics of Space:
Architecture and Allegory:
The Psychoanalysis of Fire:
Existential Space in Cinema:
Natural History:
Sculpting in Time:
Land Drawings, Installations and Excavations:
The Physical Self:
Archaeology:
Making:
Politics of Rehearsal:
Palimpsest usage by Historians as a description, of the way people experience time. That is as a layering of present experiences over faded pasts. The production of augmented realities brought about by the melding of layers of material place with virtual representations.
Accumulated iterations of a design or site, evidence of the former use remains.
A kind of forensic science used to describe objects/things placed over one another to establish the sequence of events of an accident or crime scene.
The Concept of Palimpsest, a way of describing how generations alter the landscape.
Heidegger. Jung. Archetypes. Pottery
Architecture
Building Practices
The Everyday : The Jug.
The Dwelling Place : The Bridge Mediators for spatial experiences.
Libraries with research conduits for immersive and interactive cognitive mappings, allowing a praxis to enter the practicability of the everyday, a crafted philosophical inquiry, building new livelihoods.
Colour
Texture Surface Enclosures Voids
Sample Materials
Relationships through Localities/Mood Boards/Technical and Physical Details. Erasure in drawing and architectural planning (space voids) as a methodology to superimpose multiplicities.
Erasing : Kirosan Observatory, Anti-Object, Kengo Kuma. Multiplicities and Memory, Peter Zumthor.
Learning Spaces as a performative spatial practice through a process of tuning and minimising (Minimising, NO stage in the forest, Kego Kuma).
NAVIGATION AND CRITICALITY THE READING ROOM
ORGANISATION IN THE FIELD OF RUINS COMPONENTS, AGENTS AND ARCHIVES.
Categories of Architecture as Categories of Perception. Architecture and Nature.
Architecture as a reflecting/gathering of the phenomena of human nature/Nature.
The exhibition and research relationships around the nature of things.
The architecture provides a point of intersection between mass and its sublimation in imagery and thought, between immateriality and its reification. It allows apparent opposites to be seamlessly united - or parted again, at the whim of the weather god. (Building with Images, Herzog and De Meuron’s Library at Eberswalde)
Robin Evans. Translations from Drawing to Building
Figures, Doors and Passages
Essays and Other Texts (AA Documents 2)
The Social Condenser in Operation.
Five figures and a stature distributed evenly in its isotropic space-a picture of the socialized as opposed to the sociable.
Figures, Doors and Passages, Robin Evans. 1978 (Titled Image) Robin Evans (1944-1993) Historian of Architecture.
His writings covered a wide range of concerns such as society’s role in the evolution and development of building types, together with interests on architectural representation, aspects of geometry and modes of projection. Evans always drew on first-hand experience from direct observation to arrive at his insights. These insights ‘open up the way for alternative constructions of everyday reality-a reality, an architecture, which bears the traces, albeit invisible, of its own provisional circumstances.’(Mostafavi,Mohsen, Paradoxes of the Ordinary. 1997)
Peter Greenaway. Architecture and Allegory
Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space
The Psychoanalysis of Fire
Herzog and De Meuron. Natural History
Eberswalde Library (is both a concrete cube and a
pictorial skin)
Western Culture ‘Is a culture of blending and mixing substances until they are unrecognisable producing products fated to harden into a useless degenerative state in a dump or depot.’
Alchemy of Building using Images (Eberswalde Library).
Herzog and De Meuron have a sensitivity to irreversible, entropic processes.
Since the 1980s Herzog and De Meuron have been actively working with an art praxis that has positively saturated some of the outer skins of their buildings with images. Herzog himself acknowledge that it is impossible for him to be able to art and architecture at the same time, and he comments that ‘there is no longer any need to express himself other than in architectural terms. ’
Beauty and Atmosphere/ Science and Art in Motion.
Dialogues of built works between sites of collection/classification and construction. Building on the threshold of tensions (human fabrications/craft and social interactions) between the material and the metaphysical, between evanescence and substance and illusion and specificity.
Much of Herzog and De Meuron’s practice has focused on museums and libraries, or represented other transformative ventures around winemaking and medicine.
Tony Fretton. The Architecture of the Unconscious Collective
Abstraction and Familiarity Buildings and Their Territories
The Lisson Gallery, London. 1991
This was a building that had more in common with the sculpture of Donald Judd and Dan Graham than with any known architectural tendency. Like that work , it is presented less as an object demanding scrutiny in its own right and rather as an instrument (Observatory, Kengo Kuma) that directs the viewers attention to their relationship with the wider world, (bdonline.co.uk, Tony Fretton’s Fuglsang Art Museum 2008/Ellis Woodman)
Library as a ‘type’ of spatial classification (architectonics) through visual vocabularies and working practices.
Derrida. GLAS
This ‘Anti-Book’ (see also Anti-Object, Kengo Kuma) stages a kind of linguistic battle between philosophy and literature as it creates playful interrogations/situations around the methodology of reading. Derrida cites and grafts from the works of Hegel and Jean Genet. The physical qualities of the book are arranged in such a way as to make it read like a collage open for subjective and subversive interpretations. Its boundaries and borders, paragraphs and spacings are constantly becoming merged as a fugitive entity. In fact GLAS has an excess of boundaries (The Postmodern) that seek to divide it up inside itself (Deconstruct). Its fragments (What Remains from its reading) offer multiple beginnings and endings (or maybe Openings and Conclusions, see Lefebvre).
Kate Whiteford. Land Drawings, Installations, Excavations (Fictional Archaeologies)
Colin Renfrew. Remote Sensing (Subtle Transpositions between media)
The whole landscape is a palimpsest of human activities: lines (See also Ingold) which experience has etched on the ageing face of the past. Landscape history. Where does history stop and art begin?
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Peter Zumthor. Multiplicity and Memory
Thinking Architecture Atmospheres
Heidegger for Architects
Juhani Pallasmaa. The Eyes of The Skin
Identity, Intimacy, Domicile, the phenomenology of home. The Thinking Hand
