Making Thresholds/Dialogues between the container and the contained.

 Outpost 260823

Clay-Drawings at Bayfield.

Observatory/Propositional Assemblage.

Animacy, surfaces/things that have opened up their surroundings.

The living body is only sustained thanks to continually taking in materials from its surroundings, and in turn discharging them, in the processes of respiration and metabolism. 

Yet as with pots, the same processes that keep it alive also render it forever vulnerable to dissolution. That is why constant attention is necessary, and also why bodies and other things are poor containers. Left to themselves, materials can run riot. Pots crumble; bodies disintegrate. It takes effort and vigilance to hold things together, whether pots or people.

Bodies on the run, Tim Ingold. 

Itinerant Correspondences/Drawing and Telling. 

Thinking From Things.

To think from materials, to find the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow.

Deleuze and Guattari.

The living work of art, however, is not an object but a thing, and the role of the artist is not to give effect to a preconceived idea but to follow the forces and flows of material that bring the work into being. To view the work is to join the artist as a fellow traveller, to look with it as it unfolds in the world, rather than behind it to an originating intention of which it is the final product. The vitality of the work of art, then, lies in its  materials, and it is precisely because no work is ever truly 'finished' (except in the eyes of curators and purchasers, who require it to be so) that it remains alive.

Tim Ingold.

The Telling of Stories is an Education of Attention.

Making Through Anticipatory Foresight.

To tell, in short, is not to explicate the world, to provide the information that would amount to a complete specification, obviating the need for would-be practitioners to inquire for themselves.

It is rather to trace a path that others can follow. Thus the hunter, educated in stories of the chase, can follow a trail; the trained archaeologist can follow the cut; the competent reader can follow the line of writing. Making their ways in the company of those more knowledgeable than themselves, and hearing their stories, novices grow into the knowledge of their predecessors through a process that could best be described as one of 'guided rediscovery' rather than receiving it ready-made through some mechanism of replication and transmission.

Tim Ingold.

In place of specification without guidance, the story offers guidance without specification.

Sensing Spaces

Making

Thresholds

The Materials of Life

Are you interested in the idea of threshold?

What is interesting in the world are the grey areas. So what I have designed is a threshold. It's not possible for an architect to design a space – such a concept does not exist. Instead, we design the thresholds and the limits: the walls, windows, doors and so on. And people have feelings about these elements and put them together and create the sensation of a space. I'm interested in designing the elements that give the impression of a space – which is why I like doors.

The dialogue between the container and the contained, the boundaries and the space within them, is an obsession in contemporary culture, where the node is more important than the object. That's why architecture must work at the limits, not invent the shape and language but straddle two worlds, on the knife edge.

A door is usually part of a wall, but you have extracted this element from the wall.

Kate Goodwin, Alvaro Siza. Sensing Spaces. 2014.

Telling By Hand.

The Humanity of the Hand.

The Eyes of the Skin.

Jacques Derrida holds that the proper function of the eyes is not to see but to weep. Behind the veil of tears that blurs the vision of the sighted, the eyes can tell of grief, loss and suffering, but also of love, joy and elation. Even the blind can weep.

Figure 2.3 Consciousness, materials, image, object: the diagram

Making/Flow of Consciousness/Materials into and across Image/Object

Experience can only be understood between mind and body or across them in their lived conjuction.

Merleau-Ponty. 

Telling By Hand.

The Tacit Dimension : That we can  know more than we can tell.

Polanyi is primarily interested in what it means to know, his reflections of personal knowledge assume that telling is tantamount to putting what one knows into words, in speech or writing, and that this entails two things: specification and articulation.

Michael Polanyi.

Tim Ingold, interested in 'performativity' what it means to tell, going beyond the 'predictive' nature of  what it means to know.

Ingold argues that we can tell of what we know through practice and experience, precisely because telling is itself a modality of performance that abhors articulation and specification.

The figure of the silent craftsman who is struck dumb when asked to tell of what he does, or how he does it, is largely a fiction sustained by those who have a vested interest in securing an academic monopoly over the spoken and written word.

Specifications provide information about the specified, about the materials to be used, about parts and their dimensions, about movements to be made. They define a project. But stories issue from moving bodies and vital materials, in the telling. They lay down an itinerary. It is precisely because both their knowledge and their practice have the same itinerant character that ,in storytelling, practitioners can bring them into correspondence with one another. 

Reverberations of Reverie : Architecture as the source of insights.

 Outpost  170623

Private Stillness/Palpability/Tectonics

Architecture as the source of insights.

We exit the expected bounds of time and enter space.

Reverberations of Reverie

Gaston Bachelard.

Stretto House.

Two sequences of an aqueous space that creates a connecting point.

Rooms are flooded to reveal their prior emptiness or our inability to occupy them.

Holl/Tarkovsky

Perception At Its Limits.

Perception that must exceed the location of the body and enter the wider space that has no limits.

Weight persists in his work as a knowable presence.

Deceleration : A Collapse of Plastic Space.

Attributes are revealed via the slow occupation of use, in which new spaces are generated as frames are withdrawn and the space is imploding/collapsing/decelerating.

Steven Holl consistently reaffirms the interiority of each work, showing us a city of atomized lives, interiors, and private stillness. 

The internal core of a room is a reverie.

Bachelard in The Poetics of Space suggests that at the core of a rooms emptiness is a space derived not from the bounding closure of its walls, but from its deep, but absent source of palpable energy.

By the way of the body, lyrical explorations of space/surface relations.

The body creates situations with or without others.

Certainly a sense of melancholy is in this work, but ultimately I think it is a sense of weighted and corporeal subjectivity that is implied here, a form of reverie.

Spatial definition is ordered by angles of perception.

An architecture based in perception at its limit

Parallax is the dynamic change in spatial volumes due to the moving position of the body as it experiences space. The house is not an object, it is experienced in a dynamic relationship with the terrain, the angle of approach, the sky, and through light in which it creates a focus  on the internal axes of movement.

The change in the arrangement of surfaces, defining space due to the change in position of a viewer is the essence of parallax.

Steven Holl. 

It is the precision of Holl's formal work and his tectonics that give these spaces their amazing palpability. But like Hejduk, it is his teaching and his writing, and the degree to which his architecture is the source of his insights that is of most value. It is his concept of space that precedes all work written or architectural, and it is the effect of this space and the means by which it is ultimately perceived.

Sensing Spaces

Architecture Reimagined.

Royal Academy of Arts. 2014

Presence : The Light Touch of Architecture.

Philip Ursprung.

The heart of this exhibition is the interaction between three factors: the nature of physical spaces, our perception of them, and their evocative power.

Kate Goodwin.

Architecture.

A definition may be very exact, and yet go but a very little way towards informing us of the nature of the thing defined.

Edmund Burke.

An introduction on taste in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and  Beautiful. 1759

Architecture has a more direct influence on our lives than any other art form, but its ability to affect how we think, feel and interact is often overlooked. To explore the impact of built space on our lived experience, the royal academy has invited architects from around the world to create immersive installations for a groundbreaking exhibition.

Sensing Spaces : Architecture Reimagined, sets out to redefine what an architectural exhibition might be. Instead of displaying drawings, models and photographs to illustrate an architect's work and ideas, Sensing Spaces offers visitors the opportunity to engage with architecture directly and to experience bit through their bodies and senses. Individually and together the exhibition and its works raises intriguing questions about the boundaries between art and architecture, the human qualities of space, and the role buildings play in shaping our lives.

Steven Holl argues for an architecture informed by a phenomenological interrogation in which he sees architecture as a dynamic process where by we constantly reinvent our relationship to the world of the senses, including our sense of time and space.

Architects and artists create in an attempt to make people perceive, to make something visible.

The house as a vessel, as an instrument of experience for time, light and place. As a poetic potential to speak of something other, a language and a relative autonomy that grounds or precedes the architecture.

Building transcends physical and functional requirements by fusing with a place.

The site of a building is more than a mere ingredient in the conception of architecture, it is its physical and metaphysical foundation.

Architecture through building is bound to a situation, a construction that is intertwined with the experience of a place.

House : Black Swan Theory.

Anchoring 

Steven Holl.

Clay/Raw Oxides/Biscuit Fired/Mirror/Water