Thinkers and Vessel
Makers.
Weaving the body into architecture
Kengo Kuma
Weaving the body into architecture
Kengo Kuma
Poetics as an evolving
and discursive system of dialogues that acknowledges environmental
changes, of other spatial narratives and histories, and things that
are not just about place and space.
‘The phenomenology
of space – the matter of how we experience it.’
Raveningham Sculpture Trail : Spatial Garden/Dwelling with the Landscape.
Hungate Exhibition. 2023.
Making felt through intervals/editing from within.
The Scriptorium
Performative Canvas as Shelter ( prearticulation for an installation, not used)
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Gaston Bachelard,
Poetics of Space (space and reverie), The Psychoanalysis of Fire.
‘Architecture that
forces us to confront our own spatial intelligence by moving us so
much that we recall the eidetic origination of our own mental space.’
(Schaik,2008:80)
‘Speculations about
the first shelters, the relationship between our home and the
universe, about spaces that we first use as surrogate houses as we
form our spatial histories and our mental space. It is about the
contemplative effects of the miniature, about the paradoxical way in
which the scale of many of our most cherished monuments can switch in
our minds from large to minute- the quality of intimate immensity. It
is also about propositions around the complex relationships between
inside and outside and the surface between, about the phenomenology
of roundness’ (Schaik,2008:86-87)
‘We are composed of
matter and live in the midst of matter. Our objective should not be
to renounce matter, but to search for a form of matter other than
objects. What that form is called-Architecture, Gardens, Technology-
is not important.’
Kengo Kuma.
On Anti-Object : An
extended essay that is not so much history or theory as a volume of
self-assessment that gives an opportunity for the author to
contextualise his own body of work through considered
self-reflection.
‘A monument is a form
that preserves time through the compression of space, a form in which
visual perception is the parameter. A monument is a compression of
time and space’ (Kuma,2008:92) Anti Object.
‘My purpose in
writing this book is to criticise architecture that is self-centred
and coercive.’ Kengo Kuma.
‘Like McTiernan or
the theorist Paul Virilio, Kuma sees new digital and information
technologies as leading us to an aesthetics of disappearance, rather
than image or form.(Steele,2008:3)
‘My ultimate aim is
to erase architecture’(Kuma,2008:3)
How then, can
architecture be made to disappear?
‘To be precise, an
object is a form of material existence distinct from its immediate
environment. I do not deny that all buildings, as points of
singularity created by humankind in the environment, are to some
extent objects. However, buildings that are deliberately made
distinct from their environment are very different from those that
attempt to mitigate this isolation, and the difference is perceptible
to everyone who experiences them.’ (Kuma,2008:Preface)
Art and The Humanities in reference to Waverley Abbey
Contemporary Art Practices, Installations and Interiors
Art and The Humanities in reference to Waverley Abbey
Contemporary Art Practices, Installations and Interiors
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 Farnham 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.
