Visual/Spatial Vocabularies and Narratives (Livelihoods and Social Interactions)

 The Solar Pavilion, Upper Lawn, Wiltshire. SP3 6SJ

‘A building intervenes between subject and space.’(Kengo Kuma)

‘Things need to be ordinary and heroic at the same time.’(Alison and Peter Smithson)

‘The Charged Void- contains references to the architects’ concern that their buildings should command a wider territory. The Solar Pavilion is perhaps their most compelling exploration of this theme.’ (Sergison,2005:100)

The Upper Lawn Pavilion that Alison and Peter Smithson realised is actually nothing more than a primitive hut. Much of its appeal is that of its uncompromising simplicity a ‘light touch’ promoting a way of life like camping (or bathing) in the landscape; it has the kind of enchantment of a small building with big ideas, a building in the tradition of a garden pavilion or folly. The Solar Pavilion like the earlier Patio and Pavilion of 1956 is intended to be read as a symbolic habitat that could be seen as an attempt to self-consciously to embrace an intimate connection to nature; to tum back from the city and technology. For the Smithson’s the Solar Pavilion exemplifies a place for basic human needs, a piece of ground, a view of the sky, privacy and the presence of nature. It stands as a spiritual and physical counterpoint to urbanism and city life.

‘The Solar Pavilion, is both a lookout over the distant landscape on the north facade, sitting on top of the existing cottage wall, and a garden pavilion mediating between two types of controlled landscape. It aims to provide a minimal enclosure that allows as immediate a relationship between interior and exterior as possible.’

(Sergison,2005:97)

‘Architect’s homes provide rare occasions where the two issues of architectural theory and practice can both find a natural symbiosis; not only did the Smithsons’ build their ideas as concretely as possible, they also built themselves a private place for retreat and reflection.’ (Dirk van den Heuvel 2004)

Hybrid Construction; containing Mies’ tectonics and Le Corbusier’s pilotis and free facade.

Interventions made and consisting of existing elements (garden wall, chimney and windows from an existing building).

‘The construction of the box on the wall consists of a wooden frame clad with zinc. On all sides its posts function as a casing for fitted window frames. The frame’s wooden beams are put into the existing outer wall and are supported on the inside by a concrete beam poured in-situ and anchored in the existing chimney wall, and supported on both ends by square columns placed at a 45 degree angle. This construction results in non-supporting ground level facades, allowing the creation of the teak sliding doors along the full length of the garden facade.’ (Dirk van den Heuvel 2004)

Tony Fretton, working notes.

STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE is the most enduring/valuable quality of an architectural project.

TEACHING informs my practice as an architect profoundly. It demands that I think, write and manage people, and places me in contact with great colleagues with theoretical and practical knowledge.

We have developed a methodology that channels my activities very precisely into design direction, presentations to the office and clients, and collective decision­ making on the management of the practice.

The Scheme It’s Style Their Form

Even an interesting delicacy in the detailing of the work.

MAKING architecture that is more prepositional, that reveals meaning and values in everyday objects and events.

ARCHITECTURE is a cultural artefact and a social art.

ARCHITECTS design buildings using knowledge of buildings that already exist, and the meaning of buildings is shaped by public attitudes.

FORMAL and IDEOLOGICAL INNOVATION is also necessary.

By WORKING TRANSPARENTLY with the relation between the present and past, it gives me access to richer cultural social and architectural territory.

I have understood that you can accept your social duties of being instrumental to society, while remaining productively critical.

I want to use the platform of contemporary architecture on one hand to make it more communicative and on the other more artistically enquiring about issues of the times.

BUILDINGS can explore issues such as national presence and identity in a foreign place. Political imagery in the ambiguity of the present times, the nature of place in which groups of people come together to work and its relation to the surrounding world and the relation between representation, physical security in relation to sustainable construction.

CRAFTS STUDY CENTRE Working Notes 2 July 2014-07-02

The Production/use of Space into Places to engender Societies.

A site specific induced inquiry into dwelling and building through/by way of an attentive awareness (anthropological) to people and place.

‘What I am post interested in now is inverting the structure of a culture that is centred around the city.’

‘The richness and strength of that (their) culture cannot be understood until one has worked with the people who live their- until one has eaten their food, drunk their sake, talked together with the craftsmen and made things with them.’

Kengo Kuma, Complete Works, (preface) 2012 

‘As found is a small affair, it is about being careful.’ Peter Smithson, 2001 

‘The ‘as found’ attitude is anti-utopian; its form is (site) specific, raw and immediate. It calls the will to question. It is a technique of reaction ( Opposition/Kengo Kuma and Herzog and De Meuron and Multiplicity/Calvino and Zumthor) and a concern for that which exists.’

Schregenberger, 2005

The spatial practices of exhibition and education.

The humanities and architecture, Heidegger/Bachelard/Ingold/Herzog and De Meuron/Zumthor.

The politics of things/sociology and everyday life/dwelling and making. Natural History learning/thinking through things/situations and vocations. Contents/Contexts/Collection and Presentation.

Taxonomies and Subjectivity/Spatial Narratives of Layered Space (Spatiality) Mark Dion, Archaeology, Thames Dig.(Allegories of a pseudo-archaeology) Herzog and De Meuron, Archaeology of the Mind/Natural History.

Peter Greenaway, The Physical Self/Architecture and Allegory.

Visual/Spatial Vocabularies and Narratives (Livelihoods and Social Interactions)

Spatial Methodologies. Worlds and Thresholds.

The Fanciful and The Scientific.

The Playful and The Reverent.

The Material and The Metaphysical.

Tensions in built spaces.

Between Evanescence and Substance.

Between Illusion and Specificity.

Between Slickness and Tactility.

Making Places where times and tastes, human fabrications and accidents of nature, all collide; in these situations under the shelter of a forming/becoming architecture these ‘spatial texts’ or ‘visual conversations’ of one sort or another are suggested and are manifested and explored through a praxis of inquiry and making.

The Projects Evolution.

Philosophy of Solitude, thresholds/spaces of a vital serenity, a poetics of dwelling and its angle of repose hovering somewhere between the transcendental and the real.

Relationships between Art, Photography, Craft and Building. Expanded through Exhibition, Performance, Teaching and Making.

Realized as a dialogue/delivery (Built Work) into Architectural Terms between Sites of Collection and Sites of Construction.

Working Analysis.

CSC Object Analysis : Hans Coper/Innemess in the Ceramic Vessel and Architecture. Making (act/sacred bond of both an individual and a civilisation) from the inside out, from the interior, from the first movement or impulse, from the everyday condition/situation the as found nature of things. The innemess of the vessel of a room remains the property of our shared humanity, of our social being/becoming.

Why did this opportunity produce a wealth of transformative insights (conduits and territories) that are now active agents working across all facets of my practice?

Properties: Pastoral Setting.

Built within and amongst a monastery.

Facility and retreat for cross-disciplinary inquiry (Humanities and the Social Sciences).

Repository and archive of artefacts, texts and objects.

Exhibition and making spaces, workshops and residential living spaces. Walled garden complex containing a reading pavilion and library.

Catalyst Events/Situations to engender the experience of learning.

West Dean, Singleton. Residential courses in the arts, both the grounds and the house are fully utilised in the social activity of learning.

Kilquhanity,Scotland. Free School in country setting, used as a site for exploratory fine art practices(converted a pottery into a camera obscura and drew a garden from the movements of the sun across a specific terrain).

Brockwood Park School, Bramdean. Re-imagining learning, conducted a walk across a landscape with clay, and hidden curriculum in the library with objects and texts centred around philosophy and architecture.

Winchester College, Winchester. Exhibition with talk on creative practice, display of large body drawings, cyanotypes, astronomical charts and architectural notebooks. Workshop conducted in the making and experimentation of using the cyanotype process (historical,light based,printing process 1843).

Link Gallery Winchester University, Winchester. Art and Archaeology around the Keatsian notion ‘Negative Capability’ photograms of anthropomorphic leper graves with excavated oyster shells found at the site (Mom Hill, Winchester).

Hyde Abbey Gatehouse and St Bart’s Church Winchester. Leylines exhibition of artist book photographs, drawings, maps and collages. Installation of archaeologist drawing frame with annotated lead labels, plumb bob, orientated to align with the speculative leyline phenomena.

Localities of experience and research : Making Entangled

Making Entangled : An eclectic synthesis of knowledge fields

Potters Wheel/Studio Space/Reconstrution/Licie Rie/V & A London.

Mary Quant, V&A London.

Confronting Spatial Intelligence-tracing the use of spatial intelligence. 

What are we learning about in the concrete particularity of this space?

Leon van Schaik : Spatial Intelligence

‘Architecture is the product of our spatial intelligence, of its workings in establishing the mental spaces of every individual, and of the spatial values shared by groups.’

The Retreat, Upper Lawn Pavilion. 1959

This country retreat presents itself as a glass box but is grounded by its relationship to the pre-existing masonry of a walled garden. 

Leon van Schaik comments that the little glass house retreat built by Peter and Alison Smithson around a walled garden evokes for him memories(mental spaces) of being a schoolboy working in a conservatory in a walled garden at Cliveden, such that the notion of a retreat is this ideal of being built into the walls of an existing walled garden.

You rise up into its glazed upper storey with views over the rolling hills beyond and perch atop the wall on the edge of a threshold space carved out of the woods, or remove yourself from view sink down to the ground and sit with your back to the wall.

Kenneth Frampton subscribes to a general theory of architecture independent of any local articulation beyond adaptations to meet the needs of local climatic conditions.

Dalibor Vesely, an architectural theorist who spent his teaching life demonstrating that in the modern era the unity of time, place and culture that is essential to architectural reality has been fractured. Leon van Schaik comments as a consequence in architecture today our spatial knowledge is either buried deep within our unconscious, or it is surfaced in a highly simplified (adolescent) form.

Architecture as ‘a purveyor of esoteric spatial luxuries to domestic elites’ (Schaik, 2008:84)

It follows that this fractured reality is deeply problematical to architecture, to the increasing number of architectural practices that have no ready connection to the daily expectations of citizens, resulting in a brutal instrumental policing of space (and our mental spaces) via the architecture that underpins the politics of our corporate or governmental interests.

Mediators for spatial experiences.

Interior design presented as an interactive and immersive spatial inquiry

The ruined site of the abbey at Waverley, near Farnham has been appropriated as a site and as a place within which to position and develop my practice. The Abbey, its buildings, and its grounds have provided a valuable source of the material evidence for thinking about hapticity and time in a pastoral setting.

The Scriptorium presents the “performativity of research” through specifically designed apparatuses and partitions. These designed components, made objects, together with annotated texts and drawings conspire to create a complex interior design, a “Place Study” staged in a niche-like space. This interior presents itself as both distinct and relational to the other projects in the MA Interiors Show. The interior presents the many manifestations of creative research that have been developed through engaging with the site.

The small ‘Scriptorium’ conceived as a space as a refuge, an intimate minimal construction that features a doorway and an interior that contains a place for objects, perhaps books, as well as a small sitting area. This construction, an open cell perhaps is evocative to a state of contemplation between the fabric of the everyday. The rather hybrid design appropriates a merging of minimalism, modernism and the plastic architecture of a ruined Cistercian Abbey. The construction comes into close contact with its occupant, it is a restricted spatial apparatus that attempts to promote through its awkwardness distinctive 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 minimizing. Noh stage in the forest, Kego Kuma.

PLANNING DOCUMENT use GRAPHIC DESIGN, theories and applications to visualize, design and map out the nature/interior spaces and experiences of this proposal.

Natural Connections: Retreat and Awareness through Architecture (Architectural Experience).

Experiencing The Phenomenology of Place at Waverley Abbey

INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE through a sensitive adaptation of place studies, and using materials and built spaces to form the container/scaffold/stage for an activity not its contents. Working spaces that can be given a multiplicity of tasks that can accommodate the humanities and the life sciences.

Architecture and landscape, together with the localised weather, and the sheltering buildings all contribute to finding the mental spaces for the retreat.

APPARATUSES DURATIONS EFFECTS

THINGS-MAKING-PEOPLE-IN THE WORLD

Heightening the experiential experiences of place. Ramps, stairs and passages as devices (movable) to examine and to create immediate architectural interventions. Notion of the observatory (part built/part still under development) (monuments as instruments, Japor). The camera obscura’s darken room becomes a stage and a cinema; a drawing black boarded room for making creative reciprocal social practices.

MAKING SPACES PARTIAL to the material flows and currents of sensory awareness in which IMAGES and OBJECTS reciprocally take shape/meaning.

The Body in Space: merging/mediating/climbing over architecture and its territory in the landscape.

Keywords,

Place Studies : Spatiality : Phenomenology of Place : Spatial Intelligence :

Relational Aesthetics:

Retreat, Sensing Spaces, Experiential, Pastoral, Architectural Fabric, Ruined Buildings, Historical Community/Order, Neo Romantic, Camera Obscura, Mortality, Consumption, Palimpsest, Remote Sensing, Architectural Interventions, Material, Massing, Body, Objects and Things, Craft, The Physical Body (Historical/Postmodern), Contemporary Art Practices, Tim Ingold

‘Making’ and the inter relationships of Archaeology, Anthropology, Art and Architecture.

Assets of Site

Listed Historical Site, Tranquil (of road site in parkland), Otherness (ruination and romance), Water, Archaeology (building), anthropology (significant settlement Cistercian Abbey)

CREATING FORMS AND MESSAGES

The Way Things Are Connected (or the stickiness of dependence between things and humans)

Kengo Kuma. Anti-Object

Not Networks, but rather Entanglements or Meshworks/Mesh (implying infinite connections and infinitesimal differences) or Mess (resists neat compartmentalization and order). 

Mark Dion. Archaeology

The Work, its Shelter, the Collection and its Process and Furniture (Agency)

The Wunderkammer as a structural feature (De Waal, V&A )

The Mapping/Charting Table (conduit, meeting/passing place)

Tim Ingold. Making

Ian Hodder. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things.

Peter Greenaway. The Physical Self.

The Self in a Spatial/Social/Corporeal Situation The Tactility/Closeness of Learning (Craft)

DESIGN CREATIVELY/COLLABORATIVELY AND STRATEGICALLY THINKING IN THE RUINS

THINKING IN THE FICTION OF RUINS

THE ABBEY AS A REMNANT OF ITS WORLD, IN WHICH WE HAVE COME TO LATE,

TO A WORLD THAT HAS SEEN TOO MUCH.

POLITICS OF PLACE, English Heritage/Listed Building, has been used as a filming locating in contemporary cinema ranging in genres from the historical to the dystopian. Recently use of the site as a film location allowed the building of a temporary tower structure situated in close proximity to the existing ruinous fabric of the site.

POETICS OF SPACE/Bachelard AETHETICS OF DECAY/Trigg

THE WAR OF DREAMS/Marc Auge 

The Theatre of Operations.

Ruins, as a notion and a phenomena are slowly disappearing from our western cities, out of a lack of time (faute de temps) Marc Auge further comments that we are condemned to produce waste, not remnants of the past.

LOCATION, Streetfinder O/S. GPS Locality and access options/experiences.

World placing with solar and astronomical positioning. Scale and proximity

HISTORY, site, occupations, ruination, dereliction, reclamation into a garden feature. SITE SPECIFIC to GLOBAL CONCERNS

LOCALITIES and HISTORIES

HUMAN EXPERIENCE, Qualitative and Quantitative

DWELLING, LEARNING, RUINS, AND MEMORY> WHAT REMAINS? 

MAPPING/REMOTE SENSING using the palimpsest of this landscape/of its human occupation, of its demise to re-instate and re-imagine the cultural and anthropological shifts that have affected humanity.

RE-INSTATING a gathering with intellectual concerns in the humanities.

SPEAKERS/REASEARCH POSTERS/EXHIBITIONS and ART WORKS/SCREENINGS.

Oren Lieberman, Immediate Architectural Interventions/Intraventions. 

Mark Dion, Thames Dig, tents, taxonomies, teeth and texts.

Kate Whiteford, Land Drawings, installations and excavations

Colin Renfrew , Remote Sensing, aerial photography of sites (WW2) being used to re­ image specific archaeological notions of place.

Tim Ingold, MAKING, on the entanglements of Archaeology, Anthropology, Art and Architecture.

METHODOLOGIES

Temporary structures, blue screens, stage flats, projection, surfaces and skins, envelopes and membranes, optics and materials, programmes and debate, exhibition and research, global networking and virtual presentations, workshops around the phenomenology of place and its interrelationships with critical spatial practice. Presentations and Symposium, Curriculum and Practices, Site Specific Work and Performance.

Public Intimacy in Social Spaces. Architecture and The Contemporary Arts.

Learning through Making, (The Parallel of Life and Art) Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture.

Visitor’s Centre, with interpretive exhibition (Stonehenge/Denton Corker Marshall) or an immersive intervention (Winchester Cathedral,Anima-Animus/Elferova and Wilson). A place where the interior space evokes a sense of place/a becoming (Existential, Historical, Social, Cultural) see ‘The Physical Self exhibition curated by Peter Greenaway. The Fate of Place/Human Sociology.

A contemplative space or spiritual/secular retreat featuring a series of interventions (Follies/Pavilions/Huts/Heidegger/Tschumi) that focuses the gaze on a particular view or detail, framing a distant reference (landmark or natural phenomenon, research into Lutyen’s ‘Thunder House’ for Gertrude Jekyll).

Museum of Wisdom. Kengo Kuma. 

Noh Stage In The Forest. Kengo Kuma. 

Hortus Conclusus. Peter Zumthor.

The Solar Pavilion. Alison and Peter Smithson.

The Secular Retreat, Living Architecture. Peter Zumthor. 

Heidegger’s Hut, Bachelard’s Poetics, Ingold’s making.

Spatial Apparatuses, Buildings and Social Devices/Agendas 

Events as Interventions producing Intraventions from Sociology, Architecture and the Humanities/Contemporary Arts.

USING the existing site to host concerns and education through a light footprint of temporary structures and intermediary arts based events.

THEMATIC SPACES in literature and the arts locate themselves within the ruins; become new creative points of departure, new narratives that add to the spatiality of the events experience.

CRITICAL SPATIAL PRACTICES (Architecture/Fine Art and Performance) as a methodology for engaging with the transformative processes now emerging is of vital scholarly concern for design practices and professionals.

Inclusions of observation and practice.

Experiential experiences from a place by the river, under the canopy of dappled sunlight; a secluded proximity of the monks dormitory through the pleasing decay that is aging beautifully.

Variegated and mutable veiling of transparencies through sunlight and a gentle breeze.

Shadow (voids) and Forms (layered movements) Permeable membrane (time passes through here)

The River (Jackie Leven/Kenneth Patchen, The Skaters) a corporeal presence on loss, memory/absence, subjectivity and flow.

Kengo Kuma. Complete Works, Kenneth Frampton.

‘Our aim is to create architecture that confronts and fuses with the earth’

‘Architecture should not be cut off from the ground like a building designed and transported to the site’

Kema’s ‘anti-objective’ architecture is anti-perspectival in that it is categorically anti­ thetical to the subject/object split of the occidental tradition.

‘The asymmetrical projection of the Water/Glass volume, derived from the diagonal platform of the Noh stage, makes it explicit that there is no single ideal point from which this waterborne scene may be experienced.’ (Frampton, 2012:12)

Katsura Aesthetic.

Non Corporeal Architecture ( 2001 A Space Odyssey, the final room with its dematerialised phantom character of absence and voyeurism)

Japanesse Vernacular, Void/Ma space, Translucency, Sequence of Spaces,

Siddig El’Nigoumi’s pots hold an interior space that cannot itself be transposed only broken ; they are in effect testimonial silences to his humility and his agency working with clay. In my mental space on these inner spaces of Nigoumi’s ceramics I can reach a correspondence, a pitch with its distinctive mutual timbre that is still active. The existential trait left in the innerness of these vessels is irreducible to my own subjectivity.

Site drawings, archaeology of found objects, anthropological observations, time based media, architectural plans.

Interior Spaces/Making and the adaptation of existing.

Photographic drawings, collage, montage, interventions through designed walls/pathways/interactions.

“Hut” Sensing Spaces/Building.

Materials, aesthetics, volumes, dwelling, social, light and dark, place.

Localities of experience and research.

Negative Capability Exhibition (art works in response to archaeological sites),Winchester University.

Collage : Solar Pavilion/A Philosophy of Solitude/John Cowper Powys : The Hut as a projection of self/Ann Cline

As my dwelling took shape, it began to shape my life as well. And when I sat inside reading the recluse poets, the terse simplicity of their record framed my own perception, one I likened to a camera recording a world of pure experience.

Ann Cline

Architecture is not made with the brain. 

The labour of Alison and Peter Smithson.

Architectural Association 2005.

Smithson’s on modernity, not as a goal but as an established reality that needs to be interpreted.

Articulation of the volumes based on rigorous rules that derive from the ordering capacity of the necessities of daily life.

Holistic Practices.

The way person and work fit together so seamlessly.

Embedding building within a specific contemporary cultural context. (Krucker, 2005:85)

Transitions between spaces.

‘Building relationships to relate to what already exists.’ Herzog and de Meuron The Parallel of Art and Life

Aesthetics about Perception Poetics about Production

‘The approach leads from the static object of the mere picture to the dynamic process of imagining.’(Schregenberger,2005:82)

‘As found is a small affair, it is about being careful.’ (attentive awareness (anthropological) to people and place) Peter Smithson 2001 

‘The ‘as found’ attitude is anti-utopian; its form is specific, raw and immediate. It calls the will to question. It is a technique of reaction and a concern for that which exists.’ (Schregenberger,2005:81)

Complex Ordinariness Bruno Krucker

Urban Structuring.

Importance of urban planning, specific responses to the surroundings generated different shapes. Testing out spatial bound volumes and aligning them with the site or urban fabric/passages of use and existing features.

‘As Found, is a small affair: it is about being careful, the as found (is) where the art is in the picking up, turning over and putting with.’ (Smithson.)

‘The essence of ‘as found’ as a concept lies in accepting the value of the everyday. Any aspect of the built environment can be interpreted and employed as a trigger for architectural propositions. To consider ways in which the ‘ordinary’ can be harnessed through reinterpretation.’ (Sergison’2005:98)

The Everyday.

Life between buildings.

The necessities of daily life (the repetition of basic sequences) giving shape and layout to the architecture.

Heavy Prefabrication: Whole wall sections used to a homogeneous expression that emphasises their tactile qualities.

John Cowper Powys hopes to create a new level of discourse that will appeal to the common person, that person who desperately needs a philosophy of life, a means of comprehending the world around him or her, while at the same time being a person who is receptive and curious.

‘The Solar Pavilion, is both a lookout over the distant landscape on the north facade, sitting on top of the existing cottage wall, and a garden pavilion mediating between two types of controlled landscape. It aims to provide a minimal enclosure that allows as immediate a relationship between interior and exterior as possible.’

(Sergison’2005:97)

The hut addresses the core of ritual as a part of nature versus the supposed freedom of modernist thought and the architectural contrivances it pursues. The hut represents the convergence of ritual and naturalness, at the same time addressing cultural issues and practices.

To systematise transitions of both components and internal spatial orderings. The sizes of elements are determined by the inner spatial ordering in an almost organic, non-schematic way.’

We developed elements that embrace the entire thickness of the wall.’ (Krucker, 2005:85)

The search for directness while avoiding too much design, but still ensuring that our buildings look right in their surroundings.

Cultural Background.

Fitting in with the ordinariness of the environment, an ordinariness that only reveals its strength over time.

Embedding building within a specific contemporary cultural context. (Krucker, 2005:85)

The anonymous settings of settlements and agglomerations create documents/cinematic presences of familiarity within these architectural contexts. It is important to go beyond any superficial fascination with the ‘periphery’.

John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) created an attractive and congenial meditation in his best non-fiction book: A Philosophy of Solitude.

Writing in the early 1930's in his adopted United States, where he was living and working as a free-lance lecturer, a popularizer of intellectual themes barnstorming the country, Powys' book is prompted by his experiences, his insights, and his disappointments. He sees the United States as a slave of modem technology — of megalopolis, pandemonium, noise, of "the Gargantuan monstrosities and Dantesque horrors of our great modem cities."

The situation, he declares, is too far gone for the inspiration of American writers like Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, with their facile optimism and their confidence in the virtues of an American character now lost in the twentieth century.

The only thing that can really help us is a much more definite and drastic philosophy ... a real, hard, formidable, unrhetorical introspection ..."

And this is the philosophy of solitude that Powys sets out of construct.

To Powys, solitude is the necessary social, psychological, and intellectual state of the individual. It is social in pulling away from the life and tumult of the crowd (Powys lived for decades in New York City, finally moving to a small town in upper-state New York before returning to Wales a few short years after this book's publication).

It is psychological in the sense of identifying and pursuing a frame of mind for the personal pursuit of solitude. And it is intellectual in offering a philosophy calling upon a variety of classic thinkers and using the tools of plain everyman logic.

Powys sees this simplicity of mind and desire as a key to self-control and understanding. His elementalism is based on the solitude that is evoked by this self-knowledge, which allows a person to make and define a life for themselves based not upon the tempo and rhythms of the crowd and technology but on the unspoken wisdom that wells up from solitude itself.

The hut has a sense of immediacy that no room-filled house can achieve. The hut focuses its dweller on immediacy and meaningfulness. I had found the commodity of my dwelling through the poetry of its use.

Structural Thinking. Anti Object: Kengo Kuma.

Identity out of structure/layers of latticed structure.

Character-forming ability of structures, through the transitions of interior to exterior spaces. ‘Our approach was to act decisively at an urban and a spatial level and to create precise alignments that would strengthen existing elements. Within the structure, it becomes possible to give specific places an individual identity and to create an awareness of the relation between repetition and difference. Seen in this way , the facades are less a surface around a volume, and more the outer edges of the structure itself (importantly the structuring becomes independent of the programme, which can change over time).’ (Krucker, 2005:87)

The power of a building originates from its structuring (a character of a building that is not wholly subservient to its programme).

The book is an extended essay, not a history, but it does call for a close sense of identity with the subject and with those who have come before. The author dives into the subject of primitive huts, skimming the surface with Po-i and Shu-ch'i, the recluse archetype brothers of Chinese antiquity, with modems like Gaston Blanchard and Thomas Merton, classics like Lao-tzu and Heraclitus, plus the great Japanese hut-dwellers Kamo no Chomei and Hoshida Kenko. The hut, she notes, has always been a projection of the self. When Heraclitus was chided on why he lived in such a small and humble abode, he responded, "Even here, the gods reside."

Ground Notations, the need to find an existing physical structure, see ‘Shifting the Track’ (Smithson.)

‘The Smithsons’ search for a strong existing element that could be added to and adjusted, if necessary, ensures that a project is grounded in its place. Successful ground notations operate at varying scales, ranging from large pieces of infrastructure (roadways,etc) to natural, seasonal landscape infrastructure (trees and meadows). Once absorbed into an existing situation, new ground notations begin to refocus a place and act as the basis for subsequent actions’ (Sergison’2005:97)

Drawing on an existing topographic ground notation (earth-bunds) matrices of bundways that help irrigate the marshlands and define land ownership. 

‘New topographical features containing the infrastructure necessary for development, with roads on top and supply conduits inside them. Public buildings were located on top of swollen bunds, for visibility and orientation, while the spaces in between bunds became serviced fields for new settlement.’ (Sergison’2005:98)

Could it be that where a human settlement seems structureless, without purpose, we invent and build ‘ground-notations’ to offer an analogous power to that offered by strong natural landforms?

Neutrality and Character.

‘This kind of structural thinking supports the search for a more anonymous everyday architecture that can nevertheless develop a character of its own.

The prefabricated parts generate complex volumetric forms that remain only partly visible after assembly. The effect is similar to that of Japanese timber construction, in which the simplicity and clarity of appearance belie the complexity of the joining techniques involved.’ (Krucker, 2005:89)

‘The Smithson’s embraced an architecture that was not purely driven by formal intensions but by questions regarding content. This is an architecture that results from an attitude of openness towards the world (of worlds) and an acute awareness of the impact of the architect’s actions. Such an architecture insists on addressing the nature of real conditions and how they fit into the fabric of a larger context.’ (Krucker, 2005:90)

Lessons Learnt from Alison and Peter Smithson 

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 "life-style." The hut, then, may be humankind's supreme experiment.

‘I remember finding the work awkward, even ugly in its removal from architectural conventions. ’

Research Contexts/Materials

The Shift/Italian Thoughts, both became pivotal in the understanding of the intensions behind their work.

What does it mean to be an English architect? The lessons presented as six themes.

Strategy and Detail, as a design concept and method.

A manual for negotiating our way through the development of a project. 

‘All our projects begin with an interpretation of the specifics of the programme and a response to the place we are adding to, either as a series of sketches or a model exploring a building form. A dialogue then begins about the ‘feeling’ of the project, its material presence and its language of construction; this provides a framework in which to take decisions and a structure that can be referred to.’(Sergison’2005:92) Trying it out, testing its placement in place, its on-site feelings.

A detailing of open brick perpends (a breathing building envelope) that is overlaid on all three elevations, giving a quiet expression to the building’s tectonics.

Conglomerate Ordering, as an overall interconnected building solution. 

‘A bold simple form adjusted by the forces of the site, thereby containing an equivalence, an overall tonality through the concrete frame as a structural solution and the block infill and their aluminium dressings. The building form and plan arrangement were adjusted according to the particularities of the site and to rhyme with the geometries of the neighbouring industrial buildings.’ (Sergison’2005:94)

Ways, (a spine providing a variety of spatial experiences coupled with the means by which circulation is distributed) sometimes Ways are employed in a manner that is latent and discreet; in other instances they are the most public part of a project. 

‘The concept of Ways as a means of organising circulation and supporting activity.’ (Sergison’2005:94)

A simple organising circulation element that can be read, at one level, as a street or lane running the length of the plan, linking the apartments. This space is given a strong material intensity, entirely timber-clad on floor, walls and soffit. At selected moments views of the city are framed or the sky is revealed.

Janus Face, origins in Italian Thoughts, teaches us to understand how mediation is possible between inside and outside, or between one side of a building and another; as all faces are equally engaged with what lies before them.

By focusing attention on the enclosing envelope and how the building should engage with the conditions around it.

The opposing forces of a site and its relationships to the different faces of the building can become multifaceted, through scale, the choice of material or even the layering of its construction; a discreet link is sought which connects rather than confronts.

Making Entanglements : Spatial Collage, 2010

Lead,photographic ( pinhole) and inkjet visual material from flickr stream, fixing tapes, cyanotype on tracing paper,pierced and repositioned elements on paper.

Making Entangled : An eclectic synthesis of knowledge fields

Confronting Spatial Intelligence-tracing the use of spatial intelligence. 

What are we learning about in the concrete particularity of this space?

Leon van Schaik : Spatial Intelligence

‘Architecture is the product of our spatial intelligence, of its workings in establishing the mental spaces of every individual, and of the spatial values shared by groups.’

The Retreat, Upper Lawn Pavilion. 1959

This country retreat presents itself as a glass box but is grounded by its relationship to the pre-existing masonry of a walled garden. 

Leon van Schaik comments that the little glass house retreat built by Peter and Alison Smithson around a walled garden evokes for him memories(mental spaces) of being a schoolboy working in a conservatory in a walled garden at Cliveden, such that the notion of a retreat is this ideal of being built into the walls of an existing walled garden.

You rise up into its glazed upper storey with views over the rolling hills beyond and perch atop the wall on the edge of a threshold space carved out of the woods, or remove yourself from view sink down to the ground and sit with your back to the wall.