Architectural Body/Architecture In Abjection : Bodies/Spaces and their Relations.

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Studio Works/Architectural Surround.

Art practice explores relations between organism-person-environment.

Architecture In Abjection.

Bodies, Spaces and their Relations.

Zuzana Kovar. 2018

This book marks a turning point in architectural theory by using philosophy to examine the field anew. Breaking from the traditional dualism (space-body) within architecture – which presents the body as subject and space as object – it examines how such rigid boundaries can be softened. Zuzana Kovar thus engages with complementary and complex ideas from architecture, philosophy, feminist theory and other subjects, demonstrating how both bodies and bodily functions relate deeply to architecture. 

Architecture: A dualistic paradigm.

On the breath of approaches to subjectivity.

Eisenman,Tschumi, Derrida.

Deconstructivism challenged the notion of wholes, order, rationality and stability of space/object. Hence it questioned much of modernism, which was seen as purist, and attempted to map out an in-between. In the late 1980s, Eisenman wrote that 'traditional oppositions between structure and decoration, abstraction and figuration, figure and ground, form and function  could be dissolved.

Architecture could begin an exploration of the 'between' within these categories. Explorations of the in-between can be seen in play in Eisenman's Wexner Centre (1989) in Columbus, a building split in two by a 'scaffold structure', which is not temporary but permanent. As such, the centre apparently 'falls somewhere between process and product, past and present, shelter and non-shelter, structure and form, structure and ornament, building and non-building, exterior and interior. In an almost identical sense, Tschumi has written much the same in his Manhatten Transcripts (1994). 

What emerged from Derrida and his deconstructive form of criticism was a particular way of thinking about and practising architecture beyond dualism. Yet, despite this apparent shift from a dualist mode of thought to one that engaged with the in-between, and despite the complexity and promise of thought revealed in the respective theories of Eisenman and Tschumi, if one interrogates the built works, what is revealed is that the subject remains very much intact, and so too does the dualism of subject-object.

Deconstructive architectural theory and its built works have been funnelled into a formalism, which is preoccupied with deconstructing platonic solids and the notion of the object/space as a whole and discrete entity.

For Kovar, what is necessary, is to reconfigure the dualism of subject-object/body-space, to deconstruct the hierarchy and distinction between the two and to map out an in-between between these, rather than within space itself. It is the distinction between body and space that forms the crux of dualistic thought within the architectural discipline, which unless probed, will  allow this mode of thought to prevail.

Tschumi's theory of 'event' introduces a relational conception of the body within architectural discipline. In so doing he mobilises the subject and further shifts the focus from a body to the movements of that body. For Kovar, this setting of the body in motion (although again we are dealing with just one side of the equation) is a lot more productive in the context of questioning dualistic paradigms than formally deconstructing space. Thinking in terms of event allows for not only a volatile conception of the body, but a volatile conception of architecture, given that for Tschumi architecture is constituted by spaces and events.

Developing architectural thought beyond relations to a body or space in isolation.

Event/Assemblages/Bodies/Space-Flows.

Using the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattati and the notions of event, movements, defined in terms of vectors and field relations, time (or the idea that all things change) and scale (an awareness and importance of the similarities in relations across any number of scales)

Architectural Body.

Architectural Surround

Bioscleave.

Arakawa and Gins map out a relational understanding of bodies and spaces, and hence a relational understanding of architecture.

Thinkers, theories conducted in spaces inhabited through experimental projects that illuminate theory at its core.

Sanford Kwinter, Arakawa + Gins, Brian Massumi, Gilles Deleuze.

Being Ecological.

Part of our growing ecological awareness is a feeling of disgust that we are literally covered in and penetrated by nonhuman beings, not just by accident but in an irreducible way. A way that is crucial to our very existence. Maybe this feeling of disgust will diminish if we become used to our immersion in the biosphere. Just like our neurotic feelings diminish as we become friendlier with our thoughts.

Timothy Morton.

Ceramic Deconstructions of Hidden Architectural Interiors : Spaces/Surfaces/Interiors on Solitude/Sensuality

Sensing Architecture : Movements of  Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies.

Thinking/Making within gestures of drawing spatial speculation.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/53757637955/in/dateposted-public/

Materials as Leaky Things/The Correspondences of Surfaces  : For Tim Ingold.

A Philosophy of Solitude.1933

In Defence of Sensuality.1935

John Cowper Powys

Exploring the space of solitude, to explore ideas and thoughts with a public. The hermit as a proto-performance artist displaying qualities of spirituality, intelligence, artistry and sensuality.

Anne Douglas.

The Hermit Project.

The Follies Journal. 2003

The House Fifteen Foot Square.

The proposed Hermitage at Cadland (drawing).

Interior Spaces.

The Alchemy of Imagination.

In the dead linen in cupboards I seek the supernatural.

Joseph Rouffange.

The wardrobe is filled with linen, there are even moonbeams which I can unfold.

Andre Breton. 1932

The Permanence of Childhood.

On Poetic Imagination and Reverie.

Gaston Bachelard.

While the child was dreaming in solitude, he experienced a limitless existence. His reverie was not merely an escape. It was a reverie of flight. Dreaming of childhood we go back to the den of reveries.

All the ideas that I want to put forth in this chapter tend to establish the persistence in the human soul of a nucleus of childhood. Of a motionless but enduring childhood outside of history, hidden from others disguised as history when it is narrated, but having real existence only in its moments of illumination which is to say in its moments of poetic existence.

Chamber Music/Reverberations.

Constructed Space/Ceramic Forms.

On Silences, Surfaces, Interiors and Depths.

Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life, indeed without these 'objects' and a few others in equally high favour, our intimate life would lack a model of intimacy.

They are hybrid objects, subject objects, like us, through us, and for us they have a quality of intimacy on the shelves of memory and in the temples of the wardrobe.

But the real wardrobe is not an everyday piece of furniture, it is not opened everyday and so like a heart that confides in no one, the key is not on the door. Many a time we dreamed of the mysteries lying dormant between its wooden flanks.

Rimbaud designates a perspective of hope, what good things are being kept in reserve in the locked wardrobe? This time it is filled with promise, it is something more than a family chronicle.

Exaggeration is always at the summit of any living image, and to add fantasy to linen is to draw a picture, by means of a volute of words off all the superabundant blessings that lie folded in piles between the flanks of an abandoned wardrobe.