Making Spaces/Proximities : Navigating theory and redundancy.

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Studio Spaces.

A Scriptorium, a space within the wall.

St Jerome at his study.

Making Spaces/Proximities : Navigating theory and redundancy.

INTIMUS

Interior Design Theory Reader.

Julieanna Preston.

Mark Taylor.

Declaring a field of inquiry that lies beyond disciplinary boundaries of design and architecture, all of the texts included in this reader establish generative and active exploration of interior design as a practice informed by the intellectual scholarship surrounding its cultural production and creative practice. They are not foundational in that they do not recognise or declare an originary state or propose any fundamental canon. Collected in order to catalyse creative associations within this operational field, the texts in this volume are presented via an organisational strategy that refuses both chronologic and thematic structure.

Essentially they present a connectivity to do with inhabitation and spatial presence as outlined in the examples above that is at once distant, by discipline, and intimate, by content.

Proximities/On interior theory related to the specifics of inhabitation and bodily presence.

What is being teased out hear is a multifaceted dialogue between that which is theoretical in nature, abstract, knowledge-based and immaterial and that which is grounded, physical, phenomenal and concrete. Not wishing to pull these apart, but rather to encourage convergence, this book identifies a territory of emerging points that collectively register connections of understanding with reference to a field tentatively named as the theoretical domain of interior design.

This conception forms a working method for searching and organising texts, and for mapping their locations as a relational matrix. Described in other theoretical discourse as rhizomatic, networked or diagrammatic, matrices foster the formation of connections among notions as opposed to defining or creating singular isolated entities.

However, one image in particular harboured virtual potentials pertinent to our inquiry.

Within the pages of Emily Post's book 'The Personality of a House' is a photographic plate attributed to New York architect William Laurence Bottomley. This seemingly unassuming image gently frames the prevailing issues, topics and texts in this volume. 

The doors reveal a space between the opaque panelling, a space within the wall occupied by a small vanity or dressing-table. Another mirror backs the niche which doubles the light, and the ruffles and tassels of swagged curtains are softly gathered at the boundary of this closet and cloister. The room seems to be dressed in parity to the self-reflective body that inhabits it. And yet, it is a private space,  a space for one, a space for an individual.

The mirrors reflect very little of the greater surroundings, but the scale of the panelling and the floor-to-ceiling height help to extrapolate that this secret space occurs as an informality among the far more social and self conscious home atmosphere.

How might this 'Perfect Example of Dressing-Table hidden behind panelling when not in use' be physically, socially and theoretically constructed? How are the intricate details of curved timber work on the doors and stool indicative of current and historical values of ornament, surface, gender and politics? While the doors mask the presence of the dressing-table, the mirrored interior expands infinitely. What appears as a small enclosure is a mode of liberation. What one might assume to be self-indulgent or decadent decoration may be found to be a sign of self-expression.

While the architectural room is wrapped with abstract notions of time and space, this small alcove inhabits its periphery as a pocket where body is central, maybe even fluid, and space is temporal, perhaps even subjective. 

The archive of discursive fields of inquiry.

Navigating theory and redundancy.

On a theoretical praxis, a matrix for gathering material from the archive.

The matrix is intended to be used as a surveying instrument and ordering device with the purpose to catalyse cross- and inter-disciplinary insights.

A matrix or diagram mediates between the virtual potentials generated by the data ( the field of essays/excerpts) and the actual book. The matrix is to some extent graphic shorthand used to declare latent structures of organisation. The diagram is also generative, and can be used to order possible readings.

Seeking theory informative to interior design/spatial practices by trusting that through the act of searching various sources/databases/resources a range of associations and connections would verify an emergent practice. Such associations are fuelled by the abstract and diagrammatic quality of an organising tactical matrix in its flexibility to seek casual and coincidental links among related and sometimes assumed disparate disciplines. By looking for correspondences between seemingly unrelated research and practice, and by moving laterally between existing systems and categories, not in a haphazard manner but through productive leaps generated by rules that had consequential and significant outcomes. This process enabled the gathering of material from several disciplines when the linear historical model seemed inapplicable, and thematic structures too constraining.

Coupled with its ability to engage the complexity of the real, the matrix assists in making sense of the found texts and their potential reformations. Conceptually, such order is not made towards the specificity or hegemony of a discipline, but rather to turn outwards and mobilize forces of action and imagination between matter and information.

Pragmatically, the matrix positions each text relative to a disciplinary body of knowledge (social, political,philosophical, technological, gender and psychological) and then relative to prominent interior design/spatial practice issues (material, colour, light, space, decoration and furnishing). Within this methodology an interpretive role is played in ordering these texts and the multiple locations in which each text could be placed.

Producing an interdisciplinary database search using terms typically associated with interior design as a decorative craft, an architectural speciality, a spatial art or a physical articulation of social interaction located essays framed by a wide range of types of theory, genres of writing and sources of textual discourse.

Many of the researched essays did not declare that they are concerned with 'interior theory', but instead they either operated critically on spaces, places and inhabitation of the built environment's interiors, or offered observations and abstractions of use and inhabitation that engender a criticality in this collection of texts. To include this material raises questions of what constitutes theory, and how theory relates to the critical study of the interior.

Thresholds of experiential concern.

Architectural Body/Transactive Memory.

The reclamation of theory, other spaces, further sites for production and inquiry. 

In their book 'Intersections : Architectural Histories and Critical Theories', Iain Borden and Jane Rendell outline nine epistemological tendencies on which theory is constituted within critical discourse. Rather than champion a narrow definition or description, their categories are expansive and inclusive, and when considered relative to the scope of our inquiry assist in substantiating numerous items that would normally fall outside the limits of architectural or design theory, most notably some that take the form of turn-of-the-century advice literature or historical analysis of a place or activity.

Of particular interest are those texts that are observational in nature or assert new paradigms of dwelling in light of technology. In most cases, selection of such texts proved a matter of locating the speculative mode of inquiry within the written work, registering the inferences and extending them as conduits to other contemporary works or notions. In other cases, it became an exercise in dwelling in the period, revelling in the details specific to when the text was written and recognising that theory and critical history have been defined and couched differently across time.

For if theory is conditioned by inquiries and speculation about what occurs between events, situations, objects and actions, then the method of inquiry or the analytical device employed is of primary concern.  

Art Works/Spatial Relations.

Beyond the formal values/qualities of drawing.

Figuration and the spatial inter-personal concerns of/found in drawing.

Extending the body in drawing.

Jenny Saville.

Cecily Brown.

Manuel Neri.

David Smith.

Atmospheres/Light.

The Flame of a Candle.

Charcoal, Alternative Photography.

Gaston Bachelard. 

CLAY.

Mythical city of Orion. 

Speculative retreats/Tarkovsky/Krishnamurti/Hannsjorg Voth.

Making for life on the hospitality of the body.

The architectural body and the body in care.

INTERIOR SURFACES.

Photographic Exhibition/Retrospective.

Desiring into the pathology of the image.

Breaking into corporeal and subjective spaces.

Erasures/temporalities within the materiality of photographic sensations and their memories.

The Minor Gesture : The Diagram of the Painting/Fielding the Feeling of Force taking Form

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russellmoreton.com

The plurality alive in art, always risks being overtaken, colonized, immobilized and arrested by the forces of encounter it invites. Yet paraphrasing Nietzsche, Deleuze writes, a force would not survive if it did not first of all borrow the features of the forces with which it struggles. What a will wants is to affirm its difference. Through the will to power, force takes form.

Active force always risks capture by reactive force and the risk of translation, of rendering work within a stabilizing narrative of identity or representation.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

The diagram of the painting/drawing is its feeling of force taking form that is itself in movement.

Relationscapes, Erin Manning.

Propositions of Force/Appetition.

The Work's Diagram.

The force of the work is an emergent way of looking, more than an actual taking form.

Raveningham Diagrams for Sensing the Landscape. 2023.

Opening the present to its potential for experiential complexity.

Opening to the indeterminacy of experience.

Creating work that remains open to an infinity of potential evocations.

Making works that resonate with an ontogenitic plurality of sense(s). 

The same object, the same phenomenon changes sense depending on what force which appropriates it. Deleuze.  

We become sited in the fielding of the quasi chaos of microperceptions, an experience that leaves us out of breath, our muscles tense with the twitching of kinaesthetic empathy. We move with the intensive magnitude of the micromovements moving.

Erin Manning.

Landing sites choose us, creating an associated milieu that worlds the body-environment. 

Some are perceptual, some are dimensionalizing, some are imaging. 

Organism-Person-Environment

A decision is like a hook onto the environment to gain traction on it.

Fielding how we think-feel.

Nothing happens without kinaesthetic instigation and corporeal proddings.

A landing not so much into a place, as a dancing into attendance.

Architectural Body, Arakawa/Gins. 2002.

A choreographed encounter is never, wholly what it seems, you can't really choreograph movement because we are constantly in a process of fielding our surroundings, which also fields us. How we think-feel is a space-time of experience alters where and how we can experience it. This fielding is how Arakawa and Gins define a landing site.

Erin Manning. 

The decision of the landing site is its focusing into experience.

For Whitehead a decision is a becoming actual of a virtual potential, and decision is what gives the event form and by consequence creates an individuation. The decision is the separating off, the honing in that makes a particular tonality take form.

We Land into the focus of an awareness that becomes us.

Actuality is the decision amid potentiality. 

A decision creates the potential for consciousness, not the other way around.

Whitehead. 1929/Erin Manning-Interlude.

For Arakawa and Gins, landing sites corner experience in the making.

A landing site is an activity that is as expressive as it is organizational.

Apparatuses/Diagrams

Holding their form, their bodies pause, the camera waits for them.

In the work's final form, the force of its potential can still be felt, this is the works diagram.

The camera focuses these sites into an in-gathering that captures them as transitory thought-feelings. We feel the shift from dances in the making to haptic experiments in the viewing.

The camera works with the tensile activity of the dancers minimal gestures, moving now to one side as though filming four bodies in one, suspending our attention in tandem with the suspended bodies.

Sculpting in Time.

Films heavy with the languor of relationships forming between bodies, ground, and partitioned space.

For Tarkovsky, the presence of the camera is felt as though it were another body, forcefully moving us to watch, constraining us to see not only a location or a dance, but the tensile rhythm of groundedness itself. The camera bis not there only for the recording, it feels the weight of the waiting, physically as we watch. These shifting affective tonalities are landing sites. They are what Arakawa and Gins call a depositing of sited awareness.

Erin Manning.

Fielding Assemblage : Trace/Diagram/Canvas/Paper/Studio Wall

Textual/Conceptual Forces/Siting Awareness.

Cultivation Field Research Collage

Geological era 1800.

The deep intervention into nature by humans as biological and geological agents.

The Anthropocene denotes a new framework of thinking and action.

A space where the individuals mental reality meets 'cultural narratives'

Social Conditioning/Underpinning Education.

Spatial Register between Consciousness and Social Existence.

Windows/Boundaries between the personal and the commonly shared. 

Confessional Animal/Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Corpus/The Individual Presence/Jean-Luc Nancy

Camera Obscura of Ideology/Sarah Kofman

Ceramic Diagram of Interlocking/Partitioned Spaces.

From Models to Drawings.

Spatial Tonalities/Affective Environments 

Filtered Light.

Becoming Propositional/The Human Neuron.: Each Proposition/Activates Contrast/The Dialectic of Duration.

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The Dialectic Of Duration, Gaston Bachelard. 1950

Bachelard argues for a discontinuous time, made of instants out of which we construct new durations and deconstruct old ossified ones. A time experienced as durations that addresses the nature of time in its irreducibly fractured and interrupted state, and within which Bachelard urges us to launch projects and lead lives of creative rhythms. 

Becoming Propositional.

Developing in the Incipiency of Relations/Ecologies between Things/Phenomena.

One has to realize what restraint it needs to express oneself with such brevity. Every glance can be expanded into a poem, every sigh into a novel. But to express a novel in a single gesture, joy in a single breath: such concentration can only be found where self-pity is lacking in equal measure. These pieces can only be understood by those who believe that sound can say things which can only be expressed through sound.

Arnold Schoenberg, from the introduction to the Six Bagatellies for string quartet, Opus 9, by Anton Webern, a Viennese friend and contemporary of Egon Schiele's.

Rachel's, Music for Egon Schiele. 1996.  

Individuations Dance/Relationscapes

There is no time to return to the line, the line must draw the movement, the gesture itself must become line. One pass with the paint and that's all, move the canvas. The result a vastness of localized movement, a movement across that is at once microscopic and macroscopic.

Erin Manning.

The Swimming Pool Drawings

Michael Grimshaw, Winchester School of Art.

We land into the focus of an awareness that becomes us.

Whitehead. 1929.

The architecting of spacetimes of experience co emergent with bodies in the making.

Choreographic Propositions/Mobile Architectures, Erin Manning.

The choreographic proposition  serves not to delineate positions or forms from one another in a normative practice of movement notation, but to create a diagram that captures in a fleeting moment the qualities of movement expressibility, such that their force of form can be felt.

Deleuze defines the diagram via Francis Bacon as the operative set of asignifying and non-representative lines and zones, line-strokes and colour patches, whose function is to be suggestive. He  speaks of the diagram capable of unlocking areas of sensation, suggesting that the diagram is chaos, catastrophe, but also a germ of order or rhythm.  

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

In Closing.

OURSELVES

Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world. And it's breathtaking.

I believe that our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed  the turtle, for example, to continue to exist more or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of years; for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have been in existence. We belong to a short lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What's more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes which we have triggered are unlikely to spare us.

For the Earth they may turn out to be a small irrelevant blip, but I do not think we will outlast them unscathed – especially since public and political opinion prefers to ignore the dangers which we are running, hiding our heads in the sand. We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. I fear that soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilization.

Carlo Rovelli. 2016.

It could be said that the most fantastic material is the human neuron. It dominates most materials around it, it is a prime agent of change and determines many forms on the planet.

For Cragg, ninety-nine percent of those forms are solely utilitarian, driven by survival and economics. The result is an impoverished material world. Utilitarianism censors the possibilities of form, this not only applies to designed objects and architecture the world over, it also applies to forms of education and society in general.

Our super-thinking material the human neuron with that prime position in the hierarchy of material, has a responsibility for all other material within its grasp whether mineral, plant or animal. 

Tony Cragg, Sculptures and Drawings. 2011.

Each Proposition

Activates Contrast.

Architectures based on a full recognition of the embodied human condition and of the multitude of instinctual reactions hidden in the human unconscious. A piece of furniture sets up a proposition for a event, the encounter with itself and the body of the user.

Alvar Aalto's buildings are not based on a single dominant concept or gestalt; rather they are sensory agglomerations. They sometimes even appear clumsy and unresolved as drawings, but they are conceived to be appreciated in their actual physical and spatial encounter, 'in the flesh' of the lived world, not as constructions of idealised vision.

Juhani Pallasmaa, Alvar Aalto.

Choreography As Propositional/Relations/Generative Practice.

Choreography starts from any point, it cleaves an occasion activating its relational potential. It makes time, beginning its process anew, always from the middle of the event. Choreography is thus a proposition to the event. Choreography asks/inquires into the event, how its ecology might best generate and organize the force of movement-moving.

William Forsythe, Erin Manning.

Choreography, a self generating act proposed into a movement/potential motion/event of a milieu/gathering.

Making/generating/organizing as a proposition/task/technique to the material.

Developing in the incipiency of a choreography creative ecologies of the force of movement/making/movement. 

Tony Cragg/In and Out of Material.

Carlo Rovelli/Seven Brief Lessons On Physics.

Intertwining Thinking and Making.

Architecture and the Senses.

Juhani Pallasmaa/The Eyes Of The Skin.

Bayfield Hall.

Making and deploying theoretical objects/installations/workshops.

Exploratory Clay/Ceramic based inquiry.

Creative entanglements in a world of/with materials/others.

CLAY.

Ceramic Components/Composite Sculptures.

Templates/Painted Cardboard. 

Extruded/Sledged/Moulded. 

Julian Stair/Art, Death and the Afterlife.

Sainsbury Centre.

As proposition to the event, choreography does so not by abstracting itself from the event but always as part of the event, it can never be separated out from its coming-into-itself-as-event. 

Choreography/unfolding-as-event is the fielding of a multiplying ecology in a co;constitutive environment, it develops in the incipiency of the in-between, spurred on by tendencies that waver between  the rekindling of habit and the tweaking of a contrast that beckons the new. 

For an event to tune itself choreographically many techniques are necessary. Techniques can be generated as tasks, or they can be self generated. 

Chorepgraphy as a generative practice must ask, how the tasks become propositional, how the coalescing ecology becomes more than the enabling constraints that set it into motion.

Erin Manning.

On The Body of Drawing/Demarcations

Localized/Relational/Choreographic.

Transparency/Translucency/Erasure 

  

What Remains/Of The Other Sister

Dead on Arrival.

The life drawing separated from its corporeal event is now just a representation marooned in its media.

The Life Room, a space where an individuals mental reality meets cultural narratives.

Beuys Brown and Klein Blue : Colour as substance/the transubstantiation of matter.

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Cyanotype Durational Sun Print.

Charcoal and Clay trace drawing.

Beuys Brown and Klein Blue

Magdalena Broska.

The Transubstantiation of Matter.

Beuys's materials are not to be understood literally, by their outward appearance.

Beuys emphasises that the brown floor paint is not just a colour but also a plastic substance.

I have chosen brown so as to present a plastic substance and thus express something that relates to every form of substantiality, just as I am trying to do with this superimposed red. I simply want to bridge the gap between a discussion about colour and the problem of substantiality.

Joseph Beuys, Drawings. 1979

For Beuys the real and the concretely employed material is only seemingly real, fully in a philosophical sense: a phenomenon from some essential being that is hidden behind appearances, and that is to be elicited by a kind of counter- image process.

Conceptions of Counter Images/Transformation.

The Homoeopathic Method/Like cures like.

Beuys's brown and Klein's blue form a pair of opposites: according to the hermetic-alchemical world view, such opposites contain the arcane power of polar dissimilarity that seeks to be augmented and joined together, a polar way of thinking that seeks resolution.

With his brown oil paint, Joseph Beuys assumed a counter-position to Yves Klein and his blue, which stands for immaterial manifestations, the sky, the sea, and the light of the south, and which conveys space and wide vistas.

In terms of consistency, Beuys's brown is purely coating paint, as commonly used for rust proofing.

Its visual appearance links it with earth, heaviness, darkness, and also blood.

Communicative Space Of Drawing : Radical pedagogy transduces rather than transmits.

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The Communicative Space Of Drawing.

Braking down research.

Radical pedagogy transduces rather than transmits.

Re-combinent poetics/praxis.

The Architectural Scriptorium

The Photographic Darkroom.

The Observatory.

Drawing, defined variously as an extruding, a gathering and/or a pulling closer.

The paradoxical nature of drawing is that it is simultaneously a form of recording and invention, somewhere situated between unconstrained gestures and the reiteration of a point of view.

To re-examine the significance of the human body through drawing performatively and architecture.

To understand how buildings affect individuals and communities emotionally, how they provide people with a sense of joy-identity-and place.

Across The Space Of A Page.

Drawing Propositions/Propulsions from the Body.  

Landing Sites: Organism/Person/Environment

The World Opens Up In Front Of Us And Closes Behind.

The experience of our bodies, of what we touch and smell, of how well we are 'centred' is not locked into the immediate present, but can be recollected through time and memory.

Collisions with Bounded Spaces.

The Haptic and Geometric Grid/Centripetal and Centrifugal Radials. 

Haptic choreographies/circulations that create collisions with environments and bodies.

Body 'fit' and movement is affected by the haptic sense and by the tactile qualities of the surface and edges we encounter.

Patterns are composed mostly of paths and places, but it is the system by which they are related, that allows us to make sense of a bounded space.

Place and its choreography of collision that facilitate the transaction between body, memory and architecture, allowing us to dwell in them in the fullest sense.

All architecture in its beginnings was derived from a body-centred sense of space and place. The power of the home, comes from its being the one piece of the world around us which still speaks directly of our bodies as the centre and the measure of that world.

Buildings can encourage a choreography of dynamic relationships among the persons moving within their domains. 

Emily had been playing house in a nook right in the bow of a boat and tiring of it, she was walking rather aimlessly aft – when it suddenly flashed into her mind, that she was SHE.

Gaston Bachelard.

Poetics of Space.

Emily was neither particularly conscious of, nor looking at, the centre from which she was departing – nor the centre towards which she as walking. But she was able to detect her identity in the bodily act of moving from one centre to another, she recognized that SHE had been withdrawn and was now emerging.

How can the personal world of the body provide an alternative to excessive and disorienting events in the environment?

To diminish the importance of the body's internal values is to diminish our opportunity to make responses that remind us of our personal identity.

Memories at the Centre.

Body, Memory, and Architecture.

Bloomer/Moore.

John Latham.

Drawing/Unbounded Sensations of Time.

The Stage Of Drawing.

Gesture and Act.

Conversation : Avis Newman/Catherine de Zegher.

CdZ: What happens in the space between the gesture moving away from the body, towards everything that is outside of the self, and its landing as a trace on the page?

AN: I was thinking on the way the transmission of thought can depend on the hand and eye, and how this relates to the psychic space in which the mark exists as a potentiality. The effort of the mental and physical act of projection out from the body, away from the body, firstly into the air  -  an act that pitches the hand across the space of the page to site a mark where one intends – is quite a precise act : the most thoughtful and deliberate of acts, which I would speculate harbors a necessary thoughtlessness, in the sense that the certainty of coordinated actions is always in some way provisional and as such relies on the vigilant cooperation between eye and hand.

CdZ: Drawing may also be a recovery of the gesture that allows a discovery for the eye.

AN: To retrieve the gesture in a drawing is to translate the mark back into the action of the hand. It is very pleasurable to recover the gesture in that way and in so doing to follow the action of making. I think that experience in a drawing is very precise.

CdZ: Because the eye manages to discern what has become a trace on paper from a gesture in the air?

AN: Yes, the mind's eye. Perception becomes an act of reconstruction that moves unobtrusively between interior and exterior. I would make an analogy here between how we experience unconscious emotions in the repetition and accumulation of marks (irrespective of what is being drawn) and the intonation, hesitations, and inflections of speech, all of which hold a complexity of messages and can be at odds with what appears to be said, but which nonetheless determine meaning. It seems to me that this occurs independent of sight, as that which is generated by the mind and mediated by perception.

CdZ: In drawing, the space is open-ended and unframed, while the marks are articulated over time and in time.

AN: My concern in making images relates more closely to the conceptual space of drawing, which is less circumscribed  than painting. In particular, the manner in which the boundary or edge comes to define the work is of a completely different order in drawing. In fact, the idea of inside  and outside does not occur in the same way. The marks define a position across the surface and are not registered in relation to limits. As a result the often ambiguous nature of borders can leave a vague uncertainty as to the stability of the image.

CdZ: Can you elaborate on this different notion of boundary?

AN: The natural inclination of mark-making is a relational organisation of individual inscriptive acts, which is not an expression of a unitary world. The frame as the window on the world, which traditionally internalizes the picture. This view creates an illusion  of the unique experience of looking, in the sense that there is coherence to the image. There is not that illusory consistency in drawing, as the space and image are essentially open-ended and speculative. The unframed interferes with any anticipation we might have of ordered limits or completion, and suggests the possibility that something is missing and will always elude our attention, because it cannot be framed. It is the uncertainty of the edge and how it meets the real that I find fascinating.

CdZ: Drawing is thus not to do with perceptual illusionism, but with infinite space as mental possibility. Is the drawing itself, the ground, a space of transience?

AN: There is no pressure from the outside inwards; in drawing, it bis all pressure from the inside outwards. And the idea of boundary then becomes problematic, our boundary as we project it onto the work. The physical structure of a drawing is always conditional, and when one looks, for example, at the drawing by John Latham, One-Second Drawing (17'' 2002) (Time Signature 5: 1) the work itself defies any possibility of framing because the action is embedded in the pure sensation of time. We are left with only the effect. So the idea of framing as a way of 'confirming' the space – this is not part of  drawing's language. The condition of boundaries is that they are dissolvable.

Body, Memory, and Architecture.

Sense/Sensing/Feeling/Memory.

Hapticity and The Body of Memory/Experience.

Haptic drawings are composed of piece by piece responses to the situation at hand, rather than being based on any kind of visual or conceptual grand design.

The stone and wood of a house itself are embodied in these memorable centreplace's and even they belong to the body of memory, something that maybe regarded as possessing uniquely haptic properties.

The heat  from a fire, the rushing water in the fountain, and the smooth tactile objects on the mantle deliver feelings of touch and even permanence. Here in this interior space the lifetime memories of the person collaborate with the timelessness of the world outside.

Exercises on the Haptic Experience of Space.

Drawing Choreographies : Hapticity/Mark-making/The Body.

All architecture functions as a potential stimulus for movement, real or imagined. A building is an incitement to action, a stage for movement and interaction as such it is one partner in a dialogue with the body. 

Egon Schiele/Jenny Saville, drawings rendering an insistent corporeality.

Drawing marks that can be possessed, felt, touched and known, haptic drawings are memories of human experience, seeing, feeling, experiencing and exploring corporeality.

Celestial Architecture/Skyspaces/Serenity/Re-Animating Thought.

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Matter and materials that create the potential to act. 

STRUCTURE AS OBJECT

Light supply's the raw material for consciousness and its perception. 

The structural frame as generator of architectural form.

Vitruvius implies that the geometric forms of both the  Colchians and the Phrygians primitive houses are the consequence of direct operation with physical objects, rather than the abstractions that pre-existed in the mind of the builder.

Space/Structure/Light/Performativity/Physical Participation and Play.

Tate St Ives. 2011

Profound but intimate subjective evocations/assemblages of space and time.

Prototypes for Sculpture.

Model for Spheric Theme. 1937

Naum Gabo.

These prototypes give a unique insight into his working process, one in which he employed a playful intuition and childlike, hands-on approach to the development of what were often extraordinarily complex and apparently 'manufactured' forms.

Concetto Spaziale/Spatial Concept 1962

Lucio Fontana.

Buchi Works by Lucio Fontana are characterised by holes or punctures through various surfaces. By opening up these surfaces, Fontana introduces another dimension to his work, one of space, depth and time. In their almost infinite variation and difference, as well as their primal simplicity, they seem to approach something both fundamental and universal. 

Celestial Architecture.

Architecture Without Architects.

Bernard Rudofsky.

Among abstract architecture, some of the most imposing examples stand in Jaipur, India. They are gigantic astronomical instruments built in the eighteenth century to the plans of Maharajah Sawai Jai Singh 11.Their purpose was to achieve greater accuracy of astronomical data than that available from portable brass instruments. Since they never lived up to expectations, they represent that rare instance of pure, or nearly pure, architecture of a functionless kind.

Oxfam, Madeleine Street, Norwich. 

Aesthetics of Installation Art, Juliane Rebentisch.

Situation, Documents of Contemporary Art, Claire Doherty.

Deer Shelter Skyspace, James Turrell.

The layering of traces where the reader can find the intricacy of memory and imagination.

Rethinking The Animate.

Re-Animating Thought.

Tim Ingold. 2006

Contemporary western cultures have created our estrangement to nature, which has been established by the spiritual and religious ascendency of humankind over nature, and by the rational dissociation of the human intellect from the organic world. 

European civilizations neglect of the natural world and its needs has clearly been encouraged by a style of awareness that disparages sensorial reality denigrating the visible and tangible order of things on behalf of some absolute source, assumed to exist entirely beyond, or outside of, the bodily world.

Spell of The Sensuous, David Abram.

Cosmic Serenity/Solitude.

A Mind Attuned to the Intimate Garden.

In a culture exhausted and irreparably fragmented, the walls surrounding Luis Barragan's gardens are, perhaps one of the last defences to preserve centuries of thought and emotion.

On Nomadology.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. 1980

Fieldwork.

Deterritorialized Spaces.

The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points, etc.). But the question is what in nomad life is a principle and what is only a consequence. To begin with, although the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine, the reverse of what happens with the sedentary. The water point is reached only in order to be left behind; every point is a relay and exists only as a relay.

A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys  both an autonomy  and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo. Even the elements of his dwelling are conceived in terms of the trajectory that is forever mobilizing them. 

The nomad is not at all the same as the migrant; for the migrant goes principally from one point to another, even if the second point is uncertain, unforeseen, or not well localized. But the nomad goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual necessity; in principle, points for him are relays along a trajectory.

Skyspaces.

James Turrell.

The sky is no longer out there, but is right on the edge of the space you are in. The sense of colour is generated inside you. If you then go outside you will see a different coloured sky. You colour the sky. 

In working with light, what is really important to me is to create an experience of wordless thought. The Deer Shelter is one of only a handful of private and public Skyspaces in Britain, including Cat Cairn, Kielder Forest in Northumberland.

Across the world Turrell has realised around forty temporary and permanent Skyspaces, although the Deer Shelter is one of very few that have been formed from an existing historic structure.

Drawing/Diagram/Script as a gesture of propulsion into the world.

Emotional Sensibility/Selective Intuition.

Making with the Inner Tensions of Each Element.

Timbre/Tone/Colour/Patina.

On Sonority.

Art and Technique.

Marcel Moyse. 

Spatial Distinctions/Piercings and their Movements.

In and Out of Material/Traces and Trails.

Interstices/Voids, Surfaces, Ceramic Forms, Black and White Slip over Terracotta.

Templates,Setting Bocks, Prototypes, Geometry Sets, Monoprints, Boxes.

Use of experimental photographic techniques and new materials through invention and application.

Marking a Place : Land Art/Architecture/Propositional Drawings

Outpost 050923

Reticular Events/Tentative Surfaces.

Structures/Journeys/Maps/Diagrams

Buildings that include/contain areas for inhabitation, living, working, sleeping.

Marking a place in the seemingly infinite expanse of the desert. 

For Richard Serra, such a building serves as a barometer by means of which the landscape can be interpreted and known.

Architectural Fables/Unbuilt Projects, posited as ideal communities, projects living on as architectural fables long after constructed buildings have crumbled. 

Emilio Ambasz, speaks of architecture as a myth making act, my work is a search for primal things, being born, being in love, and dying. It has to do with existence on an emotional, passionate, and essential level.

Steven Holl, speaks of architecture and site as having an experimental connection, a metaphysical link, a poetic link.

Hannsjorg Voth has developed a feeling for the formal and spatial relationship between the artifact and the ideal pristine landscape, he is interested in finding traces of this 'ideal' original landscape or as he likes to call it, zero landscape, on the sea and in the desert. 

Sky Stairway, resembling the great archaic calendar structures (Jaipur) with its steps, which seem to lead into an endless distance, symbolise the link between the finiteness of earthly things and the infinity of the cosmos. Yet the symbol is transient, the clay was trodden in the traditional manner will not be able to withstand the erosive force of the Moroccan Desert indefinitely. A special place that will only live on in the tales of the nomads.   

Between Landscape Architecture and Land Art.

Udo Weilacher.

Himmelstreppe-Sky Stairway is a seemingly archaic clay structure in the Moroccan Plain of Marha. 

Voth has developed a form of dialogue with nature, landscape and civilization which clearly stands apart from works of Land Art, on account of its semantic complexity and close links with European cultural history.

Signs of Remembrance.

Hannsjorg Voth.

Voth's creativity has always been characterized by the desire to investigate the elemental relationships in nature and their their fundamental connections with humans. The artist's almost meditative treatment of the four elements, provides revealing insights into the potential force of artistic interventions in the complex relationship between landscape and natural environment. 

Christo has made a decisive contribution to making art in public space popular, my 'bindings' for The Field Marks 1975 had a great deal to do with bandaging a wound in the landscape, whereas Christo wraps in order to reveal. My work has also very clearly got something to do with escaping from people. Today people no longer seem to be capable of approaching nature and creative work with respect. The trend today is to drive to the ends of the earth and then to destroy everything there. It is difficult for me to come to terms with schizophrenic mixture of escape and dependence.

Hannsjorg Voth. 1999.

Casa De Retiro Espiritual

Spiritual Retreat.

Emilio Ambasz

Peter Buchanan.

Casa De Retiro Espiritual, makes explicit that the entire complex is conceived as a spiritual retreat and though offering magnificent views of the lake and estate, it is essentially introverted in character.

Isolated on its estate, it withdraws below the ground. At a simple remove are the bedrooms for deep dreams, and the bathrooms oozing oriental sensuality, and still further removed is the elevated balcony. Like those found throughout the Islamic world and following a traditional Andalusian pattern, this balcony is enclosed in a lattice of turned wooden spindles giving privacy and shade while admitting the breeze. 

Of the many ways of engaging with an architectural work, there are two especially pertinent to this spiritual retreat. A house devised both as a receptacle for the changing play of light and mood as well as a carefully choreographed sequence of experiences.

To move physically through the house, exploring and experiencing its spaces in sequence is the more active mode. While the other is observing patiently how slowly subtle changes of light, colour, temperature, movement and sound register and rotate through the days and seasons.

By means of these devices the viewer is gradually induced to open up to a contemplative mood and awareness of cyclical time in which even the simplest of daily rituals are now invested with a semi sacred intensity.

Emilio Ambasz

Steven Holl

Stuart Wrede

While Ambasz's work on the whole addresses the primal psychological urges in us that have been basic to humans since time in immemorial, Holl's architecture tends to address the more elusive, complex and brittle psychological states of modern urban humans.

Both architects' work reflects the schizophrenic nature of late 1960s attitudes towards engagement and withdrawal. Each has designed 'Mythic Retreats' placed below the earth's surface. Ambasz, partly sunk in the midst of open wheat fields outside Cordoda, Spain. Holl, floating underwater of the coast of St Tropez, France.

The Poetics of the Pragmatic

Emilio Ambasz

Anchoring

Steven Holl

Michael Heizer.

Nader Khalili.

Immaterial Architectures : Organizing Structures/Making Metaphysical Space

Architectural Surface : Constructional Forms in Glass
Organizing Structures : Artist Notebook, Body/Landscape

Christopher Wilmarth ; Poetics/Duality of Light and gravity
Other Architecture
Constructing Metaphysical Space

Wilmarth's art reveals his essential concern with the mystical and physical properties of light, especially the ways in which light evokes reverie and generates sensations of space and containment.

The Architecture of Natural Light : Henry Plummer

EVANESCENCE
Orchestration of light to mutate through time

Intensity and integrity of Wilmarth's practice/vision.

PROCESSION
Choreography of light/moving eye

VEILS OF GLASS
Refraction of light/diaphanous film

Wilmarth made possibly his strongest, most beautiful works on paper, exploring a new level of expression while retaining continuity with past work.

ATOMIZATION
Sifting of light/through a porous screen

These drawings also contain allusions to the human presence. Their haunting, foreboding quality is prefigured in the grave, austere tones of some of the glass and steel structures.

CANALIZATION
Channelling of light/through a hollow mass

The duality of light and shadow and contrasts between abstraction and representation continue to be central concerns in his final drawings.

ATMOSPHERIC SILENCE
Suffusion of light with a unified mood

Wilmarth's sculptures from the early 1980's are influenced by the poetry of Stephane Mallarme.To affirm Mallarme's emphasis on the spiritual, the artist used a simple ovoid form, evoking a multitude of symbols, including the human head. These ovoids were made of blown glass, which Wilmarth viewed as "frozen breath". The artist pursued this figurative impulse into the mid 1980s, combining the anthropomorphic ovoid shapes with the larger abstract forms of his earlier sculpture.

LUMINESCENCE
Materialization of light in physical matter

Wilmarth composed with planes of delicate colour and light, placing plates of blackened steel behind translucent sheets of etched glass imbued with a luminous, greenish cast.

"He employed a painterly technique that emphasized the tactility and fichness of his materials, which like an alchemist he persistently sought to transform. He continually examined the concept of duality: contrasts between light and shadow, transparency and opacity, heaviness and weightlessness, materiality  and ethereality, form and spirit are repeatedly presented; the synthesis of geometric with organic forms, the range between abstraction and representation are constantly explored."
Laura Rosenstock, catalogue essay.


Slow Photography/Blue Transitions : Phenomenology of Visual Structures

Panspermia 2010/Banga, Patti Smith : Layered Drawings/Silent readings/diagrams/ceramics of imaginary space

Patti Smith - After The Gold Rush - Banga, 2012 (A Neil Young Song).

Reading : Slow Philosophy

With Fire, Richard Hirsch

A Life Between Chance and Design (invites the unknown)

Scott Meyer 2012

Hirsch takes us to the heart of the interface between ageless earth and the spare evidence of the rhythm of human utility 

Raku as an Ideology

Breath-Energy-Immanence

Raku, A Review of Contemporary Work

Tim Andrews 1994

The Poetry of The Vessel

A calm invitation to thought and imagination

Chris Tyler

The vessel (making, thinking, subject) as both a historically grounded form, and a vehicle to examine abstract aspects of the physical body and the natural world

Arte Povera/Germano Celant, an aesthetic-philosophical movement

An eclectic synthesis of knowledge fields, that emerges into a total space where disparate categories can meet; a art that asks only for the essential information, that refuses the dialogue with the social and cultural system, and aspires to present itself as something sudden and unforeseen

Materials are substances in becoming

Karen Barad

Towards an Ecology of Materials

Tim Ingold 2012

From the 'objectness' of things to the material flows and formative processes wherein they come into being. It means to think of making as a process of growth or ontogenesis

 

Materials-Centered Perspective

Making, almost defies precise definition

The composition and/or manipulation of materials that bring into being new or revised objects

Tim Ingold 2010

Cultures of thrift and scavenging, maintenance and repair

Making encompasses the ingenuity of fluid, locally situated and adapted technologies

Materials carry on overtaking the formal destinations that, at one time or another, have been assigned to them

Sensibilities and dispositions that are centred on a deep and considered relationship with materials

The Craftsman, Richard Sennett 2008

Crafting, often reconnects mind and body in the sites and processes of production, thereby potentially reconstituting labour processes in ways that ascribe agency to workers

Makers finding ways to resist norms of gender and neoliberal entrepreneurial subjectivities, finding ways and spaces for ethical practice to predominate

Contemporary conceptual ceramics operates at the permeable boundary between art and craft, partaking of aspects of both, and ultimately demonstrating (or performing) that permeability

Collage/Assemblage : Architectural Blueprint and Historical Garment (detail/archive) Winchester 2011

The Unfolded Garment

Embracing Subjectivity

Pierced Assemblage on Photogram

What is Philosophy?

Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari

Their book is a profound and careful interrogation of what it might mean to be a 'friend of wisdom', but it is also a devastating attack on the sterility of what has become, when 'the only events are exhibitions and the only concepts are products which can be sold'. Philosophy, they insist, is not contemplation, reflection or communication, but the creation of concepts

Assemblage/Garden Design : Architectural Plan/Victorian Corset

Blueprint, Photogram and Collage.

a thousand plateaus

Deleuze, Guattari

Assemblage

The beauty of the assemblage is that, since it lacks organization, it can draw into its body any number of disparate elements. The book itself can be an assemblage, but its status as an assemblage does not prevent it from containing assemblages within itself or entering into new assemblages with readers, libraries, bonfires, bookstores, etc.

Becoming

Body Without Organs

Nomad

Rhizome

Smooth Space

State

War Machine

Other ways, other than buildings of making : Reading Rooms/Performative Collages and Models

Spatial Agency : Other ways of thinking about social space and its architectural structuring.

Other ways, other than buildings of making a spatial difference.

Collage and Architecture. Jennifer A. E. Shields

Collage Methodologies in Architectural Analysis + Design

Architecture as Collage

Social Space, is dynamic space, things happen, and its production continues over time and hence it is not fixed to/by a single moment of completion.  

Performative Collages : Dualities of agency and structure, linked but separately identifiable conditions or proposals.

Agents are neither completely free as individuals, nor are they completely entrapped by structure. They are negotiators of existing conditions in order to partially reform them. 

Spaces are charged with the dynamics of power, empowerment, interaction, isolation, control, freedom, alienation.

Social space is intractably political space, in so much as people live out their lives in this space.