Showing posts with label discursive readings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label discursive readings. Show all posts

Monday, 6 July 2026

Diffused Ecologies : A reflective building is an echo not a statement : SENSING AND SPATIAL PRACTICE

Anarchive Material~Readings


ON MAKING SPATIAL RESEARCH

Sensing Affective Spaces in Art and Architecture.


IMMATERIAL ARCHITECTURES FOR SENSING IN THE LANDSCAPE.

RAVENINGHAM SCULPTURE TRAILS 2018/2020


The House-sheds : Camping

There's more truth about a camp than a house. Planning laws need not worry the improvising builder because temporary structures are more beautiful anyway, and you don't need permission for them. There's more truth about a camp because that is the position we are in. The house represents what we ourselves would like to be on earth: permanent, rooted, here for eternity. But a camp represents the true reality of things: we're just passing through.

Roger Deakin

WILDWOOD

A Journey Through Trees

Russell Moreton, Speculative Spatial Practices 

A reflective building is an echo not a statement.

Haptic devices/seating/dwelling in the landscapes of the mind. Landscape assemblages and the significance of solitude.

The immensity/intimacy and its immediacy to the imagination. Immensity is within ourselves Bachelard

The site a Raveningham offers the spatial practice of a social event and the opportunity to playfully engage with architectural forms, fine art surfaces and textures.

The sensing space, a sculptural assemblage created at Raveningham is an inquiry into 'making' and 'reflexivity' amongst a social landscape.

SENSING AND SPATIAL PRACTICE 

Creating a new viewer, who has to look in two self contradictory/self annihilating directions at once. Darkest Spaces of Our Times, Therese Oulton, Jacqueline Rose.

CONTEMPORARY ART AND ANTHROPOLOGY : SPATIAL PRACTICE Making Place/Tools, cognitive enactments/materials and performativity/wellbeing Sociological aspects of the Arts

Archaeology, Anthropology, Architecture, Art, Tim Ingold

A FIELD GUIDE TO GETTING LOST : Rebecca Solnit 

Experiential anthropology / Walking as 'being/becoming in place' 

Sensate, Sensing Sensuality, Otherness

WHITEBOARD : PAVILIONS/RAVENINGHAM

Art as Contemplative Practice : An Applied Praxis/Inquiry

Expressive Pathways/Building/Making as an extension to the Self/Selves In Response : To Place/Site and “Dwelling/Hut”

Subjective Hypothesis Bricolage/Tectonics






Poetic Abstractions/ Components, Elements

Physical Experience/Experiential Phenomena ( Light/Gravity/Air) Sculptural Assemblage, Building/Making an Exposition of Itself

Smithsons, The Parallel of Life/Art the everyday/quotidian Grounding/Earthing/Dwelling/Home : Reflexivity/Reflection/Reverberations

Knowing Through Making/ Embodying Insights, Tim Ingold

MAKING : Deliberation/Awareness : Constructed Situations/SURFACES and TEXTURES SENSING, Sensorium/Embodied Experience, Sensate, Intra/Intervention


PLACES that transform Chaos into Cosmos, Karsten Harries


PERCEPTUAL psychologist, J.J. Gibson departs from 'the classical approach to depth or space' in favour of an 


 




ECOLOGICAL approach to VISUAL SPACE PERCEPTION, which take SURFACES and TEXTURE as its starting point.

Socializing a Sculptural Practice, Jack Robins 2015

Strange Tools, Art and Human Nature, Alva Noe 2015

Visual Tool, Post Studio, Daniel Buren

INDEXICAL, Traits/Traces and subjective narratives Situational/Relational Aesthetics, Victor Burgin, Nicollas Bourriaud

Handmade, Repetition, Empirical, Experiences.

Metonymy, Cristina Iglesias ( Metonymic Thinking Processes)

Architecturally Speaking, Practices, praxis between art .architecture and the everyday. Visual Perceptions/ The Image

Surreealist Techniques, Collage, Photograms. Decalmania, Frottage. Assemblage, Brutalist/Modemity/Intervention

Minimalist/Drawing/Painting ARCHAEOLOGY : Mark Dion

Agency/Nature/Subject Matter. Collection of Finds, Metaphors/Interpretations for the lived experience. AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF LANDSCAPE :

Taskscapes/Relationscapes

Anarchism, everyday Aesthetics/The aesthetics of everyday LIVING Pragmatist Aesthetics/Interpretation of Concepts

Materiality, material makes more than one language possible, excess of material. LANDSCAPES for an excess of Interpretation/Politics

EXPLORING THE LANDSCAPE, through/with the CORPOREAL EXPERIENCE of OTHERS

A STRUCTURE INTERPOSED between the sunlight and the interior space it encloses. Poetic abstractions/Physical experience

Soft/Blurring boundaries between art and the everyday making/becoming REFLEXIVITY / TRANSLUCENCY surfaces into an architectural presence TEXTURES ILIMINALITY on the absence of material

STATIC ENVIRON I ANIMATED THROUGH THE BODY

THE ARCHITECTURAL SKIN / SURFACE. Blurring, revealing, masking, filtering, ARCHITECTURAL FEATURE / WALL / ARCH / PASSAGE /

VISUAL TOOL / POCHOIR, hand coloured through stencils

SCULPTURAL ASSEMBLAGES, towards Speculative Forms/Expression TECTONICS IN MAKING, and the tectonics of immateriality/traces hidden by building.

Concerned with bringing the material from its physical form into the meta-physical world.

PAVILION 

FUSELAGE

THE CAMP/HUT

represents the true reality of things, Deakin.

The building as nothing more than an exposition of itself.

A subjective hypothesis, a drawing developed into an objectivity for experience/leaming.

SITE, the undoing of PLACE

BRICOLAGE / HEURISTIC PRACTICE, Using things at hand, temporal, self constructions, becomings, mind forming explorations.

MOBILITY MOVEMENT

TEMPORAL CONSTRUCTED SPACE

A building component, scaffold, joists and fixings, a surface of absences and the movement of others come together.

MAKING, from form to programme.

WAVENEY VALLEY SCULPTURE TRAIL 2018 RAVENINGHAM

AUDIT OF NOTE FRAGMENTS 27 August 2018

Archive as a generative form/membrane Tarlaton, mesh, paper, liquid light,

Presenting, Creating, Synergies, that further explore site embodiments. The Politics of Things

Diffractive Practices : Agential Cut, Barad, Learning Spaces, 

Brockwood Park School. Reimagining  Education 

In The Cave/Canvas of the Cave

ART. began with the questioning of the involuntary, trace of a human hand, an otherness. 

Moments, Nowness, The Instant, Actuality,

Habitus of Difference

Robert Mangold text on painting/drawing minimalist interrogation into the spaces around perception Minimalist Works / Working Processes represent fields of energy/causality within our experiential perceptions.

Drawing is the experience of seeing made visible/manifest Rhizomic feedback and flow, Deleuze

Research Horizons,

Culture drives growth, wellbeing, social enterprise and community

Lines of intervals, linerality, chains of codes, intersections, utilities, interventions Causality and Chance of ideas, creative acts, art,nature, becoming, the everyday,

Quotidian/Everyday Interests, Complexities of Contemporary Life. Ambients, Phenomenas, Objects, Subjectivities,

Everyday aesthetics, heuristic practice,

Photography, Social pathology of traces layered into ecologies (Anthropological localities of desire)

Photography, The Body, Life, Death, Flemish Painting, Vivitas, Domestic Life, Nature on reclaiming the void left by the death of the mind

Walking creates its own feedback loop, The Journey, The Return,

The specific, Here and Now

Psychogeography, Dossier, Forensic Study, Inquiry.

Spatial Abstractions : Reflexivity on Reflection. Embodiment on Experiential Subjectivity LANDSCAPES Constituted by creative practice

Walks as erasures, sedimentation, (Gardiner)

Getting Lost, Walking whilst deep in thought/embodiment in the environment 

Working Towards a Secular Retreat in the Landscape


Between PLACE and SITE

Art Poverva, Materiality, Agency, Making, Nesting Building, NASCENT FINDINGS

Encoding DATA, LANGUAGE

Entanglements of Visual Data and Abstract Language CATHEDRALS OF INTELLIGENCE

The Urban Documentary,Text, Sebalt, The River : The Colour of Light

Albers/Colour Perceptions

Vernacular Architectures, Building/Making beyond the design

Footings, Voids, Roof Structures, Cavities, Between Walls, Sensing Spaces in the very making of the building.

The Architectural plan/model and its proposal became the real virtual space for architectural energy and innovation.

TRANSACTIVE MEMORY Texts, Contents, Particulars, Process,

Working through ideas with things/devices/apparatuses Cognitive Landscapes /Relationalities ? Possible Worlds Subsumed by the causality of relationships/culture

Mies van der Rohe 

The Art of Sculpture

Moholy Nagy 

The New Vision Abstract of an Artist

Light brings the moment in time to us

Presence, Praesentia, exactitude of light on place and time LAND, LANDSCAPE, CLAY

Pot, Shard, Remnant, Culture, Jug, Dominion/Grounded Temporal/Spatial Perspectives

Light/Dark Room : Towards a new Interior Experimental Vision : Research Collage

Aesthetics of the Everyday Creative, Human Praxis

Mediating/Architecting the experience of LANDSCAPE








Supportive Material/Texts/Cyanotype Drawings from found objects

SITE / COLLAGE COMPONENTS working/walking, developing a creative spatial syntax 


 
AFFECT
SENSATION / CAUSALITY LIVING
THINKING LOOKING

DRAWING and THE LAW OF STRATIFICATION, the inevitable results of the working of GRAVITY STRATIFICATION OF RECOLLECTION / MEMORY OF THE WORLD. (A Land, J Hawkes )

FACTORING THE TACTILE CONDITIONS OF THE REAL WORLD into perceptual awareness. 

PERCEPTUAL psychologist, J.J. Gibson departs from 'the classical approach to depth or space' in favour of an ECOLOGICAL approach to VISUAL SPACE PERCEPTION, which take SURFACES and TEXTURE as its starting point.


COLOUR AS CONDUIT I PERCEPTUAL ENVIRONS / CRAFT MEDIA I IMPROVISATION

PIERCED I DAPPLED NATURAL LIGHT

DIFFERENTIATED SHADOW I SURFACE

EXTRAORDINARY MATERIALS I TECTONICS AND TEXTILES INDEXICAL I GESTALT / VISUAL PERCEPTION

NETWORKS / RESOURCES / AGENCY for the potential of BUILDING SCAFFOLDS / GAUZE / POCHE solids of a building/architectural plan

ABSENCES / INTERSECTIONS I GRIDS / MESHES / SPRAYS / MOTIFS ACTUALITY

IMMATERIAL / REPETITION / SINGULARITY ENCLOSURES / ITERATIONS / THINKING FORMS

MINIMALIST SPACES / INTERVALS, tuning objects to construct environments A child 'concretizes' its existential space.

Dwelling, Reverberations, Epiphanic Instant, Gaston Bachelard. 

Tidbury Ring, field drawings with cyanotype liquid on paper.
A Hut of Ones Own. Heidegger for Architects. 
Immaterial Architectures.

SENSING AND SPATIAL PRACTICE
EXPLORING THE LANDSCAPE

Soft/Blurring boundaries between art and the everyday making/becoming REFLEXIVITY / TRANSLUCENCY surfaces into an architectural presence TEXTURES / LIMINALITY on the absence of material.

STATIC ENVIRON / ANIMATED THROUGH THE BODY


THE ARCHITECTURAL SKIN / SURFACE, Blurring, revealing, masking, filtering, ARCHITECTURAL FEATURE / WALL / ARCH / PASSAGE /

VISUAL TOOL 

SCULPTURAL ASSEMBLAGES, towards Speculative Forms/Expression TECTONICS IN MAKING, and the tectonics of immateriality/traces hidden by building. Concerned with bringing the material from its physical form into the meta-physical world.

PAVILION / FUSELAGE
THE CAMP / HUT
represents the true reality of things, Deakin.

The building as nothing more than an exposition of itself.

A subjective hypothesis, a drawing developed into an objectivity for experience/learning. 

SITE, the undoing of PLACE. (Casey)

BRICOLAGE I  HEURISTIC PRACTICE, Using things at hand, temporal, self constructions, becomings, mind forming explorations.


DWELLING / MOBILITY / MOVEMENT IN THOUGHT
TEMPORAL CONSTRUCTED SPACE





TETHERED FOLLY against a fabric of time.

ART AS INDETERMINATE, able to arrest perceptions into different states (becomings) Stone Worlds

Narrative and Reflexivity in Landscape Archaeology Architecture and Ritual, how buildings shape society. Bought to Light

Photography and The Invisible 1840-1900 CURATORIAL / DEVICE / BENCH / INTERLOCATOR

Jannis Kounellis, Theatre, stage crew shifting actors during a performance. Interconnected, between contexts, opening places between the social fabric.

Making spaces, expanding vision to create spaces 'between' in which to write ourselves. 

CONTEXT AND CONSIDERATIONS : MAKING, EXHIBIT, VIEW

ART MUSEUM CULTURE

THE CONTEXT FOR CONTEMPORARY ART IS THAT WE MAKE, EXHIBIT AND VIEW

MUSEUM DIRECTOR, CURATOR, COLLECTOR, ARTIST

None of that means anything anymore. Artists are now more DIVIDUALISTIC. They discover themselves not by securing a role within the historic narrative of a chosen medium. But by INTERGRATING into a more DIFFUSE ECOLOGY that involves not only making art, but also putting on shows, publishing, organizing events, teaching, networking.

THE STUDIO is no longer a retreat, but it now INTEGRATES, IT IS ALL EXTERIOR. THE NETWORK places the artist as a ’like' ITEM within an INTEGRATIVE

INVENTORY or DATABASE.



Friday, 19 June 2026

Hortus Conclusus : A Serious Place, Peter Zumthor, working ideas.

Hortus Conclusus : A Serious Place

01/04/2021





 
Hortus Conclusus : Enclosed Garden
Often translated as meaning “a serious place”
To construct a contemplative room, a garden within a garden.
Pavilion as both a monumental physical structure and as a site of emotional encounter.


 
 
With a refined selection of materials he has created a contemplative space that evokes the spiritual dimension of our physical environment, in so doing he is successfully emphasising the role the senses and emotions play in our experience of architecture. (Zumthor 2011: 15)
 
 
Enclosed all round and open to the sky.
A garden in an architectural setting.
“ Sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time.” (Zumthor 2011: 15)
 
Every plant name listed here evokes a distinct image; with each of them I associate specific lighting, smells and sounds, many kinds of rest, and a deep awareness of the earth and its flora.
 
A garden is the most intimate landscape ensemble I know of. In it we cultivate the plants we need. A garden requires care and protection. And so we encircle it, we defend it and fend for it. We give it shelter. The garden turns into a place.
 
There is something else that strikes me in this image of a garden fenced off within the larger landscape around it: something small has found sanctuary within something big.
(Zumthor 2011: 15)
 
 
Illustration of “Orchard” from Bible of Wenceslaus IV,Vienna, Austrian National Library
 
Depicts in the manner of an illuminated manuscript, the husbandry and community of the medieval workforce in the secure and sheltered space of a walled garden. This pastoral craft/gathering is evocative of Zumthor’s Hortus Concluses.
 
Working with ones hands, with the earth in sheltered spaces of a pastoral community.
 
Zumthor underscores this pastoral setting when he places a pavilion at the centre of the garden; he talks of future meeting there, of looking forward “to the natural energy and beauty of the tableau vivant of grasses, flowers and shrubs. I am looking forward to the colours and shapes, the smell of the soil, the movement of the leaves.” (Zumthor 2011: 15)
 
The Vintner’s Luck, Elizabeth Knox.
Tasting the soil in the wine, the soil and the wine are of the same substance, from the same locality; they are bonded together by the landscape.
 
Gardens Are Like Wells: Alexander Kluge
Inside every person (however serious or playful) lies an “enclosed garden”
 
Monasteries in medieval Europe were wells in which the clear waters of antiquity mingled with the dark waters of faith. At the centre of these monasteries was a garden, the most important part of which was enclosed. It was here that the most beautiful plants and medicinal herbs were concentrated. (Kluge 2011: 19)
 
Interestingly Kluge notes that these gardens were not everyday places, they were “timeless” because they were not subject to the general daily rituals of monastic life. These gardens were dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, but exposed perhaps to other texts, Homer, Ovid or the Gnostics. This relationship of literature finding a place of contemplation in the enclosed garden speaks perhaps of an “innerness”, an ability to unite mind and eye in the confusing realities of our age.
 
Civilisation and societies need ground that is uncultivated, gaps that are not subject to the principle of unity, something that is sufficient unto itself, which we do not consume: a sacrifice. Cities need spaces of piety. (Kluge 2011: 21)
 
“We need places in which we can engage in acts of mourning” Richard Sennett
(Sociologist)
 
 
 
Gardens of Information: DCPT (Development Company for Television Programmes)
 
 
Using the emblem of the Hortus Conclusus/The Enclosed Garden to stand for the relationship between the barren wastes on the one hand, and the happy isle on the other.
 
“To rescue facts from human indifference”
 
“To make gardens out of raw material and the bare bones of information.”
 
“A precursor of individualism, but has unmistakable traits in a way individualism never can.” (Kluge 2011: 21)
 
 
Spatial Practices for the Next Millennium.
 
Forming relationships not through superstructures, concepts or societies, but through inclusive structures/practices and localities. The Hortus Conclusus could stand for this type of concentration of identity (an inquiry, a person and a practice) within an intimate setting or situation.














Relationscapes : Open Systems/Speculative,Dynamic, Creative. An assemblage/energy of images,collage, drawing and texts and other disparate elements.

Wednesday, 17 June 2026

Inquiry is essentially the way of learning : Fragile Architectures of Hapticity and Time.

In an era in which architecture is once more learning its potential as a form of inquiry, rather than as a service — as a producer of knowledge, and not merely of ‘projects’.

Brett Steele, Atlas-Tectonics in Barkow Leibininger, Bricoleur Bricolage. AA 2013

Inquiry is essentially the way of learning.

On Learning ‘The Cultivation of a Good Mind’ J. Krishnamurti, Brockwood 1963


THE WAVERLEY INQUIRY

Interior Design MA, UCA Farnham 2013-2015.

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








This image is a collage or study board that explores the intersection of minimalism, spatial concepts, and art history. It primarily focuses on the works of Robert Mangold and Lucio Fontana. Key Elements. Robert Mangold: The text mentions "Plane/Figure" and discusses concepts like autonomy and actuality. Mangold is known for his minimalist paintings that explore the relationship between the shape of the canvas and the lines drawn upon it Lucio Fontana: The central photograph is labelled "Lucio Fontana's Studio in Milan 1961." It shows his iconic "Concetto Spaziale" (Spatial Concept) works, specifically the Fine di Dio (End of God) series—ovular canvases characterized by punctures and gashes that break the two-dimensional plane. Historical Reference: The top right features a photograph of a gothic or vaulted architectural space, with handwritten notes mentioning "Baroque" and "For the Void - Fontana." This suggests a comparison between historical architectural voids and Fontana’s modern exploration of space. Conceptual Themes. The collage reflects on how art occupies space: The Void: Exploring how Fontana used physical cuts to incorporate the "void" into the artwork. Geometry and Shape: Represented by the orange triangular overlay and Mangold’s theories on the "figure" vs. the "plane." Actuality: A section of text titled "Actuality" likely references George Kubler’s The Shape of Time, discussing the "intermittent" nature of the present moment in art history.

ROOMS AS EXPERIENTIAL OUTPOSTS 

Translations from Drawing to Building.

Robin Evans.

Interiors crafted as a palimpsest of augmented realities. 

Robin Evans, Figures, Doors and Passages.

The architect is Not a Carpenter:

On Design and Building, a talk by Tim Ingold Fieldwork on Foot: Perceiving, Routing, Socializing

Jo Lee, Tim Ingold.

The Perception of the Environment,

Essays on Livelihood, dwelling and Skill, Tim Ingold.


The Aesthetics of Decay

Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the absence of Reason, Dylan Trigg. The Projection Room (the darkened room, camera obscura)

Ruin In Architecture and Cinema, Kiefer, Pallasmaa

Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky

The Artist/'Monk, Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky 1966)

Six Memos for the New Millennium, Italo Calvino Architecture as a stage for the effects of an immersive cinema. Palimpsest

Edward De Waal, Antony Gormley, Studio Spaces designed by Architects. Tony Fretton on Retreats, Creative Centres and Exhibition Spaces. Herzog and De Meuron, Working Models, Surfaces, Images and Materials.

Subversive Libraries, researching between the walls of culture and politics.

A HUT WITHIN THE INFLUENCE AND NATURE OF ARCHITECTURE

The tendency of technological culture to standardize environmental condition 

and make the environment entirely predictable is causing a serious sensory impoverishment. Our buildings have lost their opacity and depth, sensory invitation and discovery, mystery and shadow.

Juhani Pallasmaa. Hapticity and Time. Notes on Fragile Architecture. 2000







The Scriptorium Description of Work

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 architectural and sociological inquires. The design processes of interiors have been employed as a tool to both critique and to create how we might further develop the contents of architecture. This Spatiality and its diffractions of differences and similarities, narratives and subjective experiences are what my interior spaces attempt to initiate.

Design as a interactive structure, an interlocutory interior in the making of space and spatial relations.

Interior design presented as an interactive and immersive spatial inquiry

The Scriptorium brings together a varied and discursive set of objects, texts and i interior architectures. This work seeks to understand how the virtual changes physical architecture and how this affects the space between people and buildings. The “performativity of research” is presented through specifically designed apparatuses and partitions. These designed components, made objects together with annotated texts and drawings conspire to create a complex design led inquiry 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, structures and even symposia that have been developed through engaging with the site. The visualization of the research and the relational architectures rendered through montage and collage explores digital and analogue technologies. This hybridisation and the use of pinhole photography and film footage further explore interests in the field of performance as an immaterial architecture drawn in the presence of place.

The realisation of my interiors project consists of two separate but relational elements that are presented into a built environment. 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. In particular the apparatus of the Scriptorium and its materiality is attempting to promote a sensory intensification that is further underpinned by the cognitive processes of reading and perhaps other social dialogues. The sensory intensification of a hut like space promotes a haptic sensibility, allowing the nearness and intimacies of both the built space and the imaginative, virtual realm to become entangled. Ultimately the Scriptorium is trying to build on unique human subjectivities that are manifested through a kinaesthetic repertoire or script that helps to enact further spatial experiences. It might be useful to think of this constructed space as itself still under construction, a site that acts as its own vessel within the multiplicities of human perception itself. The influence of the Cistercian Order, the site of Waverly Abbey and its pastoral landscape, have all contributed to a sense of the design process, The Scriptorium like the ruins themselves is open to the elements. Waverley Abbey remains as a sensory site between the remains of architecture and its society and the effects of our own global culture in the information age.

In troubled times they all sought to experience life away from social definitions of success or failure. From there, these primitive huts marked personal, original inquires into the ever-mysterious nature of human existence.

Anne Cline. A Hut of One’s Own

Life Outside The Circle Of Architecture.

The Scriptorium began through a research of both architectural themed texts and documentation of the site, and creative practice involving photography (digital, analogue and film) art practices of collage and drawing. The many visits promoted my own subjectivities to the site and these were also frequently subjected to change by the intervention of others in unexpected ways, these social intrusions by other revealed the very boundaries that the historic site engenders, some playful other malicious. These extremities within the social order of the visitors became problematic in designing for the site itself. An earlier proposal to host a Symposium centred on the Arts and The Humanities, that would use the Abbey and its surrounding ground appeared to be a project of vast diversities and logistics better suited to a cultural project through arts management and funding. As the project developed certain creative methodologies around particularities of the site itself began to appear, the notion of palimpsest being one of them. This promoted the idea of a reading room, as an ephemeral interior space that gathers up the experiential values of ‘ruins’ and re-enacts them as a site to explore the architectures of images. It became apparent that ‘palimpsest’ could be both a visual surface of erasures, earlier markings partially over written by newer ones ‘annotations’ and it could be a scaffold of developing ideas clearly visible merging as adaptations into the very usage of the site.

These re-imaginations through the notion of palimpsest seemed filmic and as such they would able to display a vast amount of diversities and subject matter, a library of recourses that would require users or an audience or both. The referencing of the reading room to the library, and the symposium to the cinema or theatre allowed me to realise that I was dealing with a number of spatial arrangements that needed to develop together, but which could be employed separately. The theatre of research became the vehicle in which to see if this collaboration might be possible.

The use of the image and text in my architectural collages allowed me to visualize associations, to create the possibilities of interior spaces that might be manifested into the built environment. The use of the collage in Architecture is widely acknowledged, architects from the likes of Mies van der Rohe, Daniel Libeskind and Rem Koolhaas. The ability of the collage process to juxtaposition fragments, images and texts from irreconcilable origins into an experience, that is visual, tactile and time-based makes it an interesting tool into the realms of architectural design. Collage begins to visualise not only the structure of spaces but also there content and circulation. The theatre of research is interested in how to promote collage and its use as a cognitive and perceptive tool in architecture.

Collage and montage are quintessentially techniques in modern and contemporary art and filmmaking. Collage combines pictorial motifs and fragments from disconnected origins into a new synthetic entity, which casts new roles and meanings to the parts. It suggests new narratives, dialogues, juxtapositions and temporal durations. Its elements lead double-lives; the collaged ingredients are suspended between their originary essences and the new roles assigned to them by the poetic ensemble.

Juhani Pallasmaa. The World is a Collage

Jennifer A. H. Shields. Collage and Architecture

Both the Scriptorium and The Theatre Of Research exist only in the form of the exhibition presentation. What they singularly of together propose can only be imagined through their manifested form as static objects placed within a built structure that loosely references architectural concerns and materials. They appear diminished and assigned to the voyeuristic gaze of the visitor that is equally curios and dismissive. These objects and the interior spaces they promoted seem stilled and stalled, as much they appear beyond reach as if the authenticity of their materials and construction have some how been subsumed by their stature and scale. The issues and qualities of which they are attempting to speak of seem reduced by the hegemony of vision, there is little hapicity and time to encounter, only it seems by investing narratives can we begin to re-enact the spatial encounter.

How might the performativity of research be staged, and into what contexts might it be appropriated?

As Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht notes, we live in a culture of meaning, not in a culture of presence. We constantly produce effects of meaning and multiply them with mass media. This applies not only to the humanities but also to a large degree to our wholly normal everyday lives. And in this respect, our experience of presence is getting drastically lost.

Art works may never completely be explained by theory or meaning. The sensual, material makeup of the work in its presence is not the cinders, slag, and ashes, the undigested remains of theory, but remains of an intensified moment

Peter Lodermeyer.Time, Symposium Amsterdam 2007.

Personal Structures, Time, Space, Existence.

The question I ask is do these objects and their interior spaces cause me to think beyond mere representation and recognition, or rather do they create enough of an encounter to force me to engage with them, even if I or the viewer are un-certain as to their meaning or possible outcome. Deleuze comments that something forces us to think. This something is not an object of recognition, but a fundamental encounter. Something that challenges us. Have these miniature architectures of objects become relational, do we start to use them in perhaps a heuristic manner, a hands-on approach to learning or inquiring, something that we can discover for ourselves. This heuristic finding-out could be made informative through collective collaborations and exhibition through the theatre of research. Is design stripping us of our qualitative spaces as the digital tooling removes the makers trace.

The model object has served as a thinking place in the development of the idea of the Scriptorium. The materials used and their proportions echo interests in Minimalist Sculpture, the intervals between things in the work of Donald Judd and the architectural languages of memory and tectonics of the craftsman turned architect Peter Zumthor. This open sided hut seems cut away almost anatomical as if we were looking into the internal workings of an environment and resident. The structure would have to be made relational to its surroundings if it were to be placed in the landscape. Adaptations to weather the structure, to make it serviceable for use. The Scriptorium has analogues to the notion of a fire-place and its chimney stack. It is a the heart of a building the place of warmth, of dialogues and under the influence through fire of the imagination. The incompleteness that surrounds the scriptorium creatively asks for further design proposals that are even more site specific. The Solar Pavilion built by the Smithsons utilised the old fire place and chimney from the demolished cottage. Around this central element they developed the beginnings of their Modernist (Brutalism) pavilion, an architecture clad with glass, wood and zinc and contained by a walled garden and situated in the pastoral landscape of Wiltshire. Furthering the themes of being in the landscape the Scriptorium could become an observatory, as place from both to look out from and also to look in. The mobility or need to be re-assembled from site to site could promote innovative design solutions as well as interesting detailing or use of materials and surfaces that would facilitate interactions between visitors.

The notion of the Scriptorium becoming clad by an exterior skin, an ephemeral membrane which would then render the differences between the interior and the exterior into the realms of an almost immaterial architectural experience; in as much as the usual distinction between the unpredictable forces of nature outside and the predictable domestic spaces inside. This prompt further investigation into an  architecture that blurs the boundaries of both architecture and nature, this could be further explored through the notion of quixotic gestures, art and performance that can capture the experience and the experiential engagement with the natural elements. The Scriptorium becomes the centred structure of remnant that is surrounded by an architecture that can create imprecise boundaries through inconsistent materials. This spatial arrangement will create its own qualitative responses, dialogues and subsequent movements. Architecture in this context becomes purely a sensorial response.

The body as the vector for active mediation with the world of the spirit. The body is the instrument of a qualitative evaluation, the measure of intensity, which alone is capable of giving space extension and modifying it Space is no objective parameter; it must be ‘excavated’ related to the mobile living parametrics of the body.

Frederic Migayrou. Architectures of the Intensive Body. Yves Klein. Guggenheim. 2005

Mark Prizeman. Intensity. Ephemeral, Portable Architecture.

Time, space and existence are amongst the greatest of themes-so great that we could never be so presumptuous to think we could do them justice, and too close that we could ever escape them, whether with our thoughts or actions, in life or in art.

Peter Lodermeyer. Personal Structures Time. Space. Existence. 2009

My design project has attempted to produce spaces and their interiors together with the apparatus of the Scriptorium that qualitatively seek to inquiry into the world we inhabit. The Theatre of Research attempts to establish some sense of a community that can do field work that invigorates the perception of the environment. My own interests are centred through experientially and mindfully exploring voids, cavities, and spaces between things, together with use of clay, glass and other vernacular materials. As an interior designer/artist I have become experiential to the agency of spaces. The theatre of research becomes a meeting place for furthering my programme initially proposed as a symposium at Waverley Abbey.

Through experiencing familiar images, smells, sounds, and textures, but also through making certain familiar movements and gestures, we achieve a certain symbolic stability. Disrupt that familiar world, and our psychic equilibrium is disturbed. From this we can surmise that home, and the operations performed at home, are linked intimately with human identity. Architecture, it would seem, plays a vital role in the forging of personal identities.








Neil Leach. Camouflage

Analysing the desire to blend-in with our surroundings


Beyond the limits of academic levels of discourse and learning 

Building/Working with Theoretical Objects in Architecture

The Scriptorium would need to collect up and question considerable more qualitative data. Some sort of portable shelter, lightweight and offering some protection from the elements; would have allowed longer periods of stay and the possibility of experiencing different times of day. The activity of walking to the site, of having to incorporate it into a journey would help to create a stronger sense of place and routine. I am interested in the ‘thingness’ of this place, its influence and how its influence might be transposed into a methodology of reading, theorising and making. I am reminded of the Peter Brook who deliberately demolished his avant-garde theatre building Bouffes du Nord in Paris so as he could create a more emotionally responsive space for theatre. It is this under the influence of the Abbey, which I wish to explore as a creative catalyst, a tool that picks up on its differences as qualitative readings. The ruin by its very nature has re-defined its own architecture from one of form into that of experience, this sense of liminality or immateriality that constitutes itself as the architectural experience.




A good space cannot be neutral, for an impersonal sterility gives no food to the imagination. The Bouffes has the magic and poetry of a ruin, and anyone who allowed themselves to be invaded by the atmosphere of a ruin knows strongly how the imagination is let loose.

Peter Brook. The Open Circle

Andrew Todd. Peter Brook’s Theatre Environments. 2003






Friday, 12 June 2026

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.


Monday, 11 May 2026

FORMWORK / ENCLOSURES / ITERATIONS / THINKING FORMS~The Minor Gesture : Material Agency as Cognitive Scaffolding

Making~Intensified Surfaces of a Transdisciplinary Spatial Inquiry.

https://axisweb.org/artist/russellmoreton


The 'exigencies' of the situation at hand.

Tim Ingold, MAKING. 


Clay becomes a procedural matter of concern(s).

Spatial Intelligence/Architectures

Abject (ion) Body and Matter in Process/Processual Relations.

For Manning, Arakawa and Gins, the challenge is that the procedures of a procedural architecture (its architecting) must continuously be reinvented to stay apace with the architecting of experience. And this procedure must be crafted with care, it must be relevant to the conditions already at hand.

Dress Becomes Body in The Minor Gesture, Erin Manning. 2016 














Indexical Drawing : Pencil, Wax and iron oxide on paper. 240x150 1008

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


IMMATERIAL / REPETITION / SINGULARITY

ENCLOSURES / ITERATIONS / THINKING FORMS

MINIMALIST SPACES / INTERVALS, tuning objects to construct environments

Mediating the experience of LANDSCAPE

SITE / COLLAGE COMPONENTS working/walking, developing a creative spatial syntax COLOUR AS CONDUIT / PERCEPTUAL ENVIRONS / CRAFT MEDIA / IMPROVISATION PIERCED  DAPPLED NATURAL LIGHT

DIFFERENTIATED SHADOW / SURFACE

EXTRAORDINARY MATERIALS / TECTONICS AND TEXTILES INDEXICAL / GESTALT  VISUAL PERCEPTION

NETWORKS / RESOURCES / AGENCY for the potential of BUILDING SCAFFOLDS / GAUZE / POCHE solids of a building/architectural plan ABSENCES / INTERSECTIONS / GRIDS / MESHES / SPRAYS / MOTIFS ACTUALITY










Without opposition nothing is revealed,
No image appears in a clear mirror If one side is not darkend.
Jacob Bohme, De tribus principiis 1619.
Everything is interrelated and suffers when it acts, so too the purest human thought. Holderlin, 1798.



Getting Lost, Walking whilst deep in thought/embodiment in the environment Between PLACE and SITE

Walking creates its own feedback loop, The Journey, The Return,

The specific, Here and Now

Psychogeography, Dossier, Forensic Study, Inquiry.

Spatial Abstractions : Reflexivity on Reflection. Embodiment on Experiential Subjectivity

 LANDSCAPES Constituted by creative practice

Walks as erasures, sedimentation, (Gardiner on painting)

Quotidian/Everyday Interests, Complexities of Contemporary Life. Ambients, Phenomenas, Objects, Subjectivities,

Everyday aesthetics, heuristic practices.


RAVENINGHAM THEMES : Working Notes


New Futures for Architecture Leon van Schaik

Spatial intelligence builds our mental space. Sensing Spaces

Architecture Reimagined Oak-Framed Buildings. Rupert Newman

Heidegger for Architects

Adam Sharr 


MAKING : ANTHROPOLOGY, ARCHAEOLOGY ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Tim Ingold

Touching objects, feeling materials 

The Cathedral and the Laboratory


A Hut of One's Own

Anne Cline

Solar Pavilion

Alison and Peter Smithson Architecture is not made with the brain 

The Parallel of Art and Life

Aesthetics about Perception Poetics about Production

HERZOG & DEMEURON NATURAL HISTORY

My studio is a piece of architecture that is silent. Speculative Architecture

On The Aesthetics of Herzog & De Meuron 


The Thinking Hand

Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture

Juhani Pallasmaa

The Architecture of Natural Light. Henry Plummer

Peter Zumthor

Hortus Conclusus Serpentine Gallery Pavilion

The Potentials of Spaces

The Theory and Practice of Scenography and Performance. Alison Oddey, Christine White

See Yourself Sensing Redefining Human Perception. Madeline Schwartzman

Collage and Architecture. Jennifer A. E. Shields

COLLAGE

Assembling Contemporary Art. Sally O'Reilly 

Construction/Abstraction Body/Identity Environments/Geographies

Indexical

Absences

Actuality Immaterial Architectural Sensing Surfaces,

Textures

Dimensions, Sprays, Trace











Dwelling, Reverberations, Epiphanic Instant, Gaston Bachelard.

Repetition, Empirical Experiences

Forms, Pavilion, Hut, Shelter, simple enclosure

Minimalist, tuning objects, sequences to construct/de-construct environments 

Reflexive Surfaces into architectural presence

Art as indeterminate, able to arrest perceptions into different states/becomings 

Site, undoing of place. 

Gauze/Filtered Light/Phenomena

Gesture of the work, its situation,

Meshwork. The drawing grid, making of a proposition into space.

Cyan, Sky Blue, dappled light, membrane, responding to the weather/locality


AA Pavilion Project,

Its about learning through making, being involved in the process, the installation and its reception, dislocating contextual barriers.

Ephemeral Architectures, AA Document/Project, Prizeman

Immaterial Architecture : Waverley Pavilion Building The Drawing

The drawing as analogue allows more subtle relations, of technique, material and process, to develop between drawing and building.

Immaterial Architecture The Illegal Architect Jonathan Hill

Oak 

Tree 

Oil

Paper

Plaster

Rust 

Sgratfito 

Silence 

Sound 

Steel 

Television 

Weather

Frosted Light

Index of immaterial architectures

TRANSPARENCY : LITERAL AND PHENOMENAL. Colin Rowe, Robert Slutzky

Interactions of the Abstract Body. Josiah McElheny

Object Lesson

Interactive Abstract Body (Square) The Spatial Body (After Fontana)

Tracing Eisenman

Stan Allen

Indexical Characters FABRIC=MASS+ FORM

Alan Chandler

The interest in fabric formwork is in its deployment in a building process, which is faster than conventional formwork. Fabric formwork is inherently more sustainable due to the minimising of both concrete and shuttering, and more radically, allows the constructor to intervene in the process of casting even as the cast is taking place.

ANTI OBJECT Kengo Kuma

We are composed of matter and live in the midst of matter. Our objective should not be to renounce matter, but to search for a form of matter other than objects. 

What that form is called- ARCHITECTURE, GARDENS< TECHNOLOGY is not important. ReThinking Matereriality

The engagement of mind with the material world. Elizabeth DeMarrais, Chris Gosden. Colin Renfrew

The Affordances of Things

Towards a Theory of Material Engagement Aesthetics, Intelligence and Emotions Relationality of Mind and Matter

Material Agency

Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach. Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris

At The Potter's Wheel: An Argument for Material Agency

We should replace our view of cognition as residing inside the potter's head, with that of cognition enacted at the potter's wheel.

The Neglected Networks of Material Agency : Artefacts, Pictures and Texts 

Material Agency as Cognitive Scaffolding

The Cognitive Life of Things




Material Engagement and the Extended Mind. Lambros Malafouris, Colin Renfrew

Minds, Things and Materiality. Michael Wheeler

Communities of Things and Objects : A Spatial Perspective Carl Knappett


People make space, and space contains people

Imagining the Cognitive Life of Things. Edwin Hutchins

Things and Their Embodied Environments






Architectures for Perception

Structuring Perception through Material Artifacts. Charles Goodwin