Assemblages of movement : Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies/Body Matters

Outpost 201124

Parables for the Virtual.

Brian Massumi. 1985

When we think of space as 'extensive' as being measurable, divisible and composed of points plotting possible positions that objects may occupy, we are stopping the world in thought. We are thinking away its dynamic unity, the continuity of its movements. We are looking at only one dimension of reality.

If you know where you where you will end up when you begin, nothing happens tn the meantime.

Bergson redefined space in terms of movement, space is not a ground on which real motion is posited, rather it is real motion that deposits space beneath itself. Space comes into being through motion or event.

On Architectural Experience.

Architecture has the potential capacity on human/spatial bodies to affect or to be affected.

Relations of Movement and Rest.

The bodies capacity to enter into relations of movement and rest, to affect or to be affected.

Massumi/Spinoza/Deleuze.

Architecture still remains primarily as a discussion of distinct bodies, spatial and human with the two remaining physically and psychologically distinct.

Violated Bodies-Spaces.

Intense confrontations between body and space.

Tschumi allows for architecture to be considered as an assemblage, composed of a space and a bodily event, however, even his 'equation' retains a demarcation between spatial bodies and human bodies engaging in event and maintaining that the two function according to independent logics, but  serve to affect one another.

Bodies and spaces excrete out of themselves, they penetrate one another, contemporary architecture does not know what to do with such borderless entities. It has no mode of thinking about assemblages of this kind, where once discrete objects leak into one another creating indiscernible masses. There is a multiplicity of bodies, bodies that are forever being created and dismantled, forever in flux.

Architecture between Spectacle and Use.

Anthony Vidler. 2008

Architecture in Abjection.

Bodies-Spaces and their Relations.

Zuzana Kovar. 2018

For Vidler this spectacle architecturre is one that embraces the ideas of image and iconomy.

In addition to carefully placing and posing lone figures within architectural photographs, architecture is also synonymous with casting idealised bodies, Le Corbusier's athelitic figures and his 'Modulor' of an ideal masculine body. And then there are the bodies available in computer models, and the physical little white plastic figurines. These are all ideal figures, doing proper things.

Disjunction.

Volatility-Violence.

Sets in motion a particular series of potentialities that otherwise lie dormant, which can alter architectures physical, social, cultural, ethical and at times political properties. 

Creating a schism between program and space, space and program, it does this so precisely because event-space and movement each follow a distinct logic, that when they are superimposed over one another they create disjunction.

For Tschumi there is an intense confrontation that occurs between body and space, bodies violate space and space violates bodies, the relationship between the two is symmetrical.

Christopher Wilmarth : Light and Gravity

 Christopher Wilmarth delighted the world with light-filled sculptures of glass and steel that were deeply poetic in their moods and extraordinarily rich in their modernist heritage. But in 1987, at the peak of his career, a long struggle with depression ended tragically for Wilmarth. The internationally acclaimed artist committed suicide at age 44, and his work largely fell from the public view. Now, Wilmarth's legacy is recaptured in this beautifully written, richly illustrated book by art critic, historian, and poet Steven Henry Madoff. The first in-depth look at Wilmarth's extraordinary life as an artist, the book explores both the light and the darkness that underlie his work. Madoff offers a critical overview of the artist's career, examining the sculptor's response not only to historical masters such as Cezanne, Brancusi, Matisse, and Giacometti, but also to the art world of his times--particularly the dominant influence of Minimalism. Using the newly created Wilmarth archive at Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum, Madoff anchors this moving interpretation with the sculptor's own writings unearthed from journals, student notebooks, artist sketchbooks, and letters. Madoff draws as well from interviews, articles, and poems that Wilmarth published in his lifetime, along with the body of criticism covering Wilmarth's development over the years. Acclaimed biographer Nancy Milford contributes a poignant memoir of her years of friendship with the artist, and Fogg associate curator Edward Saywell offers a powerful selection of Wilmarth's writings. The sculptor's romantic outlook, his gorgeously light-infused art, and his dramatic decline into work of harrowing darkness are sensitively examined in a book that reintroduces Christopher Wilmarth's sculptures and graphics to the contemporary art audience.

From The Bookcase to The Field Table : Landing Sites of Inquiry

Tentative Building Profiles : Speculative landing sites of surface, image and texts.

Procedural Architecture

Start by thinking of architecture as a tentative constructing toward a holding in place. Architecture's holding in place occurs within and as part of a prevailing atmospheric condition that others routinely call biosphere but which we, feeling the need to stress its dynamic nature, have renamed bioscleave.

Architectural Body

Madeline Gins and Arakawa

Working Notes/Holding in Place

Wayfinding/Movements through accumulated research

Running scripts, enactments, instances, involvements

Collaborative texts, complexity, emergent, discursive 

From The Bookcase to The Field Table : Landing Sites of Inquiry

Camouflage

Neil Leach

For Benjamin, the twentieth century is an age of alienation. Human beings are no longer 'cocooned' within their dwelling spaces. Architectural spaces are no longer reflections of the human spirit. Something has been lost.

Mimesis, 19.

New Concepts of Architecture

Existence, Space and Architecture

Christian Norberg-Schulz

A child 'concretizes' its existential space.

A Philosophy of Emptiness

Gay Watson

Artistic Emptiness

Everything flows, nothing remains.

Heraclitus

Rethinking Architecture

Neil Leach

Figure 1, Sketch by Jacques Derrida for Choral Work project. 343

Foucault, Figure 2 Bentham's Panopticon (1791). 360

Page laid in, The Atrocity Exhibition by J. G. Ballard, new revised edition,annotations, commentary, illustrations and photos.

Tracing Eisaenman

Plenum, juxtaposed to form/haptic values/body absences

Robert Mangold

Between moments of 'meaning' lie spaces or blanks of immediate experience. Such blanks are actuality. Usually the blank, the actuality, goes unnoticed because it works so efficiently to differentiate one meaningful event from another. Kubler discussed this in The Shape of Time.

Interactions of the Abstract Body

Josiah McElheny

Object Lesson/Heuristic Device

The term 'heuristic' is understood here to denote a method of addressing and solving problems that draws not on logic but on experience, learning and testing. In this regard stories and fictional narratives can be heuristic devices in acting as ideal models that are not to be emulated but which help to situate characters, actions and objects.

Space Between People

Degrees of virtualization

Mario Gerosa

Adaptive Architectural Design

Device-Apparatus

Place

Function

Adaptation

The second phase of project activity acknowledges that the proposal involves two sites; the landscape of settlement and the artifice of the factory. The design is intended to be a reflection of the conditions of each, so there was a need to work directly with the manufacturing process, at full scale, as early as possible. This would provide an immediate counterpoint to the earlier representations and a necessary part of exploring the manufacturing medium in the context of architectural design. 69

Building The Drawing

The Illegal Architect

Immaterial Architecture

Mark Cousins suggests that the discipline of architecture is weak because it involves not just objects but relations between subjects and objects. And if the discipline of architecture is weak, then so, too, is the practice of architects. Architecture must be immaterial and spatially porous, as well as solid and stable where necessary, and so should be the practice of architects.

Jonathan Hill

Index of immaterial architectures

Herzog and De Meuron

Natural History

Exhibiting Herzog and De Meuron

We are not out to fill the exhibition space in the usual manner and to adorn it with records of our architectonic work. Exhibitions of that kind just bore us, since their didactic value would be conveying false information regarding our architecture. People imagine that they can follow the process, from the sketch to the final, photographed work, but in reality nothing has really been understood, all that has happened is that records of an architectural reality have been added together.

My studio is a piece of architecture that is silent. The things of which it is made say all and at the same time nothing. Its strength lies in its demanding silence. A stern silence in order to permit works to occur. I imagine that a painting by Newman could be hung there.

The arrival of Beuys in a world that was gradually falling asleep amidst minimalism generated a kind of confusion that was truly excellent for opening up the mind. Comfort vanished, driven away by subversive complexity.

Speculative architecture

On the aesthetics of Herzog and De Meuron

Without opposition nothing is revealed,

no image appears in a clear mirror

if one side is not darkened

Jacob Bohme, De tribus principii (1619)

Reflections on a photographic medium

Memorial to the Unknown Photographer

Thomas Ruff's Newspaper Photos

Valeria Liebermann

Working Collages

Karl Blossfeldt

Anti Object

We are composed of matter and live in the midst of matter. Our objective should not be to renounce matter, but to search for a form of matter other than objects. What that form is called architecture, gardens, technology is not important. 

Kengo Kuma