In Defence of Sensuality : John Cowper Powys 1930.

Foreword.

The author feels that perhaps some explanation is due to the reader for the rather unusual employment of the word "Sensuality" which serves as the title of this work. The advantage given to the author by the use of this particular expression is that it enables him to proceed from rock-bottom upwards as far as he likes. A more refined title would have cut him off, in his method of developing his idea, from the physical roots of existence; for while it is easy to indicate the overtones and undertones of Sensuality it would be hard to bring a gentle, vague word, like the word "sensuousness" down to the bare, stark, stoically-stripped Life-Sensation which is the subject of this book.

J.C.P.

Dedicated to the memory of that great

and much-abused man

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"In the water" : Pinhole Photography/ Floating Camera

Visual Mappings : Working Collages for Sequences and Spaces

Extract from Peter Zumthor, Hortus Conclusus 2011.

Directors’ Foreword: Julia Peyton-Jones, Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Zumthor’s architectural design practices consider each project in terms of a comprehensive and encompassing sensory experience. Looking at more than the physical fabric and form of the building, he often draws inspiration from memories of childhood experience. His projects aim to reference all aspects of sensory perception, addressing the relationship between the human body and the ways it may interact within the built environment. Many of Zumthor’s projects have been specifically noted for their thoughtful and evocative play on scale, colour, material and light in harmony with the buildings function and surroundings. (Peyton-Jones 2011: 9)

Waverley Site

Hortus Conclusus

Sensing Spaces

Oculus Pavilion

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

Shadow (voids) and Forms (layered movements)

Permeable membrane (time passes through here)

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

Kengo Kuma. Complete Works, Kenneth Frampton.

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

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

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

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

Katsura Aesthetic.

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

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

  

Albert Camus : The Plague, 1947. (Penguin Fiction)

The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a virulent plague.

Cut off from the rest of the world, living in fear, they each respond in their own way to the grim challenge of the deadly bacillus. Among them is Dr Rieux, a humanitarian and healer, and it is through his eyes that that we witness the devastating course of the epidemic.

Written in 1947, just after the Nazi occupation of France, Camus's magnificent novel is also a story of courage and determination against the arbitrariness and seeming absurdity of human existence.

'Camus represents a particularly modern type of temperament, a mystic soul in a Godless universe, thirsty for the absolute, forever rebellious against the essential injustice of the human condition'
Shusha Guppy, Sunday Times


The Planet drowns in an ocean of photographic emulsion.
J G Ballard