Ceramics and Architecture : Architecting and its ecologies/matters of concern.

Outpost 100223

Spatial Bodies~Environments :  Matter(s) of Interference

Architecting and its ecologies/matters of concern.

Circulating Objects : Lines/Holloways.

Making~Journeys.

The items shown in the image are ceramic sculptures by artist Russell Moreton. 

These pieces are part of his exploratory, architectural-themed work. 

They are characterized by a processual nature that focuses on the imprint of the artist and the material itself. 

The sculptures often feature a raw, distressed finish, incorporating white paint and visible construction marks. 

Moreton's practice in these ceramics investigates themes of silence, architectural space, and the interconnectedness of interior spaces. 

The image displays a workspace cluttered with various documents, papers, and art-related materials, suggesting an environment dedicated to research, archival work, or artistic preparation.

Workspace Setting: The desk is heavily organized with stacks of papers, binders, and printed documents, which is characteristic of an academic, curatorial, or creative office space.

Artistic Materials: A large, black-and-white print or photographic work is prominently displayed on a board in the background, surrounded by smaller reference materials pinned to the wall.

Documentation: The presence of extensive paperwork and what appears to be exhibition or research documentation suggests the space is used for managing art projects, publications, or historical research.

Professional Environment: The overall composition implies a professional or semi-professional setting, likely related to art history, gallery management, or creative practice, where the physical handling of documents and visual references is central to daily work.

The body's participation in explorations, engagements and its care in attending to the values of immediacy, vulnerability, fragility, improvisation, performance, movement, multiplicity and becoming.

Apparatuses and their ecologies for learning.

The choreographic object/agent.

The role of the body is scored through a shifting agency and the power of techniques of things.

Theoretical objects of things which do theory without us imposing it, on them.

Oren Lieberman. 2013.

The Production of The Unexpected.

The Joy of Speculative Play.

Perception/Thought/Action

A caring curiosity that wants to know and understand and explore relations.

Projective Speculations.

Ecologies/Locations.

Questioning/Research.

The objects in the image are slab-built ceramic sculptures created by the artist Russell Moreton. 

Artist: Russell Moreton.

Medium: Clay.

Technique: Hand-built using slab construction.

Style: The works are processual in nature, featuring raw, distressed finishes and architectural themes.

Inspiration: The artist's work often explores the interconnectedness of interior spaces, architectural settings, and the imprint of the maker.

Processual learning occurs in movements, gestures, postures, expressions and exchanges with other bodies and things.

Landscapes Of Actions.

Modalities Of Intravention

Constitutive Qualities Of Dance.

Ephemerality

Corporeality

Precariousness

Scoring

Performativity

If we start by moving, by thinking through moving, and by living through moving. We'll arrive to that disturbing vision : that the predicament of dance is to be an art of erasure. Dance always vanishes in front of our eyes in order to create a new past. The dance exists ultimately as a mnemonic ghost of what had just lived there.

Lepecki. 1996.

Bodily interactions highlight the entanglement of material through a process/processual understanding and situated analysis.

The Archive.

Matters of Concern.

Terms of Engagement.

Interrogate with descriptors and new issues of practice.

Bringing Things to Life.

Starting conditions for responsible and curiosity driven engagements with the world.

Place-Refreshed.

New-Agencies

The Interconnectedness of Places.

For Ingold, congealed places become relationships/connections for lines of occupation.

Curriculum making/experience as the enactment of dwelling in places.

Landscape Constructions/Observatory/Garden.

Raveningham, drawing,mapping, landmarking paths, wayfinding, territories.

Ceramics and  Architecture

Marking The Line.

In response to Sir John Soane.

Joanna Bird. 2013

Arranging the physical space/circulation to receive forms/intraventions.

Christie Brown, her practice engages with mythology and narrative and the parellels between psychoanalysis and archaeology through figurative work, which references archaic collections and the significance of inanimate objects in human lives.

Carina Ciscato, relocated to London in 1999, where she worked in the studio of Julian Stair and Edmund de Waal. The move, the contrast in culture and in attitudes to ceramics, has seen her work grow in confidence and move in exciting new architectural directions.

Nicholas Rena, his art is concerned with reconciling the domestic and the sacred, through the medium of the vessel, a form that reveals in a single look an exterior, the figure- and an interior – the inner life. Rena's strong , expressionist forms make explicit this duality, this communion and tension between our inner and outer life. His intensity and feeling for interior space imbues his work with immense presence and stillness.

Clare Twomey is an advocate for craft as commensurable to the wider visual arts. Her practice can be understood as 'post studio ceramics' as her work engages with clay yet often at a critical distance.

Twomey's work negotiates the realms of performance, serial production, and transience, and often involves site-specific installations. She is especially concerned with the affective relations that bind people with things, and how objects can enable a dialogue with a viewer.

Joanna Bird Pottery

Director of the Joanna Bird Foundation.

London.

Ceramic Forms and Paintings.

Materials/Substances on a drawn and constructed surface.

Drawings, wax and yellow ochre on layered canvas and paper.

Water : A Phenomenal Lens.

The transformative properties of the substance.

The 'void space' water gardens and the interior ceilings of the adjacent apartments are connected by reflected light from the ponds. These 'void spaces', three inches of water over black smooth stones from Ise, are analogous to a sacred space within the every day world of domestic urban life.

An attention to phenomenal properties of the transformation of light through material can present poetic tools for making spaces of exhilarating perceptions.

Imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them- for when he does not understand he- becomes them by transformation himself into/with them.

 

Refraction/Reflection/Spatial Reversal Phenomena.

Time : Duration and Perception.

Duration as a multiplicity of secession, fusion, and organisation.

Henri Bergson.

One's perception modifies consciousness, attention is broadened, time is distended, just as in the density of language.

Thus when I measure time, I measure impressions, modifications of consciousness.

Saint Augustin.

Time conceived as the analog between architecture and cinema, passing time was measured and observed in a precise strip of sunlight which slowly formed different reflections as it passed across the glossy lack floor.

The physical and perceptual experience of architecture is not a scattering or dispersion, but a concentration of energy. This physically experienced 'lived time' is measured in the memory and the soul in contrast to the dismemberment of fragmented messages of media..

Steven Holl.

Hungate, Norwich. 

Anglian Potters

Undercroft, Norwich. 2023

Helgate Proposal

Exploratory Ceramic Practice.

Clay Making. 

Plaster Work.

Commissioning of Gas Kiln for large scale works.

Glass Tech Kiln.

Correspondences and Mediums /Drawing/Speculative Learning Environments

Outpost 300823

Mediums To Correspond With.

The Situatedness of Sinuous Form/Animacy Dancing.

Living/Learning with intensity/shelters and camps, Architectural Association Field Projects.

Garden Constellation.

Raveningham Transductive Mapping/Diagram.

Cyanotype Spatial Drawing.

Transducers convert the 'ductus' the kinetic quality of the gesture and its flow or movement from one register of bodily kineasthesia to another of material flow. 

Brockwood Teaching Academy. 2011.

Speculative Learning Environments.

Brockwood Park Grounds.

A walk in the landscape whilst moving-making with clay.

Developing a mindfulness that is immanent in the attentiveness to ones surroundings through the playfulness of material and others.

Brockwood Park Library.

Hidden Curriculum.

Assemblage in the library for the re-imagining of architectural thinking and spaces for learning.

Architecture without architects.

Throwing Sticks.

The energies of the work,come from the gathering of materials and the gesture that animates them. For Goldsworthy the strength of the work lies precisely in the energies emanating from materials in their movement, growth and decay, and in the fleeting moments when they come together as one. Throwing as Goldsworthy shows us is not so much the outward effect of an embodied agency as the propulsion of animate being as it pulls, spills out into the world, it is the propulsion of life itself. 

Ingold/Goldsworthy

Relationscapes/Erin Manning

Making.

The Propulsion Of Animate Being.

Tim Ingold.

The Clay-The Potter-The Wheel.

The potter's feeling flows in and out in a correspondence with the clay.

You do not need clay to 'interact' with the wheel, but you do need a wheel to 'correspond' with the clay. In pottery the mindful or attentive bodily movement of the practitioner, on the one hand and the flows and resistances of the material on the other, respond/correspond to one another in counterpoint of affective resonances, sentient awareness, and the  flows/currents of animate life.

The distinction between interaction and correspondence if that, interaction is the dance of agency between definable points and objects, whilst correspondence can be seen as the dance of animacy weaving between all things and their phenomenal flux in the world.

In the dance of animacy bodily kinaesthesia interweaves contrapuntally with the flux of materials within an encompassing morphogenetic field of forces.

The flow of air, the wind, the breath of life are all the very antithesis of embodied agency.

For Ingold the very idea of agency and agents is the corollary of a logic for a closed system of embodiment, a system of closing things up in themselves.  

Making/Intuition In Action.

Beyond mere human embodiment and objects and into a world full of correspondences/animacies that propel things and phenomena into the world. 

World Without Objects, Tim Ingold.

The choreographic diagram/proposition generates less the stability of a complex of form, than the foregrounding of a field of resonance that defines a certain quality of activity. It speaks/seeks to create a drawing/diagram that captures in a fleeting moment the very qualities of movements and their expressibility such that their force of form can be felt.

Erin Manning.

Drawing, seeing made visible, through the pencil as transducer, not a vector of projection or a bridge between the architects imagining mind and the image on the paper.

The mark on paper leads as much as it is led.

Tim Ingold advocates a way of thinking through making in which sentient practitioners and active materials continually answer to, or correspond with one another in the generation of form.

Individuation's Dance, pushing your consciousness deep into every atom and cell.

Atom and Cell, Nine Horses, David Sylvian.

Correspondences.

The Material of Life.

Drawing into the animacy of things and feelings.

The drawing that tells is a correspondence of kinaesthetic awareness and the line of flight, it is a correspondence that is alternatively sewing the line into the mind and the mind into the line in a suturing action that grows tighter as the drawing proceeds.

The Stage of Drawing, A Walk for Walks Sake, Bryson.

Instead of dictating a thought, the thinking process turns into an act of waiting-listening-collaborating-dialogue in which one gradually learns the skill of co-operating with one's own work. This thinking, this imagining goes on as much in the hands and fingers as in the head, it is strung out in the lines of practice.

Pallasmaa/Ingold.

Thinking Through Drawing.

Barry Phipps.

Drawing is a gathering and a co-operating with one,s own work, a pulling together closer of the lines of inquiry. 

Drawing The Line.

Making/Transduction and Perdurance.

Tim Ingold suggests colour saturates consciousness, line leads it. Thus if the line traces a process of thought then colour is its temperament. Both line and colour are modalities of feeling, but where line is haptic, colour is atmospheric. 

All Buildings are Drawings.

Simon Unwin.

Only in the eyes of the architect is the trowel a bridge between the initial design and the final construction. For the builder it allows him to navigate the treacherous waters that flow beneath.

Tim Ingold.

When one is young and narrow minded, one wants the text and the drawing to concretise a preconceived idea, to give the idea an instant and precise shape.

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Architectural Stratification/Installation : Crafting/Painting Transformative Reconstructions/Relationscapes

Outpost 200623

Sites of building over lived lives.

Of doing and un-doing, of being~becoming un-done by theory. 

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 

Sensing Spaces/Caryatid.

Painting Matter, Lime, Gesso, Charcoal, and Indian Ink on paper.

Clay.

Water.

Ceramics and Architecture.

 Architectural Stratifications, Carlo Scarpa, Intervening with History. 

The Placing of Pots.

The Hungate.

The Wonder Of Minor Experiences.

A Brief Phenomenology of Enchantment.

A Moment of Pure Presence.

Enchantment entails a state of wonder, and one of the distinctions of this state is the temporary suspension of chronological time and bodily movement. To be enchanted, then, is to participate in a momentarily immobilizing encounter; it is to be transfixed, spellbound.

Jane Bennett

The moment of pure presence within wonder lies in the object's difference and uniqueness being so striking to the mind that it does not remind us of anything and we find ourselves delaying in its presence for a time in which the mind does not move on by association to something else.

Philip Fisher.

Analysing The Observed.

To abstract from the observed means to simplify the complexities of seeing.

Piet Mondrian.

Space and Form are ignored in this type of Abstraction, the Lines and their Vectors of Movement become a Map, Mapping Forces onto the Surface of the Picture.

Thinking with directional, durational markings/feelings/intuitive judgements.

Small Perceptions/Perceptions in Folding.

Small perceptions are as much the passage from one perception to another, as they are components of each perception.

Deleuze, 1993.

Small perceptions are like what Arakawa and Madeline Gins call imaging landing sites.

Relationscapes.

Erin Manning.

'Incoherence' exists, which is why the composition 'Art' exists.

Art allows us to think the unthinkable, to posit one paradox after another in the hope of firming up wisps of our lives and feelings by transfiguring them. By giving them a shape, a design, a coherence, even if they remain forever incoherent.

Andre Aciman/Edmund de Waal. 

For nearly fifty years my darkroom and studio have been the focus of my solitude.

Landing Sites.

The Expanding Field of Relations.

Organism/Person/Environment

I need silence to be able to think clearly, and an empty space where my thoughts can accumulate undisturbed.

Duration.

The not yet meets the already gone.

A fluid flowing time which is intertwined with an experience of being, where past, present and future merge into an experiential time of the individual being/becoming.

Steven Holl.

Darkrooms were dangerous places as well as magical ones, they are a painful metaphoric yoking of creation and destruction.

My final print is a golden square enclosing the pinkest dusk sky I had ever seen or imagined.

Filtered Light/Pot Metal Colours/Silver Stain/Filtows/Filters/Shadows.

The Light Gatherers.

Bodleian Libraries.

March 2022-October 2023.

Light Laboratory/Creation as Duration.

Glass vessels, as light filters shining the enlarger light through them and creating photograms. Garry's work oscillates with differential velocities. He works with great deliberation and then he works with abandon. I keep thinking about the tension between deliberation and abandon. You look at a painting by Agnes Martin and experience the temporal aspect of lines repeated slowly over days and weeks. A cell like structure repeats and changes, you repeat so that in return you can find the smallest oscillations of difference. An expanded field where you sense the development of different kinds of time, movements and their durations.

Dark Room, Garry Fabian Miller.

Farewell to an Idea, Wallace Stevens/Edmund de Waal. 

Haecceity, thisness of things, which engenders feelings between ourselves/things/world.

I was grateful to have been able to live with so much pure colour for so long.

Space-Enfolding-Breath

Lake Of The Mind.

Ideas are already abstract.

Abstracted Transcriptions.

Drawing, Vectors and Forces of Subjectification.

Lines, mappings of forces across the surface of the picture.

Drawing on, analysis with, Dominants.

Formed by the dynamic forces derived from the outlines of objects and their surrounding spaces.

Palimpsest Collages

Psychogeographic Mappings

Architectural Models

The Process of Drawing/Building is Left Visible.

Psychogeography, Merlin Coverley.

Crafting Recovery and Regeneration.

Transformative Reconstruction.

SPAB, Summer 2023.

Michal Saniewski.

Falerone, San Francesco Monestry. Italy.

It's the forefront of modernisation, something that we thought the city was. The countryside is still the place where new ideas and experimentation actually take place..

Countryside : The Future.

Guggenheim Museum, 2020.

Heritage Conservation/Preservation

How do we insert new fabric into old and respect layers of history, of which the earthquakes are an inherent part? Perhaps some of the scars and cracks should be preserved to serve as a poignant  reminder of the past, becoming a living memorial? And perhaps there is potential to develop a new language of additive, 'surgical' architecture, where the contemporary timber frames serve a protective function, supporting and bracing the damaged medieval walls,  but at the same time can be inhabited, framing new uses and reprogramming internal spaces.

The reconstruction process should be used as an opportunity to add value beyond what existed before the earthquake. 

Exploring possible new functions and uses of currently empty spaces and damaged buildings, the local community was asked to participate in the act of psychogeographic mapping and thus rediscovering and revaluating the town on different levels.

Key themes of the New European Bauhaus initiative.

Renovation of existing buildings and public spaces in a spirit of circularity and carbon neutrality.

Preservation and transformation of cultural heritage.

Regeneration of urban or rural spaces.

 

Could Falerone become an experimental hotbed, an example of sustainable, community-driven reconstruction of urban fabric and place identity? The new crafts school could be an opportunity to achieve just that, stimulating collaborations not just with other towns and universities, but with regional authorities and even with the EU. 

Studio Cyanotypes.

Tools/Working Drawings and the Semblances of Spatial Agencies.

Keywords.

Visual Substance, Causal Doing, Investigating, Inquiry, Process, Agency, Matter, Material, Discursive, Iterative, Creative Apparatuses, Intra-Activity, Performativity, Bodies That Matter, 

Shadow Theatre/Sculpting In Time : Visceral Compositions~Gatherings

A Resultant Complication of  Agencement.

Shadow Theatre for a  Performative Interior.

Enfolded Structures : On a sympathy of correspondence.

Sensing Places : Towards an Alchemy of Thinking.

This site based exploratory apparatus, part self assembly, and part crafted brings together components, materials and filtered light. Built around the involvement of making in the landscape, this event based intervention creates a fictional space articulated through the alchemy of built spaces that merge the poetic with the tectonic.

Photographic Documents : Domain-Court-Cell : Research Collages

Spatialities and Interior Spaces~Apparatuses for Diffractive Thinking.

Science~Inside The Church : Spatial Documentation~Defractive Readings.

VISITORS : Collage/Waverley Project/Exploratory Practice 2015.

Cyanotype Process

Modern/Primitive

Collage/Fragment from Dom Hans van der Laan

Cell/Court/Domain

Visitors

Godfrey Reggio 

Research collage with photographic document, MA Interiors, UCA Farnham.

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience

Water at Hungate : Architectural Body/organism/person/environment

 Outpost 130723

Hungate Installation of Works.

Making Material into Paths-Of-Difference.

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

Working Fables/Visual Aphorisms.

The Poetics of The Pragmatic.

The Multivalence of Metaphor.

A series of three follies to accommodate the family, the on-site guardhouse and an art gallery.

Private Estate, Montana, USA, 1991.

I opted to be a fabulist rather than an ideologist because fables retain the ring of immutability long after ideologies have wilted.

Emilio's Folly as well as offering a figurative and allegorical manifesto of its author's idiosyncrasies, is also a catalogue of the metaphors that recur in his architecture: water and the earth, the house with a Mediterranean patio, subterranean architecture and the descent towards the depths. Emilio's island of folly tranforms the eighteenth century penchant for picturesque aesthetics into the narrative frame of a passage describing a private garden and in constructing a design image,  envisages a miniature theatre of memory in which the mechanism of memory is analysed and forgetfulness suspended.

Passing from the canopy at the entrance to the twilight glimmer of the misty cavity offers a didactic description of memory elaborated through cognition's subterranean strata, while simultaneously testifying to the hopes associated with the act of designing, evading paralysis by memory's repetition compulsion.

Fulvio Irace.

My work is a search for giving architectural forms to primal things: being born, being in love, and dying. They have to do with existence on an emotional, passionate, and essential level. I understand  architecture as the search for a spiritual abode. On the one hand, I am playing with pragmatic elements that come from my time, such as technology. On the other hand, I am proposing a certain mode of existence that is an alternative, a new one.

Emilio Ambasz.

Anyway, to come back to the story, yes, water plays an important role in what I do because it doesn't have a shape of its own; that is to say, it does have indeed have an immense power of its own, but the shape it adopts is the shape of the container you give it. To me water is important it can be nebulized.  I have used fog many times to evoke the presence of a building which isn't there, and its presence becomes very strong when the sun creates a rainbow. It cools you or warms you if you make those clouds of mist.

I use fog and its indeterminate form maybe because I am a prisoner of my time and afraid of making definitive statements. I seek to make statements which are constantly being reformulated. 

I always say there are two ways to cast a shadow: one is as a tree and the other as a cloud. I think that I chose to be a cloud.

Interview, Emilio Ambasz, Emerging Nature.

Working with the the force of a relational environment, expressing thought as an incipient movement being  articulated through sensation. 

Indexical Traces/The Flux of Processual Drawing.

Architectural Body/organism/person/environment

Bringing potential relations into actual experience.

Experiential experiments/proposals/inquiry expressing the force/nature of a relational environment.

Resonances that modulate her body, her own becoming, movement in tandem with the environment moving.

Hortus Conclusus, Centre Pompidou. 1989.

You always have the sense that behind the walls of these projects are absent presences or present absences. The notion of that which is in front of you and what happens behind the wall has always appealed to me. There is a certain anima or spirit behind the wall.

Emilio Ambasz.

The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and it is also the totality of the world. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity. 

Michel Foucault.

Notes Towards A Conditional Art.

The Art Of Colleagueship

It is a shared curiosity that ties individual creative actions into a dialogue of immanence. A special feature of which is the willingness of the participants to temporary suspend judgement so as to seriously entertain the open potential of our discoveries. That nothing occurs in a vacuum is an idea which is particularly true of human actions. So while the art of pure inquiry is uniquely individual, it does not take place in isolation.

Certainly the pure void of concept beckons the curious, and the unique motive for a pure inquiry of a pure subject is curiosity and the desire to know.

The art of pure inquiry is an open interface between the pure subject-all that is out there-and the pure potential of the individual perceiver-all that is in here. Where the strength (clarity) of this inquiry lies is in its single motive-the desire to know.

What is key here is that certain ideas (possibilities) are immanent at particular moments. That in each time and place there exists a unique body of shared experiences, knowledge, and need, that marks our moment in time, and from which all inquiry steps off. Merleau-Ponty, in writing about the work of Cezanne, reflected that art may have an advantage over philosophy as a speculative thought form in that it has at once a tactile and a cerebral dimension.

Robert Irwin.

Hungate Group  Exhibition 'Water' 2023.

Russell Moreton is a visual artist interested in gathering research and responding to the historical site of St Peter, Hungate. He has explored the exhibition theme 'Water' as both a spiritual and corporeal inquiry for site-specific artworks. He has spent time developing working ideas that have an affective resonance to the architectural setting of their presentation. His  use of slab built ceramics vessels echo the stillness and muted silence experienced within the medieval fabric of the Hungate. He has used a figural drawing on Chinese paper, processed by the evident passage of water to explore the representation of the human form in this particular place.

Materials at the Hungate Norwich/The Eyes Of The Skin.

Outpost 050823

Dwelling/Reading with Intensity.

Hungate Medieval Art.

11 Princes Street.

Norwich.

NUA Degree Show, Interior Design/Architecture. 2023.

Boardman House.

Redwell Street.

Norwich.

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

Dwelling with Intensity.

In our houses we have nooks and corners in which we like to curl up comfortably. To curl up belongs to the phenomenology  of the verb to inhabit, and only those who have learned to do so can inhabit with intensity. There is a strong identity between naked skin and the sensation of home. The experience of home, like that of a large cradle, is essentially an experience of intimate warmth. Our houses, and their homecomings from snow-covered landscapes turn the pleasure of the skin into a singular sensation.

Gaston Bachelard.

Architecture in the flesh of the lived world not as a construction of an idealised vision.

An Architecture of Visual Images.

The ocular bias has never been more apparent in the art of architecture than in the past 30 years, as a type of architecture, aimed at a striking and memorable visual image, has predominated.

Instead of an existentially grounded plastic and spatial experience, architecture has adopted the psychological strategy of advertising and instant persuasion; buildings have turned into image products detached from existential depth and sincerity.

The current deluge of images has consequences on the architecture of our time, producing a retinal art for the eye. Instead of being a situational bodily encounter, architecture has become an art of the printed image fixed by the hurried eye of the camera. 

As buildings lose their plasticity, and their connection with language and wisdom of the body, they become isolated in the cool and distant realm of vision. With the loss of tactility, measures and details crafted for the human body, and particularly for the hand, architectural structures have become repulsively flat, sharp-edged, immaterial and unreal. The detachment of construction from the realities of matter and craft turns architecture into stage sets for the eye, into a scenography devoid of the authenticity of matter and construction.

The contemporary city is the city of the eye, one of distance and exteriority.

The haptic city is the city of interiority and nearness.

The Significance of the Shadow.

In our time, light has turned into a mere quantitative matter and the window has lost its significance as a mediator between two worlds, between enclosed and open, interiority and exteriority, private and public, shadow and light. Having lost its ontological meaning, the window has turned into a mere absence of the wall.

Take the use of enormous plate windows, they deprive our buildings of intimacy, the effect of shadow and atmosphere. Architects all over the world have been mistaken in the proportions which they have assigned to large plate windows or spaces opening to the outside. We have lost our sense of intimate life, and have become forced to live public lives, essentially away from home.

Luis Barragan.

An architecture that addresses our sense of movement and touch.

Acoustic Intimacy.

Sight isolates, whereas sound incorporates; vision is directional, whereas sound is omni-directional. The sense of sight implies exteriority, but sound creates an experience of interiority. The wide, open spaces of contemporary streets do not return sound, and in the interiors of today's buildings echoes are absorbed and censored. The programmed recorded music of shopping malls and public spaces eliminates the possibility of grasping the acoustic volume of space. 

Sight is the sense of the solitary observer, whereas hearing creates a sense of connection and solidarity. Every city has its echo which depends on the pattern and scale of its streets and the prevailing architectural styles and materials.

On Skin-Architecture-Corpus-Corporeality-Matter-Sensuality

Architecture and its materials of patina and petrified silences.

The hollow smells of abandoned houses stimulated by the emptiness observed by the eye.

In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke gives a dramatic description of images of past life in an already demolished house, conveyed by traces imprinted on the wall of its neighbouring house. The retinal images of contemporary architecture certainly appear sterile and lifeless when compared with the emotional and associative power of the poet's olfactory imagery.

Architecture presents the drama of construction silenced into matter-space-light. 

The most persistent memory of any space is often its smell.

Every dwelling has its individual smell of home and every city has its spectrum of tastes and odours.

The experience of home is essentially one of intimate warmth.

The Visible and the Invisible.

The Intertwining – The Chiasm.

The skin reads the texture, weight, density and temperature of matter. The surface of an old object, polished to perfection by the tool of the craftsman and the assiduous hands of its users, seduces the stroking of the hand.

Spaces of Intimate Warmth.

The fireplace and its immaterial alcove, sensed by the skin, a warm cave carved into the room itself that is an intimate and personal space of warmth. Antonio Gaudi, Casa Batilo, Barcelona, 1904.

The bath with its heightened experiences of intimacy, home and protection are sensations of the naked skin. Pierre Bonnard, The Nude in the Bath, 1937.

The door handle is the handshake of the building. The tactile sense connects us with time and tradition, through impressions of touch we shake the hands of countless generations. It is pleasurable to press a door handle shining from the thousands of hands that have entered the door before us, the clean shimmer of ageless wear has turned into an image of welcome  and hospitality.

My body is made of the same flesh as the world, this flesh of my body is shared by the world and the flesh of the world or my own is a texture that returns to itself and conforms to itself.

Merleau-Ponty's sense of sight is an embodied vision that is an incarnate part of the flesh of the world. Our body is both an object among objects and that which sees and touches them. Merleau-Ponty saw an osmotic relation between the self and the world - they interpenetrate and mutually define each other – and he emphasised the simultaneity and interaction of the senses. My perception is not a sum of visual, tactile and audible givens; I perceive in a total way with my whole being: I grasp a unique structure of a thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Juhani Pallasmaa.

Being and Circumstance.

Notes Towards A Conditional Art.

Robert Irwin.

Here in the phenomenal realm we can no longer say that one is more real than the other. Consequently, this 'mark X' no longer rises out of ground as before, but remains an integral part of, and interacts with, its circumstances. To quote Merleau-Ponty on this point, 'Our visual field is not neatly cut out of our objective world, and is not a fragment with sharp edges like a landscape framed by a window. We see as far as our hold on things extends. Far beyond the zone of clear vision and even behind us.'

The Condition of Postmodernity

The experiences of space and time have become fused into each other by speed (David Harvey uses the notion of 'time-space compression), and as a consequence we are witnessing a distinct reversal of the two dimensions – a temporalisation of space and a spatialisation of time. The only sense that is fast enough to keep pace with the astounding increase of speed in the technological world is sight. But the world of the eye is causing us to live increasingly in a perpetual present, flattened by speed and simultaneity.

Silence-Time-Solitude.

A powerful architectural experience silences all external noise; it focuses our attention on our very existence, and as with all art, it makes us aware of our fundamental solitude.

Architecture emancipates us from the embrace of the present and allows us to experience the slow, healing flow of time. Buildings and cities are instruments and museums of time. They enable us to see and understand the passing of history, and to participate in time cycles that surpass individual life.

The essential auditory experience created by architecture is tranquillity. Architecture presents the drama of construction silenced into matter, space and time. Ultimately architecture is the art of petrified silence. The finished construction becomes a museum for a waiting, patient silence. The silence of architecture is a responsive, remembering silence.

Power Of Gentleness

Meditations on the Risk of Living.

Anne Dufourmantelle.

The Eyes Of The Skin

Architecture and the Senses.

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Making Statements/Making Things : Hungate/Anglian Potters.

The Enabling Constraint.

Objects become relational in conjunction with the ways in which the environment proposes its own constitutive limits . Erin Manning.

Architectural slab built pieces investigate ceramic forms as a dwelling place or a model for a building construction. Some thrown shapes on the theme of crucibles fired by the Raku process. Recent work has been exhibited in historical sites and locations, exploring contexts of ceramics and rituals. Studied Ceramics at Epsom School of Art and Design UCA, Visual Fine Art at Winchester, Teaching at Brockwood Park School.

Anglian Potters

https://www.anglianpotters.org.uk/members/russell-moreton/

Water at Hungate.

Hungate Architectural Explorations. 

Air/Place/Breath/Light/Architecture/Ritual/Social Space

Cell-Court-Domain.

Russell Moreton is a visual artist interested in gathering research and responding to the historical site of St Peter, Hungate. He has explored the exhibition theme 'Water' as both a spiritual and corporeal inquiry for site-specific artworks. He has spent time developing working ideas that have an affective resonance to the architectural setting of their presentation. His use of slab built ceramics vessels echo the stillness and muted silence experienced within the medieval fabric of the Hungate. He has used a figural drawing on Chinese paper, processed by the evident passage of water to explore the representation of the human form in this particular place.

Learning-In-The-Making/Processual Learning : Reading/Intraventions at Hungate.

HUNGATE

Staging of a caring curiosity that wants to know and understand and explore relations.

Site Visit/Working Notes.

070223 

Hungate, Norwich.

Building/Surface Movements : Breathing Forms

Water/Light/Vessel/Body : Sacred/Secular/Holy/Profane

Scriptorium, Waverley Abbey Project

Collage/Matters of Concern : Discursive/Graphic/Diagrammatic/Mappings

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

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

Architectural Body

A Holding In Place

Dwelling/Situatedness/Inhabitation

A Domain Of Entanglement

A Vital Emotional Dimension

Landscapes Of Action

Relationscapes

Learning-In-The-Making

Processual learning occurs in movements, gestures, postures, expressions and exchanges with other bodies and things.

Rituals through water linking the organism-person-environment.

Fonts as an apparatus linking the corporeal and the spiritual body with others.

Dwelling/Inhabitation is a perspective that treats the immersion of the organism-person in an environment or life-world as an inescapable condition of existence.

Life is the very process wherein forms are generated and held in place.

Tim Ingold.

Baptism/Water/Society as a holding/resting in place.

Letting the building breathe, with and through the narratives of others.

Site/an intravention or creative apparatus for the un-doing/un-folding of place.

Partrners-with-things

Practices that do engage in the complexities and contingencies of corporeal experiences.

Conceptual Frameworks/Cognitive/Corporeal/Imaginative

We need to live the consequences of non-stop curiosity inside mortal situated relentlessly relational worlding.

Donna Haraway.

Exploratory Movements/Dwelling/Duration/Light/Pinhole Camera

Reading

The Eyes of the Skin

Architecture and the Senses.

PARALLAX

Steven Holl.

Banga

Patti Smith

WATER

Matter and Desire

An Erotic Ecology

Andreas Weber

Sacred/Secular/Holy/Profane

The Mind as a leaky vessel

Wensum/Chalk Stream

Lime Plaster/Yellow Ochre/Lead/Silver Stain/Pot Metals

Ceramic/Cloth Wrappings/Canvas/Construction/Scriptorium/Lead Trays/Photographic Materials