'Architecting' : Making, Building, Dwelling, Thinking, concretizing existential space

Heidegger : Poetically Man Dwells. “Man builds in that he dwells”

Building Dwelling Thinking. 1951

'Architecting' :  Making, concretizing existential space

Ann Cline

A Hut of One's Own

Life Outside The Circle of Architecture.

Herzog  and De Meuron

NATURAL HISTORY

Heidegger “resolutely romanticised the rural and the low-tech before, during and after Nazism, skating dangerously close to fascist rhetoric of blood and soil.”1

Architecture can help to centre people in the world; it can offer individuals places from which to inquire for themselves. Heidegger felt that this was how architecture had been understood in the past, and that the insatiable rise of technology had obscured that understanding.

Heidegger interested on centring his qualities of architecture around those of human experience, to reintegrate building with dwelling, making the qualities of its inhabitation become part of the buildings authenticity to its locality.

IMMATERIAL ARCHITECTURES

MAKING IN THE LANDSCAPE

SCULPTURE TRAIL 2018

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

This almost vocational unfinished “architecture finds itself more at home with the ongoing daily life than any sort of finished product.”2

Immaterial Architecture : The Glass Observatory

Metaphysics/Atmospheric Cosmogonies

Spatial themes of inside/outside, negotiations between the physical, phenomenal and a metaphysical world.

Photogram, a numinous construction, spaces amongst and within other spaces

Contemporary architects of which Peter Zumthor is an exemplary example utilise and readily acknowledge the influence of Heidegger’s thinking. The inner spaces, the materiality and the locality are all directly traceable to traits found in Heidegger’s notion of the value of human presence and inhabitation.

Heidegger claims for architecture “the authority of immediate experience”3 As recorded in his most architectural writings.

The Origin of the Work of Art 1935/trans 1971 Being and Time 1927/1962

Art and Space 1971/1973

1  Adam Sharr Heidegger for Architects.

2  Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 3

3  Adam Sharr. Heidegger for /Architects. 3

Authentic building occurs so far as there are poets, such poets as take the measure for architecture, the structure of dwelling. (Heidegger, 1971:227)

To Heidegger, when someone with poetic inclinations submits themselves to the world and deliberately or instinctively takes measure of things and phenomena through creative acts, she or he creates poetry themselves. (Sharr,2007:82)

Making Sense through Measuring.

For Heidegger, building and dwelling take place through measuring, which binds them together. Whether instinctive or more deliberate, such measuring is always conducted through immediate physical and imaginative experiences rather than through scientific experiment. (Shan,2007:82)

‘Measuring should happen in the context of a unity which binds life’s experiences together with the things they measure, not by separating them.’ (Sharr,2007:83)

This measuring through acts of both becoming and being are principally located to the environment and the buildings that serve it.

(See Lieberman, Immediate, Architectural, Interventipns/The Politics of Things) The compass suggests no attempt to understand how people have engaged with the

forest intuitively before. Explorers don’t first engage their own minds with the forest to try to understand it for themselves, but instead rely on an artificial instrument, trampling everything in their way to pursue the imposed route. To Heidegger, exploring by walking a forest path which was already there instead allowed the territory itself to guide exploration. (Sharr,2007:85)

Being lost in trying to make sense of something, is no problem for Heidegger. It is in this process of an undertaking, and through its motion or agency that this undertaking can attain its dignity and its meaning.

For the philosopher, individuals have to recognise enough difference between things so they can measure other things with them. But he argued, they should not separate them from everyday experience like science does, making them the object of dissection in a laboratory or analysing them as pure abstract ideas in a lecture threatre. (Sharr,2007:82)

Heideggerian identifications of place make sense of the world through measuring and oneness. Likewise, the conjoined activity of building and dwelling, for the philosopher. Receives authority through a poetic receptiveness to the existing conditions of site, people and society. (Sharr,2007:87)

Heidegger: Placing Heidegger

Heidegger’s life can be characterised by the places where he lived and wrote. (Sharr,2007:15)

Affirming a commitment to the philosophy he found in the order of his mountain life. It is significant for architects that Heidegger chose to summarise his final writings with the term ‘place’. He referred not only to the sites where he himself thought, particularly his mountain hut, but also to the significance of thought placed in particular contexts. (Sharr,2007:20)

Heidegger established an intense routine of living, writing, chopping wood, eating, sleeping, walking and skiing: a way of life which became as concentrated and ordered as his childhood in Messkirsh. (Sharr,2007:17)

Heidegger used his vocational mountain life, its raw presences and natural rhythms as an active living influence from which he could draw and distil his philosophical writings. He was very aware of these conditions and landscapes of building, dwelling and thinking were actually becoming absent from many in the Western world.

‘Heidegger felt that we were losing the ability to appreciate our existence in the context of a sweep far longer and broader than our lives. Moments of awareness of our own presence, often brought home to us by our senses, emotions and the phenomena of nature, had become rare opportunities to him. (Sharr,2007:12) This affinity to being in and with the landscape could be seen as tending towards “romanticism”.

Sharr notes that “romanticism” has a tendency towards introspection, emotion and sensitivity, it contains at its core, ’an awe at natural forces and a perceived transcendence of nature over human affairs. Such qualities infuse Heidegger’s work on dwelling and place.’ (Sharr,2007:12)

Romanticism has its critics who accuse those engaged with it as being of having a ‘naive optimism and an abdication of responsibility. To them the romantic can be so entranced by solitary poetising as to become unable to perceive the human hardships and evils that surround them. The British tradition of Romanticism as underpinned by Wordsworth, Turner, Blake, William Morris and John Ruskin. It has the feeling of innocence and obscure dreams and pictorial visions derived from the English landscape and the existential sense and sensibility of place.

Heidegger’s romanticism is deeply problematic given the German context.

Sharr notes that many see Heidegger’s romanticism through German cultural folk law heroes (epic tales bounded by blood and soil) loaded with invocations that link it with Nazism.

‘Where there are those who honour their locality and celebrate a sense of belonging, others can be cast out as not belonging. And here are the seeds of racism and persecution. When the romantic reifies the land, ugly things might be done in the name of that land.’ (Sharr,2007:13)

Those who have authenticity to the land, can appease those who are not of the land; can this seed the germs of racism?

‘Authenticity is dangerous because it is divisive and potentially exclusive, particularly where appropriated as a cultural specific, in this case as distinctively German. Here again is the germ of racism.’ (Sharr,2007:13)

Heidegger was scathing of tourists, who he felt visited but did not see. Surrounded by the landscape only fleetingly, they were unable to perceive the vital traces of being, which the philosopher found there. Heidegger vehemently held certain ways of life to be authentic and others to be inauthentic. (Sharr,2007:13)

“Up there” referring to moral attitudes and altitude both of which he found in the locality of his hut.

“To Heidegger, proper thinking was highly tuned to the fact of being and its traces. These traces, like our own shadow, the outline of the hills or the sounds of birdsong and stream, remain reminders of our miraculous presence,”4 5

Building locates human existence,

Heidegger “ believed that building was set out around human presence, configured by it but also configuring the activities of that presence over time”3

This almost vocational activity of building human presence it at the heart of what it means “to dwell”, the poetics of which form the phenomenological inquiry of Gaston Bachelard’s, Poetics of Space. Heidegger acknowledges that the inhabitants lives are in turn configured by the building.

Adam Sharr, notes that “for Heidegger, a building was built according to the specifics of place and inhabitants, shaped by its physical and human topography.”6

Heidegger on Thinking,

The forest track, the clearing, wandering from a starting point and remaining open to findings reached on the way, it could not be readily summarised or contained by a system. It was referential, mystical model that sought to promote the authority of being.

Heidegger on the Void at the centre of the Jug.7

Made from earth/clay/fire connected the human experience of earth and sky. Heidegger attributed sacred qualities to the jugs ability to give/to pour. Part of his fourfold cosmology of earth, sky, divinities and mortals. This “fourfold” represents Heidegger’s attempt at what he judges to be the most primary circumstances of existence, “ the inescapable pre-requisite of the world into which humans are thrown without consent (1962,164-168).

Mythic and mystical, far from the strictures of logical thinking. Influences on the “fourfold”

Meister Eckhart/mystic theologian. Lao Tse/eastem philosopher. Friedrich Holderlin/poet.

George Steiner on the “fourfold” suggests it is a manifestation of an “ideolect” a personal language offered as universal.

Heidegger would refute this on the grounds that it is our technocratic conception of the world that is unhinged not his.

Heidegger A mysticism that seems to border onto/into the realm of art?

Kengo Kuma on “Ma” a void or pause, a rich emptiness, it can be created in many ways, through the effect of light, or through attention to details.8

4  Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 7 

5  Adam Sharr Heidegger for Architects. 9

6  Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 10 

7  Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 30

8  Kengo Kuma. Sensing Spaces. Royal Academy of Arts. 2014, 65

The Reading Room/Process : Cell, Court, Domain.

Research as a discursive activity gathering new forms of expression.

Duration, Steven Holl

Time is only understood in relation to a process or a phenomenon.

The duration of human beings alive in one time and place is a relational notion.

The time of one's being is provisional; it is a circumstance with an adopted aim for the time being.

SPACE-and ARCHITECTURE-exceeds the provisional

Innerness and Defined Space/Air

Throwing, Building, Dwelling, Thinking

The innerness of a ceramic vessel can be seen to be dealing with presences and absences, as like that of a building it can demonstrate the presence of its making and the absence of that same presence.

Making Spaces : Between Speculative Movements of Reading Architecture

DRAWING INTO THE READING ROOM

MAKING SPACES PARTIAL to the material flows and currents of sensory awareness in which IMAGES and OBJECTS reciprocally take shape/meaning.

FLEDGLING ARCHITECTURE IN THE MAKING ISOTROPIC SPACE

SOCIALIZED SOCIABLE

INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE through a sensitive adaptation of place studies, and using materials and built spaces to form the container/scaffold/stage for an activity not its contents. Working spaces that can be given a multiplicity of tasks that can accommodate the humanities and the life sciences.

Architecture and landscape, together with the localised weather, and the sheltering buildings all contribute to finding the mental spaces for the retreat.

APPARATUSES DURATIONS EFFECTS

THINGS-MAKING-PEOPLE-IN THE WORLD

Heightening the experiential experiences of place. Ramps, stairs and passages as devices (movable) to examine and to create immediate architectural interventions. Notion of the observatory as being part built/part still under development through drawing, (monuments as instruments, Japor).

The camera obscura’s darken room becomes a stage and a cinema; a drawing black boarded room for making creative reciprocal social practices.

Working Towards a Secular Retreat in the Landscape.

The task of architecture is to maintain the differentiation and hierarchical and qualitative articulation of existential space. Instead of participating in the process of further speeding up the experience of the world, architecture has to slow down experience, halt time, and defend the natural slowness and diversity of experience, architecture must defend us against excessive exposure, noise and communication. Finally, the task of architecture is to maintain and defend silence.

Juhani Pallasmaa : The Thinking Hand.

Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture. 2009

This exploratory project centers around the heritage site of Waverley Abbey. This site has ruins from its ecclesiastical architecture that could be utilized in the sensory aspects of an architectural experience. The site offers up the possibility of constructing and choreographing enclosures and interiors by directly working with its unique sensitivities of place, mass, light, materials and surfaces. This project sets up real potentials to explore the possibility of crafting interior spaces that can host a rich layering of place perceptions. Currently my research has explored a number of themes and formal structures that might engender these concerns through my professional engagements with contemporary art practices and experience in the construction industry.

Peter Zumthor, Hortus Conclusus, Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2011 Adam Sharr, Heidegger for Architects 2007

Leon van Schaik, Spatial Intelligence 2008

Henry Plummer, The Architecture of Natural Light 2009

The sewer is the conscience of the city. Here, no more false appearances, no possible plastering, the filth takes of its shirt, absolute nakedness, rout of illusions and of mirages, nothing more but what it is, wearing the sinister face of what is ending. Reality and disappearance.

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.

Philosophy is the microscope of thought. Everything desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it. In the effacement of things which disappear, in the lessening of those which vanish, it recognizes everything. It reconstructs the purple from the rag and the woman from the tatter. With the cloaca it reproduces the city; with the mire it reproduces its customs.

Peter Zumthor, interested in the authentic core of things, in emotions and imagining things and not theories. From the emotional/existential experience of things, Zumthor further embodies sensations of remembrance and memory into the fabric of his architecture.

For a moment there fell on Jude a true illumination: that here in the stone yard was a centre of effort as worthy as that dignified by the name of scholarly study within the noblest of colleges.

Thomas Hardy, Jude The Obscure.

An architecture that responds to the evanescence of natural light, in praise of shadows.

The Cemetery and The Allotment, differences and similarities. What is important is what is contained, not the container.

Space for an architect does not exist, so we design the limits that give the impression of space.

Eduardo Souto de Moura. RA Sensing Spaces 2014

There is a sense of pleasure in moving from darkness to light or vice versa because as human beings were cyclical. How light reflects and how light is contained is the stuff of architecture.

Grafton Architects. RA Sensing Spaces 2014

Space is already structured (Deleuze), it is place that is the relational human praxis of space.

The Dehumanised Nature of Human Consciousness, Silke Panse. Screening Nature : Cinema beyond the human. 2013

Metaphor (as a spatial experience/sensation?) is itself a philosophical concept. Multiplicity and Memory : Talking about Architecture with Peter Zumthor. Six Memos for The New Millennium, Italo Calvino.

Interiors as book, poem, essay, philosophical treatise.

To define these spaces one needs decisive characteristics woven into the fabric of the building in its everyday function. These characteristics or spatial zones will define exact physical limits to be read or navigated as an experiential experience. These zones mark the outside limits or boundaries of layered experiences.

GLAS; Derrida, (a philosopher interested with the “between”) Gias in French means the death knell tolling of a bell. 

The methodology of reading.

Playful interrogations of the borders between philosophy and literary writing. “This anti-book stages a kind of linguistic battle between philosophy and literature.”

Destabilising tactics through different typographical styles, formats and languages.

Derrida’s text turns philosophers, thieves, fathers and families into unstable figures; their identities are no longer assured, and neither are the usual hierarchies.

On The Lefthand Side.

Philosophy as expressed by Hegel, who believed that the bourgeoisie family was an embodiment of absolute knowledge and its subsequent passing down through strictly controlled channels.

On The Righthand side.

Subversive literature in the shape of the writings of Jean Genet, whose writings celebrate the very opposite of family values.

The experience of the text is its reading (like that of a collage) is that neither column can be read without its internal boundaries or edges being constantly opened up to the other column.

In each column, Derrida cites and grafts (what might these terms generate in architectural space) from Hegel’s personal letters and documents or from his philosophical texts, and from Genet’s journal of the thief and his prose poetry.

GLAS; Has in fact a multiplicity (multiplicity and memory in architecture, Peter Zumthor) of author’s and their authority is always placed in doubt; in fact GLAS has an excess of boundaries that seek to divide it up inside itself. 

Its fragments offer multiple beginnings and endings. Hegel’s Columns. (Heidegger)

Hegel’s “Absolute Knowledge” spirals through dialogues of thesis and antithesis into a higher synthesis that is in tum interrogated by conflict and resolution (dwelling) until it comes to rest as an “ultimate harmony” presided over by “absolute reason”.

Genet’s Columns. (Winterson)

Metaphors and puns seductively unfolding their colourful eddies, ruffles and dark labyrinths.

Derrida by placing both on the same page and in close proximity forces the reader to experience the literary effects, the unintentional connotations and insinuations and metaphors that blossom up in explosions of meaning; from within the most rigorously unruffled philosophical prose.

Architecture on reality and living (dwelling)

Architecture can go too far in completing and controlling social space and influencing the politics of the everyday. Spatial practices are needed as a plastic and permeable social architecture that loosens and adapts the everyday from the imposition of both state and history. From these first speculative oppositions, architectural practice can be informed with the differences between the logic of design and the reality of place.

Heidegger. Jung. Archetypes. Pottery

Architecture

Old Buildings/New Designs: Architectural Transformations. Charles Bloszies. Knocktopher Friary is a quiet place of contemplation. The new residential cloister

unifies the friary and the church. The composition of the architecture is a knitting together of two original forms with a ribbon of concrete, glass and wood. The new buildings are crafted from a minimalist vocabulary where the palette of materials was kept to a minimum. One of the interesting design features is that the new elevations never touch the old facades with a solid-to-solid intersection; the new is either set back from the old (Ashley Castle) or the joint is glazed. The existing church floor is used as both a datum for maintaining the new floor level in the new construction, and as a vein of closely controlled changes of materials and finishes. The resultant architecture is played between subtle material exchanges of concrete meeting wood, concrete meeting glass, and concrete meeting concrete with slightly different surface qualities. What results is a clear differentiation between the old and the new, both are remarkably quiet architecturally reflecting the concerns of the site as a Carmelite monastery in the southeast of Ireland.

Working Thoughts.

Scarpa, extensive use of concrete with different aggregates and finishes.

Ashley Castle, restoration of ruin into a domestic dwelling, sensitive use of materials and methods of joining or revealing the historical fabric (allowing the ruinous to remain visible) of the building.

The Dovecote Studio, a building made of CORTEN steel built within the interior of a ruined Victorian dovecote (see further notes).

Building Practices

The Everyday : The Jug.

The Dwelling Place : The Bridge Mediators for spatial experiences.

Libraries with research conduits for immersive and interactive cognitive mappings, allowing a praxis to enter the practicability of the everyday, a crafted philosophical inquiry, building new livelihoods.

Colour

Texture Surface Enclosures Voids

Sample Materials

Relationships through Localities/Mood Boards/Technical and Physical Details. Erasure  in  drawing  and  architectural  planning  (space  voids)  as  a  methodology  to

superimpose multiplicities.

Erasing : Kirosan Observatory, Anti-Object, Kengo Kuma. Multiplicities and Memory, Peter Zumthor.

Learning  Spaces  as  a  performative  spatial  practice  through  a  process of tuning and minimising (Minimising, NO stage in the forest, Kego Kuma).

Reading Rooms between the Body and the Book Not just a project but also a field of study.

Peter Greenaway, Architecture and Allegory. Peter Greenaway, The Physical Self.

Mark Dion, Archaeology (The Project as Archaeology/Thames Dig). Herzog and De Meuron, Natural History.

Appropriation and Modification/Interlocking Spaces.

Speculative Architecture : On the Aesthetics of Herzog and De Meuron. The speculative solution, which turns not the real world but logic itself on its head.

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.

Text definitions/Spatial frames and small interventions.

Surfaces and Spaces. Colour and Material dialogues/engagements.

The aesthetics of the intermingling of function and form in everyday things

 

Frames, Handles and Landscapes

Simmel 1965

A tools beauty springs from the many unintended and absolute causalities, instead of being a materialization of an aesthetic idea

The Thinking Hand

Pallasmaa

Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things

Gibson

A psychology of causality is at work as we use everyday things

Donald Norman 2002

Perception of Environment/Relational Situations

Tim Ingold

A Species of Spaces

The Social Turn

Museum Site and Display

Political Philosophy

We have all the choice in the world in terms of products, but very little choice in terms of the kind of

economy within which those things are made, accessed and used

Whose Economy

Reframing the Debate

After Neoliberalism

Doreen Massey

Other 'material interventions' and the revaluation of making through strategies of repair and

maintenance

Making Ecological Politics

A world teeming with impulsive movements, deviations and many other lively (capacious) materialities

Influences that pervade, enable, and disrupt us

Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett

Makers work in a world that does not stand still

Iteration allows for continual correction (material conversation) in response to an ongoing perceptual

monitoring of the task as it unfolds, mixing the potential for blending or combining matter that already

exists into new combinations

Tim Ingold 2010

Each thing framed dwells in the world differently

The frame and framing, through its configuration, must never offer a gap or a bridge through which as it were, the world could get in, or from which the picture could get out

The picture frame reminds us that the work of art, while it hangs in our room, does not disturb our day-to-day sentient and perceptual ecologies

It is like an island in the world that waits until one approaches it and which one can as well pass by and overlook

On The Picture Frame, Simmel

Art becomes art by virtue of literal and institutional framing

Aesthetic contemplation blurs reals and emotional space in a way that produces tangible affects in the world

The thinking hand that mediates a haptic bridge in which creating and holding, becoming and grasping are all practical everyday activities extending the thinking body

Objects that stand in two worlds at once and becoming drawn into the movement of practical life through the virtue of being held in the hand

The intermingling of persons and objects in pictorial space and the aesthetics of the intermingling of function and form in everyday things

The pictorial space is one in which persons and images intermingle and passions can be aroused

Gell

William Forsythe discusses Synchronous Objects

Spatial Practices : Experimental drawing and alternative photography.

Spatial Practices : Experimental drawing and alternative photography.

Occurrent Cyanotype : Knowledge Objects | Drawing is a philo… | Flickr

Occurrent Cyanotype : Knowledge Objects | Drawing is a philo… | Flickr

Russell Moreton Axisweb: Contemporary Art UK Network

Russell Moreton, Member in Harleston, East - Members | Axisweb: Contemporary Art UK Network

https://www.axisweb.org/p/russellmoreton/

Painting and Clay Construction : Few boundaries are impenetrable : They are rather, semi-permeable membranes providing housing while allowing selective commerce

 

Site-Specificity/Spatial Practice

The distinguishing characteristic of today's site-oriented art is the way in which both the art work's relationship to the actuality of a location (as site) and the social conditions of the institutional frame (as site) are subordinated to a discursively determined site that is delineated as a field of knowledge, intellectual exchange or cultural debate

Miwon Kwon 1997

Whilst temporary exhibitions can expand the scope of medium-specific discourse, they can also impose alternative, but equally restrictive frames

Participation, creating a bridge between socially engaged practice and the permanent collection

Expressing itself expressing 

Creating a conceptual and linguistic dexterity between absolutes, certainties, definitions

Dissolving the intellectual relevance, with its symbiotic relationship with utility to create 'vessels' beyond art and artifact

The strategy of making artworks as response

The Ceramic Object, by means of preservation and display becomes a vehicle/vessel for a social and historical narrative/entanglement/engagement

Making vessels, beyond the examining and intellectually impoverished questions 

A vessel is identified as such by its physical disposition, giving shape to the contents and clarifying what is inside and what is outside

Few boundaries are impenetrable

They are rather, semi-permeable membranes providing housing while allowing selective commerce

Like the vessel, the house shapes and nurtures the life contained inside

The Factory I build in the Tate is a place to discuss the transactions and transformations of Labour that Create Knowledge and Community

In the Factory we will examine skills and how we form Exchanges at Work , with ourselves and with others

Clare Twomey, Lead artist at Tate Exchange 2017

Post Studio Ceramics

Interfaces between Making-Makers-Museums

Exploring object engagement beyond the known historical models of clay practice

'Generate' Historical Material and Spatial Relations as they interacted with the work, and reflected on the role of the Museum/Hospital

Clare Twomey

Ceramics In The Environment 

An International Review

Janet Mansfield 2005

With Fire, Richard Hirsch

A Life Between Chance and Design (invites the unknown)

Scott Meyer 2012

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

Raku as an Ideology

Breath-Energy-Immanence

Raku, A Review of Contemporary Work

Tim Andrews 1994

The Poetry of The Vessel

A calm invitation to thought and imagination

Chris Tyler

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

Encounters with Arakawa and Madeline Gins: Endings/Beginnings