Hidden Curriculum/Assemblages : Synergies of creative practice

“When building and art are jointly focused in joint search not of an image, but of a mood, they cannot fail to produce integrity, even if they don't produce great art."

Brian Clarke, Glass In The Environment Conference, held at the RCA, London 1986.

UCA Canterbury :  Postgraduate School 2010

My current spatial practice is centred around a multi disciplinary approach through "drawing" to critical issues of site. This activity could be understood as an investigative creativity amongst the phenomenological aspects of architectural place and the potentials of producing working spaces/sites for the reflection of others. The practice informs specific sensibilities and my intuitions through concise and simple trace strategies; promoting a sense of material memory and knowledge which becomes enmeshed with the human condition. These resultant trace strategies, drawings are open, active and present in-situ where they become vessels for placed geographies, maps around human relations.

The use of site as a working drawing from which to create a temporary intervention into place helps to instigate a threshold, a room or event from which to reflect upon critical spatial, sociological and psychological conditions and perceptions.

Previous working sites have used the agencies of natural light, water and clay in long durational works realised by installation, performative drawing and elemental photographic apparatuses and processes (pinhole cameras/cyanotypes).My practice continues to employ simple indexical strategies to promote the possibility of a spatial "open text" from which to render transparency and superimpose a charismatic sense of nowness with an awareness of a duration of place.

The beauty of the assemblage is that, since it lacks organization, it can draw into its body any number of disparate elements. The book itself can be an assemblage, but its status as an assemblage does not prevent it from containing assemblages within itself or entering into new assemblages with readers, libraries, bonfires, bookstores, etc.

Land Drawing : Layered Canvas, Gesso, Yellow Ochre on Paper.

Hidden Curriculum, teaching intervention in the library of Brockwood Park School.

Auguries into the maternal body. Un-fired clay and silica sand in the chapel of rest, Andover.

Fossil Worlds, human outline with cyanotype, field chalk and Jurassic earth materials.

My practice is an inquiry into the realms of both architecture (built and social) and fine art based methodologies of making/thinking and presentation. Although my working methods and processes are informed by a number of theoretical and philosophical sources and interests, it is however the simple wonder of things and phenomena that can be brought into new forms of expression that I find wonderous and challenging.

 A Philosophy of Solitude

John Cowper Powys

a thousand plateaus

Deleuze, Guattari

Assemblage

Becoming

Body Without Organs

Nomad

Rhizome

Smooth Space

State

War Machine

http://www.rhizomes.net/issue5/poke/glossary.html

ASSEMBLAGE:

An assemblage is any number of "things" or pieces of "things" gathered into a single context. An assemblage can bring about any number of "effects"—aesthetic, machinic, productive, destructive, consumptive, informatic, etc. Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of the book provides a number of insights into this loosely defined term:

In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All this, lines and measurable speeds constitutes an assemblage. A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity—but we don't know yet what the multiple entails when it is no longer attributed, that is, after it has been elevated to the status of the substantive. On side of a machinic assemblage faces the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism, or signifying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it also has a side facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities or circulate, and attributing to itself subjects what it leaves with nothing more than a name as the trace of an intensity... Literature is an assemblage. It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and never has been. (3-4)

The book, as described above, is a jumbling together of discrete parts or pieces that is capable of producing any number effects, rather than a tightly organized and coherent whole producing one dominant reading.

Maternal Body : Clay Impression and Fragmented Form installed at Chapel Arts, Andover

Auguries into the maternal body. Un-fired clay and silica sand in the chapel of rest.

Constructed in-situ at the Yard, Winchester. 

A life-size record and memory of a human presence as a site for mutual introspection.

Inspired in part from the novel  " The  Children of Men "  by P D James.

Artist Statement/Chapel Arts Residency 2009

Practitioner using the creative receptiveness of material together with the inclusion of drawing to harbour transits and passages of human presence, vulnerabilities centred around the human condition. My work adopts strategies which articulate a sense of absence and anonymity within the abandonment of the work to its location. I feel drawn to this registering of passage, encounter together with its farewell. The choice of materials gathered together implies a personal geography, with both an emotional and aesthetic sense of locality and place. The performative recording by physical means which renders itself as a trace of human presence, now becomes a vacant territory open for the consideration of others.

My work continues to investigate this sense of material response with the performative trace of a human absences. The place-ment of these acts attempts to promote thresholds from which to reflect upon spatial, sociological and psychological conditions and perceptions. 

Currently working in clay, low fired to produce and promote a fragile vessel. This vessel is installed to act as a dwelling presence reverberating in a resting place. from which work is drawn into the human form to register a surface of absences resulting from past gestures and solitudes.

Russell Moreton a visual artist uses simple gestures of drawn Human traces gathered and presented amongst natural materials. Exploring themes around the Human condition, vulnerability and abandonment. Materials are employed to further underpin our sense of place and time. The act and gesture of drawing adds a ephemeral mark amongst the materiality and locality of place. Currently using clay to register these themes, installing work Augury Vessel into Chapel Arts as part of their research residency programme.

Russell Moreton Axisweb: Contemporary Art UK Network :

Alternative photographic photograms and collages for the CD artwork to promote the ambient music of Kontakte.

Limited edition CD artwork, and booklet.

Russell Moreton,  | Axisweb: Contemporary Art UK Network

Making Gestures and Connections in Space : Anecdote of the Jar

Making Gestures and Connections in Space. 

The Memory of Objects.

The Provocative Combination of Densities.

I placed a jar in Tennessee, 

And round it was, upon a hill. 

It made the slovenly wilderness 

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild. 

The jar was round upon the ground 

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere. 

The jar was gray and bare. 

It did not give of bird or bush, 

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Wallace Stevens, ‘Anecdote of the Jar’ (1919)

Innerness for the potter is always at the heart of the practice, as manifested through the opening up of the thrown vessel.

Inner spaces of defined interiors forming vessels that are intrinsically cyclical through light and dark by way of their surfaces and volumes.

Like the cellar, the pots interior and its containment of light and shadow becomes a dwelling space for a submerged primordial memory. (Bachelard/Trigg)

The clay links the vessel to both locality and our geocentric position.

‘Pleasure is moving from darkness to light and vice-versa.’ (Grafton Architects. Sensing Spaces: 2014)

The pot promotes an architecture of the soul, of an intimate yet social interior illuminated through the imagination.

In The Making : Hollowing out Space through Innerness and Difference. Quietus : Interiors of Silence and Space.

Innerness : A (sensorial) space or even a place interior to its environment 

Sensing Spaces : Through displacements and hidden volumes.

Defined Interiors : By material, agency and social and private architectures.

Interiors of Pots : Analogies with the Hut as both being dwelling places made from the inquiry of form and the need for a reflective solitude.

Fragment as a broken shard, from notebook March 2014.

Innerness

The light of reflection and our immediacy moves from light to dark and from dark to light; from surface to interior and interior to surface. The pot becomes a cyclical vessel reflecting our geocentric origins.

The Hut is a vessel in the making for reflective dwelling.

The Pot with its interior underpins its fidelity, its completeness.

Some pots are tuned and balanced for their “innerness”; others promote their surfaces (noise) at the expense of their interior integrity (quietness).

Vessels of Defined Spaces : Creatures of Light and Dark

In sensing a pots interior from its surface, we are as it were in some intimate tacit correspondence with its spatial sensing centre. We become known to it through its maker’s creative gesture of innemess. This anthropological inner space linking us to the potter is both sensual and distant; its vacancy allows us dwell in the maker’s absence.

Reflections on Heidegger,

We traverse from light to dark many times as we gather in the pots (thingness) as it were unfolding in our presence (nearness).

Vessels as Spatial Metaphors around Innerness and DifferenceThe Jug

Heidegger as a pouring and gathering social metaphor. Anecdote of the Jar.

Dominion over the Unmade.

Wallace Stevens, poem cited by Edmund de Waal.

Atemwende : A breathtum. Edmund de Waal.

The Great Glass Case of Beautiful Things: About the Art Of Edmund de Waal Adam Gopnik. 2013.

‘Actually, I still make pots, you know’ Edmund de Waal. The Sensuality of the Clay Body.

‘You have to work quickly and with definition, and your ideas have to come into focus with enormous rapidity.’ Edmund de Waal, on working with the different presence demanded on ones mind and hand whilst throwing with porcelain. The practice of porcelain forced a change in colour and finish in his work. New glazes, shimmering celadon and shiny black, arrived to catch the light and send it back. (Gopnik,2014:9)

The throwing of pots still remains central to his practice. ‘The material goes down, gets wet, is pulled open by the hand, spins- and then produces, as if by magic, the most transcendently human of all made things; volume, inner space, an interior, the carved out air that connects the morning teacup with the domes and spandrels of San Marco. There’s nothing there but clay and air, then there’s defined air. 

(Gopnik,2014:6)

Ceramics and Architecture. Exhibition Spaces of the Enlightenment The Porcelain Rooms

The pot, ancient as it is, is the first instance of pure innerness, of something made from the inside out. Building objects upwards is, in its way, an obvious and brutal thing; it derives from piles, and makes pyramids. Turning objects inward, on the wheel, is a subtler one, and derives from our need to have a place to put things in. (Gopnik,2014:7)

Together these new porcelain vessels collectively produced by De Waal are an experience of possessed space.

These collections of vessels in their Modernist vitrines seem to be both an expression of the architecture of a collection and simultaneously an affirmation of an interior space that can hold the singularity of a breath within a small pot.

‘ The ceramic module that he uses, the small pot, is deliberately made as non­ functional as possible.’ (Gopnik,2014:9)

‘Even if we insist on seeing them impersonally, the sheer force of their numbers creates the poetic sense inherent, as Homer knew, in all inventories. They gang up on us.’ (Gopnik,2014:9) These groupings of objects placed together produce their own narratives, their own relations, and lines of inquiry. In so doing their ordering of the space around them brings meaning to those spaces. This is reinforced through the poetry and metaphor of the effect of ceramic vessels on space, as cited by De Waal himself through Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” 1919.

‘The Jar, the elemental made thing, takes dominion over the unmade world. The air around it suddenly looks “slovenly,” insufficiently jar-like. Made things remake the unmade world. (Gopnik,2014:10)

Gopnik comments that we can’t look at hollow things without sensing their hollowness, as he notes we perceive haptically as aptly as optically. This allows us to read these vessels through both our sense of sight and our sense of space. The result is that we feel these objects; we can sense the heft of them made from their weight, shape and size. We become aware that we can feel objects as much as we can see them.

De Waal’s work brings about a sensuality and an empathy manifested between the strict ordering of his presentation through his vitrines and cabinets and the fragility and grouping of his porcelain vessels. This empathy promotes our interest with the interior parts of his groupings, with the interior emptiness and mystery of things we can only sense. His control and command of the geometric spatial relations found in his installations is juxtaposed by the multitude of diminutive interiors and negative spaces.

The relations of the architectural and those of the vessel are in constant flux, held in some sort of spatial narrative that seems to meditate stillness, like the museum these vessels are protected and intact, yet strangely they are held hostage by their surroundings.

The empathy we feel for their emptiness is perhaps choreographed, staged and ultimately forced, these are not just pots as De Waal admits but pots that have been by design rendered as non-functional as possible although they still bare the marks of his franchising. This neutering of his thrown clay forms into the realm of perhaps a purely sculptural object that is itself now a mere component in his Minimalist cabinets. What remains is a hollowness, but a contrived hollowness that speaks of spaces designed not made; unlike his Signs and Wonders intervention for the V&A, these works feel orphaned and cut adrift by their surroundings.

Does? ‘His art takes a familiar grammer of display and turns it into a poetry of memory. Inside a room, a great case filled with rows of porcelain pots. Along each row, a story. Inside each pot, a breath. (Gopnik,2014:11)

Craft and Art, Skill and Anxiety.

Craft is logic, and art defies it. The defiance is what makes art. The serenity of the artisan lies in her knowledge that it can all be done again. The anxiety of the artist; lies in knowing that if it is done again, she has become an artisan. (Gopnik,2014:7) 

Edmund de Waal is a maker of objects with imagined histories. (Gopnik,2014:11)

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1980.

Working Notes from Signs and Wonders, Edmund de Waal 2009.

‘De Waal’s installation is a hybrid of the sculptural and the pictorial.’ (Adamson,2009:40)

‘Like Wallace Stevens’s jar, this sculpture is a world unto itself, a self-sufficient object that also gathers its surroundings.’(Adamson,2009:40)

‘Judd’s sculptures occupy an uncertain middle ground between craft and industry. He did not make anything himself; instead he worked closely with a team of highly skilled fabricators. The results have the impersonal, serial quality of mass production, but an intensity of finish that can only be achieved by artisanal methods.’(Adamson,2009:40)

John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form : Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade. (London,2007)

Judd’s wall hung stacked sculptures defy direct relationships with the floor; he has in effect taken sculpture of the plinth and into its surroundings. His stacks appear to be only part of an infinitely larger sculptural form that extends down and beyond the floor as well as into the infinity of the space above.

Contemporary Architecture and Construction. Interior Design through Intervals.

Spatial and Temporal Extensions. The Sculptural and the Pictorial.

Working Notes : Clay, Interior Skins of Light and Dark. Contemporary Ceramic Practices in Craft and Design.

Interior Spaces. Environments and Atmospheres. Ceramic Building Technologies.

Screens, Boundaries and Borders.

Sensuality, Materiality as Memory in the Poetics of Space. 

Breaking The Mould : New Approaches to Ceramics. 2007

Ceramic Environments.

Space/Time based work, using clay in large-scale contexts, in gallery or outside spaces to create a fully immersive moment that challenges the common perception of what clay is capable of.

Surreal Geometries.

Makers who use large and small-scale sculpture that is in some way abstracted or represents a heightened version of reality.

The Vessel.

Works around the practicalities of functional ceramics. Human Interest.

Explorations into the human form and human nature. Beyond The Vessel.

Experimentation around the ideas of deconstructing the vessel. Earthly Inspirations.

Formal and conceptual properties of using the very nature of clay. Surface Pleasures.

The exterior skin of ceramics and clay.

'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