Working Spaces/Six Memos : Sites of Inquiry and Dialogue/Investigative Thinking/Post Studio

Every action happens in its own right and every action is an analogy of something else. 

What I do need be no more than what appears at the moment of the happening.

Peter Brook, The Open Stage.

BOUNDARIES AND JUNCTION POINTS ARE IN THE NATURE OF THINGS POINTS OF FRICTION.

Lefebvre, The Production of Space.

MAKING : Essentializing of site and community through artistic presentation and production.

ITALO CALVINO

SIX MEMOS FOR THE NEXT MILLENNIUM

LIGHTNESS 

QUICKNESS 

EXACTITUDE 

VISIBILITY 

MULTIPLICITY

CONSISTENCY not written at the time of the authors death.

SETTING UP THE IMMEDIATE THEATRE

MA Spatial Practices, Canterbury.

Project analysis and comment from Prof. Oren Lieberman, Dr Terry Perk, Dr Judith Rugg.

The desire to register working spaces is an interesting, and I believe fruitful, direction in the work. It is important that through this registration, you allow and encourage a theory to evolve. ‘Register’ is a useful term in that it accommodates both the index (through the notion of recording information) as well as the performative registering of, say, an opinion. As the pinhole apparatus registers ‘public’ spaces as well, it would be worthwhile assigning them the value of ‘work’ spaces also.

Also: you should understand the apparatus as a significant performative, spatial practitioner in its own right, and be careful about focussing only on the very engaging images produced by it.

Developing an engaging thesis exploring various forms and frameworks for thinking about thematics of photography and architecture in relation to space and its potential meanings and productions.

Using both practical workshops and theoretical enquiry to explore the differing values for both reading or engaging with the poetics of spatial formation in an ‘post’ sense of the studio. 

The work explores the concept of the open text in various ways and traces a development of the research from various approaches. This is a useful document of investigative thinking around ways of working for the project.

There are some methodological approaches proposed here through a range of contestatory areas - in particular, the nature of the document and the text as spatial tools or ways of thinking about the interfaces between them.

Some fascinating areas of insight and propositions on the nature of space - especially concepts of latency, peripheral space and methods of interaction/intervention. How could this area be explored in conceptual and crucial terms for the development of the project? - Behind your fluid approach, there is a sense of the need of the relational.

The bibliography could be further developed in terms of defining its taxonomies and the rationale or relationships between them and with the proposal.

Marc Auge, Non-Places, introduction to an anthropology of super modernity (London: Verso, 1992).

Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire (Boston :Beacon Press, 1964). 

John Berger, Berger on Drawing ( Aghabullogue: Occasional Press, 2005). 

Peter Brook, The Open Stage (London: 1968).

Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy, Architecture and the Visual Arts (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2007).

Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992). 

Martin Clark, The Dark Monarch, Magic and Modernity in British Art (London: Tate St Ives,2009).

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, 1994).

John Houston, The Abstract Vessel, Ceramics in Studio (London: Bellow Publishing, 1991).

Lefebvre, The Production of Space (London: Blackwell, 1991).

James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, A Final Warning (London: Penguin books,2009).

James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1967). 

Richard Serra, The Matter of Time (Bilbao: Steidl Publishers,2005).

Rose Temkin, Thinking is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993).

Tracey Warr, The Artists Body ( London: Phaidon Press,2000).

Christopher Wilmarth, Drawings into Sculpture (New York: Fogg Art Museum,2003).

I propose to register a site by its boundary. This new space will attempt to represent the internal dimensions of the artist’s current working studio space and be given a similar terrestrial orientation. Into the interior of this marked space objects from the working studio are to be reinstalled. This intervention attempts to create a spatial temporality into which a contemporary art practice will act as a context. The intervention sets out to display the complexities of the contemporary practitioner, the research material and works completed and those that are to instigated as a direct adaptation/response to the situation and site at hand. The temporal nature of this staged work reflects issues of mobility needed by the professional practitioner to be able to set up working sites and the ability to transpose them into other hosting environments, other challenging opportunities.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF DISPLAYED/BOOK MARKED MATERIAL.

Edward Casey, The Fate of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)

                     Giving a face to place in the present, 

                     By way of the body.

Yve Lomax, Sounding The Event (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006)

                     An impossible refrain, 

                     Fortuity,

Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy, Architecture and the Visual Arts (London: MIT Press, 2007)

Modernist Ruins Filmic Archaeologies,

DRAWING SPACES.

This activity of marking out an elsewhere (the studio space) and presenting it here and now is a fundamental quality of drawing. The act of drawing is in itself a private act undertaken primarily for the artists benefit. The finalisation of the research project revolves around issues of public intimacy with art objects whilst being in public spaces. This investigation into public intimacy and the reception of contemporary art practice as an open site; complete with works completed but not yet “framed” for any given spatial or social context attempts to stage this reality. Together with supplementary material present including in some cases work in progress, this might allow the temporal space frame of an absent space the ability to create a privileged and therefore valued experience of art objects within and amongst the intimacy of their conception.

Letting the practice stage its own intimate theatre might engender more collaborate speculation and interdisciplinary workings. “Spatial Practices” envisaged practitioners from Architecture, Fine Art and Performance driven disciplines, my own research at Canterbury has attempted to orchestrate a spatio-temporal theatre of reception for this purpose.

The Architecture of Science in Art: An Anatomy Lesson, 

                      The room as the real protagonist of the film. 

Bridget Elliott, Peter Greenaway, Architecture and Allegory (London: Academy Editions, 1997)

                       On Common Ground, 

                       Allegory as Architecture.

                       (Un)Natural Histories Collecting Cultures, Crossing Limits.

Ian Buchanan, Deleuze and Space (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005)

                       The Nomadic Subject in Smooth Space, 

                       Territories and the Refrain,

The nomadic subject open to unconventional spatial orientations can make new connections in keeping with the movements of life as it unfolds. 

Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma, geography's visual culture (London: Routledge, 2000) 

Vicente Todoli, Time Zones, Recent Film and Video (London: Tate Publishing, 2005)

                    The Where of Now,

Bernard Poerksen, The Certainty of Uncertainty, Dialogues introducing Constructivism (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004)

Gerhard Richter, Zufall, The Cologne Cathedral Window (Koln: Walther Konig, 2007)

Glen Onwin, As Above So Below (Halifax: HMST, 1991) Caroline Christov, Arte Povera (London: Phaidon, 1999)

Guy Brett, Force Fields, phrases of the kinetic (London: Hayward Gallery, 2000)

The Laboratory : Spatial Practices, 

Canterbury School of Architecture. 2009

Post studio practice/social processuality

Superimposition of studio space into the main foyer of a university. The disclosure of creative practices, spatial relations entangled by the private and the public.

Lefebvre in his chapter on Spatial Architectonics makes reference to the relationships established by boundaries and the relationship between boundaries and named places. These relationships promote significant and specific conditions or features to a space. This in turn results in various kinds of space. Lefebvre states that “every social space, then, once duly demarcated and oriented, implies a superimposition of certain relations upon networks of named places.”1

It is this superimposition of space that can within it demarcate other thresholds of experiences, within an existing demarcated space that interests me.

The act of “blocking in “ the dimensions of another space onto the floor of another create a temporal junction between a host space and a site within this host, a guest. This sets-up the notion of a temporal double occupancy held by the demarcation of a boundary and a site of proposal. This basic and temporal site marking could be said to have affinity towards some sort of anthropological marking, a territory. (Lefebvre defines anthropological marking as being at the stage when demarcation and orientation begin to create place and its social reality in archaic cultures)2. This activity also has associations with nomadic and agricultural-pastoral societies as they use paths and routes as spatio­ temporal markers or determinants.

Lefebvre acknowledges that geographical space created through the body, through routes which were inscribed by means of simple linear markings. These first markings, paths and tracks drawn into the landscape would become the pores through “which without colliding would produce the establishment of places (localities made special for one reason or another).”3Within my practice drawing is used to form sites which contain visual information, evidence of temporal activities and traces of actual objects. These territories within other territories create fields from with boundaries form material relations, differences. My drawings are inside the temporality of site I have instigated and yet they propose a territory and a surface of light years which could accommodate the temporality of terrestrial space.

Interestingly Lefebvre comments “there is no stage at which ’’man” does not demarcate, beacon or sign his space, leaving traces that are both symbolic and practical.”4

1 Lefebvre. The Production of Space, (London: Blackwell, 1991) pagel93.

2 Ibid..page 192

3 Ibid., page 192. 

4 Ibid.,page 192

UCA CANTERBURY 2010.Brief outline of final realisation.

I propose to physically register a site by creating its boundary, by way of applying 50mm self adhesive tape to the main reception area at UCA Canterbury. This new space will attempt to represent the internal dimensions of the artist’s current working studio space (5.0xl2.0metres) and as such it be given a similar terrestrial orientation. If it is necessary (through issues of setting up and health safety) a contingency plan would be to crop the footprint of the space by the use of a broken detail line where required. Into the interior of this marked space objects from the working studio are to be reinstalled and where possible to match existing placements, these initial positions will be documented to allow the registration of changes to be recognised. It is envisaged that these first points of departure may well migrate as the site becomes populated by activity and the spatial dynamics of the hosting space. This intervention (the superimposed space onto and within the existing) attempts to create a spatial temporality into which a contemporary art practice will act as a context for an investigatory and performative setting in public space of a creative private practice. The intervention sets out to display the complexities of the contemporary practitioner, the research material and works completed and those that are to instigated as a direct adaptation/response to the situation and site at hand. The temporal nature of this staged work reflects issues of mobility needed by the professional practitioner to be able to set up working sites and the ability to transpose them into other hosting environments, other challenging opportunities.

Space Folds/Melts : All that is solid melts into air : Metaphors of Memory : We exist constantly reciprocating between perceptions and relations

 

All that is solid melts into air

Armature :  Memory/Personal Biographies 

The Everyday complexity of things

Saturnian Form : Lead and Library Dates

Spatiality : Space over Time

Space folds : Containing "Spatialities around historicality and sociality"

All that is solid melts into air

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,

(Poetic observation concerning the constant revolutionizing of social conditions)

Perceptions now gathering at the end of the millennium. Spatiality, Robert T. Tally Jr. 2013

Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

“What metaphor, of all those that have been discussed, best describes the memory of psychology itself’

The author Draaisma Douwe poses this question at the end of an extensive study on the nature of what might be used to give form to ideas about metaphors of memory. The use in my practice of traces, inscriptions, photographic surfaces and materials used as indexical and material memories, call me to give some sense of critical analysis to the issue of metaphor and how it might be “formed” and “utilized” in the situation of work.

The attraction of metaphors is that they bridge or “hold court” within the visual and the textual, in the physical as perhaps a object association to a situation, and in the sensibility of the poetic.

Their inherent ability to be an intermediary between a number of things , gives them a lightness, a brevity and a concise comment on a situation, they auger well as a “what remains” of an experience.

An intriguing quality of metaphors is that they are a union/relation of oppositional associations, which are realized as “go-betweens” active presentations of a specific relation or thought “placed” by the association of concrete and abstract

relations/relativities. They function by their ability to reference their “betweeness” as held open by their associative registers." There is a reference to a set of concrete relations in one situation, in order to facilitate the recognition of an analogues set of relations in another situation.”1 Metaphors are structured and formulated around abstract relations around a concrete factualness of image associations.

G. F. Beck notes that “the metaphor is an intermediary between the agencies of the sensory and the perceptual and those of the verbal and the semantic thought; it belongs neither completely to one nor the other it mediates between analogous and semantic forms of thought

In a metaphor two constituents work to create its meaning, its place of register, the topic term and the vehicle term. This topic and vehicle terminology is used by Martin and Harre' when they write “ that the topic term and the vehicle term are each the centre of a semantic field and that the interaction between these two fields enables us to produce and understand new insights.”2 This research has been further investigated and subsequently the terms structured and functional have now been applied to inform the existing relations of topic and vehicle.

These further defining terms have arisen through metaphors becoming ideally suited to “explaining and teaching theories due to their combination of image and language, and of the graphic and the abstract.”3

This ability of “metaphor” could be directed at making it site-specific to a particular set of relations, an informative teaching device, that might engender interest through its perspectival analysis.

The metaphor is in effect a vehicle of projection in as much as it can project associations of one term over that of another , granting an intermediary state given by a superimposed form over its forming relations. This transparency and its associate projection creates new forms of thought. This value/trait has been intimated by research based around “ interaction theory” presented by contemporary theorists Martin and Harre' although the fundamental theory had already been presented by I. A. Richards in 1936. Richards stated “when we use metaphor we have two thoughts active together and supported by a single word, or phrase, whose meaning is a resultant of their interaction.”4

The “essence” of metaphor is that it has the ability ( or rather one appropriates this ability) to use something with a “concrete” image in which to form relations and new forms abstracted from this originating situation. This trait creates and is resolved by a “response", giving comment and a registering of relations. The response of metaphor to a situation could be used to underline a psychological feeling or comment about place.

Another interesting feature regarding metaphor is that metaphors can display a subjectivity, they can be said to become subject to “wear and tear.”

Like all human creations metaphors are subject to wear and tear and the process of interaction between the two domains which is set in motion by a metaphor may become fainter and finally disappear.5

This interaction between “domains” that can slide and eventually fail, and in so doing become obscured , announces the arrival of the phenomenon of the “dead metaphor.” The realisation of the “dead metaphor” is that of a metaphor gradually becoming a literal expression. The metaphor and its prose becomes as it were ossified out of usage, out of the living present. On the subject of dead metaphors Draaisma remarks “ that they have lost their graphic vitality as description of human actions.” Interestingly metaphors have already as it were “been done to death” through literal representation by conceptual artists. My interest is to appropriate their ability to encapsulate differences into a relation that mediates those differences, to aid a sort of summing-up that is “placed between” and is strangely pervasive and fluid , being just held between relations that could suddenly slide or shift. Giving and creating a metaphorical attitude to accompany the experience of place.

1  G. F. Beck, The Metaphor as a mediator between Semantic and Analogic modes of thought. ( Current Anthropology 19 1978)

2  J. Martin and R. Harre', Metaphor in Science in Metaphor, Problems and Perspectives. ( Sussex 1982) 

3  Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) page 15.

4  1. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric. ( Oxford. OUP, 1936) page 93.

5  Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) page 13.

MA Project Development, Reflective Journal: Notes/Analysis/Comment drawn from previous journal entries.

29 November 2009

Photography a process/operating system that holds “Loss” to Dwell in its Detail. Place and its Ruin.

Representation.

The Photograph proposes a “site of Loss” within the continuum of place.

Re-Visit Methodologies and Project Proposal, what might be still relevant and valid, what has occurred to shift the field of perspectives. What has had a limiting effect on the practice in respect to the projects original sphere of operations. Was the project ever thought of in the terms of being “representational” of the practice or was it a device to engage and formulate spatial practices. Recent personal research and events with other proposals for 2010 firmly speculate the need to greatly enlarge the structure of the practice so as to house its diversities, the project is now seen as merely a trace of my activities but it must in some way be representational in its formulation to the practice. 

This bringing together of the various fine-art and visual-art processes present in my practice can only be accomplished through a multi-disciplinary curatorial based spatial relation for the encounter of others. By the nature of a proposal “ a working site” could be seen as an intervention into place from which material sensibilities from fine art practices are interwoven in a situation and experience of spatial relations. Into this field of material and spatial relations a performative element of the practitioner being present and theorising/working could help to create a praxis of informative encounters, which might directly and immediately be implemented into the situation of site. With all this activity and its resultant research derived from site this dialogue , a methodology of sublimation could be engaged that could render down the experience. Maybe in the form of a token of participation, a site driven metaphor, an image that re-constituents the experience and findings of the situation .Added to this gesture it might be possible to engender some sense of hospitality, a feeling that the “visitor” has become an active “interlocutor” for themselves and others, and finally that they have become placed as it were, a “guest” hosted by their own singularities.

Working in and with Theoretical Methodologies in The Visual Arts

Gathering Exploratory Notations : Performative/Speculative Spatial Inquiry

 

Time as a Structure,

I

M                                          a tool acts as a intervention, a memory into material

E

A                                           an apparatus can register directional occurrences into visual information to      form from their abstraction, their objectivity, new sensibilities within our subjectivity.

    Rose Graphs (directional analysis of occurrences) used to plot the occurrences and frequencies of           childhood cancers in and around power stations.

S

A  Working Sites as spaces of experiencing practical intimacies written into the poetic.

N 

     forming relations by registering phenomena’s that collide with the everyday

E 

     time has a duality, a fluidity, a, between, and, the rehearsal has ended, and with it the misreading or        chance is rendered corrected.

V

E  memory as scared time (Chris Marker) or Memory as the intersection of event and its structure, its        dimension of spatial possibilities.

    Information, a superimposed system of transparent relations. Actor-networks, 

    Thinking Sociologically.

N

    Time as an event

Fire-Space, “objects maintain “their” condition”. Law.

Praesentia-the Phenomena of something presented in the light of its time.

Diagrammatic re-enactments drawn as reflections/introspections of a situation. 

A Cosmology of sensibilities illustrated and staged through a predilection for materials and processes, a sort of material allotropy centred around theoretical and physical phenomena.

Cyanotypes, a photographic process that uses a transparency to render a permanent opposite when exposed to sun-light and fixed by washing in water.

Self reflectivity, the ability to cope (gain wisdom) from a new set of co-ordinates and possibilities.

We exist constantly reciprocating between perceptions and relations.

Field notebooks/journals allow and support poetic observation amidst theoretical and practical workings out.

Stillness and an open stage conceived by a lyrical exactitude between trace and material. 

A place between words and worlds.

Intimacy of the practical written up into the poetic

The writers ability “Milton” to hold a number of themes fluid at the same time.

Tentative Building/Building The Drawing : Speculative Architecture, landing sites of surface, image and texts.

 Building The Drawing

The drawing as analogue allows more subtle relations, of technique, material and process, to develop between drawing and building.

Immaterial Architecture

The Illegal Architect

Jonathan Hill

Oak Tree

Oil

Paper

Plaster

Rust

Sgratfito

Silence

Sound

Steel

Television

Weather

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

TRANSPARENCY : LITERAL AND PHENOMENAL

Colin Rowe, Robert Slutzky

Interactions of the Abstract Body

Josiah McElheny

A heuristic technique (/hjᵿˈrɪstᵻk/; Ancient Greek: εὑρίσκω, "find" or "discover"), often called simply a heuristic, is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals.

A Hut of One's Own, Ann Cline

Texts, Annotations, Foundations, Pathways, Corridors, Bookmarks, Walking, Thinking, Ramble, Cross Country, Disciplines, 

Analogies in and of sensate materials

 

Drawing Surface 

Table Fabric

Colour Palette

Timbre in Objects

Assembled Spatial Volumes/Assemblage

Photographic Collage (mise en scene/abyme)

Making Discursive : Art Practice/Praxis

Outpost Studio, performative drawing, photographic collages, gallery bench (movable)

Drawing for charting table 1.5m x2.2m

Human trace, rust/wax on paper

Material Thoughts

Marks and Residues

Process and Reading

Matter and Desire : An Erotic Ecology. Andreas Weber. 

Walking and Mapping : Artists as Cartographers. Karen O'Rouke.

Art as Contemplative Practice : Expressive Pathways to the Self. Michael A. Franklin.

 

Object Lesson

Interactive Abstract  Body (Square)

The Spatial Body (After Fontana)

Tracing Eisenman

Stan Allen

Indexical Characters 

FABRIC=MASS+ FORM

Alan Chandler

The interest in fabric formwork is in its deployment in a building process, which is faster than conventional formwork. Fabric formwork is inherently more sustainable due to the minimising of both concrete and shuttering, and more radically, allows the constructor to intervene in the process of casting even as the cast is taking place.

ReThinking Matereriality

The engagement of mind with the material world

Elizabeth DeMarrais, Chris Gosden, Colin Renfrew

The Affordances of Things

Towards a  Theory of Material Engagement

Aesthetics, Intelligence and Emotions

Relationality of Mind and Matter

Material Agency

Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach

Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris

At The Potter's Wheel : An Argument for Material Agency

We should replace our view of cognition as residing inside the potter's head, with that of cognition enacted at the potter's wheel.

The Neglected Networks of Material Agency : Artefacts, Pictures and Texts.

Material Agency as Cognitive Scaffolding

The Cognitive Life of Things

Material Engagement and the Extended Mind

Lambros Malafouris, Colin Renfrew

Minds, Things and Materiality

Michael Wheeler

Communities of Things and Objects : A Spatial Perspective

Carl Knappett 

Imagining the Cognitive Life of Things

Edwin Hutchins

Things and Their Embodied Environments

Architectures for Perception

Structuring Perception through Material Artifacts

Charles Goodwin

Ceramic Pavilion/Fired Earth Architecture

People make space, and space contains people

MATERIAL MATTERS

ARCHITECTURE AND MATERIAL PRACTICE

Katie Lloyd Thomas

PLENUMS : RETHINKING MATTER, GEOMETRY AND SUBJECTIVITY

Peg Rawes

ARCHITECTURE

IN THE AGE  OF DIVIDED REPRESENTATION 

The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production

Dalibor Vesely

The Nature of Communicative Space

Creativity in the Shadow of Modern Technology

The Rehabilitation of Fragment

Towards a Poetics of Architecture

The Projective Cast

Architecture and its Three Geometries

Robin Evans

Architects do not produce geometry, they consume it

Analysing ARCHITECTURE

Simon Unwin

Geometries of Being

Architecture as Making Frames

Space and Structure

Atelier/Glass Studio with Scriptorium

They will be schools no longer, they will be popular academies, in which neither pupils nor masters will be known, where the people will come freely to get, if they need it, free instruction, and in which, rich in their own experience, they will teach in turn many things to the professors who shall bring them knowledge which they lack.

This then will be a mutual instruction, an act of intellectual fraternity.

 

Michael Bakunin, 1870.

 

Freedom in Education/Anarchism, Colin Ward 2004.

Procedural Architecture

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

Architectural Body

Madeline Gins and Arakawa

Working Notes/Holding in Place

Interior design presented as an interactive and immersive spatial inquiry

My research and its design proposal are centred on the arts and the humanities and their ongoing function in our contemporary society. The emphasis of this inquiry is located by the spatial practices of architecture, fine art and performance. My project is a field event and symposium that would be able to host intellectual dialogues, lectures (TED) workshops, performative events and exhibitions.

I am particularly interested in the relational production of social spaces and the aesthetics of built spaces, both historical and ephemeral. The proposed use of Waverley Abbey near Farnham as a possible site and retreat for this venture is valid as it links a possible interdisciplinary territory of anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture.

The ruined site of the abbey at Waverley, near Farnham has been appropriated as a site and as a place within which to position and develop my practice. The Abbey, its buildings, and its grounds have provided a valuable source of the material evidence for thinking about hapticity and time in a pastoral setting.

The Scriptorium presents the “performativity of research” through specifically designed apparatuses and partitions. These designed components, made objects, together with annotated texts and drawings conspire to create a complex interior design, a “Place Study” staged in a niche-like space. This interior presents itself as both distinct and relational to the other projects in the MA Interiors Show. The interior presents the many manifestations of creative research that have been developed through engaging with the site.

Wayfinding/Movements through accumulated research

Running scripts, enactments, instances, involvements

Collaborative texts, complexity, emergent, discursive 

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

A Philosophy of Emptiness

Gay Watson

Artistic Emptiness

Everything flows, nothing remains.

Heraclitus

Rethinking Architecture

Neil Leach

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

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

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

Tracing Eisaenman

Plenum, juxtaposed to form/haptic values/body absences

Robert Mangold

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

Interactions of the Abstract Body

Josiah McElheny

Object Lesson/Heuristic Device

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

Space Between People

Degrees of virtualization

Mario Gerosa

Adaptive Architectural Design

Device-Apparatus

Place

Function

Adaptation

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

Immaterial Architectures

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

Herzog and De Meuron

Natural History

Exhibiting Herzog and De Meuron

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

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

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

Speculative architecture

On the aesthetics of Herzog and De Meuron

My photographs are part of my way of thinking about and imagining spaces and light, of pondering and approaching an idea. In this case, the photographs generate a way of looking at a structure that exists only in order to provoke a sensorial and intellectual experience.

Cristina Iglesias : METONYMY 2013

Working Collages

Karl Blossfeldt

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.