Immaterial Architectures : Raveningham Pavilion and The Architecture of Natural Light

Christopher Wilmarth ; Poetics/Duality of Light and gravity

Other Architecture

Constructing Metaphysical Space

Wilmarth's art reveals his essential concern with the mystical and physical properties of light, especially the ways in which light evokes reverie and generates sensations of space and containment.

The Architecture of Natural Light : Henry Plummer

EVANESCENCE

Orchestration of light to mutate through time

Intensity and integrity of Wilmarth's practice/vision.

PROCESSION

Choreography of light/moving eye

VEILS OF GLASS

Refraction of light/diaphanous film

Wilmarth made possibly his strongest, most beautiful works on paper, exploring a new level of expression while retaining continuity with past work.

ATOMIZATION

Sifting of light/through a porous screen

These drawings also contain allusions to the human presence. Their haunting, foreboding quality is prefigured in the grave, austere tones of some of the glass and steel structures.

CANALIZATION

Channelling of light/through a hollow mass

The duality of light and shadow and contrasts between abstraction and representation continue to be central concerns in his final drawings.

ATMOSPHERIC SILENCE

Suffusion of light with a unified mood

Wilmarth's sculptures from the early 1980's are influenced by the poetry of Stephane Mallarme.To affirm Mallarme's emphasis on the spiritual, the artist used a simple ovoid form, evoking a multitude of symbols, including the human head. These ovoids were made of blown glass, which Wilmarth viewed as "frozen breath". The artist pursued this figurative impulse into the mid 1980s, combining the anthropomorphic ovoid shapes with the larger abstract forms of his earlier sculpture.

LUMINESCENCE

Materialization of light in physical matter

Wilmarth composed with planes of delicate colour and light, placing plates of blackened steel behind translucent sheets of etched glass imbued with a luminous, greenish cast.

"He employed a painterly technique that emphasized the tactility and fichness of his materials, which like an alchemist he persistently sought to transform. He continually examined the concept of duality: contrasts between light and shadow, transparency and opacity, heaviness and weightlessness, materiality  and ethereality, form and spirit are repeatedly presented; the synthesis of geometric with organic forms, the range between abstraction and representation are constantly explored."

Laura Rosenstock, catalogue essay.

Paintings, spatial field grounds, layered paint and paper with photographic inclusions.

 Outpost 080722

Paintings, spatial field grounds, layered paint and paper with photographic inclusions.

Output of Artists' Studios

Vital space for production, presentation, connection and exchange.

The cyanotype  process in contemporary art practice.

Cyanotype Collages, Karl Blossfeldt

Cyanotype canvas, yellow ochre, sun mappings, spatial space/time forms, apparatuses and diagrams.

Harleston drawing/research, access to archive material.

Parallax, Steven Holl.

Enmeshed Experience

A complex interlocking of time, light, material, and detail creates the cinematic whole wherein we can no longer distinguish individual elements.

Filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky speaks of cinematic enmeshing in his description of a scene from Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai. A medieval Japanese village. A fight is going on between some horsemen and the samurai who are on foot. It is pouring rain; there is mud everywhere. The samurai wears an ancient Japanese garment, which leaves more of the leg bare, and their arms are plastered in mud. And, when one samurai falls down dead, we see the rain washing away the mud and his leg becoming white, as white as marble. 

Enric Ruiz-Geli. Cloud 9 Architects.

Building As Prototype.

In the case of a practice like Cloud 9, driven as it is by inventing, making and testing via the evolving prototype, its buildings are never just a pavilion, a case study, a prototype or even a 'really nice sculpture': they are all of them.

Formwork/Prefabricated Coffers/Interior Surface/Exterior Substrate.

An architectural practice driven by the the act of making in which the prototype has a fundamental role in testing performance and performativity for the user.

On-site prototypes, not modelling or mock-ups that just represent design issues, but prototypes that develop with fabricators and builders to become the 'final prototype' the completed building.

Case Study House/Pavilion 3

Research Invention/Patenting.

A prototype is something between a patent and the user.

Realizing The Physical Prototype

Prototyping Performance

Prototyping Through Subtraction

Virtual Prototyping

Distinguishing between models and prototypes by attributing to each of them different communication tasks.

Models are a means of visually communicating concepts among the design team, whereas prototypes are for communicating performance as well as helping to envisage and test new ideas.

Mock-ups keep the designer from having a meaningful dialogue with the process of designing-through-making.

Architectural students are beginning to think of new ways of working, including much greater integration between off-site fabrication and on-site assembly.

DSC_6111 Spatial Drawing/Speculative Site

 BOUNDARIES AND JUNCTION POINTS

Lefebvre, The Production of Space.

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) page 193.

2 Ibid.,page 192.

3 Ibid.,page 192.

4 Ibid.,page 192.

Intertwined Media/Modalities/Architectures : Idea, Space, Materials

Idea is, the invisible of this world, which inhabits this world, sustains it, and renders it visible

Merleau Ponty

For Steven Holl, the intertwining of idea and phenomena occurs with the realization of a building as the means for the materialization of the idea force

A methodology of connecting phenomenal properties with a conceptual strategy

Responds to every project by re-evaluating the physical, cultural, historical references of the site-time or program, through which he achieves a 'limited concept' that establishes an order, a field of inquiry, a limited principle for each architectural design process 

As the body-subject is perceptually situated into the world by inhabiting space and time, a building is rooted into a specific site and situated by inhabiting, 'the visible and invisible of the site and situation'

By locating the body, 'at the very essence of our being and our spatial perception' Holl redefines architectural space as perceived space with reference to the perceiving-body-subject

Steven Holl uses 'parallax' as an experiential tool as well as a design tool in which architectural space is redefined with reference to the moving body's constantly changing spatial perceptions

Merleau Ponty's main thesis that phenomenology has potential to put the essences back into existence by re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world through the realm of perceptual experiences drives Steven Holl to search for vitalizing these essences through the experiences of architectural forms, spaces, materials, light and colour

Intellectual and Phenomenal

Philosophical Inquiry

Interplays in his thinking on and making of architecture

Utility/Interpretation

Bachelard's Poetics of Space, explores the essence of being as it resides in the perceptual situadedness of the body-subject into the world

Perception fundamentally 'acts' enabling human beings to inhabit space and time

When the body-subject gains access into the world through perception, the world becomes, what we perceive

Architecture

That which begins as an interaction with the formation of an abstract idea, the formation of a concept out of this idea and its transformation into a material, a spatial and formal reality on a physical site

Creating the experiential power of architecture

Intertwining, idea-space-material

Anchoring, physics and metaphysics of site

A path of passage in architecture that leads from the abstract to the concrete, the unformed to the formed. An architectural journey in which the idea-force, phenomenal properties and the site force interact with each other

Tentative Building Profiles : Speculative landing sites of surface, image and texts.

 

Tentative Building Profiles : Speculative landing sites of surface, image and texts.

5

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

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

Camouflage

Neil Leach

For Benjamin, the twentieth century is an age of alienation. Human beings are no longer 'cocooned' within their dwelling spaces. Architectural spaces are no longer reflections of the human spirit. Something has been lost.

Mimesis, 19.

New Concepts of Architecture

Existence, Space and Architecture

Christian Norberg-Schulz

A child 'concretizes' its existential space.

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

Building The Drawing

The Illegal Architect

Immaterial Architecture

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.

Jonathan Hill

Index of immaterial architectures

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

Without opposition nothing is revealed,

no image appears in a clear mirror

if one side is not darkened

Jacob Bohme, De tribus principii (1619)

Reflections on a photographic medium

Memorial to the Unknown Photographer

Thomas Ruff's Newspaper Photos

Valeria Liebermann

Working Collages

Karl Blossfeldt

Anti Object

We are composed of matter and live in the midst of matter. Our objective should not be to renounce matter, but to search for a form of matter other than objects. What that form is called architecture, gardens, technology is not important. 

Kengo Kuma

Experimental Photography

 

Intermedia : Articulating Sensory Thought. Yard and Metre Event

 Cyanotype Project/Poetry Reading : Winchester College

Shroud

Richard Stillman

Yard and Metre Event, Winchester

As the marks resonated, did they sound true? 

Could we tolerate margins of error or latitude? 

Is there strength in that built by blue ink?

It is hard to see without certainty.

Why have they flown, gathered, shrouded? 

Is the date significant? A memorial?

Or is it white noise reverberating, 

striking parallels, refusing focus, insisting?

The shape of the cross is still distinct

but opening out, refusing definition,

never quite caught as an intention, 

pinned on dimensions it wants to refuse.

Cyanotype from a site drawing, Space for Peace, Winchester Cathedral 2011.

When objects or atmospheres collide energy is transferred, a new force may be created. And, as forensic scientists can attest, when objects touch they exchange traces, each leaves something of itself with the other.

This is why artists enjoy collaborating. Working with another artist can give a jolt of inspiration, a spark of creative thinking, a surge of new skill, the stimulus for a new work. And the experience will leave its mark in some way on each individual’s practice.

The specific ‘collision’ may also result in a work which has its own integrity, which does not belong’ to either party and where their particular contributions merge indistinguishably - in effect fusion takes place.

This is the thinking behind 10 days | Creative Collisions and for The Yard artists  and Hyde Writers it was the ideal excuse to come together, to let the shockwaves flow and see what new possibilities emerged. As with all the best creative practice, in science or in art, this has been an experiment, it involved risk, trust and open minds. Whether or not the outcomes are fully resolved they will be filled with potential - and with potency.

Stephen Boyce

The Hyde Writers

The writers  revelled in a close engagement with artists  and their work. Rather than respond to emailed images, the writers could immerse themselves in the artist’s world. Writers  could examine the artist’s  studio space, watch the artist working and feel with their own hands  the materials  in use. They  could smell the turpentine, feel clay under their nails  and trail their fingers  over the rippling textures of paintings. Some writers took artists’ work home, so that they could live with the work. Naturally some artists provided a response to the writer’s work and the non-verbal feedback was unusual and exciting.

Writers  faced a dilemma over which aspect of an artist to focus  on. Some writers  found inspiration in the personality of an artist and others were entranced by a part of the artist’s  process. The art itself, of course provided a rich source of creativity. Writers  found that the artists’ studios  and individual objects  within them were inspiring. A fractured shell of a first world war helmet might suggest several stories. Writers  could see familiar techniques, such as  collage being used by  the artists, but they  could also understand the strange dictatorship imposed by  physical materials. The materials  are often tricky  things  that impose their own rules  and can bring uncontrollability  into a process.

It was  an experience that changed the writers. For ever afterwards a small part of us will be noticing the world from a different viewpoint, such as  that of a painter or a sculptor.

Hugh Greasley

The Hyde Writers are a group of poets, novelists, script and short story writers  who meet every  first and third Monday  in the Hyde Tavern, Winchester.

Founded in 2007, the group aims to produce high quality, challenging writing across a diverse range of genres.

The group acts as a workshop to facilitate the development of an individual writer’s works through rigorous yet supportive critical comment

Our members  include prize winning novelists  and short story  writers, published poets and broadcasters, as well as young writers developing their craft.

The Yard Artists

When the studio management group discussed how to represent The Yard in 10 days Creative Collisions, we could not have possibly  envisaged the quality  and ambition of the project. Several months  later, following a successful proposal, speed dating event and BBQ, two thriving creative communities  in Winchester have collaborated, partnering artist with writer, and produced twenty  six  ‘creative collisions’ of new and innovative work. These projects  have been prepared for an evening of projection, performance and poetry  at Winchester College.

As  a collective, Yard and Metre fuses  traditional with contemporary, the analytical with the intuitive, the tangible with the abstract, in a collision of observation and enquiry. The breadth of subject and concept, as well as  the standard of work  produced, is  testament to the dedication and enthusiasm of those participating in the project.

Thanks  to  Beatrix  Kovacs,  this  beautifully  designed  publication  documents  the  collaboration  between The Yard artists and Hyde Writers and pays tribute to the significance of the event.

Jane Price

The Yard is a working studio environment in Wharf Hill, Winchester, established in 2007 by a group of local artists with the assistance of Winchester City Council. It provides affordable studio space within a vibrant, supportive community for up to twenty five artists and aims to promote contemporary fine art in the Winchester district

Cyanotype from a site drawing, Space for Peace, Winchester Cathedral 2011.

Studio Practices : Matter/Material/Making , thinking with flux and mutuality.

 

DSC_5566 Thomas Ruff/Linnaeus Tripe, V&A London.