Thursday, 13 October 2022
Tuesday, 11 October 2022
Caruso St John : The Phenomenology of Construction
THE PRESENCE OF THE BUILT OBJECT IN THE WORLD
THROUGH THE MANNER IN WHICH IT IS BUILT.
Caruso St John : The Phenomenology of Construction
At the end of the
twentieth century, with late capitalism more widely accepted as the
economic model than ever before, the ideology of newness has become
transparently associated with the workings of the market. Recent
interest in airports, shopping malls and infrastructure emerges from
an idea that it is these places where the processes of the
contemporary economy are most brutally apparent. For architects to
engage in these programmes is for architecture to become a
commodified product and to be subject to the tyranny of the new.
Adam Caruso, The
Tyranny of the New.
History is the raw material of architecture.
Aldo Rossi
Originality does
not consist in making up new words that do not have the fine
character of experience, but in using existing words well. They can
be sufficient for everything.
Auguste Rodin
A radical formal strategy is one that considers
and represents the existing and the known. In this way artistic
production can critically engage with an existing situation and
contribute to an ongoing and progressive cultural discourse.
Adam Caruso, The
Tyranny of the New. Pp70-73
RADICAL FORMAL
STRATEGY
THEORY PRAXIS MAKING
DEEP ECOLOGIES OF
CONSTRUCTION
RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN:
VENACULAR STRUCTURES
and HIGH STATUS ARCHITECTURE
SPATIAL CONTINUITY:
MAKING, DWELLING
TRADITION
There is no compelling evidence as to why
architecture should reject more than 400 years of working within a
liberal arts context, nor is there compelling evidence that
architecture is any more marginal than at other times over that
period.
Adam Caruso, The
Tyranny of the New.
Continuity involves
the legacy of existing buildings produced by architects as well as
the much larger legacy of existing, vernacular structures. In trying
to connect these things, Caruso St John are part of a tradition that
includes figures as diverse as Adolf Loos, Auguste Perret, Alison and
Peter Smithson, Gunnar Asplund, Sigurd Lewerentz, Mies van der Rohe,
Roger Diener, or Hans Kollhof. These architects have all questioned
the abruptness of the radical break inherent in the formation of
orthodox modern architecture.
Eric Lapierre, Caruso
St John, The phenomenology of construction.
CONSTRUCTION
Adam Caruso on the
medieval ruins of Fountains Abbey, Yorkshire.
Today the nuances of
language that make up these architectures only exist as an
intellectual discourse and do not operate at the emotional level that
would have engaged the original inhabitants, or audiences of these
buildings. And yet we are still emotionally affected by these
structures. Denied access to the specific culture of their
iconography. We respond, at a more visceral level, to the more
general culture of their construction. When this formal language
ceases to be novel, a building becomes part of a more normative
condition, the condition of not ‘being new’ and its qualities
increasingly emerge from the more long-standing and stable world of
construction.
Adam Caruso, Towards
an Ontology of Construction, Knitting Weaving Pressing 2002
By ceasing to be new,
a building attains a more ‘normal’ condition, it becomes finally
more banal, from a viewpoint that has much in common with Perret’s
famous aphorism on ‘a work that would seem to have always existed’.
AFFECT SPACE POLITICS
: NIGEL THRIFT
REVERBERATIONS :
BACHELARD
RUINS : MARC AUGE
REFRAINS : AFFECT
READER
SPACES OF ENCOUNTER :
RE-DISCOVERY OF SPACE
CLAY : INNERNESS,
CRAFTED FROM THE VALLEY/DWELLING/SITUATION
CONSTRUCTION AS THE
APPLICATION OF MATTER
PHENOMENOLOGY vs.
CONSTRUCTIONAL truth
THE QUESTION OF
RUINS or the differences between the architectural ideologies of
Auguste Perret and Caruso St John.
Beautiful architecture
makes beautiful ruins, affirms Perret, since in ruins, only the
structure remains visible.
When Adam Caruso observes the ruins of Fountains
Abbey, he is concerned with physical matter.
The ruined state of the buildings serves to
exaggerate the presence of material. The feeling is that of an
enormous weight drawn out of the ground into the volume of the valley
and held in place by a matrix of structure whose schema is described
by the pattern of stone joints.
Adam Caruso, Towards
an Ontology of Construction, Knitting Weaving Pressing 2002
The essential
change in perspective between Perret and Caruso St John is that of a
construction as structure to a construction that is the
application of matter. Perret
observes the organic dimension of buildings from a distance that
makes the structural framework’s overall logic intelligible.
Caruso regards
buildings much more closely, at a distance/closeness that enables him
to grasp their tactile dimension: he looks at them with his hands. In
Fountains Abbey, it is the brickwork joints that are essential; on
the rear façade of his Van Nelle factory building, it is the
micro-topography of the façade.
Luis Moreno Mansilla
remarks that buildings by Sigurd Lewerentz, one of Caruso St John’s
main inspirations, can only be seen close up.
For Caruso St John, construction does not refer to
a constructional technique, nor to the coherence of its application
as a technique, but rather the presence of the built object through
the manner in which it is built.
Interestingly Perret’s
positivist and absolute approach belongs to a mindset that excludes
all form of doubt or ambiguity. To this approach, Caruso St John
propose a phenomenological approach in which construction frees
itself from pure technological logic to find meaning, both inherent
and more relativist, in the field of architecture itself.
INNERNESS/AFFECT : THE
CHANGE OF PERSPECTIVES
SURFACES, Juxtaposed
without articulation.
QUESTIONING STRUCTURAL
LOGIC, by playfully obscuring it.
INCREASING THE BUILDINGS PHENOMENOLOGICAL AND
PERSPECTIVE COMPLEXITY
CONSTRUCTIVE
DIALOGUES/CLADDINGS Through CRAFT, PROXIMITY, INTIMACY and SITUATION.
The depth of the
exposed beams in the exhibition areas is not proportional to their
respective spans, but to the overall heights of the rooms in
question. Walls with claddings of vertical timber boards alternate
with bare concrete walls that seem to have been cast in shuttering
identical to the timber cladding. These two surfaces are sometimes
juxtaposed, without articulation, and question structural logic by
obscuring it, thereby increasing the building’s phenomenological
and perspective complexity.
New Art Gallery,
Walsall. Caruso St John
The load bearing walls
appear to be folded along the complex contours of the non-orthogonal
site. At the corners, bricks are cut and bonded together with resin
to adapt to the geometry, while maintaining the size of standard
bricks. Although they are load bearing, these walls become surfaces
that have tactile and phenomenological qualities as well as being
constructed surfaces with real architectonic weight.
The Brick House,
London, Caruso St John
ATMOSPHERE: CLADDINGS
and ARCHITECTONICS.
CLADDINGS and their
ability/capacity to create ATMOSPHERES
AESTHETICS AND
SUBJECTIVITY: KANT to NIETZSCHE ( Andrew Bowie)
The artist, the real architect, has firstly the
feeling of the effect that he wants to produce, and then he imagines
the spaces that he has to create. The effect that he wants to create
on the beholder, will come from the material and its form.
Adolf Loos
It is through the splendour of truth that the
building attains beauty. The truth is in everything that has the
honour and task to carry or to protect. He who hides a pole makes a
mistake. He who makes a false pole makes a crime.
Auguste Perret
The originality of
Caruso St John’s work lies the fact that this atmosphere is created
by claddings that have a strong architectonic character. As opposed
to Loos, they use paint very rarely, and prefer to use construction
materials in the traditional sense of the term: brick, concrete and
wood. They do so in order to continue to create architecture, not as
a spectacle, but by merging two traditions –that of Perret’s
structural rationalism and that of Loos’s claddings –to define an
architecture that speaks to us of the contemporary world in a truly
critical manner.
Eric Lapierre, Caruso St John, The phenomenology
of construction.
Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity.
Atmospheric ecologies/architecting through situated learning.
PROXIMITY OF SPACE
INTIMACIES IN SOCIAL SPACES
SCRIPTORIUM
THREE STAGE METHODOLOGY (Kikutake) Mitsuo Taketani
KA ‘ESSENCE’
KATA ‘SUBSTANCE’
KATACHI ‘PHENOMENON’
Characteristics of an architect
CHI ‘BLOOD’
TACHI ‘TEMPERAMENT’
KATACHI ‘EMBODIMENT’
Monday, 3 October 2022
Photograms : Without the agency of time and light, there is no record.
Photogram of an allium using the historical process of cyanotype. The stilled nature of the image is caused through its contact with the paper and the exposing sunlight over time. Photographic processes such as cyanotype yield these sorts of veiled images, manifested from the revelation captured within the photograph itself.
Without the agency of time and light, there is no record.
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Thursday, 15 September 2022
Outpost 150922
Drawing Space.
The Material Discursive.
Figurative Configurations/Bodies and Landscapes.
Jenny Saville.
Intimate Drawings
Wall Scratchings
Situatedness of intra-activities.
A matrix and an archive.
It was the crucible of his art, and one of the most hauntingly eloquent spaces an artist has ever surrounded himself with.
In Giacometti's Studio.
The hermit's cave.
The alchemist's cell.
The chemist's laboratory.
Correlations do not become real, relational until the signals arrive.
Becoming Real.
The Exchange of Signals.
Framing Entanglements.
The Concretization of the Colour.
Nothing travels instantaneously and an exchange of signals is an interaction, where new elements of reality come about.
The joint properties of two objects exist only in relation to a third.
Everything that manifests itself does so in relation to something, a correlation between two objects is a property of the two objects and like all properties it exists it exists, is existential only in relation to a further third object.
Entanglement is not a dance for two partners, it is a dance for three.
Entanglement is none other than the external perspective on the very relations that weave reality.
The manifestation of one object to another in the course of an interaction in which properties of the object become actual.
Working notes/fragments.
Helgoland, Carlo Rovelli.
Lead label reads/stamped with “dwelling is always dwelling in nearness, Heidegger”.
Counterpoints/Contrapuntal Movements.
ENMESHED EXPERIENCES
WORKING WITH DOUBT
DURATION
THE FLUX OF A VECTOR FIELD
PARALLAX.
The existence/trace/invisibility/of a third object that interacts with both the systems is necessary to give reality to the correlations.
Resultants that incorporate the friction/asperities of their trajectories through medium/material.
Building as a body, a battleground of invisible forces.
The spine is the central elevator. The structure is a tube of concrete covered with insulation and tarred black wood boards.
Steven Holl.
Knut Hamsun Museum, Hamarey, Norway. 1996
Monumental sculptures take the form of vast, spectral structures built from corroded, sinewy metals and disintegrating found objects.
He seeks inspiration from sources that speak to the expansive, cyclical nature of the universe.
Kiefer looks to Norse mythology, Hebrew folklore, alchemy and theoretical physics to build dense imagery that is too often interpreted as simply apocalyptic.
While some might see wastelands and abject destruction, Kiefer sees vitality and resurrection. This attitude extends to the physical properties of his paintings and sculptures.
He embraces the ravages of time, while others might strive to suspend it in an effort to preserve a moment of imperceptible genius. Instead, his art buckles and shifts, constantly evolving and reforming under the burden of its own existence.
Artists on art, Holly Black. 2021
Sky Correlations
Cloud Space.
Particle Speculations
Seed Dispersal
Panspermia
Granular Gardens
Third Spaces
Spatial Vectors/Constellations.
Observational Blueprints/Apparatuses.
Pierced Constellations.
Vectors for Entanglements.
Spatial Agency.
Sunlight Circulations.
Daylight Drawings/New Worlds.
The Spab Magazine
Autumn 2022.
The Living and the Dead, 2017-18.
I am not interested in conservation.
If something falls down, it has meaning.
Anselm Kiefer.
Organism, Person, Environment.
Bioscleave, Architectural Body, Gins, Arakawa.
Time as experienced duration is relative to an individual and to a space.
Constantin Brancusi's studio and Endless Column, fabricated as a timepiece, where the finite time of place and culture is counterposed to infinity.
Visual substance, causal doing, investigating, agency, matter, phenomena, material discursive, iterative, creative, apparatuses, intra-activity, performativity, bodies that matter,
Monday, 5 September 2022
Visual Substance : Inter-Subjective Encounters
Outpost 090222
Architectural Body/Procedural Architecture
Organism/Person/Environment
Earth, House, Hold, Dwelling Places.
Unlike the sense of sight or hearing, only the sense of touch can discern space and time at once.
The skin as the harbourer of a subjects sense of touch.
Skin/Subjectivity becomes as flesh a connective tissue which both unites and divides.
The skin can judge time less well than the ear, and space less well than the eye, but it is skin alone that combines the spatial and temporal dimensions.
Maternal Skin/Subject Formation, Anzieu.
A Field in England : On the nature of Photography.
Between Art and Information.
Brought to Light : Photography and the Invisible.
The Visible/Invisibility between the potential of things.
The Photograph and The Lacanian Mirror.
In which identity is constantly shored up and broken down, but also as a persistent space invested with the paradoxical qualities of intimacy and alienation, of proximity and utter detachment all through which an offer of an encounter is held out in invitation.
Inter-Subjective Encounters, a space in which the subjectivities of the artist and the spectator might meet and mingle.
The skin is the surface through which self and other are mediated.
The mutuality of touch itself is echoed by the skins structure, it both touches and is touched and this duality is reflected in the way the skins surface is exposed to the outside world, whilst also protecting and containing the unseen interiority of the body.
Harriet Katherine Riches, 2004.
Light and Spaces of Intersubjectivity.
Tactile Light.
The photograph holds out the promise of an encounter through its carnal medium.
For Riches, the self-representational photograph becomes a kind of veil or mask, a displaced surface whose skin-like relationship to the subject is always suspended, and perpetually deferred. It frames a space of contact and a fantasy of union with the original subject, the photograph's skin-like quality also enables it to be imagined as an inter-subjective space of exchange.
Light creates the spatiality/transitions that passes beyond subject/object relationships.
Skin/Surface/Subjectivity : Movements in thinking through Spatial Agency
Skin becomes a site of symbolic acts of aggression/gesture.
Surfaces of suggested pain/experience through which subjectivity is created.
Conduits of colour specificities and counterpoints
Relationscapes : Movements, created through colour temperature and spatial contact.
The phenomena of things being brought into perception/focus.
Through a body every colour creates movement and has its own/creates its own perspective/its mapping/layering/extension of spatial temporal material.
Analogies/Difference : Spaces created through mimesis,wavelengths intermingling with the spatial.
Glass/Lead/Filtered Light.
Glass Slide/Subjectivities brought into the light
Colour Subjectivities, the appearance/experience of mattering material.
Friday, 2 September 2022
Some approaches and interpretations of phenomenology in architecture.
Outpost 020922
Perceptual Experience.
On The Nature of Things.
The notion of specific agential intra-actions in architectural practice.
Thingification, the turning of relations into things, entities, relata, all infects much of the way we understand the world and our relationship to it.
Karen Barad sees reality composed of intra-acting elements which together make up a phenomena.
Making Use of Useful Correlations/Meaningful Information.
The actor of this process is not a subject distinct from phenomenal reality outside it, nor any transcendent point of view, rather it is a portion of that reality itself.
Our discourse on reality is itself part of that reality.
The radical questioning of our mental maps of reality.
Lines of thought that take inspiration from, or rooted in quantum physics.
Karen Barad's utilization of the ideas of Niels Bohr.
Physics seemed to me the place where the weave between the structure of reality and the structure of thought was closest, the place where this intertwinement was subject to the incandescent test of continuous evolution.
Helgoland.
Carlo Rovelli.
In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty explores being as it resides in the perceptual situatedness of the body-subject into the world.
When the body-subject gains access into the world through perception, the world becomes what we perceive.
Perception is considered as the fundamental act that enables human beings to inhabit space and time.
Reality is not composed of things in themselves or things behind phenomena,
but things in phenomena.
For Steven Holl, the intertwining of idea and phenomena occurs with the realization of a building as the means for materialization of the idea-force.
For Merleau-Ponty idea is the invisible of this world which inhabits this world, sustains it and renders it visible.
Holl is interested in the phenomenal nature of the idea, in his search for connecting the phenomenal properties with conceptual strategy.
According to Bohr, the primary epistemological unit is not independent objects with inherent boundaries and properties but rather phenomena.
Phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting components.
Phenomena are produced through agential intra-actions of multiple apparatuses of bodily production.
Things in phenomena/agential intra action
Steven Holl points out a path of passage in architecture that leads from the abstract to the concrete, the unformed to the formed. In this architectural journey the idea-force, phenomenal properties and the site-force interact with each other. This interaction begins 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.
The Visible and The Invisible.
Phenomenology of Perception.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Posthumanist Performativity.
Towards an understanding of how matter comes to matter.
Karen Barad.
A Living Room For The City : V&A Dundee.
Kengo Kuma, Maurizio Mucciola.
Parallax
Some approaches and interpretations of phenomenology in architecture.
Steven Holl.
Saturday, 20 August 2022
Lightness/Synthesis/Solitude
Outpost 190822
LIGHTNESS
QUICKNESS
EXACTITUDE
VISIBILITY
MULTIPLICITY
Six Memos for The Next Millennium.
Italo Calvino, 1992.
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The difference between the first versions I read and the final ones lies in structure, not content.
Calvino wanted to call the sixth lecture 'consistency' and he planned to write it in Cambridge.
I found the others, all in perfect order, in the Italian original, on his writing desk ready to be put into his suitcase.
Esther Calvino.
The Drought.
J.G. Ballard.
Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts what ruins are in the realm of things.
Walter Benjamin on the origin of German Tragic Drama.
Photographic ruins an amalgam/agency of what remains.
Brown and Blue.
A Field in England.
Cyanotype material on canvas with iron pigment.
Developing a spatial serenity/synthesis/synergy.
This amalgam of colour with various substances demonstrates the change and transformation of the material world, which can be interpreted as essentially an alchemistic procedure.
The goal of such procedures is ultimately to resolve the material object into its spiritual substance.
Yves Klein.
Beuys Brown and Klein Blue.
Magdalena Broska.
Air and Dreams.
An essay on the imagination of movement.
Gaston Bachelard.
Shotesham, site based inquiry,studio practice.
Spatial registers around the corporeal and the transcendental.
Ruin its relation to time.
Fragment as ruin and on melancholia as an attitude of retrospective contemplation.
Dialectics at a standstill, a moment where the past is recognized in the present as a ruin that was once desired, allowing allegory to be understood, felt as a contemplative calm, an equilibrium in the becoming and wrapping nowness of the self/situation.
Dialectical thinking involves the clarification of ideas through discussion and contradiction.
What remains after the process of dialectical thinking?
An initial thesis is opposed by an antithesis, then resolved through a synthesis of the two terms, which can in turn become a new thesis.
Objects/inclusions for painting with/layered transitions and movements.
Holga 120WPC, f135.
Ilford Delta 100/8 exposures 92x55mm.
The Gaze of Orpheus.
Maurice Blanchot.
The Essential Solitude
In the solitude of the work, we see a more essential solitude, a self communion.
MULTIPLICITY
The work grew denser and denser from the inside through its own organic vitality.
For Musil, knowledge is the awareness of the incompatibility of two opposite polarities. One of these he calls exactitude or at other times mathematics, pure spirit, or even the military mentality, while the other he calls soul, or irrationality, humanity, chaos.
Everything he knows or thinks he deposits in an encyclopedic book that he tries to keep in the form of a novel, but its structure continually changes; it comes to pieces in his hands.
The result is that not only does he never manage to finish the novel, but he never succeeds in deciding on its general outlines or how to contain the enormous mass of material within set limits.
The network that links all things is also Proust's theme, but in him this net is composed of points in space-time occupied in succession by everyone, which brings about an infinite multiplication of the dimensions of space and time.
The world expands until it can no longer be grasped, and knowledge, for Proust, is attained by suffering this intangibility. In this sense a typical experience of knowledge is the jealousy felt by the narrator for Albertine.
It is the extension of that being to all the points in space and time that it has occupied and will occupy.
But we cannot touch all these points. If only they were indicated to us, we might perhaps contrive to reach out to them. But we grope for them without finding them. Hence mistrust, jealousy, persecutions. We waste precious time on absurd clues and pass by the truth without suspecting it.
Remembrance of Things Past : The Captive.
Infra-ordinary.
Species of Spaces
We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep.
But where is our life?
Where is our body?
Where is our space?
Georges Perec.
CHORA : trace/mark/map/body
The drama of encountering space.
Recombinant Poetics via Interventions.
Thinking about temporal issues through visual, material and spatial registers.
Concerned with artworks and architectural projects that reconfigure the temporality of sites, repositioning the relationship of the past and the present in a number of different ways.
Allegory, Montage, Dialectical Image.
Between Art and Architecture.
Jane Rendell.
Performativity/Drama of Residency
Transient readings and encounters.
Other Enactments,Dialogues,Relationalities.
Sites of evidence/knowledge and understanding.
The scheme should incorporate both careful repair of existing fabric and a significant element of new construction in a contemporary design.
SPAB, design competition.
We are not calling for a new disordered architecture to match the disorder of culture; this would only affirm the chaotic.
Rather, we propose experiments in search of new orders, projections of new relationships.
We do not wish to transpose our study into a system or method.
The energy inherent in opening up relationships presents us with a continuity of ordering that compels refection.
Steven Holl.
Correlational Programming, Parallax.
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