Refractive Phenomena : Site Circumstances, Water/Glass/Film.

 Outpost 141022

Water : A Phenomenal Lens.

Refractive Phenomena.

Void Space Water Gardens.

Steven Holl.

The haptic realm of architecture is defined by the sense of touch.

When the materiality of the details forming an architectural space become evident, the haptic realm is opened up. Sensory experience is intensified; psychological dimensions are engaged.

The psychological power of reflections overcomes the science of refraction.

As rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them, imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them, for when he does not understand he, becomes them by transforming himself into them.

Vico, New Science.

One of the tragedies of modern urban life is that a complex of urban constructions often puts us out of touch with the poetry and unpredictability of the everyday change in the weather.

Patti Smith

Baptised by the New World 

Site : Circumstance and Idea.

Phenomenal zones function life a manifold of parts, presenting the question of a whole more substantial than any of its components. 

Each challenge in architecture is unique; each has a particular site and circumstance or program, and for each to fuse sit, circumstance, and a multiplicity of phenomena, an organizing idea .. a driving concept is required.

The unity of the whole emerges from the thread that runs through the variety of parts; whether it be one discrete idea or the interrelation of several concepts.

To find a balance between the science of water and the exhilarating qualities of experience, consider the many states and transformative properties of the substance. We might consider water a 'phenomenal lens' with powers of reflection, spatial reversal, refraction, and the transformation of rays of light.

The 'void space' water gardens and the interior ceilings of the adjacent apartments are connected by reflected light from the ponds. These 'void spaces' containing three inches of water over black smooth stones from Ise, are analogous to a sacred space within the every day world of domestic urban life.

Hungate Medieval Art.

Water, Working Title.

Exhibition, St Peter Hungate, Norwich. 2023.

Sculpture, Installation, Sonic Art, Performance and Film Screenings.

The live reflection of echo and re-echo within a stone cathedral increases our awareness of the vastness, geometry and material of its space.

Water, its use in Christian rituals, baptism, confirmation, confession, ordination, matrimony and anointing of the sick.

Responding to the physicality of stone fonts as objects to hold holy water.

Objects produced according to the doctrines of the Roman Catholic church before the Reformation.

An attention to phenomenal properties of the transformation of light through material can present poetic tools for making spaces of exhilarating perceptions. Refraction phenomena produce a particular magic in architecture that is adjacent to or incorporates water.

Of Sound.

Quieting the mind

deep in the forest

water drips down

Hosha.

The brevity of a Japanese haiku poem isolates the 'thing-in-itself' of experience and perception of material and detail.

Space brings the resonance of the acoustic near to life.

John Cage.

In some European cities, the regular sound of the church bell's community call creates a psychological space. Its perceptual associations are tied to the materiality of the bell, its resonant tower, and the adjacent square. This kind of 'sound space' cannot be accurately recreated with electronic speakers.

Sound is absorbed and perceived by the entire body. A sequence of sounds can have a mesmerizing effect on the psyche.

John Cage went into an anechoic chamber over sixty years ago in order to 'hear sounds' and found that experience gave his life direction. Cage's radical and poetic experiments with sound bridged the conventional gap between musical phenomena and the physical and psychological effects of sound.

Electronic music has increased the ranges available to composers and changes in thinking have reframed sound and time.

Scripting Aural Phenomena.

The architecture of music, the structure of aural phenomena might have a graphic parallel in architectural notations; plans sections, axonometrics, etc. Many composers have used time-space notations in order to compose with irregular rhythms. Notations which allow for accidental chromatic notes, microtones, clusters of vertical bands between marked pitches all appear different from conventional notation.

Accordingly we consider a re-framing of space, light and time in architecture.

Paul Valery suggested the closeness of music and architecture, that sculpture and painting one can turn way from, but music surrounds us as does the space of architecture.

Detail : The Haptic Realm.

Today the industrial and commercial forces at work on the 'products' for architecture tend towards the synthetic; wooden casement windows are delivered with waterproof plastic vinyl coatings, metals are 'anodized' or coated with a synthetic outer finish, tiles are glazed with coloured synthetic coatings, stone is simulated as is wood grain. 

The sense of touch is dulle or canceled with these commercial industrial methods, as is the texture and essence of material and detail displaced. 

The total perception of architectural spaces depends much on the material and detail found and experienced through the haptic realm.

The texture of a silk drape, the sharp corners of cut steel, the mottled shade and shadow of rough sprayed plaster or the sound of a spoon striking a concave wooden bowl, all reveal an authentic essence which stimulates the senses.

Fields.

Diagrams of Field Conditions.

All grids are fields, but not all fields are grids. 

On of the potentials of the field is to redefine the relation between figure and ground. If  we think of the figure not as a demarcated object read against a stable field, but as an effect emerging from the field itself- as moments of intensity, as peaks or valley within a continuous field, as the figure and field become more enmeshed.

Rather than considering photography as a means to capture an instant, some artists subverted this practice to express duration in time. Sometimes through collages, sequences and superimpositions, in some cases through a single long exposure.

Photographers are exploring different methods to synthesize the fourth dimension within the bidimensional range of the frame. The results provide a wide variety of unexpected solutions, some extremely synthetic while others very fragmented, pushing further the boundaries of the practice.

Peter Zumthor : different kinds of silence

Russell Moreton : Research Journal. 2013

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/24370355922/

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’

STEPHANIE GANACHAUD JOUE L’ANGE DE LA GEOHISTOIRE

STEPHANIE GANACHAUD JOUE L'ANGE DE LA GEOHISTOIRE from Bruno Latour on Vimeo.

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.

 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, 

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.

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.