Friday, 18 August 2023

Violence of Architecture : Bodies Violating Space/Space Violating Bodies.

 Outpost 170823


The Movement of Bodies in the Space of Architecture.

White Cubes/Art Museums/Architectures of  Ritualized Display.


Violence of Architecture.

Bodies Violating Space/Space Violating Bodies.












Any relationship between a building and its users is one of violence, for any use means the intrusion  of a human body into a given space, the intrusion of one order into another. This intrusion is inherent in the idea of architecture; any reduction of architecture to its spaces at the expense of its events is as simplistic as the reduction of architecture to its facades.


By 'violence,' I do not mean the brutality that destroys physical or emotional integrity but a metaphor for the intensity of a relationship between individuals and their surrounding spaces.


Bodies carve all sorts of new and unexpected spaces, through fluid or erratic motions. Architecture, then, is only an organism engaged in constant intercourse with users, those bodies rush against the carefully established rules of architectural thought. No wonder the human body has always been suspect in architecture: it has always set limits to the most extreme architectural ambitions. The body disturbs the purity of architectural order. It is equivalent to a dangerous prohibition.


Spaces are qualified by actions just as actions are qualified by spaces. One does not trigger the other; they exist independently. Only when they intersect do they affect one another. The same occurs in architecture: the event is altered by each new space. And vice versa: by ascribing to a given, supposedly 'autonomous' space a contradictory program, the space attains new levels of meaning. Event and space do not merge but affect one another.


When spaces and programs are largely independent of one another, one observes a strategy of indifference in which architectural considerations do not depend on utilitarian ones, in which space has one logic and events another.


A ritual implies a near-frozen relationship between action and space. It institutes a new order after the disorder of the original event. When it becomes necessary to mediate tension and fix it by custom, then no single fragment must escape attention. Nothing strange and unexpected must happen. Control must be absolute. 

Bernard Tschumi.



Everyday Life/Spatial Intimacy.

The original, spontaneous interaction of the body with a space is often purified by ritual.



Concerned with the way art museums offer up values and beliefs.

Civilizing Rituals/Inside Public Art Museums.

Carol Duncan.


Art always risks the plurality its iterations, that they can become colonized, immobilized and arrested within dominant belief structures. It is always the plurality alive in the art work that always risks being overtaken by the forces of encounter it invites.

Erin Manning, Relationscapes.


The Diagram/Drawing of the Work

In-Gathers the Works Feeling.


The Dreaming's, potential to create new kinds of futures in the present.

Making works/drawings that resonate/openings into the indeterminacy of experience.

Allowing the workings of art to facilitate the opening of the present to its potential for experiential complexity through the ontogenetic plurality of sense(s). 

Napangardi's work activates the Dreaming's potential, becoming both a technology of the future and a technique for the present.

Erin Manning/Dreaming's paintings by Napangardi.



The Final Act/Fact in the Work of Art.

Landing Sites, we land into the focus of an awareness that becomes with us.


The Decision of Emphasis is how the work satisfies its becoming, this satisfaction is the present finality of its current iteration.

Alfred North Whitehead.


Creating art-work that remains open to an infinity of potential evocations.



Feeling Drawing/Spatial Experience.

Indexical Traces/Decarcations/Materiality/Media

The flow of time in the event/duration of drawing.


Figuring it out, drawings/diagrams/lines/paths of sensory inquiry.

How we feel things/phenomenology.

Uncovering unconscious things/psychoanalysis. 


Life Drawings/Propositions with/for the human body.

What the ecology of the drawings show, what is hidden, seeing naked or nude.


Naked in Norwich.

Undercroft.


Space violating bodies : Architectures of Display/Ritual/Violence.

General Ritual Features of Art Museums.


Firstly, the achievement of a marked of 'liminal' zone of time and space in which visitors, removed from the concerns of their daily, practical lives, open themselves to a different quality of experience.


Secondarily, the organization of the museum setting as a kind  of script or scenario which visitors perform. Carol Duncan has argued that western concepts of the aesthetic experience, generally taken as the art museum's raison d' etre, match up rather closely to the kind of rationales often given  for traditional rituals (enlightenment, revelation, spiritual equilibrium or rejuvenation).


In the liminal space of the museum, everything, and sometimes anything, may become art,including fire extinguishers, thermostats, and humidity gauges, which when isolated on a wall and looked through the aesthetizing lens of museum space, can appear if only for a mistaken moment, every bit as interesting as some of the intended-as-art works on display, which in any case do not always look very different.


Circumstances are everything.

Notes on the making of a conditional art.

Robert Irwin.


Art is primarily a situation.

Robert Morris. 


Like everything else in life, art is not defined by its physical description, its formal qualities or even its conceptual foundation, circumstances are everything. Something could be art or it could not be art, it all depends on the situation.


Bernard Tschumi agues that architecture is never autonomous, never pure form, not a matter of style and cannot be reduced to a language. He opposes an over-rated notion of architectural form, and hopes to reinstate the term function and more particularly, to re inscribe the movement of bodies in space, together with the actions and events that take place within the social and political realm of architecture. In Architecture and Disjunction he refuses the simplistic relation by which form follows function, or use, or socioeconomics. In contrast, he argues that in contemporary urban society, any cause-and-effect relationship between form, use, function, and socioeconomic structure has become both impossible and obsolete.   

 

Sunday, 13 August 2023

Grisaille Patterning : Drawing into/Dwelling with incipient movements of interference and negotiation.

Divergent Practices/Choreographic Thinking

Exploring and Activating/In and Out of Material.

Painting/Choreography divergent propositions on the verge of things.






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


For Erin Manning, thinking choreography as a technique for bringing to expression the patterning of incipient activity towards the definition of a movement-event, an activist philosophy. 

Grisaille Patterning/Fielding Thinking : Landing Sights/Painting Surfaces/Mapping/Choreutics 

Painting and Mapping/Choreutics 

Chaos, territory, art, Deleuze and the framing of the earth.
Elizabeth Grosz

Spirituality in Contemporary Art, the idea of the Numinous
Jungu Yoon

Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres
Architectural Environments : Surrounding Objects

House : Black Swan Theory
Steven Holl

Architectural painting for glass exploring slowness and repetition.

An Anthropology of Landscape
Christopher Tilley
Kate Cameron-Daum


lightness, luminosity, fluid, hybrid media, material, 
asperity, field, gesso, molochite, yellow ochre

















Tuesday, 8 August 2023

The Shape Of LIGHT : DISCURSIVE CONTENTS

Writing and Seeing Architecture/Performativity/Intertextuality
Originally Published10/02/2019.

RELATIONSCAPES
Movement, Art, Philosophy
Technologies of Lived Abstraction
Erin Manning

Playing with INTERTEXTUALITY
Setting the Stage MAKE SPACE


STUDIES FOR SPACE

Urban Fallow, 10 Days in The Laundry, Winchester UK. 2009.
Sculptural interventions by Nicola Saunderson

RESPONSIVE ENVIRONMENTS
ARCHITECTURE
ART AND DESIGN


THE SHAPE OF LIGHT
WRITING AND SEEING ARCHITECTURE
DRAWING,Line, Shape, Volume, Light Values



Time as a Structure and an Event

Transparency, Time and Matter.

Sculptural Space
Sculpting in Time
Filmic/Photographic Narratives/Poetics of Place


Francesca Woodman
Tarkovsky
Christian de Portzamparc
Philippe Sollers
Scott Doorley
Scott Witthoft
Natalie D'Arbetoff
Lucy Bullivant















TONY CRAGG | Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac | Paris - Pantin | 2016

Sunday, 6 August 2023

Ecology of Life/Energies between things

 Outpost 180523


Wandering Lines.

Material : The Ways/Movements of Practice.












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


An ecology of life, in short must be of threads and traces, not of nodes and connectors, and its subject of inquiry must consist not of the relations between organisms and their external environments, but of the relations along their severally enmeshed ways of life.

Tim Ingold.



Learning in the making.


Processual learning that occurs in movements, gestures, postures, expressions and exchanges with other bodies and things.


A caring curiosity that wants to know,understand and explore relations.


We need to live the consequences of non-stop curiosity inside a mortal situated, relentlessly relational worlding.

Donna Harraway.




Practices that do engage in the complexities and contingencies of corporeal experiences, ie partners-with-things.





Space-Enfolding-Breath.

Inhabiting the Wall, 1992-93.

Monica Wyatt.


Monica Wyatt asks what it means to occupy architecture, not just ordinary interior spaces but also those that are inaccessible, such as a wall and its poche. Acting as a physical limit, a wall is a boundary that cannot be traversed without an opening, but the reality of a wall's thickness and the peculiar desire to be in a wall inform Wyatt's curiosity about occupying this space.


When educating architects and interior designers, the question is often resolved by expanding the wall's thickness to contain programmed space, or left behind as a space deemed unoccupied. Wyatt does not give in to either direction. Rather, she looks to the wall, entering it to find answers to these questions.


Wyatt uses poetric interpretations of poche and interior space to produce these unconventional mappings. The result is a map and a body wrapped with wallpaper, where body and wall share the same material. Wyatt finds an entry point into the wall, through a map of the body that also reinserts the body back into the wall.

Lois Weinthal, 2011.



To define a wall : What is a wall?


The questions are phenomenological and psychological, attempting to account not only for the physical presence of the wall itself but for how it is there for her.


Like Wyatt's own body, walls have fronts and backs, interiors and exteriors. They can separate and bind, and they also possess the point of view of an other from which one is viewed. For Wyatt the wall is ambiguous: even though it presents itself as a physical limit to her body, it provokes the desire to move beyond its bounds. Her confessed desire to 'get into the wall,' to escape from the physical limits of the surroundings so that she may see herself from the other side. 


Wyatt desires to be simultaneously in both places, impossible if one accepts the materialist proposition that two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time. She desires, however to make this possible, to conceive of a situation in which space and material become intertwined, as if consciousness and body were intertwined with in the space of a fold.


In the end Wyatt entered the wall through a logic that allows for multiple faces of consciousness. It is possible to occupy a wall only if we accept that we are present for others as well as for ourselves. By projecting ourselves into another's point of view, we construct a space within which being is defined and constituted. 

Dan Hoffman, 1994. 



The architecture and public spaces of the built environment enclose and contain. Yet the structures that confine, channel and contain are not immutable. They are ceaselessly eroded by tactical manoeuvring of inhabitants whose 'wandering lines' (de Certeau) undercut the strategic designs of societies master builders causing them gradually to wear out and disintegrate.

  

For inhabitants, however the environment comprises not the surroundings of a bounded place, but a zone in which their several pathways are thoroughly entangled. In this zone of entanglement, this meshwork of interwoven lines. There are no insides or outsides, only openings and ways through.

Up, Across and Along, Tim Ingold.






Architectural Body.

Organism-Person-Environment

Arakawa and Gins. 




Ambivalences : Hostile/Intimate Relationships.

Reclining Figures and Wall Reliefs.


There is also something of the ambivalent sensualist stirred by a mixture of passion and hostility that both caresses and abrades the surface it touches.

In the hand of Manuel Neri, Marcia Morse.1983. 


Francesca Woodman.

then at one point I did not need

Camouflage.

Neil Leach. 






St Peter Hungate.

Conceptual/Corporeal Frameworks

Visual Art Facility/Making/Curation.






As the work interacts with the body of the observer the experience mirrors these bodily sensations of the maker. Consequently, architecture is communicated from the body of the architect directly to the body of the inhabitant.


Understanding architectural scale implies the unconscious  measuring of an object or a building with one's body, and projecting one's bodily scheme on the space in question. We feel pleasure and protection when the body discovers its resonance in space.


The sense of gravity is the essence of all architectonic structures and great architecture makes us conscious of gravity and earth. Architecture strengthens verticality of our experience of the world. At the same time architecture makes us aware of the depth of earth, it makes us dream of levitation and flight.


In memorable experiences of architecture, space, matter and time fuse into one single dimension, into the basic substance of being, that penetrates the consciousness. We identify ourselves with this space, this place, this moment and these dimensions as they become ingredients of our very existence. Architecture is the art of mediation and reconciliation.

Juhani Pallasmaa.


Like mothers of men, the buildings are good listeners. Long sounds, distinct or seemingly in bundles, appease the orifices of palaces that lean back gradually from canal or pavement. A long sound with its echo brings consummation to the stone.

Adrian Stokes.


Initial works made and manifested through entanglements of practice/making/place.

Slab, box, extrusions/industrial/handbuilt, flue linings, corten architectural  models.



Water/Anchorages between the sacred and the secular.

Cell-Court-Domain

Body-Water-Air


Piscina in the south wall.

Squint into the nave and tower.


Clay-Water-Fire

Five clay slab fabrications exploring intimate spaces, notion of inhabitation/anchorite within social/sacred space.


Art/Spiritual Space.

Ambivalences/Uncertainties/Paradoxes

Something Endures between The Made/Un Made.

Raw Clay Construction, lead tray, water.


The Hungate : Ambient Atmosphere/Precarious Situation/Fragile Structure and Social Relationship.


Water (secular) both corrodes/penetrates the structure, and water (sacred) caresses/comforts the soul.


White slip/emulsion paint/ yellow ochre.

Nocturnal sounds/long sounds as reminders of human solitude and mortality





Parallax.

Steven Holl.


The Eyes Of The Skin

Architecture and the Senses.


When working, both the artist and craftsman are directly engaged with their bodies and their existential experiences rather than focused on a external and objectified problem. In our imagination, the object is simultaneously held in the hand and inside the head, and the imagined and projected physical image is modelled by our bodies. We are inside and outside of the object at the same time. Creative work calls for a bodily and mental identification, empathy and compassion. A remarkable factor in the experience of enveloping spatiality, interiority and hapticity is the deliberate suppression of sharp, focused vision. 

Juhani Pallasmaa.


Figuring It Out.

The Parallel Visions Of Artists And Archaeologists.

Colin Renfrew.


Life-Class/Drawing.

The Impossible Nude.


Figural Floor Drawings.

Drawing/Wayfaring : Traces and trails over and amongst the landscape of the body.

The surface takes on a strongly sculptural sense of being moulded, modelled, abraded and yet caressed.


Thursday, 3 August 2023

Learning-In-The-Making/Processual Learning : Reading/Intraventions at Hungate.

HUNGATE

Staging of a caring curiosity that wants to know and understand and explore relations.


Site Visit/Working Notes.

070223 


Hungate, Norwich.

Building/Surface Movements : Breathing Forms

Water/Light/Vessel/Body : Sacred/Secular/Holy/Profane

Scriptorium, Waverley Abbey Project

Collage/Matters of Concern : Discursive/Graphic/Diagrammatic/Mappings


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












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


Architectural Body

A Holding In Place

Dwelling/Situatedness/Inhabitation

A Domain Of Entanglement

A Vital Emotional Dimension


Landscapes Of Action


Relationscapes

Learning-In-The-Making


Processual learning occurs in movements, gestures, postures, expressions and exchanges with other bodies and things.


Rituals through water linking the organism-person-environment.


Fonts as an apparatus linking the corporeal and the spiritual body with others.


Dwelling/Inhabitation is a perspective that treats the immersion of the organism-person in an environment or life-world as an inescapable condition of existence.


Life is the very process wherein forms are generated and held in place.

Tim Ingold.


Baptism/Water/Society as a holding/resting in place.


Letting the building breathe, with and through the narratives of others.


Site/an intravention or creative apparatus for the un-doing/un-folding of place.


Partrners-with-things


Practices that do engage in the complexities and contingencies of corporeal experiences.


Conceptual Frameworks/Cognitive/Corporeal/Imaginative




We need to live the consequences of non-stop curiosity inside mortal situated relentlessly relational worlding.

Donna Haraway.


Exploratory Movements/Dwelling/Duration/Light/Pinhole Camera


Reading

The Eyes of the Skin

Architecture and the Senses.


PARALLAX

Steven Holl.


Banga

Patti Smith


WATER


Matter and Desire

An Erotic Ecology

Andreas Weber


Sacred/Secular/Holy/Profane


The Mind as a leaky vessel


Wensum/Chalk Stream


Lime Plaster/Yellow Ochre/Lead/Silver Stain/Pot Metals


Ceramic/Cloth Wrappings/Canvas/Construction/Scriptorium/Lead Trays/Photographic Materials


Constitutive Limits/Architectural Studies : Explorative Place Making/St Peter Hungate Norwich.

The Enabling Constraint.

Objects become relational in conjunction with the ways in which the environment proposes its own constitutive limits (Hungate, Water). Erin Manning.

Harleston 090723


Outpost 190823

Hungate Architectural Explorations. 

Air/Place/Breath/Light/Architecture/Ritual/Social Space

Cell-Court-Domain.


The line of the old roof can be seen.


Like mothers of men, the buildings are good listeners. Long sounds, distinct or seemingly in bundles, appease the orifices of palaces that lean back gradually from canal or pavement. A long sound with its echo brings consummation to the stone.

Adrian Stokes.


Initial works made and manifested through entanglements of practice/making/place.


Slab, box, extrusions/industrial/handbuilt, flue linings, corten architectural  models.

Water/Anchorages/Anchorite places between the sacred and the secular.

Cell-Court-Domain


Body-Water-Air

Vessel-Boat-Building


Piscina in the south wall.

Squint into the nave and tower.

Clay-Water-Fire


Five clay slab fabrications exploring intimate spaces, notion of inhabitation/anchorite within social/sacred space.


Art/Spiritual Space.


Ambivalences/Uncertainties/Paradoxes


Something Endures between The Made/Un Made.


Raw Clay Construction, lead tray, water.


The Hungate : Ambient Atmosphere/Precarious Situation/Fragile Structure and Social Relationship.


Water (secular) both corrodes/penetrates the structure, and water (sacred) caresses/comforts the soul.


White slip/emulsion paint/ yellow ochre.


Nocturnal sounds/long sounds as reminders of human solitude and mortality









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


Hungate Ceramic Forms/Spatial and material inclinations/wayfaring in  exploring place.


Generative/Speculative use of material/volumes and historical narratives.


Clay-Drawings in volumes, void spaces and surfaces.

Brick Form/Buttressed/Tower/Scaffolding

Corten Metal Box Constructions.


Components brought into a spatial form/navigation/exploration of built spaces.


Building as drawing, showing changes taken, marked, erasures,superimpositions, indexical and scored surfaces.

Materials marked, moved and redeployed elsewhere.

Poche/Pierced Walls/Architectural Details


Lead tray/Water/Ceramic/Wooden Wedges.


Making Template/Drawing/Pierced Components

Hidden Spaces/Enclosed/Confined Volumes/Voids


The carpenter is not an architect.

Ingold 



Experiential/Spatial Alterations to the drawn plan as the building commences. 


St Peter Hungate

Norwich.


A History of the Church.

Geoffrey Goreham, Rachel M. R. Young.

1965.



This sketch by John Kirkpatrick, who died in 1728, is the earliest extant picture of the church.


John Bonde also left 6d, to the anchorite of St. Peter Hungate. This  was a man vowed to live a religious life in solitude. An anchorite's cell was often built against the church wall with a connecting window, so that he could hear Mass and yet remain secluded.


The pyx and the metal box or chrismatory (mentioned in 1368) which held the consecrated oils were also locked lest the holy wafer and oils should be stolen and used in witchcraft.


Monochrome by James Sillett, 1828.