Thursday, 17 July 2025
Wednesday, 16 July 2025
Humanities : Spatial Involvements/The Laboratory of Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture
Spatial Practice/UCA Canterbury 2009/10
Researching Proactive Apparatuses : A laboratory for speculative social evolution.
SENSORIUM AND STILLNESS, MOVEMENT AND MIRROR
A MIRROR ON WHAT IT IS TO BE HUMAN
Spatial involvements as a surface of contingent enactments giving “us” a sense of our temporality, exactitude and anonymity that becomes “preserved” by Place/Studies (Rendell).
Drawing a relationality through others in site.
VISITORS : A film by Godfrey Reggio
We have art so that we may not perish by the truth. Friedrich Nietzsche
MEANING IN THE FORM OF THE FILM
THE RECIPROCAL GAZE :
The screen is gazing at us; we are framed by our own looking. A direct relationship (what the image tells me); a singularity held by the vivacity of the image, through the activity of perception and introspection.
THE SPECTATOR MAKES THE JOURNEY into the PREMORDIAL IMAGINATION OF THE CAMERA.
CONCRETE PHOTOGRAPHY, PHOTOGRAMS, IMPRESSIONS, TRACES
THE SENSATE AND THE CONCEPTUAL
PAINTING, Robert Mangold.
TRANSFORMATION AND PROPHECY
BEUYS-KLEIN-ROTHKO
ARCHITECTURAL LEXICON OF STRUCTURES AND SYMBOLS
GESALT,
GRISAILLE,
LEITMOTIF,
MATRIX,
FORMAL PATTERN,
SURFACE
John Wood, The Virtual Embodied, (London: Routledge, 1998)
The Virtual Embodied, “ explores the ideas of embodiment, knowledge and space to address fundamental questions about technology and human presence,” these parameters are being investigated and researched in my creative practice.
Embodied knowledge and virtual space.
Physical, Psychological and Virtual Realities, Max Velmans.
List of “typical beliefs about physical, psychological and virtual realities”. PHYSICAL REALITY
Extended in space-in the world
Exists independently of the observer
Has tangible properties, e.g. Mass and solidity
Descartes s proposed our classical view of the mind/body split into res extensa ( material that extends in space) and res cogitans (thinking material). We commonly associate the physical world as having both extension and location in space.
PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITY
Non-extended in space-in the mind
Existence depends on the observer
Is relatively intangible and insubstantial
Psychological realities do not have spatial dimensions, and their location is only metaphorically “ in the mind”. It is crucial to note that psychological realities are only real for a given observer. Velmans notes” these intuitions are confirmed by the fact that physical realities have tangible, substantial properties such as mass, solidity and weight. Whilst psychological properties are, by comparison, intangible and insubstantial”.
VIRTUAL REALITY
Appears to have extension in space, but has no actual extension Appears to be in the world, but is actually in the mind
Existence depends on the interaction of the observer with VR equipment
Can appear to have tangible properties ( with suitable equipment) but does not have such properties.
Virtual realities via appropriate headsets which give “feedback” from bodily movements and visual displays, conspire to give the appearance of a virtual world extended into our physical space, but they have no actual 3D physical extension. Interestingly such worlds are physical in the fact that they rely on the physical existence and placement of equipment, virtual realities seek to create apparent changes in “self location” which do not correspond with actual changes in location. New developments can now give a physical realm into the virtual by the use of body interfaces that can restrict the movement of the body to correspond to the visual perception of a virtual identity.
Fragment from material resonances project, spatial practice research, CSA.
THE ACTIVITY OF PERCEPTION
Perception is in the “condition” of an interruption.
Rehearsal is the creative part of any performance.
Humanities : Spatial Relations
Interested in the speculative nature of work-sites that contain a narrative intervention via a device that registers and records the documentary and its rehearsal.
Work as revealed into a final sequence of superimposures on a surface created from the collective transparency of the text.
Thresholds that reveal the interspace between the Human and its condition/environment.
Photographic surface of events, a visual entropy resolved as a history of consolidated exactitudes/enactments.
The photographic surface shows that which no longer exists, it concretizes contingences on offer into an image of irreversibility.
Double Occupancy , Dwelling with the critique and its realization of an uncovering event, criticism collides with and into the work. Deleuze, Baroque house (65).
Presenting both a virtual walk through “text” ,using the transparency of “text” both as a literal transparency and its phenomenal “physicality” as applied to surface and structures within the site. Using the body of the visitor to enable
enactments/sensitivities to be derived from the site encounter. Enactments triggered by the singularity of an individuals engagement with walking amongst the working site. The final experience/superimpose remains uniquely a product of the visitor. This site driven explorative experience undertaken by both a passitivity and a curiosity on the part of “the guest” creates a self /space/time/ place relation, a localised intimacy that promotes an encapsulated sense of enchantment/wisdom.
The entirety of the “text” is stored latent in the interlocutor as they investigate the physicality of material relationships and spatial significations. In this respect the interlocutor defines his/her “traits” through a recognition and curiosity with their own body as it weaves a narrative of navigation through the experience of “site”. This theorizing by the body of its encounters, material and spatial, alone or within the proximities of others interests me as a “trace” of the encountering space through the human agent. This working notion and its site begin to posit the idea of an
“interspace” between the human and its environment. This theoretical and abstracted site could be utilized to research interventions and their effects, to attempt to register the spatial relations/traits of contemporary society. How might this material and its spatial census (human/ site temporalities) be gathered, registered and finally presented.
10 days, Observational material from site, They sense this articulating moment, their consolation becomes recursively and inexplicably consolidated with others unfamiliar undistinguishable, they are rendered into the resultant homogeneity of a surface relation bonded by specifics of space and time.
10 Days, Observational/Reflection, Journal notes Their erasure by the transits of change and chance of others over-writing themselves to reveal the transparency of temporalities as registered by the photographic duration of capture.
What remains is an exactitude of “what occurred” in a form/manner unknowable to those present, by dwelling in this visual interface of the photographic surface, things become inexplicably and irreversibly compounded with a time stretched and stilled.
Photography has the unusual attributes to be able to act as a particle accelerator on the human subject, it can present material assessed from numerous durational encounters with time. It can render a seduction and conversely an invisibility.
Spatial Practice is in effect a laboratory (of the self and worlds) from which I define and register and relate material tested under those conditions. This makes me part of the process and part of the results, part also of the problem of the investigation.
Reflections on the use of “the Negative” expedient use of material creates this inherent property, interesting analogy with human process of vision, in as much as the after-image rendered by the eye is always in the negative. This final image of what was is in effect being erased by the negative/negated. The perspective of the negative reveals more informative relations about the spatial/displacement of the environment in which the “objectivity” is being both immersed and conversely displaced. Like the displacement of a solid form by a liquid of the same displacement, the negative reveals the object displacing/relating in spatial terms. The negative gives proof to our mutual dependency and our forgetting of air as both surface and support.
In Drawing and Mapping it is tensions between the negative and the positive objectivity of things that helps to define a limit, a definition of form that is both simultaneously relational and indexical. The “Trace” also maintains these properties but interestingly it contains a transparency, a dimensionality that makes it both reflective and confrontational, it remains registered to the present but unable to escape its signification of the past.
Public Intimacy, Architecture and the Visual Arts. Giuliana Bruno.
Series of "essays" on the relations between Architecture and The Arts. Bruno notes the critical role in which architecture constitutes and supports a "public intimacy" initiated through both historical references and Contemporary Art. This spatiality of a public constructed space that grants the reception of an intimacy is seen by Bruno as being a "new moving space- a screen of vital cultural memory". She proposes a view that Architecture is mobilized as a screen/vessel in which to define a frame of memory. Architecture in this sense becomes not just "a matter of space but an art of time." Interestingly it is in the work of Rebecca Horn that she notes the combination of both the scientific and the artistic. This combination has a resonance with the architectural model and intended purpose of the anatomical theatre. Rebecca Hom and a growing number of contemporary practitioners are actively engaged in creating "works" which use architectonics and situation to create personal and profound experiences, intimacies evolved from public spaces. This new conceptualization of "body space" and its relationship to the production of space is ultimately being absorbed back into Architectural practice, the work of Nigel Coates "Guide to Ecstacity" and Rem Koolhaas use of materials and interventions that challenge our sensory and cultural aesthetics about architecture illustrate issues around the spatialisation of the body and its intimate consumption in the public realm of the senses.
To Live is to pass from one space to another. Georges Perec.
Bruno Taut, The New Dwelling, Women as Creator, (Leipzig : Klinkhardt und Biermann, 1924).
Taut asserts that it is a woman's way of inhabiting space that creates and modifies architecture, see also Mark Wigley, White walls, Designer dresses: The fashioning of Modern Architecture. (Cambridge: MIT press , 1995)
I would say that my fiction is set in the visionary present. J G Ballard.
Underlining the Hostility of the external world, The Autopsy Room/Theatre.
Victims surrender all that is left of their unique identities, what is left after the basic components are separated, nothing much to claim not even a faint presence of existence. We feel pity and the oblivion patiently waiting for us. J G Ballard on CSI
Frozen frames of a perverse geometry, flickering into a narrative of their own volition. The work is accompanied by a critical voyeurism that has the ability to reveal a prognosis.
Ballard, Every paragraph of this "fiction is frightening obscure and an obtuse puzzle. Surreal geometries, with a pervasive atmosphere of doom and imminent cataclysm that "exposes" the sordidly within us all.
Ballard, Obsessions- Dystopias/Sexuality/Technology and their discontinuities' Ballard, Abstractions-Science/Psychiatry/Mathematics.
Questions the "concrete delinearations of morality, ethics and sanity".
Notion that Aesthetics/Landscapes can harbour relations, The Gaze, male/female.
THE RESEARCH POSTER, a document outlining a field of inquiry, placing ones pitch into the public domain.
Life is Data
Progress is Optional
Understanding is a product of good marketing.
Attempting to keep the moment from being realized. Robert Rauschenberg
On Photography, Rauschenberg.
My photography is supported by a personal conflict between curiosity and shyness. Rauschenberg uses his camera as a social shied, he has "a need to be where it will always never be the same again." He comments that "photography is the most direct communication in non-violent contacts". His concern is to move at a speed within which to act in the "archaeology" of what light or its darkness touches.
The object itself is dictating your possibilities.
Validity, cannot exist without standards. How long are standards fresh? Every minute everything is different everywhere. Where is the basis for criticism. Criticism collides into the work ,it attempts to arrest it, it deliberately attempts to affect a stop.
Oren Lieberman, The "Plastic Wallet thing/Spatial Practice interview Canterbury" They promote attention, They are seductive in their surface, they "house" temporalities into a permanent/recognisable system or archive. They are deterministic in the sense of belonging to an instantly recognisable protective and presentational system of storing information. The indexical "holes" themselves promote the notion of a terminology on the material within them, sort of ironic when they contain thoughts and issues about methodologies. Perhaps these useful wallets have just become another material victim of contemporary homogeneities. Corrupt their inherent homogeneity by removal or adaptation of their indexical register (the punched holes) thereby making them unique or of a non purpose, or for a purpose not yet disclosed/realised.
Tim Ingold
MAKING 2013
Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture.
Practical Geometry
The Architect and The Carpenter
The Cathedral and The Laboratory
Templates and Geometry
The Return to Alchemy
Cyanotype image from pinhole camera with sound intervention/device within the apparatus of the camera, performative material gathered from the Canterbury School of Architecture.
UCA Spatial Practices MA under Oren Lieberman.
The marked agency and its absence of the artist leaves the site live and open. Oxford MOMA 2006 Jannis Kounallis left his coat hanging by a window adjacent and in the same room as his installation.
RUSSELL MORETON. MA SPATIAL PRACTICES.
Artist Statement used to accompany promotional powerpoint display at UCA Canterbury, 2009.
Spatial Practice provides an interesting set of methodologies in which to explore our own “relationality”1. This is particularly relevant in respect to my understanding and subsequent proposal for the role of the interlocutor within my work. Becoming increasingly interested in the concept of “ open text ”2 to explore the nature of space and its relational properties that create place, or rather a self placed. At present using Photography (large pinhole chambers) embedded in working environments to further explore properties of latency, transparency and the peripheral dwelling of spatial material.
The Practice.
Currently exploring the dynamics and dwellings of spatial relations. The use of a large oil drum as a “pin hole camera” creates a tool that records/witnesses a specific duration (dwelling) in place. This duration of approximately 45 minutes renders visual data that underpins our temporality as we constantly re-form spatial relations with each other and that of the architectural environment. The internal architectonics of the chamber gives a sense of both the proximity of peripheral space and the distance/dislocation of a filmic surface concretized by time. These imaged surfaces render a sense of place, an aura and a psychosis/pathology around images and their representation.
1 Robert Cooper, Peripheral Vision: Relationality ( London: Sage Publishing, 2005)
2 Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between ( London: I. B. Tauris, 2006)
METHODOLOGIES/PROJECT PROPOSAL
TIME
RELATIONALITY
CONTINGENT
SURFACE
CONSOLATIONS
The Trace becoming a material witness to an event/situation
Use of “information” gathered from site being re-invested with another sense of time and ambient light.
Transparent/Translucent materials “surfaced” by contemporary digital technologies, corporate media presentational light boxes, large format 24 square metres.
Use of “interventions” liquids between visual and haptic membranes, utilization of direct drawing within and amongst the “media technologies”.
Direct more of “working practice” into larger scale painting investigations with drawing and photography as inclusions. Suggest notion of temporary space situated in fine art.
Explore relationships of “objects” as the custodian of place. Analysis of the Reception and relations generated by this “first objectivity”.
Relation of “what was ”to what is left being a “spatial involvement” placed back into the continuum of ongoing spatial relations.
Spatial involvements as a surface of contingent enactments giving “us” a sense of our temporality, exactitude and anonymity that becomes “preserved” by Place/Studies (Rendell).
Drawing a relationality through others in site.
Drawn inscriptions that leave traces for others to respond
Documents of a theoretical investigation over the surface from both beneath (the place) and from above (the event).
A performative membrane/drawing/diagram/script that gains its authenticity/performativity from being there and allowing what might occur to be witnessed.
Drawing as a “open text” that allows a perspectival immersion/situatedness, because it is still active, un-resolved needing to be taken further under the authorship of viewer.
These fragments of precise interventions/enactments engender a dynamic of relational possibilities.
Naked~Nude : On The Corporeality Of The Drawn~Drawing Body
Outpost 230323
Drawing, depicting something found through the process of making visible.
The Luminescence Of Space.
An Archaeological Inquiry Into Drawing.
Correspondences/Reclaiming the drawings.
The Affect and Memory of Drawing.
To interrogate ways of seeing/looking, John Berger.
The world of the creative practitioner promotes conditions, gestures and responses that articulate social, political and other theoretical findings which are all 'present' at the inception of the work.
Colin Renfrew.
The Myth of Butades.
Figure/Ground Relationships.
Theoretical Thought : Diagram and map.
Neo-Sumerian temple plan on clay tablet from c. 2100BC.
The drawing/work may take the form of the result of an act or action carried out at a specific time but which itself does not persist.
Art can be the expression in the material world of a concept, or the transformation into one material form of a structure that exists in another.
Drawing/Substance/Memory/Display.
The artist's creative act, is of a self amongst others.
Material/Thinking Matter.
Drawings mediated by the distance of memory.
Art Works, subtle embodiments, visual markers both spatial and sociological.
Life/Drawing/Figuring It Out.
The Luminescent Dematerialization Of The Subject.
Expressions Of Both Figuration And Abstraction.
Phenomenological approaches to Drawing/Looking/Others.
Demarcation/drawing boundaries/wayfaring/paths on the land, re The Making of Space.
Walking/Movement is quiet literally what made us human.
The walk is a 'mark' laid upon thousands of other layers of human and geographical history on the surface of the land. Bipedalism is the precursor to the evolution of a large brain, creative intelligence and language.
Richard Long/Colin Renfrew.
Charles Mausson.
Walking Man, No. 3. 1990.
Oil, crayon, 203.0 x 137.0 cm.
Starting from a subject or a simple figurative form, Charles Maussion sets of like an explorer, in search of unexplored lands, looking for something spiritual. It is through walking/drawing/thinking that one can remain human even while seeking out, and without even knowing it, finding it, or finding yourself in lands which are thousands of light years from our society, whilst nevertheless being very close to it. A calm, a loudness, that is extreme, beautiful.
Robert Combas. 1993.
The simple presence of a figure is sufficient to suggest the unity of the individual in a universe which is patiently observed and precisely apprehended. There is a complete absence of any compositional device suggested within the canvas, all that emanates is a climate of strangeness, serenity and disquiet.
Sophie Dupont. 1995.
The blurring of the conventional distinction between the figure and the ground, so as to capture an atmospheric effect, which sought to approximate the murkiness of visual perception.
The legibility of the photographic image was denied by the process of blurring the image.
Paintings, abstract identities of surface and material, introducing content via a dematerialization, so as to engage in a process of pure vision, pure silence, reincarnated, vibrant, alive.
William Jeffett. 1995.
Drawing on the consciousness and corporeality of others, of figural dissolution of the traditional figure/ground relationships, and fragmentation/blurring of the human form. The contemporary body and its environments are experientially brought into abstracted absences, corporeal traces of visual matter, movement and dissolving/reappearing forms.
Figural Expressions.
Figural dissolution of a nude descending a staircase, Marcel Duchamp.
Stop-motion photography of the human body in motion, Etienne Marey.
Figural, paintings/drawings not as representations of tangible subjects, but as registers of a more abstract range of emotions, as a series of studies, always incomplete and never finished, a work in progress. The nude/ the human body has become mediated by the mechanical effects of photography and the distance/blindness of memory.
Notations.
Contemporary Drawing as Idea and Process.
Fred Sandback.
The Drawing Room.
The Secret Theory of Drawing.
Jim Dine.
Figure Drawings, 1975-79.
The Drawings of Richard Diebenkorn.
John Eldenfield.
Manuel Neri.
Drawings/Relief Sculptures.
Naked To Nude.
Life Drawing in the Twentieth Century.
Georg Eisler.
Monday, 14 July 2025
Experimental Artist/Into Beautiful Privacy : The Blurring of Art and Life
Essays on The Blurring of Art and Life, Allan Kaprow.
Kaprow_Allan_Essays_on_the_Blurring_of_Art_and_Life_with_Impurity_Experimental_Art_The_Meaning_of_Life_missing.pdf
Architectural Inquiry : Medieval Windows
Architectural Inquiry : Archaeological Remains
Immaterial Architecture : Waverley Pavilion
Kaprow_Allan_Essays_on_the_Blurring_of_Art_and_Life_with_Impurity_Experimental_Art_The_Meaning_of_Life_missing.pdf
Architectural Inquiry : Medieval Windows
Architectural Inquiry : Archaeological Remains
Immaterial Architecture : Waverley Pavilion
https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/
Building The Drawing
The drawing as analogue allows more subtle relations, of technique, material and process, to develop between drawing and building.
Immaterial Architecture
The Illegal Architect
Jonathan Hill
Oak Tree
Oil
Paper
Plaster
Rust
Sgratfito
Silence
Sound
Steel
Television
Weather
Frosted Light
Index of immaterial architectures
TRANSPARENCY : LITERAL AND PHENOMENAL
Colin Rowe, Robert Slutzky
Interactions of the Abstract Body
Josiah McElheny
Object Lesson
Interactive Abstract Body (Square)
The Spatial Body (After Fontana)
Tracing Eisenman
Stan Allen
Indexical Characters
FABRIC=MASS+ FORM
Alan Chandler
The interest in fabric formwork is in its deployment in a building process, which is faster than conventional formwork. Fabric formwork is inherently more sustainable due to the minimising of both concrete and shuttering, and more radically, allows the constructor to intervene in the process of casting even as the cast is taking place.
ANTI OBJECT
Kengo Kuma
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.
ReThinking Matereriality
The engagement of mind with the material world
Elizabeth DeMarrais, Chris Gosden, Colin Renfrew
The Affordances of Things
Towards a Theory of Material Engagement
Aesthetics, Intelligence and Emotions
Relationality of Mind and Matter
Material Agency
Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach
Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris
At The Potter's Wheel : An Argument for Material Agency
We should replace our view of cognition as residing inside the potter's head, with that of cognition enacted at the potter's wheel.
The Neglected Networks of Material Agency : Artefacts, Pictures and Texts
Material Agency as Cognitive Scaffolding
The Cognitive Life of Things
Material Engagement and the Extended Mind
Lambros Malafouris, Colin Renfrew
Minds, Things and Materiality
Michael Wheeler
Communities of Things and Objects : A Spatial Perspective
Carl Knappett
Imagining the Cognitive Life of Things
Edwin Hutchins
Things and Their Embodied Environments
Architectures for Perception
Structuring Perception through Material Artifacts
Charles Goodwin
Leach Pottery, Studio and Museum
A Potter's Book
Bernard Leach
Adventures of the Fire, Vessels Through Time
Ceramic Pavilion
People make space, and space contains people
Ceramic space and life
Gordon Baldwin
Objects For A Landscape
David Whiting
Vessels-Spaces that cannot be drawn, rather they need to be experienced.
Imagining a Vessel in a Rock on a Beach, 2006,(charcoal on paper)
The Architecture of The Ceramic Vessel
The use of the vessel in the investigation of our world.
The exploration through the dichotomy of the analysis between exterior and interior, of one pot to another and from the message they convey.
MATERIAL MATTERS
ARCHITECTURE
AND MATERIAL PRACTICE
Katie Lloyd Thomas
PLENUMS : RETHINKING MATTER, GEOMETRY AND SUBJECTIVITY
Peg Rawes
ARCHITECTURE
IN THE AGE OF DIVIDED REPRESENTATION
The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production
Dalibor Vesely
The Nature of Communicative Space
Creativity in the Shadow of Modern Technology
The Rehabilitation of Fragment
Towards a Poetics of Architecture
The Projective Cast
Architecture and its Three Geometries
Robin Evans
Architects do not produce geometry, they consume it
Analysing ARCHITECTURE
Simon Unwin
Geometries of Being
Architecture as Making Frames
Space and Structure
Building The Drawing
The drawing as analogue allows more subtle relations, of technique, material and process, to develop between drawing and building.
Immaterial Architecture
The Illegal Architect
Jonathan Hill
Oak Tree
Oil
Paper
Plaster
Rust
Sgratfito
Silence
Sound
Steel
Television
Weather
Frosted Light
Index of immaterial architectures
TRANSPARENCY : LITERAL AND PHENOMENAL
Colin Rowe, Robert Slutzky
Interactions of the Abstract Body
Josiah McElheny
Object Lesson
Interactive Abstract Body (Square)
The Spatial Body (After Fontana)
Tracing Eisenman
Stan Allen
Indexical Characters
FABRIC=MASS+ FORM
Alan Chandler
The interest in fabric formwork is in its deployment in a building process, which is faster than conventional formwork. Fabric formwork is inherently more sustainable due to the minimising of both concrete and shuttering, and more radically, allows the constructor to intervene in the process of casting even as the cast is taking place.
ANTI OBJECT
Kengo Kuma
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.
ReThinking Matereriality
The engagement of mind with the material world
Elizabeth DeMarrais, Chris Gosden, Colin Renfrew
The Affordances of Things
Towards a Theory of Material Engagement
Aesthetics, Intelligence and Emotions
Relationality of Mind and Matter
Material Agency
Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach
Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris
At The Potter's Wheel : An Argument for Material Agency
We should replace our view of cognition as residing inside the potter's head, with that of cognition enacted at the potter's wheel.
The Neglected Networks of Material Agency : Artefacts, Pictures and Texts
Material Agency as Cognitive Scaffolding
The Cognitive Life of Things
Material Engagement and the Extended Mind
Lambros Malafouris, Colin Renfrew
Minds, Things and Materiality
Michael Wheeler
Communities of Things and Objects : A Spatial Perspective
Carl Knappett
Imagining the Cognitive Life of Things
Edwin Hutchins
Things and Their Embodied Environments
Architectures for Perception
Structuring Perception through Material Artifacts
Charles Goodwin
Leach Pottery, Studio and Museum
A Potter's Book
Bernard Leach
Adventures of the Fire, Vessels Through Time
Ceramic Pavilion
People make space, and space contains people
Ceramic space and life
Gordon Baldwin
Objects For A Landscape
David Whiting
Vessels-Spaces that cannot be drawn, rather they need to be experienced.
Imagining a Vessel in a Rock on a Beach, 2006,(charcoal on paper)
The Architecture of The Ceramic Vessel
The use of the vessel in the investigation of our world.
The exploration through the dichotomy of the analysis between exterior and interior, of one pot to another and from the message they convey.
MATERIAL MATTERS
ARCHITECTURE
AND MATERIAL PRACTICE
Katie Lloyd Thomas
PLENUMS : RETHINKING MATTER, GEOMETRY AND SUBJECTIVITY
Peg Rawes
ARCHITECTURE
IN THE AGE OF DIVIDED REPRESENTATION
The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production
Dalibor Vesely
The Nature of Communicative Space
Creativity in the Shadow of Modern Technology
The Rehabilitation of Fragment
Towards a Poetics of Architecture
The Projective Cast
Architecture and its Three Geometries
Robin Evans
Architects do not produce geometry, they consume it
Analysing ARCHITECTURE
Simon Unwin
Geometries of Being
Architecture as Making Frames
Space and Structure
Sunday, 29 June 2025
The Waverley Project : Working Notes/Collages : Exploratory Project MA Interior Design
SPACE SITE INTERVENTION Through Performative Archaeological Methods.
A space has been created, allowing for a different construction of what may be significant in these circumstances, relative to objects found in association with each other. (Robert Williams, Disjecta Reliquiae The Tate Thames Dig)
Associations and coincidences that become meaningful (or are unearthed) within the context of the activity.
Erika Suderburg. On Installation and Site Specificity
The Waverley Project 2014, UCA Farnham, Interior Design MA.
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THE WAVERLEY PROJECT, methodologies in the making.
This research and its design proposal are centred on the arts and the humanities and their ongoing function in our contemporary society. The emphasis of this inquiry is located by the spatial practices of architecture, fine art and performance. My project is a field event and symposium that would be able to host intellectual dialogues, lectures (TED) workshops, performative events and exhibitions. I am particularly interested the relational production of social spaces and the aesthetics of builtspaces, both historical and ephemeral. The proposed use of Waverley Abbey near Famham as a possible site and retreat for this venture is valid as it links a possible interdisciplinary territory of anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Tim Ingold (Making) Colin Renfrew (Figuring it Out) and others have for many years been researching and mapping this new spatiality.
What remains of Waverley Abbey and its sense of place are critical to the holistic and contemporary underpinning of this experiential event. Founded in 1128 it was the first Cistercian Abbey to be built in England. It is recorded that Cistercian life was initially based on manual labour and self-sufficiency, this was further supplemented by other activities like agriculture and brewing that enabled the abbey to support itself. Later over the centuries education and academia began to dominate the concerns of the abbey. The abbey was suppressed with its dissolution in 1536, although records show its activities were already at this time substantially diminished. The ruins and their site then enter into the imaginary realm through classic literature in the novel Waverley by Scott. Further on a pictorial reference from an engraving shows the ruins now incorporated as a fashionable landscape feature within the newly built Waverley Abbey House.
On a contemporary note Waverley Abbey has featured in a number of films ranging in genres from period costume dramas through to fantasy, together with post apocalyptic visions of dystopia. A recent film shoot required the construction of a sixty-foot tower made from internal scaffolding with a skin that recreated the adjacent ruinous fabric of this historic site.
Encountering the site is currently only manageable by foot; this short walk in the surrounding landscape sets up the sense of place and prepares our own subjectivities to its reception. It is in this expectation, this thinking in the landscape that the pastoral and educational aspects of the site become apparent. Currently access is only available through one directed pathway; a multiplicity of other access points and even other structures (bridges, earthworks and thickets) could begin to open up the spatial palimpsest already located at Waverley. What remains of the architectural fabric with its diminished interiors still grants a hospitality and refuge for both the body and the imagination. This activity opens up the experiential space of encountering ourselves through the enjoyment/entanglements of layered social space.
Waverley Abbey is a public monument in the custodian care of English Heritage. It can only be accessed by walking about a quarter of a mile from the limited parking spaces.
Waverley Site
Hortus Conclusus Sensing Spaces
Peter Zumthor, Hortus Conclusus 2011.
Directors’ Foreword: Julia Peyton-Jones, Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Zumthor’s architectural design practices consider each project in terms of a comprehensive and encompassing sensory experience. Looking at more than the physical fabric and form of the building, he often draws inspiration from memories of childhood experience. His projects aim to reference all aspects of sensory perception, addressing the relationship between the human body and the ways it may interact within the built environment. Many of Zumthor’s projects have been specifically noted for their thoughtful and evocative play on scale, colour, material and light in harmony with the buildings function and surroundings. (Peyton-Jones 2011: 9)
Using spatial practices as an inquiry into issues of “site” through architecture, art and performance.
What are the possible phenomenological assets of the site?
What remains of the interior spaces of the architecture and how much of the ruin has been submerged into the parkland setting?
How might these be explored and subsequently re-presented into the public realm?
A SITE BASED Symposium on ‘Making’ as experienced through the palimpsest of place.
Featuring the ‘Reading Room’ an ephemeral interior space, which gathers-up the experiential values of ‘Ruins’ and re-enacts them as a site to explore the architectures of images.
Library of Contents/Taxonomies Knots of Reference/Lines
Humanity, An Emotional History:
The Poetics of Space:
Architecture and Allegory:
The Psychoanalysis of Fire:
Existential Space in Cinema:
Natural History:
Sculpting in Time:
Land Drawings, Installations and Excavations:
The Physical Self:
Archaeology:
Making:
Politics of Rehearsal:
Palimpsest usage by Historians as a description, of the way people experience time. That is as a layering of present experiences over faded pasts. The production of augmented realities brought about by the melding of layers of material place with virtual representations.
Accumulated iterations of a design or site, evidence of the former use remains.
A kind of forensic science used to describe objects/things placed over one another to establish the sequence of events of an accident or crime scene.
The Concept of Palimpsest, a way of describing how generations alter the landscape.
Heidegger. Jung. Archetypes. Pottery
Architecture
Building Practices
The Everyday : The Jug.
The Dwelling Place : The Bridge Mediators for spatial experiences.
Libraries with research conduits for immersive and interactive cognitive mappings, allowing a praxis to enter the practicability of the everyday, a crafted philosophical inquiry, building new livelihoods.
Colour
Texture Surface Enclosures Voids
Sample Materials
Relationships through Localities/Mood Boards/Technical and Physical Details. Erasure in drawing and architectural planning (space voids) as a methodology to superimpose multiplicities.
Erasing : Kirosan Observatory, Anti-Object, Kengo Kuma. Multiplicities and Memory, Peter Zumthor.
Learning Spaces as a performative spatial practice through a process of tuning and minimising (Minimising, NO stage in the forest, Kego Kuma).
NAVIGATION AND CRITICALITY THE READING ROOM
ORGANISATION IN THE FIELD OF RUINS COMPONENTS, AGENTS AND ARCHIVES.
Categories of Architecture as Categories of Perception. Architecture and Nature.
Architecture as a reflecting/gathering of the phenomena of human nature/Nature.
The exhibition and research relationships around the nature of things.
The architecture provides a point of intersection between mass and its sublimation in imagery and thought, between immateriality and its reification. It allows apparent opposites to be seamlessly united - or parted again, at the whim of the weather god. (Building with Images, Herzog and De Meuron’s Library at Eberswalde)
Robin Evans. Translations from Drawing to Building
Figures, Doors and Passages
Essays and Other Texts (AA Documents 2)
The Social Condenser in Operation.
Five figures and a stature distributed evenly in its isotropic space-a picture of the socialized as opposed to the sociable.
Figures, Doors and Passages, Robin Evans. 1978 (Titled Image) Robin Evans (1944-1993) Historian of Architecture.
His writings covered a wide range of concerns such as society’s role in the evolution and development of building types, together with interests on architectural representation, aspects of geometry and modes of projection. Evans always drew on first-hand experience from direct observation to arrive at his insights. These insights ‘open up the way for alternative constructions of everyday reality-a reality, an architecture, which bears the traces, albeit invisible, of its own provisional circumstances.’(Mostafavi,Mohsen, Paradoxes of the Ordinary. 1997)
Peter Greenaway. Architecture and Allegory
Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space
The Psychoanalysis of Fire
Herzog and De Meuron. Natural History
Eberswalde Library (is both a concrete cube and a
pictorial skin)
Western Culture ‘Is a culture of blending and mixing substances until they are unrecognisable producing products fated to harden into a useless degenerative state in a dump or depot.’
Alchemy of Building using Images (Eberswalde Library).
Herzog and De Meuron have a sensitivity to irreversible, entropic processes.
Since the 1980s Herzog and De Meuron have been actively working with an art praxis that has positively saturated some of the outer skins of their buildings with images. Herzog himself acknowledge that it is impossible for him to be able to art and architecture at the same time, and he comments that ‘there is no longer any need to express himself other than in architectural terms. ’
Beauty and Atmosphere/ Science and Art in Motion.
Dialogues of built works between sites of collection/classification and construction. Building on the threshold of tensions (human fabrications/craft and social interactions) between the material and the metaphysical, between evanescence and substance and illusion and specificity.
Much of Herzog and De Meuron’s practice has focused on museums and libraries, or represented other transformative ventures around winemaking and medicine.
Tony Fretton. The Architecture of the Unconscious Collective
Abstraction and Familiarity Buildings and Their Territories
The Lisson Gallery, London. 1991
This was a building that had more in common with the sculpture of Donald Judd and Dan Graham than with any known architectural tendency. Like that work , it is presented less as an object demanding scrutiny in its own right and rather as an instrument (Observatory, Kengo Kuma) that directs the viewers attention to their relationship with the wider world, (bdonline.co.uk, Tony Fretton’s Fuglsang Art Museum 2008/Ellis Woodman)
Library as a ‘type’ of spatial classification (architectonics) through visual vocabularies and working practices.
Derrida. GLAS
This ‘Anti-Book’ (see also Anti-Object, Kengo Kuma) stages a kind of linguistic battle between philosophy and literature as it creates playful interrogations/situations around the methodology of reading. Derrida cites and grafts from the works of Hegel and Jean Genet. The physical qualities of the book are arranged in such a way as to make it read like a collage open for subjective and subversive interpretations. Its boundaries and borders, paragraphs and spacings are constantly becoming merged as a fugitive entity. In fact GLAS has an excess of boundaries (The Postmodern) that seek to divide it up inside itself (Deconstruct). Its fragments (What Remains from its reading) offer multiple beginnings and endings (or maybe Openings and Conclusions, see Lefebvre).
Kate Whiteford. Land Drawings, Installations, Excavations (Fictional Archaeologies)
Colin Renfrew. Remote Sensing (Subtle Transpositions between media)
The whole landscape is a palimpsest of human activities: lines (See also Ingold) which experience has etched on the ageing face of the past. Landscape history. Where does history stop and art begin?
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Peter Zumthor. Multiplicity and Memory
Thinking Architecture Atmospheres
Heidegger for Architects
Juhani Pallasmaa. The Eyes of The Skin
Identity, Intimacy, Domicile, the phenomenology of home. The Thinking Hand
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