Hans Coper, Theory and Object Analysis, Crafts Study Centre, Farnham.

MA Interior Design

A vessel (as membrane/threshold that can hold social rituals/traditions and memories) seems to occupy space but simultaneously be occupied by space.

Theories of relativity and uncertainty have shown that all matter, even the airy oxygenated void inside a vessel is energy, and that it is composed of the same building blocks generated from exploded stars. (Daintry2007:10)

Water, although fluid it is supremely germinative and represents the condition of all potentials.(Eliade Mircea l983)

Permeable in flux, water and water’s symbolism became the pagan’s way of intuitively knowing the world. Matter was plastic, fluid and changeable. The body was plastic with parameters defined not only by individual consciousness, but also in relation to other realms of the physical world.

The pagan participated in a vast mythology where his identity changed according to narrative fantasies that combined and recombined human and animal activity endlessly, weaving together memory, reason and sensation. In this permeable world there is no sharp division between things or between life and death. It is a world of energetic flow where bodies can indifferently become attached or unattached from myriad objects and forms. (Daintry2007:9)

Flexible Ways of Seeing/Re-Making the World.

“A large part of the reason for making is to see things that I have never seen before, to build something which I cannot fully understand or explain.”

Artist Statement, Ken Eastman.

Drawings in the form of tracings were gathered from the flat planes of the display cabinet; these were further superimposed in an attempt to map the surface and forms of the Hans Coper pots and to explore their volumes and interior spaces. These new sight lines subjectively link surface details with profiles into the possibility of new spatial forms. These plans and mappings became the starting point for a series of slab and thrown assemblages. Thrown and slab worked clay forms in T Material, preliminary drawings done in-situ some with annotations. (Russell Moreton. 2014)

Rotterdam Exhibition with Lucie Rie. 1967 Hans Coper.

His arrangement was highly original and innovative, he showed his families of vases in groups, emphasising their subtle differences in form and surface treatment. The space between the pieces was just as important as the objects themselves. The architectonic character of Coper’s pots become visible through their dry, stone like skin and the sophisticated way in which Jane Gate photographs the work.

“Potters of reconciliation, they sought a marriage of function and beauty.” Douglas Hill SF author/intro to exhibition.

Craft Study Centre Publication 2014

Object Analysis

Name of object:   Vase, flattened oval form on a cylindrical stem, pinkish cream to grey glaze over                                       manganese on exterior, manganese over interior and recessed foot. It is decorated                                    with incised lines on back and around the stem with concentric rings incised on the                                   foot

Accession number:                P.74.28

Maker:                                   Hans Coper

Construction techniques:

Materials:                               stoneware

Dimensions:                           22.2 x 18.8 centimetres

Date made:                             1960s

Provenance:                           Made in Hammersmith, London. UK

Given to Muriel Rose by Hans Coper in 1966

This thistle-shaped vase is constructed from five individually thrown pieces. The joints making up the pot have been selectively accentuated with the residues of the manganese engobe. Incised geometric marks remain from the initial turning process of the component parts, prior to the construction of the pot. (Russell Moreton. 2014)

Name of object:     Vase, unglazed rim. manganese interior, decorated with vertical scoring on the                                         exterior

Accession number:                   P.74.103

Maker:                                       Hans Coper

Materials:                                  stoneware

Dimensions:                              12.7 centimetres

Date made:                                1950s

Provenance:                               London. UK

Single thrown form with the remains of the sgraffito technique after the ceramic has been heavily abraded after firing. The vertical lines of the sgraffito technique and the form itself are similar to Lucie Rie’s flower vases, see Lucie Rie by Tony Berks page 112.

This single thrown form perhaps best illustrates the creative union of both Coper’s and Rie’s practices, the form almost a kind of beaker might itself been inspired by the “dark pots” Lucie Rie found whilst visiting Avebury Museum. (Russell Moreton. 2014)

Name of object:     Squeezed ovoid-shape vase with flower holder inside, manganese interior

Accession number:                    P.74.30

Maker:                                   Hans Coper

Materials:                              stoneware

Dimensions:                          22 x 22 centimetres

Date made:                            1970s

Provenance:                          London. UK

Wheel thrown forms, comprising of bowl, open cylinder and an interior ring acting as a flower holder. The bowl form has been turned before being jointed with the upper section. The piece was then indented at four points to form an ovoid form. Pronounced incised horizontal marks remain from the joining, which has been further transposed by the action of becoming ovoid. Very subtle and restrained use of the manganese engobe followed by Coper’s characteristic post firing technique of abrading the surface of the ceramic. (Russell Moreton. 2014)

Hans Coper : Working Notes CSC/10 March 2014.

Notes re/statements

1.   Specific to the form in question.

2.   Context in relation other similar forms.

3.   Key Words: Impregnated, Incised, Eroded, Reduction, Surface, Soil, Abraded Surfaces, Machining, Grinding, Assemblage, Components, Parts, Groups, “Aryballos,Spade, Thistle, Diabolo, Cycladic, Spherical,” Sculptural, Pottery, Architectonic, Space between Forms, Spatial, Sensuality, Form and Fold, Bodily Spaces, Light and Dark, Clay, Water, Fire, Agency, Difference,

Extracts from catalogue “The Essential Potness, Hans Coper and Lucie Rie 2014”

“I become part of the process, I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument which

may be resonant to my experience of existence now.”

“My concern is with extracting essence rather than with the experiment and exploration. The wheel imposes its economy, dictates limits, and provides momentum and continuity. Concentrating on continuous variations of simple themes I become part of the process.”

Artist Statement, Victoria and Albert Museum/Collingwood, Coper Exhibition 1969. Small Beige Spade 1966.

The body comprises a thrown circular form, from which the bottom has been flattened into an oval and the lower section has been pressed together.

Throwing rings are visible on the inside.

Areas of the white engobe have loosened from the underlying layer during firing and formed blisters.

Cycladic Vase 1973.

Blisters in the slip have been sanded down to reveal a rust coloured underlying layer. Medium Sized Spade 1973.

There is a clear delineation between the light upper section and the rougher and darker lower section.

Small Thistle Shaped Vase 1973.

There is a large incised circle on one side of the disc and a smaller circle on the other. Hans Coper’s characteristic use of light engobe and dark manganese oxide has produced a hazy texture.

Black Aryballos 1966.

This ceramic form has its origins with the Oil Flask used by athletes in Greece and Asia Minor.

Tall elongated diabolo forms.

After being thrown the cup has been formed into an oval and then indented at four points.

Text Fragments. Momentum Wheel.

It is difficult to determine in which order the parts were assembled.

The underlying surface is showing through the grooves that are linking the body and the base.

The manganese engobe is demarcating dark and light zones through an undulating incised line.

“Rings” caused by the placement of a prop in the kiln. Brown-Beige Colorations.

Sensations caught within the form.

Soil like deposits/remains.

Reductions of the fired surface.

Abraded Surfaces

Incised Line.

Droplet.

Blisters, pricked open and sanded after firing. This process has produced an irregular, patch surface.

Parallel lines have been incised with a pointed object on the exterior of the base. Thistle Shaped Vase 1966.

The dark brown patches (around the jointing of the pot) and flecks appear randomly distributed but have been purposefully placed to accentuate the structure of the vase. This flat vase with the contour of a stylised thistle flower is made up of five individually thrown pieces. The tall cylindrical foot supports a vertical disc, comprising of two individually thrown flat plates. It is as though the disc has sunk approximately ten centimeters into the foot.

Spherical Vase with Tall Broad Oval Neck 1966.

The transition from sphere to neck is accentuated with darker colourations.

Hans Coper

Hans Coper’s iconic assembled ceramics frame the later part of the twentieth century with an ambivalence of both alienation and reconciliation. His pots reveal differences that have resisted the homogenizing effects of the culture of the time. They embody and are a physical testament to what the potter himself has reflected on his life, “endure your own destiny”1 2 within the space and time of the human condition.

Bom in 1920 into a prosperous middle dass background, his childhood years were spent in the small town of Reichenbach in Germany. In 1935 his father Julius, is singled out like many other Jewish businessmen for harassment and ridicule

under National Socialist Party. This would result in the Coper family moving frequently to escape the attention of the Nazis. Tragically in 1936 Julius takes his own life in an attempt to safeguard the future of his family. The remaining family. Erna Coper and her two sons return to Dresden. In 1939 Hans at the age of 18 leaves Germany for England, the following year he is arrested in London and interned as an enemy alien. He spends the next three years first in Canada then returns to England by volunteering to enroll in the Pioneer Corps. In 1946 a meeting with William Ohly who ran an art gallery near to Berkeley Square, brought about an opportunity for a job in a small workshop run by Lucie Rie, a refugee potter from Vienna. Hans Coper now began earnestly through his engagement with ceramics to reveal a continental modernity “whose work seemed uncomfortably abrasive to the traditionalists.”*

Hans Coper and Lucie Rie worked together at Albion Mews for 13 years forming a friendship and a working relationship that was mutually reciprocated through practical concerns, innovation and experimentation. There is a creative synergy in place through their mutual sharing of process and experimentation within the practicalities of the studio space. A documented instance of this reciprocal inventiveness is in the appropriation of the technique of “Sgraffito” which Lucie Rie employs after being inspired by some Bronze Age pottery at Avebury Museum bearing incised patterns, which are displayed with some bird bones, which may have been used as tools to incise the pottery. These “dark bowls of Avebury”3  are transposed through the use of manganese engobe and a steel needle into Lucie Rie’s ceramics, Hans Coper although not present appropriates the bird bone for the engineered steel of a pointed needle file and uses the action of an abrasive hand tool to remove layers of the manganese engobe. In this way Coper is enacting onto the surfaces of his ceramics, the very agencies that Modernism was acting out in the realms of architectural space and surface treatment of materials. In 1959 a move to Digwell Arts Trust would bring to a close his working relationship with Lucie Rie. Coper now became involved with a number of architecturally based projects through the Digswell Group of architects and building professionals. Coper’s engagement with the Digwell Group was not without problems and creative frustrations, but seen in retrospect it became an experimental period where Coper was strengthening his ability to bring his pottery into a spatial communion with the modernist architectural sensibilities of the time. However it was a wartime friend Howard Mason who introduced Coper’s work to Basil Spence, from this introduction Hans Coper was commissioned to design the candlesticks for the new modernist cathedral at Coventry. The Six Coventry Candlesticks completed in 1962 explicitly reveal a sensitive and progressive spatial awareness to the architectonics of built spaces. The candlesticks delicately tapered and waisted are made in sections and assembled on site onto rods set into the architectural interior. These assembled thrown and fired towering forms seem to be more about a presence than their actual physicality. They appear to paradoxically transcend the monumentality of their setting through their very immateriality, their slight of form being perfectly balanced to accommodate a single candle and its temporal flame.

As a maker of pots he was in constant touch with his working process, an analogue process, a creative membrane that surrounded the agency of making and thinking. He was able to pursue his vocation “My concern is with extracting essence rather than with the experiment and exploration”4 His resultant works reflect what might be termed a “machining in” of a creative durability that is both ancient and modern that contains both tensions and fragility, and that above all seems to exist in a state of timelessness.

His assembled “pots” are constructed from thrown components, “throwing” as o process that he remarks on “I become part of the process. I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument, which may be resonant to my experience of existence now”. It is through the wheel, the body and the interplay between clay and air that the inner space that defines the form is created. Adam Gopnik writing about the art of Edmund de Waal describes what I might be termed a spatial sensibility “the pot-ancient as it is. is the first instance of pure innerness, of something made from the inside out.”5 Hans Coper further adds sensuality to this “innerness” when he encloses it in a skin that appears archaic through a deeply physical surface treatment of engobes, incised grooves and scratching of the raw pot; then when finally once fired the dry vitreous surface is further machined and abraded to give a graphite-like sheen.

Hans Coper’s pots speak in silence of this interior “architectonic” space that is itself reverberated through an almost archaic modernity. He seems to be able to tune the interior, to load its mass, its void.

There is a strong sense of the vessel, the concrete with the emptiness, even an analogy to corporality set in motion by his treatment of the surface and interiors of his pots. The pots themselves belong to ever extended families, to new familiarities created by the subtle interlays between the negative spaces created through the spatial awareness that has been crafted into their very making. The pots through proximity with each other are in a spatial communion, they act to define particular spaces by defining boundaries and creating thresholds between exterior surfaces and space. These pots are themselves are ‘encounters’ they ask us to be attentive to the responsive sensory inner space set up in residence by the permeable world of the ceramic vessel.

1 Birks. Tony. 1983. Hons Coper. London. William Collins Publishers. p75.

2 Birks, Tony. 1983. Hans Coper. London. William Collins Publishers p22.

3 Birks. Tony. 2009. Lucie Rie. Catrine. Stenlake Publishing ltd: p44.

4 The Essential Potness. Hans Coper and Lucie Rie 2014. Collingwood and Coper Exhibition 1969. Victoria and Albert Museum.

5 Gopnic.Adam 2013. The Great Glass Case of Beautiful Things : About the Art of Edmund de Waal. New York; Gagosian Gallery: p6-7

Rebecca Solnit explores Susan Bordo’s claim that ‘if the body is a metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception and knowledge, then the post modern body is no body at all.’ Solnit comments on this post modern body that it is more of a passive object, appearing most often laid out upon an examining table or in bed. ‘A medical and sexual phenomenon, it is site of sensations, processes, and desires rather than a source of action and production, this body has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be embodied. Which is not to disparage sex and the erotic as fascinating and profound, only to propose that they are so emphasised because other aspects of being embodied have atrophied for many people.’(Solnit, 2002)

We return back to the urgent need to make and experience things that in someway that lead us back to ourselves. The creative architectural work of Peter Zumthor is something that I am engaging with. He has developed architectural design practices that consider each project in terms of a comprehensive and encompassing sensory experience. He looks beyond the mere physical form and its fabric. He attempts to address issues of the body and how it may interact within a built environment. The use of memory as a spatial narrative to accompany the atmosphere of his spaces is realised through evocative material surfaces and densities. I feel that there is a synergy here between the opening up of the interior of a pot and the opening up of a space to dwell in.

In sensing a pots interior from its surface, we are as it were in some intimate tacit correspondence with its spatial sensing centre. We become known to it through its maker’s creative gesture of innerness. This anthropological inner space linking us to the potter is both sensual and distant; its vacancy allows us dwell in the maker’s absence. We become part of the vessel, we enter its philosophy of solitude.

 Outpost 120123

Red Is Not A Colour

Architectural Concepts

Bernard Tschumi

What role does the audience play in the definition of a provocative project?

What are the ways in which I want to construct my world?

The in-between chapters that reveal his underlying beliefs and influences. From movies to built spaces or from art pieces to historical events, a melting pot of his imagination. This is where we understand what Tschumi means by his endless questioning  of the world and what the architect’s contribution could be.

Antoine Vaxelaire, AA 5th Year. 2013.

Marking The Line

Ceramics and Architecture.

Christie Brown, Carina Ciscato, Nicolas Rena and Clare Twomey in response to Sir John Sloane.

Cathected

Aesthetic Phenomenon

Aesthetic Causality

Sensual Object

Allure

Graham Harman reminds us that moments of allure, the fusion of always accessible sensual qualities onto a reified sensual object, are ontologically special experiences, but they are very common in human life.

Architecture articulates our experiences of being-in-the world.

The very essence of the lived experience is moulded by hapticity and peripheral unfocused vision.

Pallasmaa. 2005

The simple complexity of the sensibility found in textures and the drama of shadows.

Developing natural aptitudes through the sense of touch.

The senses considered as perceptual systems are defined as a haptic system in which the sensibility of the individual to the world adjacent to their body and by use of their body.

J Gibson. 1966

In some cultures, the senses of smell, touch and taste have collective importance for memories, behaviour and communication.

Indigenous clay and mud constructions, with their plastic properties, seem to be generated more from the haptic senses than the eye.

Hapticity and Alvar Aalto’s Architecture.

Sam Barnham.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous. 1996

Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin. 2005

Juhani Pallasmaa, The Thinking Hand. 2009

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. 1969

Corpus : Photographic drawings from human outlines

Borderlines : Cley 19, speculative submission for exhibition

ANTHROPOLOGICAL NOTIONS AROUND ISSUES OF SPACES, ORIGINS, SOCIAL RITUALS AND TABOOS.

CREATING CREATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY INTO TEMPORAL SITES, between the concrete and the spatial.

Utilising processes and strategies and terminologies.

Demarcation, set the boundaries or limits.

Acculturate, assimilate to a different culture.

Ethnology, the study of the characteristics of different peoples and the differences and relationships between them.

NON- SPACES, Introduction to an anthropology of super modernity. Marc Auge. My working practice intuitively reflects and responds to what Marc Auge considers to be the condition of Supermodemity, briefly his defining parameters on the idea of Supermodemity are.

Overabundance of events.

Spatial overabundance.

The individualization of references. A SOCIETY IN EXCESS.

My creative practice attempts to reconstitute spaces from this condition of Supermodemity into temporal sites, places from which to solicit a sense of a mobile anthropology, a dwelling that is both intimate and public and promotes solitudes and subjectivity.

Marc Auge states the twenty-first century will be anthropological, not because the three figures of excess are just the current form of a perennial raw material which is the very ore of anthropology, but also because in situations of supermodemitiy the components pile up without destroying one another.1

Contemporary Practitioners like anthropologists will attempt to make sense, they will attempt to resolve, to make or rather remake meaning through the processes of observing the phenomena of acculturation.

1  Marc Auge, Non-Places, introduction to an anthropology of super modernity. (London: Verso, 1992) page 41.

Submission Guidelines

All proposals must be for new work that addresses the brief, artists are encouraged to experiment, be playful and push the boundaries of their practice.

BORDERLINES

Artists translate cultural moments and offer responses to their environment, whether geographical, political or spiritual. Inviting artist’s to respond to the theme Borderlines as it requires an inquisitive approach to the site that surrounds them and to the climate in which we live.

Geographical Environmental Landscape

Terrain

Migration (Wildlife/Humans) Transmigration

Socio Political Departure

Borderlands

Borderlines

Borders

Lines

Spiritual Embodied Walking

Wandering

Wanderlust

Movement

Borderlines, simultaneously both boundary and threshold.

Visible, Existential, Imaginative, Porous, Contingent, Reflexive, Nowness, Un-Knowing, Awkwardness, Liminality, Territory, Subjectivity,

Concrete Collage : Raku fragment, clay form/photograph, drawing, handwriting and painted surfaces.

Ancient Lights : Abstract Painting and Constructional Drawing for Architectural Glass.

Anthropological Landscape : Drawing from archaeological dig, liquid light, field chalk, charcoal.

Cley, St Margaret’s South Entrance : Collage, Sketchbook, working ideas for small glass panels.

Cell, Court, Domain, Field : Layered paper, paint, and absent objects.

Architectural Concerns : Collage ,drawing, installation, blue prints, historical building plans. Scriptorium : Architectural model for a reading space within a pastoral landscape or community.

Working Notes/Extracts and Fragments from site visit. St Margaret’s Church

Silence and stillness, social/historical shelter from/within the landscape

A place acting through our sensate/spiritual world, a space crafted by the specificity of its making/usage.

An interior sensing space of a protected and defended/fortified silence, affirming beliefs and community.

Subtle and muted, stillness, embodiment from the patina of use. Bleached woodwork, lightness, dryness and the humidity of absences.

Empty and eroded stone mullion windows/ancient lights, architecture framing its un-making worn, broken and repaired flooring surfaces, ceramic and stone.

What does Borderlines mean to you? Boundary and Threshold

Visible, existential, imaginative, porous, contingent, reflexive, nowness, un-knowing, awkwardness, liminal, territory,

Material Process/Inquiry, Praxis, Content, Context

Form, Existential Qualities/Values AGENCY

Mindfullness of the brief to discover things through the inquiry and engagement with the site.

Develop Inquiry

Documentation, Artist Book, and other media mixed media painting

Small series of glass panels ceramic tiles/facades

Photographic material/photograms, drawings/hangings on Chinese paper

Melancholy Landscapes : The Plague/Vermilion Sands

Film Collages, hybrid processes and temporal states Liminality: Literature/Philosophy/Visual Art

Landscapes : entering/intruding/emerging (holga819) Existential Gestures : Looking away from the sea

Ballard : Vermilion Sands : Speculative Fields/Spatial Practices Albert Camus : The Plague, 1947. (Penguin Fiction)

The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a virulent plague.

Cut off from the rest of the world, living in fear, they each respond in their own way to the grim challenge of the deadly bacillus. Among them is Dr Rieux, a humanitarian and healer, and it is through his eyes that that we witness the devastating course of the epidemic.

Written in 1947, just after the Nazi occupation of France, Camus’s magnificent novel is also a story of courage and determination against the arbitrariness and seeming absurdity of human existence.

‘Camus represents a particularly modem type of temperament, a mystic soul in a Godless universe, thirsty for the absolute, forever rebellious against the essential injustice of the human condition’

Shusha Guppy, Sunday Times

Walking into Emergent Landscapes

Walking/Thinking/Physical Entanglements in the Landscape
Deeper Darkness, Photographic Memory/Process, Metonymy, Negative,

Analogue, Negated Nocturne. Walking, Others, Presence, Becoming,

Walking into Emergent Landscapes : Covehithe Beach

The OLD WAYS, a JOURNEY ON FOOT, Robert Macfarlane

“ Walking was a means of personal myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings:

Edward Thomas not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them.”

“To Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led out-wards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inward to the self. These traverses- between the conceptual, the spectral and the personal-occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events. He imagined himself in topographical terms.”

Bringing Things To Life.

Creative entanglements in a world of materials.

The Environment Without Objects.

Tim Ingold. 2008

Intermediaries within the cyanotype process.

Trace drawings on paper with organic and material from the built environment.

Drawing/Making Processes.

Architectural Body : Organism, Person, Environment. Arakawa and Gins.

Hans Coper, Theory and Object Analysis, Crafts Study Centre, Farnham.

MA Interior Design

A vessel (as membrane/threshold that can hold social rituals/traditions and memories) seems to occupy space but simultaneously be occupied by space.

Theories of relativity and uncertainty have shown that all matter, even the airy oxygenated void inside a vessel is energy, and that it is composed of the same building blocks generated from exploded stars. (Daintry2007:10)

Water, although fluid it is supremely germinative and represents the condition of all potentials.(Eliade Mircea l983)

Permeable in flux, water and water’s symbolism became the pagan’s way of intuitively knowing the world. Matter was plastic, fluid and changeable. The body was plastic with parameters defined not only by individual consciousness, but also in relation to other realms of the physical world.

The pagan participated in a vast mythology where his identity changed according to narrative fantasies that combined and recombined human and animal activity endlessly, weaving together memory, reason and sensation. In this permeable world there is no sharp division between things or between life and death. It is a world of energetic flow where bodies can indifferently become attached or unattached from myriad objects and forms. (Daintry2007:9)

Flexible Ways of Seeing/Re-Making the World.

“A large part of the reason for making is to see things that I have never seen before, to build something which I cannot fully understand or explain.”

Artist Statement, Ken Eastman.

Drawings in the form of tracings were gathered from the flat planes of the display cabinet; these were further superimposed in an attempt to map the surface and forms of the Hans Coper pots and to explore their volumes and interior spaces. These new sight lines subjectively link surface details with profiles into the possibility of new spatial forms. These plans and mappings became the starting point for a series of slab and thrown assemblages. Thrown and slab worked clay forms in T Material, preliminary drawings done in-situ some with annotations. (Russell Moreton. 2014)

Rotterdam Exhibition with Lucie Rie. 1967 Hans Coper.

His arrangement was highly original and innovative, he showed his families of vases in groups, emphasising their subtle differences in form and surface treatment. The space between the pieces was just as important as the objects themselves. The architectonic character of Coper’s pots become visible through their dry, stone like skin and the sophisticated way in which Jane Gate photographs the work.

“Potters of reconciliation, they sought a marriage of function and beauty.” Douglas Hill SF author/intro to exhibition.

Craft Study Centre Publication 2014

Object Analysis

Name of object:   Vase, flattened oval form on a cylindrical stem, pinkish cream to grey glaze over                                       manganese on exterior, manganese over interior and recessed foot. It is decorated                                    with incised lines on back and around the stem with concentric rings incised on the                                   foot

Accession number:                P.74.28

Maker:                                   Hans Coper

Construction techniques:

Materials:                               stoneware

Dimensions:                           22.2 x 18.8 centimetres

Date made:                             1960s

Provenance:                           Made in Hammersmith, London. UK

Given to Muriel Rose by Hans Coper in 1966

This thistle-shaped vase is constructed from five individually thrown pieces. The joints making up the pot have been selectively accentuated with the residues of the manganese engobe. Incised geometric marks remain from the initial turning process of the component parts, prior to the construction of the pot. (Russell Moreton. 2014)

Name of object:     Vase, unglazed rim. manganese interior, decorated with vertical scoring on the                                         exterior

Accession number:                   P.74.103

Maker:                                       Hans Coper

Materials:                                  stoneware

Dimensions:                              12.7 centimetres

Date made:                                1950s

Provenance:                               London. UK

Single thrown form with the remains of the sgraffito technique after the ceramic has been heavily abraded after firing. The vertical lines of the sgraffito technique and the form itself are similar to Lucie Rie’s flower vases, see Lucie Rie by Tony Berks page 112.

This single thrown form perhaps best illustrates the creative union of both Coper’s and Rie’s practices, the form almost a kind of beaker might itself been inspired by the “dark pots” Lucie Rie found whilst visiting Avebury Museum. (Russell Moreton. 2014)

Name of object:     Squeezed ovoid-shape vase with flower holder inside, manganese interior

Accession number:                    P.74.30

Maker:                                   Hans Coper

Materials:                              stoneware

Dimensions:                          22 x 22 centimetres

Date made:                            1970s

Provenance:                          London. UK

Wheel thrown forms, comprising of bowl, open cylinder and an interior ring acting as a flower holder. The bowl form has been turned before being jointed with the upper section. The piece was then indented at four points to form an ovoid form. Pronounced incised horizontal marks remain from the joining, which has been further transposed by the action of becoming ovoid. Very subtle and restrained use of the manganese engobe followed by Coper’s characteristic post firing technique of abrading the surface of the ceramic. (Russell Moreton. 2014)

Hans Coper : Working Notes CSC/10 March 2014.

Notes re/statements

1.   Specific to the form in question.

2.   Context in relation other similar forms.

3.   Key Words: Impregnated, Incised, Eroded, Reduction, Surface, Soil, Abraded Surfaces, Machining, Grinding, Assemblage, Components, Parts, Groups, “Aryballos,Spade, Thistle, Diabolo, Cycladic, Spherical,” Sculptural, Pottery, Architectonic, Space between Forms, Spatial, Sensuality, Form and Fold, Bodily Spaces, Light and Dark, Clay, Water, Fire, Agency, Difference,

Extracts from catalogue “The Essential Potness, Hans Coper and Lucie Rie 2014”

“I become part of the process, I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument which

may be resonant to my experience of existence now.”

“My concern is with extracting essence rather than with the experiment and exploration. The wheel imposes its economy, dictates limits, and provides momentum and continuity. Concentrating on continuous variations of simple themes I become part of the process.”

Artist Statement, Victoria and Albert Museum/Collingwood, Coper Exhibition 1969. Small Beige Spade 1966.

The body comprises a thrown circular form, from which the bottom has been flattened into an oval and the lower section has been pressed together.

Throwing rings are visible on the inside.

Areas of the white engobe have loosened from the underlying layer during firing and formed blisters.

Cycladic Vase 1973.

Blisters in the slip have been sanded down to reveal a rust coloured underlying layer. Medium Sized Spade 1973.

There is a clear delineation between the light upper section and the rougher and darker lower section.

Small Thistle Shaped Vase 1973.

There is a large incised circle on one side of the disc and a smaller circle on the other. Hans Coper’s characteristic use of light engobe and dark manganese oxide has produced a hazy texture.

Black Aryballos 1966.

This ceramic form has its origins with the Oil Flask used by athletes in Greece and Asia Minor.

Tall elongated diabolo forms.

After being thrown the cup has been formed into an oval and then indented at four points.

Text Fragments. Momentum Wheel.

It is difficult to determine in which order the parts were assembled.

The underlying surface is showing through the grooves that are linking the body and the base.

The manganese engobe is demarcating dark and light zones through an undulating incised line.

“Rings” caused by the placement of a prop in the kiln. Brown-Beige Colorations.

Sensations caught within the form.

Soil like deposits/remains.

Reductions of the fired surface.

Abraded Surfaces

Incised Line.

Droplet.

Blisters, pricked open and sanded after firing. This process has produced an irregular, patch surface.

Parallel lines have been incised with a pointed object on the exterior of the base. Thistle Shaped Vase 1966.

The dark brown patches (around the jointing of the pot) and flecks appear randomly distributed but have been purposefully placed to accentuate the structure of the vase. This flat vase with the contour of a stylised thistle flower is made up of five individually thrown pieces. The tall cylindrical foot supports a vertical disc, comprising of two individually thrown flat plates. It is as though the disc has sunk approximately ten centimeters into the foot.

Spherical Vase with Tall Broad Oval Neck 1966.

The transition from sphere to neck is accentuated with darker colourations.

Hans Coper

Hans Coper’s iconic assembled ceramics frame the later part of the twentieth century with an ambivalence of both alienation and reconciliation. His pots reveal differences that have resisted the homogenizing effects of the culture of the time. They embody and are a physical testament to what the potter himself has reflected on his life, “endure your own destiny”1 2 within the space and time of the human condition.

Bom in 1920 into a prosperous middle dass background, his childhood years were spent in the small town of Reichenbach in Germany. In 1935 his father Julius, is singled out like many other Jewish businessmen for harassment and ridicule

under National Socialist Party. This would result in the Coper family moving frequently to escape the attention of the Nazis. Tragically in 1936 Julius takes his own life in an attempt to safeguard the future of his family. The remaining family. Erna Coper and her two sons return to Dresden. In 1939 Hans at the age of 18 leaves Germany for England, the following year he is arrested in London and interned as an enemy alien. He spends the next three years first in Canada then returns to England by volunteering to enroll in the Pioneer Corps. In 1946 a meeting with William Ohly who ran an art gallery near to Berkeley Square, brought about an opportunity for a job in a small workshop run by Lucie Rie, a refugee potter from Vienna. Hans Coper now began earnestly through his engagement with ceramics to reveal a continental modernity “whose work seemed uncomfortably abrasive to the traditionalists.”*

Hans Coper and Lucie Rie worked together at Albion Mews for 13 years forming a friendship and a working relationship that was mutually reciprocated through practical concerns, innovation and experimentation. There is a creative synergy in place through their mutual sharing of process and experimentation within the practicalities of the studio space. A documented instance of this reciprocal inventiveness is in the appropriation of the technique of “Sgraffito” which Lucie Rie employs after being inspired by some Bronze Age pottery at Avebury Museum bearing incised patterns, which are displayed with some bird bones, which may have been used as tools to incise the pottery. These “dark bowls of Avebury”3  are transposed through the use of manganese engobe and a steel needle into Lucie Rie’s ceramics, Hans Coper although not present appropriates the bird bone for the engineered steel of a pointed needle file and uses the action of an abrasive hand tool to remove layers of the manganese engobe. In this way Coper is enacting onto the surfaces of his ceramics, the very agencies that Modernism was acting out in the realms of architectural space and surface treatment of materials. In 1959 a move to Digwell Arts Trust would bring to a close his working relationship with Lucie Rie. Coper now became involved with a number of architecturally based projects through the Digswell Group of architects and building professionals. Coper’s engagement with the Digwell Group was not without problems and creative frustrations, but seen in retrospect it became an experimental period where Coper was strengthening his ability to bring his pottery into a spatial communion with the modernist architectural sensibilities of the time. However it was a wartime friend Howard Mason who introduced Coper’s work to Basil Spence, from this introduction Hans Coper was commissioned to design the candlesticks for the new modernist cathedral at Coventry. The Six Coventry Candlesticks completed in 1962 explicitly reveal a sensitive and progressive spatial awareness to the architectonics of built spaces. The candlesticks delicately tapered and waisted are made in sections and assembled on site onto rods set into the architectural interior. These assembled thrown and fired towering forms seem to be more about a presence than their actual physicality. They appear to paradoxically transcend the monumentality of their setting through their very immateriality, their slight of form being perfectly balanced to accommodate a single candle and its temporal flame.

As a maker of pots he was in constant touch with his working process, an analogue process, a creative membrane that surrounded the agency of making and thinking. He was able to pursue his vocation “My concern is with extracting essence rather than with the experiment and exploration”4 His resultant works reflect what might be termed a “machining in” of a creative durability that is both ancient and modern that contains both tensions and fragility, and that above all seems to exist in a state of timelessness.

His assembled “pots” are constructed from thrown components, “throwing” as o process that he remarks on “I become part of the process. I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument, which may be resonant to my experience of existence now”. It is through the wheel, the body and the interplay between clay and air that the inner space that defines the form is created. Adam Gopnik writing about the art of Edmund de Waal describes what I might be termed a spatial sensibility “the pot-ancient as it is. is the first instance of pure innerness, of something made from the inside out.”5 Hans Coper further adds sensuality to this “innerness” when he encloses it in a skin that appears archaic through a deeply physical surface treatment of engobes, incised grooves and scratching of the raw pot; then when finally once fired the dry vitreous surface is further machined and abraded to give a graphite-like sheen.

Hans Coper’s pots speak in silence of this interior “architectonic” space that is itself reverberated through an almost archaic modernity. He seems to be able to tune the interior, to load its mass, its void.

There is a strong sense of the vessel, the concrete with the emptiness, even an analogy to corporality set in motion by his treatment of the surface and interiors of his pots. The pots themselves belong to ever extended families, to new familiarities created by the subtle interlays between the negative spaces created through the spatial awareness that has been crafted into their very making. The pots through proximity with each other are in a spatial communion, they act to define particular spaces by defining boundaries and creating thresholds between exterior surfaces and space. These pots are themselves are ‘encounters’ they ask us to be attentive to the responsive sensory inner space set up in residence by the permeable world of the ceramic vessel.

1 Birks. Tony. 1983. Hons Coper. London. William Collins Publishers. p75.

2 Birks, Tony. 1983. Hans Coper. London. William Collins Publishers p22.

3 Birks. Tony. 2009. Lucie Rie. Catrine. Stenlake Publishing ltd: p44.

4 The Essential Potness. Hans Coper and Lucie Rie 2014. Collingwood and Coper Exhibition 1969. Victoria and Albert Museum.

5 Gopnic.Adam 2013. The Great Glass Case of Beautiful Things : About the Art of Edmund de Waal. New York; Gagosian Gallery: p6-7

Lead, photographic (pinhole) and inkjet visual material from flickr stream, fixing tapes, cyanotype on tracing paper, pierced and re-positioned elements on paper.

Idea is,

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

Merleau Ponty

Start by thinking of architecture as a tentative constructing toward a holding in place. Architecture’s holding in place occurs within and as part of a prevailing atmospheric condition that others routinely call biosphere but which we, feeling the need to stress its dynamic nature, have renamed bioscleave.

Architectural Body

Madeline Gins and Arakawa

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

A methodology of connecting phenomenal properties with a conceptual strategy

Camouflage

Neil Leach

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

Mimesis, 19.

New Concepts of Architecture

Existence, Space and Architecture

Christian Norberg-Schulz

A child ‘concretizes’ its existential space.

A Philosophy of Emptiness

Gay Watson

Artistic Emptiness

Everything flows, nothing remains.

Heraclitus

Rethinking Architecture

Neil Leach

Figure 1, Sketch by Jacques Derrida for Choral Work project. 343

Foucault, Figure 2 Bentham’s Panopticon (1791). 360

Page laid in, The Atrocity Exhibition by J. G. Ballard, new revised edition, annotations, commentary, illustrations and photos.

Tracing Eisaenman

Plenum, juxtaposed to form/haptic values/body absences

Robert Mangold

Between moments of ‘meaning’ lie spaces or blanks of immediate experience. Such blanks are actuality. Usually the blank, the actuality, goes unnoticed because it works so efficiently to differentiate one meaningful event from another. Kubler discussed this in The Shape of Time.

Interactions of the Abstract Body

Josiah McElheny

Object Lesson/Heuristic Device

The term ‘heuristic’ is understood here to denote a method of addressing and solving problems that draws not on logic but on experience, learning and testing. In this regard stories and fictional narratives can be heuristic devices in acting as ideal models that are not to be emulated but which help to situate characters, actions and objects.

Space Between People

Degrees of virtualization

Mario Gerosa

Adaptive Architectural Design

Device-Apparatus

Place

Function

Adaptation

The second phase of project activity acknowledges that the proposal involves two sites; the landscape of settlement and the artifice of the factory. The design is intended to be a reflection of the conditions of each, so there was a need to work directly with the manufacturing process, at full scale, as early as possible. This would provide an immediate counterpoint to the earlier representations and a necessary part of exploring the manufacturing medium in the context of architectural design. 69

Building The Drawing

The Illegal Architect

Immaterial Architecture

Mark Cousins suggests that the discipline of architecture is weak because it involves not just objects but relations between subjects and objects. And if the discipline of architecture is weak, then so, too, is the practice of architects. Architecture must be immaterial and spatially porous, as well as solid and stable where necessary, and so should be the practice of architects.

Jonathan Hill

Index of immaterial architectures

Herzog and De Meuron

Natural History

Exhibiting Herzog and De Meuron

We are not out to fill the exhibition space in the usual manner and to adorn it with records of our architectonic work. Exhibitions of that kind just bore us, since their didactic value would be conveying false information regarding our architecture. People imagine that they can follow the process, from the sketch to the final, photographed work, but in reality nothing has really been understood, all that has happened is that records of an architectural reality have been added together.

My studio is a piece of architecture that is silent. The things of which it is made say all and at the same time nothing. Its strength lies in its demanding silence. A stern silence in order to permit works to occur. I imagine that a painting by Newman could be hung there.

The arrival of Beuys in a world that was gradually falling asleep amidst minimalism generated a kind of confusion that was truly excellent for opening up the mind. Comfort vanished, driven away by subversive complexity.

 The Solar Pavilion, Upper Lawn, Wiltshire. SP3 6SJ

‘A building intervenes between subject and space.’(Kengo Kuma)

‘Things need to be ordinary and heroic at the same time.’(Alison and Peter Smithson)

‘The Charged Void- contains references to the architects’ concern that their buildings should command a wider territory. The Solar Pavilion is perhaps their most compelling exploration of this theme.’ (Sergison,2005:100)

The Upper Lawn Pavilion that Alison and Peter Smithson realised is actually nothing more than a primitive hut. Much of its appeal is that of its uncompromising simplicity a ‘light touch’ promoting a way of life like camping (or bathing) in the landscape; it has the kind of enchantment of a small building with big ideas, a building in the tradition of a garden pavilion or folly. The Solar Pavilion like the earlier Patio and Pavilion of 1956 is intended to be read as a symbolic habitat that could be seen as an attempt to self-consciously to embrace an intimate connection to nature; to tum back from the city and technology. For the Smithson’s the Solar Pavilion exemplifies a place for basic human needs, a piece of ground, a view of the sky, privacy and the presence of nature. It stands as a spiritual and physical counterpoint to urbanism and city life.

‘The Solar Pavilion, is both a lookout over the distant landscape on the north facade, sitting on top of the existing cottage wall, and a garden pavilion mediating between two types of controlled landscape. It aims to provide a minimal enclosure that allows as immediate a relationship between interior and exterior as possible.’

(Sergison,2005:97)

‘Architect’s homes provide rare occasions where the two issues of architectural theory and practice can both find a natural symbiosis; not only did the Smithsons’ build their ideas as concretely as possible, they also built themselves a private place for retreat and reflection.’ (Dirk van den Heuvel 2004)

Hybrid Construction; containing Mies’ tectonics and Le Corbusier’s pilotis and free facade.

Interventions made and consisting of existing elements (garden wall, chimney and windows from an existing building).

‘The construction of the box on the wall consists of a wooden frame clad with zinc. On all sides its posts function as a casing for fitted window frames. The frame’s wooden beams are put into the existing outer wall and are supported on the inside by a concrete beam poured in-situ and anchored in the existing chimney wall, and supported on both ends by square columns placed at a 45 degree angle. This construction results in non-supporting ground level facades, allowing the creation of the teak sliding doors along the full length of the garden facade.’ (Dirk van den Heuvel 2004)

Tony Fretton, working notes.

STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE is the most enduring/valuable quality of an architectural project.

TEACHING informs my practice as an architect profoundly. It demands that I think, write and manage people, and places me in contact with great colleagues with theoretical and practical knowledge.

We have developed a methodology that channels my activities very precisely into design direction, presentations to the office and clients, and collective decision­ making on the management of the practice.

The Scheme It’s Style Their Form

Even an interesting delicacy in the detailing of the work.

MAKING architecture that is more prepositional, that reveals meaning and values in everyday objects and events.

ARCHITECTURE is a cultural artefact and a social art.

ARCHITECTS design buildings using knowledge of buildings that already exist, and the meaning of buildings is shaped by public attitudes.

FORMAL and IDEOLOGICAL INNOVATION is also necessary.

By WORKING TRANSPARENTLY with the relation between the present and past, it gives me access to richer cultural social and architectural territory.

I have understood that you can accept your social duties of being instrumental to society, while remaining productively critical.

I want to use the platform of contemporary architecture on one hand to make it more communicative and on the other more artistically enquiring about issues of the times.

BUILDINGS can explore issues such as national presence and identity in a foreign place. Political imagery in the ambiguity of the present times, the nature of place in which groups of people come together to work and its relation to the surrounding world and the relation between representation, physical security in relation to sustainable construction.

CRAFTS STUDY CENTRE Working Notes 2 July 2014-07-02

A site specific induced inquiry into dwelling and building through/by way of an attentive awareness (anthropological) to people and place.

‘What I am post interested in now is inverting the structure of a culture that is centred around the city.’

‘The richness and strength of that (their) culture cannot be understood until one has worked with the people who live their- until one has eaten their food, drunk their sake, talked together with the craftsmen and made things with them.’

Kengo Kuma, Complete Works, (preface) 2012

‘As found is a small affair, it is about being careful.’ Peter Smithson, 2001

‘The ‘as found’ attitude is anti-utopian; its form is (site) specific, raw and immediate. It calls the will to question. It is a technique of reaction ( Opposition/Kengo Kuma and Herzog and De Meuron and Multiplicity/Calvino and Zumthor) and a concern for that which exists.’

Schregenberger, 2005

The spatial practices of exhibition and education.

The humanities and architecture, Heidegger/Bachelard/Ingold/Herzog and De Meuron/Zumthor.

The politics of things/sociology and everyday life/dwelling and making. Natural History learning/thinking through things/situations and vocations. Contents/Contexts/Collection and Presentation.

Taxonomies and Subjectivity/Spatial Narratives of Layered Space (Spatiality) Mark Dion, Archaeology, Thames Dig.(Allegories of a pseudo-archaeology) Herzog and De Meuron, Archaeology of the Mind/Natural History.

Peter Greenaway, The Physical Self/Architecture and Allegory.

Visual/Spatial Vocabularies and Narratives (Livelihoods and Social Interactions)

Spatial Methodologies. Worlds and Thresholds.

The Fanciful and The Scientific.

The Playful and The Reverent.

The Material and The Metaphysical.

Tensions in built spaces.

Between Evanescence and Substance.

Between Illusion and Specificity.

Between Slickness and Tactility.

Making Places where times and tastes, human fabrications and accidents of nature, all collide; in these situations under the shelter of a forming/becoming architecture these ‘spatial texts’ or ‘visual conversations’ of one sort or another are suggested and are manifested and explored through a praxis of inquiry and making.

The Projects Evolution.

Philosophy of Solitude, thresholds/spaces of a vital serenity, a poetics of dwelling and its angle of repose hovering somewhere between the transcendental and the real.

Relationships between Art, Photography, Craft and Building. Expanded through Exhibition, Performance, Teaching and Making.

Realized as a dialogue/delivery (Built Work) into Architectural Terms between Sites of Collection and Sites of Construction.

Working Analysis.

CSC Object Analysis : Hans Coper/Innemess in the Ceramic Vessel and Architecture. Making (act/sacred bond of both an individual and a civilisation) from the inside out, from the interior, from the first movement or impulse, from the everyday condition/situation the as found nature of things. The innemess of the vessel of a room remains the property of our shared humanity, of our social being/becoming.

Why did this opportunity produce a wealth of transformative insights (conduits and territories) that are now active agents working across all facets of my practice?

Properties: Pastoral Setting.

Built within and amongst a monastery.

Facility and retreat for cross-disciplinary inquiry (Humanities and the Social Sciences).

Repository and archive of artefacts, texts and objects.

Exhibition and making spaces, workshops and residential living spaces. Walled garden complex containing a reading pavilion and library.

Catalyst Events/Situations to engender the experience of learning.

West Dean, Singleton. Residential courses in the arts, both the grounds and the house are fully utilised in the social activity of learning.

Kilquhanity,Scotland. Free School in country setting, used as a site for exploratory fine art practices(converted a pottery into a camera obscura and drew a garden from the movements of the sun across a specific terrain).

Brockwood Park School, Bramdean. Re-imagining learning, conducted a walk across a landscape with clay, and hidden curriculum in the library with objects and texts centred around philosophy and architecture.

Winchester College, Winchester. Exhibition with talk on creative practice, display of large body drawings, cyanotypes, astronomical charts and architectural notebooks. Workshop conducted in the making and experimentation of using the cyanotype process (historical,light based,printing process 1843).

Link Gallery Winchester University, Winchester. Art and Archaeology around the Keatsian notion ‘Negative Capability’ photograms of anthropomorphic leper graves with excavated oyster shells found at the site (Mom Hill, Winchester).

Hyde Abbey Gatehouse and St Bart’s Church Winchester. Leylines exhibition of artist book photographs, drawings, maps and collages. Installation of archaeologist drawing frame with annotated lead labels, plumb bob, orientated to align with the speculative leyline phenomena.

 Outpost 260622

CYANOTYPE SUN MAPPINGS

SPAB

Building Conservation/Casework Campaigning/Innovative Research/Immersive Training Programmes/Working Parties.

INHABITATION, the inter-dependence of mankind within socio economic frameworks.

SKIN, SURFACE, SUBJECTIVITY.

Insistent moments of alienated encounter.

Harriet Katherine Riches.

Vernacular Concerns/Folklore/Heritage and Fabric of Buildings.

TONALITIES

BUILDING MATERIALS

Site/Regional Specificity/Local Memory.

MATTER AND MUTABILITY

PRERSENCE AND AFFECT

Jane Grant.

AFFECTIVE ABSTRACTIONS

INTERMEDIARIES

CONSTITUENT PARTS

SPILL

IMMINENT REVELATION

EXPOSURE

NAMING THE LIGHTS

AFTERWORD

Garry Fabien Miller, Ian Warrell, Richard Ingleby.

The solitary artist literally at the edge of his environment and in a state of profound meditation about our place in the wider cosmos.

As if seeing herself from the desolate distance of a star, Woodman looks back through the alienating photographic lens of displacement and memory, her print the surface upon which she conjures an impossible moment of beautiful fusion.

Those still involved in defining photography as an art are always trying to hold some line. But it is impossible to hold the line: any attempt to restrict photography to certain subjects or certain techniques, however fruitful these have proved to be, is bound to be challenged and to collapse.

For it is in the very nature of photography that it be a promiscuous form of seeing, and in talented hands, an infallible medium of creation.

ON PHOTOGRAPHY.

Susan Sontag.

Climate Action/Built Heritage.

Jacqui Donnelly, Spring 2022.

Traditional buildings are defined as those built with solid masonry walls, single-glazed timber or metal framed windows and timber-framed roofs usually clad with slate or tiles.

One of the most effective ways of increasing the resilience of our historical structures and sites is the application of good conservation practices.

Traditional  materials and construction techniques allow for the natural transfer of heat and moisture and relied on the thickness of the walls to cope with atmospheric moisture. It is therefore essential that all materials and finishes, including mortars, renders and plasters, used on traditional walls are vapour-permeable to allow this movement of moisture to continue.

Proactive Maintenance

Repair Programmes

Upgrading through repair and adaptation.

Mitigation

Courses in traditional rural trades and crafts, Weald and Downland Open Museum.

The SPAB has made sure that the project not only repairs the mill but integrates public access and education into the process.

The scaffold design has allowed public access visits for the local community and students, offering opportunity to view the work while underway.

Douglas fir weatherboards

Vmzinc roof covering

Insulating Render, Cornerstone.

Developing a scheme that endeavours to fit a three-bedroom house into the existing footprint of the mud cottage and adjacent outbuilding,with some overspill into a new circulation space that connects the structures whilst clearly retaining the legibility of the existing modest forms.

THE POETICS OF SPACE

Gaston Bachelard.

The numbers 1, 2, 3 that mark the titles of the index, whether they are in the first, second, or third position, besides having a purely ordinal value, correspond also to three thematic areas, three kinds of experience and enquiry that, in varying proportions, are present in every part of the book.

Those marked 1 generally correspond to a visual experience, whose object is always some natural form; the text belongs to a descriptive category.

Those marked 2 contain anthropological elements, or cultural in the broad sense; and the experience involves, besides visual data, also language, meaning, symbols. The text tends to take the form of a story.

Those marked 3 involve more speculative experience, concerning the cosmos, time, infinity, the relationship between the self and the world, the dimensions of the mind. From the confines of description and narrative we move into the area of meditation.

Italo Calvino, Mr Palomar.

Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer.

Adam Nicolson, Sea Room.

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust. A history of Walking.