Making Spaces : Between Speculative Movements of Reading Architecture
DRAWING INTO THE READING ROOM
MAKING SPACES PARTIAL to the material flows and currents of sensory awareness in which IMAGES and OBJECTS reciprocally take shape/meaning.
FLEDGLING ARCHITECTURE IN THE MAKING ISOTROPIC SPACE
SOCIALIZED SOCIABLE
INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE through a sensitive adaptation of place studies, and using materials and built spaces to form the container/scaffold/stage for an activity not its contents. Working spaces that can be given a multiplicity of tasks that can accommodate the humanities and the life sciences.
Architecture and landscape, together with the localised weather, and the sheltering buildings all contribute to finding the mental spaces for the retreat.
APPARATUSES DURATIONS EFFECTS
THINGS-MAKING-PEOPLE-IN THE WORLD
Heightening the experiential experiences of place. Ramps, stairs and passages as devices (movable) to examine and to create immediate architectural interventions. Notion of the observatory as being part built/part still under development through drawing, (monuments as instruments, Japor).
The camera obscura’s darken room becomes a stage and a cinema; a drawing black boarded room for making creative reciprocal social practices.
Working Towards a Secular Retreat in the Landscape.
The task of architecture is to maintain the differentiation and hierarchical and qualitative articulation of existential space. Instead of participating in the process of further speeding up the experience of the world, architecture has to slow down experience, halt time, and defend the natural slowness and diversity of experience, architecture must defend us against excessive exposure, noise and communication. Finally, the task of architecture is to maintain and defend silence.
Juhani Pallasmaa : The Thinking Hand.
Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture. 2009
This exploratory project centers around the heritage site of Waverley Abbey. This site has ruins from its ecclesiastical architecture that could be utilized in the sensory aspects of an architectural experience. The site offers up the possibility of constructing and choreographing enclosures and interiors by directly working with its unique sensitivities of place, mass, light, materials and surfaces. This project sets up real potentials to explore the possibility of crafting interior spaces that can host a rich layering of place perceptions. Currently my research has explored a number of themes and formal structures that might engender these concerns through my professional engagements with contemporary art practices and experience in the construction industry.
Peter Zumthor, Hortus Conclusus, Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2011 Adam Sharr, Heidegger for Architects 2007
Leon van Schaik, Spatial Intelligence 2008
Henry Plummer, The Architecture of Natural Light 2009
The sewer is the conscience of the city. Here, no more false appearances, no possible plastering, the filth takes of its shirt, absolute nakedness, rout of illusions and of mirages, nothing more but what it is, wearing the sinister face of what is ending. Reality and disappearance.
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.
Philosophy is the microscope of thought. Everything desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it. In the effacement of things which disappear, in the lessening of those which vanish, it recognizes everything. It reconstructs the purple from the rag and the woman from the tatter. With the cloaca it reproduces the city; with the mire it reproduces its customs.
Peter Zumthor, interested in the authentic core of things, in emotions and imagining things and not theories. From the emotional/existential experience of things, Zumthor further embodies sensations of remembrance and memory into the fabric of his architecture.
For a moment there fell on Jude a true illumination: that here in the stone yard was a centre of effort as worthy as that dignified by the name of scholarly study within the noblest of colleges.
Thomas Hardy, Jude The Obscure.
An architecture that responds to the evanescence of natural light, in praise of shadows.
The Cemetery and The Allotment, differences and similarities. What is important is what is contained, not the container.
Space for an architect does not exist, so we design the limits that give the impression of space.
Eduardo Souto de Moura. RA Sensing Spaces 2014
There is a sense of pleasure in moving from darkness to light or vice versa because as human beings were cyclical. How light reflects and how light is contained is the stuff of architecture.
Grafton Architects. RA Sensing Spaces 2014
Space is already structured (Deleuze), it is place that is the relational human praxis of space.
The Dehumanised Nature of Human Consciousness, Silke Panse. Screening Nature : Cinema beyond the human. 2013
Metaphor (as a spatial experience/sensation?) is itself a philosophical concept. Multiplicity and Memory : Talking about Architecture with Peter Zumthor. Six Memos for The New Millennium, Italo Calvino.
Interiors as book, poem, essay, philosophical treatise.
To define these spaces one needs decisive characteristics woven into the fabric of the building in its everyday function. These characteristics or spatial zones will define exact physical limits to be read or navigated as an experiential experience. These zones mark the outside limits or boundaries of layered experiences.
GLAS; Derrida, (a philosopher interested with the “between”) Gias in French means the death knell tolling of a bell.
The methodology of reading.
Playful interrogations of the borders between philosophy and literary writing. “This anti-book stages a kind of linguistic battle between philosophy and literature.”
Destabilising tactics through different typographical styles, formats and languages.
Derrida’s text turns philosophers, thieves, fathers and families into unstable figures; their identities are no longer assured, and neither are the usual hierarchies.
On The Lefthand Side.
Philosophy as expressed by Hegel, who believed that the bourgeoisie family was an embodiment of absolute knowledge and its subsequent passing down through strictly controlled channels.
On The Righthand side.
Subversive literature in the shape of the writings of Jean Genet, whose writings celebrate the very opposite of family values.
The experience of the text is its reading (like that of a collage) is that neither column can be read without its internal boundaries or edges being constantly opened up to the other column.
In each column, Derrida cites and grafts (what might these terms generate in architectural space) from Hegel’s personal letters and documents or from his philosophical texts, and from Genet’s journal of the thief and his prose poetry.
GLAS; Has in fact a multiplicity (multiplicity and memory in architecture, Peter Zumthor) of author’s and their authority is always placed in doubt; in fact GLAS has an excess of boundaries that seek to divide it up inside itself.
Its fragments offer multiple beginnings and endings. Hegel’s Columns. (Heidegger)
Hegel’s “Absolute Knowledge” spirals through dialogues of thesis and antithesis into a higher synthesis that is in tum interrogated by conflict and resolution (dwelling) until it comes to rest as an “ultimate harmony” presided over by “absolute reason”.
Genet’s Columns. (Winterson)
Metaphors and puns seductively unfolding their colourful eddies, ruffles and dark labyrinths.
Derrida by placing both on the same page and in close proximity forces the reader to experience the literary effects, the unintentional connotations and insinuations and metaphors that blossom up in explosions of meaning; from within the most rigorously unruffled philosophical prose.
Architecture on reality and living (dwelling)
Architecture can go too far in completing and controlling social space and influencing the politics of the everyday. Spatial practices are needed as a plastic and permeable social architecture that loosens and adapts the everyday from the imposition of both state and history. From these first speculative oppositions, architectural practice can be informed with the differences between the logic of design and the reality of place.
Heidegger. Jung. Archetypes. Pottery
Architecture
Old Buildings/New Designs: Architectural Transformations. Charles Bloszies. Knocktopher Friary is a quiet place of contemplation. The new residential cloister
unifies the friary and the church. The composition of the architecture is a knitting together of two original forms with a ribbon of concrete, glass and wood. The new buildings are crafted from a minimalist vocabulary where the palette of materials was kept to a minimum. One of the interesting design features is that the new elevations never touch the old facades with a solid-to-solid intersection; the new is either set back from the old (Ashley Castle) or the joint is glazed. The existing church floor is used as both a datum for maintaining the new floor level in the new construction, and as a vein of closely controlled changes of materials and finishes. The resultant architecture is played between subtle material exchanges of concrete meeting wood, concrete meeting glass, and concrete meeting concrete with slightly different surface qualities. What results is a clear differentiation between the old and the new, both are remarkably quiet architecturally reflecting the concerns of the site as a Carmelite monastery in the southeast of Ireland.
Working Thoughts.
Scarpa, extensive use of concrete with different aggregates and finishes.
Ashley Castle, restoration of ruin into a domestic dwelling, sensitive use of materials and methods of joining or revealing the historical fabric (allowing the ruinous to remain visible) of the building.
The Dovecote Studio, a building made of CORTEN steel built within the interior of a ruined Victorian dovecote (see further notes).
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).
Reading Rooms between the Body and the Book Not just a project but also a field of study.
Peter Greenaway, Architecture and Allegory. Peter Greenaway, The Physical Self.
Mark Dion, Archaeology (The Project as Archaeology/Thames Dig). Herzog and De Meuron, Natural History.
Appropriation and Modification/Interlocking Spaces.
Speculative Architecture : On the Aesthetics of Herzog and De Meuron. The speculative solution, which turns not the real world but logic itself on its head.
Without opposition nothing is revealed, No image appears in a clear mirror If one side is not darkend.
Jacob Bohme, De tribus principiis 1619.
Everything is interrelated and suffers when it acts, so too the purest human thought
Holderlin, 1798.
Text definitions/Spatial frames and small interventions.
Surfaces and Spaces. Colour and Material dialogues/engagements.
Source: Making Spaces : Between Speculative Movements of Reading Architecture
Russell Moreton : Matter(s) in Correspondence 