SUBURB AS ALTERITY

Open publication - Free publishing - More thesis

Because I'm just about there...an architectural thesis from the ever-intriguing Nick Axel whose name may ring a bell as the architect behind the aphoristic 'Architecture is...' project. (Worth a look!)

In the thesis project his ability to travel from quite complex theoretical ideas (in this case, alterity), through design processes to a specific design outcome which has plausible consequences for a real scenario is once again on display. 

POTENTIAL FUTURES

Lecture: Potential Futures for Design Practice from Rory Hyde on Vimeo

I can't say that the University of Sydney has cropped up in my sphere of architectural thinking or web-surfing very often; but on this occasion I am glad it has! Rory Hyde explores a number of 'proactive design' models which he has both considered, engaged in, and propelled through his interesting professional life. While I feel like Hyde sometimes gets caught up in the 'coolness' of the projects, he has some very astute comments about the role(s) of built environment professionals inherently spanning from large global strategists to small everyday questions about how individuals occupy the bathroom.

TREASURE

ARCHITECTURAL THESIS TREASURY

A late find, in the scheme of things.

AMBIGUITY & CONTRADICTION

Sennett, again, as I potter away with design.

WALKING WITH SENNETT

'The impulse is much more to really make the inside and the outside of buildings more interactive, ambiguous…'

HOCKNEY

It had slipped my mind just how great - and, typically of things forgotten, useful for my thesis - David Hockney's early forays into the photographic world were (see above). That is, until I read this article on his latest foray, using multiple digital cameras in generate a gridded image which becomes a 'moving collage', in Technology review. Not only is the article inspiring, situating this new practice in relation to Hockey's broader oeuvre and in relation to historical constructs of 'perspective', but the resultant images are also stunning. As Hockney points out in the interview, "Don't we need people who can see things from different points of view?"

A still from the 18-screen video May 12th 2011 Rudston to Kilham Road 5 PM. Credit: ©David Hockney

MATERIAL DEFORMATIONS

Having been thinking about the manipulation and opening up of an existing, partially brick building on my site, it has been exciting to tumble through a series of images similar to those which are being constructed on my own drawing board.

Twisted bricks generate an oblique porosity in 

Studiomake's Dude Cigar Bar.

Increasingly spare steel verticals between horizontals creates a floating weightlessness of an otherwise seemingly 'solid' material in Gijs Van Vaerenbergh's 'Reading between the lines'. The project description and relation to the church typology is particularly compelling.

Back to bricks (or tiles, at least) at Arturo Franco's Warehouse 8B.

DO PERSPECTIVES PULSE?

do shadow-people pass through walls?

do footsteps matter if you're voiceless?

do perspectives pulse?

de-framed 1, 2 & 3

All drawings by Sophie Hamer, 2011.

Exhibited in Publication Exhibition. 

THIS IS a THESIS

Alex McCargar 

RISD Architecture Degree Project Work.

Perhaps a little more what an architecture thesis should be like.

ARCHITEKTURZENTRUM WEIN

ABSTRACT

Provisional Thesis Abstract, July 2011

An Ethics of Dialogue

        This thesis explores the production of, legitimization of and engagement with the built environment of Wellington City. It is primarily concerned with the nature, direction, and productivity of relationships between architects, clients, users, other constructional professionals and members of the broader public, and with the implications of these relations for the practice of architecture and modes of design. The thesis steps off from a analysis of the exploding number of 'Architecture Centres' across Europe, seeking not only new engagements between individuals, but new engagements with the processes and practices of the built environment.

       Embedded in much present-day architectural thinking is a reliance on the definitional terms 'inside' and 'outside'. These terms seek to exclude any person, concept or object which might bring processes of the built environment as we know them into question. This exclusion and self-definition is echoed in practice and in the space of the city.

Engaging an alternative Levinian 'ethics of dialogue' as a driving philosophy, the thesis investigates the voices of three individuals (Bruce Robbins, literary critic; Jonathan Hill, critical architect; and Sarah Whiting, proponent of the post-critical pragmatists) who conceptualise the inside and outside in different ways, from notions of the homely and the homesick, to the sensual and the institutional, and the fashionable and the autonomous. The thesis utilises drawing as a tool to spatialise these voices and to map dialogues between individuals and sites.

        This investigation forms the foundation for the the built proposition of the thesis. The 'Doorway to the Built Environment' is a committed public building sited on and under Post Office Square which acts as a non-prescriptive space for debates, exhibitions and investigations concerning the built environment to occur. Within the context of the thesis, the building is proposed as a mode of questioning, rather than as a solution. The boundary between inside and outside is transgressed by informal space, by the voices of the usually unheard, by the shadows of the existing city. It invites all, providing a public democratic platform in which the built environment becomes collective rather than individuated in production, legitimisation and engagement.  

FIELDS

Site: Mapping Perspectives and Obliques

I'm caught with my pencil, playing games, instigating linework, enabling the inteactions, all the while thinking about James Corner's The Agency of Mapping:

In devising the map (constructing field frames, naming, indexing, graphic iconography and so on), the designer 'sets up' the game-board in a very specific way, not in order to predetermine or prefigure the outcome but rather to instigate, support and enable social forms of interaction, affiliation and negotiation. 

- Page 243

INTERVIEWED

Designer Perspectives: A Relationship Guide for Clients and Architects
An interview with Karen Franck and Teresa von Sommaruga Howard

NAKAO

"Architecture must now immediately abandon its mythical function of protecting the interior from the exterior and seek rather, through its original function as edge, to protect the exterior from the interior. Instead of hastily repairing the unexpected hole found in the heart of the interior, it must give the hole firm edges so that it will not be filled. Since providing edges or contour is a means of producing a dimension of depth, architecture, by adhering to this trait of character, can make an abrupt dent in, or open a hollow in, our uniformly interiorized, glue-like environment. Architecture will make spaces like puddles in the dips of a paved road, not only altering our monotonous walking rhythm, but also moving us to get our feet wet, cheerfully, in a child-like way. At such a time, our physical bodies might attain that almost cruel brightness of the tram, at the end of Kafka's 'Metamorphosis,' when it carries the family that has set out for the suburbs, leaving the maid to clean up Gregor's dried remains." Hiroshi Nakao, 1998
via

SQUARE SQUARE

Courthouse and Public Square / Christian Kronaus + Erhard An-He Kinzelbach

via ArchDaily

OBLIQUE

Claude Parent and Paul Virilio in the ‘The Function of the Oblique’ used oblique planes to create architecture of disequilibrium in an attempt to bring the habitat into a dynamic era of the body in movement. 

“We wanted above all to create an “ordinary place” where experimentation rreplaces contemplation, where the architecture is experienced through movement and the quality of that movement. The purpose of the oblique was to encourage a constant awareness of gravity, bringing the body into a tactile relationship with the building.”  

Habitable circulation - “It is no longer feasible to separate habitation from circulation”.

Paul Virilio and The Oblique - Interview

via catrina stewart

IT STILL AMAZES ME

It Still Amazes Me that I Became an Architect

Brodsky at the Architektur Zentrum Wein, one of my favourite Architecture Centre-type places in the world.

IN PLACE OF THE PAGE

Katie Lloyd-Thomas (from memory!)

EAVESDROPPER

- Nicolaes Maas

PERIPHERIES

- Jon Tarry.

'The act of framing contains perception within a measurable border. The frame is the priori formal device of representation, creating closed boundaries between viewer and viewed. Framing confirms a window through which the visible is divided into separate components. This affirms the cartesian idea of context understood through separation.

'The frame dislocated the viewer from the context. The subject is rendered and separated for the purposes of the gaze.

' Peripheral vision is notional, existing outside the frame of the field of focus.'