Ephraim Joris :

The article Between Material and Culture is out (read abstract/intro in previous blog). Below a segment from the article as a preview …

Cold Store Diagram listing set of contextual parameters by Architecture Project

Nicolas Bourriaud proposes the term ‘Altermodernism’ announcing a new era following Postmodernism to describe aesthetic proposals critically engaging with an increasingly global context [7]. The world we experience today is entrenched by an infiltrating and ever extending communication apparatus, surpassing travel and physical migration giving birth to simultaneous attendance in this ‘fractured dessert plateau’ of multiple localities. Altermodernism, as described by Bourriaud, is deployed as an explorative platform in search of a 21st century modernism, very different from Postmodernism for example, which is setting us after or outside the historic period of modernism. As such Altermodernism does not exist in linear reference to a previous timeframe yet acknowledges history as a network of intersecting timelines where it becomes increasingly more difficult to think and thus design outside or after history yet much more appealing to sustain within its mesh of time.
As practitioners we identify with ideas acknowledging aspects of migration, notions of detachment and dispossession as implications of a transient society. In line with what Bourriaud unpacks through his argument on the end of postmodernism [8], we aim for a critical positioning, a ‘relative attitude towards history’ [6] by escaping a historical periphery, in order to re-enter a mesh of time in search for relevant points of intersection and overlap, particular to the site and the project at hand.

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I am currently developing an article “Between Material and Culture” for an issue on Editing Urbanism, to be released in March 2011.
In its youthful, agile and flexible state it is eager for input…

Valletta Cruise Passenger terminal by Architecture Project; The insertion of a new Cruise Passenger Terminal at the foot of the baroque Pinto Stores adding yet another layer to the rich historic stratification of the Grand Harbour

ABSTRACT
In today’s urban environments, sited in network, the notion of place, as described by Marc Augé [1] and Michel de Certeau [2] has a reduced capacity to designate ’fixedness’ or instigate the notion of an absolute emplacement. When we look at a site, a location or a place, we often aim to define its intrinsic character through relations of proximity connecting a network of information, such as climate, program, history and socio-political organizational strata, in order to understand and generate contextual relevance for the spaces/objects we design. Place in itself is thus inevitably relational to its surrounding. Yet in these current environments of ‘connective-ness’, where a multitude of indigenous elements start to overlap and intersect, relational proximity start to show signs of an absolute vastness. This seems to suggest a repositioning of the places we live in and the way we assume emplacement as architects or indeed, urban editors. As the contextual entanglement is more and more subject to the notion of ‘super connections’, places in the way they connect to a context, instigate simultaneous qualities of distant and near, dislodged and integrated, connected and disconnected nurturing a holistic ‘field’ of connected ‘localities’ as a dessert plateau cracked under radiating solar heat.

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Work by Anna Baranowska, exhibited at the Nous Collaborative Exhibition and Free range 2010

For the exhibition/publication ‘Spontaneous Schooling’ organised by www.nousgallery.com I wrote an article “Lost in space” commenting on a two week workshop, organised in October 2008 and repeated in 2009, at Canterbury School for Architecture, University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury.

Lost in space is a project set-up combining two seemingly unrelated creative environments as the place where students explore notions of spatial composition.
For the duration of two weeks, students underwent training in contemporary dance as part of a spatial design studio. The contemporary dance / design studio, led by Maltese choreographer Sandra Mifsud, Riet Eeckhout and Ephraim Joris, served as an arena for experimentation appropriating stage 2 students in Interior Architecture & Design to study the relationships between inhabitants and their physical and cultural environment. As part of the contemporary dance training, students developed series of choreographic studies (using their own body) exploring bodily compositions in space. This in clear relation to the conception and development of personal diagrams capturing and encoding these movements on ‘paper’.
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Since the nineteenth century a discussion syncopating between notions of restoration and anti-restoration has been implicit to conservation theory. Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814 – 1879), (in)famous for a restoration strategy combining historical accuracy with creative modification to ‘re-establish’ structures to a ‘finished state’ stands on the side of restoration.
William Morris and John Ruskin, founders of the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings [SPAB] stand on the side of anti-restoration stating that to restore buildings and spaces to a fictitious past destroys the authenticity of a historic fabric.

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In search for workable strategies to describe places as zones of social demarcation, thus correlating spatial narratives between different social communities we have been working as collaborators on a research project titled “The Reorientation of Sacred Places”. This 3 year EU funded Program (2009-2011) is organized by the Hogeschool voor Wetenschap & Kunst - Sint-Lucas Brussels in collaboration with Canterbury School of Architecture and a number of other universities.

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Two ears ago my parents became a client of Architecture Project; the site for a small size renovation project was my childhood home. Through the working of the project, playing with composing moments of demolition and new built, the need to take into account a personal history, as part of a family memory, became increasingly more important. This meant that the repositioning of a window (for example) did unlock the repositioning or part erasure of multiple storeys where a view out of that window played an important role. The storeys as intrinsically attached to parts of the house and objects in the house revealed themselves as part-building blocs in the construction of newly designed spaces. Elizabeth Spelman (2008) describes these objects as ‘scaffoldings for memory, as guiding structures through which the past is recalled’. Fascinating how childhood homes provide an architecture of memory, a place where past and present simultaneously exist or as Gaston Bachelard (1958) describes it; ‘a land of motionless childhood’ describing a place that only exist in time. Here an interest to take into account these immaterial structures in the design of material form was born. We designed new spaces for my old family home and failed tremendously in designing through these memory scaffoldings.

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This is a recently finished project. We still need a professional to hold a camera against the white reflecting surfaces. These are snapshots…

With this project we (Architecture Project) extended what was a very small and segregated kitchen adding a small toilet in one of the ‘cupboards’ reprogramming 25% of an existing free standing villa.

The new designed spaces are a juxtaposition of cupboards reprogramming a space as a large kitchen yet aiming to transcend a kitchen atmosphere and create something in-between a space for cooking and space for rest.

As such the iconic value of the kitchen is eroded in the attempt to design ‘away’ from the kitchen and towards a living space one also could use for cooking…

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