Ephraim Joris :

“Lost in space” is a two week workshop in October 2008, repeated in 2009, at Canterbury School for Architecture, University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury.

Work produced through this workshop will be exhibited at the Spontaneous Schooling Exhibition, 18 - 23 June 2010
Opening Event 18 June, 6 - 11pm, Roundtable discussion on workshops 6 - 7pm
Please check www.nousgallery.com for opening times and directions.

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’. In preparation for the drawing of such diagrams, students recorded their choreographic studies through the medium of video and photography, editing this footage through a variety of postproduction software.
The project “Lost in space” sets out an investigation in new ways of exploring space and thus new ways of ‘drawing’ space. It deals with aspects of the cinematographic as addressed by Paul Virilio. This workshop was specifically designed to deploy students in a situation where they had to question their vocabulary of spatiality. As they explored aspects of movement and choreographic composition, they developed the skills and understanding to record, not only phenomenological space, but also spatial performance through the construction of diagrams; engaging with personal annotation systems capturing the ‘unstable image’ to complement more classical annotation systems implicit to architectural drawing.
Due to the overlapping disciplinary trajectories taken by the students, their thinking process started to show signs of conceptual shifts altering paths of thinking/designing during both, moments of spatial performance (choreographic studies using their own body) and moments of capturing this performance through diagramming. In this particular context (i.e. at the start of their second year of study) the dance studio was merely used as a ‘didactic slingshot maneuver’ aiming to set up a supporting structure for students to rework habitual approaches relative to the subject of research and design.

[Read more →]

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.

“Neither by public, nor by those who have the care of public monuments, is the true meaning of the word restoration understood. It means the most total destruction, which a building can suffer: destruction out of which no remnants can be gathered; a destruction accompanied with false description of the thing destroyed. Do not let us deceive ourselves in this important matter; it is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture”. Ruskin John, [180-1989] a celebration of the patina of time proposing ancient buildings and spaces to be protected, not restored, for their entire history to be preserved as cultural heritage.

Last week we walked into this space, during a site visit with stage 2 Interior Architecture & Design in Valletta, Malta. These 16th century vaults support an 18th century palace, a site for a renovation project for stage 2 students. Standing in these spaces, with light falling through the courtyard floor we could see no reason “to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful”.
This space was magnificent in its decay; almost perfect, difficult to imagine what is it we design here…

In line with what `Henri Lefebvre describes as fields of mental and physical space this drawing wants to perform simultaneously as spatial representation and a moment of spatial practice. As spatial representation the drawing acts as a plan and invests in the measuring, categorizing and systemizing of ideas. Through this way of looking, the drawing is used to describe conceived space (physical space); one of the three fields in Henri Lefebvre’s conceptual triad. In Orthographic set I this measurement takes place on the level of organizing relations between spaces in the design of a family house. This drawing is the start of negotiating relational parameters in the design of a domestic space away from a normative vocabulary yet in search of incorporating a historical/hysterical spatial awareness. With Orthographic set I this is attempted by using ‘slow’ drawing exploring collisions and erosions of spatial program to design new amalgamations of programmatic clusters towards the de-figuration of a house. Orthographic set I was first designed as a physical model, then photographed, printed on large paper, drawn over (erasing and adding lines and texture) and digitized again.
As a moment of spatial practice the drawing is used as an instrument of performance; engaging in the drawing away of a pre-set narrative exploring the experience of meandering paper-space – a process of abstraction – an erosion of figurative space… (More drawings are needed to explain this but they still need to be drawn)

Orthographic set I

Comments on the Abandoned Sacred Places workshop in St-Lucas Brussels. An international master class negotiating the po-ethics of reconverting abandoned sacred places.

We were sat in the northeast corner of Brussels, a capital in many ways and a self-proclaimed symbol for multiculturalism. Yet within these aspirations of theatrical political performance lays an urban space that reveals a struggle, resisting questions of openness, integration and coalition. Within this fabric of oppositions we sat for just under two weeks, housed in a former furniture store, refurbished in an attempt to celebrate its emptiness within this city of struggle; emptiness as a canvas, emptiness accommodating a place for ‘The School of Architecture’ also referred to as ‘Sint-Lucas with a c’.

We all grouped around a theme questioning the ‘po-ethics’ of converting abandoned sacred places. A question gaining relevance through a 21st century cultural development where globalised territories such as Brussels provide fertile grounds for religious and cultural heritage systems to nurture demographic segregation. Close-proximity-enclaves, self-motivated in essence, are constantly claiming new territories giving rise to a perpetual flux of instability in which spaces are used and disused across the city.

[Read more →]

Methods (5) an offset of a trajectory

A fifth chapter does install the start of something new. Maybe even a new practice; at least it is a new project. Analysis and review of the previous work and practice-strategies revealed a need for - and nurtured a strong believe in a project that I currently name ‘The Post Representational House’.

The project finds its origin through different anecdotes.

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.

A few weeks after my grandmother died we agreed to meet as a family at her house. My grandmother had lived with her family in the house for more then 20 years. She continued to live there after her son left the house and even after her husband died. More than 50 years of dwelling. More than 50 years of care and inhabitation accumulated in these small spaces. The day of the family gathering I drove for more than 6 hours, crossing the English Channel by boat to get at the small village of Booischot to eventually arrive two hours late. The house was still more or less like my grandmother had left it when she suddenly became unwell and made her way to the hospital for a doctor’s visit. As I walked through the front porch, family member sat around talking about what to take home before the house would be emptied and cleaned.

Aware of this immanent erasure of the mnemonic properties of this previous home I walked away from the conversations and tried to visit all the places in the house and garden that held childhood memories. Strolling around these places, places with almost ghostly properties connecting my world with the world of my childhood, I understood how the house and garden with all its objects acted as the actualization of the ghostly properties of an intangible past. As a child I visited the house with my sisters almost every weekend to help with growing vegetables and holding animals on the surrounding land. I remember the moments helping on the land, fantasising about leaving the garden to escape the work and play in the surrounding forest or daydream about my grandmothers’ dinner that would celebrate a day of work. As I walked through the garden I though about Bachelard’s ‘land of Motionless childhood’ where he describes the childhood home as an embodiment of dreams; a place where the child learns to daydream. My grandmother’s garden certainly held memories of daydreaming as the living room and kitchen held the material of a nostalgia for these once lush family dinners.

Both storeys unlocked an interest in what Kevin Hetherington (2001) describes as objects and spaces imbued with ghostly properties. He describes such objects and spaces as products of a “time out of time – connecting different worlds within the simultaneity of space”. The description of a place for Hetherington is the result of composing spaces, objects and times. This is related to what Marc Auge describes as the anthropological place; a place of social demarcation, a place of connected narratives between previous and current inhabitants.

In both storeys I relate to very personal narrative in my description of the home as dream catcher or memory scaffolding. However similarly, as Akiko Bush (1999) describes in her Geography of Homes, through the history of domestic architecture, objects and components have been shifting from a functional use to a more symbolic use; such as bell towers, front porches and formal dining rooms. The accumulation of such symbolic components, as integrated in domestic architecture, allow the house to perform as an anthropological place established through the representation of a social memory.

It is this understanding that ignited the idea of ‘The Post Representational House’ as a project or practice. Henri Lefebvre describes spatial practice as the production and reproduction of locations and spatial characteristics particular to certain social formations ensuring continuity in the creation of what h describes as social space. He describes such practice to take place through different representations of space, as modes of production, taking into account signs and codes implicit to the relevant social formations, as such resulting in representational spaces embodying complex symbolic structures.

The post representational house starts as a search in restabilising and questioning such social structures.

(the how and what of this project will be posted soon)

The third chapter as presented at the GRC conference;

By declaring my practice to be the subject of my own research – a strategy prescribed by RMIT - the limitations of architectural practice to perform on a discursive level in line with my practice objectives becomes increasingly more apparent. It is at this point that my practice of architecture negotiates a position in symbiosis with other disciplinary strategies of making, drawing and writing. The tools by which my practice is enabled diversify, providing moments of distance to architectural practice accommodating a ‘personal playground’ outside my ‘profession’ working with people from different backgrounds using different media.

This mode of working enables a critical reflective viewing of my own work sanitizing any theoretical pursue (as part of the research), in relation to my own work, from notions of parametric design and scientific (sustainable) strategies. In return the impulsive act of design through connotation, deviation, error and coincidence is acknowledged to support the recognition and further development of the tools deployed to trigger such deviations. The title Deviation Diagram was born here and the re-reading of my practice up till that point accommodated.

One of the ‘other media’ I use is sound in the composition of ‘constructs’. The process is incredibly simple. I extract sounds from surroundings. I am particularly interested in extracting sounds that are somehow related to absence such as the crackling of radio in-between channels, the humming of electricity or the echo of a room. These sounds are subjected to a process of editing using engineering software decomposing and dissecting sound spectra. The parts are then recomposed. This process of re-composition is entirely intuitive; a search for rhythm, color, composition and emotion. This sound work has been used in film, sound design for the KLCC Aquarium in Malaysia, art events (sometimes with other musicians), fashion shows and most recently my exhibition at BrightSpace in Melbourne.

The underlying aim in the creation of these sound constructs is the careful erosion of any previous narrative. The editing/design process of the sound constructs is a movement away from the representative and in search for abstraction; a moment where the sound is entirely self-referential, studying rhythm, color and emotion and thus implicitly creating new and unexpected narratives.

Below, the abstract construct from the exhibition at Bright Space Melbourne.

I also compose more melodic tracks combining my surrounding samples with drum-tracks and synths produced/edited through a variety of software but also recorded through life sessions in the studio or kitchen (great acoustics in the kitchen). This sound project is called Naiad.

For more Naiad Songs go to The Naiad Room

The second chapter as presented at the GRC conference;

An architecture preoccupied with negotiating contextual data at first largely guided by a historical context starts to explicitly engage with other types of context such as climate and tectonics. To accommodate the inclusion of these new types of information in the articulation and design of spatial proposals the orthographic projection is gradually replaced with the drawing of diagrams. The diagrams are still subject to architectural conventions and ingredients of orthographic projections yet do not perform as descriptions of a projected reality yet describe a design process. I call these drawings Deviation Diagrams.

As an instrument of discourse, the diagram has the fantastic quality of the ‘slow’ by revealing micro shifts in a design process and thus providing opportunities to sustain in the transitional construct of a design; questioning it to learn more about its impending potential. As much as the diagram is aimed at the ‘organization’ of the design process, it becomes a tool to derail thought, make mistakes and provide moments for improvisation. As such the diagram is negated as a scientific tool and looked at as a personal thinking tool, hence the title Deviation Diagram.

For projects such as Wands Business centre the diagram is used to notate spatial boundaries on the basis of qualities particular to the site; the design of a spatial envelope is defined by various types of implicit boundaries (such as zones of temperature, light intensity, wind velocity) complemented with explicit boundaries (such walls, streets, etc). A horizontal volume floating above an urban-scape is sliced and carved with solar/wind path transcriptions to provide for sunlight and air penetration.

Wands Business Centre by Architecture Project

The undeniably hard process of developing a structure and narrative to write the book (now called methods but surely this will change) commenting on a body of work is now supported/nurtured/momentarily-sidetracked-yet-surely-helping-in-the-end by another postgraduate quest.

Last week I presented a reflection on my work as part of a PhD proposal on the practice of architecture at the GRC Conference in Ghent organized by RMIT and Sint Lucas. I presented 4 main chapters in commenting on my work describing the concept of distant-near-connections in the design of space. These chapters are now being unraveled in ‘methods’ (the book). (The PhD proposal was accepted and thus marks the new quest)

The first chapter as presented at the GRC conference;

Surrounded by Malta’s historical legacy I started my career as an architect confronted with the undeniable importance of working within a historical perspective. In practice this was done by designing towards the unlocking of an understanding of a significant past in the manipulation/design of spaces. With this particular conceptualization of place whereby place implies strong relationships between a person and a physical location with its embedded history, this early work with Architecture Project nurtures specific ‘distant’ connections with the aim to set up a critical dialogue between the designed object and its immediate context. This work drifts in modes of a ‘functionalist’ canon exploring architectonic composition in dialogue with a historical context by taking on ephemeral qualities suggesting all new interventions could be moved or taken away again and thus restores the historical context in its ‘empty’ state. This type of work is not over. It still resonates and structures current projects.

(Below recently completed work and older work by Architecture Project)

These sketches on a mixed development case study invest in the notation of the transformations and mutations of an initial spatial envelope placed on the site. The narrative is captured in the apparent coming into being of a set of architectural drawings. A volume lifts itself from a continuing urban-scape below. The volume is sliced and carved with solar and wind path transcriptions to provide for sunlight and air penetration through the building for gardens and people underneath.

Solar path subtractions defining architectural volumes grouped around voids or deep diagonal courtyards

It’s about spanning – reaching – reaching out – drawing an overcast – creating an abundance of space under – and seeing it - with the lack of a surface…

Riet Eeckhout also writes on this; Interested in space as tension (forces), as interactive fields between building elements…(on her InsideOpen blog)

…..methods….methods….at the moment the working title is methods. Riet and I are going through the minute pursue of orderings/colliding/commenting-on a number of years in practice and research into a book format. The main driver has been the recent conclusion of a research at RMIT. This research was more or less an inwards looking with the aim to establish a critical view on our own practice and nurturing the capability of projecting a new trajectory of practice. With this research Riet and I looked at our more individual portfolios of work (obviously acknowledging the embedded-ness of this individuality) generating/galvanising different yet related research topics in the commentary on our own practice. In 2007 we set up a London design office with Architecture Project, originally a Malta based practice. In our London studio our work constantly intersects and overlaps, as it has been doing for many years. With our book we have the opportunity of mapping a practice between practices, methods within methods in the careful cartography of a projected trajectory of practice.

And here it starts…….

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…

With the detail design we play a game of connecting elements such as cupboards, sinks, extractors, light armatures, windows, doors, tables to create a continues composition of elements integrating a limited selection of materials.

This research has been a progression towards a practice where I operate as a practitioner and an academic exploring possible overlaps between practice and teaching. To develop the notion of the collaborative in teaching relating it with my practice, I started work on InsideOpen, as an online tool for collaboration between designers; students and people from practice. This tool aims to act as a platform between academia and practice and between practices (surely Architecture Project offices in the different countries) to share research/information in design through the concept of a good conversation.

InsideOpen aims to examine how the integration of the principles of online communities (which most of us use as part of our everyday life) can improve a collaborative learning/design experience. The website, designed as an interactive online discussion forum, aims to develop into a user-driven directory for research in spatial design (due to the accumulation and categorization of posts) produced and maintained by its users. This recourse aims to ac­commodate users from different backgrounds, both students and practitioners from dif­ferent universities and professional environments. The concept of mixed demo­graphics is an important strategy to accommodate individuals with a learning/research/communication platform they can use and feel comfortable with outside the institutional.

With InsideOpen the collaborative is addressed by the proclamation of identities constantly being readjusted (blogs accumulate post after post, profiles are adjusted, images up­dated) through the notion of these reuse mechanisms linked to cooperation, con­frontation and possibly integration of viewpoints.

InsideOpen is set as a framework to appropriate and study these mechanisms of reuse. In doing so, two important aspects need to be identified; source (or origin of information) and target (the way this information is used vis a vis a particular design task).

Individual blogs, when they are used to describe a design/research discourse, can accommodate the construction of target situations (setting out a design task) yet at the same time act as source situations for others. The retrieval and selection of source situations will be analogous to particular target situations. Indirectly one could therefore expect bloggers, through the use of comments, to start engaging in the adaptation of their source situations to accommodate their target situation signaling the birth of a col­laborative.

Here reuse is bipolar and not just one person seeking inspiration by looking at the work of others but becoming actively engaged with the work of others just by the nature of the blog.

My main interest here is the coinciding of source and target situations through the network of blogs indicating a collective authorship. Implicitly this collective authorship nurtures the erosion of hierarchy. Or at least provides the opportunity. Between practitioners this might be less important but as an academic instrument my role as ‘contributor’ is structurally identical to a student’s role as ‘contributor’ providing the opportunity for relationships and dialogue clearly different from that what is experienced in a typical classroom…