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.

The material outcome has been very divers and very different over the two years we held the workshop. More importantly however is the knowledge generated and its impact on student performance on the course. For example; Lilly Drolsum (image above), one of the participating students, developed a very particular drawing language unlocking a research interest that informed the rest of her academic career. She did continue to develop her spatial design agenda with a clear focus on the description of an interior through the performance of the human body. ‘Trace Space’, one of her propositions for the design of an interior, appropriates the double act of siting the notion of place in time and space. ‘Trace Space’ defines itself as a case study preoccupied with exploring basic forms of orientation in ‘time-space’ and what impact this might have on the design of places. ‘Trace Space’ investigates the mnemonics of place, as a recording of a personal presence, allowing the observer to step out of his or her own presence to become the observed, perhaps appropriating an almost ‘self inflicted cubism’. Here photographs and prints simultaneously perform as analysis and proposition; measur¬ing choreographically defined qualities of place and describing kinetic representations closely related to its occupant’s performance.

With projects such as ‘Lost in Space’ students learn to critically assess the status of drawing. For example; Anna Baranowska (image below), developed particular ways of drawing to engage with projects such ‘Domestic Superimposition’ a design and description of the concept home. With her installation she illustrates the operation of her design to be closely related to “visual thinking” as described for example by Rudolph Arnheim and Robert H McKim.
This “visual thinking”, manifest in a variety of ways and expressed through a selection of media engages with the mapping of the different localities she lived in throughout her life. With the aim to interiorize a notion of home she conceptualizes, through obsessive drawing, the domestic interior beyond phenomenological space and describes a place that only exists in time.
With the development of this type of work students such as Anna Baranowska meander between the use of classical representational tools in line with architectural professional codes and more perceptive tools for examination using different media from different disciplines. This instigates interdisciplinary practice, important to appropriate an exploration/study of space through different notions of inspection. Objective observations towards the physical and technological are complemented with more sensual/subjective observations towards the sensorial and emotional to enable a critical dialogue between that which might be categorized as scientific or ‘object-driven’ and that which might be developed through experience, coincidence and error.
This nurtures an interesting questioning of the notion of ‘professionalism’ particular to spatial practice. As much as professional codes do provide the organizational support for our spatial practices, strategically superimposed ‘moments’ of ‘avoiding’ professional codes of representation to invest in ‘other languages’ seems to enable a shift from using drawing as a purely representational tool, to using drawing as a way of thinking.

This type of curriculum, particular to interior practice, aims to resist the idea of the interior to be located within the confines of pre-existing containers; as mere details to architecture. Within this physical confinement seems to lay (not always but often) the reason for conceptual and critical imprisonment nurturing an attitude towards the non-relational, the inherent and the singular.
With projects such as ‘Lost in Space’, this confinement of the interior as a phenomenological entity wants to be broken, setting up a supporting structure for designers to use their discipline, not only to identify with but question their actions and thus individual positions within the profession. This type of project work announces an attitude towards interior architecture and design where the discipline is used as a platform for questioning spatial practice. It does what architectural education has to fight for; act as a radical entity; not focused on defining its discipline yet focused on perpetually shifting the boundaries of its own disciplinary province to appropriate new and more engaging relational conditions with neighboring practices.

“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…

Orthographic set I

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.

As we position ourselves around the question, three main camps set up a perimeter of thought circumscribing three ideological proposals; (1) approaching the question through non-hierarchical, trans-clerical concepts to generate new urban impulses and new socio-spatial connections, (2) approaching the question through the re-installation of singular ideologies with a focus on dynamic interrelationships, or (3) approaching the question through the concept of emptiness as a possible tool to celebrate that-what-is-not.

With the aim to design space and to engage with this difficult pursue of answering the question of considering the ‘po-ethics’ of converting abandoned sacred places we sit comfortably within the emptiness of the former furniture store. When the first attempts ignite to engage with the question, it is soon revealed that the urge to think towards a singular answer is implicitly impossible. Through wading the murky waters of different opinions and diverse cultural codes the question is gradually unravelled. Days go by where we talk. We talk amongst each other. We talk as part of discussion groups. We talk before morning and keep on talking after dinner, when we walk to our hotel rooms. We present PowerPoint presentations illustrating the ‘digs’ screening excavation grounds where ideas have been revealed; layer for layer, forming a landscape of pits where we find our objects-of thought, one after the other.

And then anxiety sets in. Here we are, when we leave the school we walk the streets, visiting abandoned and not-so-abandoned sacred places. As we walk, we meander in and out our own disciplines. With each conversation new nuances are made. But still that anxiety, the urge to structure, remains. That urge to clearly delineate. Through the power of that singular line, through that ‘trajectory force’ from the wrist, we draw. We draw not only the demarcations of our abstract spatial proposals; we also draw the demarcations of our own professional territories.

In ‘The Production of Spaces’, Henri Lefebvre describes how our western industrialised world overwhelms us with concepts of objectifying abstraction. In such a way that even sensory aspects of our everyday life are dealt with (and thus represented) in terms of quantifiable commodities and categories. He writes how this stands at the basis of a professional authority (such as us; spatial designers) to describe and engage with abstract space privileging the element of ‘conceived space’ and repress the element of experienced space or ‘perceived space’. Through this observation he distinguishes two different types (or what he calls fields) of spaces; physical space (that what is conceived through thinking, abstracting, measuring, categorising, etc) and mental space (that what is perceived through experience; smell, touch, moving, etc.) complementing a third field what he describes a social space; a space that can only be lived, a space that is a combination of physical space and experienced space.
As anxiety sets in we indeed seem overwhelmed by the need to work through concepts of objectifying abstraction. As we discuss the concepts of converting abandoned sacred places we feel the growing pressure to start translating our objects-of thought into quantifiable categories and thus focus on a process of categorising to clearly demarcate our spatial proposals. Is this not why we are here? To design, to draw and model physical spaces…spaces that we can measure?

Yes we are (to a certain extend). But more then ever we also need to question our strategies where we privilege the element of ‘conceived space’. We are here not just to design. We are here to think about the design of abandoned sacred places. Places that are routed in a cultural and socio-political history. Places that are inseparable form what Henri Lefebvre describes as mental space, a space that is ultimately perceived and not merely conceived. So as we question the powers of that ‘trajectory force’ we ought to develop an understanding that we need to question our role within a professional authority overwhelming us with concepts of objectifying abstraction and as a result of questioning our role also question the tools by which we perform as critical designers.

We eventually start drawing. We eventually start making models; all to describe spatial proposals encapsulating the ideas developed through our dialectic sessions. Soon we understand that our hunger for debate did not end when we concluded the discussion groups yet remains strong even when we draw and model our ideas. We see how the drawing is not only used to describe an objective proposition yet used more to visualise implicitly unstable ideas. Here drawing is not merely the representation of a projected reality (as it often is in spatial practice as opposed to contemporary art practice for example). Drawing takes on forms of ‘visual thinking’ (Rudolph Arnheim and Robert H McKim) to engage with the mapping of different ideas providing conduits for conceptual transgression. As we move from the preconception of drawing to be a classical tool for observation and description and move towards an understanding that we can or even ought to use the drawing as part of a dialectic strategy to look beyond phenomenological space and engage with what Henri Lefebvre describes as mental space.

When Daniel Tollady, Liisa Poime, Lien Velghe and Tahnee van Steenbrugge design their project ‘de-form/re-form’, they do exactly that. They engage with two types of spaces in their de-form/re-form project. They look at an abandoned church in terms of a physical reality, i.e. a spatial product. In this physical state they observe the church as abandoned and empty.
Yet at the same time they also look at the church as a ‘produced space’; a space that is experienced and more specifically experienced by the immediate community living around the empty building. As such the church is observed as not abandoned at all yet fully acknowledged as empty. In this way the group succeeds in an analysis of both the conceived and perceived space in and around the church, describing the coalition between physical and the mental space. As a result of this analysis the group successfully develops a proposal that aims to transforms both physical and mental space to engage with what Henri Lefebvre describes as social space (a space that is lived).

With their design the group proposes to change the composition of the church by disassembling the clock tower and let the current community re-install the tower horizontally, penetrating the interior of the empty church. With this proposal they rightly define the clock tower to be a social symbol. They acknowledge the tower to be part of a cultural code previously locating a close-nit community around its base. As the community eroded the clock tower gradually lost it’s meaning. The disassembly of the clock tower materialises this observation of an eroding community describing the clock tower as an empty symbol. The horizontal installation of this empty symbol, penetrating an empty space, does re-install symbolic meaning particular to the current community and thus negotiates both physical and mental space in the design and description of a new social space. De-from/re-from certainly approaches the question concerning the po-ethics of reconverting abandoned sacred places through the concept of emptiness, in this case by annotating that-what-is-not hence re-installing symbolic relevance.

With the development of this type of work we meander between the use of the drawing/model as classical representational tool in line with architectural professional codes describing quantifiable space and using the drawing/model more as a perceptive tool in order to examine performative, sensory aspects of our everyday life. Objective observations towards the physical and technological are complemented with more sensual/subjective observations towards the sensorial to enable a critical dialogue between that which might be categorized as scientific or ‘object-driven’ and that which might be developed through experience, coincidence and error.
This dual performance of the drawing/model does seem to set up a platform for designing space beyond the phenomenological and negotiate space as part of a complex system of perception and conception to eventually design towards social space; a space that can only be lived.

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

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)

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…