bodyoftheory

Review of: Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces Gernot Böhme (edited/trans A-C Engels-Schwarzpaul), London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. ISBN 978-1-4742-5808-1, Hb, pp. 199. Published in: Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts, 18, Pattern / Surface: a pursuit of material narratives, December 2017, pp. 93-94. http://interstices.aut.ac.nz/ijara/index.php/ijara/article/view/258 This is a fascinating collection of essays by the German philosopher … Continue reading →

In Jacques Tati’s 1967 movie Playtime the bus-loads of tourists who have come to visit Paris seem permanently marooned in a grey and endless suburban business centre. Caught in the spatial limbo of something like an infinite airport arrivals hall – the very archetype of the contemporary ‘non-place’ described by the anthropologist Marc Augé (Auge, … Continue reading →

One of the problems that haunts any discussion of tectonics in architecture (typically defined as the raising of construction to an art form) is that it can often seem like an obvious fallacy is being committed, broadly of the pars pro toto variety. If we become too fixated on the fabric of the building as … Continue reading →

Review of: Architectural Projects of Marco Frascari: The Pleasure of a Demonstration, by Sam Ridgway (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), ISBN 978-1-4724-4174-4, Hb, pp. 109. This is a useful collection of commentaries on the fascinating work – both written and built – of the Italian architect and academic Marco Frascari, who died in 2013. Frascari, born in 1945 “under the … Continue reading →

Review of: The Extended Self: Architecture, Memes and Minds, by Chris Abel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015) ISBN 978-0-7190-9612-9, Pb, pp. 357. This is both a fascinating and a frustrating book. It ranges freely across a broad intellectual landscape and is rich with philosophical references. For me, the real fascination came from the discussion of architecture as a category of technology, … Continue reading →

Exhibitions about dance have to face a similar dilemma to most exhibitions about architecture – literally a dance around the void created by the notable absence of the object. But in the case of Rosemary Butcher this problem takes on a whole new meaning in the sense that in much of her work the performance … Continue reading →

In his latest collection of essays subtitled ‘Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture’ [1] Tim Ingold continues his interdisciplinary investigations into the messy world of making. Written in a typically lively, direct and highly accessible style, one of the strengths of Ingold’s approach is the intimate connection between philosophy and field work – you get the … Continue reading →

Architecture exhibitions typically struggle to deal with the problem of the absent object. When you can’t actually fit the main exhibit inside the gallery space it’s tempting to revert to the default option of the all-too-familiar ‘book-on-the-wall’. In other areas, museums have been keen to move away from this predominantly text-based model, preferring instead to … Continue reading →

Surprisingly little has been written about the creative use of sketching as a tool for the design process. Particularly the question of how it is possible for the architect to discover something new about the emerging design within the act of drawing. Typically, a vague and half formed idea of how a space could be configured is … Continue reading →

Much of Graham Harman’s so-called ‘object-oriented philosophy’ takes up Martin Heidegger’s account of the nature of tools and equipment, as set out in the first part and first division of his major work Being and Time. The key problem I have with Harman’s reading of this account is the overly binary view of perception which … Continue reading →

‘Seeing and Being-Seen’: In the second section of ‘Eye and Mind’ Merleau-Ponty describes what goes on in the act of making paintings – an intertwining of body and world that also serves as the model for perception in general. There are a number of ways of understanding this process of intertwining, all of which involve … Continue reading →

One of the latest products of Columbia University’s formidable factory of theory is Jorge Otero-Pailos’ book Architecture’s Historical Turn [1] which threatens to overturn at least two longstanding conventions. One is that the rise of postmodernism in architecture was mainly due to the influence of structural-linguistic and semiotic models of meaning and communication; the other … Continue reading →

In a recent lecture at the University of Nottingham, David Leatherbarrow (University of Pennsylvania) set out what might be called – in an echo of his Philadelphia neighbours Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown – a ‘gentle manifesto’ for a not-too-complex-but-just-a-little-bit-contradictory approach to contemporary design. [1] In a typically precise and measured delivery, and in language … Continue reading →

Tim Ingold likes to rough-up the edges of things. As an anthropologist he’s more interested in people than architecture-as-such, but whether he’s talking about objects, buildings or bodies, the boundaries between them soon become fuzzy. In a way reminiscent of the philosopher David Hume’s idea of the self as a ‘bundle or collection of different … Continue reading →

The engineer and educator Peter McCleary, in an essay that leans heavily  – as most things do in the philosophy of technology – on the writings of Martin Heidegger, asks a curious but interesting question: “What are the characteristics of knowledge derived during the production of the built environment?” [1]. McCleary claims that by picking … Continue reading →

The latest exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary puts together two unlikely subjects – the disputed territories of Israel and Palestine and some rough-and-ready cardboard mock-ups of 1960s American villas. Galleries 1 and 2 are occupied by DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture/Art Residency) a three-person art and architecture collective based in Palestine. Called ‘Common Assembly’ the work in the show is … Continue reading →